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!!!
Thursday, July 25, 2019
MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOS FUCKS OVER WORKERS IN OBAMAVILLE
Chicago Amazon workers confront management, demand improvements
At 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 16, the footsteps of 30 Amazon workers were heard walking to the manager’s office of a lower-west-side Chicago Amazon delivery facility, known as DCH1. The workers were part of the night shift that completes the exhausting last and often brutal steps of many before Amazon packages are delivered.
DCH1 Amazon workers were inspired by the multiple Amazon protests taking place around the world. Thousands of workers in the United States and internationally, including the UK, Germany, Poland and Spain, held demonstrations and strikes on Prime Day, Amazon’s annual sales event, which took place this year from July 15 to 16. These protests, reflecting growing universal anger, no doubt played a leading role in the initiative for DCH1 workers to confront management.
Amazon workers across the world face health and safety violations, speedups, increased quotas, harassment and injuries. In 2018, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health placed Amazon on its “dirty dozen” list of employers having unsafe workplaces. Since 2013, seven workers have been killed at Amazon warehouses in the United States.
Conditions at DCH1 are no different. Just last month, a small fire broke out in the facility, but management kept workers at their stations as it burned. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Moreover, inside the un-airconditioned plant, temperatures often reach scorching numbers. At the time of the Prime Day crush, a sweltering heat wave had settled in over Chicago.
DCH1 workers arrived at management’s office demanding the following: an increased pay of $18 an hour, up from the average $15, during all hours of Amazon’s Prime Day and the preparatory days preceding it. In the run-up to Prime Day, workers at DCH1 management asked workers to come in one hour before their shift, and in return they received $18 only for that hour.
During the days before Prime Day, known as “blackout periods,” workers cannot request scheduled time off, and their workload hastily increases and compounds in an effort to prepare for the sales event.
The last two demands are full health care and air conditioning in the DCH1 facility.
Workers receive paltry vision and dental benefits while the un-airconditioned DCH1 facility turns into an oven during the summer months, causing workers to pass out from heat exhaustion. In response to the heat, management passes out popsicles.
In May, DCH1 workers delivered a petition to management asking that water stations be installed in the facility. Soon after, a manager brought water bottles and then water stations were installed.
According to the Facebook group, DCH1 Amazonians United, when workers reached the warehouse manager’s office early Tuesday morning and relayed their demands, the warehouse manager stated he would meet with the group the next morning to discuss their demands. When the time came the next morning, the manager had left the facility and sent notice that he would instead meet with workers individually.
Amazon, Facebook Smash Lobbying Records
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Amazon and Facebook have both smashed quarterly lobbying records Tuesday amidst rising interest in regulating and using antitrust laws against America’s largest technology companies.
Facebook and Amazon both spent roughly $4 million on lobbying in the second quarter of 2019, which serves as the first time either company spent that much on influencing Congress.
In contrast, Google spent only $2.9 million in the second quarter, which amounts to the least it spent on lobbying since 2011. Google recently ended its relationships with at least 17 lobbyists at six different lobbying firms as Karan Bhatia, the search engine’s global policy chief, moves to reorganize its lobbying approach. Apple only spent $1.8 million in the second quarter.
The surge in big tech spending arises as Congress and federal regulators have become increasingly interested in regulating big tech. The Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee has held hearings on antitrust in big tech, and populist senators such as Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) have proposed to crack down on Internet censorship and big tech’s abuse of Americans’ privacy.
Sen. Blackburn also announced a task force to investigate big tech’s collection of Americans’ private data and competition in the big tech markets.
The FTC reportedly fined Facebook $5 billion for violating Americans’ privacy through the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The latest lobbying reports show that Facebook and Amazon, and to some degree, Google and Apple, have amassed a more lobbying army in Congress amidst rising interest in regulating big tech.
The four technology giants spent a combined $55 million on lobbying in 2018, doubling their previous record $27.4 million spent in 2016.
Big Tech’s rapidly growing influence puts these companies at relative parity with traditional lobbying powerhouses such as the defense, automobile, and banking industries.
Silicon Valley’s influence even extends to some conservative groups, such as Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the R Street Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which often fight regulation of big tech firms and receive donations from Google and Facebook.
Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, told the New York Times that these companies have ramped up their lobbying efforts.
Krumholz said, “They are no longer upstarts dipping a toe in lobbying. They have both feet in.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
“Trump knows that when we stand together and fight for racial, social, economic and environmental justice, we have the power to defeat him.
James Comey: ‘Send Trump and His Mob Back to Their Dark Corner’
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Fired FBI Director James Comey appears to have weighed in on chants of “send her back” at President Donald Trump’s rally this week, urging that the president and his supporters must be sent back to their “dark corner” in the 2020 presidential election.
“We have long had ugly margins in this country, but we are a fundamentally decent people, with shared values. We treasure our identity as a nation of immigrants,” Comey tweeted on Thursday afternoon. “With our voices and our 2020 votes, we must send Donald Trump and his mob back to their dark corner.”
We have long had ugly margins in this country, but we are a fundamentally decent people, with shared values. We treasure our identity as a nation of immigrants. With our voices and our 2020 votes, we must send Donald Trump and his mob back to their dark corner.
Chants about deporting Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) came as President Trump rattled off a laundry list of critical statements made by the far-left congresswoman during a campaign rally Wednesday in Greenville, North Carolina. He recalled her minimizing of the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks, mocking the threat from Al-Qaeda, and pushing leniency for a would-be ISIS recruit.
President Trump also blasted Omar’s fellow “Squad” members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). “She described contemporary America as – that’s you, that’s me, that’s all of us– as ‘garbage,’” the president said of Ocasio-Cortez’s previous remarks about his supporters. “Remember ‘deplorables’? That sounds worse. I think that’s worse. But we’ll save it for whoever’s going to be the nominee.”
President Trump has been in a war of words with the “Squad” since challenging them over the weekend to leave the U.S. if they continue with their attacks on the country. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how,” he said of the freshman congresswomen Sunday.
Democrats expressed outrage over the remarks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) referring to them as “xenophobic.”
“Trump knows that when we stand together and fight for racial, social, economic and environmental justice, we have the power to defeat him. So the demagogue is doing what he knows best: Divide and conquer through hate,” 2020 White House hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said of the remark.
Fellow Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said of the comments that it was important to continue “calling out his racism, xenophobia, and misogyny is imperative.” She also claimed the president’s remarks show he’s “desperate” to shore up support ahead of the 2020 election.
On Thursday, President Trump disavowed the chants of “send her back,” telling reporters in the Oval Office that he was “not happy” about them.
“I felt a little bit badly about it, but I will say this: I did start speaking very quickly… I was not happy with it. I disagree with it, but, again, I didn’t say that; they did,” he said.
Mixed signals on rate cut prompts Trump to demand the Fed enlist in US trade war against rivals
The US Federal Reserve has landed itself in controversy and confusion over how much it will cut interest rates at the meeting of its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) at the end of this month. The turmoil arises from the fact that as it moves to implement Wall Street’s demands for a further boost to financial markets, the Fed is trying to maintain the fiction that it acts “independently.”
The markets had priced in a rate cut of 0.25 percent after Fed Chairman Jerome Powell indicated in testimony to Congress earlier this month that the central bank was moving to a more “accommodative” policy in light of concerns over global growth, the impact of the US trade war against China, low US inflation and a fall in business investment.
But in a speech on Thursday, Federal Reserve Bank of New York President John Williams set the financial hares running when he seemed to indicate that the rate-cutting could go beyond expectations. Speaking to the annual meeting of the Central Bank Research Association, he likened early monetary policy easing to vaccination for children to guard against future illnesses. “It’s better to deal with the short-term pain of a shot than take the risk that they’ll contract a disease later on,” he said.
In a clear pointer to bigger-than-expected rate cuts, he said policymakers should not keep their “powder dry” and ease monetary policy only after there was more hard evidence of a downturn. “When you only have so much stimulus at your disposal, it pays to act quickly to lower rates at the first signs of economic distress,” he declared.
This orientation was underscored by the remarks of Fed Vice-Chairman Richard Clarida in an interview on Fox Business Network. He said a mostly rosy economic picture should not prevent the Fed from easing its monetary policy.
Clarida has previously approvingly cited examples from 1995 and 1998 when the Fed took out an “insurance policy” and cut rates before there were indications of a downturn. “You don’t have to wait until things get so bad to have a dramatic series of rate cuts,”
he said. “You don’t want to wait until the data turns decisively if you can afford to.”
There was a significant market reaction to Williams’ remarks. The yield on US Treasury bonds fell and investors priced in a 66 percent chance of a rate cut of 0.5 percentage points (50 basis points) at the end of the month, compared to a 40 percent chance before he spoke.
The New York Fed then decided to intervene, with a spokesman issuing a statement cautioning against reading too much into its president’s remarks. “This was an academic speech on 20 years of research. It was not about potential policy actions at the upcoming FOMC meeting,” the statement said.
Academic speech or not, Williams and others would have known full well the impact of his remarks just days before the cut-off point for public comment by Fed officials in the lead-up to the FOMC meeting.
As Neil Dutta, head of economics at Renaissance Macro Research, said in a note to clients: “We have not seen anything like this before and honestly, we are not sure what they were thinking. Of course the market would latch on to a speech like this—given the focus and timing—right before the July confab.”
David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff, a wealth management firm, said: “I think we have too many cooks in the kitchen when it comes to public speaking at the Fed, and it’s sowing seeds of confusion.”
But more is involved than the number of voices. The turmoil and confusion are a product of the intense pressure from Wall Street for still more cheap money to boost the markets even beyond their present record levels.
The New York Fed’s intervention appears to have been motivated by concerns that Williams’ remarks, had they been allowed to stand, would have all but locked the Fed into a 50 basis point cut at the end of the month out of fear that anything less might “spook” the markets, thereby tearing away what remains of the fiction that it acts independently.
US President Trump intervened, as could be expected, given that he has issued strident demands that the Fed cut rates and boost Wall Street by a further 10,000 points on the Dow.
In an initial tweet, issued after the intervention by the New York Fed, he said: “I like New York Fed President John Williams’ first statement much better than his second. His first statement is 100 percent correct in that the Fed ‘raised’ far too fast and too early.”
In a later tweet, he added a new component to his attack on the Fed, indicating that it should become more closely aligned with the global economic warfare being waged by the US administration.
While China is the most publicly visible focus of this war, it is by no means the only target. Trump has pointed to the monetary easing policy of the European Central Bank as leading to a fall in the value of the euro to the detriment of the US, and returned, at least indirectly, to this theme in his comments on the Fed.
“Because of the faulty thought process we have going for us at the Federal Reserve, we pay much higher interest rates than countries that are no match for us economically,” he tweeted.
Calling for an end to what he called “crazy quantitative tightening,” Trump tweeted: “We are in a world competition and winning big… but it is no thanks to the Federal Reserve.” Had they not acted so fast and so much, he continued, “we would be doing even better than we are doing right now.”
In other words, the demand of the Trump administration is that the Fed should not only juice Wall Street at home, in order to further siphon wealth into the hands of the financial elite, but must directly function as a US weapon in the global war against Washington’s economic rivals.
While Trump’s legislative agenda has focused on building a border wall and lowering taxes for wealthy people and businesses, his regulators have mounted sustained attacks on environmental standards, consumer and worker safeguards, and barriers to discrimination.
Within hours of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt began summoning the heads of American industry to Washington. Roosevelt knew the country would need an unprecedented buildup of planes, ships, and other war materiel. Without hesitation, American companies responded. Ford, Packard, Chrysler, 3M, Hormel, General Mills, Pillsbury, Cargill, Boeing, and many other major U.S. companies gave their all to the war effort. At Roosevelt's request, the president of General Motors even left his company to oversee the war production effort as a lieutenant general in the U.S. Army. Roosevelt's initial request for 50,000 new airplanes per year was openly mocked by the Germans as outlandishly high and impossible to achieve. But the mighty U.S. industrial base roared to life and pulled it off. By war's end, the United States was producing 100,000 warplanes a year. U.S. industry literally transformed itself to save our country. It's fair to wonder if our current CEOs would do the same.
Would American companies in a new globalized economy drop everything for their country? Do American companies even consider themselves American anymore? The Daily Caller News Foundation asked 19 of the biggest names in corporate America if they saw themselves as "American" companies. It shouldn't be a very hard question to answer. But 10 of the 19 -- including Amazon, Apple, Chevron and General Electric -- refused to answer altogether. The others mostly gave weasel answers. Only General Motors and the bank JPMorgan Chase were willing to clearly identify as American institutions. And even with them, the actual record is cause for concern.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel brought this issue to light recently when he accused Google of "seemingly treasonous" behavior for cozying up to the communist Chinese government. Amazingly, Google has been working on a censored search engine: Project Dragonfly, built for the Chinese government and designed to keep the Chinese people from seeing the free flow of information. At the same time, Google refused to work with the U.S. military. Thiel suggested that the FBI and CIA should investigate Google, which seems like a good place to start. More broadly, though, can we really call Google an American company?
Google and many other U.S.-based companies have operations, sales, and customers all over the world. They think of themselves globally. They value the bottom line above all. A dollar made in China is the same as a dollar made in America.
The question for America is whether this is sustainable. Every big company has a Washington office dedicated to influencing U.S. government policy and regulation. With our increasingly powerful government and regulatory regime, it's smart for companies to do this, and there is nothing wrong with it in theory. But now that corporate America is pushing Washington for its often globalist positions instead of for policies that benefit Americans, we may have a real crisis on our hands.
We're not talking about just a few corporate offices. Washington is completely dominated by corporate America. Big companies fund the influential trade associations all over Washington and hire lobbyists all over Congress and the regulatory agencies. These lobbyists understand our increasingly complex labyrinth of regulations. And they are often writing the laws Congress enacts.
Think tanks are supposed to be independently analyzing and commenting on our policies. But who do you think funds the think tanks in Washington? Corporate America dominates in this sphere as well. When they want a new law or to stop a law or regulation they don't like, these companies go even further, hiring public relations firms and ad agencies to convince us of their positions. All of this is a multibillion-dollar business.
Lately, when senators and representatives leave Congress, they go to work for the corporate influence machine. Over two-thirds of the congresspersons who retired or lost their seats this last election cycle is now corporate lobbyists. That's a record level. A seat in Congress has become an extended tryout for a high-paying corporate influence job.
All of this would be of less concern if corporate interests still aligned with actual American interests, but those days seem to have ended sometime between the great industrial ramp-up for World War II and Google's recent siding with communist China over the U.S. military. Where does this leave the American people?
Trump Acts Like a Populist. His Regulatory Record Suggests Otherwise.
The administration has consistently favored big businesses over average people.
At some point, every president has had to grapple with the fact that he is not a king. This unhappy realization usually comes after they’ve been unable to pass one of their biggest priorities through Congress. Recall Bill Clinton with health care, George W. Bush with social security privatization, and Barack Obama with gun control. Donald Trump has learned this, too, when he tried—and failed—to repeal Obamacare. Having to work with a co-equal branch of government often serves its intended purpose: to prevent the executive from imposing his or her unchecked will on the country.
But that is not the case with regulation. The regulatory process usually doesn’t involve the opposition party, at least beyond eliciting occasional complaints, and it usually draws little public scrutiny. As a result, the president’s regulatory record provides special insight into his undiluted priorities and beliefs.
The Brookings Institution catalogues all new regulatory moves, and it has reported that Trump and his appointees have taken 175 significant regulatory actions since he took office in January 2017. While Trump’s legislative agenda has focused on building a border wall and lowering taxes for wealthy people and businesses, his regulators have mounted sustained attacks on environmental standards, consumer and worker safeguards, and barriers to discrimination. They have consistently favored big businesses and important interest groups over average people. For all his bluster about America’s “forgotten men and women,” a close look at Trump’s regulatory record reveals him to be anything but a populist.
Most presidents use their regulatory authority to nudge the economy in one way or another. The Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, for instance, typically focus on promoting competition. Others are designed to simply help Americans, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which is responsible for protecting people from fraud and abuse by financial companies. Partisan disagreements are a regular part of this process. But most of the time, the controversies come down to arguments over a new rule’s relative economic costs and benefits.
On occasion, Trump’s regulators have addressed traditional economic matters, as by creating a fast track for FDA approval of new gene and cell therapies, streamlining procedures authorizing small companies to export natural gas, and proposing a simpler licensing process for commercial space launch vehicles. But their main actions have had little to do with improving the economy. Instead, Trump’s regulators have mounted a sweeping assault on environmental and consumer protections.
Perhaps because climate was one of Obama’s signature regulatory issues, Trump’s EPA moved quickly to roll backnew limits on greenhouse gas emissions by coal-fired power plants, which were put in place under Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Trump’s EPA also repealed Obama-era limits on methane emissions by oil and natural gas producers and sidetracked requirements that states track and reduce CO2 emissions on their highways. What’s more, it threw out the previous administration’s rules raising fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks and weakened requirements that oil companies install equipment to control offshore spills, allowed oil drilling on federal lands with endangered species and proposed the same for most of the Outer Continental Shelf, and suspended limits on how many toxic metals a power plant can discharge into surface water. Meanwhile, Trump is the first president since the EPA was established nearly 50 years ago to issue no new regulations strengthening environmental protections.
Nor has he used his regulatory power to beef up protections for consumers and workers. Since healthcare was Obama’s signature legislative achievement, it seems unsurprising that Trump’s regulators would do everything they can to undermine it. Starting in January 2017, they moved quickly to shorten the open enrollment period for Obamacare under the law and watered down the requirements for coverage. They have also proposed ending the Affordable Care Act’s ban on insurers discriminating on the basis of gender, gender identity, or pregnancy. It doesn’t end there. They recently proposed new rules to allow states to certify “short-term health plans” that exclude people with pre-existing conditions, have no caps on out-of-pocket costs, and don’t cover “essential benefits” like hospital care, prescription drugs, and mental health or substance abuse services.
Trump appointees have also made it materially easier for people to be ripped off: they repealed a requirement that payday lenders determine if a borrower can repay a loan before lending them funds; lessened the performance standards that for-profit colleges have to meet before they can accept federal student loans; issued new rules to increase the hours that truck, bus, and school bus drivers can work without resting; expanded the exemptions from minimum wage and overtime regulations; and nullified people’s rights to stop internet service providers from selling their personal information.
Equally disconcerting, the Trump administration regularly uses new rulemaking to advance the conservative social agenda. New regulations make it substantially more difficult for family planning clinics that provide abortion services for low-income people to receive federal dollars, and permit employers to excludecontraceptive services from their health plans if they object on “moral” or “religious” grounds.
Finally, Trump and his agency heads have deliberately weakened regulations to prevent discrimination. They shelved the requirement that communities receiving federal housing funds develop plans to combat housing discrimination based on race, along with guidelines barring auto dealers from charging higher interest rates based on race and allowing transgender students the right to choose their bathrooms. Most recently, they proposed to sharply narrow the circumstances under which colleges and universities have to investigate their students’ allegations of sexual assault.
After almost three years with Donald Trump in the White House, a clear theme has emerged. He and his appointees have used their regulatory authority to enhance the power of big businesses and conservative activist groups and weaken the rights of ordinary people. Despite Trump’s self-branding as the tribune of the working class, his record exposes him as dismissive at best, and hostile at worst, to the people a real populist would be championing.
New York Times Op-Ed: Yes, Migration Does Spike Economic Inequality, Damage Middle Class
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A regular columnist in the New York Times is admitting that mass migration causes inequality throughout America.
“I think our immigration policy should take into account the sharp rise in inequality over the last few decades,” David Leonhardt wrote July 17. He explained:
It’s not just a coincidence that the period of strongest income gains for middle-class and poor families — starting in the 1940s — followed, and overlapped with, a period of falling immigration. “Immigration restriction, by making unskilled labor more scarce, tended to shore up wage rates,” the great labor historian Irving Bernsteinwrote.
The economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have noted that the foreign-born share of the labor force fell to 5 percent in 1970, from 21 percent in 1915. Countries with “slower labor force growth” in the middle of 20th century, they note, “experienced deeper income inequality reductions.”
Leonhardt’s column is a modest step but is notable because nearly all former liberals have remained silent about the huge economic and political consequences of their high-migration/cheap-labor economic strategy. The silence is all the more remarkable because one of the most obvious consequences has been the 2016 election of a New York real-estate entrepreneur to the White House.
But Leonhardt’s admission will likely go nowhere because his proposed fix for the current inequality is to shift the pain of cheap-labor migration from blue-collar Americans to his own influential professional class and their cosseted college-graduate children.
Instead of lowering or ending immigration, he suggests the inequality problem can be addressed by reducing, “or at least hold constant, the level of immigration by people who would compete for lower- and middle-wage jobs while increasing immigration among people who would compete for higher-wage jobs.
His column provides more evidence that elite Americans are so enamored of immigration and diversity that they would throw the college graduate class under the bus rather than give up their visions of ruling over a chaotic and fractured “diverse” society.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos & Facebook's Zuckerberg are trying to snatch a huge prize from Trump - and spike the US-India Outsourcing Economy - by quietly lobbying for a law which gives green cards to more Indians who take college-grade jobs from American grads. http://bit.ly/2LpqAmx
Few establishment reporters can follow the money through the immigration debate, partly because their careers are risked by exposing the elites’ economic, statu, and political gains from mass migration. The major risk for journalists is the likely backlash from their own peers and customers — the progressives in the Democratic base, the businesselites, and high-status university leaders who pride themselves on their self-serving support for divide-and-rule diversity.
Business groups pushed @HR1044 through the House, partly because many legislators (& media) do not understand how the giveaway damages young American graduates and heartland communities. http://bit.ly/30G8CzH
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