Koch Foods Sues ICE over ‘Illegal’ Raids: Illegal Aliens Not Knowingly Hired
3:29
Food processing corporation Koch Foods Inc. is suing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency after raids which they say were “illegal,” claiming that they did not knowingly hire unauthorized workers.
Last month, ICE agents conducted the largest workplace raid in more than a decade across five food processing plants in Mississippi, netting the arrests of 680 illegal aliens. That same day, though, ICE officials said they released about 300 of the illegal workers back into the U.S. on “humanitarian grounds” while more than 200 of the illegal workers had prior criminal records. Prosecutors say many of the illegal workers stole Americans’ identities to work at the plants.
In a legal motion against ICE, Koch Foods executives claim that ICE officials did not have substantial evidence to indicate that the food processing plant in Morton, Mississippi employed illegal workers and therefore the raids were illegal.
Koch Foods executives also say that there is no evidence to support that they intentionally hired illegal workers, writing:
The affidavit sworn out against Koch Foods contains no information from confidential informants alleging that Koch Foods was knowingly hiring unauthorized workers. And the affidavit does not indicate that ICE has any source indicating that this type of illegal behavior exists at the Morton Processing Facility. The affidavit is entirely founded on the presumption that, since certain persons who have been deported by [ICE] had previously worked at Koch Foods’ Morton Processing Plant, then it should be assumed that Koch Foods must have known that they were hiring unauthorized workers. [Emphasis added]
The motion claims since the raid on Koch Foods Inc. was illegal, any data or information taken by ICE from the food processing plant should be barred from use in a courtroom.
“Imperfection ought not expose a business to the egregiously disruptive execution of a workplace search warrant,” the motion states. “The execution of the search warrant, in this case, was an abuse by law enforcement that should not be permitted.”
Federal prosecutors have asserted that Koch Foods, along with the other four food processing plants raided by ICE, “willfully and unlawfully” hired illegal workers over Americans. Koch Foods, specifically, is detailed as having a long record of hiring illegal aliens for more than a decade. Between September 2002 and April 2019, the affidavits state, ICE agents arrested 144 illegal workers at Koch Foods — not including the illegal workers who slipped through the cracks.
The legal action by Koch Foods against ICE comes as a lawsuit alleges that multiple corporations in the food processing industry have conspired for years to depress the wages of their immigrant and American workers.
To date, none of the employers at the five food processing plants have been charged with hiring illegal workers over Americans by federal prosecutors. Likewise, only 40 of the 680 illegal workers arrested by ICE have had charges brought against them.
Today, there are at least eight million illegal aliens holding American jobs in the U.S. economy that would have otherwise gone to American workers and legal immigrants. The mass employment of illegal aliens by hundreds of businesses, though, continues to go largely ignored by the law, as only 11 employers and no businesses have been federally prosecuted for hiring illegal aliens in the last year.
Plutocrat
Koch Brothers, Chamber of Commerce Lobby for Big Tech’s Green Card Giveaway
Phelan M. Ebenhack, Bo
Rader/The Wichita Eagle via AP
The billionaire, pro-mass immigration Koch brothers’ network of
organizations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are lobbying hard for passage of
a green card giveaway plan to benefit 300,000 Indian workers who were
imported by Big Tech’s outsourcing business model.
Help Bring Fairness
to Skilled Worker Visas
Progressive
Immigration Critic: Corporations Push H-1B Giveaway Bill to Slash Middle-Class
Salaries
Bills H.R.1044 and S.386 — both
titled the “Fairness to High-Skilled Immigrants Act” — will accelerate “the
active stripping of the United States” via the “outsourcing of white-collar
jobs” to H-1B visa workers, explained Kevin Lynn, executive director of Progressives for
Immigration Reform. He joined Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight for an
interview with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Watch–Mo
Brooks: Democrats Demand $15 Minimum Wage While Supporting ‘Tsunami’ of
Wage-Crushing Immigration
Rep. Mo
Brooks (R-AL) says “Socialist Democrats” are advocating a $15 minimum wage
while supporting a “tsunami of illegal alien labor” that crushes the wages of
American workers.
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a
study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
The wage and
housing problems are made worse — especially for
families — by the
loss of employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by
cutting costs. The report says:
NYT Admits Fewer
Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving Machines
Warren's core insight
was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor force had
actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages. BEN SHAPIRO
BLOG…. SO,
WHAT DOES LA RAZA WARREN THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN SHE HANDS 40 MILLION LOOTING
MEXCIANS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY???
How
the Quest For Power Corrupted Elizabeth Warren
Extensive research by economists
like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s
current mass legal immigration system burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s
working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in
wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants. Similarly,
research has revealed how Americans’ wages are crushed by the
country’s high immigration levels.
WHO WANTS OPEN BORDERS:
MEXICO, THE DEMOCRAT PARTY, EMPLOYERS OF “CHEAP” LABOR, U.S.
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE FRONTING FOR WALL STREET, ALL BILLIONAIRES INCLUDING
ZUCKERBERG, GATES, BLOOMBERG AND THE FASCIST KOCH BROTHERS!
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal
immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million
white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers —
and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work
permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does
not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal
migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth
for investors because it
ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering
higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market
with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and
blue-collar labor also shifts enormous
wealth from young employees towards
older investors, even as it also widens wealth
gaps, reduces high-tech
investment, increases state and local
tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It
also pushes Americans away
from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans,
including many who are now struggling with fentanyl
addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from
the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate
values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces. JOHN
BINDER
Plutocrat
Koch Brothers, Chamber of Commerce Lobby for Big Tech’s Green Card Giveaway
18 Jul 20196
3:02
The billionaire, pro-mass immigration Koch brothers’ network of
organizations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are lobbying hard for passage of
a green card giveaway plan to benefit 300,000 Indian workers who were
imported by Big Tech’s outsourcing business model.
Last
week, the majority of House
Republicans and Democrats — led by Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Rep. Zoe
Lofgren (D-CA) and including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and
House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) — voted to approve a green card
giveaway for 300,000 Indian workers and allow India to effectively monopolize
the U.S. green card system for at least the next ten years.
The legislation, known as HR. 1044,
will ensure outsourcing firms such as Cognizant, as well as Big Tech
conglomerates like Amazon and Facebook, have a green card system where only
temporary foreign workers on H-1B visas are able to obtain employment visas by
creating a backlog of seven to eight years for all foreign nationals. This
process would solidify that employment-based green cards only go to temporary
foreign visa workers that have been imported to the U.S. by corporations to
replace American workers.
Lobbying hard for the
legislation‘s passage is the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity
organization and the Chamber of Commerce — both of which have routinely opposed
President Trump’s “America First” immigration agenda that seeks to reduce
overall immigration to raise wages.
The Koch-funded LIBRE Initiative is
also asking members to sign letters demanding the passage of the legislation,
known as HR. 1044, claiming that it will “make our communities stronger.”
Our legal
immigration system is flawed. With proper reforms, it can be fairer and more
transparent, and do more to benefit the U.S. economy and make our communities
stronger. This bill is a great place to start. Contact your Senator here!
--> https://thelibreinitiative.ivolunteers.com/ContactOfficials/Help-Bring-Fairness-to-Skilled-Worker-Visas …
Help Bring Fairness
to Skilled Worker Visas
Likewise,
the Chamber of Commerce has issued a letter to Congress
explaining their support for the green card giveaway plan, arguing that HR.
1044 is necessary to provide certainty “for employers that hire highly-skilled,
highly-educated immigrant workers that were born in India and China.”
A
number of Senators have taken campaign cash from both Koch Industries and the
Chamber of Commerce. Senate Republicans like Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), Sen.
Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Sen.
Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) have all accepted campaign cash from the Kochs.
Similarly, the Chamber of Commerce
has funded Senators such as Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), Sen.
Cory Gardner (R-CO), Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), and Sen.
Marco Rubio (R-FL).
Progressive
Immigration Critic: Corporations Push H-1B Giveaway Bill to Slash Middle-Class
Salaries
17 Jul 2019169
6:06
Bills H.R.1044 and S.386 — both
titled the “Fairness to High-Skilled Immigrants Act” — will accelerate “the
active stripping of the United States” via the “outsourcing of white-collar
jobs” to H-1B visa workers, explained Kevin Lynn, executive director of Progressives for
Immigration Reform. He joined Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight for an
interview with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
Progressives for Immigration Reform
was founded in 2008 to examine “the unintended and intended consequences of
unbridled immigration,” said Lynn. “There’s a reason immigration [used to be]
restrictive and well-regulated. It’s because prior to it being so from the
1920s back, immigration was being used to hammer labor, so it was very much a
part of the populist movement [which] called for restricting immigration. We
began to see the first of that legislation in the 1920s, and really, that
system was in place until 1965 when the idea was to increase the diversity but
not the numbers because the Democratic Party was very much aware of what large
numbers of immigrants — how that would impact wages, benefits, [and]
social mobility through supply and demand.”
LISTEN:
The “Fairness to High-Skilled Immigrants Act,” the namesake of
both H.R.1044 and S.386, is a “misnomer,” said Lynn. Mansour described the
bills’ shared name as “Orwellian.”
Lynn recalled his time volunteering
and working for Ross Perot between 1992 and 1994. “[Ross Perot’s] big thing was
fighting NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO. We failed, and a good portion of our
manufacturing base was shipped overseas, and what we’re seeing now [is] the
outsourcing of white-collar jobs. We look at a lot at tech workers, but it’s
really beyond that — it’s any white-collar job — [and it has] been happening
since the late 1990s.”
Disney’s replacement of American
workers at Disney World with foreign H-1B workers in 2015 — which included the
American workers training their foreign replacements prior to being laid off —
is an illustration of a broader phenomenon of “displacement of American
workers” via the status quo of H-1B visa issuances, said Lynn.
Outsourcing of jobs to foreigners
has expanded beyond manufacturing jobs, explained Lynn. “Initially, they
stripped out the manufacturing, and now they’re going after the intellectual
property: what’s between the ears of our productive class here in America. This
bill, what it will do, is reward all this bad behavior.”
H-1B visas have become de facto green cards, explained Lynn.
“Prior to 1990, an employment visa
was a temporary visa,” noted Lynn. “The dual intent nature of the [H-1B] visa,
now, allows them to apply for a green card. You have 85,000 people a year
coming in on these green cards, which are supposed to be for a three-year
stint, which typically allows them to stay another three years on an extension
— so it should be six years and gone — but we have all these people coming here
with green cards staying. And then, to add insult to injury, they said, ‘If you
apply for your green card and you run into that six-year deadline, you can just
stay,’ so as a result, hundreds of thousands of workers from India [stay in
America] because 80 percent of the workers who come in on the H-1B visa are
from India. So you now have hundreds of thousands of [Indians] in the queue
versus other countries, and that’s why there’s a backlog, not because India has
such a large population.”
“This bill is just going to
exacerbate the problem, obviously,” said Mansour. “It seems as if this is a
giveaway to the corporations that are — let’s just be honest — trying to
replace American workers with cheaper labor because it dramatically cuts their
overhead and increases their profits. … This mass inflow of cheaper foreign
labor is felt overall by every American all across the American workforce, not
just the tech sector. This reduces wages for all Americans, eventually.”
Foreigners graduating from American
post-secondary institutions are less costly to hire than their American
counterparts, explained Lynn.
“In 2017, over 200,000 foreign
students who graduated from a U.S. college or university took advantage
of Optional Practical Training,” noted Lynn. “As if things aren’t
difficult enough, [American graduates] are now competing with foreign students
who actually get a 15-percent rebate to the person hiring them because [the
employer] doesn’t have to pay Social Security or FICA.” Non-citizen
foreigners, he speculated, are likely to be more “acquiescent” to employer
demands than their American counterparts. “It’s a downward spiral [of wages],”
he added.
“I see what’s going on as — I call
it — the active stripping the United States,” added Lynn.
Political leaders have prioritized “diversity and
multiculturalism” over “good-paying jobs,” stated Lynn.
“What’s going on now, particularly
with our employment visa programs, these are not high-skilled workers,”
remarked Lynn. “These are barely skilled workers. For instance, the H-1B
program, it has four skill levels: one, two, three, and four. Seventy-four
percent who come over on the H-1B program are in skill levels one and two, so
they compete directly with our community college graduates, our bachelor’s
school graduates, and they have a real advantage when it comes to getting
hired.
Mansour invited Lynn’s response to claims that
immigration is necessary to counter allegedly insufficient birth rates among
Americans.
Lynn highlighted research from the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America. He read the following abstract [emphasis added]:
We assess and compare computer
science skills among final-year computer science undergraduates (seniors) in
four major economic and political powers that produce approximately half of the
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates in the world. We
find that seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in
China, India, and Russia by 0.76–0.88 SDs and score comparably with seniors in
elite institutions in these countries. Seniors in elite institutions in the
United States further outperform seniors in elite institutions in China, India,
and Russia by ∼0.85 SDs. The skills advantage of the United States is not
because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students.
Finally, males score consistently but only moderately higher (0.16–0.41 SDs)
than females within all four countries.
“We have the brains,” said Lynn of Americans’ abilities to
compete with foreigners in the workplace. “We have the talent. We have the
numbers. But what we’re seeing now is this great displacement that is so
large.”
Lynn concluded by highlighting a brain drain of expertise to
America. “If they are skilled, that’s great,” he said of immigrant workers. “In
the case of say, doctors — and I talk to a lot of foreign-trained physicians or
international medical graduates, we’re really getting the best of the best,
here, for the most part. But the problem is there is a hit that the sending
country takes — they lose that talent — and they may be in desperate need of
medical help, instead of us doing the hard work of investing in our people.
Let’s make sure we are producing those types of people.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot
channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00
p.m. Pacific.
Watch–Mo
Brooks: Democrats Demand $15 Minimum Wage While Supporting ‘Tsunami’ of
Wage-Crushing Immigration
17 Jul 2019121
2:52
Rep. Mo
Brooks (R-AL) says “Socialist Democrats” are advocating a $15 minimum wage
while supporting a “tsunami of illegal alien labor” that crushes the wages of
American workers.
During a speech on the House floor, Brooks blasted Democrat
proponents of a $15 minimum wage for their support of wage suppression via the
country’s mass illegal and legal immigration policy that brings more than 1.5
million mostly low-skilled foreign nationals to the U.S. every year to compete
for jobs and lower wages for America’s working and middle class.
Brooks said:
Socialist Democrats support open
borders. Open borders mean a literal
tsunami of illegal alien labor that artificially inflates the labor supply and
suppresses American wages. This is Economics 101. [Emphasis
added]
If the supply goes up, everything
else being constant, the price goes down. The way to raise wages is simple. America must stop importing cheap
foreign labor that takes American jobs from American workers and suppresses the
wages of hard-working Americans who need that money for
their families. [Emphasis added]
The question is, do we care
enough about American family incomes to secure our borders and stop the flood
of illegal alien labor that suppresses American wages? Of course not. Instead,
there are those who seek an imperial decree for a $15/hour minimum wage.
[Emphasis added]
Brooks noted Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis which
estimates that nearly four million American workers will lose their jobs due to
an increase of the minimum wage to $15.
“The policies being advocated today really are advocating the
firing of as many as 3.7 million American workers from their jobs,” Brooks
said. “That’s like firing the entire population of the State of Oklahoma … If
the advocates of this legislation really cared about American workers, they
would not fire them.”
Extensive research by economists
like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota reveals that the country’s
current mass legal immigration system burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s
working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in
wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants. Similarly,
research has revealed how Americans’ wages are crushed by the
country’s high immigration levels.
For every one-percent increase in the immigrant portion of
American workers’ occupations, their weekly wages are cut by about 0.5 percent,
Camarota finds. This means the average native-born American worker today has
his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.75 percent.
Today, about 17.5 percent of the
American workforce is made up of foreign born workers. About 7.8 million of
these foreign born workers are illegal aliens living in the U.S., according
to the latest analysis by Pew Research Center.
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a
study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings
for California’s workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have
generally declined or stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled
“California’s Workers Are Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.”
The report continued:
In 2018, the median hourly earnings for
workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting
for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly
earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile,
increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The
report admits that the state’s progressive economy is delivering more to
investors and less to wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector
[annual new income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6
percentage points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016,
California’s Gross Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop
shifted $146 billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in
2016.
The
report notes that wages finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits
the credit between the Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald
Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40
years of flat wages are partly hidden by a wave of new products and services.
They include almost-free entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap
imported coffee in supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the
impact of California’s flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing
costs, the report says, even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of
the establishment’s pro-immigration policies:
In
just the last decade alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far
outpaced the rise in the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting
that working families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to
make ends meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the
state is more than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even
if all adults are working full-time.
…
Specifically,
inflation-adjusted median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017,
while inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least
35 hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget
Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
Many workers
are being paid little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker
productivity has risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans
sponsored by their employers, leaving individual workers on their own to
stretch limited dollars and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later
years affording the high cost of living and health care in California. And as
union representation has declined, most workers today cannot negotiate
collectively for better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as
retirement and health care, like their parents and grandparents did. On top of
all this, workers who take on contingent and independent work (often referred
to as “gig work”), which in many cases appears to be motivated by the need to
supplement their primary job or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely
granted the same rights and legal protections as traditional employees.
The
center’s report tries to blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the
declining clout of unions. But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan
elites’ policy of mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In 2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for Immigration
Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the economic impact
of migration:
TAYLOR:
If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have
been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good
carpenter. For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a
complete job, it was about $45 an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as
well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the
average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour.
They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not
being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece —
per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed.
Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now
being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity also damaged the unions by
shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007, the progressive Southern
Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title “Latino Gang
Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks.” In the same
year, an op-ed in the Los
Angeles Times described another murder by Latino gangs
as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic
cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The
center’s board members include the executive director of the state’s SEIU
union, a professor from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University
of California, Berkeley, and the research director at the “Program for
Environmental and Regional Equity” at the University of Southern California,
Los Angeles.
Outside California, President Donald
Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring employers to raise Americans’
wages in a hot economy. The Wall
Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall,
median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same
quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between
the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%.
The New York Times laments that reduced
immigration does force wages upwards and also does force companies to buy
labor-saving, wage-boosting machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas
about America’s identity and culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J
NYT Admits Fewer
Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving Machines
.
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."
Warren's core insight
was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor force had
actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages. BEN SHAPIRO
BLOG…. SO,
WHAT DOES LA RAZA WARREN THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN SHE HANDS 40 MILLION LOOTING
MEXCIANS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY???
How
the Quest For Power Corrupted Elizabeth Warren
I first
met Elizabeth Warren when she was a professor at Harvard Law School, in 2004.
She was fresh off the publication of her bestselling book, "The Two-Income
Trap." There's no doubt she was politically liberal -- our only
face-to-face meeting involved a recruitment visit at the W Hotel in Los
Angeles, where she immediately made some sort of disparaging remark about Rush
Limbaugh -- but at the time, Warren was making waves for her iconoclastic
views. She wasn't a doctrinaire leftist, spewing Big Government nostrums. She
was a creative thinker.
That
creative thinking is obvious in "The Two-Income Trap," which
discusses the rising number of bankruptcies among middle-class parents,
particularly women with children. The book posits that women entered the
workforce figuring that by doing so, they could have double household income.
But so many women entered the workforce that they actually inflated prices for
basic goods like housing, thus driving debt skyward and leading to bankruptcies
for two-income families. The book argued that families with one income might
actually be better off, since families with two incomes spent nearly the full
combined income and then fell behind if one spouse lost a job. Families with
one income, by contrast, spent to the limit for one income, and if a spouse was
fired, the unemployed spouse would then look for work to replace that single
income.
Warren's
core insight was fascinating: She argued that massive expansion of the labor
force had actually created more stressful living and driven down median wages.
But her policy recommendations were even more fascinating. She explicitly
argued against "more government regulation of the housing market,"
slamming "complex regulations," since they "might actually
worsen the situation by diminishing the incentive to build new houses or
improve older ones." Instead, she argued in favor of school choice, since
pressure on housing prices came largely from families seeking to escape badly
run government school districts: "A well-designed voucher program would
fit the bill neatly."
Her
heterodox policy proposals didn't stop there. She refused to "join the
chorus calling for taxpayer-funded day care" on its own, calling it a
"sacred cow." At the very least, she suggested that
"government-subsidized day care would add one more indirect pressure on
mothers to join the workforce." She instead sought a more comprehensive
educational solution that would include "tax credits for stay-at-home
parents."
She
ardently opposed additional taxpayer subsidization of college loans, too, or
more taxpayer spending on higher education directly. Instead, she called for a
tuition freeze from state schools. She recommended tax incentives for families
to save rather than spend. She opposed radical solutions wholesale: "We
haven't suggested a complete overhaul of the tax structure, and we haven't
demanded that businesses cease and desist from ever closing another plant or
firing another worker. Nor have we suggested that the United States should
build a quasi-socialist safety net to rival the European model."
So, what
happened to Warren?
Power.
The other
half of iconoclastic Warren was typical progressive, anti-financial industry
Warren. In "The Two-Income Trap," she proposes reinstating state
usury laws, cutting off access to payday lenders and heavily regulating the
banking industry -- all in the name of protecting Americans from themselves.
While her position castigating the credit industry for deliberate obfuscation
of clients was praiseworthy, her quest to "protect consumers" quickly
morphed into a quest to create the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau -- an
independent agency without any serious checks or balances. But despite her best
efforts, she never became head of the CFPB, failing to woo Republican senators.
The result: an emboldened Warren who saw her popularity as tied to her Big Government
agenda. No more reaching across the aisle; no more iconoclastic policies.
Instead, she would be Ralph Nader II, with a feminist narrative to boot.
And so,
she's gaining ground in the 2020 presidential race as a Bernie Sanders
knockoff. Ironically, her great failing could be her lack of moderation -- the
moderation she abandoned in her quest for progressive power. If Elizabeth
Warren circa 2003 were running, she'd be the odds-on favorite for president.
But Warren circa 2019 would hate Warren circa 2003.
Ben Shapiro, 35, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of
"The Ben Shapiro Show" and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is
the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller "The Right Side Of
History." He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.
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