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!!!
Saturday, May 23, 2020
HIGH TECH BILLIONAIRES DEMAND MORE 'CHEAP' LABOR FOREIGNERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
Fed Data: Visa Worker Program Sneaks Wealth, Jobs to Blue States and Tech Industry
The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program foreign employee program is shifting many billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs from heartland communities over to wealthy Democrat-dominated coastal states, according to data touted by advocates of the program.
The program allows roughly 500,000 foreigners each year to get taxpayer-subsidized jobs after enrolling at U.S. colleges.
Those 500,000 OPT employees are much cheaper to hire than American graduates, partly because many foreigners will work cheaply to help them get green cards from employers but also because they are exempt from paying taxes on Social Security and Medicare.
The OPT program is now facing the Oval Office review, following President Donald Trump’s April 22 order for an agency review of the various white-collar visa programs. The programs keep roughly 1.3 million foreign workers in the jobs needed by millions of newly unemployed American graduates.
But the programs also boost the stock values of many high-tech investors and CEOs — and they are fighting hard to persuade Trump to let them keep their huge supply of cheap OPT workers.
In 2019, the pro-OPT Niskanen Center provided a detailed report about the OPT employees, based on data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. (The DHS administers the spending-and-jobs program because it was created by White House administrations, not by Congress).
The Niskanen numbers show the program is strongly skewed in favor of investors and universities in coastal Democrat states and against heartland states, companies, and employees.
Universities and colleges say OPTs pay roughly $41 billion in tuition fees each year. The Niskanen report shows the 25 universities with the most OPT beneficiaries between 2003 and 2017. Of that top-25 group, 72 percent went to five states with two Democratic senators — California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and Massachusetts. In contrast, roughly 21 percent went to double-GOP states — Texas, Indiana, and Florida. That is a three-to-one skew.
Niskanen showed that 86 percent of the 2017 OPT employees reported where they went to work.
Of that 2017 population, 63.4 percent said they joined companies in eight states with two Democratic senators, according to the Niskanen report. Just 17.3 percent said they worked for companies in just three states with two GOP senators. That is a four-to-one skew.
Pennsylvania picked up 2.5 percent, leaving the other 38 states with an average of 0.5 percent share of the OPT workers.
Universities lobby a Microsoft exec in Trump's WH to protect the 'OPT' cash-cow created by Microsoft in 2007.
The Optional Practical Training program allows 300K++ foreigners to buy work permits via colleges, so denying good starter jobs to US grads#H1Bhttps://t.co/6B0WJ6Sdpd
The dollar value of the OPT skew is uncertain, but it is certainly large.
If each OPT employee costs $20,000 less than an equivalent American, the Niskanen report suggests that the White House OPT program annually provides a cheap labor stimulus of $2.8 billion to Democrat states.
The hidden subsidy for GOP states was far less — $740 million to three GOP states and $270 million to 17 GOP states.
“Why do Republicans support a policy that creates jobs in Democrat states by taking jobs from GOP states?” said John Miano, a lawyer at the Immigration Law Reform Institute. “Can no-one figure this out? … They don’t call it the Stupid Party for nothing.”
The Democrats, the establishment media, and the tech companies “are taking the rubes for a ride,” he said.
More details are provided in a May 2020 report by a pro-OPT university coalition, the Presidents’ Immigration Alliance.
The alliance showed a total of 209,000 OPT workers in 2017. Of those, 140,000 worked for employers in states with two Democratic senators, while only 52,000 worked for employers in states with two GOP senators. That is a three-to-one skew.
The precise numbers are unclear because roughly one-in-seven of the OPT employees did not say where they worked. Also, the program includes a significant amount of fraud. But the Alliance numbers show that:
Democrat Sen. Kamala Harris’ California got 44,536 OPT workers, while perhaps 204 went to GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer’s North Dakota.
Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer’s New York got 24,611 workers, while about 627 said they went to GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky.
Democrat Sen. Ed Markey’s Massachusetts picked up 10,604 workers, while 2,437 said they went to GOP Sen. Martha McSally’s Arizona.
Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez’s New Jersey 15,396, compared to the 2,630 who may have gone to GOP Sen. Roy Bunt’s Missouri.
Just three double-GOP states were in the top 12 — Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Sixteen dual-GOP states got just 15,197 of the 2017’s 208,000 OPT employees. That is roughly 0.5 percent per state.
GOP Sen. Mike Lee’s Utah was not on Niskanen’s list, despite his state’s hardcore push for passage of the S.386 bill, which helps foreign workers get citizenship by jumping from OPT to the H-1B program.
But these numbers understate the scale of the OPT program — and the hidden subsidy to Democratic states.
The pro-OPT President’s Alliance reported the huge scale of the program:
2018 Total Number of SEVIS Records with Authorizations to Participate in CPT, OPT or STEM OPT
In comparison, U.S. colleges graduate roughly 800,000 Americans with technology-intensive four-year degrees each year.
The cheap-labor program is huge because many of the foreigners are given “STEM-OPT” permits to work for almost three years. They can get the three-year permit once a secretive panel at DHS decides that their coursework — such as accounting — can be related to technology.
For example, from 2008 to 2018, roughly 11,174 foreign “STEM-OPT” students were hired for up to three years by Amazon, Intel, Google, and Microsoft. No Americans are hired under the OPT programs.
Moreover, many of the foreigners also get “Curricular Practical Training,” one-year work permits before they graduate. From 2003 to 2018, the four tech companies hired almost 25,000 foreign employees — but not a single American — under the CPT program.
The DHS data shows that colleges and universities are providing 500,000 cheap foreign employees to American employers each year. So if the federal subsidy is counted at only $20,000 per employee, the DHS data shows the program provides $10 billion in annual wage subsidies, most of which goes to wealthy employers in wealthy states.
The yearly subsidy adds up to $40 billion during President Donald Trump’s term in office — and most of that goes to his political enemies in a few wealthy, Democrat-dominated coastal states.
But these numbers are multiplied by the stock market. Most tech companies can raise their stock by price about $20 if they transfer $1 from payroll to profits. So if OPT shaves just $5 billion from companies’ payrolls, it adds $100 billion to their stock prices – – and several billion to the stock wealth of the C-suite executives.
Some GOP legislators are trying to use immigration to steer more cheap labor in their states, said Miano.
But that strategy is futile because the insecure OPTs and H-1Bs need jobs that help them to network with their ethnic and national peers, Miano said.
“It is hilarious – if you listen [to the GOP advocates], people are going to move to [Uah’s] ‘Silicon Slopes’… But they have already doubled and tripled the number of visa workers, and it has not happened.”
Miano’s argument is supported by the Niskanen data, which shows the OPT workers flock to the coasts, largely ignoring the inland states. Neufeld’s data shows that 73 percent went to New York, New Jersey, California, Texas, or one of the other eight coastal states in the top 11 states. The remaining ten percent of tracked OPTs went to inland Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.
The OPT workers headed to the coasts in pursuit of jobs — and networking opportunities with their co-ethics in diverse cities. For example, in 2017 and 2018, the OPT workers included 363,000 Chinese, 196,000 Indians, 44,000 Saudis, and 55,000 Koreans, the Congressional Research Service reported in November 2019.
“States and localities also lose from the cheap-labor program,” said Miano, who has launched a 12-year, three-appeal, marathon lawsuit against the OPT program:
The whole immigration system effectively screws the low-wage states in favor of the high-wage states. If you take a look in the absence of OPT and H-1B, you would have employers looking at the real cost of labor — the average wage of a programmer in Silicon Valley is $160,000, while in most of the country it is under $100,000 — and saying ‘Maybe we should move to Ohio, maybe we should go to Arkansas?’ Instead, the employers use the OPT system to get cheap labor at a discount.
Niskanen’s data shows OPTs get their jobs in the wealthiest regions, largely because the OPT program is designed to help deliver workers to the wealthy technology sectors.
For example, Neufeld’s data shows that 57.6 percent of the OPTs he tracked from 2008 to 2017 worked in ten just “core-based statistical areas,” including “New York-Newark-Jersey City,” and “Boston-Cambrdige-Newton.” Two of those wealthy areas were in the lone double-GOP state of Texas. But eight were in double-Democrat states. Four were ranked among the top ten wealthiest areas in the nation, according to the 2010 census.
The best way for the states to get a share of the coasts’ technology jobs — and their taxes — is to kill the OPT program, he said.
For governors, mayors, and employers, “the biggest way [to get tech jobs] is to take advantage of your wage differential.” Miano said.
In Silicon Valley, the average salary for a computer programmer is $160,000. Nationwide, it is a little over $93,000. That is a $70,0000 wage difference. In Topeka, Kansas, the average wage is $73,000. You could go to an employer and say “You have to pay $160,000 instead of $73,000 in Kansas.” But an employer says back “I can make that up that difference with [cheap] OPTs and H-1Bs, so I don’t have to move.”
The federal incentives for investors to stay in the expensive coastal states also ensures that heartland states lose each generation of new college graduates, Miano added. “If you are at the University of Kanas, and you have 100 computer science graduates, where will they go to work? Not in Kansas.”
Many reports show that many American graduates are sidelined by the federal government’s cheap-labor policies — and millions more are losing their jobs amid the coronavirus crash.
“Claiming there is a skills shortage by denying the strength of the U.S. STEM workforce and student supply is possible only by ignoring the most obvious and direct evidence and obscuring the issue with statistical smokescreens,” said a 2014 report by Hal Salzman, at Rutgers University. “The Census Bureau reports that only about one in four STEM bachelor’s degree holders has a STEM job,”
The OPT program is also a primary feeder for the huge H-1B visa worker program that keeps about 750,000 workers in the United States. OPT “is the main on-ramp for American companies to recruit and retain foreign talent in the United States,” Cato reported.
A 2019 report at Insights.dice.com showed that the skew in the H-1B program is far higher than in the OPT program: Just 63,000 of 301,000 H-1B requests in 2019 were sought for jobs in Texas — while 79 percent were aimed for jobs on double-Democrat states.
But those 2019 numbers hide the scale of the H-1B skew.
Many of the Texas-bound H-1Bs (and OPTs) were requested by Indian staffing companies, which normally reroute their workers to other states, such as California, Connecticut, and New York. The DHS has not released workplace locations since 2017.
Fortune 500 CEOs & VPs can happily ignore & boot US professionals b/c the execs instead hire their own army of compliant, silent H-1B visa-workers.
This economic class war is obscured by the estb media's fangirling for 'vibrantly diverse immigrants'#H1Bhttps://t.co/EgkcLsf4Xm
THE BIGGEST PROPAGANDA MACHINE IN AMERICA IS THAT THE RICH AND WALL STREET DESERVE SOCIALISM AND THE REST OF US DESERVE TO GET THE TAX BILLS FOR THEIR WHITE COLLAR CRIMES AND PLUNDERING!
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.
“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
The Gates Foundation — the wealthiest philanthropic group in the world — has come under fire for the way its leaders have slammed President Donald Trump while praising China. Bill Gates recentlypraised China’s handling of the outbreak,saying that “China did a lot of things right at the beginning.” His remarks were promoted on social media by Chinese state media.
Medieval depictions of the bubonic plague often illustrated a “dance of death,” portraying peasants, noblemen, and clergy all equally afflicted by the plague. The current pandemic affects people of all classes too. It made front page news when actor Tom Hanks (net worth approximately $400 million) announced he and his wife had contracted COVID-19.
Public opinion about Hanks, a beloved entertainer, is almost universally sympathetic, but attitudes toward the rich as a whole haven’t changed during the pandemic. Wealthy people remain easy targets for social prejudice and mistrust.
The headlines say it all. In GQ last month: “How Are Rich People Getting Richer During the Coronavirus Pandemic?” The month before that in the Atlantic: “It Pays to Be Rich During a Pandemic.” A recent Axios report detailed a smorgasbord of similar stories, all about wealthier individuals fleeing to private islands or using private health care to protect themselves from COVID-19. Axios quoted a progressive scholar who lambasted “an undercurrent of unequal sacrifice.”
Although news is supposed to be unbiased, classism is hard to shake. Supposedly neutral articles about bonuses and salaries often featured sweeping generalizations, along with negative and highly emotive terms such as “greed,” “gambling,” “excess,” “filling their pockets,” and “obscene.”
On the other hand, although Oxfam’s reports on wealth inequality in recent years have been criticized rightly for questionable methodology, widespread coverage of the reports often took their findings at face value. That’s likely because Oxfam’s central claims and the organization’s general thrust against “the super-rich” are closely aligned with much of the media’s editorial viewpoints. Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century received similarly favorable coverage.
It’s not surprising that this media bias reinforces the public’s negative view toward the wealthy. But although researchers have extensively studied other stereotypes and prejudices, very little work has been done to understand prejudice based on social class, and even less has been done on “upward classism.” An international comparative survey measured what people in the United States, Germany, U.K, and France think of the rich. The survey asked questions that identified whether participants had a sense of “social envy.” It turned out that social envy is highest in France, followed by Germany. It is significantly lower in the United States and U.K, but there’s a caveat: younger Americans were more likely than older Americans to resent and distrust the wealthy, showing that America may soon be like continental Europe in this regard.
Social envy enables scapegoating or assigning blame to an out-group for societal problems. The comparative survey showed that nearly two-thirds of social enviers tend to scapegoat other groups. Scapegoating depends on a kind of a zero-sum thinking, and many respondents across the nations surveyed agreed that “The more the rich have, the less there is for the poor” -- an assumption belied by the way that classes across a society commonly rise and fall together. BLOG: BULLSHIT! BILL GATES BUILT HIS NASTY MONOPOLY BY SCREWING EVERYONE! IN MOST OF EUROPE MICROSOFT HAS BEEN HIT OVER AND OVER AGAIN WITH MASSIVE FINES FOR THEIR LOOTING. BILL GATES IS AN ADVOCATE FOR AMNESTY AND OPEN BORDERS. THIS IS NOT BECAUSE HE GIVES A FUCK ABOUT POOR MEXICANS INVADING OUR BORDERS BUT BECAUSE IN EVERY AMNESTY BILL EVER ATTEMPTED IS A LIFT ON ALL CAPS SO FUCKERS LIKE HIM AND MARK ZUCKERRUNT COULD BRING IN UNLIMITED FOREIGN HELP TO WORK CHEAP! THERE'S NOTHING NOBLE ABOUT GATES. IF HE COULD TAKE HIS DIRTY MONEY WITH HIM TO HELL, HE'D NOT BE GIVING IT AWAY IN AFRICA!
Like any other stereotype, these negative views toward the rich discount or ignore the many individuals who are virtuous or working to solve global problems. Unconscious bias toward the rich lumps white-collar criminals and unscrupulous businessmen together with Bill Gates, who created a world-changing computing system and went on to devote much of his fortune toward philanthropy, including hundreds of millions of dollars on coronavirus research. These biases probably make it easier for people to accept strange conspiracy theories about Gates, such as the idea that he wants to use the pandemic to start a world government or use vaccines against it to depopulate the world.
Class bias is western society’s unaddressed blind spot. Someone biased on a class basis is only a hop, skip, and jump away from adopting bias toward other groups -- especially during a crisis like the current pandemic. If one blames the rich for society’s problems, it’s no surprise that they’re just as capable of blaming an entire race. Some think classism and racism come from opposite sides of the political spectrum, but that’s not always true. Many episodes of genocide, like those in Rwanda and Cambodia, have had elements of both.
These biases harm society as a whole. If people do not understand the real causes of crises and negative events, choosing instead to believe simple explanations and assign blame to an easy target, this gets in the way of finding real solutions to problems like the current pandemic. Just as we now know that the bubonic plague was spread by rats and fleas, rather than by witches or Jews, we should be able to reject scapegoating in our own time.
Rainer Zitelmann is the author of The Rich in Public Opinion: What We Think When We Think about Wealth, published by the Cato Institut
Obama Staffer, Bill Gates, Soros Behind the Group Pushing a Celebrity Global Response to Chinese Coronavirus
IAN LANGSDON/AFP via Getty Images/Olivier Hoslet/Pool Photo via AP
The celebrity campaign #PasstheMic is enlisting Julia Roberts, Hugh Jackman, and other A-list Hollywood stars to hand over their social media accounts to the likes of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other experts to promote a “global response” to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Who’s behind the push? The roster of donors and leaders reads like a who’s-who of left-wing globalists — U2 frontman Bono, George Soros, and Bill Gates. At the head of the organization is Gayle Smith, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama.
The guest line-up features another physician who has publicly denounced President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and handling of the coronavirus crisis, while praising the World Health Organization, which downplayed the gravity of the outbreak in its early weeks.
In a video interview with Julia Roberts on Thursday, Dr. Fauci urged people to pay more attention to how the coronavirus is impacting poorer countries. “We have, really, a moral responsibility for people throughout the world,” he said.
Fauci also warned Americans not to re-open the economy too quickly. “Now is not the time to tempt fate and pull back completely,” he said. “There is a golden mean there.”
ONE Campaign was co-founded by Bono as an advocacy group to combat poverty and illness, especially in Africa. The group is closely aligned with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has donated millions of dollars and holds a seat on its board of directors.
The Gates Foundation — the wealthiest philanthropic group in the world — has come under fire for the way its leaders have slammed President Donald Trump while praising China. Bill Gates recently praised China’s handling of the outbreak, saying that “China did a lot of things right at the beginning.” His remarks were promoted on social media by Chinese state media.
Meanwhile, his wife, Melinda Gates, recently gave President Trump a “D-“ for his response to the outbreak, saying that “we need leadership.”
The Gates Foundation is also a major donor to the World Health Organization, the embattled United Nations agency whose botched handling of the Wuhan virus and close ties to China’s Communist regime have prompted President Trump to suspend funding.
ONE Campaign also receives money from the Open Society Policy Center, the Soros lobbying group that opposes the Trump agenda and promotes open borders and other left-wing political issues.
Gayle Smith, who currently serves as president and CEO of ONE Campaign, previously worked as a special assistant to President Obama, who later appointed her to head USAID.
“None of us are safe until all of us are safe,” Smith tweeted this week to promote #PasstheMic.
Smith has publicly criticized President Trump’s decision to suspend funding to the WHO. “A cut in funding would mean a reduction in funding possibly for the fight against polio where we’re near successful,” Smith said in an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation.
Future guests in #PasstheMic include Dr. Tsion Firew, a New York-based emergency doctor. Firew has publicly denounced President Trump’s border wall while praising Obama. She has also denounced President Trump’s decision to suspend WHO funding.
“He doesn’t represent what America stands for!” she tweeted this week.
While all these leaders were pledging, showing solidarity and investing in what matters-health, one leader was busy taking hydroxychloroquine & drafting a letter to permanently stop funding from WHO. He doesn’t represent what America stands for! We miss integrity & authenticity. https://t.co/0PRTVGTGvT
WILL THE EPIDEMIC FINISH OFF MIDDLE AMERICA AS TRUMP HANDS THE SOCIALIST WELFARE STATE OF WALL STREET TRILLIONS?
Sinking feeling
I clung to the middle class as I aged. The pandemic pulled me under.
Derek Brahney for The Washington Post
By Ray Suarez
APRIL 30, 2020
We were on a busy D.C. street, waiting for the light to change, when my teenage daughter asked, out of nowhere, “Dad, what are you afraid of?” That might have been a cue for a heartwarming father-daughter conversation about overcoming life’s challenges. Nope. From my lizard brain, or from the primordial soup in my guts, came an answer I didn’t even consider, out of my mouth before I had a conscious thought of it.
Ray Suarez @RaySuarezNews, was a senior correspondent for “PBS NewsHour” and host of the public radio show “America Abroad.” He co-hosts the program and podcast “WorldAffairs” for KQED-FM and the World Affairs Council. This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
“Being poor. That’s what I’m afraid of.” Then we crossed the street.
I keep returning to that exchange over the past few weeks, as my inbox fills with coronavirus-driven bad news. A paid speaking engagement in Texas? Canceled. Several days of work at an international conference? The organizers decided not to take the risk. A gig moderating a climate change conference in Chicago? Postponed, maybe until October. When I traveled as a reporter to health crises in Africa and Latin America in recent years, exposed to malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia, I knew that if I got sick my health-care costs would be paid by my employer, as would any days I needed to recover. In 2010, covering the devastating Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti for PBS, I caught something that lingered when I got home, so I called in sick.
Now that I’m a gig worker over 60, “sick days” are simply salary-free days off. Even if work dries up, that $2,800-a-month health insurance bill still comes due on the first of the month. The electric company won’t take a podcast, a column or a television documentary as in-kind payment for kilowatt hours.
In the first two decades of this century, wages declined for working men over 55 with bachelor’s degrees.
BLOG: MEANWHILE THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY AND GOP PARTNERED WITH THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE TO FLOOD AMERICA WITH HORDES OF ‘CHEAP’ LABOR FOREIGNERS AND ILLEGALS. WE STILL GET THE TAX BILLS FOR THEIR WELFARE AND CRIME WAVES.
In the first two decades of this century, wages declined for working men over 55 with bachelor’s degrees. When men over 50 who are displaced from their job finally get another one, they can expect their wages to fall 20 percent. Such declines signal the decreasing bargaining power of older men. In a downturn, older men do hold on to their jobs more regularly than younger ones, but when they lose work it takes them considerably longer to find their next position.
Men older than 55 can’t command higher salaries in the marketplace, but they also can’t walk away and rely on their savings, which, for millions, are inadequate. Northwestern Mutual has reported that 1 in 3 baby boomers, knocking at the door of retirement, have less than $25,000 saved. A study from the New School estimates that 8.5 million older workers over 55 would fall into poverty or near-poverty if they retired at 62 and began taking Social Security payments. It is, the researchers found, the end point of more than 20 years of lagging behind younger men in wage increases, both among college-educated and non-degree-holding men.
An eye blink ago, I was anchoring a nightly program for the cable news network Al Jazeera America. Before that, I had long tenures with “PBS NewsHour” and NPR. When I read warnings that workers could face sudden and catastrophic losses of income in their final years of employment, I was empathetic but concluded it could never happen to me. After all, I had worked hard to build in bumpers around my life, and my career, to avoid that. I climbed the ladder in a very competitive business to jobs of greater renown, greater responsibility and higher pay. I did all the things that would have made me the hero of a financial advice column: got married and stayed married, paid off my mortgage years early, fully covered three college educations so my kids wouldn’t have to borrow. Then the wheels came off. After Al Jazeera pulled the plug on its young network, I headed to Amherst College as a visiting professor while beating the bushes for jobs in radio, television and print. I shoved down the rising panic, kept one eye on my bank balance as I started freelancing, and kept the other eye out for the next big thing. Like hundreds of thousands of men in their early 60s across the country, I had to get used to the idea that the marketplace might have already decided I was “done.” Many men my age are “job bound,” more convinced than their young co-workers that they couldn’t find a comparable position, even in a tight labor market.
“What’s this about? Corporate greed. Greed has a lot to do with it,” says Nick Corcodilos, the author of the Ask the Headhunter blog and an employment consultant. “I’ll get a guy in my office who’ll tell me: ‘I was making $150,000. I’m scrambling to get jobs at $115 or $100. I just need a job.’ ” Corcodilos knows what companies say. “You’ll hear explanations like, ‘They cost more, their benefits cost more, they’re out more often because they’re sicker.’ It turns out, it’s all BS.”
For me, the financial strain arrived quickly. As my COBRA health coverage reached its time limit, my wife and I had a long talk about how to lower our enormous monthly health-care costs. One quick fix was to drop dental coverage, so we did it. Two weeks later, I was riding my bike on D.C. streets when I hit an enormous, and unexpectedly deep, pothole. The shock slammed my jaw shut, but I shook it off and continued to pedal. Then the pain began — first searing, then a steady, throbbing ache radiating from my jaw to my eyes to the top of my head. It felt like my teeth were misaligned. I was having trouble chewing food. In just a few weeks I had moved from being a guy who had top-drawer health coverage to being one of the guys I read about, one of the guys I covered, who deferred health care for fear of the cost.
The pain eventually subsided, but the complications that allowed it to persist are still with me. I am years away from what I had thought of as the age when I could transition to part-time work. I have worked hard to avoid raiding my retirement savings to cover current expenses. Home repairs I would have had done without a second thought have to wait until there’s money: The front steps need to be re-mortared and reset. A dying tree in the yard needs to be cut down and carted away.
These past few weeks indicate that I’ll soon have plenty of company. Take the predicament of men my age at a time of 3.7 percent unemployment and add the army of people now filing unemployment claims — 4.4 million in one recent week alone. It’s unclear at the moment just what federal and state government emergency programs will do for millions of self-employed and gig economy workers, many already hustling in the best of times, who’ve been watching their work dry up and disappear.
If my own experiences are any indication, what comes next for many of them is insecurity about self-worth, status and place in the world. My name appears on mailing lists from my days as the old me. I’m asked to make generous contributions to organizations for which I had written big checks in the past; today, that’s out of the question. I feel sheepish talking publicly about all this, because I know how many live a lot closer to the edge than I do. But I’m not whining when I say my life is different now. Even before social distancing rendered the outside world strange, I would do a walk-through at the supermarket with my wife’s list in hand, to see if items close enough to what was specified were on sale. A pair of old shoes is resoled for a second time instead of being replaced. There will be no vacations for my family when this crisis ends.
And that doesn’t change the fact that I have some serious decisions to make about what these years of my life, and what’s left of my working years, can be. If I for once don’t follow the rules, take my Social Security early and start drawing from my 401(k) accounts, I will be poorer in retirement than all my planning and saving ever assumed. I can swallow hard and realize that a chapter in my life may be over. That would mean proceeding on the theory that a cratered annual income is now the reality, rather than just an aberration. I have to scratch together the dough for my property tax, my homeowner’s insurance and my monthly premium. I’ll keep an eye on the calendar and cross the line to Medicare as so many friends have begun to do.
One thing I don’t ask is, “Why me?” Given my age, given the numbers, given the realities of work in America for those who are displaced, I could well ask, “Why not me?”
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.
Fortune 500 CEOs Use H-1B Visa Workers to Grow a Bonded-Labor Workforce
Hundreds of thousands of Indian contract workers are tied to their U.S. employers for many years because U.S. companies have offered them green cards as payment for compliant labor, according to a new report by the Cato Institute.
“U.S. employers file far more petitions for Indians than the [green card] limits allow,” says the Cato report, titled “Backlog for Skilled Immigrants Tops 1 Million: Over 200,000 Indians Could Die of Old Age While Awaiting Green Cards.”
The Indian H-1B contract workers are usually hoping to get green cards after several years of labor. They know they must remain with their employers for many years to get the hugely valuable green cards, the Cato report says:
H-1B workers must maintain a job with only certain approved H-1B employers. They cannot be unemployed at any time or start their own businesses. If H-1B employers close or downsize—an obvious possibility over decades—visa holders lose their status and places in the green card queue.
The population of Indian workers and family members who are bound to their employers is growing above two million, according to the Cato report. “The government is approving nearly two [employer] petitions for employment-based immigrants for every [available] green card,” the report says. “At the current rate of increase, the backlog [for green cards] will exceed 2.4 million by 2030.”
Immigration lawyer Doug Rand says the nation’s immigration law is forcefully “lashing” the H-1B migrants to their employers:
Our #immigration laws force skilled workers into “temporary” visas like #H1B, lashing them to a sponsoring employer & impeding mobility, while they wait decades for an artificially scarce green card conveying permanent residency & ultimately citizenship.
That lashing claim is echoed by many of the Indian H-1B workers. For example, the Immigration Voice advocacy group claims more than one million Indians are trapped in their jobs as “indentured servants”:
If the system doesn’t ensure adequate rights to immigrants then it is better to not bring in any immigrants at all or else companies can treat immigrants like indentured servants. … If the system doesn’t ensure adequate rights for immigrants (including the right to change jobs and employer with as much ease as others in the marketplace), then we would rather have no immigrants be brought into the US at all.
“Indentured servitude [of H-1Bs] has become part of the American business culture, and it’s wrong, and it’s wrong right from the beginning,” said one former top-level research manager. “It has done more than just economic damage to this country — we’ve lost our competitive, innovative advantage because of it,” he said. “Guarantee that’s happening,” he added.
But this master-servant relationship is better described as “bonded service,” said John Miano, a lawyer with the Immigration Reform Law Institute.
This tied H-1B employer-employee relationship is not slavery because there is no government force, Miano said. The relationship is not indentured service because the Indians can exit, he added. “These guys can go home anytime they want, [while] indentured service was voluntary slavery for some fixed period of time.” Both slavery and indentured service were declared unconstitutional by the 13th Amendment to the constitution in 1865.
This new form of bonded labor also should be outlawed because it prevents Americans from bargaining in an equal and free market with employers for jobs, wages, and promotions, he said.
But the population in bonded service is expanding because the Indians and the employers both gain from the deal.
The employers get a compliant, stable workforce, apparently at a lower payroll cost.
In turn, the migrants eventually earn the huge deferred bonus of American citizenship.
That prize allows them and all of their descendants — plus some family members — to escape India’s poor, ancient, caste-ridden, polluted, and crowded society for the open, wealthy, welcoming, free, and non-discriminatory American culture and landscape.
But the growing role of bonded service in the American labor market is an increasing threat to the status, legal rights, and bargaining power of American employees, Miano said. “We have a new category of labor we’re creating here,” he said:
The system is trying to wedge people between [economically] free labor and historical indentured servitude/slavery situation. It’s not good for free labor — like slavery was never good for the working class but was only good for people in who lived in [the] Tara and Twelve Oaks [antebellum mansions].
For the billionaire class, the new [bonded service] system is great, for everyone else, the situation is bad.
DoJ/EEOC do nothing as US & Indian execs trade US jobs to Indian #H1B workers, cutting Americans out of careers, homes & families. This trade choked innovation in Silicon-V, slammed insurance & banking. #SenMikeLee & #S386 will expand it to healthcare https://t.co/qoENwyO6X7
Congress Allows CEOs and Indians to Create a Bonded-Service Workforce
The bonded service problem is made possible by Congress’s visa-worker laws.
Those laws allow companies to keep a population of 1.3 million or more foreign white-collar contract workers in U.S. jobs for periods ranging from months to seven years. The foreign workers are imported via the H-1B, OPT, CPT, TN, L-1, H4EAD, and E-3 programs. This legal white-collar workforce includes at least 800,000 Indians and at least 270,000 Chinese. These visa workers — including roughly750,000 H-1Bs — have almost no legal rights, and their employers can send them and their families back to the poverty of their home country at a moment’s notice.
So the imported labor force of Indians and Chinese work compliantly, often for low wages, long hours, and bad treatment, in jobs that could be held by American professionals.
But most of these visa workers are also working to get the colossal deferred bonus of a U.S. green card. The green cards give foreigners nearly all the economic and political rights of Americans. They are free to change jobs, to become citizens after five years, and to deliver citizenship to their spouses, children, and all of their descendants. In effect, green cards are the biggest prize any man or woman can win for family and descendants.
Yet companies are allowed to reward employees with up to 140,000 green cards each year, for just the price of a few lawyers’ billable hours.
Obviously, executives dangle that huge prize to get their foreign workers to work for cheap, not change jobs, and never complain.
U.S. and Indian companies have created a huge hidden economy based on this work-for-green-cards trade. The U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy is so big that companies nominated 297,878 Indians for green cards in the five years up to 2020.
But that huge number is far, far above the levels allowed for India by federal immigration law. The law’s pro-diversity rules limit the annual share of green cards that can be won by people from any one country to roughly 15,000 green cards.
In effect, by ignoring this limit, the companies and the Indians have cooperatively put roughly 150,000 Indian workers — plus 150,000 spouses and older children — since 2015 into a bonded-service, work-and-wait line that will keep some workers in line for decades.
The Threat to Professionalism and Innovation
The companies’ easy use of bonded labor is wrecking Americans’ labor rights and is destroying the ideal of professionalism, said Miano.
In Silicon Valley, the “employers love Indians on H-1Bs because employers can then keep those employees as an indentured slave,” said a former Indian H-1B who is now a citizen. “It’s a high-tech slavery.”
“Eighty percent … of the work done by [H-1Bs at] big companies, like Facebook, Google, or Qualcomm, Amazon, is so-called grunge technical work,” he continued. “You don’t really need a lot of creativity. What you need is a flood of some technical expertise along with long hours.”
The big software firms use their H-1Bs for repetitive tasks, such as testing, that could be accomplished by young American graduates, said Bob Heath, a Florida-based software engineer who created H1BFacts.com:
The testing process is a monotonous repetitive kind of job. You test functions. So you pull up a screen from a website, and you test each button under various conditions or various states under different parameters. It’s very monotonous. If you find a bug, you’ve got to re-create the scenario. And then you report it to a [software] developer [for repair]. It’s like eight hours of very monotonous tedious work.
H-1Bs have no job security, the former Indian H-1B worker said, and “your employer knows that, and an employer will use this knowledge and leverage this knowledge to their advantage.” Yet Indians accept their lower status because they are paid well to work in U.S. jobs, he said:
As a manager, you want Indian guys because you are able to produce more. You have a [workforce of] compliant, amenable, never-complaining Indian guys with an H-1B. And you are basically getting the big bonuses as a vice president because you’re able to produce more because you’re able to meet more deadlines. Of course, you don’t care about the quality of life for the employees — that’s a different game.
“You don’t really need a wow set of skills to be hired at Facebook or Google or Amazon,” the former Indian H-1B told Breitbart News. But, he added, “in companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, you’re paid quite handsomely.”
But this compliant Indian workforce has also displaced many American professionals from many banks, insurance companies, manufacturers, universities, and transport companies, say Americans.
Professionalism encourages American graduates and skilled workers to embrace and demonstrate dispassionate skill, diligence, and ingenuity, Miano said. “We put people’s lives on the line with software, so there is a great need for professionalism. But what executives want is someone who is the [payroll] equivalent of a ditch digger creating new cardio pacemakers and the Boeing 737 Max.”
Census data shows that Indian H-1Bs have displaced myriad Americans in multiple different sectors of the nation’s economy.
For example, in 2017, American-born programmers were just one-in-four software employees in Santa Clara, CA., down from four-in-five in 1980. Just one-in-three software developers in Richmond County, NY, were born in the United States. One-third of the workers in Forsyth County, GA, McLean County, IL, and in San Bernardino County, CA, in 2017 were American-born.
Census data shows how huge numbers of American software graduates have been replaced by Indian & Chinese visa-workers in N.J., California, N.C., Georgia, N.Y., Texas, Virginia, Florida, and other states. Next: Healthcare professionals. @S386https://t.co/qH9p4Ynd34
This Indian workforce is expanding upwards as older Indians get promoted, win green cards, become citizens, and form new companies — while roughly 60,000 new Indian visa workers arrive each year.
Amid this population expansion, U.S. executives have allowed India-born managers and Indian-run staffing companies to take over the technology departments of many Fortune 500 companies, say both Americans and Indians.
This wholescale change in the workforce — from American professionals to Indian bonded-laborers — has sharply reduced the innovation and the quality of U.S. software, say many Americans and Indians.
The Indian H-1Bs cannot be independent professionals because the bonded service allows their Indian and U.S. managers to exile them back to India if they speak against what the managers want, said Mary from central New Jersey, an immigrant software expert. “They are very subservient to higher managers,” she told Breitbart News.
This subservience echoes India’s caste culture, where high-born individuals dominate lower-people people — regardless of skill or education. This culture encourages Indian-born managers at U.S. companies to hire subordinates who promise kickbacks, either cash, gifts, or overtime and weekend work.
This hidden economy of kickbacks ensures Indian managers also prefer to hire loyal Indians from their hometowns and their family networks, even if the Indians cannot write any software.
Indian hiring managers will sell jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, an Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News. Honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you can’t survive — you will become a bottleneck in the chain. … [Senior managers] will fire you,” he said.
In contrast, mid-level American managers do not sell jobs, he said, adding, “There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million.”
“My experience with the people from there is that they have no basic [information technology] knowledge,” said Mary. “They will say they have all this experience [to get hired] and then try to learn on the job. If you ask them a question, they can’t answer you. So what is happening is that we’re training them … [even though] we have our jobs — and their jobs — to do.”
The Indians’ professional shortcomings create constant conflict with American professionals in offices, said Armondo from Texas. For example, Indian workers rely on office politics — including charges of racism — to deter U.S. managers from comparing productivity, he said:
That’s the way they operate — they will go over your head and start sabotaging you. They are trying to do everything they can to keep their job. … They are under a lot of pressure and are limited on what jobs they can get because of the visa. … The Indian managers know they have inexperienced people who can’t do crap, but they don’t fire them. That is another thing, they don’t fire them. An Indian manager does not fire them even because he knows this guy has a family and is married and they are not going to throw an Indian on the street.
“They’re very clannish. … They will push Americans out and make a group of their own,” Mary said. “When they’re talking in their Indian language, I have to ask them, ‘Can you speak English?’” she said. “I’m an outsider to them,” she added.
On April 7, BuzzFeed News outlined the workplace politics caused by competing teams of Indian visa workers in Apple’s Information Systems & Technology division:
“There’s a Cold War going on every single day,” Archana Sabapathy, a former IS&T contractor who did two stints in the division, told me. Sabapathy’s first stint at IS&T lasted more than three years, the second only a day. Inside the division, she said, contracting companies such as Wipro, Infosys, and Accenture are constantly fighting to fill roles and win projects, which are handed out largely on the basis of how cheaply they can staff up to Apple’s needs.
“They’re just fighting for the roles,” Sabapathy told me. “That’s all they care about, not the work, not the deliverables, the effort they put in, or even talent. They’re not looking for any of those aspects.”
IS&T is thus filled with vendor tribalism, where loyalty to one’s contracting company trumps all. “Making a friendship is — like you wouldn’t even think about that,” Sabapathy told me, speaking of cross-vendor relationships. “It’s not the traditional American way of working anymore. You build relationships when you come to work because you spend most of your time here — that’s not there.”
Apple’s Indian-born managers foster the conflict, says an anonymous post on Quora.com:
This is actually a bunch of managers (who were ex. Wipro, TCS, Infosys, Satyam) that have converted to full time employees at Apple. And they hire only H1B workers from India so that they can hold them by their balls (while waiting for their GC) and literally sucking the life out of them. Hence the managers themselves do not know anything about software engineering.
Many Indians use their green cards and citizenship to walk away from India’s culture and to bring their children towards America’s modernity. But their own jobs, peers, and families keep them tied to India’s caste culture — and force them to stay anonymous as they quietly lament the gradual loss of professional America they had hoped to join.
Top U.S. managers allow the Indians’ office culture to displace American professionalism, Mary said.
“The American managers like the [H-1Bs’] subservient relationship. … The H-1B workers can’t complain, so whatever the managers on the U.S. side need, they do it. If these guys have to work at 10 to 11 at night, the [managers] don’t care,” she said.
American executives do not want to get feedback from American professionals, said Mary.
“As a professional, you expect to speak to them at their level, but they don’t want you to speak at a professional level because they have gotten used to the [subservient H-1B] contractors,” she said. “Subservient people agree with them on everything.”
At one Pennsylvania employer, “you’re supposed to answer in a very subservient way,” she said, adding:
I would tell [the executive] professionally what the issue was, and she didn’t like that. You can’t oppose her in any way. If she tells you “It is black,” it has to be black even if it is white. [The Indian contractors] will feed her what she wants to hear … They cater specifically to that [attitude].
When the information given to that manager is wrong, and that manager does not care, the professionalism of the field is gone.
U.S. managers “don’t really want to do any work … [they] use these [Indian] guys to do all their work,” Mary added. “It is not efficient, and it does not serve the company. But I think companies have fallen into this and don’t know what to do … I don’t see them being able to get out of it.”
Top U.S. CEOs lobby India's gov't to send millions of Indian graduates into the US jobs needed by US college-grads. So #SenMikeLee#S386 bill is just a starter before a "free flow of skilled labor in both countries”? https://t.co/2mN846ZnUZ
The destruction of professionalism damages the nation’s economy and wealth, said Miano, who used to work as a software programmer:
A huge number of software projects fail in the United States. … One-third of projects are successful, one-third are total disasters, and the other third are in between. There’s no system of building codes in software.
So if you have a senior executive who says, “I need some software,” and then comes up with absolutely unimplementable plans, and goes to software services companies and presents this plan, there is not a single one that would turn then down. They would accept the deal, do the disaster, and bill them by the hour. There is no major software company on the planet that would say no to that deal.
But if you went to a building construction site where there are standards, and if you wanted to build a 40-story building in cardboard and have it done in six months, those guys would say no.
When one-third of software projects are complete failures, you’re talking about a 33 percent of loss of productivity.
Business insists that India's H-1B visa workers are vital to the Fortune 500 economy. But evidence shows little innovation & much chaos, largely b/c the H-1Bs work under oppressive cultural, legal & corp. pressures. IOW, professionalism is better.#H1Bhttps://t.co/URX7rB6nof
The H-1B program has also stifled innovation by excluding many innovative Americans from jobs in top companies, said Heath:
Somebody goes to work for a high tech company, and they would have a better idea on how to do something, but the employer, they’re focused on making money, The [top managers] are focused on the quarterly profit, and they don’t have the time to go off on some wild goose chase on what some employee may dream up.
Most executives dislike innovation because it threatens their jobs, said the top American research manager:
Innovation, true innovation is chaotic … [and] chaos is completely uncontrollable by the management and Human Relations [managers]. It’s uncontrollable. Okay. They hate it. They want to do anything they can to get rid of true boundary-pushing, iconoclastic behavior because it’s dangerous. … Chaos is the mortal enemy of a good quarterly profit-margin.
The quarterly focus is also destroying the willingness of young Americans to take up innovative careers, the research manager said:
By implementing that compliant [Indian] workforce and shoving out the people that created most of the innovation and technology, you made younger people not want to do it anymore. They’re not gonna work flat out for 15 years, get passed over in middle age. … They’re not going to do things like that for you now.
Another lawsuit alleges systematic, massive & damaging discrimination vs. American graduates by a Fortune 500 contractor. DoJ & EEOC are passive, and the estb. media is mute, b/c the discrimination occurs via H-1B visa-worker 'immigration' program.#H1Bhttps://t.co/gozepsoMWX
But that loss of innovation helps the top managers and shareholders of today’s top companies keep control of the entire high-tech sector, said Heath. He continued:
The high-tech revolution began in the United States for a reason. It was the fact that American workers are among the greatest scientists, engineers, and mathematicians that the world has ever seen. By hiring workers from India, these billionaire oligarchs, they’ve taken over the workforce and they’ve taken over the technology because American workers are being cut out of the operation. It’s killing the goose that laid the Golden Egg.
“We put people lives on the line with software, so there is a great need for professionalism,” said Miano. “But what executives want is someone who is the [payroll] equivalent of a ditch digger creating new cardio pacemakers and the Boeing 737 Max.”
Valley executives have long tried to corral their professional employees. In 2014, for example, four of the major companies to pay perhaps $325 million to 64,000 plaintiffs for allegedly colluding between 2005 and 2009 to limit the freedom of American professionals to switch jobs. This alleged behavior was illegal, the fine was modest, and the political pushback was trivial. So now the Valley’s executives are using the imported H-1B workforce to grab the legal control that they have long sought over American professionals.
Yet Silicon Valley’s top executives admit that China is innovating them out of business.
The Valley now needs a bailout from Washington, DC, said a February 27 article by Eric Schmidt, one of the former Silicon Valley chieftains who served as CEO of Google while the sector discarded its American professionals. Schmidt’s op-ed in the New York Timesadmitted:
Important trends are not in our favor. America’s lead in artificial intelligence, for example, is precarious. A.I. will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a Defense Department priority. Leading the world in A.I. is essential to growing our economy and protecting our security. A recent study considering more than 100 metrics finds that the United States is well ahead of China today but will fall behind in five to 10 years. China also has almost twice as many supercomputers and about 15 times as many deployed 5G base stations as the United States. If current trends continue, China’s overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.
Schmidt’s preferred fix would reaffirm the investors’ preference for compliant foreign workers:
A majority of computer scientists with graduate degrees working in America were born abroad, as were most current graduate students studying computer science in U.S. universities. They are a source of national strength. A vast majority want to stay and contribute to American innovation. We must make it easier for them to do so.
Cato’s report spotlighted the growing problem of bonded service. But Cato’s proposed fix would give employers more green cards so they can attract and reward more foreign workers. “Abandoning per-country limits would be a good first step, but it would be insufficient to prevent unsustainable waits for all immigrants. Congress also needs to increase the number of green cards dramatically to resolve this crisis,” Cato said.
Americans’ professionalism dies when companies get their private supply of labor out India’s caste culture, said Miano. “What you’re seeing is the same pattern throughout history — business wants cheap foreign labor,” he said, adding:
We need to focus our immigration policy on benefiting ordinary Americans. We have a system that only benefits a small group. It is akin to the United States in the 1860s when only a small group benefited from slavery. Here we have created a system where Jeff Bezos benefits while everyone else gets screwed.
But India’s workforce already dominates lower-level and mid-management positions in many once-innovative companies — including Microsoft — below the board level, say Indians and Americans.
“I went out there [to a West Coast company] for a series of meetings,” the research manager told Breitbart News. “I went out to this building out there, and I was the only white guy in the place,” he said.
The manager added, “Now let me get this right, let me paint a picture for you: The only other white people were the Americans who were serving lunch to the Indians.”
Healthcare investors are using coronavirus disaster to expand their own pipeline of foreign nurses & doctors. A bigger pipeline allows hospital chains to accelerate monopolization — b/c US-born medics/nurses have the political power to force competition.https://t.co/zY8qtaG5fS
US unemployment claims approach 40 million since March
22 May 2020
The United States Department of Labor reported on Thursday that more than 2.4 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance last week, bringing the total number of new claims to 38.6 million since mid-March, when social distancing measures and statewide stay-at-home orders were first implemented in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Even with the push by the Trump administration since then to reopen the economy and the easing of lockdown orders in all 50 states—despite a continued rise in COVID-19 infections and deaths—the US marked its ninth straight week in which more than 2 million workers filed for unemployment. While this is down from the peak at the end of March when 6.8 million applied for unemployment insurance, it still dwarfs the worst weeks of the Great Recession in 2008.
It is expected that the official unemployment rate for May, which is to be reported by the federal government in the first week of June, will approach 20 percent, up from 14.7 percent last month. This is a significant undercount, with millions of unemployed immigrants unable to apply for benefits, and many other workers who are not currently looking for work and therefore are not counted as unemployed.
A man looks at signs of a closed store due to COVID-19 in Niles, Ill., Thursday, May 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Fortune magazine estimates that real unemployment has already hit 22.5 percent, which is nearing the peak of unemployment reached during the Great Depression in 1933, when the rate rose above 25 percent. Millions more are expected to apply in the coming weeks, pushing the numbers beyond those seen during the country’s worst economic crisis.
But even these figures do not capture the extent of the crisis now unfolding across the country. Millions have been blocked for weeks from applying for unemployment compensation because of antiquated computer systems, and a significant share of those who have applied have been denied any payments. On top of this there are significant delays in processing applications in multiple states, including Indiana, Missouri, Wyoming and Hawaii. Meanwhile, Florida, which has some of the most stringent restrictions, has refused to extend its paltry three-month limit on payments for the few who manage to qualify.
Sparked by the pandemic, the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s is already having a devastating impact on the millions who have seen their jobs suddenly disappear, while millions more will see wages, benefits and hours dramatically curtailed whenever they are able to return to work. Optimistic projections that the US economy would quickly bounce back once stay-at-home orders were lifted are now becoming much gloomier.
A University of Chicago analysis from earlier this month projects that 42 percent of lost jobs will be permanently eliminated. At the current record number, this will mean a destruction of 16.2 million jobs, nearly double the number of jobs which were lost during the Great Recession just over a decade ago.
“I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist and one of the co-authors of the study, told the New York Times.
A survey by the Census Bureau carried out at the end of April and beginning of this month found that 47 percent of adults had lost employment since March 13 or had someone in their household do so, and 39 percent expected that they or someone else in the home would lose their job in the next month. Nearly 11 percent reported that they had not paid their rent or mortgage on time and more than 21 percent had slight or no confidence that they would do so next month.
With millions missing their rent or mortgage payments, tens of thousands of families will be thrown out on the street in the coming weeks and months, leading to a dramatic rise in homelessness even as the coronavirus continues to spread. While many states took steps in March to place a moratorium on evictions, and eviction notices were unable to be filed due to court closures, those measures are now expiring and courts are reopening.
The Oklahoma County Sheriff announced Tuesday via their Twitter page that the department would resume enforcing evictions on May 26. Nearly 300 eviction cases were filed in Oklahoma City between Monday and Tuesday. This process is being repeated in cities and counties across the country. Evictions are also set to resume in Texas next week, where many families were ineligible for aid due to the undocumented status of one or another parent. The CARES Act provision, which blocks evictions from properties with federally subsidized mortgages, expires on July 25; in Texas this only accounts for one-third of homes.
Meanwhile, another wave of layoffs and furloughs is expected by the Congressional Budget Office at the end of June, when the multi-billion-dollar Payment Protection Program (PPP) expires. Sold as a bailout which would help small businesses keep workers on their payroll in the course of necessary shutdowns, the PPP was in fact a boondoggle for large corporations, their subsidiaries and those with connections to the Trump administration. Many small business owners have not seen any aid, and many do not qualify for loan forgiveness.
Amid historic levels of social misery in the working class, times have never been better for those at the heights of society, with America’s billionaires adding $434 billion to their total net worth since state lockdowns began. Financial markets have soared, underwritten by $80 billion per day from the Federal Reserve.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.
US unemployment claims approach 40 million since March
22 May 2020
The United States Department of Labor reported on Thursday that more than 2.4 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance last week, bringing the total number of new claims to 38.6 million since mid-March, when social distancing measures and statewide stay-at-home orders were first implemented in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Even with the push by the Trump administration since then to reopen the economy and the easing of lockdown orders in all 50 states—despite a continued rise in COVID-19 infections and deaths—the US marked its ninth straight week in which more than 2 million workers filed for unemployment. While this is down from the peak at the end of March when 6.8 million applied for unemployment insurance, it still dwarfs the worst weeks of the Great Recession in 2008.
It is expected that the official unemployment rate for May, which is to be reported by the federal government in the first week of June, will approach 20 percent, up from 14.7 percent last month. This is a significant undercount, with millions of unemployed immigrants unable to apply for benefits, and many other workers who are not currently looking for work and therefore are not counted as unemployed.
A man looks at signs of a closed store due to COVID-19 in Niles, Ill., Thursday, May 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)
Fortune magazine estimates that real unemployment has already hit 22.5 percent, which is nearing the peak of unemployment reached during the Great Depression in 1933, when the rate rose above 25 percent. Millions more are expected to apply in the coming weeks, pushing the numbers beyond those seen during the country’s worst economic crisis.
But even these figures do not capture the extent of the crisis now unfolding across the country. Millions have been blocked for weeks from applying for unemployment compensation because of antiquated computer systems, and a significant share of those who have applied have been denied any payments. On top of this there are significant delays in processing applications in multiple states, including Indiana, Missouri, Wyoming and Hawaii. Meanwhile, Florida, which has some of the most stringent restrictions, has refused to extend its paltry three-month limit on payments for the few who manage to qualify.
Sparked by the pandemic, the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s is already having a devastating impact on the millions who have seen their jobs suddenly disappear, while millions more will see wages, benefits and hours dramatically curtailed whenever they are able to return to work. Optimistic projections that the US economy would quickly bounce back once stay-at-home orders were lifted are now becoming much gloomier.
A University of Chicago analysis from earlier this month projects that 42 percent of lost jobs will be permanently eliminated. At the current record number, this will mean a destruction of 16.2 million jobs, nearly double the number of jobs which were lost during the Great Recession just over a decade ago.
“I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist and one of the co-authors of the study, told the New York Times.
A survey by the Census Bureau carried out at the end of April and beginning of this month found that 47 percent of adults had lost employment since March 13 or had someone in their household do so, and 39 percent expected that they or someone else in the home would lose their job in the next month. Nearly 11 percent reported that they had not paid their rent or mortgage on time and more than 21 percent had slight or no confidence that they would do so next month.
With millions missing their rent or mortgage payments, tens of thousands of families will be thrown out on the street in the coming weeks and months, leading to a dramatic rise in homelessness even as the coronavirus continues to spread. While many states took steps in March to place a moratorium on evictions, and eviction notices were unable to be filed due to court closures, those measures are now expiring and courts are reopening.
The Oklahoma County Sheriff announced Tuesday via their Twitter page that the department would resume enforcing evictions on May 26. Nearly 300 eviction cases were filed in Oklahoma City between Monday and Tuesday. This process is being repeated in cities and counties across the country. Evictions are also set to resume in Texas next week, where many families were ineligible for aid due to the undocumented status of one or another parent. The CARES Act provision, which blocks evictions from properties with federally subsidized mortgages, expires on July 25; in Texas this only accounts for one-third of homes.
Meanwhile, another wave of layoffs and furloughs is expected by the Congressional Budget Office at the end of June, when the multi-billion-dollar Payment Protection Program (PPP) expires. Sold as a bailout which would help small businesses keep workers on their payroll in the course of necessary shutdowns, the PPP was in fact a boondoggle for large corporations, their subsidiaries and those with connections to the Trump administration. Many small business owners have not seen any aid, and many do not qualify for loan forgiveness.
Amid historic levels of social misery in the working class, times have never been better for those at the heights of society, with America’s billionaires adding $434 billion to their total net worth since state lockdowns began. Financial markets have soared, underwritten by $80 billion per day from the Federal Reserve.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is rescinding a $2-an-hour hazard pay increase for his warehouse workers at the end of the month, led the pack, increasing his personal wealth by $34.6 billion since the onset of the pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was close behind, adding $25 billion to his fortune. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who reopened his California auto plant in defiance of state regulators and with the support of President Trump, saw a 48 percent increase in his wealth to $36 billion in just eight weeks as the stock market rebounded from its collapse. All told, the nation’s 620 billionaires now control $3.382 trillion, a 15 percent increase in two months.
Further details emerge on the extent of the mid-March financial crisis
By Nick Beams 22 May 2020
An article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) earlier this week provided further details on how close financial markets came to a meltdown in the middle of March.
Entitled “The Day Coronavirus Nearly Broke the Financial Markets,” the article recorded how markets in financial assets, usually regarded as being almost as good as cash, froze when “there were almost no buyers.”
“The financial system has endured numerous credit crunches and market crashes, and the memories of 1987 and 2008 crises set a high bar for marker dysfunction. But long-time investors … say mid-March of this year was far more severe in a short period. Moreover, the stresses to the financial system were broader than many had seen,” it said.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In testimony and interviews, US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has been at pains to emphasise that regulatory mechanisms and policies introduced after the 2008 crisis have strengthened the financial system.
In his interview on the CBS “60 Minutes” program last Sunday, for instance, Powell downplayed the threat of unemployment reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression. In the 1930s, he said, the financial system had “really failed,” but that today “our financial system is strong [and] has been able to withstand this. And we spent ten years strengthening it after the last crisis. So that’s a big difference.”
In his interview on the CBS “60 Minutes” program last Sunday, for example, when asked about the prospect of US unemployment rising to levels not seen since the Great Depression, Powell stated that at that time the financial system “really failed.”
He claimed that in contrast to the 1930s, “Here, our financial system is strong [and] has been able to withstand this. And we spent ten years strengthening it after the last crisis. So that’s a big difference.”
In fact, Powell’s reassurances are contradicted by the Fed’s own Financial Stability Report issued last Friday. Focusing on the mid-March crisis, it noted: “While the financial regulatory reforms adopted have substantially increased the resilience of the financial sector, the financial system nonetheless amplified the shock, and financial sector vulnerabilities are likely to be significant in the near term.”
The events in mid-March revealed what has actually taken place. While the Fed has taken limited measures to try to curb some of the riskier activities of the banks that sparked the 2008 crash, the dangers have simply been shifted to other areas of the financial system.
The speculation of the banks may have been curtailed somewhat, but it is now being carried out by hedge funds and other financial operators. They are financed with ultra-cheap money provided by the Fed through its low-interest rate regime and market operations, such as quantitative easing and, more recently, its massive interventions into the overnight repo market.
The WSJ report, based on interviews with Wall Street operatives, provided some insights into how the financial system “amplified” the shock of the pandemic.
Ronald O’Hanley, CEO of the investor services and banking holding company State Street, recounted the situation that confronted him on the morning of Monday, March 16. On Sunday evening, before markets opened, the Fed had announced it was cutting its base rate to zero and was planning to buy $700 billion in bonds, but with no effect.
According to the report, a senior deputy told O’Hanley that “corporate treasurers and pension managers, panicked by the growing economic damage from the COVID-19 pandemic, were pulling billions of dollars from certain money-market funds. This was forcing the funds to try to sell some of the bonds they held. But there were almost no buyers. Everybody was suddenly desperate for cash.”
The article noted that rather than take comfort from the Fed’s extraordinary Sunday evening actions, “many companies, governments, bankers and investors viewed the decision as reason to prepare for the worst possible outcome from the coronavirus pandemic.” The result was that a “downdraft in bonds was now a rout.”
It extended into what had been regarded as the most secure areas of the financial system.
The WSJ article continued: “Companies and pension managers have long-relied on money-market funds that invest in short-term corporate and municipal debt holdings considered safe and liquid enough to be classified as ‘cash equivalents.’ … But that Monday, investors no longer believed certain money funds were cash-like at all. As they pulled their money out, managers struggled to sell bonds to meet redemptions.”
So severe was the crisis that Prudential, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, was “also struggling with normally safe securities.”
The article provided a striking example of how, when a fundamentally dysfunctional and rotting system seeks to undertake a reform, it generally only exacerbates its underlying crisis. This phenomenon has been long-known in the field of politics, but the events of mid-March show it applies in finance as well.
On the Monday morning when the crisis broke, Vikram Rao, the head of the debt-trading desk at the investment firm Capital Group, contacted senior bank executives for an explanation as to why they were not trading and was met with the same answer.
“There was no room to buy bonds and other assets and still remain in compliance with tougher guidelines imposed by regulators after the previous financial crisis. In other words, capital rules intended to make the financial system safer were, at least in this instance, draining liquidity from the markets,” the WSJ report stated.
The crisis had a major impact on investors who had leveraged their activities with large amounts of debt—one of the chief means of accumulating financial profit in a low-interest rate regime.
According to the WSJ article: “The slump in mortgage bonds was so vast it crushed a group of investors that had borrowed from banks to juice their returns: real-estate investment funds.”
The Fed’s actions, have, at least temporarily, quelled the storm. But it has only done so by essentially becoming the backstop for all areas of the financial market—Treasury bonds, municipal debt, credit card and student loan debt, the repo market and corporate bonds, including those that have fallen from investment-grade to junk status.
And, as Powell made clear in his “60 Minutes” interview, the Fed plans to go even further if it considers that to be necessary.
“Well, there’s a lot more we can do,” he said. “I will say that we’re not out of ammunition by a long shot. No, there’s really no limit to what we can do with these lending programs that we have. So there’s a lot more we can do to support the economy, and we’re committed to doing everything we can as long as we need to.”
The claim the Fed is supporting the “economy” is a fiction. It functions not for the economy of millions of working people, but as the agency of Wall Street, ready to pull out all stops so that the siphoning of wealth to the financial oligarchy, which it has already promoted, can continue.
An indication of what “more” could involve is provided in the minutes of the Fed’s April 28–29 meeting.
There was a discussion on whether the Fed should organise its purchases of Treasury securities to cap the yield on short and medium-term bonds. This is a policy employed by the Bank of Japan that has also recently been adopted by the Reserve Bank of Australia.
No immediate decision was reached, but the issue is certain to be raised again. Over the next few months, the US Treasury will issue new bonds to finance the operation of the CARES Act that has provided trillions of dollars to prop up corporations while providing only limited relief to workers.
By itself, the issuing of new debt would lead to a fall in the prices of bonds because of the increase in their supply, leading to a rise of their yields (the two move in opposite directions) and promoting a general rise in interest rates—something the Fed wants to avoid at all costs in the interests of Wall Street.
The only way the Fed can counter this upward pressure is to intervene in the market to buy bonds, thereby keeping their yield down. This would formalise what is already de facto taking place, where one arm of the capitalist state, the US Treasury, issues debt while another arm, the Fed, buys it.
This would further heighten the mountain of fictitious capital which, as the events of mid-March so graphically revealed, has no intrinsic value and is worth essentially zero.
The ruling class cannot restore stability to the financial system by the endless creation of still more money at the press of a computer button. Real value must be pumped into financial assets through the further intensification of the exploitation of the working class and a deepening evisceration of social programs.
Financial crises are presented in the media and elsewhere as being about numbers. But behind the economic and financial data are the interests of two irreconcilably opposed social classes—the working class, the mass of society, and the ruling corporate and financial oligarchy whose interests are defended by the state of which the Fed is a crucial component.
As 2008 demonstrated, what emerges from a financial crisis is a deepening class polarisation. That will certainly be the outcome of the mid-March events. A massive social confrontation, already developing long before the pandemic arrived on the scene, is looming in which the working class will be confronted with the necessity to fight for political power in order to take the levers of the economy and financial system into its own hands.
It’s not surprising that this media bias reinforces the public’s negative view toward the wealthy. But although researchers have extensively studied other stereotypes and prejudices, very little work has been done to understand prejudice based on social class, and even less has been done on “upward classism.” An international comparative survey measured what people in the United States, Germany, U.K, and France think of the rich. The survey asked questions that identified whether participants had a sense of “social envy.” It turned out that social envy is highest in France, followed by Germany. It is significantly lower in the United States and U.K, but there’s a caveat: younger Americans were more likely than older Americans to resent and distrust the wealthy, showing that America may soon be like continental Europe in this regard.
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