WILL THE
EPIDEMIC FINISH OFF MIDDLE AMERICA AS TRUMP HANDS THE SOCIALIST WELFARE STATE
OF WALL STREET TRILLIONS?
The booming economy since the Great
Recession of 2008, amplified by Republican tax
cuts that gave corporations huge benefits, has
begun to raise hourly wages, but not
significantly.
The booming economy since the Great
Recession of 2008, amplified by Republican tax
cuts that gave corporations huge benefits, has
begun to raise hourly wages, but not
significantly.
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?”
ONLY NANCY PELOSI HAS WORKED HARDER TO FLOOD AMERICAN WITH 'CHEAP' LABOR FOREIGNERS THAN TRUMP - KUSHNER!
Trump’s Self-Serving Immigration Ban
Trump closes the country to immigrants, except the ones he regularly hires and fires
By David Cay Johnston
Trump closes the country to immigrants, except the ones he regularly hires and fires
By David Cay Johnston
Salon.com, April 26, 2020
. . .
The Sinister Logic of Trump’s Immigration Freeze
The White House is closing pathways to citizenship while maintaining a flow of exploitable immigrant labor.
By Adam Serwer
The Atlantic, April 29, 2020
. . .https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/trump-order-immigration/610822/
The White House is closing pathways to citizenship while maintaining a flow of exploitable immigrant labor.
By Adam Serwer
The Atlantic, April 29, 2020
. . .https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/trump-order-immigration/610822/
Trump Closed Doors to Legal Immigration as a Distraction From His failures During Coronavirus Pandemic
By Charles C. Foster
The Houston Chronicle, May 1, 2020
. . .https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Opinion-Trump-closed-doors-to-legal-immigration-15237717.php
Lawsuit: Indian Managers Use H-1Bs to Discriminate Against Americans
9:16
An Indian-run outsourcing company used Congress’s H-1B visa-worker program to systematically discriminate against American college graduates, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in New Jersey.
The company, named Wipro, “operates under a general policy of discrimination in favor of [imported] South Asians and against [American] individuals who are not South Asian and not Indian,” says the lawsuit, which was filed in New Jersey.
Wipro has about 22 offices and 15,000 employees in the United States. The company’s revenues come from Fortune 500 companies who rent Wipro’s gig workers for software programming and other middle-class skilled jobs. Wipro’s customers, according to the lawsuit, included Mastercard, FedEx, Capital One banking, and Atlantic Richfield Company, an international oil company.
Wipro did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
The lawsuit is asking for a judge’s approval to create a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Americans who were excluded from jobs, denied promotions, or were fired from Wipro.
Wipro is just one of many Indian firms that use H-1B, L-1, and B-1 visa workers to operate the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
The outsourcing economy keeps roughly 1.5 million foreign white-collar workers in the United States, mostly via the H-1B program. The foreign population includes roughly 270,000 Chinese graduates and one million Indian graduates, despite the coronavirus shock that has pushed many American graduates out of jobs.
The outsourcing economy generates some $80 billion in revenue for Indian companies, Indian’s ambassador said in 2019.
U.S. companies are eager to tout payroll savings, in part because every dollar cut from salaries adds at least $10 to the company’s value on Wall Street.
The lawsuit says:
First, Wipro’s practice of relying on visa workers to staff U.S. positions results in available positions overwhelmingly going to visa holding South Asian and Indian individuals, to the exclusion of non-South Asian and non-Indian candidates. Second, Wipro’s employee allocation practices result in available positions overwhelmingly going to South Asian and Indian individuals, to the exclusion of non-South Asians and non-Indians, who are then terminated at disproportionate rates. Third, Wipro’s appraisal and promotion process results in South Asians and Indians receiving more promotions. Fourth, Wipro’s benching and termination practices result in South Asians and Indians receiving positions more frequently, while non-South Asians and non-Indians remain on the bench for longer periods, resulting in diminished career prospects and disproportionate terminations for these individuals. Finally, Wipro’s hiring and staffing decision-making process, as a whole, results in available positions overwhelmingly going to South Asians and Indians to the exclusion of non-South Asians and non-Indians.
The lawsuit cited the experience of four American professionals who were sidelined by the Indian managers in the United States:
in 2015, it became evident that Wipro was trying to get rid of Mr. [James] Gibbs. For instance, Mr. Rambhatla quadrupled Mr. Gibbs’ sales and margin quotas to levels that appeared unrealistic. Nevertheless, Mr. Gibbs was able to meet these quotas.…At the time he left Wipro, Mr. Gibbs was the only non-South Asian who reported directly to Mr. Rambhatla. Each of the other seven or eight non-South individuals who had previously reported to Mr. Rambhatla had been terminated or had quit. Each was replaced by a South Asian of Indian descent.
The lawsuit repeatedly notes that the favored Indian visa workers were far less skilled than the Americans, and sometimes hostile to American colleagues and customers:
For instance, Mr. [Ardeshir] Pezeshki observed that the vast majority of individuals selected for U.S. positions were South Asian. These individuals were often poorly skilled and unqualified for the positions, which created tension with Wipro’s clients. For example, based on Mr. Pezeshki’s observations, clients often had two complaints with Wipro: (1) a lack of skilled workers on projects and (2) poor quality of work. On one occasion, during a periodic sales conference, Mr. Pezeshki heard several South Asian individuals discussing a client who was upset with the lack of skilled resources on a project. One of the individuals, upon hearing about the client’s complaint, responded: “Fuck the Americans.”
Multiple lawsuits are being filed against the Indian companies for distribution, by lawyers at Kotchen & Low, and by James Otto. The federal and state governments have done very little to prevent Fortune 500 companies from using H-1Bs to sideline American graduates, aside from levying occasional fines.
However, President Donald Trump has directed his deputies to draft policies that would transfer jobs from visa workers back to Americans who have lost jobs in the coronavirus crash.
The outsourcing contracts to the Indians firms are often justified to Congress and to Wall Street experts as cost-saving measures. But the outsourcing contracts often contain hidden expenses, rewards wasteful featherbedding by Indian contractors, degrade software quality, and often alienate customers, U.S. managers and professionals tell Breitbart News.
U.S. executives strongly favor outsourcing because it makes work easier for CEOs and H.R. managers, the Americans say to Breitbart News. The Indian workforces are easy to hire and fire, they don’t complain to managers, they do not make professional arguments against executives’ decisions, and they allow kickbacks via India or ancillary U.S. businesses, the Americans say.
Indian managers have a hidden financial incentive to exclude Americans, Indian H-1B workers told Breitbart News.
Indian hiring managers will sell Americans’ jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, one 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. ”
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 bit.ly/2vIHAOp
The outsourcing business started in the 1990s, and it has helped push millions of American engineers, software programmers, and other experts out of their jobs and out of the task of developing the next generation of commercial, economy-boosting technology.
The bill for the investors’ outsourcing strategy is now being imposed on tens of millions of young Americans.
Silicon Valley CEOs are losing their fundamental competition against Chinese companies, 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.
The Valley now needs a bailout from Washington, DC, he wrote in the New York Times — without noting the CEOs’ role in destroying innovation by hiring visa workers:
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.
The establishment U.S. media has failed to follow the huge impact of colleg graduate outsourcing on the U.S. economy and technology development, just as it failed to follow the transfer of the U.S manufacturing sector to China.
For example, a Los Angeles Times’ immigration reporter recently wrote, “research shows that immigrants typically don’t compete with U.S.-born workers for jobs, or lower their wages,” even though the entire sector exists to replace Americans with cheaper foreign rivals.
Trump gets 2:1 public support for his Americans-first shift on immigration.
Even 62% support from Dems who 'somewhat disapprove' of Trump.
Is strong evidence for a strategy of incrementalism vs. a big rush for a total victory.
But deadline is Nov 3#H1Bbit.ly/3aDkl6B
Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.
What Makes a “Healthy” Economy?
The
coronavirus pandemic shows that we don’t have one.
April 16, 2020
Wikimedia Commons
Last
week, Janet Yellin, former chair of the Federal Reserve, gave an upbeat assessment of the pre-pandemic U.S. economy. “Very fortunately
we started with an economy that was healthy before this hit,” she told the PBS
NewsHour. “The banks were in good shape, the financial system was sound,
Americans at least overall on average had relatively low debt burdens.”
But
how “healthy” was that economy, really? How healthy is an economy whose workers
have so little savings that they can’t make the rent after missing just a
couple of paychecks? How healthy is an economy whose small businesses have so
little cushion that they face almost instant obliteration when their cash flow
is disrupted? How healthy is an economy where hourly employees performing many
essential services earn so little that they have to go to work sick to keep
their jobs? And how healthy is an economy whose housing costs force millions
to cram into overcrowded homes in polluted slums replete with high stress,
malnutrition, asthma, diabetes, heart problems, and other chronic disease?
“There’s
nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy,” said Fed chairman Jerome Powell
in March. It was “resilient,” he said in February. Yellin concurred, citing the
old good news in her hope that the “economy will recover much more speedily
than it did from any past downturn.”
Recover
for whom? The experts look at conventional measurements, which painted a
picture of prosperity before COVID-19. The unemployment rate last September hit
a fifty-year low, at 3.5 percent, and the rate for people without a high school
diploma dropped to a new low of 4.8 percent. The GDP had been growing within
the range considered ideal—two to three percent—and Powell reported a rising
willingness of employers to hire low-skilled workers and train them.
But
alongside the bright figures on unemployment and job creation, consider a
competing set of numbers from before the pandemic: The
poverty-level wages for those who harvest our vegetables, cut our Christmas
trees, wash our cars, cook and serve our food in restaurants, deliver groceries
to our doors, clean our offices, and even drive our ambulances. The 14.3
million households (11.1 percent)
uncertain that they could afford enough food, and the 5.6 million families (4.3
percent) where at least one person has had to cut back on eating during the
year. The 14.3 percent of black children with asthma, double the rate in
the population overall. The 20 percent of children living in crowded homes shared with
other families or three generations of their own, and the 50 percent of urban
children who have lived in those conditions by age nine.
A
pernicious dynamic of financial stress is the unexpected link between housing
costs and malnutrition. For many low-wage families without access to such
government subsidies as Section 8 vouchers or affordable housing, rent can soak
up 40 to 60 percent of income, which can leave too little for other
necessities. You have to pay the rent. You have to pay the electricity, phone,
and fuel bills. If you need a car to get to work, which the vast majority of
employees do, you have to make the car payments. Those are not optional. The
category that can be squeezed is for food, and that’s what many poor families
have to do.
A
result is childhood
malnutrition. It sometimes manifests
itself in obesity resulting from cheap, bad food, which in turn can promote
diabetes. It compromises the immune system. Even more seriously, deprivation of
nutrients such as iron during key periods of brain development, both before and
after birth, can lead to lifelong cognitive impairment. Studies show that
children who suffered iron deficiency as infants, even if they’re fed properly
later, still suffer as adolescents, scoring lower in math, written expression,
and selective recall. Their teachers see them displaying “more anxiety or
depression, social problems, and attention problems,” according to a National
Academy of Sciences report.
So
when federal and state governments are stingy with housing subsidies, as they
always are, they are effectively, perhaps unwittingly, damaging children’s
brain development and life opportunities.
The
booming economy since the Great
Recession of 2008, amplified by Republican
tax
cuts that gave corporations huge benefits, has
begun
to raise hourly wages, but not
significantly.
If
median hourly wages in certain jobs are put next to the official poverty
line—currently $25,750 a year for a family of four—it’s clear why so many
people are in desperate trouble so soon after the economy’s lockdown. Most poor
families have only one wage earner, so assuming a full-time, 40-hour week, that
person would have to be paid $12.38 an hour just to reach the poverty line. As
of May 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly
wage for ambulance drivers and assistants was just $12.45; for workers in
retail sails, $11.37 to $12.14; for building cleaners, $12.68; for parking
attendants, $12.11; and for fast-food and restaurant cooks and servers (some of
whom also get tips), $11.00 to $12.45.
The
lesson is to look beyond the unemployment rate and number of new jobs and
examine how well those jobs pay. The “healthy” economy did little to narrow the
wealth gap. The most recent Federal Reserve figures, from before the pandemic, showed the top 10 percent of
households with a median net worth of $2,387,500 and the bottom 10 percent with
minus $962—that is, they owed more than they owned.
Adding
assets and subtracting liabilities as of the fourth quarter of 2019, the
wealthiest 10 percent had 70 percent ($78.5 trillion) of the country’s total
household net worth, and the bottom 50 percent had just 1.5 percent ($1.7
trillion). The top had miniscule debt, and the bottom half had miniscule
financial assets alongside huge mortgage and consumer debt.
So,
Janet Yellin was only partially right when she said that Americans had low debt
burdens. Consumer debt reached a record high in 2019 of more than $14
trillion, according to Experian, the credit agency. But it was lower as
a portion of income. And defaults and late payments were low enough to drive
the average FICO score—a person’s credit rating—to a high of 703, up from 689
in 2010 at the end of the Great Recession. (A perfect score is 850.) Given the
high credit card and other debt among the unwealthy, however, delinquency rates
can now be expected to soar, pushing credit ratings down.
In
that prospering economy, then, the glass was either half full or half empty,
depending on whether you were looking from the top or from the bottom. There
was no need to exaggerate the hardships at the bottom, as some Democratic
candidates did with one misstated statistic.
BLOG:
INTERESTINGLY HARRIS, WARREN AND SANDERS ALL WANT AMNESTY SO 40 MILLION
ILLEGALS CAN BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO. NOW DO THE MATH ON JOBS, HOUSING AND
THE HOMELESS CRISIS
Senators
Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders all said last year that 40 percent of Americans could not
come up with the money to pay a $400 emergency expense. In fact, the contrary
was the case, according to the Federal Reserve’s annual survey, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households.”
Asked
to check all the ways they could pay for a $400 emergency, only 12 percent said
they could not pay right now, 45 percent checked “with the money currently in
my checking/savings account or with cash,” and 33 percent said they’d use a
credit card and pay it off entirely at the next statement. To a follow-up
question, 85 percent said that making the unexpected payment would not prevent
their paying other bills.
On
the other hand, 25 percent told the Federal Reserve that they were just getting
by or finding it difficult to get by. That number is troubling enough, one
bound to spike as stay-at-home orders continue. The economy was not “healthy”
for those folks in the first place, and will not be so for many more.
Improvements
will come not from the stalemate of left and right, or from their manipulating
statistics, but from a new ideology of practical realism that honors the
complex facts, without distortion. The free-market system is the one we have,
and it can work for virtually everyone if everyone in government and business
works for everyone. Too idealistic? Naïve? Probably.
No comments:
Post a Comment