Thursday, April 23, 2020

RED CHINA DESTROYS AMERICAN RETAIL ONCE GREATS - HOW MUCH DID SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN MAKE ON THE DEAL?


Silicon Valley, and the Chinese Connection to Coronavirus Infection
By James Fulford

After Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992, Blum continued profiting off their ties to China. A the same time, the freshman lawmaker was pitching herself as a “China hand” to colleagues, even once claiming “that in my last life maybe I was Chinese.” HARIS ALIC

FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.

SHE HAS AVOIDED PROSECUTION BY VOTING AGAINST ANY ETHICS BILLS AND HER HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM'S HANDING OUT "CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION" BRIBES TO EVERY DEMOCRAT OUT THERE!
  
  
IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.


“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon


“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com


Senator Who Employed Chinese Spy Endorses Joe Biden for President

 

  

A high-profile U.S. senator with professional and personal ties to China — including once employing one of its spies — is backing former Vice President Joe Biden amid mounting questions over his son’s business dealings with the communist regime.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a former chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced her endorsement of the former vice president on Tuesday, claiming to have witnessed Biden’s “fortitude” and leadership during their overlapping tenures in Congress.
Feinstein said in a statement:
I’ve worked closely with Vice President Biden and I’ve seen firsthand his legislative ability, his statesmanship, and most importantly his moral fortitude (NO, IT’S NOT A JOKE, BUT THEN FEINSTEIN IS THE MOST SELF-SERVING CORRUPT POL IN U.S. HISTORY). During his time in Congress and in the White House, Joe Biden has been a tireless fighter for hard working (ILLEGALS) MEXICAN families.
BLOG: FEINSTEIN LOVES  BIDEN BECAUSE SHE WALLOWS IN CORRUPTION. BIDEN HAD SPENT HIS ENTIRE POLITICAL LIFE SUCKING OFF BRIBES.
“He’s a totally corrupt swamp thing, and here’s the worst part of his manifest corruption – he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s corrupt, if not personally than in terms of allowing his bum kid to leverage his position. He thinks it’s A-OK for his boy Hoover to cash in all over the globe. After all, that’s what you do, right? That’s part of the benefits package for being in the liberal elite. And all these people fussing and fighting about the paternity test-failing dirtbag getting rich are totally out of line. How dare they? HOW DARE THEY!”
He wants to raise taxes, open the borders, let you pay for illegal aliens’ sex changes, and spark a civil war by taking guns from the people who don’t commit crimes.

Joe Biden? Seriously?

The establishment narrative on Joe Biden is, to put it mildly, malarkey. Gropey J actually is everything the liberals accuse Donald Trump of being – bizarre, vulgar, dumb, corrupt, incompetent, and utterly unfit to be president. But yet the Creepy Veepy is so much more. In the last month, this totally not-senile, not-at-all-weird guy has assembled a track record of freaky behavior that would put mid-eighties Crispin Glover to shame. 
Let’s review…
Corn Pop is old news. Biden’s latest rambling onion-on-the-belt monologue was something about little kids at a pool rubbing his leg hair or something – it’s so random I’m not even linking to it. There’s no best-case scenario here – he’s just creepy.
Then, for no other reason than I guess he felt like a snack, he started gnawing on his wife’s fingers in public and on camera. You know, like people do. You wonder what the thought process there was…
Hey, sure are lots of cameras…gosh, I’m kind of hungry…oh look, an index finger. Yum.
I’m a little surprised he didn’t pull out a packet of ketchup.
But the best part was when some guy pointed out that, you know, Biden’s loser son Lil’ Crackpipe is the poster child for corruption and Sane Joe started spazzing out and calling him “fat” and challenging him to a push-up contest for some reason.
This is just odd. And this is the candidate who, amazingly, is still in the lead for the Democrat nomination.
And then there’s the groping females thing. He still does it occasionally, though the media does its best to curtail coverage of his lecherous creeping. Do you believe there’s any chance at all that he is not going to, at some point, have some horrifying incident with some female at the White House, you know, like grabbing the Queen for a hug n’ rub, or walking absent-mindedly into the press room in a flapping robe with Little Joe and the gang in effect? 
And let’s be charitable. No one has ever called Joe Biden “smart.” Well, maybe as a joke. The fact is that he’s a 40-watt guy in a 100-watt world. Haters say Trump is dumb, but he is demonstrably not dumb. The thing about Trump is that because our garbage elite hates him it tends to ascribe all possible negative characteristics to him regardless of whether they apply. Trump is cunning, crafty and has a keen sense of strategy. You may dislike him, but that does not change the fact that alone, against the full force of the elite and its media serfs, he prevailed and continues to prevail. If Trump, who managed to figure out that it would be a good idea to campaign in Wisconsin, is dumb, what does that make Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and the sobbing losers who supported her?
No one can seriously argue that Joe Biden is smart, and no one does. They’ll either call you “racist” or start complaining about Trump. But you won’t get anyone comparing the former veep to Stephen Hawking. They just sort of elide past his staggering stupidity, perhaps hoping that whoever he picks for his veep will give him a rubber ball to play with and lock him in an Oval Office closet when it's time to do some presidenting.
He’s a totally corrupt swamp thing, and here’s the worst part of his manifest corruption – he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s corrupt, if not personally than in terms of allowing his bum kid to leverage his position. He thinks it’s A-OK for his boy Hoover to cash in all over the globe. After all, that’s what you do, right? That’s part of the benefits package for being in the liberal elite. And all these people fussing and fighting about the paternity test-failing dirtbag getting rich are totally out of line. How dare they? HOW DARE THEY!
Understand that Biden sees nothing wrong with this. Nothing. And that means there will be exponentially more of it. Hell, the useless DoJ under Trump won’t prosecute obvious graft. Do you think a DoJ that’s thrilled to have a fellow traveler back in the White House is going to root out Biden's business badness? You do? Well, then meet my unicorn Chet.
And SloJoe is utterly incompetent. This is the guy who thought they should let bin Laden skate. As Robert Gates, no Trumpie, said, "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.
This is the guy who wants to take your doctor, again, and impose another brilliant healthcare reform idea, again – all designed to unscrew the last big healthcare reform the Democrats passed, which he praised as “a big [vulgarity] deal.
He wants to obey that tiresome Swedish teenager’s commands to sacrifice at the altar of the weird weather cult. He wants to appoint all Hawaiian and Scat Franciscan judges. 
He wants to raise taxes, open the borders, let you pay for illegal aliens’ sex changes, and spark a civil war by taking guns from the people who don’t commit crimes.
When you think of a calm, steady, wise presence guiding the nation, you do not think of Joe Biden, though that’s what is allegedly needed to end the nightmare of the Trump presidency – you know, the record job numbers and the lack of stupid new wars. You think of Obama and Stumbles McMyturn, only dumber and touchier.
Just recently, Biden’s campaign ran an ad alleging that foreigners were “laughing” at Donald Trump. Is there any Democrat anywhere who takes America’s side in a dispute with malicious aliens? In any case, those tin pot euroweenies had plenty to cry about – Donald Trump has forced them to pay up for NATO. Of course, that will end too if Joe takes office. We’ll return to business as usual – the business as usual of being shafted for the benefit of the global bigshots.
Basically, we’ll get rid of all the peace and prosperity that Trump has brought and get back to normal – that is, people like us being plundered by the garbage elite.
Trump has a track record of success, and Democrats hate him. Joe has a track record of failure, corruption, and creepiness. Well, I guess we know why the Democrats seem to love him.
It’s out now, my new novel Collapse, the action-packed yet hilarious sequel to People's RepublicIndian Country and Wildfire. Friendless loser Never Trumpers hate it, so you’ll love it.
***One last thing.  On Wednesdays, there's BONUS KURT if you're a Townhall VIP member.  Sign up today.  Three Kurts is better than two.
And here's the biggest laugh of all: the Democrat party's only hope is a confused old man whose corruption is oozing into the 
open only because the Democrats wagered everything on impeaching President Trump.

What to do About China

Much the same way that the Nazis invasion of Poland in the 20th century, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assaulted the world with a biological agent. Instead of Panzer divisions rolling down the streets of Warsaw, Communist China’s invisible biological warfare has stricken the world with economic and human misery, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and forcing millions into unemployment lines globally.
Expansionist China is clearly a military, economic, and health threat to the world. But it’s reckoning time for the Chinese communist dictatorship. Washington should exert diplomatic, economic, and military pressure on Beijing that will put China’s dictator Xi Jingping, and the evil and corrupt CCP under enormous strain.
Here are four suggestions to counter China’s biological, military and economic threats:
Economic Distancing: Seize China’s U.S. Treasury Notes
For America, the China virus attack was a 21st century medical Pearl Harbor, inflicting tens of thousands of casualties and placing our healthcare system under enormous strain. To counterattack China’s criminal negligence and mishandling of the coronavirus epidemic, the U.S. needs to hit our communist comrades where it hurts the most -- their pocketbooks.
China owns approximately $1.07 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds, according to the Treasury Department. The United States government should seize the Chinese treasury obligations that Beijing holds in their name, and inform the CCP that this is a down payment for the death of tens of thousands of American citizens and the economic devastation Beijing has unleased on the U.S. economy. And the U.S. should encourage Canada, the U.K., Japan, Switzerland, and other allies to do the same.
Academic Distancing: Shutter China’s Confucius Institutes in the U.S.
The nefarious CCP pumps over $10 billion into its Confucius Institute propaganda machine, funding over 500 Confucius Institutes on high schools, colleges, and university campuses around the world. In the U.S., there are over 100 Confucius Institutes on high school, college, and university campuses, receiving over $150 million from the Chinese communist dictatorship, according to National Association of Scholars.
The Chinese Ministry of Education, which is run by the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department, infiltrates high schools, colleges, and universities, brainwashing American students  into accepting communist China propaganda, textbooks and operating funds to enhance its own image abroad. Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes lack transparency, threaten academic freedom and give the Chinese communist despots access to the U.S. education system that China does not extend to American programs, according to a 2019 report by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
All Confucius Institutes in the United States should be shut down, and all Chinese “teachers” deported. America must end China’s unfettered access to our research centers and universities. Also, the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, based in Washington, D.C., should be shuttered.
Seize and Sell all CCP Property in the U.S.
The Chinese Communist Party is our enemy, so why don’t we treat them that way? Let’s start by seizing all CCP property in the United States and selling it as reparations for the damage they have caused to our economy. The U.S. federal government should impound and sell all CCP property in the U.S., including companies, real estate, bank accounts, aircraft, ocean-going vessels, and all other CCP assets in the USA.
Bring Back “Made in the USA”
The U.S. federal government should pay U.S. manufactures to leave China and return to the USA. It’s time to bring U.S. manufacturing back home. Americans want to buy high-quality “Made in the USA” products; not cheap Chinese junk that breaks right away. To encourage U.S. manufactures to make products in the United States, the U.S. federal government should offer companies a 100 percent federal tax relief for 10-years if they open and produce products here in the USA.
It won’t be easy or painless, but America ought to fundamentally reconsider its relationship with China. It is imperative that we have a “hard decoupling” of the U.S.-China relationship, according to political scientist Andrew A. Michta, writing in the American Interest. It’s time to reduce our reliance on China as a manufacturing base.
Only one adversary poses a truly mortal challenge to the United States; that adversary is China.
Now that the Chinese Communist Party has murdered tens of thousands of people globally, the U.S. and its allies are being held hostage by the criminals that run the CCP. China is repeatedly singled out for its unfair trade practices, currency manipulation, support for rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran, proliferation of nuclear arms, cyberattacks on free societies, widespread human rights abuse at home, and undermining international institutions. And now, you can add bioterrorism to the list.
It’s time to cut our ties with Communist China. This is a very dangerous time for the world.  We should expect that the CCP will become more repressive domestically, aggressive internationally, and confrontational in the wake of the China virus.
And one final thought: Let’s make the China plague the last Chinese import into the U.S.A.
Octavio Nuiry is a former New Orleans Times Picayune columnist. He can be reached at onuiry@gmail.com or (562) 537-2901.

The Democratic Party Is Wounded and Dangerous

Beware the wounded animal.  In pain and desperation, it will do violent things.  It seems to me no coincidence that Joe Biden's big win on Super Tuesday was followed by Democratic senator Chuck Schumer threatening conservative members of the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
Joe Biden is hardly Lancelot to President Trump's dragon.  The Democrats and the Deep State needed a first-class warrior; instead, their best option is a walking advertisement for Alzheimer's awareness.  In his best days, Joe Biden was the political equivalent of Jack McCall, shooting his adversaries in the back.  When he wasn't using his position of power for financial gain or stealing other people's words, he was helping his family line their own pockets.  Today, he's a disoriented and stumbling shell of an unimportant political hack who looks on in confusion while his wife does his fighting for him.  If you've ever wondered what happens to the shriveled soul of a lifetime liar and Democratic swindler, just cast your eyes upon Old Joe.  He's a walking, talking effigy of Democratic corruption and amorality.  He's what the Democratic Party usually keeps far off the main stage for the back-alley entertainment; now he's the main event, but no amount of stick-prodding by Donna Brazile or Tom Perez is going to turn Joe Biden into Fred Astaire.  He's a freak-show carnival attraction at best, amazing onlookers by his ability to occasionally jumble audible words together into a sentence.  The Democrats needed a man who could command a movement; all they got was a man who can barely control his own.
I'm not saying President Trump's re-election is in the bag.  Far from it.  We've never seen such an array of villains acting in concert to take down an American president.  The Democratic Party has most of the permanent bureaucratic Deep State (as well as stealthy anti-Trump Republicans), Wall Street, Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela, cosmopolitan Europe, global warming doomsayers, the Middle East's worst terrorists, and domestic Antifa terrorists here at home all actively working to dislodge President Trump from the White House.  In the past, the chiefs of our intelligence agencies and clandestine services retired into relative obscurity, cognizant that duty commanded their silent withdrawal into the pages of history.  After orchestrating a coup against the American president, however, it is not unusual to see the former heads of Obama's CIA, FBI, and NSC all tirelessly justifying their criminal acts on cable news each night.  The corporate news media and institutional government have spent years trying to gin up enough hysteria in the nation that mock beheadings of the president and ritual re-enactments of his assassination during summer theater might lead the American people to clamor for the real thing.
So, no, the 2020 election will not be over until all the votes have been counted on November 3, and it becomes clear that we have successfully preserved Western civilization for at least a little while longer from this most recent manifestation of Vienna's bloody 1683 siege.  All I am saying is that Joe Biden was never meant to be the establishment's champion for resurrecting their oligarchic power.  They wanted a formidable presidential nominee, someone who could check all the right identity politics boxes while stringing words together that were substantively meaningless while singularly inspiring.  Instead, they're settling for a politician past his expiration date who sounds less crème de la crème and more soused in crème de menthe.  The Democratic Party may depend on dead voters to win elections, but running dead candidates is another thing altogether.
So just because the cable news anchors and Carville clones are all high-fiving each other and cheering for managing to narrowly prevent a communist disciple of Stalin and Castro from sewing up the Democratic nomination for president by the beginning of March, don't forget how disappointed they are at heart.  If Biden goes on to clinch the nomination, the Democratic Party will have managed to take all the aloof, plain, manila-folder blandness of John Kerry and combine it with the alertness and energy of a nursing home after pill rounds.  This is the one whom the commentariat is celebrating right now, the guy Obama and the gang blocked from running in 2016 because they felt him not quite up for the challenge when he was four years younger.  The vice president during the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, the wordsmith who marveled at Obama for being strangely "articulate" for a black guy, and the obtrusive shoulder-rubber whose chief political instinct was to sniff the hair of the wives and daughters of White House officials and visiting dignitaries.  Imagine being in such dire straits because the previous Democratic president so hollowed out the party's future by losing over a thousand elected officials across the country during his time in office that the last, great hope to beat President Trump this year is just hoping to make it to bed each afternoon before saying something so inappropriate or illogical or ridiculous that Red Bernie becomes the Democrat's Dear Leader by default.  For every minute of his few wakeful hours, his handlers have to be on constant guard against the possibility that a voice in Biden's head will scream, "Oh, look, a young child with wonderful-smelling hair."  "Comeback Joe"?  More like "Come back, Joe!"
The Democrats and the Deep State have spent the last four years constructing the greatest wag-the-dog spectacle America's ever seen in an attempt to cover up the malfeasance and criminality of the last administration, while preventing the current one from achieving too many victories.  Considering that Brennan and Comey are still free and Obama and Hillary are still smiling, they've been remarkably successful.  But the Mueller obfuscation and Schiff circus are behind us, the dance music of delay is dying down, and the Democrats' and Deep State's ability to keep pushing back their day of reckoning is coming to an end.  If they don't win in 2020, they cannot keep justice at bay, regardless of how stacked in their favor it has always been in the past.  And standing in the gap as their last-ditch prospect to save them from President Trump's re-election and spare them from long delayed judgment is none other than Corn Pop's archenemy.  The one "reasonable" Democrat in the race who has already burnished his "moderate" credentials by fully embracing Bernie's Green New Deal, Warren's Medicare for All, and Beto's door-to-door gun confiscation.  Nothing says "electable centrist Democrat" like "D'oh!" Biden's full tilt toward Marxist socialism.  No wonder Chuck Schumer sounds like some injured animal in the forest, lashing out at tree branches all around him.  That's what small, weak, dying creatures do when they know the end is near.

Image: Lorie Shaull via Flickr.

Neiman Marcus to File for Bankruptcy As Soon as This Week: Sources

BY REUTERS

April 19, 2020 Updated: April 19, 2020
Neiman Marcus Group is preparing to seek bankruptcy protection as soon as this week, becoming the first major U.S. department store operator to succumb to the economic fallout from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus outbreak, people familiar with the matter said.
The debt-laden Dallas-based company has been left with few options after the pandemic forced it to temporarily shut all 43 of its Neiman Marcus locations, roughly two dozen Last Call stores, and its two Bergdorf Goodman stores in New York.
Neiman Marcus is in the final stages of negotiating a loan with its creditors totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, which would sustain some of its operations during bankruptcy proceedings, according to the sources. It has also furloughed many of its roughly 14,000 employees.
The bankruptcy filing could come within days, though the timing could slip, the sources said. Neiman Marcus skipped millions of dollars in debt payments last week, including one that only gave the company a few days to avoid a default.
Neiman Marcus’s borrowings total about $4.8 billion, according to credit ratings firm Standard & Poor’s. Some of this debt is the legacy of its $6 billion leveraged buyout in 2013 by its owners, private equity firm Ares Management Corp and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).
CCP VIRUS SPECIAL COVERAGE
The sources requested anonymity because the bankruptcy preparations are confidential. Neiman Marcus and Ares declined to comment, while CPPIB representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Other department store operators that have also had to close their stores are battling to avoid Neiman Marcus’s fate. Macy’s Inc. and Nordstrom Inc. have been rushing to secure new financing, such as by borrowing against some of their real estate. J.C. Penney Co. Inc. is contemplating a bankruptcy filing as a way to rework its unsustainable finances and save money on looming debt payments, Reuters reported last week.
A bankruptcy filing would be a grim milestone that Neiman Marcus has spent the last few years trying to avoid. It pushed out due dates on its financial obligations last year in a restructuring deal with some creditors, though the transactions added to Neiman Marcus’s interest expenses.
A trustee for some of the company’s bondholders sued Neiman Marcus last year, claiming the firm and its owners robbed investors of the value of its luxury e-commerce site MyTheresa by moving the business beyond the reach of creditors in a corporate reshuffling. Neiman maintains its actions were proper.
“In light of the significant headwinds stemming from the coronavirus pandemic and our expectation for a U.S. recession this year, we believe the company’s prospects for a turnaround are increasingly low,” Standard & Poor’s analysts wrote in a note last week.
“We continue to view its capital structure as unsustainable,” the analysts added, lowering their credit rating on Neiman Marcus deep into “junk” territory. They said the move reflected the “elevated potential” of a debt restructuring.
Once it files for bankruptcy, Neiman Marcus could attract interest from potential suitors seeking to pick up the company or some of its assets on the cheap, the sources said.
Saks Fifth Avenue owner Hudson’s Bay Co. explored a bid for Neiman Marcus in 2017 but did not pursue it, people familiar with the matter said at the time. The Canadian company was taken private earlier this year by a group of shareholders led by its chief executive, Richard Baker, and it is unclear if it remains interested or would be in a position to pursue a new bid.
A Hudson’s Bay representative did not immediately return a request for comment.

From Fashion Fixture to Brink of Bankruptcy

The first Neiman Marcus store opened in Dallas, Texas, in 1907. It was opened by the Marcus and Neiman families, which decided to pursue the retail venture after considering and rejecting an investment in a little-known soft drink at the time called Coca-Cola, according to Neiman Marcus’s website.
The company expanded across the United States and in 1972 it acquired New York City’s Bergdorf Goodman, itself founded in the early 1900s, becoming a fashion fixture for celebrities and wealthy customers seeking expensive handbags and clothing.
Like other brick-and-mortar department store operators, Neiman Marcus struggled in recent years to compete with discount retail chains and a consumer shift to online shopping. Luxury e-commerce firms such as Yoox Net-A-Porter Group (YNAP) and Farfetch Ltd. have added to the competitive pressure facing Neiman Marcus.
The CCP virus outbreak has pushed the company to the brink. While it has asked some workers back to closed stores to fulfill online orders, these operations cannot make up for lost sales in physical stores.
By Mike Spector and Jessica DiNapoli
Epoch Times staff contributed to this report


Pompeo: Anger at China ‘Appropriate’ — ‘Very Confident That the Chinese Communist Party Will Pay a Price’ for Coronavirus

2:25
As the United States appears to have gotten a grasp of the coronavirus pandemic, some of the focus has shifted to the Chinese government, whose actions are thought to be responsible for the virus’ spread, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is “confident” China will pay a price.
During an interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, Pompeo argued anger at China was justified.
“That’s appropriate that you’re angry,” he said. “I think many of us are angry. I know the president feels the same way. China caused an enormous amount of pain, loss of life and now a huge challenge for the global economy and the American economy as well by not sharing the information they had. Sean, you should know, we still don’t have full transparency from the Chinese Communist Party. I’m so concerned that there are things we don’t know. We don’t know the history. We haven’t been able to get our team on the ground to do the work that it needs to do. This is an ongoing challenge and the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization have failed to do the things they have the responsibility to do. There’s a pandemic inside of the country.”
Pompeo could not offer by precisely what means China would pay a price but said the cost could come in a variety of ways.
“I am very confident that the Chinese Communist Party will pay a price for what they did here certainly from the United States,” Pompeo said. “I don’t know exactly what form that will take. Our focus today isn’t on that. It’s on making sure we keep America safe, take down the health risk, keep people healthy as we can, and get this economy going back. But I’m very confident. I talk to business people all around the country. I talk to ordinary citizens. People who have put their lives at risk over the last weeks. They know that this is a result of this virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and they know that the Chinese government didn’t do the things it needed to do.”
“There will be a cost associated with that,” he continued. “We need to focus on the here and now and there’ll be a time to make sure that we get this right to make sure that we’re not dependent on China for our pharmaceutical goods and all the things that we’ve seen that we just didn’t have right and that President Trump had identified early on as things we needed to fix in the relationship between the United States and China.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

TRUMP'S IMMIGRATION BAN - IT'S ABOUT LIKE HIS PRETEND WALL. LIES, MORE LIES AND THEN UNTRUTHS

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Washington, D.C. (April 23, 2020) – A new analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies concludes that the president's new executive order does not curtail immigration. It appears actually to re-start entries for select categories that had been paused indefinitely when the State Department shut down most visa adjudications on March 20, due to the pandemic. Even more concerning, it prioritizes the entry of the most scandal-ridden category of all – EB-5 – in which foreigners essentially can purchase green cards for their families.

The executive order is confusing. It suspends the entry of people who don't even have an immigrant visa yet, and who can’t get one until the State Department’s visa units re-open. The order also provides a large number of exceptions to the suspension, including the fraud ridden EB-5 program and the very broad exception – “Any other alien whose entry is determined to be in the national interest.” If an applicant qualifies for one of these exceptions, the person now can have their immigrant visas processed and enter the United States, if able to travel here.

Read the entire analysis: https://cis.org/Vaughan/Trumps-Immigration-Ban-May-Actually-Rev-Immigration-Back

On the bright side, the adjudication of other non-essential categories is still paused, including the chain migration categories of parents and extended family, the diversity visa lottery, most employment applicants from abroad, spouses and children of green card holders, and a few others. These categories number approximately 25,000 immigrant visa applicants per month. If the suspension lasts for 60 days, this will represent a pause of about 50,000 applicants from abroad, or about 5 percent of annual immigration. There is no indication that the applications will not eventually be issued.

Most of the applicants in these categories, with the exception of the diversity visa lottery, parents, and the highest-caliber employment applicants, have already waited many years on the waiting list, so an additional wait of two months is not especially significant.

However well-intentioned, this executive order will provide little relief to Americans. The pause applies to only a tiny fraction of total annual admissions. The order re-starts admissions that had already been paused, well before this health crisis is over and well before the employment crisis is over.

We recommend that the president take much bolder steps to help U.S. workers. For example, he should direct the Department of Labor and USCIS to review the labor certifications of thousands of pending employment-based green cards in order to ensure that the employer requests are still justifiable, that the businesses are still viable, and that the foreign workers are still needed at this time. The president should suspend all temporary work visa programs, including seasonal workers and white-collar visa workers, at least until the labor market stabilizes, or until Congress can pass needed reforms. There is no case for bringing in a million temporary visa workers when 22 million American workers are unemployed. Finally, the president should scale back the issuance of work permits to hundreds of thousands of foreign students, spouses of temporary workers, and those with unapproved pending green card applications.

Why should we be inviting immigrants into a country with a dangerous virus?


Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright was out on Tuesday calling President Trump's order to temporarily stop immigration un-American.  ABC and others are calling it xenophobic.
This is nothing new.  Trump has been called xenophobic and racist for years, no matter what he does.  Leftists who seek to destroy Trump always play these cards.  Heck, Trump was called xenophobic for sensibly shutting down travel from China and calling the virus the Chinese virus because it came from there.
Wouldn't it be cruel and un-American to invite people from other countries in when they wouldn't be able to go to work, eat, go to the dentist, get their hair cut, or most other things until we get a vaccine that ensures that no one will ever get sick and die again?  After all, that is what we are doing to the people who live here.  We would tell them they can't get "elective" surgery unless they need an abortion.  Why would we want people to come in when COVID-19 is so dangerous?
Isn't it un-American to shut down the entire country when thirty percent of the deaths are around New York and twenty percent are in nursing homes?
Isn't it time to summarize a few of the Democrats main policies?
We should have open borders for illegals, but we should prevent citizens from having the freedom to go where they want.
We should enforce dictatorial rules to stay six feet apart, to wear masks, and not to have gatherings of more than ten people, but sanctuary cities and states should not enforce immigration laws that Congress passed.
It is oppressive and racist to require photo IDs to vote, but it may be necessary to test everyone's blood to see if he has had the virus so he would qualify for an ID to allow him to go out, mingle, and work.
I wonder why there are protests.  It must be zealots who like freedom and seek to allow America to survive as it always has, as a capitalist, free society, instead of being controlled by dictatorial politicians.
Everything we need to know about Democrat thinking can be summed up by two Democrat governors.  The governor of New Jersey said the Constitution is above his pay grade when he set his dictatorial rules, and the governor of Minnesota said he didn't understand Trump's two-word tweet "liberate Minnesota."  Anyone who doesn't understand that tweet is not qualified to oversee anything in the United States.
Image credit: Pixabay public domain.



“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its  elite.”                                      Karen McQuillan 

During a segment on Wednesday, Carlson said Trump’s original draft of the executive order “would have suspended several guest worker programs, the ones that prevent qualified Americans from getting jobs” but that the draft was later gutted down to only include a small group of employment-based and extended family green card applicants who are not yet in the U.S.

“Trump has broken most of his key campaign promises … here once again he promises his audiences he will end all immigration for 60 days, but then guts the actual order to where it will have little impact for American workers.”

“I think it is great that he did it,” said Hilarie 
Gamm, the pseudonymous software 
professional who helped create the American 
Workers Coalition. Many American 
graduates have been pushed out of good 
careers by federal immigration policy, she 
said, adding, “we’ve been pushing a long time

to get it in the news.”







U.S. Weekly Jobless Claims: 4.4 Million

President Donald Trump listens as Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator,speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Thursday, April 16, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
2:58

The coronavirus continued to ravish the U.S. economy last week, with 4.4 million of American filing first-time unemployment claims, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
Economists had forecast 4.25 million new claims for this week. The previous week’s claims figure was revised down 2,000 to 5,506,500.
Continuing claims, those made after an initial week of benefits, rose to 15.98 million. Continuing claims, however, are reported with a one week lag. The total number of Americans who have lost their jobs since claims spiked five weeks ago because of coronavirus and shutdowns rose to around 26.4 million, enough to erase all the job gains since the economy began to recover after the financial crisis.
The 4-week moving average was 5,786,500, an increase of 280,000 from the previous week’s revised average.
The CARES Act, passed to offset the economic impact of the coronavirus and stay-at-home orders, expanded the ranks of those eligible to file claims for unemployment benefits and raised the amount paid to unemployed workers. Self-employed workers and independent contractors can now file for benefits, expanding the number of claims.
New claims for state unemployment benefits are a proxy for layoffs. Released weekly, they are some of the few real-time indicators of economic conditions.
Actual job losses may be higher than the most recent figures reveal. Applications in many states have been hampered by websites and phone lines failing due to the rapid rise in the volume of claims.
Employers are slashing their payrolls to try to stay afloat because their revenue has collapsed, especially at restaurants, hotels, gyms, movie theaters, and other venues that depend on face-to-face interaction. Auto sales have sunk, non-healthcare related manufacturing has ground to a halt, and factories have closed.
More than 90 percent of the U.S. population is now under stay-at-home orders, which have been imposed by most U.S. states. This trend has intensified pressure on businesses, most of which face rent, loans, and other bills that must be paid.
The CARES Act included hundreds of billions of dollars for loans for businesses that can be forgiven if borrowers keep workers on their payrolls. That could be holding down the levels of layoffs despite the shutdowns.
The biggest spike in claims was in Florida, where the Labor Department estimated claims rose by 324,718 to 505,137. That estimate may include those who lost their jobs earlier but were not counted due to problems getting on the unemployment rolls thanks to outdated technology overwhelmed by the surge in claims.




Trump Exempts Fortune 500’s Visa Workers from Immigration Curb

LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images
LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images
6:34

President Donald Trump has exempted the Fortune 500’s international labor supply from his order for a temporary immigration shutdown.
“This order will only apply to individuals seeking a permanent residency,” Trump said in an April 21 press conference at the White House. He said:
It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker — take care of the American worker. This pause will be in effect for 60 days, after which the need for any extension or modification will be evaluated by myself and a group of people, based on economic conditions at the time.
[It] will not apply to those entering on a temporary basis. As we move forward, we’ll examine what additional immigration-related measures should be put in place to protect U.S. workers. We want to protect our U.S. workers and I think as we move forward, we will become more and more protective of them … The last thing we want to do is take American workers’ jobs.
Thee white-collar reporters did not ask Trump why he exempted the corporate visa workers from taking jobs away from other white-collar Americans. One reporter, however, asked him if he is using the coronavirus epidemic to fulfill a campaign promise to reduce legal immigration.
“I want our citizens to get jobs — I don’t want them to have competition,” Trump responded, adding that the policy document is being drafted for signature, likely on Wednesday.
“The decision not to block guest worker programs — for now — is a concession to the backlash from business groups who assailed the White House on Tuesday,” reported a New York Times article.
“President Donald Trump’s new executive order banning immigration to the United States will apply narrowly to those seeking permanent immigration status, a senior administration official said on Tuesday,” said a Reuters report. The report added, “Other workers such as those on so-called H1-B visas would be covered in a separate action, the official said.”
The rollback of the expected curbs on visa programs will be a huge disappointment to the many American graduates who say they have been pushed out of Fortune 500 jobs and careers by the alliance of U.S. investors, managers, and foreign visa workers.


So Trump will come under increasing pressure during the 2020 campaign to fulfill his 2016 promise to curb the H-1B visa. That pressure will come from millions of swing-voting graduates who see good jobs disappearing all around them — and see the major companies employing roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers.
In fact, his promise of the 60-day review is his invite to millions of swing-voting American graduates to rally against the visa worker programs during the 2020 presidential election.
The college graduate protest will be spiked by the continued economic turmoil and the routine inflow of foreign visa workers. For example, Trump’s federal government is on track to allow U.S. companies to import 85,000 new H-1B workers during the next several weeks.
Fortune 550 companies, smaller companies, and universities keep a population of roughly 1.5 million visa workers in U.S. jobs, and they also use those workers to transfer many additional jobs to corporate allies in India and other countries.
The NYT article did not include any detail about the draft directive, which may split the difference between business demands and the public’s support for a shutdown of immigration and of many visa worker programs.
But the article included comments from advocates for the nation’s powerful and wealthy technology companies.
Business groups had exploded in anger on Tuesday at the threat of losing their access to foreign labor .
“This is both a political act to demagogue and distract from his awful handling of the Covid-19 crisis and lack of testing,” said Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, a technology group that advocates for immigration, “and it is also a policy effort by hardliners to use this crisis to enact their awful, decades-old wish list to radically slash immigration.”
Jason Oxman, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a tech industry trade group, said in a statement earlier on Tuesday that “the United States will not benefit from shutting down legal immigration.”
The members of Oxman’s group include Accenture, Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, MicrosoftIBM, and PWC.  Many of these Fortune 500 companies sideline American graduates to hire foreign visa workers via programs such as the H-1B and Occupational Practical Training program.
The ITI group also includes some of the Indian-run outsourcing companies that import many visa workers from India. The Indian-run companies include Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services.  Indian-run companies supply visa workers to many banks, insurance companies, utilities, auto manufacturers, and many other companies.
Oxman’s April 21 statement said:
Some of the most recognizable and dynamic American technology companies were started by immigrants, and today’s immigrants to the U.S. are valuable members of the U.S. technology industry workforce … the United States will not benefit from shutting down legal immigration. Tech workers – whether from the United States or another country – are playing an essential role in America’s response to COVID-19. They will be vital to the U.S. economic recovery and must remain part of the workforce. We urge President Trump not to endanger the country’s economic recovery by closing its economy to the rest of the world.

Trump's migration suspension will protect wages, esp. for blacks & Latinos, says WH press secretary.
That might mean easy action against the abuse of B-1 visitor-not-worker visas.
But there's far, far more corp.-$$$$ in the college-grad H-1B visas.https://bit.ly/2yvytkX 






Todd Schulte’s FWD.us group was created by West Coast investors, including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, to help pass the 2013 “Gang of Eight” wage-cutting amnesty bill.
Many polls show that American voters like — and want to like — immigrants. But the polls also show that the public strongly objects to companies hiring foreign workers before American employees. For example, an August 2017 poll reported that 68 percent of Americans oppose companies’ use of H-1Bs to outsource U.S.-based jobs that could be held by Americans.
Administration officials are touting the draft policy as a boost to blue-collar wage earners but apparently not to white-collar graduates:


FLASHBACK: Then-Senator Barack Obama in 2006: “huge influx” of immigrants “threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.” https://books.google.com/books?id=k85pcYttpW0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=audacity+of+hope&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjA0ZyBoI_ZAhUjwFkKHYmCC0UQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=%22the%20number%20of%20immigrants%22&f=false 
FLASHBACK: Senator Bernie Sanders in 2015: “You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those [American] kids?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0 

TRUMP’S CRAP ON BORDERS AND HIS PRETEND WALL IS ONLY ONE MORE TRUMP HOAX!

Only a complete fool would believe that Trump is any more for American Legal workers than the Democrat Party for Billionaires and Banksters!

“Trump Administration Betrays Low-Skilled 

American Workers.”


The latest ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) asks Trump to reject the mass illegal and legal immigration policies supported by Wall Street, corporate executives, and most specifically, the GOP mega-donor Koch brothers.


Efforts by the big business lobby, Chamber of Commerce, Koch brothers, and George W. Bush Center include increasing employment-based legal immigration that would likely crush the historic wage gains that Trump has delivered for America’s blue collar and working class citizens.

Company With Ties To Trump Receives Millions From Small Business Loan Program


Jovita Carranza, head of the Small Business Administration, addresses the press earlier this month at the White House, as Vice President Pence and President Trump listen.
Alex Brandon/AP
While many small businesses have found it difficult or impossible to get one of the Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program loans, a company owned by a prominent Chicago family with close ties to the Trump administration was able to get a $5.5 million loan under the program, according to documents the company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.
U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Ronald Gidwitz, who was appointed in 2018, was then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign finance chair for Illinois in the 2016 presidential campaign. According to filings with the SEC, Gidwitz's family owns the majority of Continental Materials Corp., which secured the 1% interest loan.

Continental Materials makes heating and cooling equipment and construction products. While it had more than $100 million in sales last year, it qualified for the loan because it meets the Small Business Administration's industry-specific "small business" size standards, according to company chief financial officer Paul Ainsworth.

Still, the company's loan is much larger than the typical PPP loan, according to a summary released by the Small Business Administration last week. The average loan was just over $200,000, and fewer than 1% of the loans under the program were greater than $5 million.
Ainsworth told NPR the money would be used to pay the company's 445 employees in the face of slowing demand for its products.
"We had planned to furlough people and we delayed those plans," he said. "To the extent that we had to let people go, we're hiring them back."
While the company may qualify as a small business under the PPP program, there are many much smaller businesses that have been unsuccessful in obtaining or even applying for the loans from their banks.
The business advocacy group NFIB surveyed a random sample of the 300,000 businesses in its membership database and found that only about 72 percent of businesses that tried to apply for a PPP loan were able to successfully submit an application.
Continental Materials will be able to pay back the loan over two years and may qualify for it to be forgiven.
When asked, Ainsworth said the loan is not related to any political activities of company leaders, and he noted Ronald Gidwitz resigned when he was appointed ambassador.

Gidwitz was confirmed to the ambassadorship by the Senate by voice vote in June 2018. He announced his resignation from the company's board a few days later in July, according to company SEC filings.

'Our middle class is dying': Tucker Carlson blames 'advisers' in Trump orbit for 'tidal wave' of immigration






Fox News host Tucker Carlson ripped some within President Trump's "orbit" for attempting to place corporate interests ahead of American workers' welfare during the coronavirus pandemic.

On his Tuesday night show, Carlson critiqued Trump advisers, who he alleges crafted a temporary suspension of immigration without addressing key concerns of the working class.
"The president is worried about preserving American jobs," Carlson said. "Unfortunately, and this seems to be the key, some in his orbit are not as concerned. Their main worry is making donors happy. And if there's one thing that donors love always, it's cheap employees. Yes, our middle class is dying at a faster clip than ever before."
Carlson said the suspension doesn't address the hundreds of thousands of temporary and guest workers who vie with Americans for industrial and agricultural jobs.
The Fox News host claimed the suspension was written by out-of-touch staff members who are "more worried about what their friends think" of the immigration measures instead of protecting the jobs of citizens.
Carlson noted the suspension does not apply to a massive section of immigrants who fight with Americans for working-class jobs.
"The new moratorium on immigration will last for 60 days," Carlson said. "The ban will apply only to individuals seeking permanent residency into this country."
Carlson said Trump's ban, which could be extended after the two-month period ends, does not apply to hundreds of thousands of temporary and guest workers who vie with Americans for industrial and agricultural jobs.

"The purpose of this tidal wave of immigration has nothing to

do with what advocates of immigration claim immigration is 

for," added Carlson. "These visas do not 

improve American society in any way. 

We have no moral obligation to give 

them. There is no mention of guest 

workers on the Statue of Liberty."


“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” --- Karen McQuillan  



While many small businesses haven't been able to get one of the federal government's Paycheck Protection Program loans, a Chicago company with close ties to the White House has. 

Continental Materials Corporation is majority owned by the family of Ronald Gidwitz, who is now the U.S. ambassador to Belgium. During the 2016 election campaign, Gidwitz was the Trump campaign's Illinois finance chair. The heating and cooling company, which had sales of more than $100 million last year, 
got a $5.5 million loan at 1% interest. That’s much larger than the typical PPP loan, which is usually just over $200,000. 

GET THIS BOOK!


Bailout of US corporations expands while workers see little relief

 

Two weeks after the passage of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus pandemic corporate bailout bill, grotesquely misnamed the CARES Act, it is clear that it was only the initial shot in the funneling of countless trillions of dollars to the corporate-financial aristocracy that rules America.
While billions have already flowed to the corporations and banks, the limited provisions of the act that were touted by both parties as a boon to working people hit by the shutdown of much of the economy have yet to kick in, and for millions they likely never will.
The act includes $454 billion as a Treasury backstop to enable the Federal Reserve to provide some $4 trillion in cheap loans to major corporations and banks, meaning the real scale of the bailout—thus far—is more than $6 trillion.
The vast bulk of the money allocated goes to covering any losses suffered by major corporations and fueling a new surge in the stock market. That it has succeeded, at least for the present, in lifting the markets is seen in more than 10 percent surge in the Dow over the past several trading days. This has occurred in the midst of an ever-rising toll of death and suffering from the pandemic and grim projections by bankers and economists of a depression-level contraction in the economy and a catastrophic growth of unemployment.
The expanding scale of the bailout and euphoria on the financial markets, alongside the economic and social catastrophe facing the broad mass of the population, demonstrates that the interests of the ruling class and those of the working class are diametrically opposed. The response of the ruling elite and its two political parties to the crisis has from the onset been single-mindedly focused on defending the economic interests of corporate-financial oligarchy, no matter the cost in human life.
In just the last several weeks, the Federal Reserve Board has announced at least 12 major measures to rescue the financial markets and backstop big business. These include:
·         Two emergency interest rate cuts, bringing the benchmark lending rate back down to near-zero
·         A pledge to purchase at least $500 billion in Treasury securities and $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities and to continue the program for “as long as needed”
·         Nearly unlimited sums in short-term loans to 25 large financial institutions that control the market for repurchase agreements, or repos, including $1.5 trillion in the days following the announcement
·         Foreign exchange swap lines, the purchase of short-term loans to US corporations in the commercial paper market, short-term loans to 24 large financial institutions, and, for the first time ever, direct purchases of corporate bonds and direct loans to corporations.
The Wall Street Journal quoted Jean Boivin, head of BlackRock Investment Institute, as saying, “The amount of measures taken in a short amount of time is surreal and unprecedented.”
“It’s kind of crazy how they’ve almost done as much in this week as they did in several months in 2008,” JPMorgan’s chief US economist Michael Feroli said last month. “Now they do have the advantage of just being able to dust off [former Fed Chairman] Bernanke’s playbook.”
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell gave a blanket 
guarantee of unlimited funds to corporate 
America, telling the “Today” show this week, 
“Where credit is not flowing, we have the 
ability in this unique circumstance to step in 
and provide those loans.”
Now both the Trump administration and the Democrats have committed to provide an additional $250 billion to the so-called “Paycheck Protection Program.” That is the Orwellian name given by the two parties to the $350 billion program ostensibly established to provide government-backed loans to small businesses, many of which face bankruptcy as a result of the shutdown of much of the economy, and save the jobs of their workers over the next eight weeks. (That this is farcically inadequate, even if implemented in full, in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, is self-evident).
The program is designed to provide a windfall for the big banks, which actually extend and administer the loans that are backed by the Small Business Administration (SBA). This ensures that Wall Street receives billions of dollars in fees and other charges.
On the eve of the official launching of the program last Friday, the law was amended, under pressure from the banks, to double the interest rate from 0.5 percent to 1.0 percent. Now the banks are demanding that the Fed buy any loans they extend to small businesses so as to remove them from their balance sheets. This will allow them to more freely engage in financial speculation and parasitic activities such as stock buybacks.
Moreover, the great bulk of the money will go not to mom-and-pop groceries, gas stations or eateries, but rather to large corporations that are included in the program. Thus, for example, the program was amended to include billion-dollar restaurant and hotel chains.
Small businesses desperate for cash are finding it difficult if not impossible to actually find lenders who will provide the loans, even if their applications are approved by the SBA. Banks, intent on maximizing profits, are turning down applications right and left.

Citigroup is refusing to participate. Bank of America is not accepting applications from companies that have borrowed from other banks. Wells Fargo says it has already reached “capacity.”
Hundreds of thousands of businesses have applied under the program, but to date only a handful have received any money.
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats are pressing the Trump administration to expand the $50 billion bailout of the airlines included in the CARES Act. This is, supposedly, another “jobs-saving” effort. Delta, for its part, has already laid off thousands of its employees.
There are no real restrictions in the law on how the corporations use the money they are given by the government. No one should doubt that the airline carriers, which spent some $16 billion over the past three years to purchase their own stock—in order to further enrich their top executives and major investors by driving up the stock price—will use their bailout money to do more of the same.
The Trump administration, for its part, is reportedly considering such additional “stimulus” measures as a payroll tax cut—which would starve Social Security of funding—a capital gains tax cut, 50-year Treasury bonds and a waiver that would relieve businesses of liability for employees who contract the coronavirus on the job.
Trump has moved to negate even the token congressional oversight of the bailout program mandated in the law. On Monday, he named a White House lawyer and Trump loyalist, Brian Miller, as inspector general of the Treasury Department’s $350 billion small business (“Payroll Protection Program”), and on Tuesday he removed Glenn Fine as head of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, tasked with monitoring the entire $2.2 trillion program. Trump replaced him with a “senior policy adviser” at US Customs and Border Protection, Jason Abend.
Workers are finding that the promised relief from the bailout law—which accounts for only a small fraction of the total cost of the measure—is uncertain if not entirely illusory.
The New York Times reported Monday that many Americans will not receive the promised relief check of $1,200, plus $500 for each child, until August or September. As many as 10 million low-income, childless adults who are eligible for the stimulus payment program may receive nothing because they have not filed tax returns. Millions more, including undocumented workers, prisoners, students and adult dependents are excluded.
As for the $250 billion expanded jobless benefit part of the law, which is supposed to extend state benefits for 13 weeks and add $600 a week in federal funds for up to four months, workers are finding it all but impossible to apply. Multiple state unemployment websites have crashed under the crush of millions of applicants, and scenes of hundreds of workers lining up, in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, to apply in person are proliferating around the country.


Watch–Trump: Immigration Pause Will Not Apply to H-2A Visa Workers

16
21 Apr 2020517


President Trump revealed on Tuesday that his executive order pausing most legal immigration in the midst of the Chinese coronavirus crisis will not keep farmers from fast-tracking foreign workers into the country.
During his daily press briefing, Trump said the upcoming executive order to pause immigration to the U.S. will exempt foreign workers arriving through the H-2A visa program that delivers an endless flow of cheap labor to farmers.
BLOG: ‘OUR FARMERS’ ARE HIS BIG AG BIZ DONORS WHO WANT UNLIMITED OF NUMBER OF CHEAP SEASONAL LABOR WHO WILL NEVER LEAVE THE COUNTRY AND WILL START ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE THE DAY THEY UNLAWFULLY SET FOOT IN U.S.
“The farmers will not be affected,” Trump said.
Trump said his administration is actually making the process easier for farmers to more quickly get H-2A foreign visa workers into the U.S. — referring to the State and Agriculture Departments’ orders to waive visa requirements and allow visa-holders to stay in the country for more than three years.
“No, the farmers will not be affected by this at all,” Trump said. “If anything, we’re going to make it easier, and we’re doing a process for those workers to come in to go to the farm where they’ve been for a long time.”
Trump said a pause on immigration is necessary, though, to make sure at least 22 million unemployed Americans are not forced to compete against cheaper, foreign workers for U.S. jobs.
“I want our citizens to get jobs. I don’t want them to have competition,” Trump said. “I want the American worker and our American citizens to be able to get jobs. I don’t want them to compete right now.”
The H-2A program allows American farms to import a limitless number of foreign workers and pay them below-average U.S. wages. American farms do not wholly rely on H-2A foreign visa workers to fill agricultural jobs, as the foreign workers make up only about ten percent of the total U.S. crop farm workforce. Last year, U.S. farmers hired roughly 250,000 H-2A foreign visa workers.
In 2017, H-2A foreign visa workers picking crops were paid about two percent less than their American counterparts. Likewise, foreign visa workers operating agricultural equipment were paid 23 percent less than the national average U.S. wage. The largest wage discrepancy comes with H-2A foreign visa workers who take jobs as first-line supervisors for farming and fishing. They are paid about 95 percent less than their American counterparts.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.







Trump’s Immigration Proclamation Starts 50-Day Debate over Wages and Jobs

NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 29: Immigrants wait for their citizenship interviews at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), district office on January 29, 2013 in New York City. Some 118,000 immigrants applied for U.S. citizenship in the New York City dictrict in 2012. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
John Moore/Getty Images
9:09

President Donald Trump’s White House proclamation Wednesday declares legal immigration can hurt Americans’ wages, and gives the public 50 days to organize a political push against the D.C. establishment’s support for the cheap-labor status quo.
“I think it is great that he did it,” said Hilarie 
Gamm, the pseudonymous software 
professional who helped create the American 
Workers Coalition. Many American 
graduates have been pushed out of good 
careers by federal immigration policy, she 
said, adding, “we’ve been pushing a long time
to get it in the news.”
The immediate policy contents of Trump’s proclamation are minor, but “it is good that the president has committed to revising this in 50 days,” said Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “That gives Americans the opportunity to weigh on what should happen, and it gives experts within his own administration the time to prepare good policy options.”
Trump’s unprecedented proclamation about wages and migration comes 30 years after Washington, DC, adopted a high-immigration, low-wage economic strategy by approving President George H. W. Bush’s 1990 pro-employer immigration-expansion bill.
Trump’s proclamation says:
Excess labor supply affects all workers and potential workers, but it is particularly harmful to workers at the margin between employment and unemployment, who are typically “last in” during an economic expansion and “first out” during an economic contraction.  In recent years, these workers have been disproportionately represented by historically disadvantaged groups, including African Americans and other minorities, those without a college degree, and the disabled.  These are the workers who, at the margin between employment and unemployment, are likely to bear the burden of excess labor supply disproportionately.
There is no way to protect already disadvantaged and unemployed Americans from the threat of competition for scarce jobs from new lawful permanent residents by directing those new residents to particular economic sectors with a demonstrated need not met by the existing labor supply.
This focus on jobs and wages is a huge shift from the establishment’s worldview, which insists working Americans actually benefit economically from the government’s policy of mass immigration.
Roughly four million Americans turn 18 each year to search for jobs, stable careers, and affordable homes. But the federal government imports roughly one million legal immigrants a year, alongside the inflow of visa workers and illegal migrants, to compete against them for jobs and housing.
Trump’s proclamation gives the public 50 days to make a public case for a low-immigration, high-wage national economy, saying:
Whenever appropriate, but no later than 50 days from the effective date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Labor, recommend whether I should continue or modify this proclamation.
However, Trump’s policy is far less sweeping than the promise of his original tweet.
But the promise of Trump’s tweet was blocked amid furious closed-door lobbying by hugely wealthy Fortune 500 companies and elite investors. Their opposition was chiefly intended to stop the inflow of non-immigrant, white collar visa workers, including the roughly 900,000 H-1B workers who spike stock prices by shrinking salaries for U.S. professionals.
The April 22 proclamation exempts the resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers from curbs.
That was a deep disappointment to many supporters, including some liberal graduates who are forced to vote for any politicians who protect their salaries and jobs from the Fortune 500’s army of visa workers. “I gave to your campaign from my severance the last time I was replaced by a foreign worker,” said a message from a U.S. professional named James. “You don’t deserve your voters.”
But Trump’s offer of a June re-match between voters and the Fortune 500 gives the public another chance to shift the nation’s economic policy towards employees, say reformers.
Many polls show American voters like — and want to like — immigrants. But the polls also show the public strongly objects to companies hiring foreign workers before American employees. For example, an August 2017 poll reported 68 percent of Americans oppose companies’ use of H-1Bs to outsource U.S.-based jobs that could be held by Americans.
Professionals in many commercial jobs outside journalism recognize the job-market impact of the visa worker programs. Many engineers, designers, software experts, and others have provided their stories, nearly always with the demand that their identity be shielded from hostile hiring managers. For example, one software professional recently provided this note to Breitbart News:
My company laid off [nearly all] of its IT contract labor. However, a few contractors were kept on to maintain the existing infrastructure. I did not see a single American keep their contract … managers assume they can rehire the Americans on a whim if things pick back up. If they laid off an H1B then that H1B would have to depart [for home].
Another told Breitbart News
I work as a computer scientist and know firsthand how out of control these H1B visas are. Constantly see job postings asking for 10 years of experience [working] 4-year-old-software so the [employers] can turn around and plead to the government for a low wage replacement from another country.
“I’d like him to end OPT, H4EAD, and cut back H-1B to be merit-based and less than 10 percent of what is today,” said Gamm. “I’m hoping that Trump and his administration are going to put Americans first.”
There is a wide variety of groups and activists that are already pushing at Trump to change the nation’s cheap-labor policy — amid the establishment’s well-funded efforts to portray the mainstream debate over economics and class as an illegitimate demand for “xenophobia.”
For example, FWD.us was founded by wealthy West Coast investors to promote the doomed 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap-labor bill. On April 23, it dismissed Trump’s proclamation, saying:
Slashing legal immigration in response to a public health crisis is as ridiculous as it is dangerous. Let’s be honest: this has nothing to do with public health or economic well-being during the COVID-19 crisis. This executive order is about two things: first, this is a political act to demagogue and distract from President Trump’s abysmal handling of the COVID-19 crisis, including a lack of testing, ahead of the election. Second, it is a policy effort by hardliners to exploit this crisis to enact their awful, decades-old wish list to slash immigration radically.
The reform groups include national groups with permanent D.C. and grassroots support, such as the Federation for American Immigration ReformNumbersUSA, and US Tech Workers.
The groups also include a large number of white-collar graduates who are trying to influence politics even as they work their jobs and seek their next contract. American professionals have organized to lobby against the H-1B program via the American Workers CoalitionU.S. TechWorkersProUSworkers, and White Collar Workers of America, and TechsUnite.US.
These groups also share their expertise to broadcast data to the public and to reporters via SAITJ.orgMyVisaJobs.com. and government sites.
Trump’s 50-day clock includes a 30-day deadline for federal agencies to gauge the huge economic impact of the nation’s immigration policies, which inflate the new labor supply of job-seeking workers by roughly 25 percent each year. The proclamation says:
Within 30 days of the effective date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State, shall review nonimmigrant programs and shall recommend to me other measures appropriate to stimulate the United States economy and ensure the prioritization, hiring, and employment of United States workers. 
But Trump’s zig-zagging between donors and voters is alienating many of those who stuck with him in 2016.
“We knew it was best not to react to Trump’s initial claims about stopping immigration or any immigration matter because his past behavior has shown us there is an 80% chance that what he is telling us isn’t true,” said William Gheen,  the founder of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, or ALIPAC.
“Trump has broken most of his key campaign promises … here once again he promises his audiences he will end all immigration for 60 days, but then guts the actual order to where it will have little impact for American workers.”




Analysis: Less than 10 Percent of Immigration Affected by Trump Order




Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

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Less than ten percent of the total number of green cards rewarded annually to foreign nationals will be affected by President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily pausing a sliver of legal immigration to the United States.
On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order pausing employment-based and extended family green card categories for 60 days. The order is much narrower, according to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, than originally intended.
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) Director of Research Matt O’Brien told Breitbart News in a statement that Trump’s order will likely only slow about 5,000 to 80,000 green card applications — less than ten percent of the roughly 1.2 million green cards that are given to foreign nationals every year.
O’Brien said the at least 60-day delay for these green card applicants may go unnoticed to many attempting to enter the U.S. as standard visa processing has already been disrupted due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
“There are a larger number of temporary visa applicants who could be nominally affected by any moratorium,” O’Brien said. “However, since air, land, and marine travel across U.S. borders is virtually shut down anyway, it’s difficult to say whether these folks will even notice a temporary pause in the processing of their visa applications.”
During a segment on Wednesday, Carlson said Trump’s original draft of the executive order “would have suspended several guest worker programs, the ones that prevent qualified Americans from getting jobs” but that the draft was later gutted down to only include a small group of employment-based and extended family green card applicants who are not yet in the U.S.
“Every year, 180,000 new H-1B visas are awarded, and more than 200,000 are extended for a longer period. These are not for people picking grapes or lettuce. These are for people making good wages in white-collar jobs,” Carlson said. “Currently, there are about 470,000 active beneficiaries of this program … suspending that program for a year would open up a massive number of jobs at a time when we desperately need them because we have so many unemployed more than ever.”
“The final version … does not restrict any foreign workers at all,” Carlson said. All of them are free to keep coming here and taking American jobs, including high-paying American jobs.”
Carlson said a number of officials with the White House, Department of Labor, and the Council of Economic Advisors warned against pausing foreign worker visa programs, concerned about the backlash from multinational corporations like Apple.
“They argued that the unemployment benefits in the coronavirus stimulus bill were so generous, that American citizens would refuse to go back to work,” Carlson said. “So we have to bring in more foreigners. Welfare for you. Real jobs for foreign nationals.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.