TYSON HAS LONG BEEN IDENTIFED WITH THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR OBVIOUS REASONS.
Tyson Foods Faces Boycott After Firing 1,200 Americans, ‘Would Like to Employ’ 42,000 Migrants - AND BIDEN - MAYORKAS - SCHUMER HAVE USHERED OVER THE BORDER 15 MILLION TO PICK FROM.
Congress dithers over token relief bill as 4.8 million more Americans face poverty in January
Despite claims of “good progress” and assurances of “getting a deal done,” Democratic and Republican congressional leaders adjourned Friday without passing an estimated $900 billion coronavirus relief bill. The completely inadequate bill, which is still subject to change, would reportedly provide a $300-a-week federal unemployment benefit for 10 weeks and a one-time direct payment of $600 to low- and middle-income people.
The short-term federal jobless benefit is 50 percent less than the $600 weekly supplement that expired on July 31, and the one-time stimulus check is only half the amount provided under the CARES Act, passed by a near-unanimous bipartisan vote in March. That bill provided some $6 trillion in low-interest loans and cash handouts to banks and corporations, dispensed by the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
The new bill is being touted by the Democrats as a “down payment” on a second stimulus package to be enacted under the incoming Biden administration, which will undoubtedly provide trillions more for the financial markets and the stock portfolios of the financial oligarchs.
The current measure, under the rubric of the “small business” Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), includes billions of additional dollars for large businesses and another multibillion-dollar bonanza for Wall Street banks in the form of loan fees. The vast bulk of small businesses were frozen out of the two previous iterations of the PPP, resulting in the permanent closure of hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of layoffs. This round of the program promises to be no different.
Congress passed a two-day continuing resolution to extend federal spending and prevent a government shutdown while remaining differences are thrashed out and the relief bill is passed and signed into law by President Trump, who has signaled his support. The bill is to be attached to a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending package.
As of this writing, it was not clear whether the bill would include an extension of the Centers for Disease Control eviction moratorium, which expires in less than two weeks. According to the Aspen Institute, failure to enact an extension will result in a wave of evictions leaving up to 40 million people homeless.
A study released this week by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University estimates that without the immediate renewal of the $600 weekly federal unemployment supplement and other CARES Act programs, such as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), an additional 4.8 million people, including 1.3 million children, will fall into poverty next month. This is on top of the already eight million who have been driven into poverty since the expiration of enhanced unemployment benefits at the end of July.
Overall, the authors of the Columbia study estimate that without any action, 17.5 percent of the US population, and over one in five children, will fall into poverty. Even if a deal is struck immediately, for the roughly 13 million people making use of the PUA and PEUC programs, including the self-employed, contract workers and “gig” workers, there will be a delay in receiving checks that could last weeks, according to Michele Evermore, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. “It usually takes around two to three weeks to turn benefits back on,” Evermore told CNBC.
Data from the Census Household Pulse Survey conducted between November 25 and December 7 gives some indication of the suffering and hardship endured by millions of people due to congressional inaction and indifference. In several states, over half of the population surveyed is expected to be evicted or foreclosed on in the next two months, with the District of Columbia leading the nation at 67.3 percent, a 14.4 percent increase from last month.
DC is followed by South Dakota at 59.5 percent, a nearly 20 percent increase, and North Carolina at 54 percent, while in Wisconsin, 44.1 percent expect either to be evicted or foreclosed on in the next two months.
Overall, the Census notes that some 13 million adults in the US, or over nine percent of the population, are not current on their rent or mortgage payments and have “slight” or “no confidence” that they will be able to pay next month’s bill on time, an increase of nearly two million compared to two weeks ago. Louisiana leads the nation in this category, with nearly 16 percent, followed by Delaware at 15.2 percent, an increase of 5.5 percent, while Pennsylvania and Florida have seen a more than three percent increase from the last survey, at 13.2 and 12.3 percent, respectively.
What little money workers do have has been going to provide necessities such as food. However, for millions of people even that is a struggle in the richest country on the planet, with an estimated 27.4 million adults in the last month agreeing with the statement that in their households there were “sometimes” or “often” not enough to eat over the previous seven days. This is an increase of nearly two million from the month prior. Arkansas leads the nation, with 19.4 percent, or one in five people saying they did not have enough to eat, while 16.7 percent of Hawaii residents, an increase of 4.6 percent, went hungry.
Weekly state and federal unemployment claims have topped one million in recent weeks, job growth has slowed dramatically, and more than 10 million jobs have been permanently lost since the pandemic began in earnest in March.
The failure to provide serious aid to workers and small businesses is the result not of confusion or mere incompetence. Rather, it is part of a policy dictated by the economic interests of the capitalist class to block any serious measures to contain the pandemic that would impinge on corporate profits and use mass unemployment and the threat of starvation and homelessness to force workers into coronavirus-infected factories and workplaces. The reopening of schools in the midst of the raging pandemic is part of this homicidal “herd immunity” policy.
The Trump administration has openly carried out this policy of mass death, while the Democrats have feigned opposition while in practice collaborating fully at the state and local level and in Congress. The result is over 17 million confirmed cases, more than 300,000 deaths, a daily death rate surpassing 3,000, and the overwhelming of hospitals in many parts of the country. This is combined with the greatest levels of unemployment, social distress and suffering since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In Nevada, where the state government has run out of money to provide unemployment benefits, over 45 percent of the population expects a loss in income in the next four weeks. This is followed by California at 38.9 percent and New Mexico at 38.6 percent. New York and Hawaii are not far behind at 36.5 and 36.4 percent, respectively.
The criminality of the ruling class was underscored this week by the announcement by the Federal Reserve that it would continue to pump billions of dollars a month into the financial markets and purchase dubious corporate bonds indefinitely.
As of Friday evening, the main obstacle to the passage of the miserable relief bill appeared to be Republican Senator Pat Toomey’s inclusion of language that would end several Fed lending programs, such as the misnamed $600 billion Main Street Lending Program. This provoked an apoplectic reaction from Democratic lawmakers, including senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and California Representative Maxine Waters, chair of the House Financial Services Committee.
Warner said putting an end to the programs would “set a terrible precedent, hurt the Fed’s independence, and weaken its ability to respond quickly to future crises.” Warren called the proposal “reckless” and an attempt to “sabotage President Biden.”
Wall Street is greedily anticipating another windfall from an incoming Biden administration. Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock, which is heavily represented in Biden’s cabinet, hailed the selection of former Fed Chair Janet Yellen as Biden’s Treasury secretary, saying he expected to forge an “important partnership.”
“I think people understand this is a big deal,” Rieder said. “The economy can handle more accommodation and more fiscal, funded by the Treasury and supported by the Fed.”
CATO Shows Joe Biden How to Flood the Labor Market for Wall Street
Joe Biden’s deputies can bypass Congress and use their bureaucratic powers to open the U.S. economy to millions of foreign graduates, blue-collar workers, and chain-migration families, says a legal guidebook posted by the Cato Institute.
“The new administration should go far beyond simply rescinding [President Donald] Trump’s changes and adopt reforms that make legal immigration easier … this compilation fills a gap in the administration’s regulatory agenda,” said an op-ed in TheHill.com by David Bier, a Cato employee.
The guidebook reflects the political shift of big business from the increasingly populist GOP towards the increasingly progressive Democratic Party. The new alliance promises to spike Wall Street with a wave of government-delivered consumers and workers, albeit with minimum wages set by the Democrats.
Bier helped write the December 18 guidebook, titled “Deregulating Legal Immigration: A Blueprint for Agency Action.”
The nation’s immigration law was loosened in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, and the annual inflow doubled in 1990 to roughly one million by President George W. Bush. The one million is a huge number in comparison to the four million Americans who turn 18 each year. In fact, wages and salaries have grown very slowly since 1970, even as the stock market has exploded the wealth of Americans with money to invest.
But Cato’s advisers are disappointed by the annual inflow of one million immigrants and the resident population of roughly two million temporary foreign workers. So they are offering Biden’s agency officials numerous options for getting many more millions of taxpayer-aided migrants into U.S. jobs, shopping malls, and apartment rentals.
For example, the one million annual limit means that many would-be immigrants — including most chain-migration family members — are forced to wait years in line to migrate into the United States’ labor market, communities, and schools.
Cato responds by suggesting the federal agencies let them in as not-quite-immigrants:
What about the 3.5 million immigrants who are waiting abroad? [immigration lawyer Cyrus] Mehta [says] the administration should “parole” — the legal term for waiving restrictions on entry — the backlog of family and employment applicants waiting in other countries. This would allow them to reunite with family and start working for U.S. companies immediately under a well-known legal authority.
The resulting inflow of migrants would boost consumer sales, raise real estate prices, cut wages, and spike profits — all of which would be good news for investors, but not Americans.
Cato’s 99o form for 2019 lists several individual donations, including three $1 million donations, one $3.6 million donations, one $1.99 million donations, as well as donations of $700,000 and $900,000.
But a wide range of politicians, business leaders, and academics admit any infusion of new labor suppresses salaries for American white-collars and blue-collars. In 2019, median family household income jumped by 7.3 percent from March 2018 to March 2019 in President Donald Trump’s popular l0wer-immigration economy, even as salaries for college graduates fell by two percent from 2016 to 2019.
But amid the current large inflow of foreign college-graduate workers, the median or midpoint income of American college graduates fell by two percent from 2016 to 2019, according to a survey released in September by the Federal Reserve banking system.
Hispanics are the most supportive of immigration shutdown, says WashPo poll Polling quirk shows the obvious: Immigs want opportunities & their kids to be full Americans. You can't get either if 'the land of opportunity' is just a 'nation of immigrants.'https://t.co/Ad05lnaYNP
Several of the Cato proposals sketch ways employers could import hundreds of thousands of compliant foreign graduates instead of hiring outspoken American professionals.
Greg Siskind, an immigration lawyer for healthcare employers, says that the agencies “should add nurses, physicians, and other health science professionals to the list of occupations eligible for a 24‐month employment authorization extension under Optional Practical Training (OPT).”
The OPT program is now used by roughly 400,000 foreign graduates of U.S. colleges to get work permits lasting up to three years. There are no caps or barriers for foreigners to get OPT work permits, so Siskind’s plan would cut young American doctors, nurses, and therapists from starter jobs.
In fact, said Bier, the Department of Homeland Security “should issue OPT [work permit] extensions to every international student sponsored for a green card.” Again, there would are no limits to this workaround because companies already nominate many supposedly temporary foreign contract workers so they can stay and work until they get green cards, years or decades later. This green card workforce now consists of at least one million foreign graduates, including roughly 600,000 temporary workers working for many years while waiting for green cards.
Congress did not create the OPT program. It was invented by officials working for President George W. Bush. The entire program rests on a claim that Section 1324a of federal law allows the president’s Attorney General to award work permits to whomever he or she wishes and exempt the employers of those foreigners from Social Security taxes.
Many visa workers bring their wives or husbands to the United States, and they should get work permits too, says Cato. The United States Citizens and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency “has denied jobs to all other spouses and children of temporary workers not specifically authorized by Congress. It makes little sense to have foreigners residing in the United States under programs designed to enhance economic growth but who are banned from working. For that reason, USCIS should authorize all spouses and children of foreign workers to work.”
That practice would be great for companies because they could import two or more workers with one visa.
Migrants should be allowed to import millions of their own relatives if they are relabelled as refugees, says Cato:
The president should classify all beneficiaries of approved family‐sponsored immigrant visa petitions as those of “special humanitarian concern” and allot refugee numbers equal to the number of qualifying applicants. The State Department should establish a fee to accept refugee applications directly at consulates from beneficiaries of approved family‐sponsored immigrant visa petitions …
If they are approved, the refugees would be “resettled” by their relative, not through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, without government funds just as they would have been had they received immigrant visas.
Companies should also be allowed to import their own workers — as refugees — if Americans demand excessive wages, according to Cato:
U.S. sponsors—organizations as well as individuals—should be allowed to submit sponsorship applications directly to the State Department. They would be required to present evidence of the refugee’s status, provide a resettlement plan showing where the refugees will live for the first year after arrival, and pay a fee to cover the costs of resettlement for the first year.
Overall, open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrivals help transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.
Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook has been discriminating against American grads when trying to hire foreign #H1B for permanent jobs, says Trump's DoJ. So a class & labor rights issue, not 'immigrant rights.' And what about Google? Apple? The Fortune 500?https://t.co/yahYUWjs4f