The immigration reform and its potential impact on employment

A while ago, I was surfing the net to get more information about "The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013" the latest in immigration reform, and one that has been touted by the media as good one.

You know who likes this bill, Grover (I wish he could be as nice as his namesake Muppet) Norquist.  I saw an opinion piece he wrote for the British newspaper, "The Guardian."  He says that the bill will be good for the American economy.

 

Why does he like the bill? For the same reason all the Republicans like the bill (but some do pretend to hate it), because it basically opens the flood gates for immigration.   With more available people to compete for jobs, wages will go down, it is the simply law of supply and demand.  Republicans will not be happy until Americans are making the same wages as the Chinese and Indians (of India not Native Americans).  

The bill does call for more border security, but only across Mexico as many of the states that border Mexico have pleaded for.  I do not believe the bill does much for the Canadian border or any other way someone can enter this country illegally.  

In times of economic prosperity, when America has a growth economy, it makes sense to allow for immigration, but in the shrinking economy that Americans are living in, it would make sense to freeze immigration until unemployment dips below 4% or so.

Australia, which has a very strict anti-immigration policy, and no countries bordering it, currently has only 5.6 percent unemployment as opposed to America's 7.6.

Wealthy Americans will not be happy until unemployment is around 26% as in Greece which would eventually enable them to drive wages down to a fraction of what they currently are at least as low as mainland China's. 

Then why are some Republican politicians opposed to the bill?  Perhaps it is to appeal to some of their racist constituents or perhaps they just want to keep President Obama from appearing to move things forward with immigration and by doing this they make him look even more inept than he already does.

President Obama is behind giving Visas to highly-skilled foreigners in order to help grow the economy, but I think this also hurts opportunities for American citizens.  If we had a strict anti-immigration policy, companies would be forced to pay to train Americans to fill the jobs they need.  This would benefit the American worker who would gain a useful skill set and make him employable as well in demand in the workforce.  It would also benefit the college or institution that has to train him.  The only one that looses out is the company that has to pay for the training.  It is much easier and cheaper to import foreign laborers that already have the skill sets that American companies need.  It is even cheaper if the company can off-shore the jobs altogether.

And then there is the issue of security.  While America has always been a country made great by immigrants who have left their oppressive countries to be free in the USA, the times have changed greatly.  While immigrants love to come here to enjoy a higher quality of life, there is much hate and envy of the United States.  We have to make sure that at all entry points,not just the borders, that we are not letting in foreign terrorists.  Any immigration reform act should have strict provisions for this, but of course it does not.

In summary I think we should keep the doors to immigrants closed as much as possible until our economy makes a full recovery.  I think that it is awful that there are liberal groups pushing for both lax immigration and raising the minimum wage, because the influx of cheap labor, especially in hard economic times, would only keep wages down.

 

Is it one party time?

If you  are like me, you have Republican friends who are still in a state of shock, still sitting or standing around with their mouths open.  They were sure that President Obama was going to be another one-term wonder like Jimmy Carter, absolutely sure.  How could the American people not see what a mess President Obama's evil socialist agenda has made of their country? Of course it had nothing to do with George W. Bush's economic agenda that brought the economy down shortly before President Obama took office in 2008.

Well, the American people are not that stupid after all, but there are enough pockets of stupid people around to allow for the Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives, you can't win them all.  And of course, they still have the agenda of not taxing the wealthy under any circumstances, another battle looms over this issue and I hope Preisdent Obama will be able to make some headway on this problem over the next four years, but I am doubtful.

Your Republican friends are probably also, saying stuff like, "Well, I guess we are going to have a one party system now, only Democrats, the GOP is kaputsky!"   I was surprised to hear this from a couple of different friends on a couple of occasions, therefore I am wondering if they are quoting someone else from Fox News or another right-wing media source. 

You can respond to this statement by saying that there is plenty of room for two parties, there will be the Democrats as always, and new Socialist party, won't that be great?  Then watch your Republican friends' faces go beet red with anger.

This of course will be a hollow victory for us if President Obama cannot now turn the  tide and get the rich to pay their fair share of taxes and regulate a more fair system of trade in order to turn the American economy around. And then if Obama fails, your Republican friends are going to turn to you and say,"See, I told you so...."

Betwen Barack and a hard place.

Now that the Republican and Democratic National Conventions are over, Americans will have to turn to media ads and the debates to see and hear the final mudslinging before casting their vote.

I understand that the choices are not very good.  The Democrats for me talked the talked, telling the American middle class what they wanted to hear, that they are the middle class's party and they are the only ones interested in its preservation.  But they haven't walked the the walk, and taken the right actions to restore the economy.

What really scares me is that they have accused the Republicans of actually planning to raise taxes on the middle class in their vision of economic recovery, and the Republicans are not vehemently denying it!  They should have been at their national convention quoting George H.W. Bush's infamous line, "Read my lips, no new taxes!" but they know they are not dumb enough to let history repeat itself.  The Republican economic plan would only add gasoline to the fire.

So the choices are basically, another four years of a do nothing President, who will now be a lame duck with really little incentive to do anything, and a crazy Republican who thinks that that by raising taxes on the middle class and slashing government spending left and right, that all of our economic woes will be over.

I am going to have to vote for Obama, because I truly feel that doing nothing, is a much better scenario than what the Republicans have proposed.

The job situation and the real road to serfdom.

A reporter friend of mine recently got laid off, as the economic downturn and advancements in information technology have taken a great toll on jobs in the newspaper industry. He was a bureau reporter for a newspaper in a relatively small market, and he knew it was coming and wasn't surprised when it did finally come, it was like what took them so long? It was a family owned newspaper, therefore the publisher had a little bit of a heart, I guess.

What kills me is that he replaced a reporter who held the position for almost thirty years, and who retired on his own terms. It took him several weeks to get out of the office and retire completely. I am just angry that the previous generation had this kind of job security, one that Generation X or our children will never have.

And you get people like Thomas L. Friedman, author of the books "The World is Flat" and "That Used to Be Us," who say that it is good thing. That we all have to reinvent ourselves and work our butts off to provide a unique service or product just in order to have the right to survive. All the while knowing that the previous generations just had to fall off a log in order to get a life long job or career. This is ridiculous we are heading backwards instead of forwards. In fact, I think we are heading all the way back to the dark ages, but more on that later.

I am encountering all sorts of people in every age group and every level of education who are either recently laid-off and struggling to find a new job, or entering the job market for the first time and unable to find work. With the recent poor jobs report and companies like HP announcing as many as 25,000 layoffs, I cannot imagine things getting better anytime soon.

But this is the dream of the wealthy, those that own the means of production. They have and will continue to off-shore as many jobs as possible. They will make sure that labor markets worldwide are like the labor markets in China. They will make sure that our working future is a lot like Foxconn in mainland China. Foxconn manufactures electronic components for companies like Apple, and runs what basically sounds like a labor camp where the workers live miserable lives making only two dollars an hour. Their only means of outlet appears to be suicide as they protest their poor working conditions. This is our future, but it sounds like the past.

There is a famous book that conservatives use as their economic manifesto. It is called the "The Road to Serfdom" by an Austrian economist,  Friedrich August Hayek.  It basically warns of the evils of socialism and how if government is allowed to grow out of control we will all become "serfs" of an oppressive overlord government.  Ah, but that wasn't feudalism.  Feudalism was where there was no government at all.  There was just a feudal lord who was the landowner, the knights who were like his sword-for-hire security detail, a type of police or enforcers, and the serfs who worked his land and produced crops for the feudal lord.  The wealthy people of the United States and probably the rest of the West want desperately to go back to this system.  A system where only their word is law and workers have absolutely no rights.   You can see this as the rich so desperately want to downsize federal and state governments, but always have a hand in their local government to make sure that they have more than their fair share of power in the area where they live, they desperately want and need to micromanage their own backyard. 

But why would Hayek call his book "The Road to Serfdom"?  Because the wealthy are notorious for saying something is white when it is actually black.  Look at the accounting firm Arthur Anderson who tricked shareholders into thinking everything was OK by calling Enron's losses profits.

United States is moving to real serfdom, much more quickly than I have expected, as President Obama has refused to take any helpful action for getting Americans back to work.  What scares me is now I am hearing a lot of Democrats say well maybe we should vote for Romney, just to shake things up a bit and see what he does.  The most shocking place I have encountered this suggestion is Paul Krugman's new book "End This Depression Now,"  where he basically states that Romney has some moderate economic advisers that might advise him to do the right thing and move away from the supply-side self-correcting market model we are following now, to a more Keynesian approach.  This is not bloody likely.

I am certain that if re-elected Obama will continue to do nothing about the unemployment situation, but I am also certain that whatever action Romney will take, it will only make things worse.

Just a note about the picture above.  It was a dispenser of an employment advertisement magazine called "Top Jobs" and it now used for garbage.  A perfect statement for what's going on in this country.

Obama supports Cartoon Network's anti-bullying campaign.

I saw President Obama on Cartoon Network the other day introducing a special for children on bullying. I guess he wanted to introduce the show because he must be a victim of bullying as well. During his entire presidency he as been bullied by the GOP, special interests, corporate America, and BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China).

He must have been a victim of bullying, this is why he cannot break the GOP hold on government that says supply-side economics is a good thing, that not raising taxes on the wealthy is a good thing, that having a huge trade deficit is a good thing, and off-shoring all of our jobs is a good thing.

Yes, Obama must be the victim of bullying, because it is the only explanation of why someone who ran on a campaign of change, didn't manage to change one darn thing from the mess that was created by George W. Bush from the previous eight years.

Will I vote for Obama? Of course. What choice do we have? But it's like the wealthy people and special interests are Jersey Shore musclemen kicking sand in our faces, while the only person we have to defend us is the 98 pound AV geek.

Congress and Budget Blithering

I can't believe I haven't posted here at all this year. Just like many of the people who would take the time to read this post, I am a working stiff. I have work off-the-books overtime just to keep my job, and I have to enroll in courses and study just to prepare for the time when I may no longer have a job, which may be soon. The economy isn't getting any better, and I need to brace myself for when I have to start collecting unemployment just like many of you are or will be.

I am only posting here now because I am so upset about the banter between President Obama and Speaker of the House John "Bonehead" Boehner over raising the debt ceiling and passing a budget. President Obama has been very weakly trying to get across the message that we need to tax the wealthy, while Boehner very loudly states he just wants budget cuts, cuts and more cuts.

Boehner's Congressional District suffers over 9% unemployment just like the rest of the country, how high does unemployment have to get before someone runs against this Bozo and takes his seat away from the Nazi Republicans out to destroy this country.

Federal budget cuts will just amount to more unemployment. The government needs to step in an create jobs, not take more jobs away. Already the US Post Office plans to cut thousands of jobs, and if Boehner gets his way more Federal jobs will just disappear, but no one is calling him a "job killer" the label that House Republicans put on the health care reform bill. Let's face it private industry is not going to pick up the slack for all of the government jobs we are going to loose with the substantial budget cuts that Republicans pose.

Actually, private industry will wind-up suffering as well, as budget cuts result in the end of government contracting, and laid-off federal employees will stop spending money in the retail and food markets which will beget more lay-offs. The unemployment that the budget cuts will create will cause such a great feedback loop of more unemployment that the economy will have no other recourse but to crash again, this time probably harder than before.

In their book "Aftershock: Protect Yourself and Profit from the Next Global Meltdown," authors, David and Robert Wiedemar and Cindy Spitzer predict that government jobs will be a safe haven from the next big ecnomic downturn which they predict will befall us within the next couple of years. (They were right about the real estate bubble in a previous book published before the crash, but who couldn't see that coming?) With all of the Federal spending cuts coming their will be no save haven in Federal jobs or any government jobs for that matter.

Let's face it, there is a huge budget deficit and the only way to close the gap is raise revenue and tax the crap out of the rich and add large tariffs to imported goods, something Congress and the President are very reluctant to do because the rich have them in their pockets.

You know the wealthy have Boehner in their pocket because he comes from a fairly rural district with 9% unemployment. A few of his siblings are even unemployed according to Wikipedia. With his background he should really be a Democrat, but you know the wealthy and the corporate interests are bank rolling him, so he will keep fighting to run this country into the ground.

If the Republicans have their way and all we have is cuts, cuts and more cuts to the budget in a time where the Federal government really needs to step in and spend money to create jobs, you are going to see an economic collapse greater than the one we saw in 2008.