Immigration reform means more people compete for fewer jobs.

That new immigration policy President Obama announced was a real humdinger.  It will allow 800,000 illegal aliens who had come to United States when they were sixteen years or younger to reside and work here. 

Mitt Romney has refused to make any real comment coming out against this policy because it would seem that he would not want to offend the Latino community whose vote is very important for the upcoming election.  However, I believe that the Republicans want this new policy even more than the Democrats do.  It will mean 800,000 more people competing in a shrinking job market, driving labor costs down even further, now if we could only get rid of that pesky minimum wage....

The country that is renowned for having a very strict immigration policy is Australia.  I checked online to see what their unemployment rate was like since the current economic downturn is supposed to be worldwide.  The statistic I found was that in April 2012 their unemployment was only 4.9%.  Wow, that's about equal to the United States unemployment rate before the economic downturn in 2008.

It is very easy to see the purpose of immigration, which is to bring labor costs down.  It may make sense in times of prosperity, but it does not make sense in times of despair.  "But things are looking up" you say.  I don't think things will look up until our unemployment rate is the same as Australia's.

No Democrat or Republican is pushing for a mandate of the E-Verify system to establish a nationwide citizenship verification system.  E-Verify was put into place after 9/11 in order to enhance security, but no one wants to use it to get rid of cheap illegal labor.  

Also the Republican controlled House of Representatives voted down the "U.S. Call Center Worker and Consumer Protection Act" which was aimed at giving the right for a person to ask to speak to a customer service representative in the United States.  Over 500,000 call center jobs in the last six years have been lost to off-shoring and this bill would have prevented the loss of even more jobs.  

By looking the actions of both the Democrats and the GOP and the actions of both the executive and legislative branches of our government, Americans can see that we are the victims of a two man con came.  A game that will bring the same 30 percent unemployment that some European countries currently have to the United States.  Neither party is looking to alleviate this unemployment situation, they appear to only want to make things worse.  Is there no one out there who can help us?

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.

Wisconsin: They don't call them cheeseheads for nothing...

I have only met one person from Wisconsin in my entire life. And he left there because he thought it was a good-for-nothing state. How these people could allow Scott Walker to remain as their governor is beyond me.

Well, I know a couple of reasons. The Republicans outspent the Democrats greatly. Thanks Koch brothers (who have allegedly supported causes like this one). Also do you think President Obama could have paid a visit to Wisconsin in support of the Democratic candidate, Tom Barrett? Of course he couldn't. Perhaps the Koch brothers have him in their pocket as well.

The wealthy are winning their never ending battle to eliminate the American middle class. By off-shoring jobs and moving manufacturing to Asia they have all but eliminated unions from private industry. The new target is now is local government jobs, because they cannot be easily off-shored. It is now necessary to break government unions by passing legislation that takes away their rights. Wisconsin is only the beginning.

Their sights are now set on New York where a movement to eliminate a piece of legislation called the Triborough Amendment of the Taylor Law is now underway. The Triborough Amendment allows the regulations of expired contracts to stand until new contracts are negotiated. Therefore, salaries that have a negotiated salary step schedules will remain on schedule until a new contract is negotiated. They want to have the right to freeze contracts altogether and not allow contracts to advance in salary steps until a new contract is negotiated.

The wealthy know that the off-shoring of jobs was a great union buster, and the private sector can no longer afford to offer its workers decent wages and benefits. They desperately want to make sure that the public sector follows suit.

Labor unions and individual citizens must stand-up and defend this last bastion of the working class in the public sector, as well as try restoring it to the private sector, if the middle class is to survive. Scott Walker's victory in Wisconsin will probably be remembered as the beginning of the end of  middle class America if we continue to allow things like this to happen.

Why different prices for cash and credit at gas stations?

Here is a pet peeve of mine.  Why is does it seem like it is only gas stations that make you pay a higher price for using credit cards?  Shouldn't that be true for all retailers? 

What the gas stations are doing here are two things.  One, they are pushing off the fees that the credit card companies charge them onto the consumer.  You didn't think that those reward points you get from your credit card company came out of thin air, did you?  Two, they are also trying to take in more cash. When they take in cash they do not necessarily have to declare the cash on their tax filings.  This is exactly what Richard Kiyosaki states in his "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" book series.  He wants everyone to run a small business, doing as much of it as possible as cash only.  This way you can run your business at a loss on paper, pay no taxes, and maybe even get assistance from the government.  Isn't that great?

I once heard of a take-out restaurant owner in a neighborhood where I worked, that did a cash only business.  A co-worker of mine said that she had seen the owner pay for groceries with food stamps, and then drive away from supermarket in a new Lincoln Continental or similar luxury car.  Anyway, we guessed that she really didn't need to be paying for groceries with food stamps.

I imagine that the gas station owners are doing a similar thing, by pushing customers to pay cash in order to save a buck.  I wonder if the Service Station Association had Kiyosaki as a guest speaker at a national convention or something.  

The bottom line is I hate to be inconvenienced so someone else can pocket more money.  There should be laws that prevent businesses for charging different prices for cash and credit payment.  While some may argue that people who want to pay cash shouldn't be penalized by credit card user's service fees, all I have to say to that is, well maybe we shouldn't have credit cards at all.  I didn't come up with this system, I only use it because it is convenient.

France and Greece: Just say no to austerity!

Wall Street was in an uproar when France and Greece used their right to vote to oust elected government officials that imposed austerity measures causing their economic downturn to be much worse than the one in the United States. Now I believe the same thing is about to happen in Germany.

When businesses will not spend their money and banks will not loan their money, it is up to the government to step in as the big spender. This what happened in the United States with the United States government's bail out of Wall Street. Our recession/depression would have been a lot worse if they did not step in this role. I would even argue that the United States hasn't done enough. If they knew what they were doing they would raise taxes on the top one percent of earners and use the money to create nice government jobs for people out of work, but the right-wing nut jobs corrupting our government will not let that happen.

Right-wingers want to seem the same austerity measures here while sending as many American jobs to overseas as possible. They want small government because big government cost money and the wealthy are the only ones with the money to pay for big government.

Republicans do not want the economy to get better, they want it to get worse. In his book "Greedy Bastards" Daniel Ratigan, quotes minutes from a Dallas Federal Reserve meeting showing that Richard Fisher, its president is very disappointed that more jobs are not going overseas to make American labor costs cheaper.

Europeans seem to know that this is what this recession is all about. The wealthy want to move as many jobs over to Asia as possible to make labor costs as cheap as possible globally. They do not want businesses to create jobs in the West because labor is too expensive here, and the only remedy is to send as many jobs away as possible.

They want us to all be like Foxxcon employees in mainland China. They work in labor camp like conditions for a about $2.00 an hour, and the only recreational outlet they have is to commit suicide. This what the wealthy people want for the entire world.

Thankfully, European voters are not letting the rich pull the wool over their eyes. I hope Americans will follow suit and make sure that Republicans stay out of office.

So much for free trade with South Korea.

South Korea recently banned United States beef with just concern over Mad Cow Disease, but doesn't that violate our free trade agreement? They should only ban beef for sale only if we ban beef for sale in the United States, isn't that how free trade works? I guess not.

Perhaps later the Korean government will deem America cars unsafe and ban them from being bought in Korea as well. I doubt that they will go that far, but if Korean automakers start to feel the pinch from American competition, I bet something like that will arise and Koreans will be "encouraged" to buy Korean automobiles instead of American ones.

I have to say that I totally do not blame the South Koreans for banning American beef. I stopped eating beef around 2003 when their were reports that Canadian beef had been discovered to contain Mad Cow Disease. And I know that unless the American farmer has his armed twisted, he is going to ignore safe feed practice laws if it impacts his bottom line. Therefore beef will never really be safe unless proper feeding guidelines are strictly enforced or that beef sales decline so much that they have to change their ways. Perhaps a ban on beef would be a good thing for everyone, not just South Koreans.

I really miss hamburgers, but I'm not taking any chances and I do not blame the South Koreans for playing it safe either. I just wanted to give you this example of how free trade doesn't really work very well when a government places a ban on imported products.

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.