The Way Life Should Be? Vol. XI: It’s All Happening
“The wage and employment rules have far-reaching, deleterious effects for workers and the US economy. H-1B workers are underpaid and placed in substandard working conditions, while US workers’ wages are depressed, and they lose out on job opportunities. Rather than fixing a market failure, the rules significantly distort the market and its price signals. It lowers incentives for workers and students to enter certain fields and reduces job mobility in sectors key to driving innovation in a regional economy. In sum, instead of fixing market failures, the H-1B program does just the opposite. It creates new market failures and exacerbates existing ones.”— Ron Hira and Bharath Gopalaswamy
“Under the new rules, employers experiencing a long-term need for a larger workforce could completely avoid the demands of the domestic labor market by serially employing H-2B workers to meet this long-term need. This would drag down wages and working conditions for workers in the industry or region as a whole. The combination of self-attestation, the elimination of the state workforce agencies, and the broadened definition of “temporary” will further depress wages in the industries in which the H-2B program operates, to the detriment of U.S. workers. And, because there is an endless supply of citizens of foreign countries willing to work in the United States … employers have little or no economic incentive to meet the economic demands of U.S. workers seeking a better wage.”—Associate General Counsel of the AFL-CIO, Lynne Rhinehart
“The financial sector has succeeded in depicting itself as part of the productive economy, yet for centuries banking was recognized as being parasitic. The essence of parasitism is not only to drain the host’s nourishment, but also to dull the host’s brain so that it does not recognize that the parasite is there.”—Michael Hudson
Labor’s share of income has continued to decline, and even in the corporate world, finance is an overgrown tumor. In 1985, the financial sector earned less than 16% of domestic corporate profits, whereas by the early 2000s it was over 40%. This is not coincidental, as the US continues to orient itself along a FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) axis, which comprises the rent and interest paid by debtors and rent payers. As Gottfried Feder wrote, “Only labor is productive.” In a debt-driven economy, one predicated on an exponential growth model, extensive lines of credit, and the creation of new markets both in terms of consumers and goods and services, the entire apparatus is increasingly being built on a house of cards. The economy is basically a Ponzi scheme, one where all of the benefits accrue to the top (wildly disproportionately Jewish) 1%. When we see things like the self-created housing shortage in Britain corresponding exactly to the number of immigrants who arrive every year, when “conservatives” scream about a 2% inflation rate from the Federal Reserve, when the entire globalist establishment decries tariffs and “nativism” in favor of “free trade” and open borders, it’s not difficult to see what the angle is here. Per Michael Hudson:
When we say “people worry” about inflation, it’s mainly bondholders that worry. The labor force benefitted from the inflation of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s (my note: which is also why the populist movement of the late-19th century, led by William Jennings Bryan, advocated a move away from the gold standard). What was rising most rapidly were wages. Bond prices fell steadily during these decades. Stocks simply moved sideways. Inflation usually helps the economy at large, but not the 1% if wages rise. So the 1% says that it is terrible. They advocate austerity and permanent deflation. And the media say that anything that doesn’t help the 1% is bad. But don’t believe it. When they say inflation is bad, deflation is good, what they mean is, more money for us 1% is good; we’re all for asset price inflation, we’re all for housing prices going up, and we’re all for our stock and bonds prices going up. We’re just against you workers getting more income.[1]
Now obviously inflation is to be differentiated from hyper-inflation—the kind that occurs when you steal Whites’ land and drive them out of the country, as happened in Rhodesia, and which is now set to commence in South Africa and probably Namibia in the near future. Cultivating Community in Portland tries to set up refugees from Africa with their own farms in Maine, which is a fool’s errand, considering over 60% of the arable land in Africa lies uncultivated, and when in Rhodesia, for example, the White farmers were dispossessed of their land, “the Breadbasket of Africa” fell apart so quickly its currency was insolvent within a few years and it went from a food exporter to a food importer. To top that off, Maine has notoriously acidic soil, so only a local and/or a truly expert farmer is going to get much out of the land. Therein lies the rub with regards to sustainability—only locals and/or people who are otherwise expert know their land or their oceans well enough to have good crop yields or catches that do not deplete resources and destroy the ecosystem. Neo-liberalism does not allow for that. What it does allow for in its exponential growth model is, as Hudson illuminates:
If the economy is growing, people want to employ more workers. If you hire more labor, wages go up. So the 1% always wants to keep unemployment high—it used to be called the reserve army of the unemployed. If you can keep unemployment high, then you prevent wages from rising. That’s what’s happened since the 1970s here. Real wages have not risen, but the price of the things that the 1% owns has risen — stocks, bonds, trophy art and things like that.[2]
This is precisely why, despite over one-third of eligible Americans not participating in the labor force and increasing automation making certain jobs redundant, immigration continues to rise. The infamous New York Times article about how Maine “needs” African immigrants includes a section where these newcomers are expected to become lumberjacks in the Great North Woods, which is curious, since, as a recent Washington Post piece notes, northern Maine has been “battered by the closure of its lumber mills.” Coinciding almost exactly with the opening of the immigration floodgates into America, beginning in the early 1970s, wages essentially remained stagnant in this country until recently, where by some indicators they are on the decline for the majority of American workers, which makes total sense. Similarly, the very conditions which drive away the young and suppress birthrates are of course never discussed; instead, we must import enough “diversity” to drive down wages, increase alienation and consumption, lower trust, and make cross-cultural communication and thus labor organizing impossible. This is despite the clear disingenuousness of the vested interests declaring a “labor shortage” in the third-most populous country in the world. As David Seminara:
Economists have found no evidence of a labor shortage in the occupational groups that constitute the bulk of H-2B employment. George W. Bush was a vocal advocate for guestworker programs. In 2004, Bush proposed a new guestworker program that, had it been enacted, would have tripled the number of visas issued to seasonal workers. On January 18, 2009, his administration published new regulations that significantly reduced oversight of the H-2B application process and extended the definition of “temporary” in the H-2B context from 10 months to up to three years. The H-2B visa was created in 1986 (the same year of Reagan’s illegal alien amnesty), as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which split the H guestworker program into an H-2A visa for agricultural guestworkers, and an H-2B visa for non-agricultural guestworkers. The popularity of the H-2B program for temporary, seasonal, non-agricultural guestworkers has soared from just 15,706 visas issued in 1997 to an all-time high of 129,547 in 2007. American companies filed petitions to request nearly 300,000 H-2B workers in FY 2008. Use of the H-2B program has morphed from its original intent to help employers that need seasonal and/or temporary workers. The majority of the program’s current users are neither small nor seasonal employers, but rather mid- to large-sized companies and recruiters that petition for H-2Bs to work for 10 months out of the year, year after year. Many of the businesses filing H-2B petitions for foreign workers are “body shops” that have no actual “seasonal or temporary” need for labor. Body shops can petition for large numbers of workers and then essentially sell them off to companies that either could not get their own H-2B workers or did not know how to do so.[3]
This is very clearly not a partisan issue; the entire Establishment, political and private sector, is in total agreement that more non-White immigration is always beneficial. Whether the labor is “specialized”[4] or not is irrelevant. We’ve also discussed the transformative role H-2A visas play in Maine’s targeted demographic transformation, and now the United States has offered to triple the number of H-2A visas issued to Guatemalans “to reduce the pressure on the Southern border”—which will in no way incentivize more to come. This comes—like Reagan’s amnesty and the creation of the H-2B visa, the “invade the world, invite the world” ethos of the neo-conservatives, and so on—under a “conservative” regime. As Charles Eisenstein astutely observes:
In opposing redistributive policies, conservative governments seem to see concentration of wealth as a good thing. You might too, if you are wealthy, because concentration of wealth means more for you and less for everyone else. Hired help is cheaper. Your relative wealth, power, and privilege are greater. Governments serving the (short-term) interests of the wealthy therefore advocate the opposite of the aforementioned distributive policies: flat-rate income taxes, reduction of estate taxes, curtailment of social programs, privatized health care, and so forth.
From the US Chamber of Commerce on down, this is seen as a good thing indeed. The Maine State Chamber of Commerce has become a leading voice in supporting an increased role for immigrants in the workforce. Republicans are happy to do their part; Jewish Republican State Senator Roger Katz:
Sponsored LD 1492, an Act to Attract, Educate and Retain New Mainers to Strengthen the Workforce…The bill in its original form would have established a state office for “new Mainers” to carry “out responsibilities of the State relating to immigrants in and into the State.” The bill also would have funded a second immigrant welcome center for the state, located in Lewiston and modeled on Portland’s New Mainers Resource Center, which receives $75,000 a year in state funding. Katz’s bill included funding for vocational and workforce training and English-language training, too. All told, the projected 2018–19 costs were $825,000. …“What has changed (about the immigration issue) is that as our workforce challenges have grown—you are hearing an outcry from the business community,” says Katz. “Because we need more workers, the voices in the Maine Legislature have changed from the usual social justice advocates. They are now being joined by chambers of commerce and business men and women from around the state (my emphasis). That’s starting to really shift the attitude.”[5]
Rachel Peric, Jewish executive director of the Soros-backed immigration advocacy group Welcoming America, concurs, and she uses Baltim0re, Maryland as one example of an immigration success story. The Partnership for a New American Economy (discussed in a previous installment) and their financial backers and corporate partners—Google, Intel, Microsoft, United Fresh Produce Association, Jewish venture capitalist and Managing Director of the Foundry Group Brad Feld, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, American Farm Bureau Federation, the US Chamber of Commerce, American Immigration Lawyers Association, Pinterest, Society for Human Resource Management, the Council for Global Immigration, Western Growers, and eWIC—agree: think of the GDP growth! Also in agreement are Vaishali Mamgain of the University of Southern Maine and Karen Collins, formerly of Catholic Charities Maine Refugee and Immigration Services in Portland: it appears only “white supremacists” object to “policies to facilitate refugee resettlement in Maine.” According to David Brenerman, “a Democratic member of Portland’s City Council who is Jewish” and Chair of the Economic Development Committee, and Julie Sullivan, Senior Advisor to the City Manager:
Immigration is an important part of this city’s economic growth strategy and improving immigrant integration is critical to ensuring Portland’s work force and vitality… The Committee’s research and public input seem to point to creating an Office of Economic Opportunity and Immigrant Integration…to also improve economic opportunity for youth, people of color, and other disadvantaged populations… There would be a Director overseeing the Office, with a Program Manager implementing the Immigrant Integration efforts and a Program Manager implementing the Inclusion and Equity efforts focused on people of color…[plus] proactive, consistent and systematic outreach to employers to identify jobs that are difficult to fill and subsequent partnering with Portland Adult Education, Southern Maine Community College, and the University of Southern Maine to provide those skills…The Director would work on the more macro level issues and would convene partner organizations, build the intern/apprentice/mentor programs, oversee the data tool development, and link with funders.
Who would this matrix of partners and funders include? Among those proposed were: Catholic Charities Refugee and Immigration Services, Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI), the University of Maine Law School, Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP), Maine Access Immigrant Network (MAIN), Maine Equal Justice Partners, New Mainers Resource Center and Portland Adult Education, Pine Tree Legal Assistance (PTLA), and the State of Maine Office of Multicultural Affairs. PTLA receives funding from the Sam L. Cohen Foundation, the Harvard University Consumer Project, and the J.T. Gorman Foundation, among others.[6] One of the JT Gorman Foundation’s primary financiers is the Jewish Burton Sonenstein, and the Investment Committee Chair is Maggie Keohan, who “advises high net-worth individuals and institutional clients throughout New England from Goldman, Sachs & Co.’s office in Boston.”
Maine Business Immigration Coalition advocates for immigration “from a business and economic perspective,” though not without the essential ingredients of ersatz compassion and humanitarianism; its partner organizations include: Barber Foods, Ready Seafood, Coastal Enterprises, Inc. (CEI), MaineHealth, Maine State Chamber of Commerce, SIGCO, several seafood companies, and of course the Partnership for a New American Economy (NAE). Also partnered, in one of the great ironies of this whole affair, is the Portland Buy Local campaign. Ready Seafood:
One of Maine’s largest lobster-processing companies, now has a workforce of more than 200 in Portland and Scarborough that’s more than half foreign born. … Ready Seafood has now developed a pipeline for new workers, making the time-consuming task of recruitment easier. … Ben Waxman, co-owner of American Roots, the Westbrook clothing manufacturer, echoes Skoczenski’s comment about the importance of immigrants to his company’s survival, … To make it easier for businesses to connect with immigrants and to help coordinate services, the city of Portland created the Portland Office of Economic Opportunity in 2017. Run by Julia Trujillo, its mission is to help integrate immigrants into the economy so that businesses can connect with potential employees. … Skoczenski points to the office as the source of Ready Seafood’s recruitment success: “Julia is the only reason this program is working for us.”[7]
If all of these businesses thrive on cheap labor, well of course it makes sense for them to donate to so-called philanthropic organizations which advocate for “immigrants’ rights” and open borders—they do their dirty work without any direct accusations of “dirty money” and lobbying efforts.
What we know is that for both ideological and economic reasons Maine finds itself “suddenly” in the crosshairs of the globalist establishment. From Time to the New York Times to The Christian Science Monitor to the Huffington Post,[8] we are told in unison that Maine is too old, too White, and in dire need of Haitian nurses, Guatemalan blueberry rakers, Somali who-knows-what?, and all the rest of it. As this sudden media blitz is totally organic and definitely not coordinated at all, enter Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post stage left: In “‘This will be catastrophic’: Maine families face elder boom, worker shortage in preview of nation’s future,” written by Jeff Stein (you can’t make this stuff up), the neo-liberals show their hand to anyone paying attention:
Across Maine, families like the Flahertys are being hammered by two slow-moving demographic forces — the growth of the retirement population and a simultaneous decline in young workers — that have been exacerbated by a national worker shortage pushing up the cost of labor (my emphasis). … The disconnect between Maine’s aging population and its need for young workers to care for that population is expected to be mirrored in states throughout the country over the coming decade, demographic experts say. And that’s especially true in states with populations with fewer immigrants, who are disproportionately represented in many occupations serving the elderly…“As the oldest state, Maine is the tip of the spear — but it foreshadows what is to come for the entire country.” (my emphasis) … Experts say the nation will have to refashion its workforce …. The results of not doing so fast enough are already visible in Maine…Care workers in Maine were paid about $11.37 an hour in 2017, according to an AARP report, with a 2019 minimum wage of $11 an hour. …“Even Dunkin’ Donuts pays you more.”…The rising demand for care is occurring simultaneously with a dangerously low supply of workers…“There are simply just not enough people to go around,” [Mary Jane Richards, chief operating officer at North Country Associates] said. “We try to elevate our wages, but then the nearest facility brings theirs up.”[9]
Oh, the horror of having to pay workers a living wage! Also of note in this piece is the commentary by mass non-White immigration advocate and senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute Howard Gleckman. Gleckman is not Jewish.
Just kidding, of course he is! Gleckman makes the seemingly apropos-of-nothing argument that, “With climate change, towns get burned down, or people die in fires.” We’ve talked about climate alarmism before—in addition to the monetization of carbon emissions and the creation of a new financial market, “climate change” and open borders are synonymous—because “climate change causes migration,” we need to accept any and all (non-White) comers who will increase their consumption while we are expected to confine ourselves to matchbox-sized apartments, sterilize ourselves for the environment, and eat soy and maggot sausages, all while remaining great consumers in our own right, just in different ways, from the cradle to the grave.
Reposted with permission from The Anatomically Correct Banana.
[1] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-slow-crash-the-shrinking-of-the-real-economy/5532131
[2] Ibid.
[3] https://cis.org/Dirty-Work-InSourcing-American-Jobs-H2B-Guestworkers
[4] “In practice, virtually any white-collar occupation qualifies as a specialty occupation for the H-1B program. It is used by employers to fill a variety of occupations, from accountants to reporters to school teachers to salesmen to software developers. There is nothing particularly special about the ‘specialty occupations’ as defined in the H-1B program.” https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/Reforming_US_High-Skilled_Guestworkers_Program.pdf
[5] https://pinetreewatch.org/help-wanted-the-immigrant-opportunity-immigrants-can-greatly-help-fill-maines-workforce/
[6] https://ptla.org/sites/default/files/2015%20Audited-Public.pdf
[7] https://pinetreewatch.org/help-wanted-the-immigrant-opportunity-maine-employers-look-to-immigrants-to-fill-severe-gap/
[8] The HuffPo article was written by Jewish filmmaker Yael Luttwak (also affiliated with the Maine Jewish Film Festival, catalogued in Volume V): “We need to show that diversity works. With one million immigrants making their home in the United States each year, it’s urgent that those who believe deeply in America and the notion of diversity as a core American value, find ways to push back against the rising tide of discrimination against “the other.” The challenge for all of us now is to look, state-by-state, at how our communities are responding to immigration, and find the good news stories that epitomize the value of immigration and the bridges that have been built between immigrant and non-immigrant communities. A good place to start is Maine—one of the whitest states in America. Since 2015, I along with our documentary filmmaking team, have been following a group of female students—some new immigrants— some not, in South Portland as they navigate life in a public school. I co-directed, along with [Jewish] Abigail Tannebaum Sharon, the new documentary, “Maine Girls” which just premiered at the 2017 Camden International Film Festival and is now on the festival circuit and picked up for distribution by Kanopy – follows immigrant girls from the Congo, Jamaica, Somalia and Vietnam. What’s inspiring about these girls is that, even in this anti-immigration environment, teenagers will be teenagers. Through hip hop, culture, and common experiences in a Maine public school, the American and immigrant girls develop trust—with the help of a school curriculum built around tolerance and acceptance who end up enriching life in South Portland.”
[9] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/this-will-be-catastrophic-maine-families-face-elder-boom-worker-shortage-in-preview-of-nations-future/2019/08/14/7cecafc6-bec1-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html