Foreign Labor Continues To Flow Into US, Displacing US Workers

Jump to Comments

Instead of protecting workers, our government protects the contractors who bring in foreign labor.  The depression cycle of making labor cheaper and cheaper continues with government blessings.  Across all industries, the importation of labor is rising, not dropping.  Even as native unemployment rises rapidly.  Also, the ZIRP system which moved from being a Japanese system to a global system, is increasing its iron grip on planetary banking systems even as economic chaos rises.  And workers wishing to get out of this death spiral via education are seeing the doors to academe slam shut in their faces..

The story below is the same old story we hear over and over and over again.  That is, US workers are forced to train foreign replacements and then are fired.  The race to the bottom includes many ‘high skill’ occupations.

.

Aircraft repair jobs sold to foreign workers, resumes not important | Latest News | WFAA.com

A News 8 investigation found that hundreds of aircraft mechanics have been brought into the United States to work at aircraft repair facilities.

Insiders say the companies that are importing the mechanics are so eager to save money, they’re overstating their qualifications. The result may be a threat to safety, abetted by lax enforcement of immigration law.

At daybreak any morning at San Antonio Aerospace, hundreds of workers amble through the gates for the day shift. They repair big jets like Airbuses, Boeing 757s and MD-11s. But, despite the fact that it’s a huge facility in the middle of the San Antonio International Airport, a large number of the mechanics are only temporary workers from foreign countries.

And we wonder why planes are simply falling out of the skies?  Understanding all aspects of a system is valuable because this creates a culture whereby all the staff knows many things and can communicate effectively.  This means, very little will slip through the cracks.  If this is replaced with a working culture where many cannot communicate clearly to others or understand anything at all, where the staff barely understands limited actions and perform them mechanically and with no regard to all other systems, we get collapses.

.

Originally, the difference between a third world country and a first world country was the higher quality of production and systems being run in the first world country.  Ever since the Free Trade golden goose was hatched, we have seen a deterioration in quality across the board.  Tools are made with inferior steel (ask anyone who has used tools over the last 50 years, it is very noticeable!) or things are very frail.

.

This frail sort of operational system is a sign of cultural decline.  About 20 years ago, US workers would be loudly enraged when displaced.  Today, they go away, quietly.  This is due to unions being reduced to the vanishing point.  Displaced workers have zero political power.  Except if they band together and create a ruckus like what we saw in Iran recently.

.

This story in Texas is particularly annoying.  Texas votes very heavily for this sort of thing, the voters there forget all about their own needs when they vote and instead, go lockstep for whatever cultural distraction that hammers the news during elections.  Ross Perot is a Texan, for example, who first talked about the ‘giant sucking sound’ back in 1990.  But no longer talks about this in public.  That little business of his, telling the truth, gave him a very significant share of the vote in the Presidential election.  Ron Paul is from Texas, too.  He also has some understanding of what is going on.

.

So why is this so stupid?  What went wrong?  I would suggest, this is due to the hatred of any unions.  The belief that unions are evil is very powerful in America.  For example, there were rumblings when banking gnomes were bailed out.  But the roar of hatred was deafening when it looked like auto unions would be bailed out.  So, we will have no unions and no jobs and have pathetic wages for the former middle class and will become a third world nation but by jimminy!  We won’t have those pesky unions anymore!  Whoopee.  Now, back to slitting our own wrists….

.

University clearing places ‘to plummet by two-thirds’ – Telegraph

Only 16,000 course places will available on A-level results day, compared with 43,000 in 2008, it is claimed. The disclosure raises fears that thousands of students failing to meet conditional offers – given out before the publication of results – face missing out on university altogether….

Research by The Daily Telegraph last week suggested demand for degree courses has increased by almost 65,000 across Britain – a rise of 11 per cent. But ministers have effectively put a freeze on university places for September amid mounting pressure on public finances.

In the UK, they face the exact same problems we have here.  For example, the belief system that unions destroyed the nation is the mainline story.  Unions make this worse by going on strike at inconvenient times.  But then, this is the only time a strike works!  They have to do this or die.  Few people like to be even slightly inconvenienced so they don’t support strikers at all.  Even union members get angry when there is a strike by another union and it interferes with traffic, for example.

We are in a Great Depression.  These things follow in the wake of credit bubbles and a widening of the wealth share where the top 1% get a bigger and bigger slice of the pie compared to the rest.  During Great Depressions, one of the few escape pods is to go to school and outlast the Great Depression.  Then, when things finally look up, one graduates and gets a nice job.  Only problem is, where are these nice jobs?

.

‘Kick in the teeth’ for students as grants are frozen – Telegraph

Ministers announced that financial support for students would be capped because of “difficult economic times”. But at the same time, tuition fees will increase by two per cent to £3,290….

Student leaders warned that the freeze in grants and loans represented a real-terms cut and would saddle graduates with higher debts. Many current graduates face debts of more than £20,000. Student groups and university lecturers warned that yesterday’s announcement would only increase that total still further.

With the popping of the credit bubble, we have record debts owed to the banks.  The debtors can’t possibly pay up so they go bankrupt, then the banks go bankrupt and then governments go bankrupt.  This is why Great Depressions cause immense social and political chaos.  Riots, insurrections, coups, revolutions, imperialist wars all proliferate like crazy.  Often going global!  People are willing to go very deep into debt if this means higher future earnings.  But these are in jeopardy due to globalization.  Get a degree in any number of fields and then try finding work: wages are being depressed via the movement of workers from cheap education/cheap labor venues to high education/high wages locations.

.

This depresses wages and degrades production.  The free trade lunatics don’t care.  They care about ‘profits’ which is ‘capital’ and which they use to make the system more depressed.  That is, all available capital created via this depressed labor/dropping wages system is used to depress wages even more by investing this money in places where labor can be ruthlessly reduced to as near zero as possible.  Thus, the ability to exploit labor for profit rises.

.

There is tremendous mental resistance to understanding the role of labor in economic systems due to the ideological need to devalue communism.  Even though we see, clearly, that Asian communist countries exploit capital better than the ‘capitalist’ system.  The communist countries doing this, such as China or Vietnam, are trying to make wages go up, not down, and are exploiting the needs of the capitalists, to export labor production to communist countries, to raise the living standards of labor.

.

Just six families helped by government Mortgage Rescue Scheme – Telegraph

The scheme, which cost more than £280 million to put in place, was launched at the beginning of this year, with the Government saying it would reach its 6,000 target within two years. But increasing numbers of households are struggling to meet their monthly mortgage payments and face losing their homes amid the recession….

Almost 1,000 home owners are being evicted every week, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders. Repossession numbers reached 12,800 in the first three months of this year, a rise of more than 50 per cent from 8,500 this time last year.

The entire, 100% excuse for bailing out the bankrupt banks was, this way, the bankrupt bankers would extend rescue packages to people caught up in the credit collapse.  This idiotic rescue scheme worked for the bankrupt bankers but not for anyone else on earth.  So the bankers got their stupid bonuses back and are again, looting the world’s capitalist systems, and absolutely not one penny has filtered through to anyone else.

.

It was ridiculous, trying to save the bankers and everyone from a credit bubble.  The pain of this business has to be endured, alas.  This is why regulators have to regulate. When they see bankers circumventing restrictions on lends, the regulators must step in and make it much harder to borrow money!  If raising interest rates don’t work, they can use other restrictions like raising the reserve ratios.  China did this, for example.

The regulators can restrict free trade!  DUH!!!  There are many ways of regulating things so bubbles don’t take off.  But no one wants to do this because bubbles are immense fun. Until they pop.  We love going deep in debt if the monthly payments remain the same.  Time to party!  Back to the UK news story: the US has the same thing.  The very few people who were bailed out by the banks after we spent literally trillions, bailing out the bankrupt bankers, these very few who had their mortgages reset, the vast majority went bankrupt within a year, anyway.  In other words, these elaborate rescue operations have been a total failure.

.

And, as usual, I predicted this last fall!  It was easy to see.  The US government has an obligation to protect itself.  Instead, it threw us to the wolves to protect a consortium of private bankers who were the top 1% of the income earners during the bubble years.  These leeches were given the keys to all our future taxes while we are being told, there is no money for social services.  By the way, the Afghanistan ’surge’ is now beginning and we hope to win in Afghanistan a la USSR-style butchery.

.

Payrolls Fall More Than Forecast, Unemployment Rises (Update4) – Bloomberg.com

Employers in the U.S. cut 467,000 jobs in June, theunemployment rate rose and hourlyearnings stagnated, offering little evidence the Obama administration’s stimulus package is shoring up the labor market.

The payroll decline was more than forecast and followed a 322,000 drop in May, according to Labor Department figures released today in Washington. The jobless rate jumped to 9.5 percent, the highest since August 1983, from 9.4 percent.

So much for the ‘green shoots’.  This news is more like shooting bullets and killing the workers!  Again: after spending tremendous, stupendous trillions of dollars, bailing out the creatures who destroyed our economic system and international finances, we get absolutely nothing.  After all, we just decided to not save GM.  Whoopee!  Everyone celebrated the death of the UAW.  Now, we get to eat dirt for the next 50 years or so.  Until we figure out how we killed ourselves.

.

Fannie, Freddie to Refinance Larger Underwater Loans (Update3) – Bloomberg.com

Fannie Mae andFreddie Mac will begin refinancingmortgages with loan-to-value ratios of as much as 125 percent as the Obama administration seeks to boost participation in its anti-foreclosure programs.

Housing and Urban Development SecretaryShaun Donovan made the announcement in a statement today. Currently Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, through President Barack Obama’s Home Affordable program, can refinance mortgages they own or guarantee when the loan is worth as much as 105 percent of the home’s market value.

The continuing slide in home prices has pushed millions of Americans beyond that 105 percent loan-to-value ratio, limiting participation in Obama’s initiative. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have refinanced 80,000 loans under that program, which set out to help as many as 5 million people who may owe more than their homes are worth, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director James Lockhart said at a real estate conference on June 18.

This is the latest attempt at reviving a dead body.  Just this week, we saw the stupid spectacle of Michael Jackson’s drug dealing doctor trying to revive him after he died, then the ambulance guys tried the impossible and then, for 2 hours, the staff at the hospital wasted their time on a dead man.  So it is, here: we waste precious time and resources trying to prop up a bubble.

.

When the Dutch Tulip Mania crashed, the city governments of the main trading venues all tried to keep the artificial bubble prices up where they were.  Finally, the wise city leaders GAVE UP!  They realized, this was impossible and even more, undesirable.  The hour that civic leaders finally grasp that sustaining bubble prices is deadly is when the fever finally breaks and recovery is possible.

.

Unfortunately, the damage done can take generations to fix.  This is why prevention of credit bubbles is so vital.

Bundesbank Colossus Loses Ability to Dictate ECB Rate (Update1) – Bloomberg.com

Germany’s Bundesbank, which once dictated interest rates for a continent, is losing influence to smaller nations as the European Central Bank tries to reverse the worst recession since World War II.

President Axel Weber’s focus on fighting inflation at any cost, rooted in German hyperinflation during the 1920s, is under attack on the ECB’s 22-member Governing Council by policy makers from Slovenia to Cyprus who want to promote growth. Weber was defeated last month after trying to stop the central bank from buying assets to ease credit. His December warning against allowing thebenchmark interest rate to fall below 2 percent went unheeded as the ECB cut it to half that level by early May.

The Germans still fear hyperinflation!  Shows how much an impression this makes.  In South America, everyone is OK with hyperinflation which is why these countries go bankrupt like clockwork.  Germany, on the other hand, had the capacity to use the other options when going bankrupt.  That is, the ‘imperialist wars’ options.  This is the option being used by the US.  Even as all our financial systems go bankrupt, our imperial wars rage on and spending on them increases, not decreases.

.

It is just beyond amazing to see us bailing out half of the planet, spending hundreds of billions internationally in aid packages (to Israel, one of the world’s richest countries, per capita!)  or war spending.  Meanwhile, all our states slide into negative spending and are left to flounder by themselves with only draconian solutions offered to the American people who are being rapidly displaced by foreign cheap labor.

.

BIS Sees Risk Central Banks Will Raise Interest Rates Too Late – Bloomberg.com

The Bank for International Settlements said there’s a risk central banks will raise interest rates and withdraw emergency liquidity too late, triggering inflation.

History shows that policy makers “have a tendency to be late, tightening financial conditions slowly for fear of doing it prematurely or too severely,” the BIS, which oversees central banks, said in its annual report published today in Basel, Switzerland. “Because their current expansionary actions were prompted by a nearly catastrophic crisis, central bankers’ fears of reversing too quickly are likely to be particularly intense, increasing the risk that they will tighten too late.”

Central banks around the globe have lowered borrowing costs to record lows and injected billions of dollars into the financial system to counter the worst recession since World War II. While some policy makers have stressed the need to withdraw the emergency measures as soon as the economy improves, the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and European Central Bank are still in the process of implementing asset-purchase programs designed to unblock credit markets and revive growth.

The central banks will not stop this freight train.  As I showed the other day, T-Bill Troubles , for example, the graphs show very clearly that we had an immense credit bubble starting in 1985.  I also showed graphs that clearly indicate we are in an interest rate trough right now that will end with a rapid climb in inflation rates in the future.  The central bankers all know that we have a higher interest rate future ahead of us.  This is why they secretly fret about this.

.

The illusion that they control events means, they avoid knowledge that they are in the grip of History and that History always wins in the end.  Even if they try to manipulate interest rates via the feeble tools they use like buying government debts, etc, they can’t overcome the forces of History.  The alarming accumulation of debt during the cheap credit years will be replaced by an equal, yes, EXACTLY EQUAL period of high interest rate/low credit growth years.  This is a 50 year cycle.  And thus, very dangerous.  We have to figure out, how to cope with this coming high interest/low growth half a century!  Now, on to Dr. Fekete, one of the few economists I trust:

.

http://www.professorfekete.com/articles%5CAEFIsAggregateDebtExcessive.pdf

By virtue of pricing power the granting of “cost-of-living adjustments” to labor is easy and logical, provided that the cycle is in its upswing, so things are kept in fair balance. By contrast, reverse adjustments are very hard to make on the downswing. Therefore rigidities and maladjustments accumulate much faster, and they result in a much more precipitate decline as compared to the preceding rise in output. The Obama administration is looking at the wrong ratio. Instead of the ratio of total GDP to total debt it should watch the ratio of additional GDP to additional debt, that is, the amount of GDP contributed by the creation of $1 in new debt. This ratio shows how effective debt is to make the economy grow at the margin, and for this reason it may be called the marginal productivity of debt. As long as it is well above 1, the creation of new debt has an economic justification. It shows that the economy can have a healthy growth. But a falling marginal productivity is a danger sign. It shows that the quality of debt is deteriorating. Should the ratio fall below 1, it is “red alert”. The volume of debt is rising faster than the national income. The country is living beyond its means and is consuming capital. In the worst-case scenario the marginal productivity of debt may fall into negative territory. This means that the economy is on a collision course with the iceberg of debt. Not only does more debt add nothing to GDP, in fact it causes contraction and greater unemployment. Debt creation must cease at once as a matter of utmost urgency. The condition of the economy can be compared to that of a patient suffering from internal hemorrhaging that must be stopped immediately.

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Fekete.  I wish we were doing the right thing.  The fact that we now have spend trillions, trying to restart lending, with zero results, is a warning sign about as big at it gets!  What more do we need?  We would have been much better off to simply eliminate all the bankrupt banks, all at once, and start all over again.  But we cannot do this because about half of our system is now owned by foreign powers.  Any interruption in our finances will trigger retaliations of the nastiest sort.  For example, no selling us oil.

.

We are dependent on trade partners for nearly everything.  We hollowed out our native economy and slaughtered it on the altar of ‘Free Trade’ which was like tossing our children into the belly of Moloch to be burned so we can fuel our culture.  We destroyed all of our own future in order to party today.  This was very infantile of us and we still can’t get the truth that stares at us in the face: we have to reduce consumption until we fix global trade imbalances.  This is where I differ with many online commentators.  They often cannot see that world competition in a race to the bottom with wages and working conditions are the root cause of what is going wrong.

.

The recent climate bill passed by Congress is a classic example: it will accelerate our trade deficits, it will eliminate US jobs and at the same time, won’t fix the climate problem.  A higher gas tax will do the trick very nicely, thank you!  And that is anathema!  So it won’t happen.  Neither the GOP nor the DNC want to touch the obvious solution.  Just like, we won’t have a VAT tax like our trade rivals who destroy us in competition in world trade!  Nope.  We refuse this just like we refuse to fund our government with tariffs like in the old days.

.

We want to have our cake and eat it too.  And let them (the workers) eat cake!

Email:

emeinel@fairpoint.net

MAILING ADDRESS:

EMS NEWS

P.O. BOX 483

BERLIN, NY 12022

Make checks out to ‘Elaine Supkis’

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO THIS WEBSITE

21 Comments

Filed under Free Trade

Tags: bankruptcy, Congress, Free Trade, ZIRP