Workers Are Consumers (Business Is Not)

The depth of ignorance displayed by the business oriented community sometimes is mind-boggling. At the risk of repeating myself once too often; without the means to buy their goods, the workers are not going to be able to spend the country back to prosperity - a simple basic fact that the idiots in U.S. boardrooms evidently have failed to comprehend. Creating a Third World economy seems to be business ethics at the moment, shooting themselves in the foot its great idea.

I just read this article on the 'immigration problem' which mindnumblingly ignores the American workers, while purporting to promote their interest. It is the wage earners who are expected to resist immigration - but it isn't immigration that is keeping wages low and cutting the number of workers to fill our needs (i.e. productivity).

American employers likely won't just sit by while Congress does nothing -- frozen between those who want amnesty at any cost and those who want secure borders and iron-clad enforcement of the law. America needs workers. With the economy slowing, it's more important than ever to get employers the workers they need so that they can prime the business pump again.
(snip)
According to the Labor Department, between 600,000 and 800,000 here illegally are working on America's farms -- mostly because employers can't find legal workers to do the job. In a sense, though, illegal labor isn't cheap labor; it's subsidized by communities crushed under the burden of education, emergency-room care and other benefits and entitlements they must pay to take of America's shadow work force. With food prices rising and many communities emptying their tax coffers, the need for more legal agricultural workers has never been more severe.

America wants border security and workplace enforcement, along with a legal workforce adequate to its needs, now -- not when it's convenient for the Congress. The administration must continue to increase border security and more stringently enforce immigration laws. But Congress must also streamline current visa programs, raise caps and implement measures to reduce visa over-stay rates. (Emphasis added.)

No one has ever heard of CCC camps, is that it? In the 30's, workers were re-located from the wage-free zones of the cities, and trained to do the work in the country that the U.S. needed. Is that so far-fetched? So much good came of it, that Providence, RI has a zoo as a result and San Antonio, TX has the riverwalk.

Employers' needs are not the object of government. The public interest, that forgotten quantity, is its purpose. Making the seque from a public interest in jobs and wages to a need to give everything to business rather than the worker has become a mantra to the right wing, and has led to the economic crisis we're experiencing. 'Priming the pump' is not going to happen until there is a consumer base for the products of business.

Immigration is the bugaboo but not the problem for American workers. The business community has developed so vast a You're On Your Own (YOYO) mentality that it's resisted finding obvious solutions when they are colored as 'entitlement' provisions.