Sunday, April 13, 2008

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.

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Morning, Ruth.

I left a message for our good friend, Fred, yesterday, but I screwed it up by mixing Jeff Sessions with James Inhofe (2 top candidates in anyone's list of dumbest Senators).

Comment on: A Good Arbiter at 4/12/2008 10:30 AM EDT
Fred Hiatt wrote:
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) provides a better framework to improve the system.
-----------------------------------------
James Sessions?

Right, Fred. I also eagerly await Senator James Inhofe's contributions to string theory, and John Cornyn's opus on classic English poetry.

Why don't you follow your fellow craven republican-licker, John Solomon, over to the Moonie Times?

You've taken the WaPo's reputation down to Newsmax's level. For shame.
~

5:52 AM  
Blogger Ruth said...

Hi, thunder, saw it and gave you a recommend click. Inhofe works for me, still unlikely to write any Great Work. Hiatt shames WaPo beyond bearing for those of us who were its followers in Watergate.

6:11 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you, Ruth.

By the way, George F. Marie Antoinette Britney Spears Will did it again.

People working a couple more years and housing prices coming down don't seem so bad.

Oops!
~

8:41 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

The U.S. immigration debate has been frozen since 9/11 and perhaps understandably so.
Americans want their government to be reasonably sure that visitors and immigrants aren’t a security risk. But the absence of a coherent immigration policy is
hampering both our states economic growth and national security.
Like a lot of other states, Rhode Island is affected by the fate of illegal immigrants. That is why we should embrace the same idea as the Arizona Republicans initiative. Their legislation contains provisions that advocates on both sides of the issue disagree with. But they present an unanticipated opportunity to place the unresolved issue of illegal immigration back to the political agenda The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, relegated illegal alien issues to the back burner of American politics. But where's the wisdom in continuing to allow thousands of people each year to come across our borders unchecked and undetected? Forget the back burner. The time has come for the Rhode Island state house to tackle this issue—before the body count gets any larger. Illegal immigration leaves the door open to terrorism and terrorist attacks PERIOD.
(The new Arizona law would suspend the operating license of any business that “knowingly or intentionally hires an illegal immigrant. A second violation would put the business, out of business. All new hires must have their identification cross-checked by the Federal Basic Pilot system. Basic Pilot serves about 17,000 businesses nationally.)
Dennis Lefebvre
Rhode Island

3:44 AM  

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