Layoffs Prove the Deceit of Amnesty

Phyllis Schlafly / Townhall Columnist

 

 

The shocking announcement that Microsoft is cutting 18,000 jobs is still sinking in. Most of those employees do not have a realistic chance of obtaining as good a job as the one they are losing.

In the United States, the number of engineering jobs has been sharply declining. In 2002 the number of electrical engineering jobs in the United States was 385,000, but despite increased demand for technology, the job total dropped to only 300,000 last year.

And that number is not even for American workers, because thousands of these jobs are soaked up by the H-1B visa racket, whereby companies like Microsoft can import and pay foreign workers less than it costs to hire an American. High-tech companies have thousands of foreign employees working on H-1B visas who are almost like indentured servants to the company, because they lose their right to be in our country if they leave their job.

Microsoft's massive layoff makes downright ridiculous the op-ed recently published by Bill Gates and his billionaire pals, Warren Buffett and Sheldon Adelson. They and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who financed the lobby group FWD.us, demand immediate amnesty disguised as immigration reform in order to bring in more cheap labor.

The real shortage is in good jobs, but these visas flood the labor market and hold wages down, when wages should be climbing for American workers. Fewer Americans have a job today than just six years ago, even though the potential workforce has expanded during that time. One reason is the overuse of foreign labor by large companies.

Microsoft is highly profitable, breaking its own records for revenue and profits as recently as last year, with an effective tax rate of less than 20 percent. One of its directors has agreed to pay $2 billion for a basketball team, and Gates is often listed as the wealthiest man in the world.

In 2007, at a U.S. Senate committee hearing, Gates asked for permission to import "an infinite number" of foreign workers. "I don't think there should be any limit," he continued, but at any rate the cap should be "dramatically increased."

In 2008, before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Gates claimed he had jobs "going begging" that no American could be found to do, so he had no choice but to import workers from India. When Representative Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., suggested he might consider raising the pay for those jobs, Gates impatiently dismissed that option, saying: "No, it's not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very high-paying jobs."

Economics 101 teaches that wages are a function of supply and demand. When the supply of labor is increased, such as by expanding immigration, then wages can and do decrease, despite increased productivity.

Recently a reporter caught up with the laid-off semiconductor engineer whose wife publicly challenged President Barack Obama in January 2012, "Why does the government continue to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?" Darin Wedel eventually found a job in the health care industry, earning $40,000 a year less than before.

Obama is still deceiving the American public about the economy, bragging that 288,000 jobs were created last month. As Mortimer Zuckerman explained in The Wall Street Journal: "Most people will have the impression that the 288,000 jobs created last month were full-time. Not so." They were part-time jobs, which pay lower wages than the full-time jobs that have disappeared.

There are several reasons for this, such as employers' desire to avoid the Obamacare mandate to provide health insurance to anyone working 30 or more hours a week. Another is women's willingness to accept lower pay in exchange for a flexible schedule with fewer hours per day, per week and per year.

But now many breadwinners, including men, have been forced to take these jobs. Of men aged 25 to 54, one in six does not work; 50 years ago, only one in 20 was not working.

When we first brought the transformation of the American economy into a part-time-worker society in 2010, many scoffed and suggested that when the "recovery" really gets going, the temp jobs will all be morphed into high-paying full-time jobs. Instead, Zuckerman writes, "more than 24 million Americans remain jobless, working part-time involuntarily or having left the workforce."

Zuckerman hits us with the depressing conclusion: "Faith in the American dream is eroding fast. The feeling is that the rules aren't fair and the system has been rigged in favor of business and against the average person."

One senator who always speaks up for Americans, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said, "I don't think you can make the argument that we have a labor shortage." The answer should be: close the border; absolutely no amnesty masquerading as "immigration reform."

U.S. Territories Suddenly Exempt from Major Obamacare Requirements

Christine Rousselle / Townhall Tipsheet

 

 

Good news for the residents of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, et. al: according to a memo quietly posted on the HHS website last Thursday, Obamacare's coverage provisions no longer apply in these areas.

After a careful review of this situation and the relevant statutory language, HHS has determined that the new provisions of the PHS Act enacted in title I are appropriately governed by the definition of "state" set forth in that title, and therefore that these new provisions do not apply to the territories. This means that the following Affordable Care Act requirements will not apply to individual or group health insurance issuers in the U.S. territories: 1 guaranteed availability (Act section 2702), community rating (PHS Act section 2701), single risk pool (Affordable Care Act section 1312(c)), rate review (PHS Act section 2794), medical loss ratio (PHS Act section 2718), and essential health benefits (PHS Act section 2707).

Specifically, under this interpretation, the definition of "state" set forth in the PHS Act will apply only to PHS Act requirements in place prior to the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, or subsequently enacted in legislation that does not include a separate definition of "state" (as the Affordable Care Act does).

Naturally, this is a complete 180 from the rhetoric espoused by the HHS last year. Under Obamacare, insurance companies operating in America's territories had to accept every insurance applicant, but residents of the territories were not subject to the individual mandate and did not have to actually purchase insurance while still healthy. Additionally, subsidies were not available to residents of territories; only for people living in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. As a result of the law, insurance companies threatened to stop selling new plans altogether in American territories.

When territory officials asked for government leniency last year, they were told that there was nothing possible to remedy this problem:

"HHS, at the request of and with full support from territories, confirmed the Affordable Care Act's market reform provisions that are incorporated into the PHS Act, including the guaranteed availability provision, are applicable to the territories," Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight director Gary Cohen wrote in a July letter to territorial governors.

"However meritorious your request might be," Cohen continues, "HHS is not authorized to choose which provisions...might apply to the territories."

While it is certainly a good thing that the insurance market in these areas isn't going to be completely destroyed, it is somewhat troubling that the administration is continuing to pick and choose its definition of a state depending on the situation. Congress is supposed to write and change laws--not the Department of Health and Human Services.

Thank you Pamela...

AFDI PRO-ISRAEL DEMOS July/21/2014

COUNTERING THE GENOCIDAL MUSLIM HATE MARCHES Over the past two weeks, AFDI has helped organize pro-Israel marches in New York City. Part of Hamas's war effort are these death marches that are staged across major cities in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, etc. in support of Islamic terror against the Jewish state. They are as much a part of the war against Israel as Hamas rockets.  Many of these hatefests are violent. Attacks on Jews have become commonplace. That is why we must counter with a strong message of support and love for the state of Israel. Despite threats of violence, the huge rally we helped organize for Israel drew tens of thousands of Israel lovers. What an awesome sight. The event is under the hashtag #NYClovesIsrael -- and we tweeted it, posted it, shared it all over social media.  We let Israel know she is not alone in the fight for freedom and life. And it went viral. Because of bomb threats, we had to hire private security for the event.  We also hired private security for last week's counter protest against the ugly pro-Hamas hatefest at the Israel consulate (scroll down). There were too many young Jewish students to risk a confrontation with these violent thugs against Israel. Security costs money. These actions cost money. Help us offset those costs. We can't do this alone. We need your help. Contribute here or go to Paypal.com and send your donation to americanfreedomdefense@aol.com -- we are a 501c3. I spoke before a crowd of 10,000 Israel lovers and was not deterred by savage threats of carnage and violence.

What Choice?

by Bob Livingston / Personal Liberty Digest

“Choice” is one of the many altruistic-sounding code words the elites use to enslave you gradually, without your knowledge. I have told you about these words before and listed many of them.

The progressive left claims to be all about choice. A central tenet of the Democrat Party’s message is that it alone is the protector of choice.

It claims to stand as a bulwark against the “Republican’s war on women” (more code words) and those “evil” people who want to eliminate a woman’s “right” to murder their unborn (and even partially born) babies.

This ensures a woman has a “right” to make a choice about her body and whether to purge it of the unwanted organism (that moral people call a baby) through an abortion. Of course, the 57 million babies killed since Roe v. Wade had no choice. No matter. They are just collateral damage for the “greater good” (more code words).

The progressive left and its propaganda arm corporate media tout Obamacare as a victory for choice. It is anything but.

Obamacare has forcibly eliminated the healthcare insurance many people chose to have — and were happy with — because it did not fit the egalitarian parameters established by a group of collectivist, elitist bureaucrats. Those with so-called “Cadillac plans” (more code words) were forced into more expensive and less expansive plans. Those who chose to have minimal or only catastrophic coverage have been denied that choice as well. All must have a one-size-fits-all health insurance policy that is both more expensive and often more restrictive.

Obamacare has also removed the choice that employers had of whether to offer insurance as a benefit, and just how much or little coverage to offer. The progressive left has gone apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision in which the rights of the corporate owner were upheld. It was a victory, of sorts, for real choice, in that it upheld the natural right Christians have to not subsidize something they find abhorrent.

Of course, the progressive left, which turns logic on its head at every turn, claims the ruling is a defeat for choice. This is nonsense. First, Hobby Lobby already provided 16 of 20 forms of birth control in its insurance coverage in addition to paying its employees wages that are above the “living wage” (more code words) the progressive left has established as a “right.” Second, neither the owners of Hobby Lobby or any other corporation have the power to prevent women from purchasing with their own money whatever form of abortifacient they would like to buy. Nor did Hobby Lobby seek to do so. It simply sought to have the choice not to pay for it itself.

But to the progressive left, the choice of Christian business owners — and Christians in general — always take a back seat to their altruistic notions of “greater good.”

The progressive left and their corrupt corporate media enablers are curiously silent on the ways Obamacare is waging a true war on women — and men — in the healthcare field and its gradualism that will eventually enslave all Americans to Big Medicine, Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Big Brother.

Big Brother sometimes uses a carrot and sometimes uses a stick in order alter behaviors and bend people to the will of the elitist do-gooders who sit in the halls of power making choices on behalf of the “greater good.” The carrot is redistribution of wealth in the form of removing money through taxes and inflation from the producers and offering it as incentives to people, corporations, and local and State governments in order to encourage certain behaviors. The stick is the threat to remove those incentives after people, corporations, and local and State governments become dependent upon those incentives.

Such is the case with an Obamacare provision that reduces Medicaid and Medicare funding by 2 percent in 2015 to healthcare organizations that do not obtain a staff flu vaccination rate of 90 percent or better. The corporate propaganda machine is silent on this, and healthcare organizations are as well. In fact, healthcare organizations are outright lying to their employees about the reason behind the flu vaccine mandates by claiming it is for the benefit and health concerns of the patients and health workers.

Healthcare workers are not given a choice in the matter — unless one considers the false dilemma of either having the vaccine or being fired as being given a choice.

Healthcare workers are even now being fired for their choice of refusing to have harmful substances injected into their bodies for reasons that do not exist or are greatly exaggerated. By the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own statistics, flu vaccines are at best only 50 percent to 60 percent effective. But these figures come from an organization that is part of the Big Brother swinging door that sees people going back and forth between government, the medical-industrial complex and the regulatory agencies, creating a symbiotic relationship rather than a regulatory one — an organization that routinely promotes the lie that the flu kills 36,000 people annually.

In fact, the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration are nothing more than taxpayer-funded marketing arms for the medical-industrial complex. They are used to provide government-sanctioned legitimacy to a host of fake “diseases” created in labs along with their cures: expensive pharmaceuticals and tests for diagnosis, as I’ve told you before.

According to a report in the British Medical Journal, actual annual flu deaths are really measured in the dozens, not the thousands, as the CDC claims. Of hundreds of thousands of respiratory samples taken each year from U.S. patients and tested in labs, only 16 percent test positive for the influenza virus. And according to a report by the independent research firm The Cochrane Library, the average vaccine (which is produced before the onset of flu season and based on the previous year’s strains) must be administered to 100 adults to prevent one case of influenza. If the exact strain is matched, 33 adults must be vaccinated to prevent one case of the disease.

Yet despite its minimal efficacy, healthcare workers have lost their freedom to continue in their chosen profession unless they forgo their own right of self-determination and accept to have poisons injected into their bodies.

Many are making the choice to get out of healthcare work altogether. This includes doctors as well as nurses and other healthcare professionals. The decrease in the number of healthcare professionals combined with the increase in patients abusing their “free” healthcare will necessarily limit choice and options people have for seeing their physician or having a needed procedure at their preferred medical complex.

Some nurses have formed an organization called Nurses Against Mandatory Vaccines in order to support healthcare professionals and help them to regain their right to refuse forced medical procedures.

The mandates for forced medication of healthcare workers are just the beginning of the road to serfdom that Obamacare paves. A government that provides you with something — healthcare — can just as easily take it away. It will employ the carrot first and then the stick, in order to drive you into forced behaviors.

Obamacare is a nothing more than a great transfer of wealth designed to enslave the public and enrich Big Medicine, Big Pharma and Big Insurance by giving them a mass of new customers with guaranteed payoffs from the public Treasury.

Had Obamacare been about choice, it wouldn’t be a mandate.

Newsmax
Texas Gov. Perry to Deploy 1,000 National Guard Troops to Border 

Gov. Rick Perry is deploying up to 1,000 National Guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border over the next month to combat what he said Monday were criminals exploiting a surge of children pouring into the U.S. illegally. Perry, a vocal critic of the White House's response to the border crisis who is himself mulling a second presidential run, said the state has a responsibility to act after "lip service and empty promises" from Washington.

"I will not stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children from Central America are detained in squalor," the governor said.

The deployment of National Guard troops, which may act in a law enforcement capacity under state authority, will cost Texas an estimated $12 million per month.

They will simply be "referring and deterring" immigrants and not detaining people, Texas Adjutant General John Nichols said. But he added that the National Guard could take people into custody if need be.

"We think they'll come to us and say, 'Please take us to a Border Patrol station," Nichols said.

Messages seeking comment were left with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Perry bristled at suggestions from some Democratic state lawmakers and business groups that his move means Texas is militarizing is southern border.

Still, Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio said he didn't know if troops would be coming to his part of the border and questioned what good they would do if they did.

"Those people are trained for warfare, not for law enforcement," said Lucio, whose county includes Brownsville. "I think the money would be better spent if they would give it to the local law enforcement that is close to the border."

More than 3,000 Border Patrol agents currently work in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, but Perry had repeatedly asked Obama to send the National Guard to the border amid an influx of immigrants.

Since October, more than 57,000 unaccompanied children and teenagers have entered the U.S. illegally — more than double compared to the same period a year earlier. Most have been from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, where rampant gang violence and intense poverty have driven tens of thousands of people outside their borders.

Obama administration officials have said that the flood has slowed in recent weeks, with Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley finding fewer than 500 children last week compared to as many as 2,000 a week last month.

Perry, though, said that, for years, the federal government failed to secure the border and suggested that criminal gangs could be exploiting the recent surge to make things worse. He said more than 200,000 criminals in the country illegally had been booked into Texas jails since 2008, many for drug-related offenses but also for homicides and sexual assaults.

As governor, Perry can deploy National Guard troops, but that means Texas has to pay for it. An order by Obama would have meant Washington paid. Still, Perry and other top Texas conservatives said they expect the federal government to eventually reimburse the state.

"Texans are willing to put the boots on the ground, but we expect Washington to foot the bill," said Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican who is favored to replace Perry in November.

Perry isn't seeking re-election but hasn't ruled out a 2016 presidential campaign after his short-lived 2012 run — and he's used the immigration issue to repeatedly hammer Obama for what he called inaction.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday that Perry wanted to "make a symbolic statement to the people of Central America that the border is closed."

"He thinks that the best way to do that is to send 1,000 National Guard troops to the border," Earnest said. "It seems to me that a much more powerful symbol would be the bipartisan passage of legislation that would actually make a historic investment in border security and send an additional 20,000 personnel to the border."

That refers to the U.S. Senate's passage of comprehensive immigration reform that stalled in the House. Earnest also said the White House hasn't received the kind of "formal communication" from Perry's office that usually accompanies such deployments.

The Texas Democratic Party accused Perry, who spent part of the weekend in Iowa, of "continuing his routine of photo-op politics to further his presidential aspirations" rather than seeking long-term border solutions.

Eduardo Campirano, chairman of the Rio South Texas Economic Council said "adding a military presence to our communities will only create an inaccurate image that our safe and viable border region in the Rio Grande Valley is dangerous."

President George W. Bush sent 6,000 National Guard troops to the border in 2006, and Obama eventually extended that deployment while ordering a second wave to Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico in 2010.

On previous border deployments, National Guard soldiers have served in support roles — administrative, intelligence gathering. Some troops already participate in counter-drug operations on the border, though they don't have arrest powers.

Perry had announced last month that Texas would give $1.3 million per week to the Department of Public Safety to assist in border security through at least the end of the year. He said the state has already spent $500 million on border security but "as all of the Texans who have fallen victim to the crime at the hands of these criminal aliens will attest to, the price of inaction is too high for Texans to pay."

Is this man freakin' insane...

Barack Hussein Obama to send $47 million to Hamas

Bare Naked Islam

The U.S. is sending $47 million in humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip to help tens of thousands of Palestinians there who have been forced from their homes since war broke out two weeks ago.

FOX News  A State Department breakdown of the aid that was released Monday said nearly a third of the money — $15 million — will go to the United Nations’ refugee mission in Gaza. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was expected to discuss the aid with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in a meeting late Monday in Cairo.

Kerry arrived in the Egyptian capital only hours earlier in a U.S. push to help broker a truce between Israel and the militant group Hamas that controls Gaza.

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