President Joe Biden is weighing expanding foreign competition in the labor market against working class Americans by offering green cards to foreign visa workers, a new report suggests.
An exclusive report from Fox News’s Adam Shaw reveals that Biden is considering allowing foreign workers on H-2A agricultural visas and H-2B non-agricultural visas to apply for and secure green cards to remain permanently in the United States labor market.
Fox has now learned that the rule process, which is still going through the consideration process at USCIS, would allow workers on those visas to take steps to become permanent residents and obtain a green card. [Emphasis added]
…
“The [rule-making process] also proposes to provide increased flexibility for H-2 workers by extending grace periods, and allowing H-2 workers to take steps toward becoming permanent residents of the United States without being deemed to have abandoned their nonimmigrant intent or their foreign residence solely on that basis,” says a summary of the proposal, seen by Fox Digital. [Emphasis added]
The H-2A visa program allows farms to bring an unlimited number of foreign workers to the U.S. every year to take American agricultural jobs. As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, the program is often used to replace Americans and preserve the low cost of farm labor.
Meanwhile, the H-2B visa program allows U.S. employers to import tens of thousands of nonagricultural seasonal workers. The program has been used to cut wages in those eligible industries.
Biden’s seemingly wanting to expand foreign competition against Americans in blue-collar industries comes as analysis shows his administration is growing employment by funneling millions of foreign workers into U.S. jobs while millions of Americans, particularly working-class men, are left on the labor market sidelines.
By the end of 2022, for instance, close to two million fewer native-born Americans were working in jobs compared to the same time in 2019 while two million foreign-born workers were added to the workforce.
Annually, more than a million foreign nationals are awarded green cards. Hundreds of thousands of those newly permanent residents will go on to secure naturalized American citizenship. In addition, about a million foreign visa workers are admitted every year to take U.S. jobs.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
It sounds like a bad punchline: At a time when businesses are having difficulty finding and retaining qualified workers, one state wants to use taxpayer dollars to pay businesses so their employees work less.
That’s the genesis of a bill introduced in the Maryland General Assembly last month, which seeks to study shifting to a standardized four-day workweek. While businesses should certainly reassess how they manage their employees — a move that the pandemic accelerated via the explosion in remote work — they don’t need taxpayer dollars, or government micro-management, to do so.
The Maryland legislation creates a tax credit program, purportedly to sunset after five years, to provide subsidies to businesses. The program would reduce state income taxes for two years for businesses with at least 30 employees that switch from a five-day workweek to a four-day workweek without reducing employee pay.
The bill would fund the subsidy program with up to $750,000 for each of the five years. It would also “encourage governmental units to institute a four-day work week” — which Maryland taxpayers may not appreciate, particularly if it has any effect on the quality of services they receive.
The legislation itself seems like a solution in search of a problem. If businesses find it in their best interests to change or reduce working hours, they will do so. They shouldn’t need taxpayer funding to alter their business practices. And these types of subsidy programs will come with myriad new regulations, which will only further entrench the government’s role in dictating how a business should operate.
Moreover, this type of program could easily prejudice certain types of industries and types of workers over others. Service-sector businesses, in particular, that rely on personal interactions with customers seem unlikely to qualify or want to participate. Would a gas station, or hair salon, shift its employees to a four-day workweek at a time when many can’t find enough qualified employees as it is? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Rethinking How and Where People Work
As misguided as the Maryland bill is, that doesn’t mean the existing work environment doesn’t need to change. Some businesses could perhaps change their practices to reduce employees’ workweeks — they just don’t need the government paying them to do it.
For instance, what employee hasn’t, at one point or another, found the dreaded “weekly meeting” the bane of his existence? I faced these on Capitol Hill in nearly every office I worked for. Every week — normally at some point on Monday — the entire staff would gather to update the boss on that week’s activities.
In many cases, these types of meetings feature very limited interaction: One person at a time updates the boss, and everyone else listens. And the cumulative effects of those people sitting around waiting to update the boss add up. Even if a weekly meeting lasts “only” half an hour, in a 10-person office, that amounts to five total hours being spent on a meeting — more than half a working day for one employee.
Eliminating endless, and in some cases unnecessary, meetings would certainly improve productivity, as would moving to a task-oriented mindset. Rather than thinking about how many hours an employee needs to “be working,” whether in the office or remotely, managers should focus on ensuring that the essential work gets done. If that means efficient workers can complete their tasks by working 30 hours a week, or even less, why punish those workers for their efficiency by forcing them to sit behind a desk for the additional time?
Moving to a New Paradigm
As someone who has largely worked from home and very independently for the better part of a decade, I have to admit I found the traditional work environment stultifying — so much so that, even before the pandemic, I had difficulty envisioning a scenario where I would return to a “regular” office job.
Working for oneself brings with it challenges — managing income flow among the most significant. But it also provides flexibility that I relish. Work can tend to intervene at odd times, but I would gladly field a work call from Parliament Square (and have) or write an op-ed from a hotel in Florence in exchange for the freedom to explore the world from far beyond a desk. Plus: No boring meetings!
In a bit of a silver lining to an otherwise deadly pandemic, Covid has accelerated these trends by encouraging remote work and empowering employees to move away from crowded cities where they had hitherto remained tied to their desks. Businesses should respond in kind by re-envisioning the way they run their workplaces. They just shouldn’t need or get what amounts to corporate welfare from the government to do it.
Jumpin’ ju-ju bones, Neil Oliver is going to that place publicly and loudly, that many of us have contemplated and discussed quietly with hushed tones and knowing nods.
What Oliver outlines in this monologue does not need much discussion amid the audience awaiting its arrival. After all, he is basically discussing the logical consequence to the current state of political affairs not only in the U.K but also in the United States. However, that said, it is rather remarkable in the era of government sponsored fear of rebellion, complete with labels of domestic extremism attached, to see Oliver’s voice bravely citing the outcome.
With 87,000 new IRS agents authorized by the regime quietly assembling for their assault, as Oliver notes, “there is nothing to fear if we have each other” and are willing to stand the gap as an ally for our fellow man. What Oliver is saying is profound, true and could – in the most significant of ways, lead to a new beginning. Yes, it is talk of a united rebellion, and that’s exactly what we need. WATCH:
[Transcript] – People write to me every day to tell me they fear the future. People from all over the world, all ages, all walks of life. I say this: we should not be afraid. If anyone should be afraid it is our government, the whole of parliament, the State and the Establishment. They should be afraid because they are in the wrong – doing wrong things and behaving unforgivably.
You can tell they are afraid by the way they keep doing more and more, faster and faster, to make the people poor, cold and hungry – also demoralised, anxious and fearful about the present, never mind the future. The fear felt by people around the world is the deliberate consequence of the actions of so-called leaders all across the West and beyond.
I say again, we should not be afraid. Those plotting and working against us, against our interests both as individuals and as sovereign states, have no power and no money other than that which we, the people grant them. They are supposed to use that power and money to protect us, to keep us free and to provide opportunities for those hard working, free people to make happy and successful lives for themselves. Instead, they are working night and day to have us welcome a state of being that is nothing less than digital enslavement.
Many of the people who contact me ask:
What should we do? How can we fight back?
I think about the answers to those questions all the time. Right now, I wonder what would happen if those who are cold in their homes – millions of people – just turned on their heating and turned off their direct debits and standing orders. What would happen if, when the bills came, we all just agreed to toss them on the fire? All of us together? What would happen, if millions of us, peacefully acting as one just stood together in quiet defiance? I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s enough cells in the prisons, enough judges to hear the cases. If the system wasn’t already broken – by them – such actions would break it.
What would happen if we all withdrew our money from the banks on the same day? What would happen if we all asked, as we are entitled to, for the cash? The banks don’t have the money to meet all those demands and so presumably they would close their doors. Then what? Would their inability to pay out all that cash be evidence of the fraud that is fiat money? I wonder.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the social contract – that notion by which we surrender power to the state in return for services and safety – is broken beyond repair. They broke it, not us. Successive governments – not just the present bunch of cardboard cut-outs … have, over decades, knowingly and deliberately betrayed every aspect of that contract. It is null and void and we, the blameless party, are no longer bound by its conditions.
We the people – the sovereign people of this country – don’t just hold the power: we ARE the power. We loan some of it – a short-term loan – to governments. And those governments are supposed to serve us, do our bidding. NEVER the other way round. We tell them what to do.
Hundreds of years’ worth of governments has quietly and secretively presided over a financial system that is no more than state-sanctioned fraud. Power to create money out of thin air was put in the hands of an entirely private, unelected, unaccountable business and this power has been abused to make a tiny group unimaginably rich by enslaving all of US with debt. That system is now on the point of collapse. The West is bankrupt, and governments and bankers are scrambling to solve a problem: how to subtract every last shekel from the people while still having a handful of wealthy bankers, and their enablers, left over.
Britain has no functioning border against the rest of the world. Hundreds are arriving in this country every day and night, many ferried across the Channel by agencies paid for by British taxpayers. British people have to wait longer for health and social care and accommodation – to make way for economic migrants with their eyes on a soft touch, who have paid illegal gangs thousands of pounds a head to get here. They send their luggage on ahead and collect it at their hotels. We are at the back of the queue while anyone else, from anywhere else, is looked after hand and foot. And always the loudest calls are not for stopping it, but for more money and faster processing. I wonder if the illegal immigration isn’t just convenient for the State … softening up the citizens for a supposed solution … like digital ID perhaps? And then borders open once and for all. I wonder.
The British people are no longer kept safe by the police force they pay for. Burglaries of properties and assaults on the person are barely investigated, while officers prioritise thought crimes on social media. Uncounted thousands of little girls are abandoned to organised gangs of rapists up and down the country, because the State turned a blind eye to the relentless raping of children rather than ruffle community feathers.
A tenth of the population is on the waiting list for treatment by the NHS. The National Health Service is not keeping the nation healthy. All this about free at the point of delivery is about as much use as a magic spell. You can call a lunch a free lunch – but you’ll still be left hungry if you can’t get into the restaurant. So-called free steaks won’t fill you up if you have to wait so long in the queue you starve to death in the meantime. Free becomes another word for something you’ve heard about but can’t have.
I say again, though – we have nothing to fear. Not if we decide to be unafraid. In many ways, the worst has already happened: we have been shown where we stand, in the eyes of the State – which is beneath their contempt.
I don’t have the answers to all of the questions, but I know this much – even just asking them, airing the thoughts, should make the government, the State, the Establishment – sit up and pay attention.
More and more strikes are happening – rail workers, teachers and university lecturers, nurses next. What about the self-employed who were abandoned for the last two years? They can’t strike. What would happen if they withheld their taxes, all at the same time? I wonder.
But history tells us we should never underestimate the power of the many.
Just over a hundred years ago, during World War I, thousands of workers were pulled into the City of Glasgow to work in the munitions factories. At that time there wasn’t a single council house or flat in the whole of Britain. Private landlords owned 100 percent of homes for rent. They could and did raise rents as often as they wanted. Tenants either paid up or were evicted.
In February 1915, landlords across the city told tenants their rents were going up by as much as 25 percent. This was against a backdrop of the steeply rising cost of living generally, food scarcity and the rest. There was a war to win – remember – and sacrifices were expected from the people if the enemy was to be defeated.
In the case of many homes, the man of the house was away fighting in the war, leaving just women and children.
Into this crisis for poor people stepped Mary Barbour, an ordinary Glasgow woman with two children. She and others realized their only hope lay in sticking together. A mass non-payment campaign got under way. Arrears built up and soon Sheriff’s Officers were turning up to demand back rent or to evict non-payers.
But whenever anyone got wind of an eviction, hundreds of women would descend on the address and block the entrance to the home. A Glasgow MP, Willie Reid, described a typical incident:
“A soldier’s wife in Parkhead, had an eviction notice served on her, with a warning that if she failed to vacate her house by 12 noon the Sheriff’s Officer would call to enforce it. The strike committee got busy. They instructed every mother in the district with a young child to be there for 11 am on D-Day, complete with prams.
“Long before noon the close and street were packed with prams, and every pram had at least one youngster in it. No raiding party could have got near the house. Moreover, the men of Parkhead Forge and other works in the district decided to down tools at 11.30 am and lend a hand if necessary…”
People began to talk about Mary Barbour’s Army. On 17 November, 18 tenants appeared in court for eviction. Tens of thousands of Glasgow people lined the streets outside. In the end, on 25 November 1915, rents were frozen at pre-war levels. The Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest Act 1915 was passed and some elements of it remained in force as late as 1989.
I wonder what would happen if all of us … opposed to what is going on now … came together like those Glasgow women of 1915 – AND JUST SAID NO.
I wonder.
When thinking about that time, I am reminded of real leaders. I’ve been talking again this week about Ernest Shackleton who, when all seemed lost – his ship sunk beneath the Antarctic ice and with nothing but flimsy tents, three little boats, and 28 men trapped on the pack ice and depending on him for life itself he said,
“Well … now we’ll go home.”
Our so-called leaders tell us our lives must be filled with hardship while they warm themselves in centrally heated homes paid for with our taxes … and look forward to Christmas parties and food and drink and decorations paid for by all of us. That is not leadership. That is an abusive relationship.
Shackleton put himself through every hardship he expected his men to endure. He did it first and for longest. What he asked of them, he did too. He said they should leave behind on the ice anything that would not help keep them alive.
Some saying he walked to a hole in that ice and dropped in his gold watch and cigarette case, to the bottom of the ocean. He led from the front, every step of the way and over nearly a thousand miles of the cruelest sea on earth. And in the end, he got every man home.
They called him The Boss.
He cared not a jot for the comforts of home. Back home once more he wrote:
“We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down and grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.”
He was a leader who saw that it was shared endeavor and shared striving that made all else possible.
Our leaders? … our leaders would pick our pockets for any gold watches and valuables before climbing aboard their private jets and flying home, leaving us behind on the melting ice.
I say we owe them nothing – not our loyalty and not our obedience. If we continue to comply, we build our own prison around ourselves, for their benefit.
They have promised us the earth while stealing it from us – raping and pillaging its resources only for their own enrichment. I say again, there is nothing to fear if we have each other.
Here’s the thing: if we set a course for ourselves and back each other every step of the way, we will cross this ocean of darkness together, all the way to where we want to be. [Transcript End]
Why Did the Left Fail So Utterly to Resist the Global Biosecurity State?
SIMON ELMER for THE DAILY SCEPTIC
The question that continues to confuse socialists almost to the same degree that it delights their political opponents is why the Left today – not only in the U.K. but across the West – continues to collaborate so willingly and unquestioningly with the authoritarian programmes and regulations of the emerging Global Biosecurity State.
As the imminent implementation of Digital ID, Central Bank Digital Currency, Universal Basic Income, Environmental and Social Corporate Governance criteria (ESG), Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, Social Credit, Smart Cities, and all the other programmes of Agenda 2030 are demonstrating, the New World Order being forced upon us outside of any democratic process is capitalist in its economic infrastructure, fascist in its governmental, juridical and ideological superstructure and totalitarian in its aims. So why do those who, however mistakenly, self-identify as of the political Left continue to be its noisiest and blindest cheerleaders?
If, by the Left, we mean in the U.K. the Labour Party and those trades unions, political organisations and pressure groups that advocate voting Labour every time there’s an election, then the U.K. Left has little or nothing socialist in its principles, politics or practices. For those of us who read its policies and oppose its actions in town halls and local authorities, Labour is irrefutably and even openly a party whose political philosophy is founded in the principles of neoliberalism. This is, perhaps, most demonstrably evident in its collusion in the marketisation of human needs such as housing and the financialisation of those markets by global capital. Moreover, anyone who has knocked around the Left as I have also knows that, whatever its so-called ‘Left-wing’ elements and organisations argue between elections, when it comes to supporting or opposing the policies and practices of Labour in government at municipal or local authority level, they all toe the party line, keep silent and vote Labour.
It has come as no surprise to me, therefore, that the U.K. Left, including not only Labourites but the wide diaspora of people who call themselves ‘Leftists’ and even ‘socialists’, have become fervent ideologues of the biosecurity state. But it’s not, as the followers of Friedrich Hayek argue, because of the inherent authoritarianism of socialism that leads it to impose a totalitarian social model at the first opportunity. There is (it can’t be repeated too often) little or nothing socialist – in the Labour Party nothing, in its affiliates and fellow travellers little – about the policies or practices of the U.K. Left. Even those small groups and independent organisations that are openly critical of Labour have adopted the U.K. Left’s almost universal support for biosecurity restrictions, remain indifferent to the immiseration and suffering of the U.K. working classthey are causing, and steadfastly refused to join the millions of U.K. workers who protested against their imposition in the spring and summer of 2021. They instead uncritically accepted and adopted the Government and corporate media’s dismissal of those workers as ‘far-Right conspiracy theorists’.
Undoubtedly, the political naivety of the Left disposed it to welcome the imposition of the regulations and programmes of the biosecurity state in March 2020 as the triumph of the common good over government incompetence and ‘Right-wing’ greed. But that was nearly three years ago, and naivety has become bad-faith and denial in the face of the vast apparatus of global biosecurity that’s been constructed around, between and within us. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Left now regrets its collaboration, which of course continues today, or that it hasn’t obstinately confined its protests to the erasure of our rights and freedoms being enacted by the wave of new legislation introduced in 2022 on the back of 582 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments, without admitting any relationship between them. The betrayals and duplicities of the Left are legion, but many socialists are still asking how it came to this.
What all the Left shares – and the origin of its otherwise inexplicable collusion with the implementation of the U.K. biosecurity state – is a decades-long infiltration by the neoliberal ideologies of multiculturalism, political correctness, identity politics and, most recently, the orthodoxies of woke. In some organisations, the infiltration is marginal and exists, under the umbrella of ‘intersectionality’, in an uneasy and usually unexamined co-existence with the slogans – if not the practices – of socialism. In others, such as the Labour Party and its affiliates, what socialist principles they may once have had have been entirely replaced by the values and orthodoxies of these relatively new ideologies, which have manifested themselves in such youthful, energetic and well-funded movements as Momentum, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and now the masked-up, jacked-up advocates of the Global Biosecurity State. These are all (whatever they may say themselves) pro-capitalist movements, hostile to the working class – which they consistently and casually denounce as ‘racist’– and directly if not openly opposed to socialism. It’s by their principles that the Left has operated for some time in the U.K. as in all the former neoliberal democracies of the West.
It can’t be long before we see a similar movement, funded by the same or even more powerful billionaires, formed to support the next stage in the U.K. biosecurity state. This includes the adoption of a Universal Basic Income for those impoverished by lockdown, spiralling inflation, rising energy prices and the mass digitalisation of white-collar jobs by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And like its predecessors, this movement of the Covid-faithful will claim a position on the U.K. Left by criticising the Conservative Government’s response to this or the next ‘crisis’. In doing so, it will help create an even greater consensus among U.K. youth and ‘liberals’ in the middle-classes for increased online surveillance, stricter laws, harsher sentences, more intrusive technologies of public control and greater police powers to enforce them. As we saw most publicly in the counter demonstrations organised across Canada during the blockade against vaccine mandates in February 2022, the Left didn’t hesitate to align itself with the Government of Justin Trudeau and the riot police he deployed, denounced truckers as ‘white supremacists’ and every other insult in the woke handbook, while waving placards telling working men and women facing unemployment and destitution at the hands of the biosecurity state to ‘check their privilege’.
This largely middle-class, neoliberal Left, which today constitutes a homogeneous force of compliance across the biosecurity states of the West, did not suddenly become devotees of the restrictions and programmes imposed due to a justification of a major threat to public health that never existed. On the contrary, the Left is the Church in which these Covid-faithful have been raised, their guiding religion and cultic practices formed by the same radically conservative beliefs. To state again what should be obvious to all: no-platforming, cancel culture, misogyny disguised as trans-rights, policing of speech and opinion, and all the other symptoms of this woke ideology did not emerge from a politics of emancipation, class struggle or wealth distribution. They emerged from, and are advocates for, authoritarian practices of censorship, suppression of debate and punishment of non-compliance that are culturally inseparable from the technologies of surveillance and control developed by finance capitalism to police and protect its borders. These are not the borders between the nation states that finance capitalism straddles like a colossus and across which the Global Biosecurity State now controls our movements to a degree hitherto unimaginable to the children of multiculturalism. They are rather the borders between, on the one hand, the international corporations and offshore jurisdictions through which global capital flows, and on the other, scrutiny by and accountability to what remains of the public sector in those nation states.
Far from the Left being, as some have claimed, under some form of collective hypnosis or programming – presumably from the propaganda of the Right – it is from the Left that we hear the most Puritanical demands for displays of public virtue, for the harshest punishments to be imposed on unbelievers in the new faith of biosecurity. There is a direct line of ideological influence between the Black Lives Matter slogan that ‘silence is violence’, the ‘rebels’ groomed by Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil offering themselves for arrest, and the ideologues of ‘Zero-Covid’ denying human rights to those who refuse to comply with the dictates of the Global Biosecurity State.
Just as, for the past century and more, trades unions under Labour’s duplicitous leadership have repeatedly sacrificed U.K. workers to the interests of U.K. capital, so the Left has handed over U.K. youth to the U.K. biosecurity state.To claim that this corporate, technocratic, authoritarian, repressive, violent and totalitarian ideology has anything in common with the emancipatory aims of socialism shows just how little the ideologues of the Left know or care about socialist politics, socialist principles or socialist practices, except insofar as it exists to suppress any organisation that attempts to enact them.
Indeed, with such willing compliance from the Left, is there any need anymore for the ideologues of capitalism to extol its supposedly unique ability to defend our freedoms? The declarations of a New World Order made at the concurrent meetings of the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation this May strongly suggest not. As an ideological principle, ‘freedom’ is well and truly off the political agenda today. Fascism – although, as Orwell predicted, imposed under another name (‘biosecurity’, ‘Net Zero’, ‘stakeholder capitalism’ etc.), no longer under the authority of a sovereign leader but of new international technocracies like the World Economic Forum and World Health Organisation, and in this country appearing in a slimy Anglicised form — is the new common goodto which all of us are being compelled to sacrifice our human rights, our privacy, our bodily autonomy, our freedoms.
And the truth the Left continues to refuse to face up to is that none of this could have been achieved with such speed and ease without its collaboration.
But is that all? Can so momentous a historical failure, which may one day equal that of the failure of the Left to defeat the rise of fascism a century ago, be attributed entirely to the ideological erasure of socialism not only from the parliamentary parties and political organisations of the Left but also from the ideology of its membership and fellow travellers? If the psychological structure of fascism is the pull between an almost childlike obedience to the imperious forms of authority that operate above the law, and a visceral hatred of the impoverished, the diseased, the ostracised and the criminalised, what can we say about the psychological structure of the Left in the West in 2022? Is the Left now, in effect, fascist? And if it is, was Hayek right, after all, about socialism being a stepping stone to fascism?
The answer to both these questions must be ‘no’: not only because the past 40 years of neoliberalism in the West have witnessed the outsourcing of public services to the private sector and deferral of economic policy to central banks and international financial institutions; but also because the division of the political spectrum on which Hayek’s argument rested into Left and Right – with social democrats and socialists, respectively, one and two steps to the Left, and liberals and conservatives one and two steps to the Right – no longer has any descriptive purchase on the political paradigm of the Global Biosecurity State.
The orthodoxies of woke ideology have been employed by self-styled ‘liberal democracies’ under some of the most authoritarian and anti-working-class governments in recent history – including those of Boris Johnson in the U.K., Emmanuel Macron in France, Mario Draghi in Italy and Karl Nehammer in Austria – in order to subordinate the Left to the Global Biosecurity State. ‘Subordinate’ is perhaps the wrong word, because, at the same time, notionally Left-wing governments – including those of Pedro Sánchez in Spain, António Costa in Portugal and Magdalena Andersson in Sweden – as well as Left political parties in opposition such as U.K. Labour, have been just as ready to embrace the Global Biosecurity State on the woke principles of safety, censorship and a paternal state. And, of course, liberal and conservative governments – including those of Olaf Scholz in Germany, Mateusz Morawiecki in Poland, Alexander de Croo in Belgium, Mark Rutte in the Netherlands, Sanna Marin in Finland and Kyriakos Mitsotakis in Greece – have long since made woke orthodoxies the foundation of their political platforms, and rapidly deployed them in their opportunist response to the coronavirus ‘crisis’.
This unity of response by the notionally politically differentiated governments of European nation states, together with their willing subordination to the new technocracies of global governance, has demonstrated – hopefully once and for all – that Left and Right no longer exist as positions within the new biopolitical paradigm of the West.
One could argue that they haven’t for some time. Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister
of the U.K. and one of the West’s most influential ideologues of neoliberalism, whose New Labour party did so much to close the Overton Window, replaced Left and Right with what he called ‘Open and Closed’, with the former in favour of neoliberalism, multiculturalism and globalisation, and the latter with protectionism, cultural conservatism and anti-immigration. In this new political spectrum, in which so-called ‘openness’ more accurately describes the ideology of the Left, the socialist values of political emancipation, economic equality and wealth redistribution have been removed altogether, with the middle-classes enjoined to openness and the working class dismissed as closed. Of course, with the current revolution of Western capitalism into the Global Biosecurity State, ‘open and closed’ have taken on very different meanings, with the ‘open’ advocates of neoliberalism now demanding lockdown, the imposition of ‘vaccine’ passports as a condition of travel and mandatory medical intervention as a condition of employment, and the ‘closed’ workers defending their rights and freedoms.
Indeed, insofar as the residual polarity between Left and Right has served to divide opposition to the biosecurity state, with compliance depoliticised as obedience to medical ‘measures’ issued by supposedly non-political technocratic advisory boards (whether SAGE or the WHO), the collaboration of Left and Right has facilitated the imposition of the biopolitical paradigm of the state. Just as Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom allowed neoliberals to reduce politics to economics – most famously expressed in Thatcher’s slogan that “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) – the sanctimoniously repeated mantra of the Covid-faithful that the coronavirus crisis is ‘above politics’ is the dream of a post-political totalitarian world in which, whatever party is elected to administer its dictates, the state and its powers remain at the disposal of the same international organisations of global governance.
The Left of today, therefore, is not fascist, but neither is it socialist in any recognisable sense of the term. As the more than two-and-a-half years since March 2020 have demonstrated more clearly than any other recent event in the history of the West, the Left is a residual but still functioning political form of the power of the nation state to assimilate, through the spectacles of parliamentary democracy and street protest, the potentially subversive elements of society into the homogeneous political order, in order to protect the productive forces of the economy from the increasingly frequent crises of finance capitalism. The coronavirus ‘crisis’, and the collaboration of the Left in constructing the Global Biosecurity State, is the demonstration of this function.
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CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — Republican J.D. Vance says a new Congress must reverse a policy that allows corporations to replace American professionals, often in high-paying STEM jobs, with cheaper foreign workers on the H-1B visa program.
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Saturday, the Ohio Senate candidate blasted a plan by OhioHealth where nearly 640 American tech and finance employees are being laid off and having their jobs sent to Accenture — a Fortune 500 multinational corporation notorious for importing foreign H-1B visa workers to replace Americans in white-collar jobs.
The interview took place over lunch after Vance’s second campaign stop for the day in Chillicothe — roughly 100 miles outside of Cincinnati, Ohio.
The Buckeye State Republican was making a swing through the southeast part of the state to channel his Appalachian roots with two weeks left in the race. Throughout the day, Vance, vying for the open United States Senate seat, visited Gallipolis in Gallia County, Chillicothe inBrown County, and Mt. Orab in Ross County.
While speaking with Breitbart News over a Mad Dog sandwich at 7 Mile Smokehouse, Vance spoke on a number of issues including what he calls the “bipartisan … big mistake” of shipping American jobs to China and, in some cases, Mexico, as well as crime, the U.S.-Mexico border, and inflation, which he attributes mainly to the Democrats shutting down American energy.
I got the Mad Dog sandwich at 7 Miles Smokehouse in Chillicothe. It’s gigantic but delicious. pic.twitter.com/PZ8bPRj64k
On the OhioHealth layoffs, set to occur early next month and continue through the beginning of 2023, Vance said federal law must be overhauled to ensure corporations like OhioHealth are not allowed to replace their American employees via third-party outsourcing firms like Accenture.
“Generally speaking, a lot of the H-1B abuse we see is in the interests of the people hiring the [foreign visa] worker, who can undercut the wages of Americans, but is it in the interest of the 700 Ohioans who lost their jobs? Absolutely not,” Vance told Breitbart News.
“This is one of these issues where you actually need public policy to solve this problem because they’re taking advantage of a visa system that’s meant to ensure that American companies have the workers that they need, it’s not meant to undercut the wages of American workers in this country,” Vance continued. “Unfortunately, that’s what the H-1B visa is just being used to do right now.”
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), whom Vance is running against, has for years voted to increase foreign competition in the labor market that working and middle class Americans are forced to compete against.
“My argument to [Tim] Ryan is the legislature creates these policies that allow these companies to take advantage of American workers, the only real solution is for the legislature to make different policies,” Vance said. “I really think we have to cut down on the abuse of the H-1B visa system.”
The outsourcing-offshoring business model has proven extremely lucrative for Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, JP Morgan Chase, and others as they often contract with “body shop” firms like Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Infosys, Accenture, IBM, and Capgemini to lay off their American employees and replace them with tens of thousands of foreign H-1B visa workers primarily from India.
Accenture, for instance, sought to import more than 3,800 foreign H-1B visa workers this year alone. In 2021, Accenture sought to bring 6,200 foreign H-1B visa workers to the U.S. to take white-collar American jobs.
While being laid off, Americans are often forced to train their foreign H-1B visa replacements. If they do not, in most cases, their employer withholds their severance package. There are about 650,000 foreign H-1B visa workers in the U.S. at any given moment.
In Ohio, alone, firms and corporations including Cognizant, Tata Consulting Services, Accenture, and JP Morgan Chase were allowed to fill more than 9,700 American white-collar professional jobs with foreign H-1B visa workers this year.
Vance said “the first principle” of national immigration policy ought to “be about defending the interests of America and America’s workers” rather than corporate special interests.
“The question when we allow a new person to come to America should be, ‘Is this in the interests of the people who live here? Or is this in the interests of some narrow, multinational corporate interests?’” Vance told Breitbart News.
Economic Policy Institute research has shown that most corporations importing foreign H-1B visa workers are making significant savings in wages paid by doing so.
Likewise, internal documents from the India-based HCL Technologies body shop firm have detailed how the company grows its profit margins by hiring cheaper foreign H-1B visa workers over American professionals who have worked in the tech industry for years.
Last year, Facebook reached two settlements with the federal government after it was sued for discriminating against qualified American professionals and graduates in favor of imported foreign H-1B visa workers.
Though Vance is one of only a couple of Republicans to speak on H-1B visa abuse this election cycle, the GOP base, swing voters, and a majority of Americans — for years — have said U.S. employers should boost wages and offer better benefits to attract Americans for jobs rather than being allowed to import foreign visa workers whenever possible.
The latest Rasmussen Reports survey on the issue shows that 57 percent of American adults, 65 percent of Republicans, and nearly 6-in-10 swing voters say companies should raise their pay and try harder to recruit Americans for blue-collar and white-collar jobs over the federal government subsidizing them with foreign labor year after year.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy were the most popular party among workers and the middle class in last weekend’s election, while the wealthiest Italians, along with university graduates, were more likely to vote for left parties.
The Brothers of Italy (FdI) came first in last weekend’s elections with 26 per cent of the vote, winning nearly six million more votes than in the previous election in 2018, and according to a breakdown of voting by the firm Ipsos, the party managed to secure just over 30 per cent of the votes of lower-middle-class people amid strong numbers across all income ranges.
Among upper-middle-class people and university graduates, the left-wing Democrats were the most popular party, followed by Meloni’s FdI, the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Serareports.
Italy: Ipsos analysis shows that the centre-left PD (S&D), left-wing AVS (G/EFA|LEFT), liberal +E (RE), liberal A/IV (RE) are strongest among richer voters.
Nando Pagnoncelli, the head of Ipsos, commented on the breakdown of the voting saying, “These elections, even more than the previous ones, have shown how the traditional reference groups of each party have disappeared” and noted that among workers the Democratic Party, the traditional left-wing party in Italy, had come in fourth place behind the FdI, the Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini’s League.
While Meloni is likely to become Italy’s first-ever female Prime Minister, the number of female voters who voted for her party was slightly lower than the number of male supporters according to the analysis.
The data comes just days after it was revealed that the FdI and the centre-right coalition had broken through the so-called “red wall” of traditionally left-wing areas in regions like Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, beating Democratic candidates in areas that have been the heartland of the left in Italy for decades.
The centre-right coalition won a total of 29 single-member constituencies in the former “red wall” areas and three of the five single-member constituencies for the Italian Senate.
Not sure what to think of the likely new conservative prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni? Worry not! The corporate media has already provided the talking point for you to accept and parrot. https://t.co/ilWnTnEO1ppic.twitter.com/roIKB8WJwR
The number of manufacturing jobs that have been reshored to the United States is at a “record high” as concerns swirl over supply chain dependency on China, a new research report details.
The report, published by the Reshoring Initiative, reveals that a record number of American manufacturing jobs have been brought home after being offshored and outsourced to foreign countries over the last two decades when China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO).
“In 2021 the private and federal push for domestic supply of essential goods propelled reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI) job announcements to a record high,” the report states.
In 2022, the report projects that about 350,000 American jobs are expected to be reshored to the U.S. labor market — another record after 2021 set a record when 260,000 American jobs were brought home.
“If the projection is achieved, 2022 will bring the total jobs announced since 2010 to over 1.6 million,” the report continues.
Reshoring Initiative
Reshoring Initiative
Researchers suggest that reshoring of American jobs from overseas has trickled slowly since 2010 but has taken off in recent years because of a number of factors, including federal support for domestic manufacturing, supply chain woes from the Chinese coronavirus, tariffs, and the increase in shipping costs:
Other important forces included increased recognition of the total cost of offshoring and rising concern over U.S. dependency on China. [Emphasis added]
For the third year in a row, reshoring outpaced foreign direct investment (FDI). FDI did set an all-time record in 2022 as a result of large companies making huge investments in [electric vehicle] batteries. [Emphasis added]
A similar recent analysis by Bloomberg showed that former President Trump’s hyper-focus on American manufacturing, mostly via billions worth of tariffs, helped spur an industry boom.
The number of American jobs being reshored, though at a record high, pales in comparison to the number of American jobs that have been eliminated as a result of decades-long free trade policy governing the economic consensus in Washington, DC.
From 2001 to 2018, U.S. free trade with China eliminated 3.7 million American jobs from the economy — 2.8 million of which were lost in American manufacturing. During that same period, at least 50,000 American manufacturing plants closed down.
Those massive job losses have coincided with a booming U.S.-China trade deficit. In 1985, before China entered the WTO, the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled $6 billion. In 2019, the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled more than $345 billion.
Meanwhile, a study from 2019 found that permanent U.S. tariffs of 25 percent on all Chinese imports would create more than a million American jobs in five years. American manufacturing is vital to the U.S. economy, as every manufacturing job supports an additional 7.4 American jobs in other industries.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
The Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction Act” is set to squeeze $20 billion from working and middle class Americans with new funding for increased Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audits, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates.
On Friday, House Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act after Senate Democrats passed the bill earlier this week.
Hours before its passage in the House, lawmakers received the bill’s CBO score — revealing that billions will be taken from working and middle class Americans as a result of billions in new funding for IRS audits.
Specifically, the CBO estimates that the Democrats’ $80 billion for new IRS audits will take at least $20 billion from working and middle class Americans earning less than $400,000 a year. These billions are in addition to the billions already taken from this income group via IRS audits.
The revelation comes as Democrats and President Joe Biden’s administration have falsely claimed that the Inflation Reduction Act does not go after Americans earning less than $400,000.
In fact, no such language exists in the bill prohibiting the IRS from going after working and middle class Americans with the new funding. This has resulted in Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen begging the IRS not to use the $80 billion to target Americans earning less than $400,000.
Senate Democrats actually voted down an amendment by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID) that would have banned the new IRS funding from being used to go after working and middle class Americans — ensuring that additional audits would only target high-income earners.
The Democrat deal is seemingly a violation of a promise Biden made to American taxpayers in his State of the Union (SOTU) address in March.
“And under my plan, nobody earning less than $400,000 a year will pay an additional penny in new taxes. Nobody,” Biden said at the time.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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Just over a hundred years ago, during World War I, thousands of workers were pulled into the City of Glasgow to work in the munitions factories. At that time there wasn’t a single council house or flat in the whole of Britain. Private landlords owned 100 percent of homes for rent. They could and did raise rents as often as they wanted. Tenants either paid up or were evicted.
When thinking about that time, I am reminded of real leaders. I’ve been talking again this week about Ernest Shackleton who, when all seemed lost – his ship sunk beneath the Antarctic ice and with nothing but flimsy tents, three little boats, and 28 men trapped on the pack ice and depending on him for life itself he said,
of the U.K. and one of the West’s most influential ideologues of neoliberalism, whose New Labour party did so much to close the Overton Window, replaced Left and Right with what he called ‘Open and Closed’, with the former in favour of neoliberalism, multiculturalism and globalisation, and the latter with protectionism, cultural conservatism and anti-immigration. In this new political spectrum, in which so-called ‘openness’ more accurately describes the ideology of the Left, the socialist values of political emancipation, economic equality and wealth redistribution have been removed altogether, with the middle-classes enjoined to openness and the working class dismissed as closed. Of course, with the current revolution of Western capitalism into the Global Biosecurity State, ‘open and closed’ have taken on very different meanings, with the ‘open’ advocates of neoliberalism now demanding lockdown, the imposition of ‘vaccine’ passports as a condition of travel and mandatory medical intervention as a condition of employment, and the ‘closed’ workers defending their rights and freedoms.
