Category Archives: Labor

Orwellian Labor Day

Even when America’s official cognoscenti—those who see to the dissemination of information—finally report reality as it is, they will typically obfuscate it by cleaving to the truth as they see it. What do I mean? The title of a PBS news story covered on Labor Day is “U.S. optimism lags behind economic gains, study finds.” The subterranean message PBS is transmitting with the title is that Americans have failed to notice the “steady economic recovery” afoot. Too dense, perhaps? In fact, the headline twists the researcher’s finding, as he states them, for he did not make any mention of these so-called “economic gains.”

Smart.

The fact “that more people feel there’s been permanent damage [to the economy] now …” tells me that the cohort questioned is cognizant that something in the (inflationary) policies pursued by DC, irrespective of who’s in power, is “damaging” their prospects for good, and that whatever the stock exchange is doing; this has no bearing on their financial well-being.

… 42 percent say they have less in savings and salary now than they did five years ago.

And they say that their current economic status for three out of five of them is either fair or poor. And so they have had some diminution of the quality of life. We asked two questions that allow us to try and frame this, whether they have had a major or minor change in the quality of their life and whether it’s been temporary or permanent.

And we have one-third in the country — so that’s 80 million people — who say there has been a permanent impact or their quality of life, either major or minor. So whatever has happened in the stock market and other indicators is not getting through to Main Street at all. People are struggling, and there’s been no letup really in the last five years. …

… We asked them how much confidence they had in Washington’s ability to solve problems. Just 2 percent said a lot. Another 20 percent said some.

If they had to choose between President Obama or the Republicans in Congress to handle the economy, they said neither of the above at 40 percent. And they don’t think unemployment is going to get better even if the Republicans take both houses of Congress in the fall.

MORE.

Some Americans Are Worth More Than Others

Free Markets, Labor, Military

You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who will commiserate with your loss or dub it “dangerous and bad for the morale”—a risk to your family—in the event that you get the pink slip while serving nobly in the private economy, supplying fellow Americans with the services and products they need and desire.

On the other hand, the Pentagon “shrinks” the largest military in the world a smidgen—and the military-industrial-complex’s spokespeople fly into a rage.

Said Major Gen. Robert Scales: “It puts the soldier, the soldier’s family and the men under his command at risk.”

Seconded Sen. James Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Once again [President Obama] is putting domestic politics ahead of the security of our nation. The Army captains and majors receiving pink slips while on the battlefield is just the latest example. My heart goes out to these men and women who are risking their lives and making great sacrifices, yet are now being told they are being separated from the Army and will have no job when they return home to their families.

Why should Army captains and majors be spared unemployment, a reality that faces American working in the market economy?

Militarism gone mad.

UPDATED: We Are The World, We Are The Children (‘The Barbarians Control The Gate’)

IMMIGRATION, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood

“The children, the children, it’s all about the children. We are the United States, what do we do about the children?” That was Fox News’ Megyn Kelly showing off her humanitarian credentials, regarding the crossing of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America into America (WND). This “humanitarianism” invariably means that working people in the US, with children of their own to mind, are roped into supporting the children of the world.

Via Fox News:

Illegal immigrant minors are crossing into the U.S., and border patrol is overwhelmed and unable to care for them. The government has been putting them on buses and “dumping” them on street corners in cities like Phoenix, Ariz. Military bases in Texas, California and Oklahoma are also being used to house them.
The problem could reportedly go from bad to worse. Officials say 6,560 unaccompanied minor aliens crossed the border in 2011. This year, it’s estimated that the number will jump to more than 90,000.
This is a crisis of the federal government’s creation, and the fact that the border remains unsecure – now apparently intentionally – while this operation continues full-steam ahead is deplorable,” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said in a statement.

Michelle Malkin reports that “military bases are stealthily being used to redistribute, house, process, and release the illegal border crossers,” who arrive on base by the planeload.

Word about America’s free-for-all immigration policies has reached the untapped pool of potential dependents, across central America.

Via KRGV.COM:

Central Americans say news reports in their countries are encouraging them to make the journey north to the United States. A mother and child told CHANNEL 5 NEWS that the message being disseminated in their country is, “go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away.” …Bercian Diaz said she has no family in the United States. Her hope of staying here relies on her little girl. She said the message in her country is that America’s borders are open to all families.

Where’s the humanity for Americans working to support the president’s charities?

The right thing to do is to send these people back whence they came, and ask liberal bleeding-hearts stateside to send their own money, in the form of donations, to these illegal immigrants IN THEIR HOMES OF ORIGIN.

UPDATE (6/13): Pat Buchanan on “pitchfork populists”:

Talk radio, led by Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, pounded Cantor on the issue of illegal immigration, the emotive power of which our Beltway elites will never understand.
For like Eurocrats, the leaders of our Beltway parties call to mind the “sophisters” and “calculators” of Edmund Burke’s depiction.
They do not understand people of the heart to whom illegal and mass immigration means the disappearance of the country they grew up in and the dispossession of their children of what is most precious to them. …

A good one from Diana West:

It isn’t that the barbarians are at the gate. The barbarians control the gate. …
… Children are usually just children, but when 130,000 of them are expected to storm the border in the coming year, they more closely resemble an advancing column, a kind of foreign legion of child-mercenaries raised abroad with cynical promises of booty in the form of cradle-to-grave taxpayer charity.
But who will fight “children”? This is the audacity of this latest Obama “crisis”: Trojan horse as “humanitarian crisis.” For the literary set, call it “Camp of the Saintlets,” a twist on the prophetic “Camp of the Saints,” the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail envisioning an apocalyptic “invasion” of Europe by successive boatloads of Third World nationals, which is today old news out of Spain, Italy and other nations. …
… Of course, there is an undeniable genius to this form of border attack. All “the kids” from the rest of the world (do you really think Central America is the end?) have to do is serve as pitiful proxies of the assault. Once vanquished by pangs of conscience, however false, we’ll support them forever. We’ll have to. Have you taken a look at your local police department’s massive and bristling military hardware lately? Just shut up and watch as this newfangled children’s crusade turns our border, the concept of nationhood itself, into dust. Welcome to Obamaland.
Of course, even the 17-year-old gangbangers among the youngsters aren’t the masterminds or generals. Like American citizens, they are pawns, dupes, lured by promises Washington may indeed extract from Us, the People. “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away,” one Guatemalan mother told a radio station in the Rio Grande Valley. She is right. Come one, come all. …

It’s Official: Obama Care To End Employer-Based Health Care

Business, Healthcare, Labor, Regulation

In “The Glories of Hussein’s Proctology,” I worried that, “Perhaps, like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my coverage. It is not impossible that even a mammoth like Microsoft, whose chairman trumpets Big Government at every turn, will see the benefits to the bottom line of dropping spouses like myself.”

Our healthcare plan has since altered for the first time ever. The complete coverage we were previously afforded is now a high-deductible, cost-sharing plan with a health-savings account. It had already cost us over 2000 additional dollars in 2013.

A year has gone by, and the New York Times is pleased to bring tidings of these very developments, agreeing for the most with the researchers, S&P Capital IQ, that pushing people like me off coverage we like and want to keep, and onto the Idiot’s exchanges will make us gormless fools “more autonom[y] around [the] management of [our] own health care.”

The NYT is correct in that the third-payer system has turned the employer into “a social service agency.” The answer, however, is not more government, but a free-market in medicine where nothing comes between doctor and patient.