Archive for the ‘Labor Market’ Category

‘Commercial Drivers License’ to be forced on Farmers

Your teenage son operating a tractor helping plow a field, haul a load etc.
Will be effectively stopped!

An entire way of life is rapidly dying right in front of our eyes. The family farm is being systematically wiped out of existence in America, and big agribusiness and the federal government both have blood all over their hands. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from about 6.8 million in 1935 to only about 2 million today. That doesn’t mean that there is less farming going on. U.S. farms are producing more than ever. But what it does mean is that farming is increasingly becoming dominated by the big boys. The rules of the game have been tilted in favor of big agribusiness so dramatically that most small farmers find that they simply cannot compete anymore. Back in 1900, about 39 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. At this point, only about 2 percent of all Americans now live on farms. Big agribusiness, the food processing conglomerates, and big seed companies such as Monsanto completely dominate the industry. Unless something dramatic is done, the family farm is going to continue to be wiped out of existence. Unfortunately, it does not look like things are going to turn around any time soon.

The way that the farming industry is structured today, it is simply not economically feasible to operate a small family farm. According to Farm Aid, every week approximately 330 farmers leave their land for good.

Many old timers are trying to hang on for as long as they can. A very large percentage of family farmers are in their fifties, sixties or seventies at this point. Today, only about 6 percent of all farmers are under the age of 35.

Most young people these days are not too eager to choose farming as a career. A lot of young adults that grew up on family farms have decided that investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a business that requires you to work 12 hours or more per day most of the year for very meager wages is simply not worth it.

In recent years, many family farmers have been forced to find second jobs in order to support their families. Many farm families are constantly on the verge of financial ruin. It is a really tough life for many of them.

Sadly, less than 25 percent of all farms in America bring in gross revenues in excess of $50,000.
On top of everything else, the federal government and many state governments just keep endlessly piling more rules and regulations on to the backs of farmers.

Big agribusiness has the resources to deal with all of these regulations fairly well, but most family farms do not.

With each passing year, the farming industry becomes even more centralized. If current trends continue, big agribusiness will eventually control nearly all of it.

by Paul Craig Roberts

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) calls the government’s latest jobs and unemployment reports “nonsense numbers.”
There are a number of ongoing problems with the released numbers. For example, the concurrent-seasonal factor adjustments are unstable. The birth-death model adds non-existent jobs each month that are then taken out in the annual downward benchmark revisions. Williams calculates that the job overstatement through November averages 45,000 monthly. In other words, employment gains during 2012 have been overstated by about 500,000 jobs. Another problem is that each month’s jobs number is boosted by downside revision of the previous month’s jobs number. Williams reports that the 146,000 new jobs reported for November “was after a significant downside revision to October’s reporting. Net of prior-period revisions, November’s seasonally-adjusted monthly gain was 97,000.”
Even if we believe the government that 146,000 new jobs materialized during November, that is the amount necessary to stay even with population growth and therefore could not be responsible for reducing the unemployment rate from 7.9 percent to 7.7 percent. The reduction is due to how the unemployed are counted.
The 7.7 percent rate is known as the “headline rate.” It is the rate you hear in the news. Its official designation is U.3.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has another official unemployment rate known as U.6.
The difference is that U.3 does not include discouraged workers who are not currently actively seeking a job. (A discouraged worker is a person who has given up looking for a job because there are no jobs to be found.) The U.6 measure includes workers who have been discouraged for less than one year. The U.6 rate of unemployment is 14.4 percent, about double the headline rate.
The U.6 rate does not include long-term discouraged workers, those who have been discouraged for more than one year. John Williams estimates this rate and reports the actual rate of unemployment (known as SGS) in November to be 22.9 percent.
In other words, the headline rate of unemployment is one-third the actual rate.
The drop in the November headline rate of unemployment from 7.9 percent to 7.7 percent is due to a 20.4 percent increase in the number of short-term discouraged workers in November. In other words, unemployed people rolled out of the U.3 measure into the U.6 measure.
Similarly, a number of short-term discouraged workers roll out of the U.6 measure into Williams’ measure that includes all of the unemployed. Williams reports that “with the continual rollover, the flow of headline workers continues into the short-term discouraged workers (U.6), and from U.6 into long term discouraged worker status (a ShadowStats.com measure), at what has been an accelerating pace. The aggregate November data show an increasing rate of individuals dropping out of the headline (U.3) labor force.” In other words, the headline rate of unemployment can drop even though the unemployed are having a harder time finding jobs.
The U.S. government simply lowers the unemployment rate by not counting all of the unemployed. We owe this innovation to the Administration of Bill Clinton. In 1994, the Clinton Administration redefined “discouraged workers” and limited this group to those who are discouraged for less than one year. Those discouraged for more than one year are no longer considered to be in the labor force and ceased to be counted as unemployed.
If the U.S. government will mislead the public about unemployment, it will also
mislead about Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, Russia, China and 9/11. The government fits its story to its agenda.
A government that wants to cut the social safety net doesn’t want you to know that the unemployment rate is 22.9 percent. A government that wants to cut the social safety net when between one-fifth and one-fourth of the workforce is out of work looks hard-hearted, mean-spirited and foolish. But if the government reports only one-third of the unemployed and presents that rate as falling, then the government can present its cuts as prudent to avoid falling over a “fiscal cliff.”
If the “free and democratic” Americans cannot even find out what the unemployment rate is, how do they expect to find out about anything?
–Paul Craig Roberts

BY JOHN HINDERAKER
If you have high blood pressure, take some medication before reading further.

A basic premise of immigration law is that immigrants to the U.S. are expected to be self-supporting. We obviously don’t want to attract people who have no intention of working, but simply want to benefit from our generous welfare system. This principle is incorporated into the Immigration and Nationality Act, which provides:

An alien who, in the opinion of the consular officer at the time of application for a visa, or in the opinion of the Attorney General at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible.

But, as in so many other instances, President Obama has simply changed the law by executive fiat. In this case the administration acted quietly, so that it took quite a while before others understood how badly Obama had subverted the immigration laws. Yesterday, four Republican Senators wrote to Janet Napolitano and Hillary Clinton; you can read their letter here:

It has long been a sound principle of immigration law that those who seek citizenship in this country ought to be financially self-sufficient. We were thus shocked to discover that both the State Department and DHS exclude reliance on almost all governmental welfare programs when evaluating whether an alien is likely to become a public charge. Your agencies apply a cramped interpretation of the law in this regard, considering reliance on only two of nearly 80 federal welfare programs as evidence of likelihood of becoming a public charge: Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

In fact, guidance from your agencies specifically prevents consular and DHS officials from considering the likelihood that an alien will receive SNAP benefits [food stamps], WIC payments, Medicaid, child-care benefits, foster care, energy assistance, educational assistance, other medical and health benefits, and assistance from at least fifteen different nutritional programs.

The Obama administration advertises the fact that anyone is welcome to come to the United States to receive food stamps. Barack Obama’s mania to make everyone a dependent of the federal government extends even to illegal aliens. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has uncovered the astonishing fact that the Obama administration pays billions of dollars in child tax credits to illegal aliens:

A few tidbits from the IG’s report:

* In one instance, four illegal aliens fraudulently claimed that 20 children lived with them in the same trailer and received from the IRS $29,608 in ACTC refunds. The children claimed did not even live in the U.S.

* The Inspector General recommended that, “Legislation should be considered to require a Social Security Number in order to be eligible for the ACTC, consistent with the requirements for the Earned Income Tax Credit… As it now stands, the payment of Federal funds through this tax benefit appears to provide an additional incentive for aliens to enter, reside, and work in the U.S. without authorization, which contradicts Federal law and policy to remove such incentives.”

Republican Senators proposed such legislation, but Harry Reid refused to allow it to come to the Senate floor for a vote. So at the same time that the United States is going broke, with $16 trillion in debt, we are bribing people from all over the world, illegally as well as legally, to enjoy federal benefits at taxpayer expense. And Barack Obama and Harry Reid refuse to permit anything to be done, even to the extent of limiting blatant fraud.

Soros Wants Open Borders

ICE Agents Say Obama Won’t Let Them Arrest Illegals: Supervisor Tells Man Detained By Agent – He is being let go because he was not a Presidential Priority…..

Word has it that they gave him an Obama button and bumper sticker before he left.

A veteran Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent is facing suspension after he refused to release an illegal immigrant who was not considered a priority target under the Obama Administration’s new immigration enforcement policies, according to documents provided exclusively to Fox News.

“They’re punishing law enforcement officers who are just trying to uphold U.S. law,” said Chris Crane, president of the National ICE Council. Crane is a union representative acting on the unidentified officer’s behalf.

The officer under fire is an 18-year law enforcement and military veteran.

On March 27 he and another officer were conducting surveillance on a vehicle in Newark, Del. with plates that were registered to a criminal alien target. During the surveillance, they observed an individual get into the vehicle. The person was detained, questioned and taken to an ICE office so that his fingerprints could be run through a federal database.

The individual was not their criminal alien target. However, he was a 35-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico who had ten previous traffic violations – including driving without a license.

“The officer made the determination using prosecutorial discretion that he would charge (the suspect) as being in the United States illegally and let the judge sort it out,” Crane said.

“That’s our place in the universe,” he said. “We’re supposed to make arrests and let the judges and the legal system sort through the details.”

Instead, two supervising officers, including the acting field director, intervened and ordered the officer to release the illegal immigrant. The acting field director sat down with the illegal and explained that he was going to be let go because he was not a “presidential priority,” Crane said.

By Todd Starnes
A veteran Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent is facing suspension after he refused to release an illegal immigrant who was not considered a priority target under the Obama Administration’s new immigration enforcement policies, according to documents provided exclusively to Fox News.
“They’re punishing law enforcement officers who are just trying to uphold U.S. law,” said Chris Crane, president of the National ICE Council. Crane is a union representative acting on the unidentified officer’s behalf.
The officer under fire is an 18-year law enforcement and military veteran.
On March 27 he and another officer were conducting surveillance on a vehicle in Newark, Del. with plates that were registered to a criminal alien target. During the surveillance, they observed an individual get into the vehicle. The person was detained, questioned and taken to an ICE office so that his fingerprints could be run through a federal database.
The individual was not their criminal alien target. However, he was a 35-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico who had ten previous traffic violations – including driving without a license.
“The officer made the determination using prosecutorial discretion that he would charge (the suspect) as being in the United States illegally and let the judge sort it out,” Crane said.
“That’s our place in the universe,” he said. “We’re supposed to make arrests and let the judges and the legal system sort through the details.”
Instead, two supervising officers, including the acting field director, intervened and ordered the officer to release the illegal immigrant. The acting field director sat down with the illegal and explained that he was going to be let go because he was not a “presidential priority,” Crane said.
In essence, the supervising officers took on the role of a public defender.
“You had the supervisors intervening with the alien to assist the alien and counsel the alien on avoiding receiving a charging document,” he said.
The officer’s supervisors ordered the officer to release the illegal – an order the officer refused.
According to a “Notice of Proposed Suspension,” dated July 19, the officer “failed to follow these supervisory instructions, when you arrested a non-targeted alien who did not appear to meet any of the ICE priorities.”
A memorandum from Assistant Field Office Director David O’Neill, written the morning of the incident, reveals that the officers were told to release the subject even though he was in the country illegally.
The officer “became agitated and began to raise his voice and stated that he would not do as instructed,” O’Neill wrote in his memo.
As a result of disobeying the order to release a known criminal, the officer faces a three-day suspension and could ultimately lose his job and pension if he arrests another illegal not on the Obama administration’s priority list.
“They’re willing to take away their retirement, their job, their ability to support their families in favor of someone who is here illegally and violating our laws,” Crane told Fox News. “Right now (the Obama administration) is standing in the way of us enforcing the law by either taking a disciplinary action, threats of disciplinary action, or refusing to sign off on charging documents to put an illegal alien into immigration proceedings so a judge can sort it out.”
A spokesman for ICE told Fox News they will not discuss “ongoing personnel matters.”
“ICE officers are not disciplined for lawful arrests,” the spokesperson said. “They may, however, be subject to discipline for insubordination and failure to follow agency polices and directives, among other reasons.”
Ironically, the illegal alien in this particular incident was given better treatment than an American citizen would have been in similar circumstances.
A spokesman for the Newark Police Dept. told Fox News that if an American had been stopped on the same charges – they would have been put in jail. The spokesman said officers would have let the judge sort out the details.
Crane said that’s the way it used to be – until President Obama loosened restrictions on illegal immigrants.
“Our hands are tied much more than your average police officer,” Crane said. “Normally an officer would have made an arrest like this, processed him, put the paper work in front of the supervisor and they would have signed off on it.”
At the heart of the issue are significant changes announced in June by the Dept. of Homeland Security. The new rules outlined how younger illegal immigrants could stay in the country and gain work permits through the use of “prosecutorial discretion.”
Crane said agents in the field disputed the idea of prosecutorial discretion.
“This whole prosecutorial discretion thing is a big lie,” he said. “The administration is trying to say it gives us more flexibility to release people. It’s garbage. These are orders – very clear orders that you will release people.”
The policy allows for discretion involving individuals who have not been convicted of a “felony offense, a significant misdemeanor offense, multiple misdemeanor offenses, or otherwise poses a threat to national security or public safety; and is not above the age of thirty.”
The illegal immigrant in this case had 10 traffic violations and is 35-years-old.
And it’s not the first time that ICE agents have found themselves frustrated by Obama’s new policy. Last month an illegal immigrant injured an officer during an attempted escape in El Paso. Assaulting a federal officer is considered a federal crime. However, because the suspect was not a priority target, he was released without any criminal or immigration charges.
“We can’t do anything anymore under these new guidelines,” he added. “
As a result, he said, an 18-year law enforcement veteran has to pay the price — and somewhere in the nation, a 35-year-old illegal immigrant is driving on a roadway without a license.
“If a law enforcement officer can’t perform routine enforcement functions, what do we have a law enforcement agency for,” Crane wondered.

RIGHT TO WORK IS RIGHT FOR OHIO
posted by LaborUnionReport

As today’s government-union bosses push higher taxes, establish dues schemes to fund their bloated salaries and union-bought politicians, the evidence has become pretty clear: Government unions have become political, parasitic entities injuring taxpayers and the communities they control (see Central Falls and Providence, RI; Detroit, MI; and the once-great State of California for examples).
In the private sector, however, where taxpayers’ pockets are not in endless supply, the parasitic model of today’s unions, far too often, allows unions drain companies and ends up killing their hosts.

• Related: Ohio Business Owner Shot For Being Non-Union, Police Investigating
In large measure, the power unions have gained to cripple economies and companies comes from the ability to require workers to pay union dues (or have the workers fired from their jobs should they refuse to pay the union tribute).

In the public sector, union bosses have declared war on Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Ohio’s John Kasich, Florida’s Rick Scott and, to a lesser extent, Arizona’s Jan Brewer, for their threats to union treasuries through collective bargaining reform.

In the private sector, however, while Indiana finally became the 23rd state in the nation to became a Right-to-Work state—which outlaws unions from having workers fired for refusing to pay union dues—other states like, Maine and Ohio are considering the reform, as well.

Source: http://goo.gl/n1B1w

In Ohio, for example, where unions spent in excess of $30 million to crush reforms to the Buckeye State’s antiquated laws governing collective bargaining for government unions, the state is among the worst states in the nation to do business—only topped by California, New Jersey and New York.
In their Pyrrhic victory in beating back reform, Ohio’s union bosses demonstrated they can dominate a state, regardless of the price. This, in part, may explain why Ohio is losing more high-tech jobs than the national average and companies like NCR are moving to more business-friendly climes like Georgia.
In late March, Ohio’s Buckeye Institute released a report entitled: Ohio Right-To-Work: How the Economic Freedom of Workers Enhances Prosperity.

In the report [in PDF], Economist Richard Vedder and his colleagues state that Ohio’s residents would benefit if the Buckeye State enacted a right-to-work law, making Ohio a more attractive place to do business:
The typical Ohioan today would have a higher income and standard of living if the Buckeye State had matched the nation in its rate of economic growth in recent decades. However, it did not, and one reason is that the labor climate in the state is unattractive both to businesses making strategic investments and workers wishing to work.

According to the Hudson Hub Times, Right-to-Work may make it on Ohio’s ballot in 2013:
The report (available online at www.buckeyeinstitute.org) comes as backers of a constitutional amendment to make Ohio a right-to-work state are collecting signatures to place the issue before voters. They don’t expect to gain enough registered voters’ names to qualify for this year’s general election and are eyeing November 2013.
In addition to pointing out that Ohio’s “substandard performance performance with respect to economic growth since the late 1970′s would have been eliminated if a right-to-work law had been adopted several decades ago,” Vedder and company estimate that personal income for a family of four would have been $12,000 higher annually if Ohio had a right-to-work law in 1977.
The report provides an excellent analysis on the history of unions’ legal authority to coerce dues from workers, as well as the emergence of states’ ability to enact right-to-work laws in 1947 and the chronology of individual states’ enactment of those laws.
The report also provides a history of Ohio’s failed efforts to enact a right-to-work law in the late 1950s—much of it due to a lack of a clear and cohesive campaign. Like the recent SB5/Issue 2 campaign, where unions outspent and out organized collective bargaining reform proponents, the lack of a united front (right-to-work proponents were besieged with internal divisions in the late-50s) gave unions the upper hand to defeat right-to-work and solidified union power for decades.
Unions and their union dues-funded think tanks, like the Economic Policy Institute, continue to downplay and fight right-to-work laws by claiming right-to-work states have a negative effect on wages.
However, the Buckeye Institute report addresses that issue as well:
A recent study by Robert Reed helps clear some of the ambiguity by demonstrating that when one controls for the economic conditions of a state prior to its adoption of a RTW law, the relationship between RTW and wages is positive and statistically significant. Reed estimates that when “holding constant economic conditions in 1945—average wages in 2000 [were] 6.68 percent higher in RTW states than non-RTW states.”
The Buckeye Institute’s report on Ohio Right-to Work is an excellent read, both for the economic argument behind right-to-work, as well as the history of the effort in Ohio.
As Ohio continues to lag behind the nation due to the continued domination of unions in that state, over time, more may realize the right-to-work is right for Ohio (and elsewhere, as well).

Posted by LaborUnionReport
It was less than a year ago that Barack Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe said:
After 2½ years in office, President Obama now “owns” the economy as an issue, according to top adviser David Plouffe, who added he was confident that voters understand that recovering from a devastating recession Mr. Obama inherited takes time.
“Of course he does,” Mr. Plouffe told NBC’s “Today” show host Matt Lauer when asked point-blank if Mr. Obama owns the economy.
“But the American people understand that we — it took us a long time to get to this mess,” Mr. Plouffe said. “It’s going to take us some time to come out. We are making progress.”
Well, after Friday’s jobs numbers came out (the economy added 120,000 jobs) Labor Secretary Hilda Solis promptly proclaimed: “That’s a noteworthy achievement.”
In fact, for the man who campaigned on the message of “hope” in 2008, the 120,000 jobs added is much fewer (about half) than expected and the edging down of the unemployment to 8.2% is not from job creation but from hopelessness.
There are now 88 million American who are “Not In Labor Force,” according to Department of Labor statistics, which the St. Louis Federal Reserve put into this pretty chart:

Obviously, others are seeing past Obama’s cheerleaders.
The Wall Street Journal stated:
But mostly, the picture was disappointing at a time when all eyes are on the U.S. to help keep global growth humming. The jobless rate, which is obtained from a separate survey of households, edged down to 8.2% from 8.3%, its lowest point in three years. However, that decline was due less to new hiring than people abandoning their job searches.
“I’m nervous,” said Jared Bernstein, former chief economist* for Vice President Joe Biden.
* Although Bernstein, according to his bio, is not really a trained-economist (he just played one in Washington), he is right to be nervous.
And, so should the Obama Administration.
The hard truth for Barack Obama is:
People have given up.
They have gone from ‘Hope’ to Hopelessness.
_________________
“Truth isn’t mean. It’s truth.”
Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)