Tariffs. How are you affected?

I was being facetious...

 

And my sorry, sarcastic ass didn’t recognize it. Toadally my bad, dude.

 

Where are these native born citizens that are being pushed out of their jobs harvesting fields, or roofing, or the grunt work at construction sites, or the canneries?

During the credit crisis when unemployment was over 12%, Louisiana enacted some tough anti-immigrant legislation and chased out all the immigrants. Farmers could not get any workers. They put out a nationwide advertising program to try to get workers. In the end, only 2 people showed up to fill thousands of vacancies.

 

Ah yes, “the illegals do the work Americans just won’t do,”… at that price.

You’re a finance man, right? You know very well that everyone and everything has their price. So the mean value has shifted. So what? I like to bitch about the role of the central bank and our debt-funded currency as the cause of this exponential shift since 1913 but again, so what? The shift has happened.

People here don’t want to suffer in the sun for peanuts: they want a living wage. So rather than pay them a living wage, we decide we’d rather import a large underclass to do the work for shitty wages and poor working conditions. This increase in population puts upward pressures on the necessities of life like food, housing, and other basic consumer items; puts strain on our school capacities, healthcare services and other civil services. Our own underclass suffers the most because of this but we just say, “fuck ‘em! They weren’t willing to do the work and these new folks do. I want my avocados dammit!”

 

Consolidation in meat packing has left fewer plants. Yes. Wondering where all of our union organizers are? Such a constriction in the supply chain is ripe for action. Could this be that the workers are temporary or immigrants? Perhaps, just like the capitalists, our union people are chasing low hanging fruit in other places like the public sector.

 

Unions, where they are not simply mafia fronts, are still just nepotistic fiefdoms for deadwood. I have to work with them very much. They like to talk about how much better trained they are and the quality of their work is. I’ve seen little actual evidence when I compare them to our non-union contractors. I believe unions once had a very important purpose for honest working class people. Now, I’m very sceptical as to whether or not they still do.

 

A fair warning to the both of you to tread lightly here. I have been debating politics with MAGA since 2015, radicalized Republicans since probably 2005. I have always given them a large benefit of the doubt when they say, "Im not a racist." Many of them were good friends, and even family members. In every single debate, some lasting for years, this is the turn in the conversation that led to their racism becoming openly stated. And I have pointed it out. A lot of these debates were very public, for example, on Facebook, and I do have a very diverse group of friends, and they all were appalled by how racist these debates turned----every time. This is so consistent that I have realized that I have never actually met a MAGA that is not racist. Many of them do not think they are racist, but as these debates continue down this path, I point it out to them.

My wife and stepkids are immigrants. I have been through the immigration process in various countries, and I have been through the immigration process into the US with my family. I started helping immigrants in college, because of my Japanese abilities---a Japanese girl I knew, here on a student visa, was afraid of being separated from her fiance, who came here with her on a tourist visa, and got a job at a Japanese restaurant, but his visa had run out, and immigration was threatening to deport him. So I helped them get an immigration attorney and went with them through the process to make sure they understood everything. I have never stopped helping, as I have been an immigrant myself--in Japan, in the Philippines, in Europe. There is a lot of misinformation around immigrants. And it ignores and denies statistical realities, our own laws, cultural traditions, and human decency.

Do you understand the source of animosity against the Haitians that occurred in Springfield OH that J.D. Vance and Trump exploited to push ugly racist lies? There were a lot of jobs in Springfield that were going unfilled because the people of Springfield did not want to do them. The Haitians were happy to take these jobs, and they made good money at them. The racists in Springfield probably wouldn't have cared, except that the Haitians made so much money at these jobs, that they were able to afford to buy houses, and nice cars, and really started to do very well for themselves. In other words, they were not sticking to the cotton fields and living in the crowded bunkhouse in their own little corner at the back of the plantation. They were out in the open as if they were equal to the best middle class white folk with their fancy TV's, and cars, and going out to fancy restaurants, and doing the things that no black immigrant should ever do in America unless he stole that job from a well deserving American.

One of the complaints was that the Haitians were pushing up the prices of housing, because they were buying so many of them. But the fact is, they were holding down these jobs and able to buy the houses. Why couldn't the Americans buy them? Because the Haitians took their jobs? Then the local people should have done them. Were they lowering wages and destroying the opportunities for Americans to make more money? The Haitians were doing just fine, including buying homes in a market of increasing real estate prices.

It's like the same old ignorant narrative----the lazy immigrants are coming to America to leech off the system, and they're taking our jobs away! Which one is it? Are they coming here to work? Or are they coming here to be lazy and leech off the system? (Despite what Republicans say, they can't leech off the system as they say. The benefits they can get are very limited!)

No one brought a bunch of immigrants here. It sounds like you guys think that Biden drove a big truck down to Mexico City, opened the back, and yelled, "Come on everybody--Jump in! I've got jobs for you! Just vote for me in the next election!" As far as I know, he only did this twice, maybe three times... (LMAO!-----these narratives are so F-ing stupid!) We had a very strong economy, one of the strongest to come out of Trump's pandemic. We need a growing population in order to have a growing economy. Immigrants are literally doing the jobs no one else will do. Without immigrants, no one will do them. Its not a question of how much someone will pay for those jobs----all we have to do is look at the recent history of agricultural labor in Georgia and Louisiana going back 20 years. I agree that there is terrible exploitation of illegal immigrant labor, and labor that comes over on temporary work permits, but that is not impacting general wage growth. You are told that immigrants are pushing wages down, and so that's what you argue, but the people that are telling you this are the ones who are grabbing an ever-increasing share of the money! Funny how you blame the immigrant, while the chief executives grab more and more money, bigger and bigger bonuses, while your check, and that of the immigrant, stays the same! And, by the way, immigrants are not voting in our elections!

As I mentioned earlier----the San Francisco Federal Reserve published a study on immigration just a month or so ago. You should read it:

Unauthorized Immigration Effects on Local Labor Markets - San Francisco Fed

 

Notice, in that San Francisco Fed study report, that they concluded that any crowding out effect (i.e. 'They're takin' our jobs!') is offset by the multiplier effect, in other words, that the increase in unauthorized immigrant workers, creates more additional jobs in that sector and adjacent sectors to offset the issue that they may be taking jobs away from local workers. This is not a surprise to most economists that have been saying that this is the result of immigration for years. And I am fairly certain that if you were to add legal immigrants into the mix, the impact of creating more jobs is even greater than the 1 for 1 that they found in this study based only on illegal immigrants. Likewise, the loss of immigrants will have a much worst impact on employment.

Let me give you an example of what you are defending here. When Mt. Pinatubo exploded in the Philippines, covering vast amounts of rice fields in Central Luzon---the main island of the Philippines, with Lahar (volcanic mud). Whole villages disappeared under the lahar, and the rice fields around them. My wife said to me that she wanted to rent a jeepney and take food and medicine up to the refugee camps there, particularly those of the Aeta tribes people, because many of them lived around Mt. Pinatubo. I told her that I was thinking the same thing, except that I thought we would just get in the way-----the news was reporting how UNICEF, and the Red Cross, and all kinds of other groups where there providing food and so forth. We decided we would wait and see how those efforts go.

There was a shortage of rice and food in particular and this impacted the price of rice across the country. But in the areas around Mt Pinatubo, it was soon reported in the press that wealthy landowners had intercepted most of the rice that had been shipped into the area for relief and that they were stockpiling it and selling it at exorbitant prices. So we decided we had to act, and made several trips north to that region with a rented jeepney filled with food, medicine and clothes that we had separated into individual packs suitable for a family of 4. Every trip we made, where we went directly to the Aeta refugee camps, the food was gone in minutes. And still people would come for their families. We helped a lot of Aeta, but there were far more that we couldn't help (for that matter the needs were far, far more than one jeepney could carry). And yet these Aeta, were so gracious that they would thank us over and over and bless us, even though you could see the disappointment in their eyes that we did not have enough for them.

But people all over that region could not afford to buy rice, and were unable to eat. So more rice was sent, and once again it was intercepted and stockpiled by the wealthy land owners who continued to sell it to the very few that could afford it at the extremely high prices they charged. So the government tried to make it illegal for them to stockpile rice, and to fine people for price gouging at such high prices. It didn't really matter for several reasons----1.) they could pretty much do what they wanted by paying off local officials, the police, and so forth. 2.) Their families made up the local government or were closely 'connected' to the local government.

As far as these families were concerned, this was rice, so if people can't pay what they are charging, they still have stockpiles of rice---which they could use for bribes, influence, and all kinds of things.

This went on for several months if I recall correctly, and people were starving. It wasn't until the Aquino government imposed price limits and made sure that they were being enforced in the local markets that people in the area were again able to eat. Did this disrupt the rice market? No. In fact I think it helped lower prices across the nation, throughout the crisis. In the long run, lahar is a very fertile soil and in time new rice paddies were planted and villages were dug out of the mud, or built over the old ones. Did this create any problems for the nation. No, it stopped people from starving until supply chains, could be re-established to provide rice into these areas and new paddies could be planted.

Back then I argued that such an ugly display of greed and corruption would not happen in America. Today it is so rampant that this country disgusts me. Take for example the last minute spending that Pete Hegseth did with our tax dollars at the Department of War's (I hate that name) financial year end-----in the face of Republicans unwillingness to fund the ACA, the destruction of USAid, and the wholesale massacre of so many social programs, and our very government agencies themselves. And then there is the tariffs! Why are we being forced to pay more for anything we import so that Hegseth and his buddies can eat lobster, crab, and steak, while getting their own ice cream machines, or a grand piano! WTF!!!

 

One other point about this comment----have you ever heard of Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle? This fictional piece is based on true events. It tells the story of an immigrant worker that died in a slaughterhouse and his body got mixed into the ground meat and was sold in the markets with the meat it had been ground up with. The book depicts immigrant life in Chicago's meat packing district, and is also a depiction of the "...slughterhouse abuses, protectionism and The Beef Trust, muckraking, progressivism, and consumer rights." It is responsible for the anger and disgust that brought about the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

I have a copy that includes writings by immigrants and social commentators at the time over the conditions of life for immigrants and accounts of life then, and in the slaughterhouses and so forth. At the time, the immigrants that worked the slaughterhouses were slavic immigrants, and faced the same prejudice that Latino immigrants face today.

My point here is that, the exploitation of immigrants in these industries has gone on for most of America's history. So, no, immigrants have nothing to do with consolidation in the meat packing plants. The true problem is right in front of you---staring you in the face! Jesus! They are the ones telling you that the immigrant is going to steal your only cookie, as they grab all the cookies for themselves! Seriously!!!

And by the way----where are the unions? Well, you have Reagan and all the subsequent Republicans to thank for that...

 

There it is. Every discussion of any issue with a liberal always comes down to, “if you disagree with me, you’re a racist and anything you say is automatically invalid.” Yep, well, I’m white. Therefore, by the new definition, I’m automatically racist. Furthermore, I belong to the only demographic of people that can even be called racist anymore. White=racist. Simple as. Ok. So be it.

But a simple thought exercise betrays the truth. Replace all of the people of various ethnicities that have been imported over the last half century with the most melanin-deficient, blonde-haired, blue-eyed WASPs from North-Western Europe. Keep all else the same; poor wages and working conditions for work “Americans just won’t do”. Their culture and ethnicity would be almost exactly the same as the countries founding stock. The effect (and my argument) would also be the same. Downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on the basic necessities and on everything else in life, strain on our civil services , infrastructure, and the native born population still gets screwed. Worse yet, we wouldn’t get all the tasty ethnic foods - though I’d happily forgo Philippino food. That stuff is unpleasant.

As to who I blame; please read more carefully. I blame both political parties and their corporate donors. Just like the oligarchs since Plato’s time, they import foreigners to the harm of their own countrymen.

We’re fed the propaganda that we need ever more immigrants because either we don’t reproduce enough or simply to keep our economy growing. We’re not allowed to ask why the native citizenry can’t afford to reproduce or why our country needs to import people to keep our economy growing. If we did seriously consider those questions, the fact that our currency and economy is just an intricate Ponzi scheme would be laid out for all to see.

 

As I said, “I believe unions once had a very important purpose for honest working class people. Now, I’m very sceptical as to whether or not they still do.”

I work with union members every day. Rather than self police their own poor performers and the poorly behaved, they let them set the pace. And their training/apprenticeship has become a joke. I’ve had to explain the most basic circuitry, electrical theory, and even simple trigonometry to several “journeyman” electricians! Other trades are even worse.

I have had (for many years) and continue to have, daily, first-hand, interaction with tradespeople. 90 to 99% of them are union members. Like most people anywhere, most of them are good honest people who want to do a good quality job. Just like anywhere else, a few of them are truly outstanding. The problem, unlike with non-union contractors, is that they protect the worst among them. If we could summarily dismiss the bottom 10-15% of them, not only would marginal productivity increase, so would nominal productivity, and so would total production!!! If unions would police their own, they could command better total packages for their members. I’ve seen several non-union subcontractors who gave their trades people higher total packages than we paid our union trades. And their product reflected that.

You say you’re a proud union member. I see many hardhat stickers, shirts, belt buckles, and innumerable other bits of paraphernalia each day that proclaim the same. Then I watch the behavior of those wearing it and I wonder; proud of what? I have even noticed the pattern, though not collected the data to test the hypothesis, that there may be a negative relationship between the number of such visible symbols of a given individual’s union pride and the quantity an especially quality of work for which they should feel proud.

 

Far too many things there to address but I’ll pick it a few.

1. thank you for sharing your experience in the Philippines. Both your telling of it, as well as the help you gave people, is pleasant to read.

2. “The fed published…”. Would they have published it if the data said otherwise? You could have just mentioned that the fed published a study on the net effects of immigration and then ended the sentence there. I could then have told you without reading it what they determined. You see what I’m getting at? Of course they found it to be a net positive. If they hadn’t found that, we’d never know such a study had been done. Unless the data had been so unfavorable that there was no way to massage it to get the desired outcome, then the conclusion was a given before the first bit of analysis had been done.

3. I like the label “Department of War”. Call it what it is. This country has not fought to defend itself since… shit, have we ever not been the provocateurs/initiators? Sure we’ve played the victims many times but delving into the historical facts, if it wasn’t some false flag we used as a pretext then weren’t we always just begging for a fight or worse from those we ultimately went to war with?

 

So post 1980 the US has seen a pronounced shift in wealth to the top at an increasing rate and the problem is those at the bottom…right…or better yet collective bargaining. What a myth. And over time Unions have been one of the few countervailing forces. In every sector of the economy.

I know first hand what a lack of Unions leads to. In the late 1960’s I was sent out to work alone in remote areas at temperatures of minus 30F and 4feet of snow….talk about dangerous!! Only when Federal Unions came in did such practices stop….and then RR came clip clopping into town and fought Federal unions…to make America safe for the wealthy again.

 

What you may find confusing, and will certainly be confusing to the more ideologically pure commenters here, is that I agree with what you said here. Unions did do great things for workers both in terms of total benefits and in safe and sane working conditions and hours.

Furthermore, I don’t wish them to ever go away. I do wish them to train their apprentices and not just pass everyone with a heartbeat. I wish they would impress upon their members that their behavior and workmanship on the job reflects upon them and all union workers.

I also agree that the distribution of wealth has skewed drastically and to the detriment our nation. This NEEDS to be corrected if our nation is to survive. But both parties have facilitated this for a long time, while their own noses were deep in the trough. I find it at least as laughable that people still believe that the democrats look out for the interests of the working class any more than the republicans ever did.

 

Come on! And all liberals are Marxists too, is that correct? I know many conservatives who I would not call racist, even though we disagree on many points. My Father and my grandfather were lifelong Republicans (and they both recognized how bad Nixon was. My grandfather really admired Reagan and campaigned hard for him. I have never known my grandfather to be racist. My father was a Republican until Trump came along. He listened to us, and recognized what we (his children) saw in him (except my evangelical sister). Both him and my mom raised us to not be racist, and to recognize racism from a very young age. I disagreed with my father and grandfather's politics, but there were things we could agree on. But I would never consider them racist.

Like I said, I gave MAGA a very large benefit of the doubt. We disagreed on just about everything from the start, and many of these people debated with me for years, as I said. Again, many were friends and some were family. So I never accused them of being racist until they actually started saying very racist things. At first it was things one could overlook, and I'd warn them, that these are the kind of narratives that people can be offended by and can be considered racist. But the more we debated the worse it became. And this happened with every single one of them. I tried to hold intelligent discussions, and talk reason with them. I even taught many of them how to debate, how to get facts, how to think critically, I told them how they could refute my arguments, and the types of fallacies one could encounter. But it was to no avail, and eventually we got down to the racism buried underneath.

I am not an idiot! I know when someone is making a political statement, or a misinformed idea, and when someone is being racist.

Also, let me point out that the person in my avatar is me. I am a white blonde-haired caucasian of largely Swedish, German and English heritage. My hair should be grey already, but unlike all my friends, it is not. I don't use any dye or anything else---i.e. I'm still blonde and supposedly the perfect aryan, so don't give me that, "I am white so I am automatically racist crap." I am white and I certainly know who is racist and who is not. As human beings we all tend to have some racist ideas and concepts--largely born out of ignorance. The difference between a racist and non-racist is that when one of these innocently racist things are pointed out to them, a non-racist learns from it, and tries to change such ideas and concepts. A racist becomes defensive, completely unaware that their defensive position tells more about them than they themselves may know.

Biologists and anthropologists have demonstrated over and over that race is a human construct. In one of my last posts I mentioned Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle. The dirty immigrants that were pushing down wages and taking jobs away from the native born citizens, etc. etc. were slavic people that were just as white as any other caucasian living in America. Yet they experienced the same racism that Latinos, Asians, and black people experience today. It is straight out prejudism against immigrants.

Downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on basic neccessities, strain on civil services, infrastructure, and the native population gets screwed, you say. Yet study after study says that this does not happen, certainly not to the extent that people who exploit these narratives say they do. And even more important, that the economic benefits they bring from population growth, increased spending, and tax payments, etc, more than outweigh any problems and promote economic growth.

As I already pointed out, those same narratives have been around for 100's of years. They were directed at Germans, then Irish, then Italians, and so forth. And yet through each wave of immigrants, the overall lot of the American people continued to improve. When people found themselves up against a brick wall, and could no longer advance, it was not because of immigrants, rather it was the wealthy elite, taking more than their fair share, and doing what they can to lower the general status of the populace.

And your response is that 'THEY' are bringing over immigrants. Who is bringing over immigrants? The people that are telling you the low birth rate propaganda you mentioned? Who is that? How are they doing this? In all my years of traveling and living abroad, I have never seen anyone bringing immigrants to America, or inviting them over, or anything else in that sense.

When I lived in the Philippines, I didn't hear people preaching to go to America. There were a lot of job brokers selling overseas jobs, because the Philippines is one of the world's largest exporters of labor. But not to the US. The jobs were in Asia and the Middle East, And guess what they preached about in the 1990's----the falling birth rate around the world. And the message was, don't follow the ideas of Western culture and use birth control. Stop the falling birth rate. And this is a critical problem in a land like the Philippines because people were not migrating there to increase the population, so a falling population there meant stagnation. Today it is a different story. A lot of foreigners are moving to the Philippines because of the cheap costs and they bring their money, and you generally don't find racism directed towards them.

But you say that this falling birthrate stuff is propaganda to bring in foreigners. Seriously? In my experience, propaganda has very little in the way of verifiable statistics. It is expressed in emotion-inducing language rather than reason and facts. It is largely couched in the language of hate. That is the very opposite from what academics are saying about the global birthrate.

Now I wonder what you think the solution to the slowing population growth is? Pro-choice and forcing women to have babies? The Philippines is a strict pro-choice country and yet they also are seeing trends toeards falling birth rates. This is a global phenomena, so why is it something we could solve easily here. Just because you deny factual data, does not make it false. The same is true about the connection between a growing population and a growing economy. This is not just someone's idea or a belief.

 

Yes, of course it would have been published regardless of what the data said. It is ridiculous to think otherwise.

Is this a pattern? Anything academic is automatically rejected? All academics are simply out to fool everyone and it is all fake news?

While FED published reports are generally not peer reviewed, they are internally checked and scrutinized and are considered very high caliber. Furthermore, they are typically precursor reports to actual published peer-reviewed articles in professional journals.

Again, how would anyone trust the FED, or the US for that matter, if they published a bunch of nonsense? There is a reason that the Treasury Bills are the global hallmark of risk-free.

 

Population totals, like so much of everything else in this world, fluctuate/oscillate over time. Things are cyclical, sinusoidal even. A decline in everything, at least for some periods of time, is inevitable. But we pretend otherwise. The economy and population must always grow! Why? Who says this must be so? Why should those two things behave in a way that absolutely nothing else in this universe except entropy does?

I propose that the reason this has been programmed (a la 62,400 repetitions) is because the “economy” nowadays is just a ponzi scam. An accounting shell-game even. It no longer reflects the industriousness or productiveness of the population. Our national economic statistics/indicators have less to do with the economic health and productivity of our citizenry than debt derivatives have to do with the value of underlying asset upon which they were issued.

 

“Forcing women to have babies”? No. I propose nothing of the sort. I also don’t propose encouraging them to kill their babies before they’re even born. What I think you are perceptive enough to realize, is that my views are not monolithic. I can see and accept differing perspectives. In this particular case, I think that killing an unborn baby is hardly different than killing it after it has made some supposedly magical trip down the birth canal and taken its first breath. Seeing abortion as significantly different from infanticide is a form of mental gymnastics which is beyond my abilities. In the ignorance, inexperience, and perhaps even mental flexibility of youth I was more able to see this distinction. After a fair bit more time in this world, and becoming a father, the ability faded significantly.

At the same time, I realize that people have always, and always will, choose to kill their own children before they’re born. They have many reasons, rationalizations and circumstances for wanting to do so. I can empathize and even understand those reasons and accept that the choice must ultimately be their own. And I can still find the practice abhorrent.

But I fear we should abandon our natural conversational style and get back to the topic of tariffs before the eye of Sauron sets his gaze upon us.