In plain English, the section in the rule would automatically provide updated work-permits to 15 categories of migrants who are appealing judges’ deportation orders.
In plain economics, the rule would increase the number of foreign migrants in U.S. workplaces and impose wage-cutting job competition on ordinary blue-collar Americans so that university-trained, white-collar immigration lawyers could be paid billable-hours by their due-for-deportation, work-permit clients.
“Obama is transferring the jobs and salaries of Americans to foreign nationals, including illegal aliens… [who will be] licensed to take middle class jobs,” said one Hill staffer. The pending rule “highlights the unholy alliance between progressive Democrats, progressive Republicans, and the Obama administration… [so] when it comes to finding a job in America, being native-born in America is a disadvantage,” the staffer said.
There’s little chance that establishment GOP leaders will fight Obama’s pro-migrant, anti-American rule.
If the rule is not struck down by the courts, the due-for-deportation migrants who would automatically get new work-permits include many categories of provisional immigrants, such as people who falsely claim persecution in their home countries. Most of the 250,000 Central Americans who have been allowed by Obama to migrate into the United States since 2009 have claimed in court hearings that they fear persecution in their home countries.
Other categories of migrants who would get Obama’s work-permits include migrants who lied to get work-permits, or children of migrants who accused their foreign spouses with domestic abuse back in their home countries, or the parents and children of foreign religious workers, such as Saudi-trained Imams.
The document even says the federal government has the authority to give updated work-permits to people admitted under a foreign emergency, such as West Africans who were allowed to stay in the United States until the Ebola crisis had passed. This “Temporary Protected Status” can be conferred by the DHS Secretary, without any review by Congress, and so could be used to invite large group of foreigners — such as Muslims from Islam-wrecked countries — to live in the United States.
The list of to-be-deported yet work-eligible groups is listed on page 112 and 113 of the pending rule:
The new regulations will also be a giant payout to Obama’s allies in the immigration-law industry.
That’s because the offer of extended work-permits to people facing deportation— including criminals and fraudulent asylum-seekers — gives them them the incentive and the means to appeal and re-appeal their deportation orders for many years.
Nationally, the backlog of immigration cases has doubled from roughly 225,000 pending cases in 2009 to 450,000 pending cases in late 2015, according to TRAC Reports. In 2009, the cases took 439 days to complete an average case. By 2015, the cases took an average of 918 days to resolve.
The new regulation will likely extend these courtroom delays, so increasing the number of foreigners improperly living and working in the United States. Inevitably, those extra migrants drive up the labor supply, and force down average wages for Americans and legal immigrants. The last time wages rose for lower-income Americans was in 1998 and 1999, when companies had to compete for workers during the dot.com boom, and amid a low rate of illegal immigration.
Since 2009, for example, Obama has allowed more than 250,000 Central Americans migrants to cross the U.S. borders and then to file for asylum and refugee status. This was a policy choice — because Obama and his border officials have the legal authority to reject and repatriate all migrants, including the many strong young men who claim to be “unaccompanied alien children.”
This new pro-migrant rule reflects Obama’s preferences for large-scale immigration, and his frequent description of migrant foreigners as better than Americans.
Obama made his political strategy clear in 2006, when he wrote in his autobiography that immigrants can become the foundation of new political movement that transform Americans’ culture and politics, whether or not Americans want any transformations. “In my mind, at least, the fates of black and brown were to be perpetually intertwined, the cornerstone of a coalition that could help America live up to its promise,” he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope.”
But you’ve got to break some Americans to make transformational omelettes; “This huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole… [but] it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans,” Obama admitted.
In 2013, Obama used the immigration laws to being in roughly 2 million foreign workers — plus women and children — in a year when 4 million Americans began looking for jobs. Unsurprisingly, wages flatlined while profits spiked and the stock market shot up to record highs.
This executive action, which directly bypasses Congressional lawmakers, is likely to reverberate across the presidential race, as GOP voters look to choose a nominee they believe will most effectively roll back the President’s still-expanding agenda. And it will certainly raise new security concerns as it covers categories of immigration utilized by migrants from the Middle East and nearby regions.
President Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security plans to publish the proposed rule tomorrow, the last day of 2015.
“Obama has gone the Full Monty to bust the immigration system,” says immigration lawyer John Miano. “What is going on is he is effectively giving Green Cards to people on H-1B visas who are unable to get Green Cards due to the [annual] quotas… it could be over 100,000.”
The new rules to aid foreign college-graduates are an extension of his earlier efforts to bypass popular laws against illegal immigration, said Miano, the co-author of a new book about the painful impact of the white-collar guest-worker programs, titled “Sold Out.”
In April, Sessions proposed language to reduce and cap the number of work-permits — dubbed “Employment Authorization Documents” — that could be distributed to foreign workers each year. Sessions’ recommendation was rejected by GOP and Democratic leaders in Congress, and so House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) December omnibus is enabling the president’s new executive action.
“The objective here is to strip American workers of their protections from foreign labor embodied in the Green Card quotas” that are set by Congress, not the White House, Miano said.
The annual award of Green Cards — and vital preliminary work-permits — is limited by quotas that mostly impact the many Indian and Chinese graduates who come to the United States as H-1B guest-workers, or who first arrive as students and later start working in the United States via the Optional Practical Training and H-1B programs.
Roughly 650,000 foreign graduates are working in the United States for roughly 5 years each under the H-1B program. Roughly 120,000 foreign graduates of U.S. colleges are working in the United States for two years each via the OPT program, often called the ‘mini-H-1B program.’ Without this new regulation, most of those foreign graduates will return home after several years, forcing companies to hire U.S. graduates in their place.
The foreign graduates typically get entry-level jobs that would otherwise go to new U.S.business graduates, designers, doctors, programmers, engineers and scientists. Also, the foreign graduates are used to replace mid-level American professionals once they seek mid-career pay-raises to help pay for mortgages and child-rearing.
The new policy also creates a large economic incentive for U.S. employers to hire foreign college-grads instead of new American college-grads.
That’s because the policy will allow U.S. employers to hire foreign college graduates at very low salaries. The foreign graduates will gladly take those low-wage white-collar jobs because the new policy allows them to get deferred payments from the federal government — valuable permanent work-permits that are the first step on the golden pathway to Green Cards and citizenship.
In contrast, employers can’t pay American graduates with this combination of low-salaries plus the federal promise of citizenship — because the Americans already have citizenship.
That means employers must pay more money to hire American college-grads than they would to hire foreign college-grads. That puts a huge disadvantage on American graduates because they need higher salaries to pay off their expensive U.S. college debt.
Miano slammed the new regulations, and said they reflect Obama’s preference for foreigners over Americans.
“Notice that when foreign workers are going to lose their jobs, Obama has DHS make protecting their jobs the agency’s highest priority,” chiefly by minimizing enforcement of immigration laws, he told Breitbart News. But “when American workers lose their jobs to foreign workers, Obama does absolutely nothing,” he said.
The public can object to the new regulations, according to the DHS document.
“All you black American people, fuck you all…just go to the office and pick up your check,” the supervisor at Hamilton Growers told workers during a mass layoff in June 2009.
The following season, according to a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, about 80 workers, many of them black, were simply told: “All you Americans are fired.”
Year after year, Hamilton Growers, which has supplied squash, cucumbers, and other produce to Wal-Mart and the Green Giant brand, hired scores of Americans, only to cast off many of them within weeks, according to the U.S. government. And time after time, the grower filled the jobs with foreign guest workers instead.
Although Hamilton Growers eventually agreed to pay half a million dollars to settle the suit, company officials said the allegations are baseless. Mass firings never happened, they said, nor did anyone use racially inflammatory language. But workers tell a different story.
“We want to go to work and work all day,” said Derrick Green, 32, a father of six who said he was fired by Hamilton Growers in 2012 after only three weeks picking squash. “But they don’t want that.”
Last year, thousands of American companies won permission to bring a total of more than 150,000 people into the country as legal guest workers for unskilled jobs, under a federal program that grants them temporary work permits known as H-2 visas. Officially, the guest workers were invited here to fill positions no Americans want: The program is notsupposed to deprive any American of a job, and before a company wins approval for a single H-2 visa, it must attest that it has already made every effort to hire domestically. Many companies abide by the law and make good-faith efforts to employ Americans.
Yet a BuzzFeed News investigation, based on Labor Department records, court filings, more than 100 interviews, inspectorgeneralreports, and analyses of state and federal data, has found that many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to skirt the law, deliberately denying jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers on H-2 visas instead.
A previous BuzzFeed News report found that many of those foreign workers suffer a nightmare of abuse, deprived of their fair pay, imprisoned, starved, beaten, sexually assaulted, or threatened with deportation if they dare complain.
At the same time, companies across the country in a variety of industries have made it all but impossible for U.S. workers to learn about job openings that they are supposed to be given first crack at. When workers do find out, they are discouraged from applying. And if, against all odds, Americans actually get hired, they often are treated worse and paid less than foreign workers doing the same job, in order to drive the Americans to quit. Sometimes, as the government alleged happened at Hamilton Growers, employers comply with regulations by hiring Americans only to fire them en masse and hand over the work to foreign workers with H-2 visas.
What’s more, companies often do this with the complicity of government officials, records show. State and federal authorities have allowed companies to violate the spirit — and often the letter — of the law with bogus recruitment efforts that are clearly designed to keep Americans off the payroll. And when regulators are alerted to potential problems, the response is often ineffectual.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Labor, which is charged with protecting workers and vetting employers seeking visas, said in a statement: “We acknowledge that the laws that authorize these programs are inadequate.” But the department also said that despite limited resources, it “actively pursues measures to strengthen protections for foreign and U.S. workers.”
The H-2 visa was created to address shortages in the American workforce. Although labor is indeed tight in some areas — such as North Dakota, where an oil boom has driven unemployment below 3% — there is little evidence of labor shortages in many industries that use the visas. In some cases, there is even a glut of available workers.
Landscaping companies, for example, were approved for more than 30,000 H-2 visas in the 2014 fiscal year. Yet Daniel Costa, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, which receives some funding from unions, found that over the same period, unemployment in landscaping was more than twice as high as the national average.
“The problem with the system is that the H-2 workers who are coming in are not tied to actual, demonstrated labor shortages,” Costa said.
Companies that have difficulty finding American workers could attract more applicants by offering higher wages. But instead of encouraging or even subsidizing that, the government’s H-2 program effectively subsidizes the opposite effort — helping companies find pliant foreign labor, often at the expense of American workers.
Derek Davis outside his home near Moultrie, Georgia. Kevin D. Liles for BuzzFeed News
In the last five years, the number of H-2 visas issued by the State Department, which administers the program along with the Department of Homeland Security and the Labor Department, has surged by more than 50%.
Bills in Congress to expand the guest worker program have won support from both Democrats and Republicans in recent years. Business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce have lobbied for as many as 400,000 additional H-2 visas per year. But the issue has been overshadowed by larger debates over the legal status of millions of undocumented immigrants.
Around the country, lawyers and labor brokers actively promote the H-2 program as a way to boost profit margins. Usafarmlabor, a labor broker serving the agricultural industry, until this month bluntly statedon its site: “Our workers actually save you money each month in a comparison with U.S. workers.”
Employers who use the H-2 program note that it entails numerous added costs, including visa fees and transportation, as well as compliance with complex rules. It requires that most workers be paid above minimum wage, sometimes substantially so.
But the guest worker program also offers numerous financial incentives. Agricultural employers are exempt from payroll and unemployment taxes on H-2 workers, for example; nonagricultural employers do not have to provide housing, but if they do they are allowed to charge their workers rent, which is sometimes extortionate.
Foreign laborers usually live at the job site, available to work at any time. They typically come alone, without families or other distractions that could cause them to miss work. The terms of their visas prohibit them from taking other jobs, so they have almost no leverage when it comes to wages or working conditions. And since they often come from abject poverty in their home countries, many visa holders put up with difficult or even backbreaking conditions without complaint to ensure they are invited to return the next year.
The visa program can be even more advantageous to the many employers that exploit their guest workers, making them work long hours without overtime pay, charging them illegal fees, or flat-out cheating them of their wages — all of which are against the law, regardless of whether workers are American or foreign.
A cotton field near Moultrie, Georgia. Kevin D. Liles for BuzzFeed News
Hamilton Growers has been cited, repeatedly, for its treatment of its mostly Mexican workforce. Even as the farm was accused of casting off American workers, government investigators found that it failed to pay foreign employees all they were owed and that ithoused them in often deplorable conditions. Hamilton Growers vigorously denies that it mistreated workers.
Americans are far less isolated than foreigners on H-2 visas, many of whom cannot speak a word of English. U.S. workers often know at least some of their rights and how to complain about abuses. They frequently have family nearby whom they can turn to for support. And, perhaps most importantly, they can’t be threatened with deportation. But the guest worker program can still have a devastating impact on their jobs, their families, and their entire communities.
In house after house in Moultrie, American workers said they have been shut out of agriculture jobs that have been available in their community for generations. Older workers talked of becoming impoverished; younger ones said their chances of financial stability have been strangled, leaving them, in some cases, with little choice but to leave town.
“They got rid of us,” said Mary Jo Fuller, referring to black workers. A field-worker on and off for most of her life, she said she was abruptly terminated from J&R Baker Farms, near Moultrie, as part of a mass firing in 2010. Unable to find other employment, the 59-year-old said she wound up homeless for more than a year. “We don’t really have jobs no more.”
Moultrie is “nowhere, really, for a young person trying to make it,” added Green. “It just makes you angry, very angry,” he said. “We right here in America, and you don’t want us to work. You’d rather get foreigners.”
For several years, Abrorkhodja Askarkhodjaev ran a temp firm based in Kansas City that relied on H-2 guest workers from the Philippines, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic and that serviced large hotels and other businesses around the country.
“Foreign people will clean two rooms in one hour. The American will not even finish in one hour one room,” he said speaking from the federal prison where he is serving a 12-year term for crimes related to visa fraud.
“Foreigners are better,” Askarkhodjaev added. “Of course I tried not to hire Americans.”
Before a company can bring in any guest workers, it must clear a series of legal hurdles to prove to the government that it has tried but failed to recruit Americans for the job.
Companies that don’t actually want Americans, however, have devised a whole set of creative tricks to get around these hurdles.
To apply for the right to import foreign workers, a company must first post at least two newspaper job ads, including one on a Sunday, “in the area of intended employment.”
Some employers have a very broad definition of “area of intended employment.”
In January 2011, Talbott’s Honey, a small honey producer, placed ads as requiredsoliciting workers for jobs in Kimball, South Dakota. The ads, however, ran in Elkader, Iowa; Dalhart, Texas; and Hobbs, New Mexico — towns that arehundreds of miles from Kimball.
Talbott’s then told the government there were no available American workers and got permission to import 12 foreign workers instead.
Reached by phone, the company declined to comment on the matter. But when asked why it hadn’t run an ad somewhere in the actual vicinity of the job, Talbott’s wrote that it had tried but the ad “somehow fell thru the cracks,” according to Labor Department records.
Sometimes the government actually abets this tactic. In North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, seasonal jobs cutting down Christmas trees in the frenzied weeks before the holiday pay well. But year after year, the state’s online job board has incorrectly posted those jobs in the wrong counties, sometimes hundreds of miles from any pine forests. As a result, workers looking for Christmas tree work close to home face a peculiar paradox: The only way to find the openings nearby is to search in a faraway corner of the state.
Lawyers at Legal Aid of North Carolina have been complaining to the state Department of Commerce about the Christmas tree job posting discrepancies for years. Yet despite repeated promises by state regulators to fix it, the issue persists, the lawyers said.
Indeed, officials in the state at times seem to make it easy for employers to avoid hiring Americans. During the fiscal year that ended this July, the state’s job bank tallied work orders seeking H-2 workers for 17,496 agricultural job openings, according to the North Carolina Department of Commerce. More than 7,000 U.S. farmworkers had registered with the agency actively seeking work — yet only 505 of them were referred to those jobs.
Kim Genardo, spokesperson for the department, wrote in an email that the state’s “Foreign Labor Certification program is absolutely in compliance with federal law.”
Across the country, employers have run ads that failed to list any contact information,omitted the name of the company, or excluded relevant information such as what kind of job it was, where it was located, or how much it would pay, records show.
Some simply don’t place ads at all.
For years, Linda White ran a business in Livingston, Louisiana, securing H-2 visas for hundreds of employers. Late last month, she was sentenced to 18 months in federal prisonfor creating phony receipts in an attempt to convince regulators she had placed newspaper ads for dozens of clients, when in fact she had not. During a three-year period reviewed by the Labor Department, her clients were approved for more than 8,000 visas, federal data shows.
In an interview, White called the matter “a mistake,” adding that “nobody was going to call for these jobs over dumb newspaper ads anyhow. When clients come to me, what they want is their Mexicans.”
The H-2 program dates all the way back to 1952, and employers have been coming up with ways to game the system for almost as long.
An information sheet from the Snake River Farmers Association in Idaho from the mid-1980s, obtained by a legal aid group representing farmworkers from Texas, offered a list of tips on how to write job postings so that they would deter American applicants.
“Irrigators or pipe movers is a great job description because no one wants to move pipe,” the fact sheet said. “Ranch Hands,” by contrast, is “a poor description,” the memo noted, adding: “One might get some adventuresome young ladies from Cincinnati seeking the thrill of working on a western ranch. With numerous applications from such U.S. workers, the employer would never get around to recruiting aliens.”
In response to a query from BuzzFeed News, Jeanne Malitz, a lawyer who represents the association, initially said it was “unaware of the source of this document, or whether it was published or ever disseminated” and disavowed its contents. Told of the document’s origin, she declined to comment further.
Despite all the obstacles, some U.S. workers do manage to find out about job openings at the companies that are seeking to hire abroad. But many of those companies set unusually stringent requirements — for their U.S. applicants, at least.
Even for entry-level jobs, or tasks as simple as picking melons, some employers demand that American applicants have months or sometimeseven years of experience, clean drug tests, high school diplomas, familiarity with botanical nomenclature, knowledge of diabetic cooking, multiple references, or commercial driver’s permits.
Despite the H-2 program’s focus on unskilled labor, employers seeking guest workers routinely demand previous work experience, further raising the bar for Americans. In recent years a full three-quarters of companies approved to bring in agricultural guest workers have listed such requirements, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of federal data. In some states — as geographically diverse as New York, North Carolina, Montana, and Washington — virtually all agricultural employers demand prior experience.
Such requirements are a way to “filter out U.S. workers,” said Lori Johnson, an attorney at Legal Aid of North Carolina. She noted that some fruit and vegetable picking jobs now require three months of experience. And, Johnson said, there is little evidence that such requirements are ever imposed on the foreign guest workers who ultimately get the jobs.
Some requirements also appear racially coded.
“I will keep my pants pulled up around my waist. I will wear pants and shirts that fit,”reads a document that Hamilton Growers required its workers to sign in 2013. “If I have long hair or extensions in my hair, I will fix my hair in such a manner that it can be placed under a hair net.”
Jon Schwalls, director of operations at the farm, said it was “ridiculous” to suggest that the language targeted black workers; those rules were about food and workplace safety, he said.
Early this year, the sign manufacturer Persona, of Watertown, South Dakota, obliged American applicants to take the Thurstone Test of Mental Alertness, which “helps measure an individual’s ability to learn new skills quickly, adjust to new situations, understand complex or subtle relationships, and be flexible in thinking.”
The 20-minute exam is often deployed to assess computer programmers, accountants, bank managers, andcommercial airline pilots, but Persona used it to evaluate — and reject — Americans applying for painting and welding jobs. A Labor Department official questioned whether the test “is going to be administered to foreign workers.”
A Persona official declined to comment.
When American workers showed up to apply for a job at Pro Landscape, in Hillsboro, Oregon, they were told they would have to dig a trench four feet long, a foot and a half wide, and a foot and a half deep within five minutes to be considered for the position, according to Labor Department records.
Manuel Castaneda, the company’s owner, called the task a “fair way” to see who was up to the job. But the Labor Department said the tests appeared “to not be normal” for the industry and to “be restrictive to U.S. workers.” Indeed, Labor Department records show that only five of the 18 applicants who attempted the tests passed. “The employer’s tests,” the department found, appear to have “discouraged U.S. workers.”
When Nicole Burt applied for work as a stable attendant in Kentucky, she was sure her experience and skills were unimpeachable. As a teenager in Vermont she showed, trained, and groomed horses, and no sooner did she graduate high school than she moved to the Bluegrass State in order to be in what she dubbed “the horse capital of the world.”
In early 2011, she applied to a dozen or so stables, she said, but none called her back. One of them was Three Chimneys Farm, a stately home for legendary thoroughbreds including the 1977 Triple Crown winner, Seattle Slew.
Three Chimneys, based in the town of Versailles, had told federal authorities it was “facinga distinct labor crisis and cannot locate or retain American workers” and that “all U.S. workers who express an interest in the employment opportunity will be interviewed for employment.” But when Burt called to check on her application, she was told no jobs were available.
“Basically we never hire US workers who are applying,” the farm’s director of human resources, LaTerri Williams, told the Department of Labor in a signed statement. “I don’t conduct interviews or take their applications. Basically I just tell them we have no openings.”
Nicole “Niki” Burt, at her home in Hustonville, Kentucky. Katie Simpson for BuzzFeed News
Asked by regulators why it didn’t give Burt a chance, as federal law required, the company stated that the single mother of three was better off unemployed than taking the $9.71-an-hour job. “Given the length of the commute, the cost of daycare, the loss of her eligibility for food stamps, it would cost Ms. Burt more to work for Three Chimneys than if she did not work at all,” the company said.
Burt said she never found another job working with horses, and in the months she waited, holding out hope that she’d get a call, she lost both her cars and her house. Almost four years later, the Labor Department awarded her $16,313 — the amount regulators calculated she would have earned at Three Chimneys had she been hired as the law required.
Three Chimneys did not respond to several requests for comment.
“I kept hearing the employers say that they couldn’t find anybody. And I just want to smack them, because we’re right here,” said Burt. “I felt betrayed. I just felt like America had let Americans down.”
The Westin Kierland Resort & Spa in Scottsdale, Arizona, was approved for 23 foreign housekeepers in 2012, arguing that the golf and convention seasons created a need from October to May. As required by law, the sprawling luxury resort, part of the $12 billion Starwood chain, placed ads for American workers in the Arizona Republic newspaper — but it rejected all five applicants. The company told the Labor Department that some failed to meet a one-month experience requirement.
The following year, however, when government inspectors contacted some of those rejected workers, a different story emerged. One applicant “revealed that she had over 25 years of housekeeping experience” and “used to run her own motel in Colorado,” investigation documents said.
The Labor Department ultimately ordered the Westin Kierland, which has a championship golf course, multiple pools, and a 900-foot “lazy river” spread over 262 acres, to pay a total of $13,500 in lost wages to two American workers it judged should have been hired. In a statement, Bruce Lange, Westin Kierland’s managing director, said the resort disagreed with the Labor Department’s findings but “chose to resolve the matter in order to focus our time and resources on caring for our associates and guests.”
Throughout the Midwest, corn detasseling is a popular summertime gig. So when D&K Harvesting filed a job posting in April 2013 — a step it had to take to win approval to import 120 H-2 workers — Katlyn Sanchez rushed to apply. The job, which involves removing the flower from cornstalks, typically draws high school kids and young adults.
But when the Kalamazoo, Michigan, teenager’s mother spoke to a recruiter over the phone a few days later, she was warned that it was “not a good situation for a young female worker alone,” according to a complaint later filed to regulators by Sanchez. “There will be all single men from Mexico” working alongside her, the recruiter later said, and her daughter “could get physically or sexually attacked.”
The recruiter added that D&K “will not be responsible for anything that happens” to Sanchez in the fields. Employers do not have the right to absolve themselves of workplace dangers, nor to decide that they’d rather not hire women. But the recruiter’s tactic worked: Sanchez’s mother agreed not to let her take the job.
The recruiter offered her approval: “I think you’ve made a good choice.”
D&K president Larry Marsh did not return several calls seeking comment.
Far off the interstate, perched under a big blue sky and surrounded by fields of fluffy cotton, Moultrie, population 14,000, feels frozen in time. Coffee can be found for less than a dollar. The charming central square is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And the town’s quiet old neighborhoods — some graceful, some ragged — are deeply segregated.
For many black men, job options are especially scarce. In the spring of 2012, Derrick Green, the father of six, had been unemployed and looking for work for several months, while his wife’s uncle, Derek Davis, 42, had trouble landing a job because of a pair of old drug convictions. When the two friends went together to the Moultrie branch of the Georgia Department of Labor to review job listings, both said they were desperate for work.
They were referred to Hamilton Growers, one of the area’s largest farms and one of the county’s largest employers, which had posted the openings as part of threeseparateapplications to import a total of 614 H-2 workers that year.
Along with roughly a dozen other folks, most of them black, Green and Davis submitted to drug tests and filled out applications. Picking squash under a relentless Georgia sun for$9.39 an hour is brutally hard and monotonous. But Green, who is athletic and slender, said he “learned to pick” as a child alongside his grandmother. Davis, a former U.S. Army mechanic, said he first toiled in the fields at 14.
It was June and already sweltering when they reported to work among lush crops rolling across the red clay. Rumbling old school buses transport workers to and from long rows where they stoop in the hot sun, picking squash, cucumber, and peppers.
Hamilton Growers is owned by the Hamilton family, which boasts that it has cultivated land in this area for six generations. The enterprise has grown into an agricultural behemoth, with more than half a dozen interconnected corporations and LLCs running each aspect of the business: While Hamilton Growers files H-2 visa requests to the Labor Department, Southern Valley Fruit and Vegetable sells produce grown on the land.
Beyond south Georgia, the farm also has operations inTennessee and in 2003 went international, cultivating hundreds of acres in a remote section of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
At the headquarters in Norman Park, a 20-minute drive northeast of Moultrie, a prominent plaque proclaims that the farm commits to “feeding the nations and providing a source of income for those who labor here, as servants of our Lord for His glory.” The chief executive, Kent Hamilton, is beloved by local youths for the zip line over his swimming hole. He is on the board of the nonprofit Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Foundation and has donated thousands of dollars to local elected officials, including former U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who lives in Moultrie and previously chaired the powerful agriculture committee.
Nearly two decades ago, Hamilton Growers began bringing in foreign guest workers. It’s a transition increasing numbers of farmers have made in recent years — often, as in Hamilton’s case, after complaining they had lost crops for want of people to pick them.
“You don’t save any money” by using H-2 guest workers, said Matt Scaroni, whose family owns Fresh Harvest, a farm labor contractor based in California that accounted for roughly one-fifth of all agricultural H-2 visas approved in the state last year.
Matt Scaroni at his home in Heber, California. His family has farmed in California for five generations. Melissa Wood for BuzzFeed News
By Scaroni’s calculation, housing, transportation, and legal costs, not to mention state and federal inspections and regulations, cost upwards of $4,000 to $5,000 for each guest worker “before they pick one fruit.”
In the past year, Scaroni said, Fresh Harvest has rented entire motels in Salinas to accommodate workers, along with apartments and traditional farmworker housing. The company has also been forced into once unthinkable expenditures, such as purchasing 3,000 new beds and launching a catering operation to provide meals, he said. In Salinas, he added, a paid cleaning service even visits many of the Fresh Harvest motels.
That’s a very different standard of living from that of many guest workers at Hamilton Growers. Some of them live in concrete dorms, others in rotting old school buses on cinder blocks in a forest near the grower’s packing operation, for which they say they must pay nearly $300 a month. In 2005, health inspectors told Hamilton Growers that its portable toilets couldn’t simply “have a hole cut in the bottom and a pit dug for waste.”
On a recent afternoon, some Mexican H-2 workers sat in the thick heat inside a dimly lit school bus and said that the company wasn’t paying them for all the hours they worked. None agreed to be named. “People are scared,” one of them said.
Their grievances echo those made by more than a dozen Mexican H-2 workers who suedHamilton Growers and Southern Valley in federal court last year, alleging that the companies had engaged in intentional wage theft. American workers eventually joined the suit.
The companies deny the charge, but earlier this month they agreed to pay $485,000 to settle the lawsuit because, Schwalls said, doing so was less expensive than litigating it.
He said that the company pays its employees properly and that its housing “meets and exceeds” federal standards. All bedrooms have central heat and air conditioning even though it is not required, he said, and there are no pit toilets at the housing site.
He expressed shock when told that workers had a receipt showing they had paid the company’s longtime foreman, who departed this summer, $296 a month to live in the school buses. “That is not our land,” Schwalls said. “I can only speak to those workers who choose company housing, which is at no charge to the employees.”
Some of Hamilton Growers’ H-2 guest workers pay to live in school buses near the company’s headquarters. Jessica Garrison / BuzzFeed News
Hamilton Growers has consistently maintained that it uses foreign workers not because they are cheaper or more pliant, but because there are simply not enough U.S. workers. “I would prefer to have an all-domestic workforce,” Schwalls said. “We hire 100% of the American applications we receive.”
But according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Hamilton Growersfired or pushed out “the overwhelming majority” of the 114 American field-workers it hired in 2009 — but “few to none” of the 370 Mexican guest workers. In 2010, the company hired 233 American workers and got rid of “nearly all” of them, yet almost none of its 518 Mexican H-2 employees lost their jobs. The story was the same in 2011, the government charged in a rare lawsuit.
In late 2012, the company agreed to pay $500,000, without admitting guilt, and entered into a consent decree, pledging to be “a model employer in the area of anti-discrimination and equal employment opportunity.”
Despite the settlement, Schwalls said the government’s claims were “completely inaccurate and false” and that it was only poor record keeping that prevented Hamilton Growers from proving that workers had voluntarily abandoned their jobs. “It’s just a family farm,” he said. “There was no understanding of the need for documentation.” Wal-Mart, which has been one of the farm’s customers, declined to speak for this story, while Green Giant didn’t respond to a request to comment.
By the time Derrick Green applied for the job at Hamilton Growers in 2012, he had heard rumors about troubles at the farm but was assured by staff at the local employment office that the company had mended its ways.
“They told me they was good now,” Green recalled.
Derrick Green in his home in Moultrie, Georgia. Kevin D. Liles for BuzzFeed News
He lasted just three weeks, he said, before he and a dozen other Americans were abruptly fired for not meeting production targets.
The workers protested, demanding to see some kind of accounting of their performance, but the company refused to provide it, Green recalled. “We had a big argument in that office,” he said. The dispute ended, he said, only after one manager pulled out a can of mace and another picked up the phone to summon the cops.
Schwalls said he could not comment on terminations of individual employees but insisted no one was ever threatened with mace.
This month, as part of their settlement of the suit brought by foreign guest workers, Hamilton Growers and Southern Valley agreed to pay 13 American workers, including Green, $1,500 each for claims that they were wrongly fired.
After their time at Hamilton Growers, Green and Davis returned to the employment office and were referred to J&R Baker Farms, another big vegetable grower in the area that has come to rely heavily on guest workers. In 2012, the farm appliedfor 160 H-2 visas, arguing there were not enough Americans who wanted the job.
Davis and Green were both hired. For the first few days, they say, the company made it difficult for them to work — by not sending the bus that was supposed to transport them to the fields or by dismissing them after just a couple of hours. On Green’s fourth day, the bus made an unscheduled stop at the front office, Green recalled, and a foreman told the Americans — but not the Mexican guest workers — to get off the bus. Nine Americans were fired that day, according to a lawsuit Green and others later filed against the company.
The entrance to J&R Baker Produce. Jessica Garrison / BuzzFeed News
J&R Baker too has been repeatedly accused of mistreating both its American workers and guest workers. In 2010, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour division fined the farm $136,500 and said it should pay $1.3 million in back wages. The farm eventually settled with the agency, agreeing to pay a fraction of those amounts.
In 2012, two dozen black workers sued J&R Baker, alleging that they were held to different production standards than H-2 workers and that many of them were unlawfully fired for not meeting quotas. The grower settled that case in February 2014, agreeing to pay up to $2,200 to each of the terminated employees.
Six months later, in a case similar to the one it filed against Hamilton Growers, the EEOCfiled suit against J&R Baker in federal court, accusing the grower of giving American workers fewer hours than guest workers and then firing them.
Among the plaintiffs who received $2,200 in the 2012 case is Fuller, the woman who said she wound up homeless after being laid off. Fuller said her firing was particularly painful because of her long relationship with the Baker family. She grew up on the farm, she said, and her grandmother was a nanny for the family. She said she took care of Jerod and Rodney Baker, the two current owners, when they were kids.
Back then, she said, they were “sweet little boys.” Sitting on a rickety lawn chair in front of her tiny home in Moultrie, Fuller frowned. “They grown now. They can do what they want.” She paused. “They mean.”
In an interview, Jerod Baker said his former workers’ allegations were false. They weren’t fired, he said — they quit.
“They’ll say anything, believe me. Half of them was either on drugs or coming to work late or smelling like a brewery,” he said. “They literally come out here with baggy pants, and they have to hold their pants up, and the other ones either have a cigarette in their mouth or a cell phone. How are they going to be able to work like that?” He added, “85% of them told me, ‘Screw this, we’ll keep getting our government check.’”
Baker vowed never to settle the lawsuit filed by the EEOC, even though, he said, fighting it is costing him a fortune. “The word on the street is go get a job with J&R Baker or Southern Valley, work for a few days, and quit — you can go sue them and then get you a check. That’s exactly what’s going on.”
As for Fuller, he said the idea that she was his babysitter was “the craziest bull sense of crap I ever heard.”
The heart of the issue, Baker said, is that domestic workers “can’t keep up with the Mexican workers. It’s just a disaster,” he said. “We would much rather hire American people in our own country to work, but they will not work.” Without legal guest workers or “illegal people” to work the fields, Americans are “either going to have to buy all our food from another country, or we’re going to have to all starve to death.”
A cabbage field near Moultrie, Georgia. Kevin D. Liles for BuzzFeed News
The H-2 program often pits one vulnerable group against another.
Last year, the South Carolina watermelon and blueberry producer Coosaw Farms was suedin federal court by black workers who allege their bosses told them “colored people just don’t work as fast as Mexicans.” The suit charges that Coosaw officials called its American employees “niggers” and made it easier for Mexican workers to meet production quotas. The farm also gave its H-2 workers access to nicer bathrooms, letting them wash their hands before lunch, the lawsuit claims.
Angela O’Neal, who helps direct the H-2 program at the farm, said she could not comment on the litigation, which is still pending, but added, “I can say that we do not, nor would we ever, tolerate a work environment that is anything less than respectful toward each and every employee.”
She added that “independent, third-party audits” — performed on behalf of buyers — “confirm that the company has a strong record of providing a positive and fair work environment for our employees, regardless of their nationality.” She declined to provide the audits, saying, “We do not own them and do not have the legal authority to share them.” In 2013, Labor Department investigators looked into a complaint that Coosaw had displaced domestic workers in favor of guest workers but found it was unsubstantiated.
Downtown Moultrie, Georgia. Kevin D. Liles for BuzzFeed News
Around Moultrie, the resentment goes both ways. Inside a sweltering school bus near the Hamilton Growers labor camp, Mexican workers complained that U.S. workers don’t have to work as hard as they do, aren’t required to work on Sundays, and often get released early — apparently unaware that the American workers want more hours, not fewer.
Many American workers, meanwhile, are resentful because they claim guest workers are stealing their jobs. But some Americans note that the workers who replace them get a raw deal too.
“It ain’t hard to see. As long as they out there on that farm, they must work, and they never get to leave. I felt bad for them,” Green said.
His uncle-in-law, Davis, said he feared that the lack of jobs might eventually force him to leave his home. Standing next to a trailer he is refurbishing on a family plot of land, Davis gestured out at the lawn and the quiet country roads slicing through green fields that stretch to the horizon.
“This is my country,” he said, “and I can’t get a break for nothing.”
![[icon]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small}
The Pronk Pops Show 656, April 12, 2016, Story 1: Open Borders Ryan Counts Himself Out — Going, Going, Gone — Trump and Cruz Supporters Want A Trump/Cruz Ticket (1150 Delegates For Trump and 850 Delegates For Cruz = 2000 Delegates! — United We Win, Divided The Establishment Ticket Wins — The Dream Ticket vs. The Corrupt Ticket — Keep Your Eyes On The Prize — The Long Winding Road — Or– The Party’s Over — Videos
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The Pronk Pops Show Podcasts
Pronk Pops Show 656: April 12, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 655: April 11, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 654: April 8, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 653: April 7, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 652: April 6, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 651: April 4, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 650: April 1, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 649: March 31, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 648: March 30, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 647: March 29, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 646: March 28, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 645: March 24, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 644: March 23, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 643: March 22, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 642: March 21, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 641: March 11, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 640: March 10, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 639: March 9, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 638: March 8, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 637: March 7, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 636: March 4, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 635: March 3, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 634: March 2, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 633: March 1, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 632: February 29, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 631: February 25, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 630: February 24, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 629: February 22, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 628: February 19, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 627: February 18, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 626: February 17, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 625: February 16, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 624: February 15, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 623: February 12, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 622: February 11, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 621: February 10, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 620: February 9, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 619: February 8, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 618: February 5, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 617: February 4, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 616: February 3, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 615: February 1, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 614: January 29, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 613: January 28, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 612: January 27, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 611: January 26, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 610: January 25, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 609: January 22, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 608: January 21, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 607: January 20, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 606: January 19, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 605: January 15, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 604: January 14, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 603: January 13, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 602: January 12, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 601: January 11, 2015
Pronk Pops Show 600: January 8, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 599: January 6, 2016
Pronk Pops Show 598: January 5, 2016
Story 1: Open Borders Ryan Counts Himself Out — Going, Going, Gone — Trump and Cruz Supporters Want A Trump/Cruz Ticket (1150 Delegates For Trump and 850 Delegates For Cruz = 2000 Delegates! — United We Win, Divided The Establishment Ticket Wins — The Dream Ticket vs. The Corrupt Ticket — Keep Your Eyes On The Prize — The Long Winding Road — Or– The Party’s Over — Videos
House Divided Speech
Springfield, Illinois
June 16, 1858
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
~Abraham Lincoln
The Green Papers
2016 Presidential Primaries, Caucuses, and Conventions
Presidential Nominating Process
Debate – Fox – Cleveland, Ohio: Thursday 6 August 2015
Debate – CNN – Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, California: Wednesday 16 September 2015
Debate – CNBC – Boulder, Colorado: Wednesday 28 October 2015
Debate – Fox Business News – Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Tuesday 10 November 2015
Debate – CNN – Las Vegas, Nevada: Tuesday 15 December 2015
Debate – Fox Business Channel, Charleston, South Carolina: Thursday 14 January 2016
Debate – Fox – Iowa: Thursday 28 January 2016
Debate – CBS – South Carolina: February 2016 (presumably)
Debate – NBC/Telemundo – Texas: Friday 26 February 2016
Debate – CNN – TBD: March 2016 (presumably)
Debate – Salt Lake City, Utah (announced 20 February 2016): Monday 21 March 2016
41st Republican National Convention: Monday 18 July – Thursday 21 July 2016
Vote
Pledged
Unpledged
Total
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16/R
The Beatles – Long and Winding Road (Plus Lyrics) (1970)
The Long And Winding Road
That leads to your door
Will never disappear
I’ve seen that road before
It always leads me here
Lead me to you door
That the rain washed away
Has left a pool of tears
Crying for the day
Why leave me standing here
Let me know the way
And many times I’ve cried
Any way you’ll never know
The many ways I’ve tried
To the long winding road
You left me standing here
A long long time ago
Don’t leave me waiting here
Lead me to your door
To the long winding road
You left me standing here
A long long time ago
Don’t keep me waiting here
Lead me to your door
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Olivia Newton-John – The long and winding road
Liz Wheeler: A Trump/Cruz Unity Ticket?!!
Limbaugh on Trump-Cruz “Dream Ticket”
Full Speech: Donald Trump MASSIVE Rally in Bethpage, NY (4-6-16)Donald Trump Bethpage New York Rally
Sen. Cruz: I am proud to stand with Donald Trump
How Can Trump Turn Things Around Race To The White House Hannity
Donald Trump Vs The Establishment New Found Love For Ted Cruz – Convention Chaos – Hannity
Buchanan: Trump, Cruz will not allow nomination to be taken
Pat Buchanan: Ted Cruz is a Trojan Horse for the GOP establishment
Digital Exclusive: Establishment Shuffle
Paul Ryan on GOP presidential nomination: ‘Count me out’
Paul Ryan – Count Me Out
Why Rule 40b might backfire on GOP establishment
Peggy Lee – The Party’s Over
Peggy Lee The Party’s Over Lyrics
It’s time to call it a day
They’ve burst your pretty balloon
And taken the moon away
It’s time to wind up the masquerade
Just make your mind up the piper must be paid
The candles flicker and dim
You danced and dreamed through the night
It seemed to be right just being with him
Now you must wake up, all dreams must end
Take off your makeup, the party’s over
It’s all over, my friend
It’s time to call it a day
Now you must wake up, all dreams must end
Take off your makeup, the party’s over
It’s all over, my friendIt’s all over, my friend
Pat Buchanan: Let’s face it, a Trump/Cruz ticket would set the country on fire
Via Breitbart, the key bit below starts at 6:30. When he says “set the country on fire,” does he mean people literally setting things on fire in rage over how much they hate a Trump/Cruz ticket? Because I can sort of see that. Trump’s numbers are flaming garbage, as you know, but check out Cruz’s numbers from the same poll:
What should we call that? Smoldering garbage? I’m a Cruz backer but I’m also under no illusion about how popular he is and isn’t among the general electorate. (Although the AP data here is from a poll of adults, not likely voters, please note.) Unlike Trump, he really would have a chance against Hillary this fall, but only because her own numbers are a smoking dumpster — and even then, he’ll have trouble flipping any of Obama’s blue states in 2012 to red. There is no ticket involving Trump or Cruz, let alone both of them, that sets the country on fire. There’s a ticket involving Cruz and someone not named Trump that might eke out a close victory if they catch some breaks. That’s your best-case scenario.
Buchanan’s logic here, if there’s any logic behind this, presumably is that a Trump/Cruz ticket would give the party its best chance at unity against Clinton this fall by reconciling embittered Trump fans and embittered Cruz fans. It would, for sure, eliminate the risk of a major third-party effort from one side or the other. But so what? What’s the prize for bringing the party together only to lose with 45 percent of the vote in a two-way race instead of with 37 percent in a three-way one? Trump/Cruz still leaves you saddled with all of Trump’s negatives at the top of the ticket, with all but the most hardcore Cruz-fan conservatives deeply disaffected with the direction of the party. It’s one thing for Trump to win the nomination by piling up votes in the primaries, it’s another thing for him to coopt the party’s leading conservative lights by bringing them onto his team to serve his agenda. Many Cruz fans would be enraged at him, I’m sure, for tossing his principles aside to join Trump, especially after Trump’s boorish nastiness towards Heidi Cruz. There’d still be a #NeverTrump movement, albeit a bit smaller than it is now as some strong Cruz supporters would eventually decide to suck it up and back Trump. How does all of this add up to setting the country on fire? Which swing voters, among whom Trump is toxic right now, are thinking, “No way will I support that buffoon — unless he puts Ted Cruz on the ticket, in which case ‘game on’”?
Buchanan does make one good point, though. If we go to a brokered convention, which seems likely, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Cruz agrees to accept the VP slot. Trump will lead on the first ballot; if he doesn’t clinch there, a bunch of votes will shift to Cruz on the second. If Cruz doesn’t lead on that one, he almost certainly will when more delegates become unbound on the third. Once he takes the lead, what incentive does he have to accept the number-two slot? You’d need to see some delegates shift back to Trump on the fourth ballot or fifth ballot, I think, and then have them end up in a protracted stalemate. In that case, Cruz might eventually cave and agree to be VP. (If only because, once there’s a stalemate, the odds of a dark-horse nominee will rise and Cruz will risk being left with nothing.) So long as Cruz maintains a lead among the delegates, though, he has no reason to bow to any other prospective nominee. If you want a Trump/Cruz ticket, it needs to happen with Trump winning on the first ballot.
Exit question: If you’re saddled with Trump as nominee, wouldn’t one of your top priorities for VP be finding someone who’s exceptionally personally likable, whom voters trust instinctively? They could look at the veep and tell themselves that if that person trusts Trump to run the country, maybe he’s worth taking a chance on. Ted Cruz has many good qualities. Being exceptionally likable isn’t one of them.
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/07/pat-buchanan-lets-face-it-a-trumpcruz-ticket-would-set-the-country-on-fire/
Rep. Paul Ryan’s Immigration-Reduction Report Card
Updated April 12, 2016
Printable Handouts
MEMBER PROFILE – PAUL RYAN
REP. PAUL RYANWISCONSIN (R)
CONTACT
RYAN AT A GLANCE
Rep. Paul Ryan was elected to the House of Representatives in 1998. Since his arrival in the House, he has been regarded by many as a rising star in a new generation of conservatives. However, his voting record as well as behind-the-scenes backing of an establishment agenda, reveals that he is one of the more moderate members of the House Republican Conference.
Before he ran for office, Ryan worked for Republicans Sen. Bob Kasten and Rep. Jack Kemp. He joined Empower America, a think-tank formed by Rep. Kemp and William Bennett, and became legislative director for Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. He then went home to Wisconsin where he won a seat in the House of Representatives at the age of 28. (National Journal)
Ryan positioned himself as a leading conservative voice on fiscal and economic issues during his tenure as chairman of the House Budget Committee. His budget plan, the Path to Prosperity, “called for freezing most domestic spending for five years and repealing the economic stimulus law in the course of cutting spending more than $6 trillion over 10 years, shrinking federal spending as a percentage of the economy to its lowest level since 1949.” (National Journal) The plan proved controversial with Democrats and the media, who took particular issue with the budget’s plan to eventually replace Medicare with a subsidy that used free market forces to drive down the cost while raising the level of care. (National Journal)
In the wake of his budget passing the House and promoting a more conservative roadmap for the nation’s fiscal future, Ryan was chosen by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as his running mate. Ryan was selected with the goal of brining a more conservative approach to balance out Romney’s moderate policies, and provide a more youthful demeanor to challenge President Obama, despite Ryan’s voting record. (Washington Post) While the ticket lost in the general election, Ryan was viewed as an asset to Romney’s efforts, providing substance on the campaign trail, reaching out to conservatives while staying loyal to Romney’s talking points.
After the election, Ryan returned to the House and pursued what was supposed to be a more pragmatic approach to policy, that moved Ryan closer to the center. He said that the presidential election reminded him that “[t]he Electoral College matters. That’s what I learned.” (National Journal) Ryan seemed to be increasingly concerned with creating a more geographically broad base for Republicans and his voting record tracked more to the middle. In December 2013, he helped broker a budget deal with liberal Senator Patty Murray that repealed one of the key conservative victories under President Obama’s reign — the sequester budget caps that helped keep spending in check. The Ryan-Murray budget increased fees, and claimed to reduce the deficit in the final years of the 10-year plan, making it unlikely that said reductions would ever be realized. (FreedomWorks) Simplified, Ryan-Murray was trading real spending cuts occurring at the time, for increased spending and spending cuts in future years, which are unlikely to materialize.
In the 114th Congress, Rep. Ryan became chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, where he plans to “fix the tax code, hold the I-R-S [sic] accountable, strengthen Medicare and Social Security, repair the safety net, promote job-creating trade agreements, and determine how best to repeal and replace Obama-care with patient-centered solutions.” (The Drive FM) He has announced that he would not run for president in 2016, choosing instead to devote his efforts in the House to leading the Ways and Means Committee. (FoxNews)
Reflecting his recent move toward the political center, Rep. Ryan has earned a poor Liberty Score.
There can be no doubt that some of Ryan’s prominent entitlement reform efforts—such as the introduction of the Medicare “premium support” proposal that garnered national attention during the 2012 election—have helped conservative solutions enter the forefront of political debate. He has similar success in landing a media spotlight on conservative welfare reform proposals, helping to jumpstart a conversation about the untenable state of spending in these areas. Nonetheless, these contributions to the mainstream dialogue do not excuse his often patently liberal votes. While championing fiscal sanity from his perch on Budget Committee, Ryan voted for an extension of unemployment benefits, for a bailout of the IMF, and several times to increase the debt limit with no discernible reductions.
In the pre-Tea Party days of Washington, Ryan quietly but firmly supported the No Child Left Behind Act, the failed big government approach to education policy, as well as the enormous Medicare prescription drug program. He opposes crony capitalism in theory, but this has not stopped him from endorsing bailouts for banks and the auto industry, as well as a failed stimulus package. He continually supports status quo transportation spending, and even led the charge in the House to make amnesty a reality.
Friendly Republicans will defend Ryan’s consistent moves to the middle as “pragmatic,” but the policy results are the same — gains for a big government agenda. (Mediaite) While Ryan may have an eye toward a more conservative governing vision, and would one day like to see that vision realized, it is a mistake to see him as an enemy of Speaker Boehner or the establishment — he simply provides no true contrast to their culture of surrender.
www.conservativereview.com/members/paul-ryan/#sthash.dq7BKFQa.dpuf
How GOP Could Still Steal Nomination From Trump Even If He Wins 1,237 Delegates
The 2016 Republican presidential primary has proven that anything is possible. Last year, no respected pundit worth their airtime would have predicted Donald Trumpwould be the front runner. After Tuesday’s win in Michigan and Mississippi, Trump now has 428 delegates and many say he is well on his way to securing the necessary 1,237 delegates to win the Republican nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
So, we wanted to know, even if Trump wins all the needed delegates, is there any possible way the GOP establishment could steal the nomination back from him? The answer is yes. It comes down to some intricacies on how the convention rules are set up, but these rules matter. It would certainly be unprecedented but given the rebuke of Donald Trump by the Republican establishment in recent days, anything is possible.
“There are many ways to undo a first ballot, even if you have the magic number assuming the Trump delegates are not really loyal. They may start out to be loyal and change their minds,” Elaine Karmack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute told LawNewz.com. Karmack is also the author of “Primary Politics.”
First some background on how the convention process would NORMALLY work — again, this is in your typical election. Delegates are bound by either state party rules or law to vote for the candidate who they are assigned to based on the primary or caucus in that state. However, they are usually only bound in the first round of balloting. After that, it varies by state, but delegates are eventually freed up to change their vote. For example in Massachusetts, Trump won 22 delegates. Those delegates are bound to vote Trump in the first round of balloting only. So you would think, if Trump wins 1,237 delegates or more, there would be one round of balloting and he would win the nomination. Trump is the Republican candidate.
So that’s how it normally works, but this isn’t a normal election. We’ve already heard some rumors of back room dealings going on by the GOP establishment. So here’s how Trump could still lose according to a variety of election law experts with whom we spoke. The delegates could vote to change the convention rules even BEFORE the first round of balloting takes place. That’s right, in the days leading up to the convention, the RNC Rules Committee could recommend rules changes to the Convention Rules Committee. That committee could tweak the recommendations but they they would ultimately have to send the new rules to the floor of the convention for a vote by the delegates. If the delegates vote to change the rules so as to ‘unbind’ themselves, then they could vote for whoever they wanted even in that first round.
“The delegates ultimately have the final say in the rules that will govern the convention. That may mean that they opt to unbind themselves, but a majority of them would have to agree to that,” Josh Putnam, an expert in this matter, and lecturer at the University of Georgia told LawNewz.com.
Now you might say — wait a minute — there are many states that require by law delegates to vote a certain way in the first round of balloting. For example, in Arizona, the law binds all 58 delegates to the winner of the March 22, 2016 primary election. How could the delegates just throw that all away at the convention? Well, because state law can basically be overruled by new national convention rules, according to most legal experts.
“Political parties operate like private clubs. This stuff isn’t law, it is a matter of state party and national rules and regulations,” Gregory Magarian, a elections law professor at Washington University at St. Louis told LawNewz.com. Simply put, the state rules/laws are not enforceable.
“Are the Arizona State troopers going to go to Cleveland and arrest people on the convention floor? I don’t think so,” Karmack said.
In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that parties are protected under the First Amendment right of association. Meaning, political parties are voluntary organizations so they can make their own rules. For more on this, see U.S. Supreme Court decision Cousins v. Wigoda .
“What can you do to (the delegate) if he violates state law? It is doubtful any such action to stop it would be upheld. Even electors can stray under the electoral college, which is a crime under some state laws. No such prosecution would be upheld,” Kenneth Gross, a DC based elections law attorney at Skadden, Arps told LawNewz.com. So bottom line, it appears delegates can change the rules to favor another candidate even before the first round of balloting.
In fact, there was an attempt in 1980 by Sen. Ted Kennedy to unbind delegates during the Democratic National Convention. The move ultimately failed but the Democrats adopted a rule which required delegates to vote in all “good conscience.”
“They recognized a situation in which you abandon the candidate (you are assigned),” Karmack said.
Of course, if this happened, you can bet that Donald Trump would take legal action to stop it. “It would be playing with fire if they take it away from him. You risk tearing the party apart if you take the nomination away from him in ways that are viewed as less then fair,” Putnam told LawNewz.com. Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee Chairman says the prospects of a brokered convention are “highly unlikely.” But again, nothing about this election is typical.
“The reason (the Republican primary) is so unusual is that people worry about Trump and his policies, they also worry that he doesn’t have the right temperament to be President,” Karmack said. She added that if there is a bombshell dropped about Trump in the next few months (as Mitt Romney predicted), that could be enough to push delegates to change their minds — or spur members of the GOP to start lobbying to change the rules.
http://lawnewz.com/important/how-the-gop-could-steal-the-nomination-from-donald-trump-even-if-he-wins-majority-of-delegates/
Zuckerberg criticizes ‘fearful voices calling for building walls’
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg criticized the “fearful voices calling for building walls” during his opening remarks at the company’s developer conference Tuesday in San Francisco.
The social media company’s founder and chief executive said the world has become a global community and warned against people and nations trying to isolate themselves — a possible allusion to GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who has heavily pushed a plan to finish building a wall along the Mexican border to limit the influx of immigrants coming to the country illegally.
“We’ve gone from a world of isolated communities to one global community, and we are all better off for it,” Zuckerberg said. “But now, as I look around and I travel around the world, I’m starting to see people and nations turning inward — against this idea of a connected world and community.”
He added: “I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as others, for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, reducing trade and, in some cases around the world, even cutting access to the internet.”
Adopting the rhetoric of a politician, Zuckerberg said, “It takes courage to choose hope over fear” and said the company would continue to focus on connecting people.
He did not mention any politician or nation explicitly. But during the speech, he briefly highlighted a number of policy issues including immigration reform, the Syrian refugee crisis, climate change and Ebola.
Zuckerberg has been a vocal advocate for immigration reform, including expanding a visa program for high-skilled immigrants. The Facebook founder’s name has even been invoked on the GOP debate stage as candidates argued over the issue.
Zuckerberg made his remarks during the opening of the company’s annual developers conference. He described Facebook’s 10-year plan, which includes connecting millions of people around the world with basic internet service, as well as making improvements to virtual reality and artificial intelligence technology.
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/275998-zuckerberg-criticizes-fearful-voices-calling-for-building-walls
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