It’s not news that Donald Trump is a fraud, nor that he has poor record of practicing what he preaches. Still, I feel compelled to highlight his employment practices every time a new story emerges detailing his propensity to hire undocumented or foreign workers over American applicants.
For years, President Donald Trump has insisted it’s impossible to find Americans to fill seasonal jobs at his hotels, resorts, and wineries, leaving him no choice but to hire foreign guest workers instead.
“You can’t get help,” he has said.
But government records obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal for the first time that at least 58 US workers applied for the temporary jobs as cooks, servers, and housekeepers at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump resorts from early 2014 through mid-2018.
Only one of them appears to have been hired.
The last time I harped on this issue was back in January when I lamented that Trump’s use of undocumented workers should be a bigger scandal, but even then I admitted that I’d probably be moving on to focus on the next outrage, just like everyone else.
Perhaps it’s just a personal quirk, but I am especially galled by this particular brand of hypocrisy. I think it’s because it gets to something that goes beyond my political disagreements with the president or even people with a conservative viewpoint. If they aren’t worried about environmental degradation or access to health care, I can somewhat respect their opinions even if I think they’re cruel, short-sighted, or based on faulty information. If they actually like the president’s style and are mostly pleased with his results, I can almost write that off as a difference of priorities and taste.
But I have real trouble getting past examples of the president doing things he professes to despise and that he’s premised his entire political career on stamping out. I don’t much care if the president hires undocumented people to manicure his fairways and greens, and I don’t mind if he wants visiting Irish students to wash the dishes at Mar-a-Lago. It’s the people who make up his most fervent base of supporters who are supposed to care about these things, because it’s taking the jobs of hard-working patriotic Americans. He’s not putting them first. They should realize that he’s conning them, and they should be angry about it.
It makes me a little crazy that he gets away with this, and I just wish that one day the scales would fall from more people’s eyes.
Instead of giving jobs to local workers, the Trump properties applied for permission to bring in more than 375 low-wage workers from abroad on short-term visas. All of the requests were approved by the Department of Labor, the records, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show.
The BuzzFeed article focuses on Trump turning down American applicants in favor of foreign workers on short-term visas, but this is legal and only half of the “problem.” He has consistently relied on undocumented workers who do not have visas, and that isn’t legal. Both of these practices fly in the face of Trump’s whole political raison d’être.
And, yet, Gallup says that 89 percent of Republicans approve of the job he is doing. It’s like some prion disease or brain virus has infected almost half the country.
Here is more evidence that the Republicans are suffering from some prion disease.
Geez, had to look that one up. Brand new site and now you want to raise everyone’s intelligence!
Anyway I agree. He is a freaking hypocrite. But here’s the thing. As our temperature increases it will likely increase migrations to escape the possible deadly heat and crop failures. Great opportunity to invest in the Trump Superior Fencing Company. Someone should tell him and his friends they are missing a thing here to get rich.
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Obligatory to mention at the end: The American workers who aren’t getting jobs at the Palm Beach County properties are black and brown, the H1b visas are for Romanians. In this Trump is not catering to Southern whites, who are pretty comfortable having black servants, as you know, but to people more like himself, the Arab, Chinese, and Russian customers.
Guest worker arrangements are supposed to be the future of much work in the US.
You can read a substantial amount about it on http://policyspace.xyz/external under categories like movement of natural persons, labor mobility, GATS Mode 4, and so on.
This has been planned since the 1990s and has been in negotiations off and on since then. If these negotiations had been less contentious with all sorts of issues only very slowly getting resolved, the shift would have happened around the same time as NAFTA was offshoring the factory jobs.
But its been delayed for basiclly two decades, and its only been recently that it seems to be moving forward again. We can be pretty certain that whoever wins the next Presidency wll implement this huge potentially disastrous change. . You can read about the math and their rosy predictions for increased profits. They are blinded by this small insular echo chamber of neoliberal economists who ae ignoring a lot of research that have thrown many of their cherished assumptions into disrepute. As they explain it, we’ve been throwing trillions of dollars away in wages that are way too high.
By trading all these jobs away they hope to stabilize Africa, Asia and South America, propping up a bunch of countries with lots of raw materials and authoritarian, very unequal governments. Specifically helping them repay their Third World Debt.
Large numbers of US workers will have to find new employment under this system, competing with a lot more people for the same jobs all around the world.
This is probably why Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wanted the student loans to be forgiven. (We would have to pursue the Article XXI procedure to amend our GATS committments in financial services to do so however which would be very costly and greatly reduce their influence over these countries in areas like pharmaceutical prices.,)
It will be absolutely horrible for young people to have to repay loans under these circumstances.
A couple of years ago, in the early 2000s there seemed to be a lot more concern than today about the losers of globalization.
Since the country was never informed this was being done there was never any debate when it could have been changed in the early and mid 1990s.
I should mention that Bernie Sanders was always against these programs which he called modern day slavery. (Thats 100% true)
But he made a big mistake not providing more information about why and how and even just the fact that these things were being done whether we liked it or wanted it or not. And that they would lock in forever, out of the reach of voters.
That was his big fatal mistake. One that is going to stick in the minds of a lot or people, they are likely to blame it on him (wrongfully, hes just way too nice to people who dont have the slightest clue that what they are doing will literally kill people. Expecially nonwhite people who worked really hard, ten times as hard to get their public jobs. This system has no mercy.
They really should blame it too on all the previous Administrations going back to the early 80s. Not just the Administrations that signed these deals or hid them. What are they hoping to get out of it? Basically they are doing it to increase the value of dollar denominated investments. For a long time its been explained as a Trilemma. Dani Rodrik calls it the “Inescapable trilemma of the global economy”. So these trade agreements which implement the theft of democracy and lock it there so tight that even total changes in governments dont release countriues from these obligations. That would make it too easy for the Corporate State. Not Delaware, I am not talking about Delaware, I mean a global corporate state made up of the new global economic governance organizations that control the planet now. (See http://www.levyinstitute.org/conferences/minsky2011/presentations/Wallach.pdf ) Our abdication of so much policy space to them in the hope of excluding all of humanity by stealth really are proof that the US and most other rich countries other countries are really controlled 100% by corporations now, with the governments really just being there to implement the laws that the corporate lobbyists write.
A film that shows how destructive this is to human lives is “Fire in the Blood” (which you can stream on the major services, I highly recommend that everybody reading this watch it now, because this is on the verge of happening again and of being enabled very greatly by the US, and this time we wont get off with just a few thousand AIDS patients dying because they couldnnt afford a 15,000 drug. By outsourcing jobs they literally change the value of human life making peoples lives basically not worth saving, legally. This is why anything other than a complete change will become a nightmare under the current system which is obsessedby profit. By artificially jacking up the prce of healthcare, housing, heating, water, etc, makes the simple act of survival impossible for the ever growing number of jobless, priced out of the job market by their rights and “unrealistic exectations”
Its hard to believe but the drug industry stood idly by as as many as 10 million poor Africans dies of AIDS before it was brought out into the open that the drugs that could have saved their lives, which were being priced at around $10,000 a year for the rest of somebody’s life, could be made and sold profitably for around $100/year. Of course corporations make a killing. Things like that story illustrate why the US wants more control over developing countries. If we had that control, CIPLA never would have been able to make and sell that $100 drug. One day its insulin, the next coronavirus.
Drug sales are extremely profitable. Its an area where the huge gains given the oligarchs by technology have not been shared. And they have no intention of changing, and they are experts at deception. All the deception an incredible amount of money can buy.
Contrast it with electronics, where chips double in value for money, in computing power for the same price every 18 months. Thats what drugs should be doing but never will.
The implication is both freedom, freedom from work, but under the current system its likely to lead to slavery because peoples labor becomes worth sovery little once a computer can do it. Overnight.
Jobs that cannot be automated now will be within two or three years. Thats what the real battle is all about, who will own the future. The 20th century was relatively compassionate because of a general shortage of labor and the fact that industry needed skilled hands to run its expensive machinery.The cost of computing hardware and the feasibility of automating jobs has a huge influence on the value of human labor. Now we have software that analyzes problems and then literally writes itself Creating a binary blob that will solve a problem, based on what information it has analyzed, an unauditable dense binary blob that arbitraily makes decisons consistent with the ones made by the highly skilled humans who had trained it. I have applications like that. They can recognize images and spit out a good description of what is happening. We have come very far in just the last few years. This is the future. This is why the corporate state picks the kinds of opaque and insipid candidates it does today. It really does not want intelligence. Anything but that. Soon the question will come up, why educate Americans when there are no jobs for them? They already have unrealistic expectations, why make it worse?
And indeed that is what is happening right now.
Lets remember that how we treat others eventually ends up being how we are treated ourselves, maybe sooner than we think.
We have to somehow do better. We’re not ging to be able to just vote to reverse the changes that are being made, they are locked in stone by international treaties, because now corporations get certainty, people are basically markets to be bought and sold which cannot be devalued. We have no standing Thats what they have done . We’re all in this together. Unless Democrats and Republicans unite against this monster, we are doomed. “Oh, its only the other group that is dying” The sock puppets are paid to pretend they are dozens of people and they play both Republicans and democrats. Thats what they do.. they make obscee amounts of money to confuse issues like health care, hiding all of the things that might open peoples eyes to whats really going on, like the 1995 services deal. The media wont cover it, at all. Because they are literally taking over the world. I’m not joking. This is real.
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
What do we need to do, get out of these agreements before they make it impossibly costly. the US TR has to file the intent to do it in Geneva. By the way the guest worker visas are non-immigration, officially, Only Congress can determine immigration, when people come here to live permanently, not just work for five years because they are cheaper, that is not considered to be immigration any more. Thats work it will become the default kind of labor. Like it already is in the Middle East, and many other countries in Asia.. Thats the model they want. Soon the WTO will be in charge of it so then its not possible to influence it by voting. The door to ecape could shut very soon because of the DS503 case.
The only way the mass of impoverished and destituted Americans will be able to get help after all the jobs are traded away – and become entitlements of trading partners that cannot be taken away, no matter how few jobs there are for the Americans is -. Read the Thirteenth Amendment.
This is not unusual, except during the job scarce 20th century. (which still had a very bad problem with it. Now there are more slaves than ever before.. many countries economic miracles including that of West Germany, were powered by slave labor.
Thats what trade agreements do, thats their intent. Profit. Capture of policy space. It makes no difference if they pay the guest workers a living wage, they are working for cheap to get a decent resume. Often their parents pay their rent. yes,its very unfair.
There is no safety net. GATS makes subsidies of all kinds FTA illegal unless they are absolutely the minimal possible. Bernie was not just trying to get affordable healthcare, he was trying to save millions of healthcare jobs from being offshored and outsourced like so many others will be. By excluding at least that sector. Al roads lead to guest workers, you will real;ize. The whole world is doing this and hiding it by similar methods. Dont discuss it openly, you might disturb the animals. Ive been told that.
Only the 100% noncommercial service sectors with no competition are exempt, otherwise the subsidy means OUTSOURCE THIS. Only services supplied in the exercisef governmental authority” (official legal definition) are exempt. . Increasingly, Poltics is just for the political not the economics. Wars and stuff. Corporations get control over everything economic, and in exchange they get captive policy space. They get the certainty, the people get the precarity. GATS is the end of democracy.
This is about Article XXI https://www.ictsd.org/sites/default/files/downloads/2009/04/suspension_of_concessions_in_the_services_sector.pdf