United States Farm Job Corps

The Department of Agriculture is a large government agency. They do everything from crop insurance to farm loans and assistance to rural housing which directly benefits over 2% of Americans (the percent of our labor force in agriculture) across the country. These are important and most should be continued because the free market will not insure farms because of the high risk which would cause premiums to be too expensive for most farmers.

I've done farm work and I know it is neither glorious or well-paying. But it is a job and an important part of the global economy. Because most Americans are very well educated the United States is full of workers who are severely overqualified for such work, since most Americans make more in a year than one can make on a farm (which is minimum wage). The current system means finding enough domestic labor to fill our surplus of jobs is impossible.

The current immigration system requires farmers to make an effort to fill positions before they hire foreigners in this country which given the number of people looking for such work is extremely difficult. For people who want such work they merely have to sign up at http://www.takeourjobs.org/ to get a job as a farmworker immediately. They were interviewed also on the Colbert Report which demonstrated how they are having a really hard time getting Americans to work to work on the farms. It is laborious, time consuming, and expensive for farmers to get the labor they need so many decide to forego the legal requirements and hire foreigners without the paperwork because they can't afford to wait 45 days because their crops need to grow.

Instead of putting burdensome regulations on our farmers across America we should change the system to make it easier for farmers to get the labor they need to stay in business. Instead of making it hard to get workers ICE and The Department of Agriculture could make a program where farmers can choose to post their jobs and are open first to Americans for the first week and then after that period the remainder will turn into visas for those jobs in particular open to foreigners. We might limit these workers to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, which will be politically feasible. The foreigners would apply through the American embassy in their country after which they would go through a background check from the embassy to ensure they are not dangerous at which point they would receive the visa valid for the extent of the position plus one month when they can freely work in the United States. Along with this any dependents under the age of 18 will automatically receive visas so they can attend school and their spouses will also receive a spouse visa. Employers will be required to pay for the transportation of their employees. I propose calling this program the United States Farm Job Corps which will help both small and large farms in our country.

Canada already has system like this called the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program which is a well-run program that protects workers and gives farmers the labor they require, which is something we should work on. This program is not identical however because it will also work for people within the United States and give Americans the first choice at farm jobs which will be politically feasible.

This will fix illegal immigration and create a solution so all farmers can get the labor they need, and illegal immigration will stop being such a major political issue. We should implement this policy soon to protect people and keep our agriculture running efficiently and ensure farmers treat their workers ethically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-2A_Visa The current farm worker program

The next 2 years,

Independence Day is a good day to look backwards at our accomplishments (emancipation, universal suffrage, civil rights, etc.) and look at what our country must do in the future. So that is my theme for today.

The United States currently has a large number of daunting problems/challenges, and a number of great opportunities:

1. Partisan gridlock and yellow journalism (the largest of whom are MSNBC and FOX) is tearing our nation apart. With such polarization it puts a lot of pressure on our leaders to lead extremely well to make it impossible for these pundits make them look bad or good depending on their point of view. Obamacare is a perfect example of how such biased reporting can skew people's opinions, as Kaiser points out where the majority of Americans don't know what Obamacare actually does. That the majority of Americans don't know what a major law does shows a clear failure in our country's media. Obama clearly needs to work on his PR.
2. Our two parties are at once closer than they should be and more distant than they have been in a long time. Everything the Democrats propose, even if it is taken practically word for word from a previous Republican proposal (like Obamacare and the Republican counterproposal in 1993) will be blocked from the Republicans. Most Americans when they turn on cable news get very biased and incomplete information about what is actually being proposed on the hill, and this furthers the partisan split as the Fox News watchers go one direction and the NBC folks go another. Very few people find the balanced center where you get the facts without the spin. This helps move our parties further and further apart in social issues with very little center in the middle, but on some issues like our constitutional freedoms (like the right to an attorney) neither the left nor right wing media is willing to tell the full truth and the parties further split on some core issues (like health care, whether there actually were weapons in Iraq, distribution of wealth and income, access to education, among others) and the coverage on some issues the media is so completely monotonous and frequently incorrect that there is little knowledge or debate about some pressing issues (like what should be done in Europe with the economy, Israel, North Korea, China, mass transit, among other issues). This force drives our two parties further to one side as they continue to get money from a select group of people that drive our policy. American policy is so much more diverse and there is so much more information about these issues than the media tells us, which eventually will be so clearly incorrect that a lot of Americans are going to be very disillusioned as the media grows further from reality.
3. We will need more parties and a new election system to represent the splitting of Democrats ("Old Democrats" and "New Democrats") and Republicans (Libertarians and Christian fundamentalists) which have such large differences between them that will make the parties unstable. If we don't I fear we will eventually have a situation like Canada in 2011 which will be devastating to the victors once the parties split. Changing our voting system will also help bridge the partisan divide because everyone can agree with the Libertarians on something, creating a bridge in congress between the two sides. It will allow more views to be represented in Congress that will be a more accurate picture of Americans' beliefs.
4. Our health care costs will continue to rise (though not as quickly as they have been) with Obamacare in place because it doesn't go far enough and it will need to be expanded upon and reevaluated.
5. Many students coming out of our education system today will be so unprepared to be in the world compared to their international peers because of the way the government finances and runs education which means it will need to be reevaluated. If we don't we will be beaten economically and our economy will suffer from the lack of knowledge our students will have.
6. We will need to reform our tax code so tax capital gains as regular income (like Australia) which will balance the budget and encourage investors to invest for the long-term so companies can use the money they give them, and give tax breaks to struggling American families to raise the demand curve. We will need to increase the incentives of businesses to hire people through taxes. If we don't our economy will remain unstable. This will also balance the budget. If we changed it we could become a very stable economy and surpass all other nations in economic growth.
7. Immigration reform will finish going through which will probably be more work visas for farm workers.

Happy Independence Day, let's make this country greater!

A Politically Inconvenient History of Immigration

I am currently taking American History II which spans from 1850-1914 at the local Community College. My book is highly uncensored, talking about all the major aspects of American History, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the politically inconvenient. I have read about my ancestors over the past few weeks, the Irish and German immigrants who settled in the Midwest and East Coast. They also hated the Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the West. According to The Irish Americans: A History 5 million German and 4.5 million Irish immigrants immigrated to America, with concentrations in the Midwest and New England. This was fiercely opposed to by the American "Know-Nothing" party. They used the arguments "steal our jobs," "take over our government" sending us all to the lower class. They wanted a ban on Irish and German immigrants to prevent us from destroying American culture. They didn't work in 19th century business jobs, they worked on farms, and if they were in a city they worked in factories or other low paying hard labor jobs. Their descendants now include most of the powerful people in America who are also descended from people who have been here for hundreds of years.


Fast forward 150 years. There are many immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Many come to work on farms where native-born Americans do not work anymore. They do not work in high-paying jobs and live in poorer areas of America. People opposing these immigrants use the arguments "steal our jobs," "take over our government" sending us all to the lower class. They want a ban on immigrants if not a strict quota to prevent them from destroying American culture.


This is not a new issue. People have been immigrating to America for years to escape poverty and famine or political turmoil in their homeland. Because of this, I am firmly opposed to laws that prevent hard-working people from moving to America. These are recycled arguments, and they are not running out as they should. Somebody in power needs to make this connection in a gigantic speech and destroy the racism that is prevalent in our nation.


There is one difference though between current immigration and historical immigration and it has to do with American foreign policy and economics. In the 1970s America started to cut down on the supply of drugs in America, but people who made the drugs in Central America kept making them. Because the demand didn't drop the cost of the drugs went sky high. In order to fulfill the demand for the drugs drug cartels are transporting drugs at high prices to fulfill the demand. They are the perfect capitalistic businesses, doing anything to fulfill the demand and make a profit. Not to say that drugs are not dangerous, because they are, but the economies of Mexico and Central America are not diverse or strong enough to stand up to the great demand for their dangerous resources. The governments of these countries do not have enough resources to cut down on the cartels and they run rampant.


This would be bad enough, but because we have strict immigration quotas that prevent good workers from migrating on a visa to work here that then as perfect capitalists fulfill the unfilled demand for work here in America they have to come over at places where they will not get their visa. Racist people in the media who oppose any immigration then make a false connection between the drug dealers and the farm workers which causes people to believe that their false connection is the truth. This makes political clout that prevents any reform to fix the problem. That is just what that side of the issue is, racist hence unamerican.


Another issue of this is that the workers on the farms who do not have visas then are not paid the same as their native born competitors which as businesses many farms will want the cheapest  worker to expand their personal income. They do not get any benefits and if any abuse happens they cannot go to any authority to report it because they will be returned to Mexico jobless and impoverished, back to square one.


How do we solve this problem? I think what we need to do is rewrite our immigration policy to allow workers to get visas to do farm work. Another bonus for everyone would be that the workers on visas would pay into social security and income tax, eliminating the argument that they do not pay for their government services. This would allow workers to report abuse on the farms and end their need to come across at unguarded and dangerous spots on the border. The only people who would come across at those spots would be drug dealers. If we write the law so that people coming across who are suspected to be drug dealers have to get their car sensed for drug fumes and then arrested than the problem with the drug trade would diminish. This would make the dangerous parts of Mexico and central American safer because the cartels would not have the money and power that they currently have. Everybody wins, except for the drug cartels.


America, the fate of the hemisphere is in your hands.

Israel

Israel is a great country. There are people of many ethnicities with Israeli citizenship. There is freedom of religion. There is freedom of speech and many different freedoms for all of her citizens.

However, the Gaza Strip and many parts of the West Bank do not have the same rights as Israel. They are led by terrorist organizations that do not have the good of the people in mind. By having citizenship for Muslims difficult, possible, but difficult to achieve most good citizens of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank cannot fulfill the requirements to become citizens of Israel. If there is to be peace, I think that everyone who has lived in Israel and Palestine since they were born or the creation of Israel should be offered citizenship without any other qualifications. This would take away a major recruitment tool from the terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah which would diffuse the situation. Israel will not fall if they do this because Jews are now the majority of the land. They would become like South Africa or the United States where there are many different ethnic groups coexisting with equal rights for all.

I believe Israel to be a good country. I believe that all peoples should have equal rights. I also believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a good Document to determine the most important rights. Peace is possible.

Tearing us apart from the inside

Anarchists, might sometimes sound amusing at what they say, but the system of government is the scariest of all the systems. Of 195 countries in the world 1 has what could be considered an anarchistic form, and that would be Somalia. Every other nation has the government involved in many things, infrastructure, education, public utilities, public goods, and other things that directly help the People. They currently have been eliminating funding for programs that go directly to the people, education is getting the axed with the saying of "budget" all the while people's incomes are being sucked up by health care more than anywhere else in the world (World Health Organization) and places where actual waste happen are not being targeted. We spend more money on military than any other nation except Israel (which is understandably spending a lot being in a region in complete turmoil and instability) while we are in the safest part of the world. This goes back to my previous previous post "Of, By, and For the Rich" where the rich can buy these "fiscally conservative" tea party members to get billions of tax payer dollars sent to the politically powerful.

But what actually disturbs me about this is that they do not focus a lot of energy into making government more efficient. Every American should look at the US Immigration system which is I hope the most convolved part of the law. Also, why does the tax code have to be 16000 pages long? That seems bloated and if it were simplified by removing the lobbyists' sections the government would not have a deficit and everyone's taxes could go down, stimulating the economy, and decreasing the amount of bookkeeping necessary to keep the government running. If they really were proponents of small government they would have this on their platform. They don't which tells me that this isn't what they are concerned about. They then must be the lobbyists' best friend.

One idea I have is that Social Security should not be mandatory. Many people do not want the paychecks. If they do not want the help they should not be forced to have it. It should be a voluntary basis though because some seniors live on social security paychecks and they keep them from being a burden on their families. Those seniors' families benefit greatly by the paychecks for their years of work and the seniors live better lives.

Also, on welfare, there is a lot of waste in the system. Many people get their welfare checks and spend it on things that should not be covered, such as big luxuries, cigarettes, drugs, and other things that should not be covered. Welfare should be designed to give people enough money to live when they are down on their luck so that they can recuperate from an injury, or some other condition. Welfare should be designed so they can buy things that they need and other things that give them the information they need to stay on top of the news. Things like food, newspapers, internet, cable, books, toiletries, pet supplies, fuel, basic insurance, and inexpensive electronics so that they can stay on top of current events and developments, but do not buy luxuries that they wouldn't afford otherwise. It should be seen as an intermediate step and they should spend their welfare dollars on a debit card. They should be allowed only $100 of cash from the debit card and an upper limit of the current cost of living so that they cannot overspend or purchase things that are not necessary. This would eliminate the waste that happens saving billions of dollars that are wasted.

Education should not be cut. Education is the one part of government services where I do not see any real waste because, excluding teacher's salaries, every penny goes directly to maintenance and education. It should be the last to be cut because it is where students should learn the skills necessary to succeed in the modern world. Education should be looked at as the greatest investment of them all because through it our economy becomes stable through our future leaders and professionals, no matter what their career, get the jobs they need to keep our country running. It should train students to be active members in society and know how society works, which it has not been designed to do with the emphasis on testing and the removal of High School Civics several decades ago. The reforms have made the curriculum less preparing for what we are going to need as adults with many concepts, like economics, psychology, and political science being removed to dumb down the curriculum. An attitude change is needed here. Children are brought up by our culture to think that school is a chore and not supposed to be fun. It should be more focused on preparing children for being world citizens than passing tests and going to college. The culture of high school sends students to college who then go on to do careers that do not require college education for their entire lives, which forces up the demand curve for college, making those of us whose careers require advanced degrees have to spend more than we should. Many of the "college-bound students" should go to trade schools. Most programmers for instance should go to trade schools because they are prepared for their careers. Once high school prepares people for the responsibilities of citizenship and adulthood, career training would be all that is required for productivity and full societal participation. This would save society billions of dollars for society and save years of time and tens of thousands of dollars each for many young adults in unnecessary college tuition.
     Also, school districts across the country should get the amount of money that they need to have state of the art equipment, up to date textbooks, up to date school buildings, and an environment that tells students that America cares about their futures. Rural school districts have to scrounge for money to replace out of date equipment all the time while rich school districts get their computers replaced all the time. Every school district should have the same high standard of education that is appropriate for the richest nation in the world. China is still a long ways behind us in GDP.

What they are doing is eliminating the very programs that allow the people who are not rich to not go bankrupt, the same programs that raised the United States from an agrarian nation to a first-world industrialized superpower are being put first for cutting. These things are so ingrained in society that many do not realize the impact these have on our society today. This makes the number of lobbyists fighting for them small, while the corporate interests in the military-industrial complex are very interested at more arms sales, because they get richer.

This would look like corruption but it also shows a purposeful lack of care for what happens in the future and a hatred for government. Some civilizations fall from invaders and some fall from revolution. Others fall from internal vandalism to society's structure. They are destroying American's acts of citizenship through a massive propaganda machine spreading fear through lies, i.e. the so-called death panels. By destroying all of the things that our country is built on they are effectively destroying our country by bringing our society from the level we share with Western Europe to the only country on the face of the planet that does not provide any services for its citizens, Somalia. This is treason and must be stopped.