This page was last updated on July 9, 2018.
Does This Have to Be This Way?; Carl Davidson (KD); Facebook; June 24, 2018.
You can learn more about BCR’s leftster management here. “Leftster” is the combination of leftist and gangster, inspired by the left-originated “bankster.”
“DOES THIS HAVE TO BE THIS WAY? No, not at all. A serious government could clean it up permanently with a Green Jobs program that would put everyone to work. The payoff would be huge, not only quality of life, but tourism and recreation businesses of all sorts. We could even welcome a new influx of immigrants to work on it and living in our currently underpopulated river towns. But we need a Green Jobs majority at all levels of government to get it. Democrats who want to run on more than dumping Trump, make this part of your core message. h/t Nancy O’Leary”
KD’s post links to “The Ohio River - Most Contaminated Body Of Water In The Country.”
[RWC] “We could even welcome a new influx of immigrants to work on it and living in our currently underpopulated river towns?” Like when Chinese were brought to the U.S. to work in mines and build railroads?
How would our rivers be cleaned up permanently?
According to a 2009 Pew Research report titled “A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States”:
· “Adult unauthorized immigrants are disproportionately likely to be poorly educated. Among unauthorized immigrants ages 25-64, 47% have less than a high school education. By contrast, only 8% of U.S. born residents ages 25-64 have not graduated from high school.
· “An analysis of college attendance finds that among unauthorized immigrants ages 18 to 24 who have graduated from high school, half (49%) are in college or have attended college. The comparable figure for U.S.-born residents is 71%.
· “The 2007 median household income of unauthorized immigrants was $36,000, well below the $50,000 median household income for U.S.-born residents. In contrast to other immigrants, undocumented immigrants do not attain markedly higher incomes the longer they live in the United States.
· “A third of the children of unauthorized immigrants and a fifth of adult unauthorized immigrants lives in poverty. This is nearly double the poverty rate for children of U.S.-born parents (18%) or for U.S.-born adults (10%).”
Unless KD’s idea of permanently cleaning up our rivers is about picking up trash, his “new influx of immigrants” is a mismatch.
Permanently cleaning up the Ohio River is not like organizing and executing a clean-up day for Bradys Run Park, something a friend and I did in the early 1970s. My guess is the vast majority of the labor required to clean up our rivers would be in the form of well-educated engineers and scientists redesigning processes and equipment.
If your primary concern is for working Americans and unemployed Americans (includes all legal residents) who want a job, you don’t want an uncontrolled flood of undereducated and unskilled immigrants who can’t speak English to enter the U.S. job market. It’s commonsense and simple high-school economics.
What happens to the “new influx of immigrants” after the “Green Jobs program” “permanently” cleans up the Ohio River?
What is an “underpopulated” river town?
Here are excerpts from a few Facebook posts by KD over the last seven months. Click on the date/timestamps for the full posts.
1/31/18 @ 12:19am: “Take unemployment, yes, the rates have continued the drop from Obama’s reversal of the decline after 2009. But what Trump left out was that those no longer counted in the labor force have grown larger since he took office. Or take wages: the current rate of upward change - very slight to begin with - has slowed down since its uptick under Obama. In either case, the average has been basically flat since Reagan.”
1/14/18 @ 9:03am: “ANOTHER BUBBLE GETTING READY TO POP? Let’s see how well the Marxist monthly does in getting things right in the year ahead. Here’s a snippet:
“‘On the flip side of that euphoria however, is the fact that the median wage rose just 2.4 percent and has remained effectively stagnant relative to inflation. And although the unemployment rate fell to a 17-year low of 4.1 percent, the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.7 percent, its lowest level in nearly four decades - particularly difficult for new entrants to the workforce, such as students graduating under a $1.3 trillion pile of unrepayable or very challenging student loan debt.’”
11/23/17 @ 2:33pm: “WE’RE TOLD THE UNEMPLOYMENT PROBLEM IS OVER. Because it’s at 4%. If it goes below that, the Fed will take measures to get it back up to four, since a ‘too tight’ labor market means wages go up. Can’t have that. In any case, the numbers are cooked by placing whole batches of people ‘outside’ the labor force altogether. Hence the headline [Thanksgiving help for the homeless: ‘We haven’t seen numbers like this since the Great Depression’] on this informative article.”
If KD’s correct in these posts, does it make sense to bring in “a new influx of immigrants to work on” his “Green Jobs program” when we already have too many unemployed and “the average [wage] has been basically flat since Reagan.” In a separate review, I addressed the labor union flip-flop from strong border and immigration law enforcement to “NO BORDERS.”
Heck, if the info in the subject piece is correct, just shut down the Rockport (IN) Works of AK Steel and you whack 70% of the “23 million pounds of chemicals … discharged into the [Ohio] river in 2013.” The piece didn’t say how much of the “23 million pounds of chemicals” is harmful.
What “tourism and recreation businesses of all sorts?” Up through the early-1970s, the Beaver and Ohio rivers in this area were covered with motorboats and water skiers when the rivers were a lot more polluted than they are today. That changed with the double whammy of increasing gasoline prices and the collapse of local industry and its high wages.
In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity. <g>
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