The Booming Economy

I certainly am not surprised about this report of banks importing foreign workers while at the same time the system was going down the shitter.

Why should I be surprised? When companies couldn't outsource jobs for cheap labor, they'd "insource" the cheap labor to undercut workers here.

This really and truly is criminal behavior:

The dozen banks now receiving the biggest rescue packages, totaling more than $150 billion, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions that included senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers, junior investment analysts and human resources specialists. The average annual salary for those jobs was $90,721, nearly twice the median income for all American households.

As the economic collapse worsened last year — with huge numbers of bank employees laid off — the numbers of visas sought by the dozen banks in AP's analysis increased by nearly one-third, from 3,258 in the 2007 budget year to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.

The AP reviewed visa applications the banks filed with the Labor Department under the H-1B visa program, which allows temporary employment of foreign workers in specialized-skill and advanced-degree positions. Such visas are most often associated with high-tech workers.

The H1B program has been abused for years solely to undercut white-collar workers. And honestly, white-collar workers didn't bitch when blue-collar jobs were being sent overseas. We kept hearing the mantra of the blue-collar workers being "retrained" for the "new economy" jobs, which in turn would disappear eventually. Now there's virtually NOTHING to be retrained for, except perhaps in health care, but many of THOSE workers are also foreigners.

In the end it's all about greed and destroying what middle class we have left in this country in order to turn this into a third world paradise for the zillionaires and their political hacks. Now that so many people are laid off and have NO income apart from measly unemployment insurance, the whole house of cards has collapsed. Third world country workers who received the stolen American jobs themselves cannot even buy the products they make; the products were made SOLELY for the American consumer market. Well, that's gone with all of these AMERICAN workers being laid off.

It's payback time, and people are going to get madder and madder. Yours truly saw this class warfare be instituted against working-class and middle-class workers when Reaganomics took hold. There's no shock in this neck of the woods about the banks doing the same thing.

(H/T Cannonfire)