Biden’s Union Push

Or maybe it’s Biden’s union putsch.

The Labor Department on Tuesday proposed a rule that aims to reclassify millions of independent contractors as employees. About 20 million Americans work as independent contractors, which have more autonomy than employees and can set their own hours and work for multiple companies at the same time.

But that autonomy is anathema to the Left: it’s much harder to unionize all those independent contractors, much harder to bring them under control until they’re created formal employees and so can be forced into unions in closed shop States. And make no mistake: the Progressive-Democratic Party is bent on eliminating all right-to-work laws so that every State becomes a unionized closed shop State.

This move by the Biden administration is just an early one on its path to making it easier to convert these free market jobs to mandatory union jobs. And to increase government control over average Americans and so to increase Party power.

Bank of England Fails

The Bank of England, in its panic over the British bond market repricing, is extending its intervention into that market. The purpose of the BOE’s intervention, though, is exposed by the beneficiaries of the move [emphasis added].

The central bank on Tuesday said it would add inflation-linked government bonds to its program of bond purchases after a fresh attempt on Monday to help pension funds failed to calm markets.

And [emphasis added]

The central bank first launched its bond purchases on September 28 in an effort to help pension funds that held large positions in derivative-based investments that were upended by the surge in UK government bond yields.

Clearly, the BOE is not in the business of maintaining a stable pound; it’s in the business of protecting special interests from the results of their foolishness—like “investing” pensioners’ and future pensioners’ money in risky vehicles like those derivatives.

The proper move would be for the BOE to stand aside and let the market do what it will—which is to say let the market investors, all of them buyers and sellers according to their own imperatives, do what they will according to their own, independently arrived at, imperatives. That will be painful during the (re)adjustment period, but the outcome will be what investors, with their pounds, say they want.

After all, a properly free and open market is self correcting; a government intervened-in market never can be. Aside from the fact that a centrally directed market cannot respond quickly enough, those interventions color those investors’ imperatives, driving them necessarily away from independent development. Such politically-created market distortions permanently block corrections from running to completion.

What Did They Think Would Happen?

The influx of illegal aliens into New York City is unsustainable, especially for the city’s schools. At least that’s the claim many involved in running the city’s education infrastructure are making, now that they’re being forced to accept the outcome of their city being a Sanctuary City for illegal aliens. For instance, Travis Civic Association President Gene Guerra claims that the school in his neighborhood is already “overflowing” and he’s unsure if the principal would be able to accept more students. He’s insisting,

There’s really no place to put these children.

Mayor Eric Adams (D) now complains that illegal alien (whom he cynically terms “migrants”) “crisis” that confronts New York City will cost the city at least $1 billion by the end of the fiscal year, and

My fellow New Yorkers, we are in a crisis situation[.]

What did these worthies think would happen when the city’s management, after deliberate, conscious, careful consideration, decided to make the city into a Sanctuary City, a status that Adams has so proudly continued?

Of course, the influx is entirely sustainable; as responsible officials, they prepared for the influx. Or were these Progressive-Democrats insincerely virtue-signaling with no intention at all of following through?

Visit the Border?

Nah. The border tsar was too busy noshing with mega-donors in Texas to take the time to go to the border and see with her own eyes the disaster the Biden-Harris administrating is inflicting on us. She has people to do that, with their eyes. Except, no, she doesn’t….

She did, though, spend her busy time speechifying.

Harris [joined] a conversation at the LBJ Presidential Library on Saturday to discuss abortion access, then [gave] a speech at a fundraiser for the Texas Democratic Party.

The LBJ library, in Austin, is just about 200 miles from the Rio Grande River, a bare 3 hours, more or less, by auto and even quicker via Marine Two. But it’s too much trouble for the woman appointed by President Joe Biden (D) to the responsibility of dealing with our border to spend half a day there, on the river, seeing the illegal aliens walking/wading across that border, illegal aliens that Biden, through his Press Secretary, yokked it up (skip ahead to 1:50) over the very idea that anyone walked/waded across.

“This is unsustainable”

That’s what the Progressive-Democratic Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, is saying about the influx of illegal aliens into his city, a city that is proudly sanctuary to illegal aliens. So he’s declared a “state of emergency” over that influx.

These are the statistics Adams is citing:

  • More than 61,000 people are now in city shelters, a near-record that officials say they will shortly exceed
  • Officials are renting rooms in more than 40 hotels across the city to try and keep up with the influx
  • Arriving families have enrolled 5,500 new students in New York City’s public schools, a jump from the previous tally of 3,200
  • [I]t will cost $1 billion to provide [the illegal aliens] with shelter space and social services

Never mind that more than 2 million illegal aliens have flooded across our wide open southern border this year—and the year is not over. The Dell Rio sector, which includes the city of Eagle Pass, had 350,000 illegal aliens come through. The El Paso sector is getting 1,000 to 1,300 illegal aliens per night.

And none of that includes the unknown number of illegal aliens who got across our border undetected, no does it include the hundreds of thousands of gotaways, those known to have crossed illegally, but escaped capture.

Nor does any of that include the massive amounts of drugs flooding across our southern border carried by so many of those illegal aliens.

Nor does any of that include the crimes the illegal aliens commit once across our southern border, crimes ranging from petty theft through vandalism to killing pets to killing livestock to robberies and murders. None of which the illegals bused to Adams’ sanctuary are doing.

Adams at least knows all of the illegal aliens he’s whining about sheltering in his sanctuary city.

Adams thinks what he’s getting is unsustainable. He needs to come down to the border, do a ride-along with the border patrol along the border, get out on the river with the border patrol—see what unsustainable really is. And quit his crocodile tears.