Mountain Views News, Sierra Madre Edition [Pasadena] Saturday, April 14, 2018

B4

OPINION

Mountain Views-News Saturday, April 14, 2018 

JOE GUZZARDI

Mountain Views

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DISMAL JOBS REPORT LOST 
AMID BREAKING NEWS

The March Bureau of Labor Statistics report was a 
disappointment, with the economy adding only 103,000 jobs. 
March’s poor performance deflated the enthusiasm February’s 
report generated with its 313,000 new jobs, the biggest increase 
in 1-1/2 years. From the 320,000 revised February total, the 
jobs created drop-off measured 66 percent. Since January, 
monthly new employment averages are 202,000 - not terrible, but nothing to shout 
about.

 As usual, apologists dismissed the employment report’s palpable downside, 
blaming it on cold weather, a favorite villain. Completely and purposefully 
overlooked is a more important yet unmentionable variable - federal immigration 
policy that admits about one million legal immigrants who receive life-time valid 
employment authorization documents which permits them to work in any job 
category, and dramatically expands the labor market. Too many workers compete 
for too few jobs, forcing many Americans who would like to be employed to the 
sidelines. In March, the number of Americans not in the labor force, measured 
month over month, increased by 323,000 to more than 95 million.

 On top of the one million average, historically high immigration levels, the U.S. 
grants between 750,000 and one million employment-based guest worker visas 
which makes job seeking for at-risk unskilled and under-educated Americans more 
challenging. For young Americans, immigration means one green card per every 
four who turn 18 and become full-time employment candidates.

 Moreover, prime-age American male employment is in long-term decline. A 2016 
White House report, prepared during President Obama’s administration, revealed 
that foreign-born prime-age men participate in the labor market at higher rates than 
the native-born. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City predicted that prime-
age Americans may never return to the employment market. Lawful permanent 
residents’ participation rate has risen over the last two decades by 1.4 percentage 
point, while the native-born prime-age male participation fell by 4.4 percentage 
points.

 When viewed through accelerating automation’s prism, the one million annual 
work permits issued to newly arrived immigrants becomes indefensible. Recently, 
a respected think tank, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation 
and Development, found that in the near future 13 million American jobs will be 
lost, mainly in manufacturing and agriculture, and principally among the young and 
economically vulnerable.

 For Congress to continue decade after decade, as it has since 1990, to authorize 
millions of new U.S. workers is obviously flawed, and detrimental to the American 
labor force, both employed and unemployed. Since 1990, federal immigration laws 
have provided about 25 million work permits to newly arrived lawful permanent 
residents.

 Tight labor markets, in other words, less immigration, is good for American 
workers. For the unemployed, reduced immigration means that more jobs will 
eventually open up. For the employed, wages will increase. In his speech to business 
leaders, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Board president Neel Kashkari told business 
leaders to stop whining about worker shortages, and start raising wages.

 Despite the incontrovertible connections among a loose labor market, high 
immigration, tepid employment reports and stagnant wages, analysts refuse to 
include congressionally mandated immigration into their analyses. The U.S. accepts 
more immigrants than any nation, and will always be welcoming. Wanting Congress 
to pass immigration laws that help, not hurt, U.S. workers isn’t anti-immigrant, but 
rather pro-American.

-

Joe Guzzardi is a Progressives for Immigration Reform writer and researcher. Contact 
him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org. Find him on Twitter @joeguzzardi19.


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LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

JOHN L. MICEK

MAKING SENSE by 

MICHAEL REAGAN


CONGRESS NOT UP TO 
THE TASK OF TAKING ON 
FACEBOOK

As I watched Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg go head-to-head 
with members of Congress, I couldn’t help but have the same reaction I have 
when I get a pointless chain email from an elderly relative.

 The inclination to smile, shake your head indulgently, and hit the “delete” key was impossibly 
strong.

 Because after watching lawmakers fumble their way through the questions they posed to 
Zuckerberg, who’d swapped his customary hoodie for what appeared to be his dad’s suit, it’s not clear 
the majority of them possess the baseline understanding of what Facebook does to responsibly regulate 
it.

 Let’s face it, Facebook was wildly irresponsible with its handling of the personal information of tens 
of millions of its customers. It allowed its platform to be infiltrated by operatives working on behalf of 
a geopolitical rival who used it to meddle in the 2016 elections. Until it was caught, the massive social 
media company seemed entirely indifferent to changing its ways.

 But the questioning from members of Congress, most of whom are old enough to be the 33-year-
old Zuckerberg’s grandparents, was excruciating to watch.

 Take Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who asked Zuckerberg how Facebook, which is free, made its 
money.

 “Senator, we run ads,” Zuckerberg said patiently.

 “I see, that’s great,” the 84-year-old Hatch responded. That Zuckerberg didn’t pat him on the head 
and give him a cookie is a source of wonder.

 Then there was Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who asked Zuckerberg: “Is Twitter the same as what 
you do?”

 Well, no, senator. It’s Twitter. You (or, one of your staffers) even have a verified account there.

 But it was also Graham who asked one of the most important questions of the five hours’ worth of 
grilling that was set to continue in the U.S. House on Wednesday - whether Facebook is a monopoly. 
Zuckerberg unconvincingly replied, “It certainly doesn’t feel like that to me.” 

 Which, of course, is nonsense.

 That’s only true if you’re capable of time-travel, or still live in 2002, where you faithfully maintain 
your Friendster or MySpace pages. 

 Facebook, along with Google, Apple and Microsoft, is a tech behemoth whose operations touch 
almost every aspect of our daily lives.

 If you’re not checking in on Facebook for the news (both real and fake, as it turns out), or to touch 
base with relatives and friends, you’re interacting on one of the platforms it controls, such as Instagram, 
to share the most intimate moments of your life.

And Facebook makes money - gobs of money - from our willingness to share ourselves online in a way 
that we could not imagine doing in flesh-and-blood interactions with others.

 And behind Zuckerberg’s Ivy League earnestness and soft-touch Silicon Valley idealism, is a 
ruthless capitalist who knows full well that wringing as much data as possible from his customers, and 
then using it to attract advertisers, is the core of his business. 

 Still, Zuckerberg, as is the custom of a corporate titan on an apology tour, appropriately simulated 
penitentence before the joint committee. 

 “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” he said of the alleged sharing of the personal data of 87 million 
users with the English firm Cambridge Analytica, which was working on behalf of President Donald 
Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Sorry isn’t even close.

 When he was asked by Graham whether Facebook would submit to regulation, Zuckerberg told 
him he would if it were the right kind of regulation. Zuckerberg also said he’d be willing to send 
suggestions to Graham’s office for that right kind of regulation.

 Yes, it’s true that Zuckberg has said, as he did in a CNN interview last month, that he’s “actually ... 
not sure we shouldn’t be regulated.”

 And, yes, he made positive noises in response to a proposal by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., to 
notify users within 72 hours of any data breach. 

 Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, the ranking Democrat on the Commerce Committee, sounded this 
stern warning to Zuckerberg: “If you and other social media companies do not get your act in order, 
none of us are going to have any privacy anymore.”

 But leaving Zuckerberg and his fellow titans to come up with appropriate regulation is way too 
much of a surrendering of Congress’ proper oversight role. 

 They’re unwilling to do it. And Congress is incapable of doing it.

 Dislike. 

-

Copyright 2018 John L. Micek, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

An award-winning political journalist, Micek is the Opinion Editor and Political Columnist for PennLive/
The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. Readers may follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek and email him 
at jmicek@pennlive.com.


GETTING ASSAD’S 
ATTENTION, REAGAN STYLE

To strike Syria, or not to strike Syria.

 As of Thursday evening, Donald Trump, our tweeter in chief, 
is keeping the world, the Russians and Syria’s dictator-in-chief 
Bashar al-Assad guessing.

 On Wednesday, President Trump said U.S. missiles “will 
be coming” to visit Syria in retaliation for its government’s alleged use of chemical 
weapons on the Syrian town of Douma on April 7.

 On Thursday, Trump hedged a little, tweeting that he “Never said when an attack on 
Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!”

Later he tweeted, “We’ll see what happens.”

 Trump being Trump, we won’t know what will happen until he makes it happen.

Meanwhile, everyone in the media and politics has a different opinion about what we 
and our allies should or should not do militarily to punish Assad for his latest crime 
against humanity.

 In some conservative and Republican circles, I’ve been hearing that old familiar 
question - “What would Ronald Reagan do?”

 I like to turn that around and ask, “What did Ronald Reagan do? What did he do 32 
years ago this week?”

 On April 14, 1986 my father sent a powerful message to Libyan dictator Muammar 
al-Qaddafi, the leading international thug of the day, that made Qaddafi behave for the 
next two decades.

 For years Qaddafi had been sponsoring terrorism against American troops and 
citizens around the world and also financing Muslim rebels in the Philippines, the 
IRA, Palestinian guerrillas and even the Black Panthers in the USA.

 Increasingly tough economic sanctions on Libya and the freezing of its overseas 
assets didn’t impress Qaddafi and on April 4, 1986 he ordered his terrorists to bomb a 
dance hall in West Berlin known to be frequented by American soldiers.

Nine days later my father got Qaddafi’s full attention.

 At 2 a.m. Libyan time, about 100 U.S. Air Force and Navy warplanes hit five military 
targets and “terrorism centers” in Tripoli and Benghazi.

 My father’s message to Qaddafi lasted less than an hour. But one of the targets U.S. 
planes obliterated - the most important one - was one of Qaddafi’s homes.

 Qaddafi and family were elsewhere, but he got the message my father wanted him to 
get - “We know where you and your family live and any time we want to take you out, 
we can.”

 If I could give advice to President Trump about what to do in Syria, it would be this:

If you think we need to do something in Syria to show Bashar al-Assad we do not 
approve of his use of chemical weapons against civilians, you have to make him feel it.

Taking out a Syrian airbase or blowing up some Russian planes on the ground is 
nothing, Mr. President.

 You have to make Assad know we know where he lives and that any time we want 
we can take him out with a missile strike targeted at his morning grapefruit bowl.

 We have eyes on the ground in Syria. We know which palace or home Bashar al-
Assad and his family are staying in at any given time.

 Blowing one of them up with a cruise missile at 2 a.m. will be a wake-up call 
Vladimir Putin’s favorite dictator won’t be able to ignore. 

-

 Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, 
a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s 
Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan 
Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.
com. Send comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. 

 Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For 
info on using columns contact Sales at sales@cagle.com.

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