November 27, 2017: A New York Businessman Hired Undocumented Workers, and then Tried to Screw Them Out of Pay

 

11/27/17: Trump doubles down in his attack on the First Amendment. Hoping to stir his base (to what? violence against reporters?), the president channels his inner Robert Mugabe.

He tweets: “We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!”

 

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_____________________ 

“We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our rights.” 

Wojciech Kozak

_____________________ 

 

IN OLD BUT STILL INTERESTING NEWS, The New York Times offers up the tale of yet another rich businessman who went about screwing his workers in an unwavering effort to fatten his bank account. First, he hired undocumented workers for a job that had to be done. He wanted to knock down an old building so he could put up a mixed-use 58-story skyscraper in downtown New York City. 

Second, he conspired to pay those workers less than half what union workers would have demanded. 

Third, the businessman required the undocumented to put in 12-hour shifts, but didn’t pay overtime. 

Fourth, if those workers (in this case from Poland) complained about working conditions or because their wages were late or sometimes not paid at all they would be threatened with deportation.

The Bonwit Teller building had to come down.

 

How did this scam work? Recently, a judge unsealed records from a settlement, twenty years ago. According to that settlement the businessman was forced, after battling for years, to pay the undocumented workers what they said he owed. Including legal costs and interest the tab came to $1.375 million. 

The businessman testified that he never visited the work site, where the Poles were demolishing the 12-story Bonwit Teller building. A foreman on the job, Zbignew Goryn, disagreed. The businessman, he said, did visit the site. He marveled about the Polish demolition crew. “He said, ‘Those Polish guys are good, hard workers,’” Goryn told the judge.

 

A smaller group of union workers, paid union rates, made fun of the Poles. Adam Mrowiec testified in court: “They told me and my friends that we are stupid Poles and we are working for such low money.” 

“We worked in horrid, terrible conditions,” Wojciech Kozak remembered. 

We were frightened illegal immigrants and did not know enough about our rights….We were working 12, 16 hours a day and were paid $4 an hour. Because I worked with an acetylene torch, I got $5 an hour. We worked without masks. Nobody knew what asbestos was. I was an immigrant. I worked very hard.

 

Eventually, pay stopped coming. The Poles found a lawyer, John Szabo, to represent their cause. Szabo went to the businessman’s office. If something wasn’t done, he would place a mechanic’s lien on the property. If that happened the building could not be sold until the lien was settled. 

A representative of the businessman began showing up to pay the Poles in cash. This insured there was no income-tax-social-security-tax-union-dues paper trail. Joseph Dabrowski testified that the businessman appeared on site and told workers, “If you finish this fast” then “I will pay for it.” 

Szabo filed a lien. Daniel Sullivan, a labor consultant, said that the businessman came to him for help. He said he had “difficulties…that he had some illegal Polish employees.” The businessman had his lawyer call Szabo. They were going to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service and have his clients deported. Szabo refused to back down in court. Eventually, the businessman wilted and settled the case. The workers were paid 100% of what they had been demanding for fifteen years. 

The new 58-story tower went up at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56^th Street in downtown New York City. 

Proud of his accomplishments, the businessman slapped big gold letters on the side of his skyscraper: T-R-U-M-P.

 
Trump Tower, New York City.

January 22-23, 2018: The GOP Suckers' Bet

 

1/22/18: The GOP-controlled Congress manages to rack up an average approval rating of 15.8%. Most Americans agree that House Speaker Paul Ryan has no more spine than a bowl of butterscotch pudding.

___ 

 

1/23/18: Immigration talk is all the rage in Washington. Trump’s right-wing base hates immigrants because immigrants want to kill Americans with saws, hammers, and garden tools. 

Let’s take a trip to Texas – where they really, really, really need a wall! 

____________________ 

“Texas lives on immigrant labor. Our economy is the way it is partly because cost of living is cheap and the reason for that is labor is cheap.” 

Jeff Nielsen, Houston Contractors Association

____________________ 

 

Look closely and you notice something odd. Texas government is dominated by the GOP. Texas has a GOP governor. The GOP controls the Texas House of Representatives. And the Texas Senate! The state has two Republican U.S. senators. Republican-gerrymandered districts ensure Republicans send 25 GOP representatives to the U.S. House of Representatives vs. 11 Democrats. Yet, undocumented workers are employed all across the state. 

Despite what Trump & Co. would have you believe the undocumented aren’t killing people. They’re laying brick, finishing drywall, and shingling roofs. According to the Houston Chronicle, 400,000 construction jobs in Texas are filled by undocumented workers. 

Why? 

They work for half what American workers might demand (see, Polish workers: 11/27/17). Jeff Nielsen, executive vice president of the Houston Contractors Association, is blunt. “Texas lives on immigrant labor. Our economy is the way it is partly because cost of living is cheap and the reason for that is labor is cheap.” 

(As a blogger, I found that 400,000 number so surprising, I decided to recheck my sources. The sources agree.)

 

A Pew study completed in 2014 estimated that 1 in every 12 Texas jobs was filled by an undocumented worker. They were hired mostly by GOP-leaning business owners, almost all of whom would argue what we what we need most if we want to help real American workers would be massive tax cuts for business. Tax cuts would allow them to hire more workers.

Republicans control government in Texas

and still don't stop hiring of undocumented workers

 

 

This is the GOP suckers’ bet.

 

This is the GOP suckers’ bet. A GOP president insists he’s going to build a big, beautiful wall to keep illegal immigrants out. GOP lawmakers, local, state, and federal, talk about helping the real American worker. Many of those real American workers vote for GOP candidates because, hey, Democrats want to “take away all their guns.” Democrats want to make “war on Christmas” and let transgender individuals invade the bathrooms. Meanwhile, GOP business types drive wages down for the real American worker by hiring the undocumented.

 

Also: they ship jobs overseas for fun. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Might I add, as a card-carrying liberal, that I believe Donald J. Trump is a sack of excrement when he hints that all Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers and jaywalking monsters. I believe the average person from Mexico, entering the U.S. legally or not, is pretty much the same as the average native-born citizen. I figure the average immigrant in 2018 has the same motivation my equally-reviled Irish immigrant ancestors had in 1846. 

I taught American history for decades. I don’t forget that my ancestors were supposedly a “threat” to traditional American values. 

Why? 

They were Catholic.

May 26, 2018: The Great Scam Perpetrated on Workers by the GOP

 

5/26/18: We start the Memorial Day weekend the way Republicans like it. First, there’s excitement because…well…giant tax cuts for fat cats! 

The blogger bicycled across the USA twice

to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund.

Meanwhile, Big Pharma bought up GOP lawmakers

and jacked the price of insulin by 700%.

____________________ 

How the Great Scam worked.

____________________

 

In related news, did you realize top prices for Rolex watches can surpass $400,000? This is exactly the way to insure a healthy economy. Cut taxes and the superrich will create more jobs for Rolex factory workers.

 

(I should point out the website offering the watch above includes “free shipping and handling” if that might be a factor in your decision.)

 

Speaking of the typical American worker, this has been a great month for them. No, I’m joking! First, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, that companies which require individual workers to sign arbitration agreements can ban collective action by workers to recover overtime pay they were denied. Now, if Mega Corporation-R-Us bends the rules and 980 workers are cheated out of $1,900 overtime pay each, those workers can go to arbitration individually and complain. 

I think we can say with total confidence that Mega Corporation-R-Us will not fire Worker #1, who steps forward first and complains. 

Or Worker #2, who doesn’t get the message when #1 gets the boot. 

In similar fashion, if Worker #3, a female, has been sexually harassed by her superior, she must go to arbitration to complain. She may not join forces with other female Workers, #4, #5, #6 and #7, similarly harassed. 

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the Supreme Court majority in Epic Systems Corp v. Lewis, rules that the Federal Arbitration Law of 1925 has precedence over the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The latter act was passed to improve the rights of workers eight decades ago.

 

Now that conservatives have a grip on the highest court in the land, the corporations can do as they please. This kind of decision is a “payoff” for donations corporations have heaped in the laps of the GOP. Abercrombie and Fitch won’t need to change a policy that requires thousands of workers not scheduled for shifts to come in immediately, at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday or a Friday, if given two hours notification. Company leaders at Mega Corporation-R-Us can sexually harass a nightshift cleaning woman, two receptionists, three interns and five secretaries over the course of several years. 

The nightshift cleaning woman will have every right to pay for a lawyer and go to arbitration herself.

 

* 

Noble efforts to save taxpayer dollars. 

AS SUMMER APPROACHES, teachers can relax after bruising strikes in deep red states. These strikes in West Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky were sparked by a variety of issues. In Oklahoma teachers had gone a decade without raises. Now, you may be asking why states can’t raise pay for teachers. The answer is simple. GOP lawmakers are proud of having signed the Grover Norquist “taxpayer protection pledge.” If you go to the webpage for Americans for Tax Reform you can see that 46 members of the U.S. Senate and 208 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all members of the GOP (I think), have agreed never to raise taxes again, not in a million years, assuming they live so long. 

Meanwhile, President Trump has issued a series of executive orders stripping protections from federal civil service employees. Now it will be easier to fire them if they ask for more money or improved benefits and – hopefully, as Republicans would put it – to bust their unions. 

Republicans will cast all these moves as noble efforts to save taxpayer dollars. Actually, these are bricks in a wall (no, not that wall) to break the power of ordinary American workers. 

There was a time when many workers in private industry had excellent pensions. Then Mega Corporation-R-Us began to complain about greedy workers. Leaders of the GOP agreed. Unionized workers with pensions were the worst! Executives at Mega Corporation-R-Us, however, earning seven-figure salaries were not greedy. Mega executives wanted to create jobs!!

 

Mega Corporation-R-Us, Behemoth Retailing, and Leviathan Cable TV, as well as various multinational corporations, managed to pull off several slick moves. First, corporations insisted they had no choice but to move factories from “high-wage” states to states where “business-friendly” rules prevailed. These states, almost exclusively Republican-controlled, had laws that made it difficult for unions to organize. They promised lower taxes on businesses, and reduced services like healthcare for ordinary citizens. But hey! Job creation! Texas “created” 10,000 jobs by syphoning off 10,000 jobs from Michigan and Ohio. Those jobs just happened to pay $25.75 per hour in Ohio. In Texas non-union workers would accept $13 instead. 

Democrats were not the enemies of workers. Government was not the enemy of workers. Unions, imperfect as they are, were not the enemy. The corporations and their political allies were perpetrating a Great Scam. 

Soon the corporations realized that immigrant labor was even cheaper than non-union labor. You could pay an undocumented Mexican $6 per hour to install drywall in new homes. An American, if unionized, might demand $23. A non-union, native-born worker might expect $16. Americans would expect overtime if workdays stretched to nine or twelve hours. The undocumented wouldn’t complain if overtime went unpaid. They wouldn’t dare. In Texas, one of the reddest states in the land, hundreds of thousands of construction jobs were lost by native-born workers and filled by the undocumented.

 

Let me stop a moment and make clear. This is not a diatribe against immigrants. My Irish ancestors came to America in the 1800s for much the same reason millions of Mexicans have come more recently. I do not fear Haitian immigrants for their race. I do not fear Syrian immigrants for their religion. I do not fear Nigerian immigrants for their cultural beliefs. I do not fear immigrants. As a liberal, I would argue that immigrants enrich this country in a multitude of ways. 

I am simply listing the steps required to pull off the Great Scam. The Mega Corporation-R-Us crowd, overwhelmingly Republican in sentiment, took a series of steps that inevitably depressed workers’ wages. 

Now, we have a president who promises to build a magic wall to keep the undocumented out – and keep the jobs in – and the GOP continues to sell the same worthless “male enhancement” fiscal pills. 

Yes. Unemployment is down. Plenty of $10 per hour jobs and even $13 and $15 per hour jobs are opening up. 

For most Americans, the $29 per hour-jobs at Ford Motors, General Electric and Stanley Tools are gone. 

 

They were loyal only to their bank accounts. 

The corporations still weren’t done. The rise of multi-nationals meant Ford looked to Mexico to build engines. General Electric turned to China to manufacture lightbulbs. Stanley Tools started producing wrenches in Taiwan. The people who ran our corporations showed less and less loyalty to workers and to this country. They were loyal only to their bank accounts. Why pay a worker in North Carolina $14 per hour to make underwear, if a worker in Sri Lanka could make the same garments and do it for $14 per day? Why build iPhones in the U.S. and deal with overtime rules when you could do business in China and workers would put in 90 hours per week and never complain? 

True. China was (and is) a communist nation. True. Communism is founded on the premise of destroying capitalism. Truer still: China is a growing threat to the United States on the international stage. 

The multinationals didn’t care if decisions they made helped China gain power. Great piles of money were to be made. 

The average American worker could see his or her economic position weakening but couldn’t exactly understand why. The multinationals sent Joe’s shipyard job to Vietnam. Calvin’s steel-making job ended up in Bangladesh. GOP politicians and shills at Fox News told Joe that Democrats wanted to take away his guns and convinced Calvin there was a “War on Christmas” to obsess about. 

The average worker felt the economic pain. The coal miners who voted for Trump in 2016 were desperate. They saw a vote for him as a worthwhile gamble. The men and women at the Carrier plant in Indiana, scheduled for closing shortly after the election, should, almost unanimously, have voted Republican, if Republicans could really save their plant from closing, as Trump promised. If a Republican candidate was promising to bring jobs back from China, voting Republican, not Democratic, made sense. 

The problem, again, was that the Democrats had never been the ones to ship jobs to China to begin. 

You could listen to the truth, buried at the end of Mitt Romney’s famous 47% speech if you paid attention in 2012. It wasn’t the obvious part (about how 47% of Americans were “takers,” and Romney and the superrich were “makers”) that should have alerted workers to the fact the Great Scam was on. 

 

A fundamental truth about the Republican Party. 

It was the second part that revealed a fundamental truth about the Republican Party. Romney was talking to a room full of the fattest possible cats about the joys of investing in China. 

In that role, Romney had reveled in opportunities to make money by shipping jobs to China, failing to take note of the near-slave wages and terrible working conditions Chinese workers had to accept. 

Here’s how he described the “possibilities” of making piles of dough in China: 

And I remember going to – sorry just to bore you with stories – but I was, when I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there, employed about 20,000 people, and they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married, and they worked in these huge factories, they made various small appliances, and as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms at the end with maybe ten rooms. And the rooms, they had 12 girls per room, three bunk beds on top of each other. You’ve seen them.

 

American workers would never accept similar conditions. Romney continued in tone-deaf fashion: 

And around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire, and guard towers. And we said, “Gosh, I can’t believe that you, you know, you keep these girls in.” They said, “No, no, no – this is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out, or they’ll just come in here and start working and try and get compensated. So, we – this is to keep people out.”

 

And they said, “Actually, Chinese New Year, is the girls go home, sometimes they decide they’ve saved enough money and they don’t come back to the factory.” And he said, “And so on the weekend after Chinese New Year, there’ll be a line of people hundreds long outside the factory, hoping that some girls haven’t come back and they can come to the factory. And so, as we were experiencing this for the first time, for me to see a factory like this in China some years ago, the Bain partner I was with turned to me and said, “You know, 95 percent of life is settled if you’re born in America [emphasis added].” This is an amazing land. And what we have is unique, and fortunately it is so special we’re sharing it with the world. I’m concerned about the future, but also optimistic as I said, and I look forward to getting America back on track… 

 

If wages and benefits declined, it didn’t bother the fattest cats. 

If wages and benefits declined at home, it didn’t bother Romney or the rest of the fattest cats. It didn’t bother the Koch brothers or the Walton clan. The Koch’s could afford to donate hundreds of millions to Republican candidates and causes. They would eventually be repaid for their “investment” with policies that granted them tax cuts worth billions. The Walton family continued to donate and continued to pay workers subpar wages. Walmart managed to curtail hours so fewer employees would qualify for healthcare under the Obama plan. Big Pharma donated millions to the GOP and kept jacking up drug prices. Republicans kept arguing that it would be a horrible idea if Medicare started negotiating to lower drug costs. The price of insulin shot up by 700% in twenty years. And champions of capitalism pronounced it good. 

The average worker got a few extra dollars in his or her paycheck when Trump and Congress cut taxes. 

Unfortunately, Calvin could no longer afford the insulin his daughter, who suffered from type-1 diabetes, needed to live. Still, if he watched enough right-wing TV, he found solace in thinking Republicans were fighting for him, fighting to keep transgender type-1 individuals from using the same bathrooms as his girl. 

The Great Scam was in.

 

POSTSCRIPT: For more on how the fat cats prospered, see: 6/29/18, and their efforts to move profits to offshore tax havens like the Isle of Man and The Cayman Islands.

June 22, 2018: A Perfect Way to Curtail Illegal Immigration without an Expensive Wall

 

6/22/18: The President of the United States starts his morning, as he almost always does, with a tweet. You can tell he really cares about those poor kids being locked up down on the border. 

____________________ 

“Their phony stories of sadness and grief.” 

President Trump

____________________ 

 

His tweet reads: 

We must maintain a Strong Southern Border. We cannot allow our Country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief, hoping it will help them in the elections. Obama and others had the same pictures, and did nothing about it!

 

It’s more gratuitous lying by Trump; and his fans swallow it down like Oliver Twist swilling a second bowl of gruel. 

Contrary to what the president likes to claim, we liberals and Democrats and people with hearts don’t want to let criminals come pouring across the border. This blogging, bloviating liberal often feels the criminals in the story of immigration already reside here in the United States. 

If you missed the story, ICE recently carried out one of its largest immigration raids in years. Agents descended on the Fresh Mark meat-packing plant in Salem, Ohio, and led away 146 employees in cuffs. Fresh Mark is alleged to have hired undocumented workers for years. 

You might start your arrests here.

 

Focus on businesses that hire the undocumented. 

Why would Fresh Mark do it? Simple. The undocumented work cheap and don’t expect healthcare. 

So, this blogger (who thinks immigration helps the country) has a suggestion. If the Trump administration wants to enforce all immigration laws, they can stop detaining toddlers and focus on businesses that hire the undocumented. We know that business folk love Trump. They love Trump because he cuts regulations and taxes. 

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi don’t hire the undocumented. 

Business folks do. 

If you could stop the money-grubbing corporate types from hiring undocumented workers you wouldn’t need a big, beautiful border wall. Companies like Fresh Mark – which has three other factories in Ohio – wouldn’t hire the undocumented if company executives and owners weren’t greedy. 

The Democrat Party isn’t killing American jobs. 

Avaricious bosses are.

 

Exhibit A: Neil Genshaft, CEO of Fresh Mark. Genshaft has a long history of donations to Republican politicians. Between 2000 and 2012 he donated to 21 Republican candidates. In 2012, Genshaft wrote a check to the Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from his district. So did a host of Ohio business leaders – because the Republican Party is business-friendly. 

In 2016 he gave $2,500 to “Team Josh,” in support of Josh Mandel, a Republican running for U.S. Senate. 

At no time has Genshaft – the main lawbreaker in this tale – donated to Democratic candidates. 

Now, imagine you wanted to address the matter of undocumented workers being hired by businesspersons out for the easiest possible buck. Why not ask Congress to pass a law fining any business caught hiring the undocumented $25,000 per worker? Make it that much for every year they worked illegally. Then enforce with rigor. 

That would give you enough in fines to pay for your wall, although you wouldn’t need a wall if Congress passed such a law.

 

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“The Trump of Pahrump.” 

REMEMBER THE “GOOD OLD DAYS,” when the Republican Party claimed to stand for family values? 

Dennis Hof, 71, the Republican choice for an assembly seat in the Nevada legislature in November, shows just how far the party has veered from message. Hof campaigned as the “Trump of Pahrump,” to win the primary. Hof tells reporters he is part of the “Trump movement.” He hopes voters will choose him in the regular election in the fall. “People will set aside for a moment their moral beliefs, their religious beliefs, to get somebody that is honest in office,” he adds. “Trump is the trailblazer. He is the Christopher Columbus of honest politics [emphasis added here and below].”

 

Leaving aside Hof’s clear failure to follow the news – leading him to believe Trump is honest – how else does he stand out? He’s been divorced three times, which does seem like he fits in with the “Trump movement.”

 

Hof also bills himself as America’s “most famous pimp.” He owns a strip club and five legal brothels around the state.

 

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LIFELONG CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST George Will suggests in an editorial that everyone with a conscience or spine, or a spleen, should vote against Republican candidates for Congress in November. 

The existing Republican majorities, Will warns, have been no better than the “president’s poodles.”

January 27, 2019: Trumps Are Cheap - So, They Hire the Undocumented

 

1/27/19: The president yaps about building a giant wall to keep us safe from killer immigrants. While he yaps, psychos already stalk the land. On January 23, a 21-year-old walks into a Florida bank and kills five women, execution-style. The next day, a Georgia man kills four and wounds a fifth, shooting his final victim in the face. Saturday morning a young Louisiana man murders his mother, father and three others, including a woman with whom he had been in a relationship. None of the killers were immigrants, legal or otherwise. 

At Trump properties, they definitely do!

____________________ 

Dangerous illegal immigrants with vacuum cleaners!

____________________ 

 

On the other hand, a dozen “dangerous” illegals were recently fired from jobs in New York. No word yet on how many were psychopaths, waiting for the right moment to murder and maim. They could have been plotting harm for years, to vacuum carpets, cut the grass and finally slit a few throats at Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, New York. 

Once again, we discover that Mr. Trump has been hiring the undocumented for years, because they work cheap. 

And he’s cheap.

 

The case of Margarita Cruz, who worked at the New York club for eight years, highlights the hypocrisy of the president’s anti-immigrant screeds. Cruz admits she bought false documents, including a green card and Social Security card long ago. It cost her $120. You might excuse Trump management, and say, “Well, how could they know?” The flaw in that argument is plain to see. Cruz was never provided health insurance or pension benefits, like co-workers. Anibal Romero, the lawyer who represents Cruz and other recently fired employees, including a head chef, is blunt. “I’m not buying they didn’t know. This was a two-tiered system. The people who were legal and the people who are undocumented.” One of the employees in question had worked for Trump for eighteen years. No healthcare or pension required. 

Eric Trump feigned shock. He promised the Trump Organization would redouble efforts to ferret out all the illegals clogging the payroll. 

And: working cheap. 

Because Trumps…are cheap.

July 5, 2019: Trump Explains a Baffling Speech and Why He Hires Undocumented Workers

 

7/5/19: Reporters manage to stop Trump outside the White House and pose a few questions. Trump never holds real press conferences because he’d face tough queries and have to offer follow up. Then he’d get logic tangled in hopeless wads and have to start lying again. 

What happened with that speech, someone asks, the part where Washington “took over the airports” during the Battle of Yorktown? Well, the president admitted, rain knocked out his teleprompter. (See: 7/4/19.) 

(Trump and Fox News used to hate it when Obama used a teleprompter, and sounded articulate, and spoke in complete sentences.)

 

“That’s not a good feeling when you’re standing in front of millions and millions of people,” he added. 

Still, he said his memory was sharp as a bone saw, and his speech, it would live forever in the annals of presidential speech-making, like the Gettysburg Address, only way more creative. Luckily, he says, “I knew the speech very well so I was able to do it without a teleprompter. And it was actually hard to look at anyway because of the rain.” 

So, the part about Washington taking over the airports was in the original speech? Meaning whoever wrote the speech was a blithering idiot? 

And the person delivering it was too dense to realize immediately, that that couldn’t be right?

 

* 

ANOTHER REPORTER manages to ask the president if he realizes the Trump Organization has been employing undocumented workers for years? 

 

A way that people did business. 

“I don’t know, because I don’t run it,” the president said. “But I would say this: Probably every club in the United States has that because it seems to be, from what I understand, a way that people did business.” 

Ironically, Trump was about to board a helicopter for another trip to his Bedminster, N.J. club, where many of the undocumented worked as recently as 2018. Once the free press started interviewing workers who admitted they were in this country illegally – workers who said their employer knew they had phony papers and even helped them get those phony papers – the Trump Organization leaped into action. As the president explained, again in Gibberish, his preferred language, his clubs were now following tougher standards. “But we’ve ended – whatever they did, we have a very strict rule that, those rules are very strict [emphasis added, for fun].” 

 

* 

IT TURNS OUT, the president isn’t the only Trump who speaks the Gibberish tongue. Last January, Eric, who, along with Don Jr., now runs the Trump Organization, claimed the fact that all Trump properties seemed to have hired undocumented workers and employed them for years – well, that was a sign that the U.S. immigration system, not the Organization, was messed up. 

Eric did want to make clear. He had a heart. True, it was a Trump heart, but a heart with valves and chambers. “I must say, for me personally, this whole thing is truly heartbreaking. Our employees are like family, but when presented with fake documents, an employer has little choice.” 

Wait! 

Did he just admit there are good people who sneak into this country and don’t want to rape and kill? 

What about the monsters of right-wing fever dreams, the drug mules “with calves like cantaloupes?” What about the “animals” crossing illegally so they can join MS-13 and disembowel Americans in MAGA hats? What about the “invaders” his dad always describes: “A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country.” 

Was Eric admitting there were actual human beings who came across the border, people who were like “family” to him?

 

Let’s give the final word to Victoria Morales, an undocumented worker from Guatemala. She worked for the Trump Organization for years, both before the president turned over control to his sons, and after. “How can the president profess to not know we were undocumented workers if we have all [now] been fired?” she said recently. “I cleaned his house. I cleaned Ivanka’s house. He saw me all the time. I’m sure he figured I didn’t have papers.”

December 30, 2019: The Trump Organization Hires Undocumented Workers!

 

12/30/19: Holy sh*t! The Trump Winery in Virginia fires at least seven employees who lack legal immigration status. 

Omar Miranda, who gave his name, and a second worker who refused, both told reporters they had worked at Trump Winery for more than a decade. Miranda noted that employees had finished the harvest season, which meant 60-hour work weeks, sometimes picking grapes under floodlights. 

(Something tells Mr. Blogger that the Trump Winery wasn’t paying overtime for these workers.)

 

According to the Washington Post – “Fake News” to all Trump fans – but a paper that contacted the Trump Organization for comment – the Trump Winery “has long relied on a couple dozen immigrants – primarily from Mexico. Those workers arrive legally year after year, on seasonal work visas, living in a dormitory on the winery property during the harvest.” But it was another group of year-round staff that got the axe just before the end of the holiday season. 

So, let’s recap: 

1.     Trump can’t find American workers to do the grape-picking. 

2.     He’s not willing to pay a wage that would attract them. 

3.     He takes a chance and hires Mexicans.

 

And we all know, with few exceptions, Mexicans who come here are “murderers” and “rapists.” Trump said so himself. 

Over the past year, the Post has spoken with at least 49 former Trump employees who lacked proper immigration documentation.

Few Americans are interested in picking grapes for poor pay.

(Not a Trump property shown.)

 

* 

IN OTHER NEWS, Vladimir Putin invites President Trump to come to Moscow next spring, to celebrate the anniversary of the victory against Germany, during World War II. 

You figure the two leaders can discuss better relations and also plan for the 2020 U.S. election. 

If Trump does attend, he can watch a big military parade. Putin can also provide tips on how to silence pesky critics forever.