03/31/2016
The California legislature has voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour ($30,000 per year, roughly) by 2022.I could see a high minimum wage doing some good, but I could also see it turning into a fiasco.
Here’s a question that I haven’t seen discussed much. Everybody has an opinion on what the impacts of the law would be assuming it is implemented the way it says in the law it would be implemented; but I’m wondering more what sectors of the California economy will just ignore this new law the way they currently ignore many of the other laws and regulations?
How enforceable are high minimum wage laws, especially in contemporary California, a state where a huge fraction of small business employers these days aren’t from cultures where the concept of Rule of Law is highly valued?
California is an interesting example of corruption because the government isn’t all that corrupt relative to, say, Illinois, where the government tends to shake down honest businesses. California still has 1910 Progressive government structures that are more resistant to governmental corruption than Chicago. But California now seems to have a high level of private enterprise corruption, with businesses cheating the government over taxes and Medicare and each other via insurance fraud and the like.
So, it’s hard to say what will happen with a very high minimum wage. Big companies will have to follow the law, but a huge fraction of small businessmen in California these days are Men in Gold Chains who think laws are only for chumps.
Consider this analogous situation: Turkey’s Gulen cult, which is run out of Saylorsburg in the Poconos ever since the Imam Gulen fled to exile in the U.S. in the late 1990s, is the largest operator of charter schools in the United States, taking in over a half billion dollars of American taxpayer money annually. They import a lot of Turkish men to teach in their charter schools here and force these immigrants to kick back a sizable percentage of their teachers’ salary, such as 40%, to the cult: after all, 60% of an American teacher’s salary is still a lot of money to a Third Worlder.
I could imagine such practices becoming fairly widespread in California with a $15 minimum wage: immigrants would get officially paid $15 per hour, but would have to kick back $5 per hour (or whatever) under the table to their employers.
By the way, a couple of years ago, the FBI was aggressively investigating the Gulen cult charter school fraud, but I haven’t heard much about it lately. (I kind of suspect the CIA had a sit down with the FBI and explained that the Gulen Cult was the U.S.A.’s government-in-waiting for Turkey and, as Napoleon said, “As always, the central question is Constantinople.”)
From The Hill:
March 31, 2016, 06:00 amOkay, but Counselor Amsterdam, you’re a hired gun for Erdogan, ruler of Turkey. Back when I first wrote about the Gulen on 1/1/14, the Gulenists were trying to overthrow Erdogan on corruption charges, just as they had previously helped Erdogan imprison his secularist and military enemies on charges largely trumped up by Gulen’s guys. But Erdogan appears to have since done a deal with the beaten down military to stick it to the Gulenists, — and, by weaponizing refugee flows, Erdogan has found new, more powerful friends in the world, such as Ms. Merkel who is getting the EU to payoff and admit Turkey — so now I’m feeling sorry, kind of, for Gulen.Why should Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen operate charter schools on U.S. Military bases?
By Robert R. Amsterdam
A secretive Islamic movement is trying to infiltrate the U.S. military by establishing and operating publicly-funded charter schools targeted toward children of American service personnel.
That charge may sound like a conspiracy theory from the lunatic fringe, but it is real and it is happening right now. The most immediate threat is in Nevada, where Coral Academy of Science Las Vegas (CASLV) is currently negotiating with the United States Air Force to locate a charter school at Nellis Air Force Base, with classes starting this fall. What is not widely known is that CASLV is part of a nationwide organization of charter schools and other businesses headed by Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen, a reclusive but influential Imam living under self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania to avoid criminal prosecution in his native Turkey.
Our law firm has been engaged by the Republic of Turkey — a key NATO ally in a hotbed region — to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the operations and geopolitical influence of the Gülen organization, which is behind the Coral Academy of Science and over 140 other public charter schools scattered across 26 American states. Our investigation, still in its early stages, reveals that the Gülen organization uses charter schools and affiliated businesses in the U.S. to misappropriate and launder state and federal education dollars, which the organization then uses for its own benefit to develop political power in this country and globally.
Aside from defrauding American taxpayers, the Gülen organization has an even more ominous objective in the United States. The organization is one of the country’s largest recipients of H1-B “specialty occupation” visas, which it uses to import Turkish teachers into its charter schools, supposedly because local U.S. talent is not available to fill math and science teaching positions in its charter schools. The Gülen organization illegally threatens to revoke these visas unless the Turkish teachers agree to kick back part of their salary to the organization.
More importantly, the Turkish teachers in Gülen organization charter schools are evaluated not on the basis of their teaching skills, but rather on whether they achieve monthly goals in a secret point system designed to instil Turkish culture and Gülenist ideology in our American students. The goal, we are told, is to develop a Gülenist following of high achievers, incubated in our local community schools across the country.
But shouldn’t the U.S. subsidy for Gulen come out of the CIA’s budget rather than out of local taxpayers’ property taxes for schools?
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