Daily Discussion - December 1, 2024

How NYC’s Migrant Housing Scheme Became a $220M Gift to Pakistan

Americans should be outraged by New York City's $220 million sweetheart deal with Pakistan to lease the prestigious Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan as a luxury shelter for illegal aliens. The most alarming issue is that NYC paid a foreign government to help house the migrants.

For some context, Pakistan has owned the Roosevelt Hotel since 1979. State-owned Pakistan International Airlines acquired the trophy property through its investment arm, PIA Investments Limited.

According to the 2023 report, the lease agreement spans three years, during which NYC stuffed thousands…   of illegal aliens into the 1,250-room hotel like cattle—funded entirely by taxpayers. This arrangement has sparked outrage about how NYC paid a foreign gov't to help support the invasion of the third world into a first-world city.

"The hotel is owned by the government of Pakistan, and the deal was part of a $1.1 billion IMF bailout package to help Pakistan avoid defaulting on their international debt," LeFevre wrote on X.

According to the public records website The Org, Najeeb Samie is a director at Roosevelt Hotel Corporation, as well as a director at Habib Bank and board member and managing director at PIA Investments.

Samie's connection with Habib Bank is alarming, given that in 2017, the New York State Department of Financial Services fined the Pakistani bank $225 million and surrendered its license to operate in the US over compliance failures in its New York branch, such as weaknesses in monitoring transactions for potential links to terrorism financing and sanctions evasion.

Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE's Vivek Ramaswamy (also led by Elon Musk), is livid over NYC funding a foreign gov't entity with taxpayer dollars in supporting the migrant invasion. He called the migrant housing scheme totally "nuts":

"A taxpayer-funded hotel for illegal migrants is owned by the Pakistani government which means NYC taxpayers are effectively paying a foreign government to house illegals in our own country. This is nuts.

Volkswagen Faces Explosive Strikes Over Plant Closures and Job Cuts

Tens of thousands of Volkswagen workers will participate Monday in strikes at plants across Germany, labor union IG Metall said, marking the largest walkouts at the carmaker’s domestic operations since 2018.

The walkouts, which are planned to last several hours, follow weeks of collective bargaining negotiations during which VW refused to rule out mass layoffs and potential plant closures in its home market — drastic measures the company says are necessary to prop up its fortunes amid competition from China and weaker European demand.

A so-called “peace obligation” between worke…  rs and the company, which prohibited industrial action, expired on Saturday, allowing strikes to take place from Sunday at virtually all of Volkswagen’s German factories.

“If necessary, this will become the toughest wage dispute Volkswagen has ever seen,” IG Metall’s chief negotiator Thorsten Groeger said in a statement Sunday. “How long and intense this dispute will be is Volkswagen’s responsibility at the negotiating table.”

“Volkswagen has set our collective bargaining agreements on fire, and instead of extinguishing this fire during three rounds of negotiations, the management board keeps throwing open barrels of gasoline onto it,” he added.

The walkouts will be the first large-scale strikes that Volkswagen has faced since 2018, according to IG Metall, when 50,000 workers idled plants over pay. Although the work stoppages will last only a few hours, it is possible that 24-hour warning strikes could be called later this year. Indefinite strikes could also be called as a last resort, but only after members have been consulted again, IG Metall said.

The strikes represent a fresh headache for Europe’s largest automaker, which saw operating profit for the first nine months of the year tumble by a fifth from the previous year, as its flagship brand struggled. Vehicle sales also slipped on particularly weak demand in China, where it is losing market share to Chinese electric vehicle brands.