"More than 14 million Americans are out of work, and nearly half of them have been jobless for six months or longer. The unemployment rate for black Americans is 15.4 percent."
"What a country. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the bankers keep living the high life and swilling that Champagne while at the same time we’re taking books out of the hands of schoolchildren trying to get an education."
"What’s needed is the same sense of urgency about helping struggling families and putting people back to work as the Bush and Obama crowds showed when the banks were about to go bust. That sense of urgency is always missing when it’s ordinary people who are in trouble."
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THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
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July 12, 2010
Outside the CasinoBy BOB HERBERT
The hustlers and high rollers at Wall Street’s gaming tables are starting to feel lucky again.
Hiring is beginning to pick up in the very sector that led the country to the edge of a depression. An article on the front page of The Times on Sunday noted that this turnaround “underscores the remarkable recovery of the biggest banks and brokerage firms since Washington rescued them in the fall of 2008, and follows the huge rebound in profits for members of the New York Stock Exchange, which totaled $61.4 billion in 2009, the most ever.”
The hustlers and high rollers are always there to skim the cream, no matter what’s happening in the real world of ordinary American families.
In a column that was published a few days before Christmas 2007, the very month that the great recession began, I wrote about the record-breaking seasonal bonuses being handed out on Wall Street: an obscene $38 billion, the highest total ever. The subprime mortgage debacle was already upon us and the economy was sinking like a stone, but the casino crowd was celebrating as never before. “Even as the Wall Streeters are high-fiving and ordering up record shipments of Champagne and caviar,” I noted, “the American dream is on life support.”
The fattest of the fat cats live in a perpetual heads-I-win, tails-you-lose environment. But if you step outside the Wall Street casino, you’ll notice that things aren’t going too well in the rest of the country. More than 14 million Americans are out of work, and nearly half of them have been jobless for six months or longer. The unemployment rate for black Americans is 15.4 percent.
School districts across the country are taking drastic steps to cope with collapsing budgets: firing personnel, increasing class sizes, cutting kindergarten and summer-school programs and, in some cases, moving to a four-day school week. The Associated Press, in a demoralizing report, recently noted: “As the school budget crisis deepens, administrators across the nation have started to view school libraries as luxuries that can be axed rather than places where kids learn to love reading and do research.”
What a country. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the bankers keep living the high life and swilling that Champagne while at the same time we’re taking books out of the hands of schoolchildren trying to get an education.
I’m no friend of the deficit hawks, but the staggering amounts of money we’ve been spending for the past several years have not benefited the people most in need of help and have not laid the foundation for a more secure economy going forward. We’ve handed over unconscionable tax breaks to the very rich (you can see the Prada paraders high-stepping along Fifth Avenue in their million-dollar flip-flops) and countless billions to the private contractors brazenly feeding off the agony of the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
(Sunday’s paper also had an article about six more American G.I.’s killed in Afghanistan.)
What’s needed is the same sense of urgency about helping struggling families and putting people back to work as the Bush and Obama crowds showed when the banks were about to go bust. That sense of urgency is always missing when it’s ordinary people who are in trouble.
Millions of Americans are stuck in an economic depression. Several million have either lost their homes to foreclosure during the recession or are in imminent danger of losing them. The long-term unemployed are facing painful daily choices on such basic matters as whether to buy food or refill needed prescription medication or pay electric bills to keep the lights on.
Back in February, The Times’s Peter Goodman wrote about the new poor, “people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.”
There can be no real national recovery with so many millions of people in such deep economic distress. We can pretend that we’re locked in some kind of crisis of confidence, that if only people felt better about themselves and the economy then they’d start spending again. This is a variation on the “mental recession” lunacy spouted by Phil Gramm, John McCain’s top economic adviser during the presidential campaign.
People who are out of work and deeply in debt don’t have any money to spend. The only way to get real money back into their wallets and bank accounts (and thus back into the economy) is to get them back to work.
With our help, the banks and Wall Street have done fine. Better than they had any right to expect. It’s the ordinary folks outside the casino, in the real world, who are still in desperate need of help. But in a society of, by and for the rich, that help will be a long time coming.
LA RAZA HARRY REID’S STATE IS NOW 25% ILLEGAL!
The president’s attention is a favor to Senator Harry M. Reid, the Democratic majority leader, who faces a tough re-election battle in Nevada and promised to pursue immigration legislation in an appeal to his state’s growing Hispanic population.
July 1, 2010
Obama Urges Fix to ‘Broken’ Immigration System
By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON — President Obama pressed Congress on Thursday to pass comprehensive immigration legislation to fix a “fundamentally broken” system by toughening enforcement of existing laws while creating a path to citizenship for many of the 11 million people in the United States illegally.
In his first speech devoted entirely to the hotly disputed issue since taking office, Mr. Obama tried to navigate between what he called the two extremes of the immigration debate, defending his efforts to strengthen border security while rejecting the idea of mass deportations as “logistically impossible and wildly expensive.” But he said change could not wait, despite the political risks.
“In sum, the system is broken and everybody knows it,” he told an audience of lawmakers, activists, business executives and labor leaders at the American University in Washington. “Unfortunately, reform has been held hostage to political posturing, special-interest wrangling and to the pervasive sentiment in Washington that tackling such a thorny and emotional issue is inherently bad politics.”
Embracing legislation drafted by Senators Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, Mr. Obama said the solution was to take a “practical, common-sense approach” and put the onus on Republicans to step up and join him. He noted that some of the Senate Republicans who voted for immigration legislation when President George W. Bush was in office have backed off, and he attributed their shift to the politics of the moment.
“I’m ready to move forward, the majority of Democrats are ready to move forward and I believe the majority of Americans are waiting to move forward,” he said. “But the fact is, without the bipartisan support that we had just a few years ago, we cannot solve this problem.”
Several Republican lawmakers fired back, arguing that the real problem is an administration that does not do enough to enforce laws already on the books. Moreover, they said, with 10 percent unemployment, this is the wrong time to be loosening the laws on illegal workers.
“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
The president’s speech, along with high-profile meetings earlier in the week with advocates for immigrants and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was more about politics than legislation at least in the near term. Neither the White House nor the Democratic leadership in Congress has any expectation of trying to actually push through a law this year, given the major issues already on their plate, like financial regulation and energy.
But Mr. Obama’s public focus on the issue appeared aimed at framing the debate for the approaching midterm elections, when the Hispanic vote could be critical in several important states. The president’s attention is a favor to Senator Harry M. Reid, the Democratic majority leader, who faces a tough re-election battle in Nevada and promised to pursue immigration legislation in an appeal to his state’s growing Hispanic population. Mr. Obama invited Mr. Reid to meet with him at the White House after the speech.
Mr. Obama also used the opportunity to repeat his opposition to Arizona’s new law requiring law enforcement officers to question the immigration status of anyone they stop for other reasons if they suspect that they are in the country illegally, calling it “ill conceived” and “divisive.” But he did not announce the lawsuit that the Justice Department is preparing to challenge it.
“We face the prospect that different rules for immigration will apply in different parts of the country, a patchwork of different immigration rules where we all know one clear national standard is needed,” he said. “Our task then is to make our national laws actually work, to shape a system that reflects our values as a nation of laws and as a nation of immigrants.”
Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican minority whip, said the state’s law was a response to Washington’s failure to deal with the problem: “All Americans would be better served if this administration focused on implementing proven border security solutions rather than engaging in demagoguery and criticizing states that have been left to enforce immigration law because of the federal government’s unwillingness to do so.”
Mr. Schumer and Mr. Graham have proposed a plan to require Social Security cards with biometric data — like fingerprints or retinal patterns — to ensure that illegal workers cannot get jobs. They say the plan would also strengthen border security and interior enforcement, create a process for admitting temporary workers and establish a “tough but fair path to legalization” for those already here.
Under their plan, illegal immigrants would be required to admit that they broke the law and to pay fines and back taxes, pass background checks and prove that they can speak English before going to the back of the line of prospective immigrants seeking permanent legal residency and citizenship.
Republican critics said that still amounted to amnesty for millions of people who broke the law and would only encourage continued illegal migration.
“Part of the reason why we have been so successful in this country is because we live by the rule of law,” Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the second-ranking House Republican, said before the president’s speech. “We do live by its enforcement and transparency in our judiciary. And I think some of the ire right now surrounding the immigration issue is having to do with the illegal immigration and, frankly, the flouting of the law.”
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