Sunday, August 8, 2010

Workers Since the Great Depression - SHOULD JOBS GO TO ILLEGALS FIRST?

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

JUDICIALWATCH.org

FAIRUS.org

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MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO LA RAZA – THE MEXICAN FASCIST POLITICAL PARTY

(figures are dated and now calculated to be $300 to $400 billion annually in depressed wages)

“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” Christian Science Monitor
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20 YEARS OF BUSH, HILLARY, BILLARY, BUSH and Bush’s war profiteer whore, DIANNE FEINSTEIN now being encored by OBAMA the ACTOR!
More billionaires, and a higher percentage of this once great nation’s economy transferred to the corporate class. RAPE BY BIG BUSH SAUDI OIL, BIG DRUGS, BIG AG BIZ, BIG FUCKING WALL STREET.
And Barack Obama, the consummate actor, has lied through his teeth about everything BUT servicing Wall Street, and protecting their profits from pillage.
Even the bankers’ whore Dianne Feinstein and her pimp-husband, Richard C. Blum surely couldn’t have sold us out more than this clown OBAMA!
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THE NEXT MOVE FOR THE SELL OUT LIFER-WHORES IN WHORINGTON, D.C., IS AMNESTY FOR 38 MILLION MEXICAN FLAG WAVERS. JUST AS IS THE CASE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS PICKING UP THE STAGGERING BILLS FOR BANKERS’ RAPE AND PILLAGE, IT’S THESE SAME STUPID GRINGOS THAT PAY FOR THE STAGGERING COST FOR ALL THIS “CHEAP” MEXICAN LABOR.
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Gov. Schwarzenegger said California is facing “financial Armageddon”. He is making drastic cuts in the budget for education, health care and services. But there is one place
he isn’t making cuts… services for illegal immigrants. These services are estimated to cost the state four to five billion dollars a year. Schwarzenegger said he is “happy” to offer
these services. We will have a full report tonight.
GET THIS:
47% OF THOSE WITH A JOB IN LOS ANGELES ARE ILLEGALS!
LOS ANGELES PUTS OUT $40 MILLION PER MONTH IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS!
THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN MEX GANG LAND OF LOS ANGELES IS CALCULATED TO BE $2 BILLION PER YEAR!


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USA Today report: Workers face worst conditions since the Great Depression
By Barry Grey
13 June 2009
Even as US unemployment rolls soar to their highest levels in post-war history, employed workers face the worst conditions since the Great Depression, according to a front-page article in Friday’s USA Today.
Based on its analysis of employment data, the newspaper reports that pay cuts, reduced hours, furloughs and involuntary part-time work have driven the working class back to conditions not seen since the 1930s.
USA Today writes that in the first quarter of 2009, US businesses cut total wages at a staggering 6.2 percent annual rate. It notes that paychecks are being further slashed by reduced hours of work. The employed worked fewer hours in May—an average of just 33.1 hours a week—than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records in 1964.
Part-time labor, the report continues, is at an all-time high, and overtime at a record low. A record 9 million people want full-time work but can find only part-time positions.
Those who are laid off face protracted unemployment. The average duration of joblessness is at a post-Depression high of 22.5 weeks. “Baby boomers—79 million people born from 1946 to 1964—have been hit particularly hard,” the newspaper states. Unemployment rates for workers 45 years and older have reached the highest levels since at least 1948, when the government began tracking this demographic.
USAToday cites Laura Sejen of compensation consulting firm Watson Wyatt as saying, “The use of pay cuts—the last choice of most companies after hiring freezes, salary freezes and layoffs—shows how the recession is unlike any since the Depression.”
These statistics demonstrate that the American ruling elite is carrying out a class-war policy. It is exploiting the economic crisis produced by capitalism to create an environment of mass unemployment, and utilizing the threat of protracted joblessness to blackmail workers into accepting cuts in wages and benefits.
This offensive is being spearheaded by the Obama administration. Its decision to force Chrysler and General Motors into bankruptcy, while it continues to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the banks, is part of a deliberate policy aimed at permanently slashing the living standards of the working class.
A raft of economic indicators and reports released this week show that, despite the talk of recovery by the government and the media, the economic crisis in the US and internationally continues to deepen. The World Bank on Thursday nearly doubled its projection of global economic decline in 2009. On the eve of this weekend’s meeting of G8 finance ministers in Italy, the World Bank said it expects the global economy to contract by “close to 3 percent,” a far bleaker assessment than the 1.7 percent decline it made in March.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick said that while there are signs that the pace of the contraction may be easing in the wealthy countries, the crisis in the so-called “developing” countries is accelerating. The fall in consumer demand in the advanced countries, combined with massive government borrowing to bail out the banks and prevent a collapse in consumer spending, has led to a plunge in exports, remittances and foreign investment in much of Africa and Asia. He warned of “large-scale public defaults” that could undermine financial institutions in the US and Europe.
Even in the wealthy countries, the much-touted recovery trends are highly exaggerated. Figures released this week showed German exports falling 28.7 percent in April from a year earlier, the sharpest drop since the government began keeping records in 1950.
The Commerce Department report on the US trade deficit for April, released Wednesday, underscored the ongoing contraction in world trade. The deficit rose to $29.2 billion from $28.5 billion in March, but most significant was a decline in both exports and imports, with the fall in exports accelerating from March. The overall decline in trade surprised most analysts, who were predicting a small uptick in world trade volumes.
China, which is being looked to by the West as an engine of global recovery, issued a disastrous report on its exports for May. They fell 26.4 percent from a year earlier, accelerating from April’s 22.6 percent decline. May exports also fell sharply in South Korea and Taiwan.
The crisis has already taken a massive toll on the wealth of the American people. The Federal Reserve Board reported Thursday that US households lost $1.33 trillion of their wealth in the first three months of the year. In its “flow of funds” report, the Fed said household net worth—total assets such as homes and checking accounts, minus liabilities such as mortgages and credit card debt—fell to $50.8 trillion, the lowest level since the third quarter of 2004.
The first quarter loss represented a decline of 2.6 percent from the final quarter of 2008. US households have seen their net worth contract for seven straight quarters. The first quarter 2009 figure represents a decline of $16 trillion from the highpoint in the second quarter of 2007.
A major part of the decline comes from the stock market. Stocks, which are disproportionately held by a small percentage of the population, have fallen $8.1 trillion from their peak. But the bulk of the decrease comes from the collapse in home prices, which are down 32.2 percent since peaking in the first quarter of 2006. Real-estate-related household assets decreased by $551 billion in the first quarter of this year, following a $974 billion fall in the final months of 2008.
Other indicators herald a further rise in unemployment, home foreclosures and defaults on consumer debt. The Labor Department’s report on initial jobless claims, released Thursday, showed that 601,000 people filed for jobless benefits in the week ended June 6. While this is a small decline, 24,000, from the previous week, it brought the number of workers collecting benefits to an all-time high of 6.82 million.
Mass layoff announcements this week included American Airlines, which said it would cut 1,600 jobs, about 2.4 percent of its work force. Delta announced that it would slash capacity, a prelude to further layoffs by the world’s largest airline.
Home foreclosure filings in May were up 18 percent from a year earlier, according to a report issued Thursday by the California firm RealtyTrac. “There were almost one million foreclosure filings in a three-month period, and that’s simply unprecedented,” said RealtyTrac Senior Vice President Rick Sharga.
The firm counted 321,480 filings nationally, making May the third consecutive month that foreclosure filings exceeded 300,000. RealtyTrac estimates that in a normal market, filings would be under 100,000 a month. May also saw a rise in bank repossessions. RealtyTrac forecasts some 4 million foreclosure filings will be made this year on 3.1 million households. This is 900,000 more than the record number in 2008.
Credit-reporting bureau TransUnion LCC reported Monday that delinquencies on bank credit cards jumped in the first quarter of this year by 11 percent from a year earlier.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that retail sales rose slightly in May, up 0.5 percent from a month earlier. However, the bulk of the increase was the result of sharply higher gasoline prices, a trend that can only depress consumer spending going forward. Retail sales in May were still 9.6 percent below their levels of last year.
The Federal Reserve’s “beige book” survey of regional economic conditions from mid-April to mid-May, released Wednesday, showed a continued weakening of economic activity. The report, issued by the Fed’s 12 regional banks, concluded that economic conditions “remained weak or deteriorated further” in all regions.
While the report noted that businesses in five of the districts said the pace of economic decline was slowing, this marked no improvement from April, when the same number of districts reported a moderation of the rate of decline. Even the more optimistic regions reported that they “do not see a substantial increase in economic activity.”
All districts reported the labor market remaining weak and wages generally “flat or falling.” The report also warned of an accelerating crisis in commercial real estate, with vacancy rates rising “in many parts of the country.”
In the Cleveland district, manufacturers predicted that demand this year would be lower than last. They said they were continuing to cut jobs and wages and slash capital spending.
Chicago reported that sales fell, and manufacturing and capital spending declined. Dallas said business was “bouncing along the bottom.” A large number of manufacturers in the St. Louis region announced shutdowns and several auto companies said they planned permanent layoffs.
At the same time, massive government borrowing and the flooding of financial markets with dollars to pay for the rescue of Wall Street have sparked a decline in the dollar on world currency markets and sharply rising interest rates for Treasury notes. In the immediate term, this has reversed the decline in home mortgage rates, which track the yields on ten-year Treasury notes, aborting an earlier surge in home refinancings and new home sales.
Longer term, the rise in the price paid by the government to finance its huge deficits and soaring external debt—the federal government increased its borrowing by 22.6 percent in the first quarter of the year—threatens to undermine the position of the dollar as the world reserve currency, with catastrophic implications for the US and world economy.
This week Russia and Brazil announced that they were reducing their purchases of Treasury notes.
The so-called recovery envisioned by the Obama administration and the Fed entails an end to negative growth and a small rise in gross domestic product of 1-2 percent later this year or early in 2010. Even should this occur, it will not mean a recovery in the jobs and wages of workers.
The Wall Street Journal on Friday reported that economists in its latest forecasting survey expect the jobless rate to hit 9.9 percent by the end of this year. They see an additional one million jobs being wiped out over the next 12 months. As of December of 2010, they predict an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent. Even this dire prognosis is likely to prove optimistic.
The newspaper noted that officials at the Fed assume that the unemployment rate is “likely to remain above 9 percent for years.”
Within this environment of mass unemployment and wage-cutting, policy makers in the Obama administration and the Fed are demanding austerity measures to slash social spending, so as to prop up the dollar and corporate profits. The Journal cited the remarks this weak of Dennis Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Pointing to the danger of rising rates on Treasury bills, Lockhart said the trend “can be seen as an expression of creeping doubt that the American polity, community, is up to the sacrifices, trade-off decisions and the courage of convictions the situation requires.”
This is the reality behind the administration’s talk of an imminent economic recovery. It is seeking to restabilize the banks, and the capitalist system as a whole, by wiping out the social gains won by previous generations of workers and impoverishing large sections of the working class.
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Wall Street on the offensive FOR MORE WELFARE!
By Barry Grey
8 June 2009
Bolstered by the policies of the Obama administration, Wall Street is waging a political offensive to shed the minimal limits on executive pay that were tied to government bailout funds and to further weaken regulations on the banks’ speculative practices.
This week, the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department are expected to give the OK for many of the biggest banks to pay back the billions of dollars in cash infusions they received last October under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
The banks’ rush to repay the taxpayer handouts has nothing to do with altruism or a desire to make restitution for the disaster they have inflicted on society by gambling on subprime mortgages and other semi-criminal activities. They are eager to repay the money in order to escape restrictions on executive pay as well as other requirements, such as limits on dividends and stock repurchases.
By repaying the TARP money, moreover, the banks will save billions of dollars they would otherwise have to pay the government in the form of dividends on the preferred shares they gave the Treasury in return for the cash infusions. And having repaid the TARP money, they will be in a stronger position to get back to “business as usual,” i.e., making exorbitant profits by speculating with borrowed funds.
The TARP cash comprises only a relatively small part of the government subsidies that have flowed to Wall Street. These include hundreds of billions of dollars in government guarantees on the banks’ debt, virtually interest-free loans from the Federal Reserve, Fed purchases of mortgage-backed securities, and other government programs designed to prop up the financial markets. The total commitment in public funds for these efforts runs into the trillions of dollars.
Among the firms expected to receive approval to repay their TARP funds are many, if not all, of the nine companies that were deemed by the Obama administration to have sufficient capital to withstand a deeper recession in the so-called bank “stress tests,” the results of which were announced a month ago. They include JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, American Express, US Bancorp, State Street, and Bank of New York Mellon.
The stress tests were rigged by the Fed and the Treasury to give the 19 largest banks and financial firms a clean bill of health. The administration presented a picture that understates the critical state of the banks’ finances so as to justify keeping them in private hands, boost investor confidence and the banks’ share prices, and provide a rationale for foregoing tougher bank regulation.
In the run-up to the stress test results, the Obama administration intervened repeatedly to reassure the markets that it would do nothing to challenge the property or wealth of the financial elite. Obama and his treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, repeatedly declared their support for capitalism and private ownership of the banks. They intervened to block congressional legislation that would have imposed a tax surcharge on bonuses awarded by bailed-out firms. They laid out detailed plans to use government funds to enable the banks to offload their bad debts. And their Auto Task Force, run by investment bankers, made clear that it would force Chrysler and General Motors into bankruptcy in order slash the jobs and wages of auto workers, setting a precedent for similar attacks on every section of the working class.
They declared in advance that they would not allow any of the banks being tested to fail, making clear that there was no limit to the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry.
The result has been a run-up of stock prices, 34 percent overall since early March, with financial stocks surging even higher. One key index shows large-bank stocks rising 87 percent.
JP Morgan stock has jumped 118 percent. Bank of America shares are up 263 percent. Its CEO, Kenneth Lewis, has made a tidy profit of over $2 million on 400,000 shares he bought earlier this year.
Investors are rushing to buy up stock offerings by the banks, even though they continue to hold an estimated $1 trillion in toxic mortgages on their balance sheets. The Wall Street Journal reported on June 3, “Money is pouring in so fast that surprised bankers can hardly believe it, especially since most investors didn’t want to go near financial stocks just three months ago, even though they were nearly 40 percent cheaper.”
As Richard Bove, an analyst at Rochdale Research, put it in a note to clients last week, the banking industry is on the verge of a “golden age.”
What is the basis for this surge in investor enthusiasm for bank stocks? It is the government’s assurance that it will cover the banks’ bad gambling debts, dollar for dollar.
The Journal quoted William Mutterperl, a Wall Street lawyer and former vice chairman at PNC Financial Services Croup, as saying, “I’m an optimist by nature, but it’s perplexing because there are still problems out there. No one has suggested foreclosures are going down, and I don’t think anyone is saying loan quality is getting any better.”
Analysts at Moody’s Investors Service warned last Tuesday that US banks could lose $640 billion through next year. “In such a scenario, absent continuation, and likely deepening, of US government capital and liquidity support programs for the banking industry, numerous banks would be insolvent,” the Moody’s analysts wrote.
The Obama administration’s good offices have encouraged the big banks to launch a multi-front offensive to block any measures that would limit their profit-making, and to weaken already existing regulations.
Last February, for example, financial firms and banking organizations launched a multi-million-dollar lobbying drive to change mark-to-market accounting rules that forced banks to report losses or write-downs totaling $175 billion in 2008. Mark-to-market essentially requires banks to value their assets according to prevailing market prices. The banks have balked at this standard, demanding instead the right to assign their own values to their bad debts, using “internal models.”
With the aid of $286,000 in campaign donations to the 33 members of a key House subcommittee, the Fair Value Coalition, the lobby group set up by the banks, succeeded in getting the industry rule-making body, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, or FASB, to give the banks immense latitude in suspending mark-to-market rules.
The Wall Street Journal on June 3 published an investigative report detailing the banks’ use of campaign fund bribes and other monies to get their way. The Journal reported that the banking coalition spent a total of $27.6 million in the first quarter of 2009 on its lobbying effort.
It focused its drive on a House Financial Services subcommittee chaired by Rep. Paul Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat. Kanjorski received $18,500 from Fair Value Coalition members in the first quarter. Over the past two years, Kanjorski has received $704,000 in contributions from banking and insurance companies, the third-highest among members of Congress.
Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the Democratic chairman of the Financial Services Committee, received $8,500 from the coalition.
Kanjorski and other recipients of the bankers’ largess from both parties grilled the head of FASB, Robert Herz, at a committee hearing on March 12, demanding that he expedite a review of mark-to-market rules and threatening him with a bill to broaden government oversight of his board if he failed to comply.
Herz got the message, and on April 12, in advance of the stress test results and early enough to enable the banks to pad their first-quarter financial reports, FASB announced the changes demanded by the lawmakers.
According to the Journal, the American Bankers Association was the biggest contributor to the campaign funds of committee members in the weeks before the March 12 hearing. The newspaper quotes ABA President Edward Yingling as boasting, “We worked that hearing. We told people that the hearing should be used to talk about the big problems with ‘mark to market,’ and you had 20 straight members of Congress, one after another, turn to FASB and say, ‘Fix it.’”
The Journal notes: “The change helped turn around investor sentiment on banks.... Wells Fargo & Co. said the change increased its capital by $4.4 billion in the first quarter. Citigroup Inc. said the change added $413 million to first-quarter earnings.” The newspaper cites a tax and accounting analyst, who estimates that the accounting changes will increase bank earnings in the second quarter by an average of 7 percent.
The Journal quotes Lynn Turner, the former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a former FASB member, as saying “he doesn’t think the banking industry will be satisfied until mark to market accounting is dismantled completely. ‘Despite efforts by FASB to give ground to the banks, enough is never enough, he says.”
On a separate front, the World Socialist Web Site reported in a June 4 article on the campaign by the banks, organized in another lobbying group called the CDS Dealers Consortium, to block any serious regulation of derivatives, such as credit default swaps, which played a major role in the collapse of the financial system last year. The Obama administration has essentially adopted the proposals for regulation of derivatives drawn up by the banking group and secretly distributed to the Treasury Department and congressional leaders. (See: “Wall Street, Obama administration conspire to block financial regulation”)
Then there is the report in the June 4 New York Times that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has scrapped a central plank in the Obama’s administration bank rescue plan because it could not get the banks to participate. The scheme, dubbed the Legacy Loan Program, was part of the administration’s Public-Private Investment Program, designed to enable the banks to offload their bad loans and asset-backed securities.
Under the “legacy loan” plan, the FDIC was to finance private investment firms, virtually guaranteeing them double-digit profits, if they agreed to buy failed mortgages and other toxic loans from the banks at inflated prices. However, the banks have refused to participate, because even at the rigged prices under the scheme they would still have to accept some losses on their bad debts.
Finally, the Wall Street Journal reported June 4 that the banks have launched a lobbying drive to block an accounting rule, slated to take effect next year, that would force them to bring some of their off-balance-sheet investments back onto their books. The rule would apply to hundreds of billions of dollars in financial vehicles through which the banks packaged and sold off loans to other investors.
The vehicles are Enron-style gimmicks by which the banks evade accounting rules requiring them to maintain sufficient capital to back their speculative bets. “Here we go again,” the former SEC chief accountant Lynn Turner told the Journal. “They will get out their checkbooks and go to [Capitol] Hill.”
Despite having plunged the US and world economy into the deepest recession since the 1930s, the banks are demonstrating their controlling influence over Congress and the federal government more openly than ever. As a result, their stock is soaring, their profits are mounting, and top executives are relishing the prospect of salaries and bonuses that will exceed the huge compensation packages that preceded the financial crash.
The diametrically opposed trajectory of Wall Street’s fortunes and those of the broad mass of the people, who are reeling from depression levels of unemployment, home foreclosures and wage cuts, exposes the class divide that dominates all aspects of American social and political life.
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