MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
POVERTY IN AMERICA… as the LA RAZA DEMS expand the ever growing Mexican welfare system in our borders!
THIS WEEK, LA RAZA PELSOI AND REID, WITH FEINSTEIN AND BOXER are pushing the MEXICAN DREAM ACT to hand over another bit by bit massive amnesty!
NO WORD OUT OF THEIR MOUTHS about the already staggering payouts in welfare to illegals, alone in CA $20 billion of your tax dollars to the Mex flag wavers! NO WORD OUT OF THEIR MOUTHS about the daily cold blooded murders committed by Mexican gang members, which number in the million now! Or the tunnels under our borders as these same squalid politicians vote for endless war over there!
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Michigan families face rising poverty, hunger and homelessness
By Helen Halyard
30 November 2010
The continuing economic crisis is pushing an increasing number of families in Michigan into poverty and homelessness, with children disproportionately affected.
According to the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness, there are more than 86,000 people homeless in the state. More 50 percent are families and one in three are children. The average age of a homeless child is seven years. The Detroit metropolitan has the highest homeless population in Michigan, with over 35,000 reported homeless, but the number of homeless has grown in every region.
Thanksgiving meal at Grace Center of Hope in Pontiac
Unemployment in Michigan stands at 12.8 percent, second highest in the US, and there are now 1.9 million families in the state receiving food stamps. According to the most recent US Census Bureau figures, based on a totally inadequate income of $22,000 for a family of four, 1.4 million people in the state lived in poverty in 2009. This was an increase of 100,000 from 2008. At the same time the number of children living in poverty in Michigan rose to over 500,000 in 2009, or 22.1 percent, up from 19.4 percent in 2008. The situation facing children age four or younger is even more catastrophic, with 26.9 percent living in poverty statewide.
These conditions are going to worsen, with some 168,000 jobless workers in Michigan set to lose their extended unemployment benefits over the coming months due to the failure of Congress to pass an extension.
Conditions in Pontiac, a former center of General Motors manufacturing operations north of Detroit, are particularly dire. WSWS reporters recently conducted a series of interviews with staff, volunteers and residents of Grace Centers of Hope, one of the major homeless and food shelters in Pontiac, Michigan, about conditions in the city.
Pontiac, population 65,000, is the seat of Oakland County, one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. Like many former industrial cites in Michigan, it has been devastated by the collapse of the auto industry. Unemployment in the city has nearly doubled in the past two years, currently standing at over 30 percent.
In 2009, General Motors shut down Pontiac East Assembly, its last remaining assembly plant in the city, after the Obama administration forced the giant auto manufacturer into bankruptcy. Some 1,100 workers employed at the plant lost their jobs, along with those of many people employed at businesses in the surrounding community. In December, the Pontiac Stamping plant will be idled, eliminating an additional 1,100 workers.
The Michigan League for Human Services reports that nearly half of children in Pontiac age four or younger, 49.8 percent, are living in poverty and 31.6 percent of families in the city have incomes below the poverty line, compared with 9.7 percent in Oakland County and 16.2 in Michigan overall.
According to Sharon Parks, president and CEO of the Michigan League for Human Services, median family income for Pontiac residents is $33,207, compared to $62,308 for the county and $45,255 for the state.
Michelle Atwell, director of development at Grace Centers of Hope, organized a sleep-out November 19 to raise awareness of the conditions facing the homeless. She explained, “We organized this sleep-out during National Homeless and Hunger Week to bring attention to the problems of growing homelessness. This is the first time that we have done this. We felt our center needed to be on the frontline of a struggle against this growing problem. People are really hurting.
“We have seen a situation develop over the past year which is frightening and speaks to what is happening. Many of the people who used to donate money to assist the shelter have been laid off and are themselves in need of help. In the city of Pontiac, there is a high level of foreclosure and in 2009 our center had to turn away 3,500 mothers and children who came to us for help because we didn’t have any space. We are now in the middle of renovating our center so that we can accommodate more people this year.”
Many of those who came to participate simulated what it was like to sleep outside, putting up makeshift cardboard boxes. Most of these were young people from Pontiac and surrounding communities.
Joey and Pete from Lahser High School in Bloomfield
Hills
Joey and Pete, who live in a more affluent community, told us why they were participating. “The main reason we are out here,” one of them said, “is because this is becoming an issue that is starting to affect everyone and we see that it is only getting worse. It is hitting people in every area, not just poorer cities.
“In Bloomfield Hills, the two high schools, Andover and Lahser, will be consolidated because people are moving out of the city to find work. Last year our high school had 1,200 students and we are now down to 800. The economy is terrible and even where we live, there are foreclosures and people losing their houses.”
The WSWS returned to the center on Thanksgiving Day as meals were distributed to workers and families. Darin Weiss, the chief operating officer of the Grace Center of Hope in Pontiac, spoke to the WSWS about the program he helps direct.
A makeshift shelter
“We have thousands of volunteers who come out each week,” he said. “They want to come out and help.”
“We are the oldest and largest homeless shelter in Michigan. We serve 250 men, women and children on a daily basis through shelter, food, clothing and other services.”
Darin said the goal of the program was to help homeless to a position of self-sufficiency.
“It is difficult to get figures on the number of homeless people,” he added. “We try to track the last known address. Was the person sleeping on a couch? The figures can vary depending on how you define homelessness. It depends on who is doing the counting.”
“There is definitely an increase in the number of homeless families with children. There is always a waiting list. We see more couples homeless. We are seeing people who just can’t get jobs, who are staying unemployed.
“The majority of the homeless population are addicted or have some kind of mental diagnosis. But underlying it is definitely the economy. They can’t find a job to sustain themselves. One injury, one accident, one paycheck...
“Some people say, quit whining, ‘get a job.’ They lack understanding of the complex and horrible situations people can find themselves in. There are thousands of kids who are homeless. They didn’t make a wrong decision.
“You talk to some of the people about their situations and you say to yourself, ‘How can you not use drugs?’”
The WSWS spoke with several residents of the Grace Center in Pontiac. Dan said, “I am a previous graduate of the program and I came back five weeks ago because the conditions changed where I was living.
“I was born and raised in Indiana and moved to Michigan as a teenager. I am a machinist by trade. The manufacturing industry has taken a big hit. It’s not just auto; it is all tier 1 and tier 2 industries.
Angie, a former truck driver
“The job situation is beyond bleak. I have been on a good number of interviews over the last several weeks. I’ve heard a lot of, ‘I’ll get back to you after the holidays.’
“Since I was laid off in 2007, I have worked only once briefly, just a fill-in job making parts for Corvettes. The machining industry has shrunk and I don’t see it coming back.”
Angie told the WSWS, “I grew up in Detroit. I was a truck driver, an 18-wheeler.
“There aren’t many shelters here that will take whole families. So families that want to stay together are often staying out in the cold.”
“I’ve been here a few months. I have been looking for employment. It is hard.
“I have members of my family that have businesses and they are being affected. They are struggling to pay utilities.”
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OBAMA – Working hard for his bankster donors and LA RAZA “THE RACE” ILLEGALS! The rest of us mucked over big time!
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Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)
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They Go or Obama Goes
Robert Scheer | August 25, 2010
This story originally appeared at Truthdig [1].
Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to create but which he has failed to solve. That is somewhat unfair because the basic blame belongs to his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who let the bulls of Wall Street run wild in the streets where ordinary folks lived. And there was universal Republican support in Congress for the radical deregulation of the financial industry that produced this debacle.
The core issue for the economy is the continued cost of a housing bubble made possible only after what Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers back then trumpeted as necessary "legal certainty" was provided to derivative packages made up of suspect Alt-A and subprime mortgages. It was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Senate Republican Phil Gramm drafted and which Clinton signed into law, that made legal the trafficking in packages of dubious home mortgages. In any decent society the creation of such untenable mortgages and the securitization of risk irrationally associated with it would have been judged a criminal scam. But no such judgment was possible because thanks to Wall Street's sway under Clinton and Bush the bankers got to rewrite the laws to sanction their treachery.
It is Obama's continued deference to the sensibilities of the financiers and his relative indifference to the suffering of ordinary people that threaten his legacy, not to mention the nation's economic well-being. There have been more than 300,000 foreclosure filings every single month that Obama has been president, and as the New York Times editorialized, "Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the Obama administration's efforts to address the foreclosure problem will make an appreciable dent." The Times noted that the administration's main program has been a bust, with only $321 million of the $30 billion allocated to the program having been spent to help folks stay in their homes.
The ugly reality that only 398,198 mortgages have been modified to make the payments more reasonable can be traced to the program being based on the hope that the banks would do the right thing. While Obama continued the Bush practice of showering the banks with bailout money, he did not demand a moratorium on foreclosures or call for increasing the power of bankruptcy courts to force the banks, which created the problem, to now help distressed homeowners.
The subject of housing foreclosures is inherently boring unless you happen to own a home being foreclosed, in which case your family's life has just been turned disastrously upside down. But few of the well-paid pundits on television are in such a position, and as a result the tragedy that has hit 4 million families in the past two years has received scant notice.
But even that highly privileged group of commentators must now be aware that those foreclosures are behind Tuesday's news that US home sales reached their lowest point in fifteen years and that there is unlikely to be an economic recovery without a dramatic turnabout in the housing market. The stock market tanked Tuesday on reports that US home sales had dropped 25.5 percent below the year-ago level.
When homes are foreclosed in a neighborhood the equity of those in the area who have faithfully paid their mortgages is slashed. And when the banks dump those foreclosed properties back on the market, prices drop even lower. Yet the administration has offered the most tepid of responses to stanch the fierce bleeding of home equity worth. A paltry $4.1 billion has been committed to efforts by the states to help the unemployed and other distressed borrowers stay in their homes. Compare that with the trillions spent on making the financial industry super-profitable once again.
There is no way that Obama can begin to seriously reverse this course without shedding the economic team led by the Clinton-era "experts" like Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who got us into this mess in the first place. They are spooked by one overwhelmingly crippling idea—don't rattle the financial titans whom we must rely on for investment. But when it comes to keeping people in their homes, it is precisely the big banks that must be rattled into doing the right thing.
Obama gained credibility through sacking General Stanley McChrystal for making untoward remarks. Why not sack Summers and Geithner for untoward policies that have inflicted such misery on the general public?
Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street [2] (Nation Books).
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“Wells Fargo said last month that first-quarter profit jumped 53 percent from a year earlier as borrowers rushed to refinance mortgages amid record-low interest rates.”
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, November 12, 2007
Mortgage giants Wells Fargo and Countrywide Financial are accused of slapping dubious fees on homeowners struggling to save their homes. With fewer new mortgages being written, these
companies appear to be leaning on these lucrative fees to stay profitable—with devastating consequences for homeowners. We’ll have that report.
SANCTUARY COUNTY LOS ANGELES SPENDS $600 MILLION ON WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS
County Spends $600 Mil On Welfare For Illegal Immigrants
Last Updated: Thu, 03/11/2010 - 3:14pm
For the second consecutive year taxpayers in a single U.S. county will dish out more than half a billion dollars just to cover the welfare and food-stamp costs of illegal immigrants.
Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, may be in the midst of a dire financial crisis but somehow there are plenty of funds for illegal aliens. In January alone, anchor babies born to the county’s illegal immigrants collected more than $50 million in welfare benefits. At that rate the cash-strapped county will pay around $600 million this year to provide illegal aliens’ offspring with food stamps and other welfare perks.
THE EXORBITANT FIGURE DOES NOT INCLUDE THE ENORMOUS COST OF EDUCATING, MEDICALLY TREATING, OR INCARCERATING ILLEGALS ALIENS. THIS COSTS THE COUNTY AN ADDITIONAL ONE BILLION DOLLARS.
The exorbitant figure, revealed this week by a county supervisor, doesn’t even include the enormous cost of educating, medically treating or incarcerating illegal aliens in the sprawling county of about 10 million residents. Los Angeles County annually spends more than $1 billion for those combined services, including $500 million for healthcare and $350 million for public safety.
About a quarter of the county’s welfare and food stamp issuances go to parents who reside in the United States illegally and collect benefits for their anchor babies, according to the figures from the county’s Department of Social Services. In 2009 the tab ran $570 million and this year’s figure is expected to increase by several million dollars.
Illegal immigration continues to have a “catastrophic impact on Los Angeles County taxpayers,” the veteran county supervisor (Michael Antonovich) who revealed the information has said. The former fifth-grade history teacher has repeatedly come under fire from his liberal counterparts for publicizing statistics that confirm the devastation illegal immigration has had on the region. Antonovich, who has served on the board for nearly three decades, represents a portion of the county that is roughly twice the size of Rhode Island and has about 2 million residents.
His district is simply a snippet of a larger crisis. Nationwide, Americans pay around $22 billion annually to provide illegal immigrants with welfare benefits that include food assistance programs such as free school lunches in public schools, food stamps and a nutritional program (known as WIC) for low-income women and their children. Tens of billions more are spent on other social services, medical care, public education and legal costs such as incarceration and public defenders.
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latimes.com
Opinion
California must stem the flow of illegal immigrants
The state should go after employers who hire them, curb taxpayer-funded benefits, deploy the National Guard to help the feds at the border and penalize 'sanctuary' cities.
Illegal immigration is another matter entirely. With the state budget in tatters, millions of residents out of work and a state prison system strained by massive overcrowding, California simply cannot continue to ignore the strain that illegal immigration puts on our budget and economy. Illegal aliens cost taxpayers in our state billions of dollars each year. As economist Philip J. Romero concluded in a 2007 study, "illegal immigrants impose a 'tax' on legal California residents in the tens of billions of dollars."
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The danger, as Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson argues, is that of “importing poverty” in the form of a new underclass—a permanent group of working poor.
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