Thursday, April 8, 2010

WEST COAST MELTDOWN by Sasha Abramsky - CALIFORNIA as MEXICO'S WELFARE SYSTEM

What is the impact of an invasion of 38 million illegals, most of whom occupy California, and the staggering cost of this Mexican invasion and occupation for “cheap” Mexican labor?

There are only eight (8) states with a population greater than Los Angeles. Here, 47 of those employed are ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. Here also, 95% of all arrest warrants for MURDER are for MEXICAN ILLEGALS. Here the County of Los Angeles pays out $600 million for welfare for ILLEGALS!


CALIFORNIA IN MELTDOWN:

West Coast Wasteland
By Sasha Abramsky
January 21, 2010
In the pretty northern Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, the staff of VMH (formerly Verdugo Mental Health) go to work in a brand-new building. It is elegantly constructed in Spanish colonial style, and when you wander the corridors you can still sniff out that fresh-paint odor coming from some of the cream-colored, plushly carpeted counseling rooms. On the surface, it all looks good. Spend a few hours at the clinic, however, and you realize that there's something grievously amiss. The rooms, even during prime counseling hours, are almost all unoccupied.
Sasha Abramsky: Savage budget cuts and political dysfunction are tearing California's social infrastructure apart.
VMH has provided counseling and medication to impoverished children and adults since 1957. But in August, shortly after the new facility opened, the clinic lost most of its funding for adult services when the state and county yanked their dollars, triggering huge matching-fund losses from the federal government. Eighty percent of the counseling staff, including nearly all of the site's adult counselors, were laid off. Kids still receive some counseling, but the walls of the rooms in which they are seen by staff are bare--the clinic ran out of funds before it could decorate them--and the doors have paper signs taped to them instead of brass plaques.
Nowadays, VMH's adult clients are treated exclusively with medication. And the indigent mentally ill--whose treatment had been paid for by LA County, which in turn received money from the state--are turned away at the door. Many of them end up sleeping on park benches near the clinic. "These are the chronically mentally ill," says psychologist Janie Strasner glumly, "who will end up being the raving lunatics on the street."
What makes this all the more troubling is that Glendale isn't an outstandingly poor neighborhood, Los Angeles isn't a poor city and California certainly isn't a poor state. And yet something is seriously wrong with the organism that is California. The state's savage budget cuts--$26 billion in 2009, an expected shortfall over the next year that could reach $20 billion--now serve as anti-stimulus to the federal stimulus package. Its basic educational, public safety and social service infrastructure is crumbling. As a self-sustaining political system, as a set of relationships between local and state governments, as a revenue-raising and revenue-spending mechanism, California is deeply damaged. And the impact of that damage is hitting an awful lot of people awfully hard.
The state's unemployment rate stands at more than 12 percent, and in some poorer counties it's in the 25 percent range. In Los Angeles, that number is 12.2 percent. "It boggles the mind," says LA's mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. "Not since the Depression have we had numbers this bad." To make matters worse, in an attempt to slow the state's fiscal implosion, halfway through 2009 Sacramento forcibly borrowed billions of dollars from city coffers statewide. "They took our community redevelopment dollars that are capital we need to create jobs and housing in this town," the mayor argues.
The network of public universities, long the country's most prestigious state-supported higher education system, is wilting. The state's schools, starved of money from a combination of thirty-year-old local property-tax revolts and the more recent budget implosion, are rapidly sinking into what can only charitably be called mediocrity.
There's a Mad Max feel to daily life in many neighborhoods. The Central Valley has a swath of cities whose home foreclosure rates rank in the top ten in the country. Friends looking to buy a home in a poor part of Sacramento tell me of foreclosed houses stripped of their copper wires, their toilets, their pipes, even their drywall. An ex-student reports visiting homes in which furious foreclosed owners and evicted tenants have urinated and defecated on the carpeting, abandoned pets to starve, left kitchens filled with rotting food. Sure, you can buy these properties for next to nothing, but you'll have to bring in the biohazard squads before you can safely occupy them.
University departments looking to pinch pennies are removing their professors' office phones. Judges in some counties have donated a percentage of their salaries back to the courts so that the courts will have enough money to stay open. And on furlough Fridays, downtown Sacramento--the capital city of the world's eighth-largest economy--is practically a ghost town. The restaurants are empty, the streets quiet. Nobody's at work.
Why this has happened, how the mess can be cleaned up, how big-picture fixes to a discredited political machine can be implemented--well, that's all up for debate. Political consensus is as rare a commodity in California these days as baseball-sized gold nuggets were after the forty-niners had picked the mountains clean. Practically the only thing conservatives and liberals agree on in Sacramento is that the decision-making system has stalled and that the state leadership's ability to implement long-term strategic plans in the face of economic crisis has been corroded in recent years. California, historically the country's most populous, wealthiest, most dynamic state, has become chronically anxious about its future. Its citizens have grown distrustful of those who govern them, increasingly aware that ineptitude is making a bad economic situation worse. Recent polling suggests only 13 percent of voters approve of the job their state legislators are doing.
Some residents want tax reform--though Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's tax reform commission recently issued recommendations that appear, in their chilly reception, to have been stillborn. Others want to tweak term limits; curb the sprawling, open-ended initiative process; introduce open primaries; further cut government services; even hold a constitutional convention to rewrite the basic governing mechanisms of the state. Few, though, deny the storm clouds overhead.
"The outlook for next year and the year after is worse," says veteran California observer and journalist Peter Schrag, over a BLT lunch at a casual-but-chic cafe in the Berkeley foothills. "The stimulus money goes away. The tax increases [passed in February 2009 after weeks of acrimonious debate] expire. If we're up shit creek now, we're going to be further up shit creek two years from now." Since the state, unlike localities, cannot declare bankruptcy, if its tax revenues continue to wilt it will have no choice but to dramatically scale back its spending on big-ticket items such as education, healthcare and prisons. Recognizing these realities, Schwarzenegger recently suggested rewriting the Constitution to ensure that the state never spends less than 10 percent of its general fund on higher education or more than 7 percent on corrections. But he didn't propose limiting what sorts of offenses would trigger a prison term; instead, he suggested cutting costs by wholesale prison privatization--a proposal almost certain to be defeated in the legislature.
Schrag looks out on his state and sees an eroding sense of common destiny--a great experiment gone awry, a place where racial and economic groupings are retreating into their own corners, where the social bonds that give people confidence in their futures are disintegrating. California's disarray is, for him, a psychological crisis as much as an economic one. If things get bad enough, he wonders aloud, "will there be some restoration of the public sense? Is there a point at which people will basically begin to develop a sense that something has to be done? And that could go in various directions. It could go in the direction of a furious backlash against immigrants, or a realization that we better do something else--tax millionaires, oil companies."
Lenny Goldberg, an economist at the left-leaning California Tax Reform Association, believes California's crisis is about a failure of will: the money's there, Goldberg says--even during a recession as deep as the current one, California's is still a nearly $2 trillion economy--but the willingness to access it through a viable tax structure is absent. Since it takes only a bare majority of state legislators to lower taxes but a two-thirds supermajority to increase them--a side provision to Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative better known for limiting property-tax rates--the result, he says disdainfully, is a "roach motel." Once tax loopholes crawl in, they're all but impossible to remove. The GOP in California, long a minority in the legislature, has just enough muscle in Sacramento to hold the budget and tax process hostage to its no-new-taxes agenda.
Not surprisingly, Jon Coupal, the perfectly coiffed Tim Robbins look-alike president of the conservative Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (named after the anti-tax crusader who led the Prop 13 campaign), has a different take. For Coupal, tax increases to fill some of the holes in California's budget "would be a nonstarter." To him, it's all about waste, government inefficiency and a decades-long flirtation with "an entitlement mentality--whether it's healthcare, whether it's a free education. People have lost sight of the one thing government should do as a first priority--it's to preserve liberty." Downsize the state, move core social service functions to the private sector, and California's cascading budget crisis could be controlled.
Betwixt these donkeys and elephants, never the twain shall meet. Moreover, because of an extraordinarily restrictive term-limits law passed by voters in 1990, legislators in Sacramento no longer have the time to develop expertise about how their state works. As a result, few legislators in either party accumulate the confidence born of experience to challenge special interests. As Jim Brulte, a onetime GOP leader in both the State Assembly and Senate and a vocal critic of the restrictions of the term-limits law, explained at the Getting to Reform conference in mid-October, state leaders can never do what redbaiting Nixon did: "go to China." They can't challenge their constituencies to think outside the box.
In the case of the GOP, those interests tend to be rigidly anti-tax but somewhat fuzzy on exactly what programs to cut to balance California's budget. In the case of the Democrats, they tend to favor higher spending but don't necessarily support tax hikes to cover those bills. In the meantime, as momentum for reform slowly builds and voters' anger intensifies, the state continues its slow bleed.
Californians have long wanted to have their cake and eat it too, using the initiative process to mandate generous levels of spending on specific programs but using that same process to limit localities' ability to raise property taxes and state legislators' ability to raise state revenues. The result? California is increasingly reliant on borrowing, increasingly at the mercy of the credit markets and thus increasingly vulnerable to crises such as the seize-up of those credit markets in 2008.
Why does California have the country's lowest bond rating? "Because of our political and fiscal system," Goldberg believes. "We're so tied in knots, the market doesn't believe we can get a solution to our problems. It's the market saying, Your political system is really fucked up."
"Since '78," explains Tim Hodson, executive director of California studies at California State University, Sacramento, "we've developed a political culture that believes you can have world-class public services without having to pay for them. We need to get control of ballot-box budgeting."
Voters recognize the state's dysfunction and the concomitant need for reform. But recent Field Poll data show the electorate to be deeply resistant to the sorts of reforms that would help get the state back on its feet. There's not only no will to modify the residential property tax constraints imposed by Prop 13; the majority also opposes a "split roll" property tax that would allow for commercial properties to be taxed at a higher rate. There's no support for reining in the initiative process or modifying term limits. A clear majority also oppose ending the two-thirds vote requirement needed to raise taxes or pass state budgets. And a majority believes--implausibly, according to almost all fiscal experts who have studied the issue--that the state could plug a $25 billion deficit simply by eliminating government waste and fraud.
Seeing which way the winds are blowing here, ex-governor Jerry Brown, who wants to cap his career by getting elected as governor once more--and who, at least for now, is seen as the front-runner among Democratic hopefuls--has come out in opposition to reforming Prop 13 and in support of a "simpler" (read: "flatter") tax system. On the Republican side, 
former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and other high-profile would-be candidates have come out against any tax increases and any constitutional reforms that would eliminate the two-thirds requirement.
It's a Catch-22: voters know the system is breeding paralysis and needs to be reformed, but as long as the dysfunction continues to send legislators' reputations swirling down the toilet, those same voters are unwilling to cede more power to the legislature or limit their ability to make policy on the hoof via the initiative process. This, in turn, leads gubernatorial candidates to circumscribe their reform ambitions in order to curry favor with a disillusioned electorate. And so the circle of dysfunction-suspicion-dysfunction remains unbroken. "You have to restore voters' trust in government to make good decisions," argues Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project. "They see declining public services and say, 'Why would I give these people more authority?' But until they do, we're going to see cuts in everything from public schools to the DMV."
September 24, the first day of classes at many of the UC campuses, was a cloudless, blazing hot day in the college town of Davis. It was also a day when many classes weren't going to be held. Across the UC system, faculty and students were walking out to protest the cascading series of budget cuts and fee hikes triggered by the state's reducing its commitment to the public universities by many hundreds of millions of dollars.
"Educate! Agitate! Organize!" were emblazoned on many protesters' T-shirts. "Respect the unions, bargain now," read the UPTE CWA 9119 local's banners.
Since Mario Savio set the bar for impromptu student speeches at Berkeley in December 1964, university protests in California have had that certain frisson, that sense that maybe, just maybe, someone else will come along who can speak as eloquently and passionately as he did. It never happens, but that doesn't stop them from trying. A young man who identified himself as a TA in the physics departments told the crowd that students and faculty alike had to stand up and resist. There was, he concluded, power in this teachable moment.
The crowd agreed. Shortly afterward, thousands of them set off on a long march around campus, to the administration building and then to the chancellor's residence. "Whose university? Our university!" they called and responded. "Whose university? Our university!"
Of course, that's only true if the general public agrees--including the 87.5 percent of the state's high school graduates who don't qualify for a University of California education. It's only true if a new consensus can be forged that channels enough tax dollars to the state to keep these vaunted public institutions afloat. And unfortunately, that consensus isn't emerging.
A few weeks after the rolling series of campus protests began, the UC Regents voted to increase student fees by a stunning 32 percent over the next academic year. While they attempted to soften the impact by increasing the number of students who would qualify for financial aid, the public relations impact was disastrous. Across the ten-campus system, students began occupying administrative buildings. Many faculty members, outraged at being asked to take furlough days that cut their salaries by up to 10 percent and at increased teaching loads caused by many lecturers' and TAs' positions being eliminated, joined in the walkouts. At UCLA and Berkeley, huge protests captured the attention of the national media. Meanwhile, UC president Mark Yudof pleaded with legislators to restore more than two-thirds of the $1 billion in lost funding to avoid an implosion of the country's pre-eminent public university system.
Half a state away from Davis, in the working-class, heavily industrial southern Los Angeles suburb of Torrance, tea partyers have taken to demonstrating weekends on the grassy street corner on the southwest side of the civic center. Their main bugbear is the fear of federal tax hikes to fund Obama's social programs. But talk to them--mostly white, mostly old, almost all beneficiaries of Social Security and Medicare, dwellers in a bungalow-land built from the wages doled out by government-funded military industries--and they quickly pivot into a denunciation of state and local tax increases too.
"I think we need to get the government to understand we won't accept new taxes--the federal government. The state needs to listen also," explains 75-year-old Donald Mitchell, sitting by the information table at a recent protest. A retired Hughes Aircraft engineer with a hearing aid in his left ear, a ruddy complexion and thinning, yellowing hair, Mitchell believes there's a power grab under way that is converting the country he loves to socialism. "The government is trying to take over one-sixth of our economy with healthcare, and that gets awfully close to socialism. Forget about the ownership of the banks."
These shock-troop opponents of healthcare reforms are also the most vociferous defenders of Proposition 13, the people who saw their tax rates locked in a generation ago and who are now unwilling to pony up more cash for the benefit of a younger, browner population. They watch Glenn Beck and listen to Rush Limbaugh--or to his virulently right-wing LA variants on The John and Ken Show. They believe big government is bringing down the Republic, and they're all too happy to wave at cars passing along Crenshaw Boulevard a bizarrely adapted US flag--the stripes and a circle of thirteen stars representing the original colonies, inside of which is the Roman numeral II, which stands, I'm told quietly, for the Second Revolution.
On the ground, the effects of this stalemate--one party wedded to big spending, another equally wedded to anti-taxism; one part of the population interested in building infrastructure, another only too happy to retreat further into its privatized world--have been catastrophic.
Mental health clinics are closing, state parks are limiting their admissions hours, county health clinics are shutting their doors, in-home services to the elderly have been decimated. And access to the state's health plan for low-income kids has been restricted--a less draconian option, it must be said, than the one contemplated at the height of the crisis: completely defunding the plan. At one point last summer, friends reported to me in amazement that local playgrounds had padlocked their toilet doors.
Shamefully, as a result of a line-item veto by Schwarzenegger in 2009, domestic violence centers have been all but defunded. In Santa Clarita, an exurb on the edge of Antelope Valley with a growing heroin and meth problem, that meant the loss of $200,000 for the local center; the firing of several counselors responsible for helping the 200-plus clients who came through the doors each year; the replacement of a full-time shelter advocate with three part-time ones; and an inability to pay rent on the down-at-the-heel suite of rooms the center occupied in a low-grade strip mall. Until a local businessman offered the use of one of his buildings a few miles away at below-market rates, the center teetered on the edge of closure.
"It's left us with two full-time staff in the office, including myself," asserts 32-year-old executive director Nicole Shellcroft. "Our clinical director volunteers two days a week to do therapy, and we have one part-time administrator. With two of us in the office, we have five lines that ring. We may miss someone or not be able to provide court accompaniment coverage."
At the same time that staffing has plummeted, the number of desperate people contacting the center for help has grown. Shellcroft and her colleague will answer the doorbell, and there'll be a mom with her kids and their suitcases standing outside, pleading for help in getting into a shelter.
Instead of working to protect the poor and maintain local services during these tough times, the state is punishing localities to cover for its own dysfunction. California's budget crisis "is as big a threat as the bank failures were," argues LA City Council president Eric Garcetti. City politicians, he says, "feel like the guy who knows times are tough; we cut back expenses, sold the car, got an old clunker and stopped going out to dinner. And there's a guy down the street saying, 'My Ferrari's not working. Give me your money.'" The state, Garcetti adds in clarification, is the Ferrari owner.
"I'm aghast at what's happened there [in Sacramento]," Mayor Villaraigosa declares. "The gridlock, the partisanship, the pervasive vitriol, which has prevented us from solving this crisis." LA has a $30 million hole in its housing authority budget and is only able to subsidize rent for one-bedroom apartments these days, no matter the size of the needy family. Because the state took the city's redevelopment dollars, park construction has been put on hold. And severely mentally ill patients around the city are being turned away from clinics because the money simply isn't there to treat them.
"We have a beautiful building and we're on life support," Dr. Steven Hochstadt, director of clinical services at the VMH facility in Glendale, explains. "It's all edifice."
It could serve as an epitaph for California these days: a gorgeous state with a terrific infrastructure built up over the past century, but no money or political will to keep the place running properly.

WEST COAST MELTDOWN by Sasha Abramsky - CALIFORNIA as MEXICO'S WELFARE SYSTEM

What is the impact of an invasion of 38 million illegals, most of whom occupy California, and the staggering cost of this Mexican invasion and occupation for “cheap” Mexican labor?

There are only eight (8) states with a population greater than Los Angeles. Here, 47 of those employed are ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. Here also, 95% of all arrest warrants for MURDER are for MEXICAN ILLEGALS. Here the County of Los Angeles pays out $600 million for welfare for ILLEGALS!


CALIFORNIA IN MELTDOWN:

West Coast Wasteland
By Sasha Abramsky
January 21, 2010
In the pretty northern Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, the staff of VMH (formerly Verdugo Mental Health) go to work in a brand-new building. It is elegantly constructed in Spanish colonial style, and when you wander the corridors you can still sniff out that fresh-paint odor coming from some of the cream-colored, plushly carpeted counseling rooms. On the surface, it all looks good. Spend a few hours at the clinic, however, and you realize that there's something grievously amiss. The rooms, even during prime counseling hours, are almost all unoccupied.
Sasha Abramsky: Savage budget cuts and political dysfunction are tearing California's social infrastructure apart.
VMH has provided counseling and medication to impoverished children and adults since 1957. But in August, shortly after the new facility opened, the clinic lost most of its funding for adult services when the state and county yanked their dollars, triggering huge matching-fund losses from the federal government. Eighty percent of the counseling staff, including nearly all of the site's adult counselors, were laid off. Kids still receive some counseling, but the walls of the rooms in which they are seen by staff are bare--the clinic ran out of funds before it could decorate them--and the doors have paper signs taped to them instead of brass plaques.
Nowadays, VMH's adult clients are treated exclusively with medication. And the indigent mentally ill--whose treatment had been paid for by LA County, which in turn received money from the state--are turned away at the door. Many of them end up sleeping on park benches near the clinic. "These are the chronically mentally ill," says psychologist Janie Strasner glumly, "who will end up being the raving lunatics on the street."
What makes this all the more troubling is that Glendale isn't an outstandingly poor neighborhood, Los Angeles isn't a poor city and California certainly isn't a poor state. And yet something is seriously wrong with the organism that is California. The state's savage budget cuts--$26 billion in 2009, an expected shortfall over the next year that could reach $20 billion--now serve as anti-stimulus to the federal stimulus package. Its basic educational, public safety and social service infrastructure is crumbling. As a self-sustaining political system, as a set of relationships between local and state governments, as a revenue-raising and revenue-spending mechanism, California is deeply damaged. And the impact of that damage is hitting an awful lot of people awfully hard.
The state's unemployment rate stands at more than 12 percent, and in some poorer counties it's in the 25 percent range. In Los Angeles, that number is 12.2 percent. "It boggles the mind," says LA's mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. "Not since the Depression have we had numbers this bad." To make matters worse, in an attempt to slow the state's fiscal implosion, halfway through 2009 Sacramento forcibly borrowed billions of dollars from city coffers statewide. "They took our community redevelopment dollars that are capital we need to create jobs and housing in this town," the mayor argues.
The network of public universities, long the country's most prestigious state-supported higher education system, is wilting. The state's schools, starved of money from a combination of thirty-year-old local property-tax revolts and the more recent budget implosion, are rapidly sinking into what can only charitably be called mediocrity.
There's a Mad Max feel to daily life in many neighborhoods. The Central Valley has a swath of cities whose home foreclosure rates rank in the top ten in the country. Friends looking to buy a home in a poor part of Sacramento tell me of foreclosed houses stripped of their copper wires, their toilets, their pipes, even their drywall. An ex-student reports visiting homes in which furious foreclosed owners and evicted tenants have urinated and defecated on the carpeting, abandoned pets to starve, left kitchens filled with rotting food. Sure, you can buy these properties for next to nothing, but you'll have to bring in the biohazard squads before you can safely occupy them.
University departments looking to pinch pennies are removing their professors' office phones. Judges in some counties have donated a percentage of their salaries back to the courts so that the courts will have enough money to stay open. And on furlough Fridays, downtown Sacramento--the capital city of the world's eighth-largest economy--is practically a ghost town. The restaurants are empty, the streets quiet. Nobody's at work.
Why this has happened, how the mess can be cleaned up, how big-picture fixes to a discredited political machine can be implemented--well, that's all up for debate. Political consensus is as rare a commodity in California these days as baseball-sized gold nuggets were after the forty-niners had picked the mountains clean. Practically the only thing conservatives and liberals agree on in Sacramento is that the decision-making system has stalled and that the state leadership's ability to implement long-term strategic plans in the face of economic crisis has been corroded in recent years. California, historically the country's most populous, wealthiest, most dynamic state, has become chronically anxious about its future. Its citizens have grown distrustful of those who govern them, increasingly aware that ineptitude is making a bad economic situation worse. Recent polling suggests only 13 percent of voters approve of the job their state legislators are doing.
Some residents want tax reform--though Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's tax reform commission recently issued recommendations that appear, in their chilly reception, to have been stillborn. Others want to tweak term limits; curb the sprawling, open-ended initiative process; introduce open primaries; further cut government services; even hold a constitutional convention to rewrite the basic governing mechanisms of the state. Few, though, deny the storm clouds overhead.
"The outlook for next year and the year after is worse," says veteran California observer and journalist Peter Schrag, over a BLT lunch at a casual-but-chic cafe in the Berkeley foothills. "The stimulus money goes away. The tax increases [passed in February 2009 after weeks of acrimonious debate] expire. If we're up shit creek now, we're going to be further up shit creek two years from now." Since the state, unlike localities, cannot declare bankruptcy, if its tax revenues continue to wilt it will have no choice but to dramatically scale back its spending on big-ticket items such as education, healthcare and prisons. Recognizing these realities, Schwarzenegger recently suggested rewriting the Constitution to ensure that the state never spends less than 10 percent of its general fund on higher education or more than 7 percent on corrections. But he didn't propose limiting what sorts of offenses would trigger a prison term; instead, he suggested cutting costs by wholesale prison privatization--a proposal almost certain to be defeated in the legislature.
Schrag looks out on his state and sees an eroding sense of common destiny--a great experiment gone awry, a place where racial and economic groupings are retreating into their own corners, where the social bonds that give people confidence in their futures are disintegrating. California's disarray is, for him, a psychological crisis as much as an economic one. If things get bad enough, he wonders aloud, "will there be some restoration of the public sense? Is there a point at which people will basically begin to develop a sense that something has to be done? And that could go in various directions. It could go in the direction of a furious backlash against immigrants, or a realization that we better do something else--tax millionaires, oil companies."
Lenny Goldberg, an economist at the left-leaning California Tax Reform Association, believes California's crisis is about a failure of will: the money's there, Goldberg says--even during a recession as deep as the current one, California's is still a nearly $2 trillion economy--but the willingness to access it through a viable tax structure is absent. Since it takes only a bare majority of state legislators to lower taxes but a two-thirds supermajority to increase them--a side provision to Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative better known for limiting property-tax rates--the result, he says disdainfully, is a "roach motel." Once tax loopholes crawl in, they're all but impossible to remove. The GOP in California, long a minority in the legislature, has just enough muscle in Sacramento to hold the budget and tax process hostage to its no-new-taxes agenda.
Not surprisingly, Jon Coupal, the perfectly coiffed Tim Robbins look-alike president of the conservative Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (named after the anti-tax crusader who led the Prop 13 campaign), has a different take. For Coupal, tax increases to fill some of the holes in California's budget "would be a nonstarter." To him, it's all about waste, government inefficiency and a decades-long flirtation with "an entitlement mentality--whether it's healthcare, whether it's a free education. People have lost sight of the one thing government should do as a first priority--it's to preserve liberty." Downsize the state, move core social service functions to the private sector, and California's cascading budget crisis could be controlled.
Betwixt these donkeys and elephants, never the twain shall meet. Moreover, because of an extraordinarily restrictive term-limits law passed by voters in 1990, legislators in Sacramento no longer have the time to develop expertise about how their state works. As a result, few legislators in either party accumulate the confidence born of experience to challenge special interests. As Jim Brulte, a onetime GOP leader in both the State Assembly and Senate and a vocal critic of the restrictions of the term-limits law, explained at the Getting to Reform conference in mid-October, state leaders can never do what redbaiting Nixon did: "go to China." They can't challenge their constituencies to think outside the box.
In the case of the GOP, those interests tend to be rigidly anti-tax but somewhat fuzzy on exactly what programs to cut to balance California's budget. In the case of the Democrats, they tend to favor higher spending but don't necessarily support tax hikes to cover those bills. In the meantime, as momentum for reform slowly builds and voters' anger intensifies, the state continues its slow bleed.
Californians have long wanted to have their cake and eat it too, using the initiative process to mandate generous levels of spending on specific programs but using that same process to limit localities' ability to raise property taxes and state legislators' ability to raise state revenues. The result? California is increasingly reliant on borrowing, increasingly at the mercy of the credit markets and thus increasingly vulnerable to crises such as the seize-up of those credit markets in 2008.
Why does California have the country's lowest bond rating? "Because of our political and fiscal system," Goldberg believes. "We're so tied in knots, the market doesn't believe we can get a solution to our problems. It's the market saying, Your political system is really fucked up."
"Since '78," explains Tim Hodson, executive director of California studies at California State University, Sacramento, "we've developed a political culture that believes you can have world-class public services without having to pay for them. We need to get control of ballot-box budgeting."
Voters recognize the state's dysfunction and the concomitant need for reform. But recent Field Poll data show the electorate to be deeply resistant to the sorts of reforms that would help get the state back on its feet. There's not only no will to modify the residential property tax constraints imposed by Prop 13; the majority also opposes a "split roll" property tax that would allow for commercial properties to be taxed at a higher rate. There's no support for reining in the initiative process or modifying term limits. A clear majority also oppose ending the two-thirds vote requirement needed to raise taxes or pass state budgets. And a majority believes--implausibly, according to almost all fiscal experts who have studied the issue--that the state could plug a $25 billion deficit simply by eliminating government waste and fraud.
Seeing which way the winds are blowing here, ex-governor Jerry Brown, who wants to cap his career by getting elected as governor once more--and who, at least for now, is seen as the front-runner among Democratic hopefuls--has come out in opposition to reforming Prop 13 and in support of a "simpler" (read: "flatter") tax system. On the Republican side, 
former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and other high-profile would-be candidates have come out against any tax increases and any constitutional reforms that would eliminate the two-thirds requirement.
It's a Catch-22: voters know the system is breeding paralysis and needs to be reformed, but as long as the dysfunction continues to send legislators' reputations swirling down the toilet, those same voters are unwilling to cede more power to the legislature or limit their ability to make policy on the hoof via the initiative process. This, in turn, leads gubernatorial candidates to circumscribe their reform ambitions in order to curry favor with a disillusioned electorate. And so the circle of dysfunction-suspicion-dysfunction remains unbroken. "You have to restore voters' trust in government to make good decisions," argues Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project. "They see declining public services and say, 'Why would I give these people more authority?' But until they do, we're going to see cuts in everything from public schools to the DMV."
September 24, the first day of classes at many of the UC campuses, was a cloudless, blazing hot day in the college town of Davis. It was also a day when many classes weren't going to be held. Across the UC system, faculty and students were walking out to protest the cascading series of budget cuts and fee hikes triggered by the state's reducing its commitment to the public universities by many hundreds of millions of dollars.
"Educate! Agitate! Organize!" were emblazoned on many protesters' T-shirts. "Respect the unions, bargain now," read the UPTE CWA 9119 local's banners.
Since Mario Savio set the bar for impromptu student speeches at Berkeley in December 1964, university protests in California have had that certain frisson, that sense that maybe, just maybe, someone else will come along who can speak as eloquently and passionately as he did. It never happens, but that doesn't stop them from trying. A young man who identified himself as a TA in the physics departments told the crowd that students and faculty alike had to stand up and resist. There was, he concluded, power in this teachable moment.
The crowd agreed. Shortly afterward, thousands of them set off on a long march around campus, to the administration building and then to the chancellor's residence. "Whose university? Our university!" they called and responded. "Whose university? Our university!"
Of course, that's only true if the general public agrees--including the 87.5 percent of the state's high school graduates who don't qualify for a University of California education. It's only true if a new consensus can be forged that channels enough tax dollars to the state to keep these vaunted public institutions afloat. And unfortunately, that consensus isn't emerging.
A few weeks after the rolling series of campus protests began, the UC Regents voted to increase student fees by a stunning 32 percent over the next academic year. While they attempted to soften the impact by increasing the number of students who would qualify for financial aid, the public relations impact was disastrous. Across the ten-campus system, students began occupying administrative buildings. Many faculty members, outraged at being asked to take furlough days that cut their salaries by up to 10 percent and at increased teaching loads caused by many lecturers' and TAs' positions being eliminated, joined in the walkouts. At UCLA and Berkeley, huge protests captured the attention of the national media. Meanwhile, UC president Mark Yudof pleaded with legislators to restore more than two-thirds of the $1 billion in lost funding to avoid an implosion of the country's pre-eminent public university system.
Half a state away from Davis, in the working-class, heavily industrial southern Los Angeles suburb of Torrance, tea partyers have taken to demonstrating weekends on the grassy street corner on the southwest side of the civic center. Their main bugbear is the fear of federal tax hikes to fund Obama's social programs. But talk to them--mostly white, mostly old, almost all beneficiaries of Social Security and Medicare, dwellers in a bungalow-land built from the wages doled out by government-funded military industries--and they quickly pivot into a denunciation of state and local tax increases too.
"I think we need to get the government to understand we won't accept new taxes--the federal government. The state needs to listen also," explains 75-year-old Donald Mitchell, sitting by the information table at a recent protest. A retired Hughes Aircraft engineer with a hearing aid in his left ear, a ruddy complexion and thinning, yellowing hair, Mitchell believes there's a power grab under way that is converting the country he loves to socialism. "The government is trying to take over one-sixth of our economy with healthcare, and that gets awfully close to socialism. Forget about the ownership of the banks."
These shock-troop opponents of healthcare reforms are also the most vociferous defenders of Proposition 13, the people who saw their tax rates locked in a generation ago and who are now unwilling to pony up more cash for the benefit of a younger, browner population. They watch Glenn Beck and listen to Rush Limbaugh--or to his virulently right-wing LA variants on The John and Ken Show. They believe big government is bringing down the Republic, and they're all too happy to wave at cars passing along Crenshaw Boulevard a bizarrely adapted US flag--the stripes and a circle of thirteen stars representing the original colonies, inside of which is the Roman numeral II, which stands, I'm told quietly, for the Second Revolution.
On the ground, the effects of this stalemate--one party wedded to big spending, another equally wedded to anti-taxism; one part of the population interested in building infrastructure, another only too happy to retreat further into its privatized world--have been catastrophic.
Mental health clinics are closing, state parks are limiting their admissions hours, county health clinics are shutting their doors, in-home services to the elderly have been decimated. And access to the state's health plan for low-income kids has been restricted--a less draconian option, it must be said, than the one contemplated at the height of the crisis: completely defunding the plan. At one point last summer, friends reported to me in amazement that local playgrounds had padlocked their toilet doors.
Shamefully, as a result of a line-item veto by Schwarzenegger in 2009, domestic violence centers have been all but defunded. In Santa Clarita, an exurb on the edge of Antelope Valley with a growing heroin and meth problem, that meant the loss of $200,000 for the local center; the firing of several counselors responsible for helping the 200-plus clients who came through the doors each year; the replacement of a full-time shelter advocate with three part-time ones; and an inability to pay rent on the down-at-the-heel suite of rooms the center occupied in a low-grade strip mall. Until a local businessman offered the use of one of his buildings a few miles away at below-market rates, the center teetered on the edge of closure.
"It's left us with two full-time staff in the office, including myself," asserts 32-year-old executive director Nicole Shellcroft. "Our clinical director volunteers two days a week to do therapy, and we have one part-time administrator. With two of us in the office, we have five lines that ring. We may miss someone or not be able to provide court accompaniment coverage."
At the same time that staffing has plummeted, the number of desperate people contacting the center for help has grown. Shellcroft and her colleague will answer the doorbell, and there'll be a mom with her kids and their suitcases standing outside, pleading for help in getting into a shelter.
Instead of working to protect the poor and maintain local services during these tough times, the state is punishing localities to cover for its own dysfunction. California's budget crisis "is as big a threat as the bank failures were," argues LA City Council president Eric Garcetti. City politicians, he says, "feel like the guy who knows times are tough; we cut back expenses, sold the car, got an old clunker and stopped going out to dinner. And there's a guy down the street saying, 'My Ferrari's not working. Give me your money.'" The state, Garcetti adds in clarification, is the Ferrari owner.
"I'm aghast at what's happened there [in Sacramento]," Mayor Villaraigosa declares. "The gridlock, the partisanship, the pervasive vitriol, which has prevented us from solving this crisis." LA has a $30 million hole in its housing authority budget and is only able to subsidize rent for one-bedroom apartments these days, no matter the size of the needy family. Because the state took the city's redevelopment dollars, park construction has been put on hold. And severely mentally ill patients around the city are being turned away from clinics because the money simply isn't there to treat them.
"We have a beautiful building and we're on life support," Dr. Steven Hochstadt, director of clinical services at the VMH facility in Glendale, explains. "It's all edifice."
It could serve as an epitaph for California these days: a gorgeous state with a terrific infrastructure built up over the past century, but no money or political will to keep the place running properly.

Department of Justice - DRUG INVASION THROUGH OUR OPEN & UNDEFENDED BORDERS

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

OBAMA’S SO CALLED “HOMELAND SECURITY” IS NOW THE “HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP”

OBAMA HAS TAKEN HUNDREDS OF BORDER GUARDS OFF OUR BORDERS WHEN HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN PUTTING THOUSANDS ON THEM.
EVERY DAY THOUSANDS MORE ILLEGALS WALK OVER OUR BORDERS FROM NARCOMEX (see MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com)
OBAMA HAS ALSO MAINTAINED PELOSI’S PROMISE OF NO WALL BY SABOTAGING FUNDING OF THE WALL. IN FACT ANYTHING THAT WOULD LIMIT THE MEXICAN INVASION, OBAMA AND HIS LA RAZA DEMS HAVE SABOTAGED FUNDING.
IN MEXICAN OCCUPIED CA, THE PRISONS ARE CHOKED WITH MEXICANS. THEY COST LEGALS ONE BILLION A YEAR TO KEEP BEHIND BARS, AND THE FEDS REIMBURSE CA ONLY ABOUT $100 MILLION, LESS THAN 10%!!!
*
U.S. Department of Justice
National Drug Intelligence Center
National Drug Threat Assessment 2010
February 2010
Drug Trafficking Organizations
Wholesale-level DTOs, especially Mexican DTOs, constitute the greatest drug trafficking threat to the United States. These organizations derive tens of billions of dollars annually from the trafficking and abuse of illicit drugs and associated activities. All of the adverse societal impact resulting from the illicit drug trade begins with the criminal acts of DTOs that produce, transport, and distribute the drugs.
Drug Cartels, Drug Trafficking Organizations, Criminal Groups, and Gangs
Drug cartels are large, highly sophisticated organizations composed of multiple DTOs and cells with specific assignments such as drug transportation, security/enforcement, or money laundering. Drug cartel command-and-control structures are based outside the United States; however, they produce, transport, and distribute illicit drugs domestically with the assistance of DTOs that are either a part of or in an alliance with the cartel.
Drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) are complex organizations with highly defined command-and-control structures that produce, transport, and/or distribute large quantities of one or more illicit drugs.
Criminal groups operating in the United States are numerous and range from small to moderately sized, loosely knit groups that distribute one or more drugs at the retail level and midlevel.
Street gangs are defined by the National Alliance of Gang Investigators' Association as groups or associations of three or more persons with a common identifying sign, symbol, or name, the members of which individually or collectively engage in criminal activity that creates an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.

PRISON GANGS WORKING FROM PRISONS!
Prison gangs are highly structured criminal networks that operate within the federal and state prison system and in local communities through members who have been released from prison.
Outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs) are highly structured criminal organizations whose members engage in criminal activities such as violent crimes, weapons trafficking, and drug trafficking. OMGs maintain a strong centralized leadership that implements rules regulating membership, conduct, and criminal activity.
The influence of Mexican DTOs, already the dominant wholesale drug traffickers in the United States, is still expanding, primarily in areas where the direct influence of Colombian DTOs is diminishing.
Mexican DTOs are more deeply entrenched in drug trafficking activities in the United States than any other DTOs. They are the only DTOs that are operating in all nine Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) regions (see Map A1 in Appendix A) and all 32 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTAs) (see Map A2 in Appendix A). They are active in more cities throughout the country than any other DTOs. Law enforcement reporting and case initiation data show that Mexican DTOs control most of the wholesale cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine distribution in the United States as well as much of the marijuana distribution (see Table B3 in Appendix B).
In the past few years, Mexican DTOs expanded their operations in the Florida/Caribbean, Mid-Atlantic, New York/New Jersey, and New England Regions, where, in the past, Colombian DTOs were the leading suppliers of cocaine and heroin. As a result, the direct influence of Colombian DTOs has diminished further, although they remain a source for wholesale quantities of cocaine and heroin in many eastern states, especially New York and New Jersey. Mexican DTOs have expanded their presence by increasing their transportation and distribution networks, directly supplying Dominican drug distributors that had previously distributed cocaine and heroin provided primarily by Colombian DTOs. The switch by Dominican DTOs from Colombian to Mexican suppliers is most evident in the Mid-Atlantic Region, specifically in the Philadelphia/Camden and Washington/Baltimore areas. In these locations, some Dominican DTOs bypass Colombian sources of supply in New York City and Miami and obtain cocaine and heroin directly from Mexican sources or from sources in the Caribbean or in South America.
The supply arrangement between Mexican and Dominican DTOs has aided Dominican DTOs and criminal groups in expanding their midlevel and retail drug distribution networks, primarily in the Mid-Atlantic Region, but also in other regions such as the Great Lakes and Southwest. The establishment of multiple sources of supply--rather than reliance entirely on Colombian sources--has also enabled Dominican DTOs to lower costs and increase profit margins.
The direct effect of the Mexican DTO expansion in eastern states on the drug trafficking activities of Italian Organized Crime (IOC) groups is unclear, although IOC drug trafficking appeared to diminish in 2009 as Mexican DTO influence increased. In 2008, drug trafficking by IOC in eastern states appeared to be increasing, based on information revealed through several significant multiagency drug investigations. However, in 2009, there were no similar drug cases involving IOC, and the relative strength of these groups in drug trafficking in eastern states now is unclear.
Asian DTOs have expanded their influence nationally in recent years by trafficking MDMA and high-potency marijuana--drugs that do not put them in direct competition with Mexican, Colombian, or Dominican DTOs.
The rising influence of Asian DTOs that was observed and reported by law enforcement agencies in 2008 continued to increase in 2009. Asian DTOs trafficked wholesale quantities of drugs in 24 of the 32 HIDTAs (see Map A2 in Appendix A), compared with 22 HIDTAs in 2007. Asian DTOs that had previously trafficked high-purity Southeast Asian heroin have become the predominant distributors of MDMA and high-potency marijuana, drugs typically associated with low criminal penalties and high profit margins. Asian DTOs increasingly smuggle large quantities of MDMA through and between ports of entry (POEs) along the U.S.-Canada border, as evidenced by seizure data that show a substantial increase in the amount of MDMA seized along the Northern Border from 2004 (312,389 dosage units) to 20098 (2,167,238 dosage units). While Asian DTOs continue to produce high-potency marijuana in Canada, they have decreased their reliance on foreign production by establishing marijuana grows in the United States, further reducing associated smuggling risks and costs. Consequently, the amount of marijuana seized along the U.S.-Canada border decreased from 10,447 kilograms in 2005 to 3,423 kilograms in 2009.
Asian DTOs have filled a niche by trafficking high-potency marijuana and MDMA--drugs not typically trafficked by Mexican, Colombian, or Dominican DTOs. This factor has contributed to their success; however, their success is largely due to their ability to estimate the risk and cost of engaging in any given criminal activity. Asian DTOs are willing to cooperate with other criminal groups to increase their profit and work with Caucasian, Hispanic, and African American DTOs or criminal groups in most major cities in an effort to expand their drug distribution and customer base.
Cuban DTOs and criminal groups are slowly expanding their drug trafficking activities beyond the Florida/Caribbean Region, in part by partnering with Mexican DTOs.
The influence of Cuban DTOs and criminal groups is expanding, albeit at a slower rate than that of Asian DTOs. The number of HIDTAs reporting Cuban DTO or criminal group activity increased from three in 2007 to eight in 2009. The expanding influence of Cuban DTOs and criminal groups is largely the result of their ability to exploit Cuban émigrés to establish and tend indoor marijuana grow sites in locations throughout the Florida/Caribbean and Southeast Regions (specifically in Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina). Cuban DTO and criminal group activity also appears to be expanding in the Southwest Region, where law enforcement agencies in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas report Cuban DTO or criminal group involvement in cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana trafficking. This expanding influence of Cuban DTOs and criminal groups can also be attributed to their close working relationships with Mexican DTOs. Many Cuban émigrés are brought illegally into the United States by smugglers who are associated with a Mexican DTO. Moreover, communities composed of both Cubans and Mexicans allow for the development of personal relationships between criminal groups. The full extent of these relationships is unknown. However, if they follow patterns similar to the relationships established between Mexican and Dominican DTOs, the involvement of Cuban DTOs and criminal groups in drug trafficking should expand further in the near term, although the threat posed by these groups will remain much lower than that posed
*
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

BECOME A FOLLOWER OF THE BLOG! CUT – PASTE – POST ON CL AND EMAIL BROADCAST. YOUR ELECTED REPS ARE WORKING FOR ILLEGALS, AND WALL ST. NOT YOU!

*
WHAT COSTS MORE PER YEAR THAN THE IRAQ WAR?

Illegal Aliens Cause Massive Cuts For US Seniors (THESE ARE DATED FIGURES. CALIFORNIA ALONE PUTS OUT NEARLY $20 BILLION. LOS ANGELES COUNTY ALONE PAYS OUT $600 MILLION IN WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS, WHILE IT’S SCHOOLS ARE IN MELTDOWN AND MEXICAN GANGS FLOURISH!)
1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year.
*
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
*
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
*
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
*
5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
*
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
*
7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
*
8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare and Social Services by the American taxpayers.
*
9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
*
10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two-and-a-half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US.
*
11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.
*
12. The National Policy Institute, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.
*
13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin.
*
14. 'The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States Total cost is a whoopin'... $338.3


*
VISIT THIS SITE FOR INFO ON OUR NATION’S IDENTITY AS WE BECOME ANNEXED BY MEXICO
THE BRADLEY REPORT ON AMERICAN’S NATIONAL IDENTITY
BRADLEYPORJECT.org
*
Anchor Baby Power
La Voz de Aztlan has produced a video in honor of the millions of babies that have been born as US citizens to Mexican undocumented parents. These babies are destined to transform America. The nativist CNN reporter Lou Dobbs estimates that there are over 200,000 "Anchor Babies" born every year whereas George Putnam, a radio reporter, says the figure is closer to 300,000. La Voz de Aztlan believes that the number is approximately 500,000 "Anchor Babies" born every year.
The video below depicts the many faces of the "Anchor Baby Generation". The video includes a fascinating segment showing a group of elementary school children in Santa Ana, California confronting the Minutemen vigilantes. The video ends with a now famous statement by Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez of the University of Texas at Austin.

http://www.aztlan.net/anchor_baby_power.htm

*
LA RAZA AGENDA: 3 Examples
Richard Alatorre, Los Angeles City Council "They're afraid we're going to take over the governmental institutions and other institutions. They're right. We will take them over. . We are here to stay."

Mario Obledo, California Coalition of Hispanic Organizations and California State Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Jerry Brown, also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton "California is going to be a Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn't like it should leave."

Jose Pescador Osuna, Mexican Consul General We are practicing "La Reconquista" in California."
*
NOTE THAT PELOSI HAS LONG ILLEGALLY HIRED ILLEGALS AT HER NAPA WINERY. FEINSTEIN HAS LONG HIRED ILLEGALS AT HER S.F. HOTEL. BOTH ARE DILIGENT IN SABOTAGING E-VERIFY AND WORK HARD FOR AMNESTY.
BARBARA BOXER HAS LONG HARANGUED I.C.E. FOR ATTEMPTING TO ENFORCE OUR LAWS AND DO THEIR JOBS! SHE HAS FOUGHT ENGLISH ONLY LAWS KNOWING MEXICANS HATE THE GRINGO LANGUAGE.
BOTH FEINSTEIN AND BOXER HAVE FOUGHT VOTING I.D. REQUIREMENTS SO ILLEGALS DON’T HAVE TO PULL OUT ONE OF THEIR POCKETFULS OF FRAUDULENT I.D.s to VOTE.
nancy pelosi's email address

http://www.speaker.gov/contact/comment_email

obama email address white house

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

senator feinstein's email address

http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.Emailme

senator boxer's email

http://boxer.senate.gov/en/contact/policycomments.cfm
*


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

“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
*

Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, June 16, 2008
Tonight, we’ll have all the latest on the devastating floods in the Midwest and all the day’s news from the campaign trail. The massive corporate mouthpiece the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is holding a “North American Forum” to lay out its “shared vision” for the United States, Canada and Mexico – which is to say a borderless, pro-business super-state in which U.S. sovereignty will be dissolved. Undercover investigators have found incredibly lax security and enforcement at U.S. border crossings, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office. This report comes on the heels of a separate report by U.C. San Diego that shows tougher border security efforts aren’t deterring illegal entries to the United States.
*
ACCORDING TO SENATOR LAMAR SMITH OF TEXAS, WHEN CHALLENGING SO- CALLED “HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIPS” LA RAZA JANET NAPOLITANO, AS TO WHY OUR BORDERS ARE WIDE OPEN TO NARCOMEX, OBAMA HAS CUT ENFORCEMENT BY MORE THAN 60% IN ALL AREAS.
Obama soft on illegals enforcement

Arrests of illegal immigrant workers have dropped precipitously under President Obama, according to figures released Wednesday. Criminal arrests, administrative arrests, indictments and convictions of illegal immigrants at work sites all fell by more than 50 percent from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2009.

The figures show that Mr. Obama has made good on his pledge to shift enforcement away from going after illegal immigrant workers themselves - but at the expense of Americans' jobs, said Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican who compiled the numbers from the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Mr. Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said a period of economic turmoil is the wrong time to be cutting enforcement and letting illegal immigrants take jobs that Americans otherwise would hold.
*
! YOU LIE! THE BELOW IS EXACTLY WHAT THE DEMS DO TO US EVERY DAY. THEY LIE ABOUT DEFENDED OUR BORDERS, JOBS, AND CULTURE, WHILE THEY CONTINUALLY PUT OUT INDUCEMENTS FOR MORE ILLEGALS TO CLIMB OUR BORDERS, AND HEAD FOR THE VOTING BOOTHS!
*
“The president's straddling can work for the time being. But unless he wants to end up in the sawdust, acrobat Obama will eventually have to hop on one horse and lead the way. That would have to be the horse named "Enforcement First." CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
*
“What's needed to discourage illegal immigration into the United States has been known for years: Enforce existing law.” ….. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR


*
But President Obama lit the fuse in February when he signed the massive expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). That law loosened eligibility requirements for legal immigrants and their children by watering down document and evidentiary standards – making it easy for individuals to use fake Social Security cards to apply for benefits with little to no chance of getting caught. In addition, Obama’s S-CHIP expansion revoked Medicaid application time limits that were part of the 1996 welfare reform law. Immigration activists see the provisions as first steps toward universal coverage for illegals.
*
WHILE BARACK OBAMA GIVES HIMSELF A B+ (HIS BANKSTERS GAVE HIM THE GRADE) JUDICIAL WATCH’S GRADE IS A BIT MORE REALISTIC:
JUDICIAL WATCH.org
With trillion dollar bailouts, government-run healthcare, banks and car companies, ACORN corruption, attacks on conservative media, illegal alien amnesty, unprecedented and dangerous new rights for terrorists, perks for campaign donors—this is the Obama legacy—and we haven't even gotten through the first year of his presidency!
*
You can contact President Obama and let him know of your opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

BARACK OBAMA 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW Washington, DC 20500 comments@whitehouse.gov Comments: 202-456-1111 Switchboard for live listener: 202 456 1414 Fax: 202-456-2461
*
Here is the Department of Homeland Security's Hotline for reporting suspected illegal employees and employers: 866-347-2423 (YOU MAY BE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE. HISPANDERING OBAMA SELECTED LA RAZA JANET NAPOLITANO TO HEAD “HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP” FOR OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS)



FIGHTING FOR AMNESTY, UNDEFENDED BORDERS, MORE WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS, NO ID FOR ILLEGALS TO VOTE, NO ENGLISH ONLY, NO ICE, NO ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS PROHIBITING THE HIRING OF ILLEGALS, CHAIN MIGRATION TO DOUBLE THE ILLEGAL POPULATION, NO E-VERIFY, NO WALL are

LA RAZA, THE FORTUNE 500 (MAJOR LA RAZA DONORS), U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE (fronting for corporate interests) LA RAZA DONOR BANKS WELLS FARGO and BANK of AMERICA (both exploit illegals) the GOVERNMENT OF MEXICO (we are Mexico’s welfare system), as well as the following

BARACK OBAMA, FEINSTEIN, BOXER, PELOSI, REID, WAXMAN, ESHOO, LOFGREN, HONDA, FARR, BACA, BECERRA, SANCHEZ, CLINTON, KENNEDY, McCAIN, SESSIONS,

FOR A LIST OF DIVERSE ENTITIES FIGHTING TO END MEXICAN OCCUPATION AND RETURN AMERICA TO AMERICANS, SEE LIST BOTTOM.


Report Illegals & Employers Toll Free... (866) 347-2423
INS National Customer Service Center Phone: 1-800-375-5283.
http://www.ice.gov/ ICE, ice, ICE
http://www.reportillegals.com/


CALL NANCY PELOSI Washington , DC - (202) 225-4965 San Francisco , CA - (415) 556-4862 EMAIL NANCY PELOSI sf.nancy@mail.house.gov EMAIL FORM FOR NANCY PELOSI www.house.gov/pelosi/contact/contact.html If you are out of her district, you can still make your feelings heard: Americanvoices@mail.house.gov Senator Harry Reid 202-224-3121 in Washington DC 775-686-5750 in Reno , NV www.reid.senate.gov
*
SPREAD THE WORD!
Email the entire Senate regarding the LA RAZA HISPANDERING OBAMA AMNESTY PUSH: http://houseofbills.com/email-the-senate/
*
SPREAD THE WORD!
Email the entire Senate regarding the LA RAZA HISPANDERING OBAMA AMNESTY PUSH: http://houseofbills.com/email-the-senate/
*
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com GO HERE AND CUT/PASTE ARTICLES TO EMAIL OR POST!
*
CALIFORNIA’S GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER STATES THAT ONE BILLION PER YEAR IS SPENT MAINTAINING ILLEGALS IN CA PRISONS. OF THAT, THE FEDS ONLY REIMBURSE 100 MILLION!
*
TEN MOST WANTED CRIMINALS IN CALIFORNIA ARE MEXICANS!
http://ag.ca.gov/wanted/mostwanted.php?fid=mostWantedFugitives_2010-01
*
LOS ANGELES MOST WANTED CRIMINALS – A WHO’S WHO OF LA RAZA “THE RACE”???
MURDER, RAPE, SEX OFFENDERS AND MEXICANS
VILLARAIGOSA’S MEXICAN OCCUPATION
WE ARE MEXICO’S WELFARE AND PRISON SYSTEM!

Thank you OP for the original posting. I went to that site and looked at all 206 Most wanted criminals in Los Angeles. Out of 206 criminals--183 are hispanic---171 of those are wanted for Murder.

Why do Americans still protect the illegals??

http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_11255121?appSession=934140935651450&RecordID=&PageID=2&PrevPageID=&cpipage=1&CPISortType=&CPIorderBy=


*
(THE FIGURE FOR MEXICAN GANG MEMBERS IN OUR NATION NOW CALCULATED BY CNN TO BE MORE THAN A MILLION. ACCORDING TO THE F.B.I., THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS OPERATE IN 233 AMERICAN CITIES – HOMELAND SECURITY?)
Lou Dobbs Tonight
And there are some 800,000 gang members in this country: That’s more than the combined number of troops in our Army and Marine Corps. These gangs have become one of the principle ways to import and distribute drugs in the United States. Congressman David Reichert joins Lou to tell us why those gangs are growing larger and stronger, and why he’s introduced legislation to eliminate the top three international drug gangs.
*
Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, September 28, 2009

And T.J. BONNER, president of the National Border Patrol Council, will weigh in on the federal government’s decision to pull nearly 400 agents from the U.S.-Mexican border. As always, Lou will take your calls to discuss the issues that matter most-and to get your thoughts on where America is headed.
*
NANCY PELOSI, LIKE DIANNE FEINSTEIN, HAS LONG ILLEGALLY HIRED ILLEGALS AT HER NAPA WINERY AND RESTAURANTS. PELOSI IS ALSO HEAVILY INVESTED IN SUNKIST, WHICH DOES NOT PAY LIVING WAGES FOR ORANGE PICKERS.
Report Illegals & Employers Toll Free... (866) 347-2423
INS National Customer Service Center Phone: 1-800-375-5283.
http://www.ice.gov/ ICE, ice, ICE
http://www.reportillegals.com/


CALL NANCY PELOSI Washington , DC - (202) 225-4965 San Francisco , CA - (415) 556-4862 EMAIL NANCY PELOSI sf.nancy@mail.house.gov EMAIL FORM FOR NANCY PELOSI www.house.gov/pelosi/contact/contact.html If you are out of her district, you can still make your feelings heard: Americanvoices@mail.house.gov
EMAIL: NANCY PELOSI
http://speaker.house.gov/contact/
CALL NANCY PELOSI Washington , DC - (202) 225-4965 San Francisco , CA - (415) 556-4862 EMAIL NANCY PELOSI sf.nancy@mail.house.gov

*
WSWS.org
NO ADS FREE NEWS ON CORPORATE RAPE
criminal illegals and the benefits to society
http://www.usillegalaliens.com/impacts_of_illegal_immigration_property_crimes_and_operation_predator.html
*
LA RAZA – “THE (MEXICAN) RACE”….
THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA
1126 16th Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C.
202-785 1670
Get on La Raza’s email list to find out what this fascist party is doing to expand the Mexican occupation. NCLR.org
FOR THE EXPANSION OF THE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE, AND MEXICAN SUPREMACY
LA RAZA is the virulently racist political party for ILLEGALS (only Mexicans) and the corporations that benefit from illegals, and the employers of illegals. IT IS ILLEGAL TO HIRE AN ILLEGAL.
LA RAZA IS THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of AMERICA and has contempt for AMERICANS, AMERICAN LAWS, AMERICAN LANGUAGE, AMERICAN BORDERS, and the AMERICAN FLAG.
However LA RAZA does like the AMERICAN WELFARE SYSTEM. The welfare system in the country is so good that Mexico has dumped 38 million of their poor, illiterate , criminal and frequently pregnant over our border.
*
FAIRUS.org
FEDERATION FOR AMERICAN IMMIGRATION REFORM
FAIR CHARACTERIZES THE OBAMA, AND LA RAZA DEMS PLAN FOR AMNESTY AS FOLLOWS:
That's why, throughout 2009 FAIR has been tracking every move the administration and Congress has made to undermine our immigration laws, reward illegal aliens and burden taxpayers.
• Foot-dragging on proven methods of immigration law enforcement including border structures and E-Verify.
• Appointment of several illegal alien advocates to important administration posts.
• Watering down of the 287(g) program to limit local law in their own jurisdictions.
• Health care reform that mandates a “public option” for newly-arrived legal immigrants as well as illegal aliens.

*
LosAngelesTimes
Do a search for Mexican gangs, or go to “Mexico Under Siege”
“THE DRUG WAR AT OUR BORDERS” …ask yourself why the LA RAZA DEMS want these borders OPEN!
*
usillegalaliens.com
*
USCFILE.org
Cut and paste articles and post email all over the country!
*
REPORT ILLEGALS TO: 1-866-DHS-2-ICE.
http://www.ice.gov/ ICE, ice, ICE

*

JUDICIALWATCH.org
*
Report Illegals & Employers Toll Free... (866) 347-2423
INS National Customer Service Center Phone: 1-800-375-5283.
http://www.reportillegals.com/
*
Immigration Enforcement Group Defends Against Amnesty Push

The ALIPAC Team
www.alipac.us
*
Here is the Department of Homeland Security's Hotline for reporting suspected illegal employees and employers: 866-347-2423

*
OUTSIDE OF MEXICO CITY, THE LARGEST NUMBER OF KIDNAPPINGS IS IN PHOENIX.
EVERYDAY THERE IS A KIDNAPPING BY A MEXICAN IN PHOENIX!

http://arizona.mugshotlist.com/

http://arizona.mugshotlist.com/mugshots/male/

http://arizona.mugshotlist.com/mugshots/female/

illegals vs crime
http://www.usillegalaliens.com/impacts_of_illegal_immigration_crime.html

http://www.cis.org/mortensen/bratton

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/08/local/me-jail8
*
http://www.numbersusa.com
*
http://www.capsweb.org
*
http://www.fairus.org
*
http://www.immigrationwatchdog.com
*
http://www.veteransforsecureborders.us
*
http://www.minutemanproject.com
*
http://www.minutemanhq.com/hq/
*
http://www.americanpatrol.com
*
http://www.americanborderpatrol.com/
*
http://www.americanimmigrationcontrol.com/
*
http://www.alipac.us
http://www.frostywooldridge.com/