January 19, 2010
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Blacks in Retreat
By BOB HERBERT
It has been easy for people to forget in the decades since we lost the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that he was a passionate fighter for economic justice as well as civil rights. The two goals were as closely linked as the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water.
The historic gathering in 1963 at which Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
And when Dr. King was murdered in Memphis in 1968, he had gone there to support sanitation workers who were striking for higher wages and better working conditions.
Jobs and freedom. In America, you can’t have one without the other. Democrats are in deep trouble right now — just a year after their giddy celebration of Barack Obama’s ascendance to the presidency — because so many millions of Americans are out of work, unable to find the gainful employment that would unlock the door to a stable future for themselves and their families.
The president and his party may be obsessed with health care, but unemployed and underemployed Americans want a job. Why this has been so hard for the Democrats to realize, I can’t say.
As the nation continues to wallow in the trough of widespread unemployment, black Americans are bearing a disproportionate burden of the joblessness. The election of a black president may have been important to African-Americans for myriad reasons, but it hasn’t done much for their bottom line, which continues to deteriorate.
For example, without a dramatic new intervention by the federal government, the poverty rate for African-American children could eventually approach a heart-stopping 50 percent, according to analysts at the Economic Policy Institute. Already more than a third of black children are living in poverty.
Present trends are not good. Communities of color are being crushed economically and the national news media have not fully focused on the carnage. The official unemployment rate for blacks is 16.2 percent and could well pass 17 percent before the year is out. The real jobless rate is far more ghastly. The Boston-based group United for a Fair Economy noted that even “college-educated black men are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed as their white, college-educated counterparts.”
In some poor neighborhoods, a man or woman with a traditional full-time job is the exception, not the rule. In five Midwestern states — Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Oklahoma — the jobless rate for blacks is at least three times as high as that for whites.
Some decades ago, you would have heard a sustained outcry against such dire conditions among blacks, and there would have been loud demands for policy changes designed to bring more black Americans into the economic mainstream. You don’t hear much of that now. Too many so-called black leaders are much more interested in invitations to the White House and positive profiles in mainstream publications than in raising any kind of ruckus that might benefit people in real trouble.
What the politicians and today’s civil rights types won’t tell you is that we’re looking ahead to many long decades of grief and strife in America’s black communities because of our failure to respond effectively to the horrendous impact of the Great Recession and the policies that led up to it. Black Americans are going backward economically, and right now no one is stepping up to stop the retreat.
United for a Fair Economy, in its latest “State of the Dream” report, which is released annually around the time of Dr. King’s birthday, is urging Congress and the president to identify communities with the highest unemployment rates and develop specific job-creation initiatives for them.
That kind of targeted effort is desperately needed, but don’t hold your breath. There is precious little sentiment for programs that would provide real help to communities trapped in the nightmarish depths of this downturn, whether the residents are mostly black, mostly white, mostly Hispanic, or whatever.
Speaking about one of his many antipoverty initiatives, Dr. King told Look magazine in 1968: “We called our demonstration a campaign for jobs and income because we felt that the economic question was the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, were confronting.”
That was then. The loudest voices against poverty and economic injustice of all kinds have long since faded. The government, reclining comfortably on a vast cushion of campaign contributions, has allied itself with big business and the big banks against the interests of ordinary Americans. Millions upon millions of families are suffering, but mostly in silence.
We honor Dr. King with a national holiday, but his long campaign for economic justice has been all but forgotten.
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Pat Buchanan
Is This Our America Anymore?
Buried in the Oct. 30 Washington Post was a bland headline: "Report Points to Faster Recovery in Jobs for Immigrants."
The story, however, contained social dynamite that explains the rage of Americans who are smeared as nativists and xenophobes for demanding a timeout on immigration.
In the April-May-June quarter, foreign-born workers in the U.S. gained 656,000 jobs. And native-born Americans lost 1.2 million.
From July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010, foreign-born Hispanics gained 98,000 construction jobs. Native-born Hispanics lost 133,000. Black and white U.S. construction workers lost 511,000 jobs.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, from Jan. 1, 2000, to Jan. 1, 2010, 13.1 million immigrants, legal and illegal, entered the United States, a decade in which America lost 1 million jobs.
From 2008 and 2009, the figures are startling. In 24 months, 2.4 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrived, as U.S. citizens were losing 8.6 million jobs.
Query: Why are we importing a million-plus workers a year when 17 million Americans can't find work? Whose country is this?
Why do we not declare a moratorium on all immigration, until our unemployment rate falls to 6 or 5 percent? Charity begins at home. Ought we not take care of our own jobless first before we invite in strangers to take their jobs?
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, each year between 300,000 and 400,000 "anchor babies" are born to illegal aliens. These newborns are entitled to citizenship, free health care and education, welfare and food stamps
Their parents -- almost all are poor or working class -- rarely pay any state or federal income tax.
How long can we keep granting citizenship and full social welfare benefits to the children of people who break our laws and break into our country or overstay their visas? How long can we keep bringing in workers to take jobs when our unemployment rate hovers around 10 percent?
Again, according to the Pew Center, the number of anchor babies here now is about 4 million. Add to that 3 million to 4 million born each decade, and it will not be long before Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and Texas resemble California, which is on the brink of default.
If no action is taken, the Republican Party will soon be unable, even in wave elections, to win the presidency, as it won nothing and indeed lost state legislative seats in California in 2010.
The border will disappear, and America will be a geographical expression, not a country anymore.
Legal scholar William Quirk describes a new phenomenon in the invasion of America: "maternity tourism." Pregnant Asian women pay $15,000 to agents to ensure they are in the United States when their child is born so that they can return home secure in the knowledge he or she will be a U.S. citizen with the right to a U.S.-taxpayer subsidized education in college.
Though the nation has awakened to the threat to social cohesion and national solvency, Harry Reid is still attempting to ram through a lame-duck Senate an amnesty for illegal aliens up to age 30 who claim they were brought here before they were 16, have a high school diploma or GED and state that they intend to go to college within six years.
An estimated 2.1 million illegal aliens would be amnestied, put on a path to citizenship, and be eligible for student loans and more.
According to Alabama's Jeff Sessions, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee:
"Aliens granted amnesty by the DREAM Act will have the legal right to petition for entry of their family members, including their adult brothers and sisters and the parents who illegally brought or sent them to the United States, once they become naturalized U.S. citizens. In less than a decade, this reality could easily double or triple the 2.1 million green cards that will be immediately distributed as a result of the DREAM Act."
Lawbreaking would be rewarded. Chain migration would continue. A permanent powerful magnet would be provided to all foreigners to sneak into the United States and be sure to bring the kids.
As Rep. Dana Rohrabacher argues, one effect of the DREAM Act will be to move illegals applying to college ahead of many Americans, as 80 percent of illegals are Hispanics and eligible for affirmative action.
U.S. soldiers coming home from Afghanistan will "sit in back," as Obama puts it, when competing against amnestied illegals.
Several days ago, UCLA's Kent Wong addressed a pro-amnesty rally in Los Angeles' MacArthur Park. Wong turned the race card face up.
When Reid's bill passes, said Wong, "the young people of the DREAM Act movement will go on to accomplish and do great things. ... You will go on to become lawyers, teachers, doctors and members of the U.S. Congress to replace those old white men ... ."
If the DREAM Act passes, Wong is right about whose time has come and gone. May the tea party take names at the call of the roll.
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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.
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THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
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OBAMA, LA RAZA PARTY DEM FOR BANKSTERS AND THE RICH… American middle class gets the bills for all their crimes!
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MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
“President Obama’s summit with US corporate chiefs on Wednesday was a shameless display of the complete subordination of the administration to big business. In the midst of the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression, with millions losing their homes and falling into poverty, Obama met for five hours behind closed doors to reassure the leaders of 20 major corporations of his unquestioning support, while plotting new initiatives to boost profits and reduce working class living standards.”
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“The corporate elite, having been bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars, wants more. Two years after the Wall Street crash, it is cracking the whip on its political representatives more imperiously than ever. In Obama, it has a president who is eager to please.”
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