Thursday, February 10, 2011

America - Land of Criminal Bankster Billionaires and LA RAZA FASCISM - CALL IT OBAMAnation

AMERICA… Land Of Staggering Poverty, Bankster Billionaires and LA RAZA OCCUPATION


MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com



Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico is EVERYWHERE. copy and pass it to your friends.





WHEN OBAMA IS FINISHED, THERE WILL BE MILLIONS MORE ILLEGALS IN OUR COUNTRY, JOBS, WELFARE LINES, AND PRISONS and STILL NO BANKSTERS IN PRISON.

OBAMA WILL HAVE COMPLETED THE TRANSFER OF THE ECONOMY, WHAT WAS LEFT AFTER BUSH, TO WALL ST. FOR UNREGULATED PILLAGE.

THE AMERICA MIDDLE CLASS WILL HAVE THE ENTIRE MESS DUMPED ON THEM TO PAY FOR.

WE’RE STILL PAYING FOR THE SAVINGS AND LOAN DEBACLE OF THE 1980’S. WON’T BE PAID OFF UNTIL 2012, AND THAT PILLAGE WAS MINISCULE COMPARED TO WHAT THE BANKSTERS HAVE DONE TO US!



February 7, 2011

A Terrible Divide

By BOB HERBERT

The Ronald Reagan crowd loved to talk about morning in America. For millions of individuals and families, perhaps the majority, it’s more like twilight — with nighttime coming on fast.

Look out the window. More and more Americans are being left behind in an economy that is being divided ever more starkly between the haves and the have-nots. Not only are millions of people jobless and millions more underemployed, but more and more of the so-called fringe benefits and public services that help make life livable, or even bearable, in a modern society are being put to the torch.

Employer-based pensions, paid vacations, health benefits and the like are going the way of phone booths and VCRs. As poverty increases and reliable employment becomes less and less the norm, the dwindling number of workers with any sort of job security or guaranteed pensions (think teachers and other modestly compensated public employees) are being viewed with increasing contempt. How dare they enjoy a modicum of economic comfort?

It turns out that a lot of those jobs were never so secure, after all. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us:

“At least 44 states and the District of Columbia have reduced overall wages paid to state workers by laying off workers, requiring them to take unpaid leave (furloughs), freezing hew hires, or similar actions. State and local governments have eliminated 407,000 jobs since August 2008, federal data show.”

We have not faced up to the scale of the economic crisis that still confronts the United States.

Standards of living for the people on the wrong side of the economic divide are being ratcheted lower and will remain that way for many years to come. Forget the fairy tales being spun by politicians in both parties — that somehow they can impose service cuts that are drastic enough to bring federal and local budgets into balance while at the same time developing economic growth strong enough to support a robust middle class. It would take a Bernie Madoff to do that.

In the real world, schools and libraries are being closed and other educational services are being curtailed. Police officers are being fired. Access to health services for poor families is being restricted. “At least 29 states and the District of Columbia,” according to the budget center, “are cutting medical, rehabilitative, home care, or other services needed by low-income people who are elderly or have disabilities, or are significantly increasing the cost of these services.”

For a variety of reasons, there are not enough tax revenues being generated to pay for the basic public services that one would expect in an advanced country like the United States. The rich are not shouldering their fair share of the tax burden. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to consume an insane amount of revenue. And there are not enough jobs available at decent enough pay to ease some of the demand for public services while at the same time increasing the amount of taxes paid by ordinary workers.

The U.S. cannot cut its way out of this crisis. Instead of trying to figure out how to keep 4-year-olds out of pre-kindergarten classes, or how to withhold life-saving treatments from Medicaid recipients, or how to cheat the elderly out of their Social Security, the nation’s leaders should be trying seriously to figure out what to do about the future of the American work force.

Enormous numbers of workers are in grave danger of being left behind permanently. Businesses have figured out how to prosper without putting the unemployed back to work in jobs that pay well and offer decent benefits.

Corporate profits and the stock markets are way up. Businesses are sitting atop mountains of cash. Put people back to work? Forget about it. Has anyone bothered to notice that much of those profits are the result of aggressive payroll-cutting — companies making do with fewer, less well-paid and harder-working employees?

For American corporations, the action is increasingly elsewhere. Their interests are not the same as those of workers, or the country as a whole. As Harold Meyerson put it in The American Prospect: “Our corporations don’t need us anymore. Half their revenues come from abroad. Their products, increasingly, come from abroad as well.”

American workers are in a world of hurt. Anyone who thinks that politicians can improve this sorry state of affairs by hacking away at Social Security, Medicare and the public schools are great candidates for involuntary commitment.

New ideas on a grand scale are needed. The United States can’t thrive with so many of its citizens condemned to shrunken standards of living because they can’t find adequate employment. Long-term joblessness is a recipe for societal destabilization. It should not be tolerated in a country with as much wealth as the United States. It’s destructive, and it’s wrong.

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MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com



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/



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Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico is EVERYWHERE. copy and pass it to your friends.



http://www.FAIRUS.org



http://www.JUDICIALWATCH.org



http://www.ALIPAC.us



APPARENTLY OBAMA’S NON-ENFORCEMENT, OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, AND ENDLESS HISPANDERING FOR ILLEGALS’ VOTES IS WORKING.... at least for them!

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“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’s rejection of any serious jobs program is part of a conscious class war policy. Two years after the financial crisis and the multi-trillion dollar bailout of the banks, the administration is spearheading a campaign by corporations to sharply increase the exploitation of the working class, using the “new normal” of mass unemployment to force workers to accept lower wages, longer hours, and more brutal working conditions.” WSWS.ORG

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com



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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MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO LA RAZA – THE MEXICAN FASCIST POLITICAL PARTY. THESE FIGURES ARE DATED. CNN CALCULATES THAT WAGES ARE DEPRESSED $300 - $400 BILLION PER YEAR!

“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” Christian Science Monitor



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More than a million immigrants land U.S. jobs

Stepped-up enforcement is not deterring trend of foreign-born employment

By Ed Stoddard



updated 31 minutes ago

DALLAS — Over the past two years, as U.S. unemployment remained near double-digit levels and the economy shed jobs in the wake of the financial crisis, over a million foreign-born arrivals to America found work, many illegally.

Those are among the findings of a review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data conducted exclusively for Reuters by researchers at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

Often young and unskilled or semi-skilled, immigrants have taken jobs Americans could do in areas like construction, willing to work for less wages. Others land jobs that unemployed Americans turn up their noses at or lack the skills to do.

With a national unemployment rate of 9.4 percent, domestic job creation is at the top of President Barack Obama's agenda and such findings could add to calls to tighten up on illegal immigration. But much of it is Hispanic and the growing Latino vote is a key base for Obama's Democratic Party.

Many of the new arrivals, according to employers, brought with them skills required of the building trade and found work in sectors such as construction, where jobless rates are high.

"Employers have chosen to use new immigrants over native-born workers and have continued to displace large numbers of blue-collar workers and young adults without college degrees," said Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies.

"One of the advantages of hiring, particularly young, undocumented immigrants, is the fact that employers do not have to pay health benefits or basic payroll taxes," said Sum.

From 2008 to 2010, 1.1 million new migrants who have entered America since 2008 landed jobs, even as U.S. household employment declined by 6.26 million over that same period.

But in a sign of the times, the pace of job growth for new arrivals has also slowed, to an average of 550,000 a year from 2008 to 2010 from over 750,000 a year from 2000 to 2008.

Sum said it was fair to estimate that around 35 percent of these workers were undocumented or illegal.

Many immigrants acquired jobs in traditional low-wage work associated with foreign, undocumented and especially Mexican labor: hotels and food services, retail trade, sanitation, cleaning and construction.

There are a number of programs by which the United States lets foreign workers into the country to fill gaps in its domestic labor market but employer groups complain little is done in this area for legal, unskilled workers.

"There is basically no unskilled immigration that is legal. There are basically no provisions in the law for unskilled immigrants," said Bill Hammond, president of the Texas Association of Business.

Farm workers in particular argue that Americans would not do the tough field work that is rife with undocumented workers, titling one recent union campaign "Take Our Jobs". The slogan meant that if Americans wanted their jobs, then take them. But it is likely they don't.

Immigrant hiring also comes despite stepped-up workplace enforcement against companies that hire illegal immigrants and the rapid expansion of the online E-verify system used by employers to check immigration status.

Some of those who entered the country since 2008 were employed in sectors that generally require a high level of skills and education, such as finance and insurance.

But the 28,500 new arrivals since 2008 who found work in the finance and insurance sector only comprised 2.6 percent of the 1.1 million migrants. Over 90,000 of the newcomers since 2008 got work in health care and social services, a fast-growing sector where skills are in demand.

Young, educated and willing to work

But the demographic profile of the immigrants who are still landing jobs is slanted to the young, uneducated, unskilled or semi-skilled. Accommodations and food services, for example, was a sector that employed over 144,000 new arrivals -- the biggest group of employed new immigrants. These would be jobs such as hotel maids and dishwashers.

And 42 percent of the 1.1 million were under 30.

The unemployment rate for all Americans without a high school diploma in this age group is about 27 percent to 29 percent -- a level that Sum says is "Depression scale." And in sectors such as construction the unemployment rate is almost 21 percent.

Asked about hiring, industry sources say there is little.

"What hiring? Our guys laid off another 16,000 people in December," said Brian Turmail, spokesman for the Associated General Contractors of America.

Yet the analysis by Sum and his colleagues shows that over 86,000 foreign-born workers who arrived in America since 2008 have been employed in the construction sector.

Sum said the whole situation was creating a deeper domestic labor glut at the bottom of the workforce ladder, depressing wages and sharpening already widening income disparities.

But Ezequiel Arvizu, the compliance and diversity representative with federal contractor Sundt Construction in Arizona, said his company had hired new arrivals over the past three years simply because they often have experience that native-born Americans lack.

"People often think construction is unskilled but the trades are very skilled and we need cement masons, carpenters, equipment operators," he told Reuters in a phone interview.

"We are looking for qualified candidates and it just so happens that some of the candidates who we select are legal immigrants. It means they have the skills we are looking for," he said.

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One in seven Americans on food stamps

By Tom Eley

8 February 2011

A record one in seven Americans relied on government food stamps to help feed themselves in 2010, according to the latest data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Last year 43.6 million people turned to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—a 67 percent increase over the 26 million who received food stamps in 2007, the year before the economic crisis erupted. All but 14 states saw double-digit percentage increases in food stamp use in 2010. Nearly half of all SNAP recipients are children.

Sharp increases in food stamp use took place across the country. The Rocky Mountain state of Idaho saw the sharpest increase, at 28 percent. Other states that saw increases in food stamp use of 20 percent or above include: Nevada (27 percent); Delaware (25.4 percent); Utah (24.9 percent); Florida (23.2 percent); Maryland (22.1 percent); New Jersey (22 percent); Texas (21.6 percent); and Rhode Island (21.4 percent).

There are nine states plus the District of Columbia in which about one fifth of the population (18.4 percent to 23 percent) relied on food stamps in 2010. They include Mississippi, Tennessee, New Mexico, Oregon, Louisiana, Michigan, West Virginia, Kentucky, and South Carolina.

A separate survey of USDA data by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), released in January, found that in 22 large urban areas food stamp participation rates increased by an average of 18.6 percent from May 2009 to May 2010.

The average monthly benefit through SNAP, which now allows purchases of food through debit cards rather than with coupons or “stamps,” is woefully inadequate: $154 for a household of four. Advocates say that most SNAP recipients exhaust their benefits within days of the start of the month.

Nationally, about two thirds of all eligible households receive food stamps, but there is great variation among the states. In Texas and California, for example, less than half of eligible households receive SNAP benefits. Even though the program is funded in full—except for administrative costs—by the federal government, California vindictively requires those seeking food assistance submit to fingerprinting and a 13-page application.

Only about one third of the nation’s 7 million food stamp-eligible senior citizens receive assistance. Many of the remainder may be unaware of the program or confused about how it works.

“A lot of people aren’t aware that they are eligible, particularly the elderly,” Barb Rupert of Commission on Economic Opportunity in Luzerne and Wyoming counties in Northeast Pennsylvania told the Hazleton Standard Speaker. In Luzerne County, an old coal-mining region, food stamp use is up 12.1 percent in two years.

State and federal governments throw up other roadblocks to using the program. A household of four that earns more than $2,389 in gross monthly income, less than $30,000 gross annually, is ineligible. Having more than $2,000 in savings or other financial resources—including second vehicles— precludes access to SNAP. Immigrants are barred from the program until they have been legal residents for five years, and undocumented workers and their children are ineligible.

Behind the 28 percent surge in Idaho’s SNAP enrollment is the rapid growth of unemployment, which has increased to 9.5 percent, threefold since 2007. Stateline.org, citing Kathy D. Gardner of the Idaho Hunger Relief Task Force, notes that the increase in the state is remarkable because Idaho provides no outreach or advertisement of the program. While applications can be found on-line, they must be delivered in person.

In Minnesota, SNAP participation increased by 16.6 percent in one year. Lorie Kratchmer of the state’s Emergency Food Shelf Network told the World Socialist Web Site that the increase in food stamp use was part of a dramatic growth in those seeking food assistance. Visits to food charities in the 31 counties overseen by the group have increased by 60 percent since 2008, “and there’s no sign it’s slowing down,” Kratchmer said.

“The face of hunger has changed so much in recent years,” she said. “Much of the growth has been in suburban areas. The person who is hungry could be your neighbor two doors down, or someone sitting at the end of the church pew.” Kratchmer attributes the growth of hunger to financially-strapped families choosing to pay for their utilities or their mortgages ahead of food.

In Oregon, food stamp usage increased by 11.5 percent to just under 750,000 people in 2010, or 20 percent of the state’s population. Oregon’s official unemployment rate has been at or above 10.5 percent for fourteen months, and the broader U-6 measure puts the jobless rate at over 20 percent.

In Illinois, food stamp use spiked by 12.7 percent in one year. Significantly, the counties with the greatest increases were wealthy suburban counties of Chicago—DuPage, Kendall, Kane, and McHenry.

“Since the fall of ‘08, we’ve had an increase practically every month” in food stamp enrollment, state SNAP director Jan Freeman told the Chicago Sun Times. “We’re not seeing it go down yet.”

The high level of hunger indicated by spiraling food stamp use in metropolitan Chicago has been corroborated by a consortium of 650 area food charities, the Greater Chicago Food Depository, which reports a 65-70 percent increase in the number of individuals served at its pantries since 2007.

“More people turned to the pantries in our community in November than in any month in our 32-year history,” said the group’s head, Kate Maehr.

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