SHOULD CA CONTINUE TO BE MEXICO’S WELFARE, JOBS, JAILS AND FREE BIRTHING CENTER?
NOT IF THE LA RAZA DEMS CAN HELP IT!
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MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.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.
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CA IN MELTDOWN… LIFER POLITICIANS FEINSTEIN, BOXER AND PELOSI HAVE ALL GOTTEN FILTHY RICH OFF ELECTED OFFICE.
BOXER HAS LONG SIPHONED OFF BRIBES FROM THE SPECIAL INTERESTS TO HER SON, OAKLAND LAWYER DOUGLAS BOXER, IN THE FORM OF “CONSULTANT FEES”. MILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF “CONSULTANT FEES”. WHEN GIVEN THE CHANCE TO CLEAN UP THIS BRAZEN FORM OF CORRUPTION, FEINSTEIN AND BOXER BOTH VOTED HELL NO!!! THEY VOTE NO ANY ATTEMPT TO CLEAN UP “ETHICS” IN THE SENATE. BOXER TAKES BIG LOOT FROM FEINSTEIN HUSBAND TO ASSURE THERE WILL NEVER BE ANY INVESTIGATION INTO THE CRIMES OF DIANNE FEINSTEIN BY THE SENATE.
THERE PROBABLY HAS NEVER BEEN A MORE CORRUPT AND SELF-SERVING POLITICIAN THAN SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN. SHE IS A MAJOR BUSH WAR PROFITEER, AND GENEROUS OBAMA DONOR. YOU SAW HER GIVING PART OF OBAMA’S INAUGURAL, WITH HER WHITE COLLAR CRIMINAL HUSBAND, RICHARD BLUM, SITTING BY BEHIND THE EASILY BOUGHT OBAMA.
RALPH NADER HAS CHARACTERIZED FEINSTEIN AS A “CLOSET REPUBLICAN”, AND OBAMA AS A “CORPORATIST”. THIS CRIME DUAL IS EXACTLY THAT.
FEINSTEIN, WHO TAKES BIG MONEY FROM BANKSTER CRIMINALS WELLS FARGO and BANK of AMERICA, PUSHED FOR MASSIVE NO-STRING BAILOUTS, AND WAS THE BANKSTERS’ BOUGHT FRONT FOR THEIR BANKSTER WRITTEN BANKRUPTCY “REFORM” NOW LAW. THIS LAW, WHICH OBAMA SAID HE WOULD REVERSE, PREVENTS VICTIMS OF BANKSTERS MORTGAGE FRAUD (OF WHICH WELLS FARGO HAS LONG HAD THEIR CA MORTGAGE LICENSE REVOKED FOR) FROM OBTAINING HELP IN THE COURTS. OBAMA WENT LIMP ON THAT PROMISE.
PACIFIC GAS & ELECTRIC, ANOTHER CORPORATE MONSTERS, IS FEINSTEIN’S LARGEST CAMPAIGN DONOR.
FEINSTEIN DOES NOT EXPOSE WHAT MONEY SHE’S TAKEN FROM RED CHINA FOR BEING THEIR ADVOCATE IN CONGRESS, AS THESE BRIBES ARE MAINTAINED AS “LEGAL” BY SIPHONING THEM ALL THROUGH FEINSTEIN’S ACCOMPLICE, RICHARD C. BLUM.
NANCY PELOSI ALSO SIPHONS OFF SPECIAL INTEREST MONEY AS “CONSULTANT FEES” TO HER HUSBAND.
NANCY PELOSI, A LA RAZA ENDORSED POLITICIAN, HAS VOWED THE WALL WITH NARCOMEX WILL NEVER BE BUILT. OBAMA HAS STOPPED IT AND TURNED HOMELAND INTO Dept. of Homeland Security = Pathway to Citizenship. DEPT. HEAD NAPOLITANO IS A LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER AND ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS LIES ABOUT OUR BORDER SECURITY.
NANCY PELOSI HAS LONG EXPLOITED ILLEGAL LABOR AT HER ST. HELENA, NAPA WINERY.
DIANNE FEINSTEIN HAS LONG EXPLOITED ILLEGAL LABOR AT HER S.F. HOTEL, ONLY MILES FROM HER $16 MILLION WAR PROFITEER MANSION.
FEINSTEIN IS QUOTED AS SAYING “Americans are stupid not to want amnesty and more illegals!”.
FEINSTEIN AND PELOSI REGULARLY MAKE JUDICIAL WATCH’S 10 MOST CORRUPT, ALONG WITH OBAMA.
AND YOU WONDERED HOW CALIFORNIA TURNED INTO A CATASTROPHE WHERE CORPORATIONS, BANKSTERS AND LA RAZA RULE? WHERE NO LEGAL NEED APPLY? WHERE MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY ARE SIPHONED OFF TO THE SPECIAL INTERESTS, WHICH TRICKLE THEM DOWN TO THESE WOMEN??? AND BOATLOADS OF CHINESE AND INDIANS STILL ARE BEING IMPORTED TO TAKE ALL OUR TECH JOBS!
THESE THREE WOMEN, AND OBAMA HAVE AND WILL ALWAYS SELL US OUT TO BANKSTERS, ILLEGALS AND THEIR CORPORATE PAYMASTERS!!!
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California’s budget crisis: a historical overview
By Jack Cody
28 February 2011
Recently elected California Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, is continuing the austerity policies of his Republican predecessor. As working class Californians brace themselves for deep cuts in education and social services, it is worthwhile to look back at how the state with the highest number of billionaires found itself in a situation of recurrent fiscal crises.
Contrary to many claims, California’s fiscal problems are not the result of administrative excess. Rather, the state has been at the center of the transformation of the American economy from a system of producing socially useful commodities to one in which wealth is transferred to the financial class without going through the intermediate process of production.
The total budget gap for California exceeds $25 billion for fiscal year 2011-2012. Brown is seeking to balance the budget through a combination of $12.5 billion in cuts to social services and $14 billion in regressive tax hikes, including increases to sales tax and vehicle license registration fees. The taxes are subject to voter approval, which Brown hopes to gain in a special election in June. The proposed cuts and taxes will disproportionately affect the state’s working class population.
Brown’s doomsday budget will attack all of the socially beneficial services that remain in California. The state’s colleges will lose $1.4 billion in funding: $500 million from the University of California system, $500 million from the California State University system, and $400 million from community colleges. These cuts to education come one year after tuition hikes drew protests from tens of thousands of students throughout the state.
Brown is proposing even deeper cuts, as much as $4.6 billion, from public K-12 education. The governor will cut $1.5 billion from the budget by lowering the pay and benefits of tens of thousands of state employees. Services for disabled persons will be cut by $750 million. Millions will be taken from parks, causing closures in California’s world-renowned parks system for the first time.
California is the most extreme example of the fiscal shortfalls facing virtually every state in the US. Despite the ongoing fiscal emergency, the Obama administration has insisted that Washington will not provide any money to aid state governments. Politicians and media pundits alike have portrayed the fiscal crisis as evidence of the wasteful state expenditures, invariably invoking the need for all Americans to “tighten our belts,” and begin “living within our means” (See: “The New York Times and ‘living within our means’“). The working class, however, has demonstrated its hostility to these attacks with protests throughout the country, most notably in Wisconsin.
Contrary to the claims of corporate media and politicians, California’s budgetary problems can only be understood as the end result of decades of transferring wealth from the working class to the financial elite. Beginning in the 1970s, the US economy underwent a transition from the world’s leading industrial producer to a so-called post-industrial society. This has entailed the deregulation of financial markets and a policy of cheap money that has facilitated the rise in equity prices beyond the value of the underlying stream of wealth to which they nominally lay claim. Those industries that have remained in California—like the movie industry, aerospace and software development—virtually hold the state hostage, threatening to go elsewhere unless they receive subsidies and tax write-offs.
Deindustrialization led to mass layoffs and declining tax revenue in California. In the 1990s, manufacturing in Los Angeles declined by 22 percent, resulting in the loss of 169,000 jobs. In 2010, New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) closed. NUMMI was the last auto manufacturing plant in the state. In California’s case, the structure of the tax system also changed with Proposition 13. The state began to rely more on income tax revenue, which tends to be cyclical and volatile.
By the middle of the 1990s, the US economy faced a serious crisis. Corporate profit rates stagnated as the layoffs and technology boom that had increased productivity for the past decade reached their limits. At this point, aided by the cheap money policy of the Federal Reserve, corporations began borrowing heavily to purchase shares of their own stock. This set off the stock market bubble of the late 1990s, which came to a grinding halt in 2001 with the collapse of the dot-com bubble.
Enron became the most notorious example of the Ponzi nature of the American stock market. Corporations cannot be the sole purchasers of their own stock, but rather draw investors into the process to inflate the value of the stock beyond the so-called fundamentals, or the profits to which the stock is nominally a claim. For this to succeed, corporations must at least present themselves to stockholders as profitable ventures. Throughout America, firms were accomplishing this through creative accounting practices.
Enron used an accounting technique known as mark-to-market, which allowed the company to claim as current revenue projects slated sometimes well into the future. When these projects began to fall through, Enron had to find a way to actually make money.
This is where California comes in. California is the largest economy in the US, and Enron, an energy trading company, deliberately sought out the loopholes in California’s recently deregulated energy markets in order to “game” Californians out of billions of dollars. Enron spent millions of dollars in the 1990s lobbying for deregulation of California’s energy market. Jeffrey Skilling, then-CEO of Enron, promised that deregulation would save the state billions of dollars a year in energy.
According to Bethany McClean and Peter Elkind, authors of Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, “In one appearance before the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) Skilling claimed that the state would save $8.9 billion a year: ‘Let me tell you what you can buy every year,’ he said. ‘You can triple the number of police in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and San Diego, and you could double the number of teachers.’” Skilling’s claims stand in stark contrast to the current situation, in which thousands of teachers throughout the state face layoffs.
The deregulation of California’s energy markets took place within the context of a nationwide onrush of corporate and financial deregulation. This deregulation, a boon to the ruling class, had bipartisan consensus, beginning with the Reagan administration and culminating in Bill Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, which abolished the 1933 legislation that had established a strict separation between commercial and investment banking.
After securing deregulation in 1996, the energy companies, including Enron, proceeded to loot the state’s energy markets. They used various strategies, with names such as “Death Star,” “Get Shorty,” and “Fat Boy,” to artificially raise the cost of energy. Although Enron became the face for the looting of California, all the energy companies were taking similar advantage of the deregulated energy markets.
The scheming of the energy traders led to an explosion in energy prices. At the peak of the “energy crisis,” itself a fabricated affair caused by traders such as Enron selling energy to themselves, prices rose from an average of $340 per megawatt hour to over $2,500 per megawatt hour. The price increase triggered rolling blackouts throughout the state.
The utility companies were on the hook for the money, because the deregulation laws did not allow them to pass on extra prices to the consumer. Meanwhile, major banks, looking to get in on the action, had loaned heavily to the California utilities. When the price of energy skyrocketed, due to speculation and gaming the market, the utilities were unable to pay back their loans. Bank of America alone had $1.2 billion in outstanding loans to the utilities. Looking to protect the interests of the financial aristocracy, and avoid financial meltdown spreading throughout the international system, California stepped in to bail out the utilities. All told, the energy crisis cost the state some $40 billion to $45 billion, most of which has never been recouped.
The looting of the California treasury to bail out the state’s largest privately owned public utilities—Pacific Gas and Electric, San Diego Gas and Electric, and Southern California Edison—set the stage for the budget-cutting regime that has persisted ever since. Then Governor of California Gray Davis responded to a $38 billion deficit, the product of the bailouts and the collapse of the dot-com bubble, with a combination of cuts to social services and regressive tax increases, including a hike in the sales tax and the wildly unpopular increase of automobile registration frees. The latter in particular hurt Davis’s popularity, opening the door for the right-wing, anti-democratic recall election of 2003. The recall campaign, funded by Republican Congressman Darrell Issa and far-right-wing elements within California’s political establishment, ultimately ended in the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger’s first act in office was to change California laws to push through the austerity regime desired by the right wing. In 2004, Schwarzenegger put two initiatives to the voters, Propositions 57 and 58. Proposition 57 authorized Schwarzenegger to sell $15 billion in state bonds to pay back $9.2 billion of state debt. Proposition 58 mandated that future state expenditures must match revenue, barring the state from further borrowing to repay debt. As the WSWS reported at the time: “The combined effect of Propositions 57 and 58 will be to drastically increase state indebtedness over the course of the next 14 years, while at the same time providing lawmakers with the legal authority to make unprecedented cuts in public services.” (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/mar2004/cali-m09.shtml)
After the collapse of the stock market bubble in 2001, the Federal Reserve Board responded by again lowering interest rates, pumping the market with liquidity and fueling a new asset bubble—this time in securitized debt, in particular subprime mortgages. Like the stock market and dot-come bubbles, the subprime mortgage bubble, which would ultimately bring the global economy grinding to a halt with its collapse in 2008, found its epicenter in California. The inflow of speculative capital into California was driven by the rise in housing prices. Between 2000 and 2005 home prices in California increased by 65 percent. With such a meteoric rise in home values, speculative capital flooded into California subprime markets. Three quarters of all mortgages issued in California in June 2005 were Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs). In 2005, 60 percent of all mortgages issued in the state were either interest-only mortgages or ARMs.
The banks stood to lose trillions when the subprime mortgage market collapsed. The federal government, once again demonstrating an unmitigated willingness to prop up the financial aristocracy, stepped in with the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to bail out the Wall Street investors that had invested so heavily in California’s real estate markets, while refusing to take any steps to stem the tide of foreclosures throughout the state. Through TARP, the government took trillions of dollars of toxic debt onto its own balance sheet.
With the collapse of the housing bubble, tax revenues in California were seriously undermined. Many working class families, facing decades of stagnating wages, had subsidized their income by capitalizing on the equity realized by the rising value of their homes. When the bubble burst, these families found themselves underwater on their mortgages (owing more on their homes than the market value) and could no longer pay their bills. The year 2010 witnessed the highest rate of home foreclosures in US history, with as many as 2.8 million foreclosures nationwide. All predictions point to an equally devastating 2011.
The banks were made whole on their speculative investments in the California mortgage market. Meanwhile, the catastrophe that these social parasites have left in their wake has directly resulted in the current budget shortfalls for states throughout the nation, and in California in particular. The fiscal emergency at the federal and state levels is being used as a pretext for slashing government services that benefit the working class.
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FORBES.com
New Geographer
Worst Cities For Jobs
Joel Kotkin, 04.28.09, 12:00 AM ET
One of the saddest tasks in the annual survey of the best places to do business I conduct with Pepperdine University's Michael Shires is examining the cities at the bottom of the list. Yet even in these nether regions there exists considerable diversity: Some places are likely to come back soon, while others have little immediate hope of moving up. (Please also see "Best Cities For Jobs" for further analysis.)
The study is based on job growth in 336 regions--called Metropolitan Statistical Areas by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which provided the data--across the U.S. Our analysis looked not only at job growth in the last year but also at how employment figures have changed since 1996. This is because we are wary of overemphasizing recent data and strive to give a more complete picture of the potential a region has for job-seekers. (For the complete methodology, click here.)
First let's deal with the perennial losers, the sad sacks of the American economy. Mostly cities in the nation's industrial heartland, these places have ranked toward the bottom of our list for much of the past five years. Eleven of the bottom 16 regions on our list are in two states, Ohio and Michigan. In fact, the Wolverine State alone accounts for bottom four cities: Jackson, Michigan, Detroit, Saginaw and Flint.
In Depth: Worst Big Cities For Jobs
In Depth: Worst Medium-Sized Cities For Jobs
In Depth: Worst Small Cities For Jobs
Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of short-term--or perhaps even medium- or long-term--hope for a strong rebound in those places. President Obama seems determined to give the automakers, for whom Michigan is home base, far rougher treatment than what he meted out to ailing companies in the financial sector.
In addition, new environmental regulations may not help auto production, since it necessitates some carbon-spewing and therefore perhaps unacceptable levels of greenhouse gas emission.
However, not all of Michigan's problems stem from Washington or the marketplace. Many of the locations at the bottom of the list remain inhospitable to business. To be sure, housing is cheap--in Detroit, property values are fast plummeting toward zero--but running a business can be surprisingly expensive in these hard-pressed places.
In fact, according to a recent survey by the Tax Foundation, Ohio has an average tax burden roughly similar to New York, California, Massachusetts and Connecticut. But while the others are comparatively high-income states, Ohio residents no longer enjoy that level of affluence.
Can these places come back? It is un-American to abandon hope, but there needs to be a radical shift in strategy to focus on creating new middle-class jobs. Some Midwestern cities, like Kalamazoo and Indianapolis, have made some successful efforts to diversify their economies, encouraging start-ups and trying to be business-friendly.
But those are exceptions. Cleveland, one of our worst big cities, could spark a renaissance by revamping its port and nearby industrial hinterland. Once the world economy improves, it could re-emerge--building on the existing knowledge and skills of its production- and design-savvy population--as a hub for manufacturing and exports.
But right now, Cleveland does not seem to be pursuing such opportunities. As Purdue's Ed Morrison has pointed out, local leaders there seem to "confuse real estate development with economic development."
So Cleveland will focus on inanities such as convention business and tourism, believing we all fantasize about a week enjoying the sights along Lake Erie. Yet even high-profile buildings like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, completed in 1986, have not transformed a gritty old industrial town into a beacon for the hip and cool.
Old industrial cities like Cleveland are better off focusing on their locational advantages--access to roads, train lines and water routes--while offering a safe, inexpensive and friendly venue for ambitious young families, immigrants and entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, cities with formerly robust economies--like Reno, Nev., Las Vegas, Orlando, Fla., Tampa, Fla., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., West Palm Beach, Fla., Jacksonville, Fla., and Phoenix--are more likely to rebound. These areas topped our list for much of the 2000s; their success was driven first by surging population and job growth and later by escalating housing prices.
But the collapse of the housing bubble and a drop in large-scale migration from other regions has weakened, often dramatically, these perennial successes. "We could rely on 1,000 people a week moving into the area," notes one longtime official in central Florida. "These people needed services, houses and bought stuff. Now the growth is a 10th of that."
Instead of waiting for the real estate bubble to return, these areas should choose to focus on boosting employment in fields like medical services, business services and light manufacturing. In much of Florida and Nevada, there's also a need to shift away from a reliance on tourism, an industry that pays poorly on average and is always subject to changes in consumer tastes.
We can even be cautiously optimistic about some of these former superstars. After all, observes Phoenix-based economist Elliot Pollack, the existing reasons for moving to Arizona, Nevada or Florida--warm weather, relatively low taxes and generally pro-business governments--have not disappeared. "There's no change in the fundamentals," he argues. "It's a transition. It's ugly, and there's pain, but it's still a cycle that will turn."
Once the economy stabilizes, Pollack says he expects the flow of people and companies from the Northeast and California to Phoenix and other former hot spots will resume, once again lured by inexpensive real estate, better conditions for business and a generally more up-to-date infrastructure.
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The Problem with California
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So what about California? The economic well-being of many metropolitan areas in the Golden State has been sinking precipitously since 2006. This year, three California regions--Oakland, Sacramento and San Bernardino-Riverside--have sunk down into the bottom 10 on the large cities list. That's a phenomenon we've never seen before--and never expected to see.
Like other Sun Belt communities, California suffered disproportionately from the housing bubble's bust, which has devastated both employment in construction-related industries as well as much of the finance sector. But some, like economist Esmael Adibi, director of the Anderson Center for Economic Research at Chapman University, where I teach, thinks a real estate turnaround may be imminent.
Among the first to predict the potential for a real estate bubble back in 2005, these days Adibi is more upbeat, pointing to rising sales of single-family homes, particularly at the lower end of the market. California's inventory of unsold homes is now down to about six months' worth, a figure well below the national average of 9.6 months.
(ILLEGALS STILL POUR OVER OUR OPEN BORDERS AND INTO OUR JOBS AND WELFARE LINES DAILY)
It seems not everyone is ready to abandon the Golden State--but still, recovery in California may prove weaker than in surrounding states. One forecaster, Bill Watkins, even predicts unemployment could reach 15% next year, up from about 11% today. California, most likely, will see only an anemic recovery in 2010 even if growth picks up elsewhere.
Much of the problem lies with the state's notoriously inept government. The enormous budget deficit will almost certainly lead to tax increases, which will fall mostly on the state's vaunted high-income entrepreneurial residents. Stimulus funds won't do much good either, Adibi notes, since "the state is grabbing all of the federal stimulus money" to keep itself afloat.
A draconian regulatory environment also could dim California's prospects for growth. Despite double-digit unemployment, the state seems determined not only to raise taxes but also to tighten its regulatory stranglehold.
This is a stark contrast to what happened in the 1990s during the last deep recession. At that time, leaders from both political parties pulled together to reform the state's regulatory and tax environment. Almost everyone recognized the need to improve the economic climate.
But an even deeper recession, it seems, hardly troubles today's dominant players--public employees, environmental activists and gentry liberals who largely live along the coast. The state has recently passed a draconian Assembly bill aimed to offset global warming by capping greenhouse gas emissions--a measure that seems designed to discourage productive industry.
"This is becoming a horrible place to produce anything," says Watkins, who is executive director of the Economic Forecast Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
California's lawyers, though, might stay busy. Attorney General Jerry Brown has threatened to sue anyone who grows their business in unapproved, environment-threatening ways. To be sure, this promise may have relatively little impact on the more affluent, aging coastal communities--but it could wreak havoc on younger, less tony areas in the state's interior. Many of the local economies there still reply on resource-dependent industries like oil, manufacturing and agriculture.
It's sad because California has the capacity to recover more quickly than the rest of the country if the state moderates its spending and stops regulating itself into oblivion. This current round of legislation is so dangerous precisely because it could eviscerate the heart of the economy by slowing down entrepreneurial growth, the state's greatest asset.
Even in hard times, there are people with innovative ideas trying to bring them to market--and not just in Hollywood- and Silicon Valley-based industries but in a broad range of fields, from garments to agriculture, aerospace and processed foods. The desire to increase regulation reflects a peculiar narcissism and arrogance of the state's ruling elites, who believe the genius of San Francisco's venture capitalists and Los Angeles' image-makers alone are enough to spark a powerful recovery.
This is delusional. True, California still has a lead in everything from farm products to films to high-tech manufacturers. But it has been slowly losing ground--to both other states and overseas competitors. CEOs and top management might stay in the Golden State, but they increasingly send outside its borders all jobs that don't require access to the local market, genius scientists or talented entertainers.
"There's a feeling in California that we will come back, no matter what, because we are California," Watkins says. "The leadership is swallowing Panglossian Kool-aid. Some very smart people, a beautiful climate and nice beaches is not enough to guarantee a strong recovery."
Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is executive editor of newgeography.com and writes the weekly New Geographer column for Forbes.
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MEXIFORNIA
IN ANY CALIFORNIA CITY, IT WILL BE ILLEGALS THAT GET JOBS FIRST. IN SILICON VALLEY, IT WILL BE THE IMPORTED CHINESE AND INDIANS THAT WILL GET JOBS FIRST.
WORST BIG CITIES FOR JOBS: HERE’S CALIFORNIA’S SHARE
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No. 10: Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif.
The mortgage crisis and housing bust in this populous suburban area south of Los Angeles led to a halt in home building and a subsequent drop in natural resources, mining and construction jobs, which declined 23.6% between 2007 and 2008. Overall employment declined by 6.2% in the last year and 38.5% over the last decade, sinking the Inland Empire into the first major downturn in its recent history. Yet it’s not all negative. Home sales are up, which may mean that this once vibrant area could come back sooner than many expect.
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No. 7: Sacramento-Arden Arcase-Roseville, Calif.
The real estate bust in California's capital and its surrounding areas has stunted job growth. Construction and natural resources jobs fell by 30.4% between 2005 and 2008. The housing crisis is accompanied by ones in the financial services and manufacturing industries, in which jobs declined 14.8% and 12%, respectively, over the last three years. The year between 2007 and 2008 saw a 3.9% overall decline in jobs. Employment in education and health services has been the area's saving grace; jobs in that sector increased 23.5% between 2003 and 2008.
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No. 5: Oakland-Fremont-Hayward, Calif.
The financial services sector of this metropolitan area, across the bay from San Francisco, which includes urban Oakland and the surrounding suburbs, lost 21.1% of its jobs between 2003 and 2008. Construction jobs were hit almost as hard, dropping 18% over the same period. However, the Bay Area, bolstered by colleges in and around San Francisco and Berkeley, saw a 1.6% increase in education and health services jobs last year. But, overall, job losses in this northern California region totaled 3.7% from 2007 to 2008.
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No. 4: Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, Calif.
The fallout from real estate speculation and a longstanding tech boom in this region, which is south of Los Angeles and includes some of the toniest coastal real estate in the nation, has slowed employment to a crawl. Here, between 2005 and 2008, jobs in construction declined 17.8%, and jobs in information declined 10%. Employment in financial services, a field that especially boomed in Irvine, dropped by 22% over the same years. Much of this was tied to mortgage related companies. Overall, the area saw a 4% decline in jobs between 2007 and 2008. Dropping home prices and rising sales suggest a slow recovery could be on the way though.
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CA CONTRIBUTION TO WORST MEDIUM SIZED CITIES FOR JOBS
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No. 10: Santa Rosa-Petaluma, Calif.
"Best of the worst" is a dubious honor. But for the cities of Santa Rosa and Petaluma, home to just under 500,000 people north of San Francisco, the news isn't all bad. Despite cumulative job losses of 4.5% between 2007 and 2008, these communities have seen an 8.2% overall uptick in jobs if you consider data since 1997. The drops are biggest in one predictable sector: the construction sector which saw a double digit decline in jobs, largely from the collapse of the bay area’s housing bubble. Retail and financial services employers also cut workers, with each sector losing about 10% of its jobs.
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CA CONTRIBUTION TO WORST SMALL CITIES FOR JOBS:
No. 7: Redding, Calif.
Partly because of the housing slump affecting many Sun Belt states, between 2005 and 2008 jobs in the natural resources, mining and construction sector contracted by 41%. Overall employment has dropped 10% since 1997. In the last year, Redding also saw double-digit job loss in the wholesale, information and transportation and utilities sectors. While government positions account for 22.8% of all jobs--and their number has been increasing over the last five years--the Redding Record Searchlight has reported that the city may have to lay off 60 workers.
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WORST PLACES IN COUNTRY BY CNBC
1. El Centro, California
Population: 41,241
Lose your job in El Centro and it may be quite some time before you find another one. One in four people here are out of work and the city holds the not-so distinguished honor of having the highest unemployment rate — 27.5 percent — in the country (close behind is Yuma, Ariz., with 27.2 percent unemployment).
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The desert city, which is located in Imperial County just across the border from Mexicali, has a jobless rate triple the national average of 9.5 percent thanks to the seasonal fluctuations of field laborers. Field work is the county's third-largest employment sector after government, transportation and utilities, according to AOL News.
"Its location across the border from a much larger Mexican city means that there is a large floating labor force," Jim Gerber, an economics professor and director of the international business program at San Diego State University, told AOL News.
"The data for Imperial County is skewed by this, such that the layoffs and out-of-work laborers are not actually counted correctly."
Even with the ebb and flow of its working population, things are still pretty bleak in El Centro. Last year, the city's cemetery went into foreclosure.
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6. Los Angeles, California
Population: 3,849,378
If you don't really care about breathing, Los Angeles is a great place. The metro area that stretches from Long Beach to Riverside has the worst ozone pollution in the country, according to the American Lung Association's State of the Air report for 2010. Along with being tops in ozone pollution, L.A. is ranked third in year-round particle pollution, and fourth in short-term particle pollution.
Ozone is the byproduct of pollutants released by cars, chemical plants, refineries, and other sources. It exists naturally in the upper atmosphere of the Earth, but when emitted at ground level, it's considered a harmful outdoor pollutant. Inhaling ozone can cause wheezing, coughing, chest pain, throat irritation, congestion, and can make people more susceptible to respiratory illnesses such as bronchitis and pneumonia, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Think about that next time you drive in Los Angeles, which also lays claim the worst traffic in the country.
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Lou Dobbs Tonight Friday, May 16, 2008
Some in Congress are once again trying to push piecemeal immigration reform through the back door. Sen. Diane Feinstein of California attached a farm worker program to the multibillion dollar Iraq war funding bill yesterday which would grant temporary amnesty to 1.3 million farm workers and their families over the next five years.
FORBES:
LOS ANGELES AMONG FORBES’ ‘TOP 10 U.S. CITIES IN FREEFALL’
Forbes has released its list of 'Top 10 U.S. Cities In Freefall', and California has the dubious distinction of appearing thrice. The greater Los Angeles, Riverside and Sacramento areas all made the list, only Florida had more cities represented. In compiling the list, Forbes used six metrics, including the percent the median home price has fallen since its individual peak, how many people were moving in and out of these metros, and percent change in unemployment.
Of California's woes, Forbes writes:
Riverside, Los Angeles and Sacramento are suffering because of the knocks they took after their inflated housing markets began to plummet. Unemployment in the City of Angels has nearly tripled in three years, to 12%. Riverside's unemployment has also ballooned, to 15%. Meanwhile Sacramento saw a 75% drop in new building permits. These are troubling signs for Cali metros, but not surprising. The end of the state's home-price climb triggered more than just a housing slump.
"In California, so many jobs were concentrated in construction," says Michael Fratantoni, vice president of research at the Mortgage Bankers Association, the professional association for real estate financiers. "Jobs building single family homes wound up not being sustainable, and there were a lot of job losses."
The Forbes report comes on the heels of California's most recent jobless report, which put the state's unemployment rate at a record 12.6% for March. However, in what might be an encouraging sign for the region, KPCC reports today that foreclosures in LA County are down 43.5% for the first quarter of 2010 compared to last year.
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LOS ANGELES UNDER MEX OCCUPATION:
Additionally, the county spends $550 million on public safety and nearly $500 million on healthcare for illegal aliens.
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JUDICIAL WATCH.org
County’s Monthly Welfare Tab For Illegal Aliens $52 Million
09/07/2010
As the mainstream media focuses on a study that reveals a sharp decline in the nation’s illegal immigrant population, monthly welfare payments to children of undocumented aliens increased to $52 million in one U.S. county alone.
The hoopla surrounding last week’s news that the annual flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. dropped by two-thirds in the past decade overlooked an important matter; the cost of educating, incarcerating and medically treating illegal aliens hasn’t decreased along with it, but rather skyrocketed to the tune of tens of billions of dollars annually.
THIS FIGURE DOES NOT INCLUDE EXTRA MILLIONS PAID FOR ANCHOR BABIES
Those figures don’t even include the extra millions that local municipalities dish out on welfare payments to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, commonly known as anchor babies. In Los Angeles County alone that figure increased by nearly $4 million in the last year, sticking taxpayers with a whopping $52 million tab to provide illegal immigrants’ offspring with food stamps and other welfare benefits for just one month.
That means the nation’s most populous county, in the midst of a dire financial crisis, will spend more than $600 million this year to provide families headed by illegal immigrants with welfare benefits. In each of the past two years Los Angeles County taxpayers have spent about half a billion dollars just to cover the welfare and food-stamp costs of illegal immigrants. Additionally, the county spends $550 million on public safety and nearly $500 million on healthcare for illegal aliens.
About a quarter of the county’s welfare and food stamp issuances go to parents who reside in the United States illegally and collect benefits for their anchor babies, according to the figures from L.A. County’s Department of Social Services. Nationwide, Americans pay around $22 billion annually to provide illegal immigrants with welfare perks that include food assistance programs such as free school lunches in public schools, food stamps and a nutritional program (known as WIC) for low-income women and their children.
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, February 11, 2008
In California, League of United Latin American Citizens has adopted a resolution to declare "California Del Norte" a sanctuary zone for immigrants. The declaration urges the Mexican government to invoke its rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo "to seek third nation neutral arbitration of disputes concerning immigration laws and their enforcement." We’ll have the story.
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latimes.com
Opinion
California must stem the flow of illegal immigrants
The state should go after employers who hire them, curb taxpayer-funded benefits, deploy the National Guard to help the feds at the border and penalize 'sanctuary' cities.
Illegal immigration is another matter entirely. With the state budget in tatters, millions of residents out of work and a state prison system strained by massive overcrowding, California simply cannot continue to ignore the strain that illegal immigration puts on our budget and economy. Illegal aliens cost taxpayers in our state billions of dollars each year. As economist Philip J. Romero concluded in a 2007 study, "illegal immigrants impose a 'tax' on legal California residents in the tens of billions of dollars."
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MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
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“Through love of having children, we are going to take over.” AUGUSTIN CEBADA, BROWN BERETS, THE LA RAZA FASCIST PARTY
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The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) is not only one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful militant organizations in the country, it is also notoriously racist and subversive. The group's name, "La Raza," means "The Race," by which they are referring to ethnic Mexicans, or more broadly to "hispanics" or "latinos." And it is quite clear from their decades of vitriolic rhetoric — both spoken and written — that the La Raza activists are trying to engender not only race consciousness amongst hispanic U.S. citizens and Mexican migrants, but also racial militancy and animosity toward "Gringo America."
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