Monday, October 31, 2011

A PORTRAIT of AMERICA IN DECLINE - AS THE POWER OF THE LA RAZA MEXICAN WELFARE STATE SOARS!

HALF OF ALL JOBS IN CALIFORNIA ARE HELD BY ILLEGAL USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. CA PUTS OUT $20 BILLON PER YEAR IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS. LOS ANGELES COUNTY ALONE PUTS OUT $600 MILLION PER YEAR IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS, AND LA RAZA ENDORSED GOV JERRY BROWN JUST SIGNED INTO LAW A BILL MAKING IT ILLEGAL FOR EMPLOYERS TO USE E-VERIFY, CLEARING THE WAY FOR EVEN MORE OF HIS LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS TO TAKE OUR JOBS!


A portrait of America in decline

31 October 2011

A series of reports over the past ten days—on poverty, wages, income inequality and social mobility—have painted a portrait of America starkly at odds with the official mythology of the United States as the land of unlimited economic opportunity, the country with the world’s highest standard of living.

The World Socialist Web Site has naturally drawn attention to these reports, but Marxist critics and opponents of American capitalism did not collect this data. On the contrary, the figures come from US government agencies like the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security Administration, the Bureau of the Census and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

That makes the picture of the real state of affairs in the America of 2011 all the more damning. Even agencies controlled by political representatives of the financial aristocracy are compelled to admit that the conditions of life for the vast majority of the American people are disastrous.

These figures demonstrate that America is a country of mounting social disparities, in which those who labor and produce all the wealth have less and less to show for it, while those who collect the profits of this labor, while playing a parasitic, destructive and thoroughly reactionary role, see their wealth accumulate to astonishing levels.

Two reports frame the dramatic social polarization in America, not so much between the rich and the poor, as between the rich and the entire rest of society.

According to figures published by the Social Security Administration on October 20, the median income for American workers in 2010 was $26,364, not much more than the official poverty level of $22,025 for a family of four. Given that a family making even twice the official poverty level faces real hardship and insecurity, it is no exaggeration to say that the SSA report shows that the “poor,” by any reasonable definition, constitute the absolute majority of the American people.

On the other side of the spectrum, a Congressional Budget Office study released October 25 shows that the richest 1 percent of US households saw a 275 percent increase in their income between 1979 and 2007 and more than doubled their share of the national income. While the income of this layer nearly tripled, the income of the middle 60 percent of the population rose only 40 percent over 28 years, and the income of the poorest 20 percent rose by only 18 percent.

Some other revealing statistics:

The unemployment rate for workers aged 55 or older has doubled since 2007, and the average period spent jobless has tripled. One third of employed workers 65 and older make less than $11 an hour, while the rates of poverty and food stamp dependence have increased sharply for this sector of the population.


The dollar amount of student loans taken out in 2010 topped $100 billion, the largest ever total for a single year, and total student loan debt has passed the $1 trillion mark in 2011, exceeding the total of credit card debt. Students are borrowing twice as much as they did only ten years ago to pay for their college education.

Geographical mobility in America has fallen to the lowest level reported since 1948, one reflection of the loss of opportunity particularly for the young. People cannot sell their homes or buy new ones, and the majority of young college graduates are being compelled to move back in with their parents because they cannot find work that pays enough to set up on their own.

The Gallup poll found that three times as many American workers are worried about being able to feed themselves or their families, 19 percent of the population, compared to only 6 percent of Chinese workers with similar concerns. Gallup’s measure of access to basic social necessities showed that American workers were finding it more and more difficult to obtain food, adequate shelter and decent medical care.

What these figures demonstrate is both a profound social crisis, and an immense historical transformation. The United States has gone from leading the world in most social indices, including working-class living standards, to a new status as the leader, at least among the industrialized countries, in condemning the majority of its population to conditions of deprivation and misery.

The decline of American capitalism is shown in the decay of its once powerful industrial base, the crumbling of roads, bridges and other social infrastructure, and the closing of schools, libraries, hospitals and other public services. It is no wonder that more than 80 percent of the American people, according to most recent polls, feel that the country is on the wrong track.

Presiding over this decline is a financial aristocracy whose relationship to the rest of society recalls the ancien régime of pre-revolutionary France.

The reports and the portrait they provide of American society are a particularly damning indictment of the Obama administration and all those who presented the election of Obama as a transformative event in American politics. The real content of the past three years has been a colossal redistribution of wealth, overseen and encouraged by Obama, from the working class to the finical elite. And it only continues.

The overriding political necessity is for the working class to grasp the source of the social and economic decline. It is capitalism that has failed in the United States, and on a world scale. The system of production for profit has indeed produced record profits for the tiny minority at the top, but it has become a dead end for the working people who comprise the vast majority.

The working class must advance its own program in defense of jobs, decent education, a secure retirement and other basic social rights. This is only possible by breaking free from the grip of the official trade unions and the Democratic Party, which uphold the interests of the banks and corporations, while falsely claiming to defend the workers.

The growing opposition to inequality and corporate control of the entire political system underlies the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the mass support it has won in less than two months. But this is only an initial expression of what is to come.

The answer to the crisis of capitalism is a bold attack on the capitalists. The working class must fight for socialist demands: the expropriation of the billionaires and the entire ruling financial oligarchy, the public takeover of the major banks and corporations, and using the vast wealth produced by working people to meet social needs, not private profit.

The decisive issue in carrying forward this struggle is the building of a new, revolutionary leadership in the working class—the Socialist Equality Party. We urge young people and workers who are entering political struggle today to join the SEP and fight for this perspective in the international working class.

Patrick Martin

WSWS.org

The author also recommends:

Record low mobility reflects US social crisis
[29 October 2011]

Government report says richest 1 percent doubled their share of US national income
[27 October 2011]

Majority in US earn near-poverty wages
[22 October 2011]

*

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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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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