Wednesday, February 16, 2011

OBAMA'S BANKSTER DONORS GETTING OFF SCOT FREE as they always do!

OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:


“I’m not here to punish the banks!” Barack Obama, on the floor of the Senate and in the faces of the American people







The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.





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Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them



By Matt Taibbi



February 16, 2011 9:00 AM ET

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. "If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

Taibblog: Commentary on politics and the economy by Matt Taibbi

To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.

Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.

Wall Street's Naked Swindle

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Obama seldom brings anyone into his administration that is not corrupt, a bankster, or LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER.

WITH HIS NEW CHIEF OF STAFF DALEY, OBAMA HAS BOTH! A J.P. MORGAN BANKSTER (J.P.s PROFITS UP THIS YEAR 47%), AND AN OPEN BORDERS ADVOCATE PER THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE.



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“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”



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THE REASON OBAMA BROUGHT IN DALEY TO BE CHIEF OF STAFF, WAS SO J.P. MORGAN COULD OPERATE THEIR BANKSTER CRIMES OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE, JUST AS CHENEY OPERATED HALLIBURTON OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE, AND GEORGE BUSH OPERATED BIG BUSH SAUDI CARLYLE GROUP OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE!

!AND!.... DALEY, LIKE OBAMA, LA RAZA AND THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE IS AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED WITH HORDES OF ILLEGALS POURING OVER OUR BORDERS!



FROM CREOLE FOLKS

THE REASON WHY OBAMA WANTED DALEY WAS BECAUSE OF HIS CONNECTIONS TO OBAM PAYMASTERS, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS J.P. MORGAN, AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.



Obama Seeks Brother of "Chicago Mob Boss" for Top White House Post

The roaches and con-artist, fake journalist on cable news are all lying about William Daley being all this and all that, this man is an open borders, down with America, free trade globalist. MSNBC and Gretta "the Scientology" Van Susteren from Fox News are knowingly deceiving the public about D. Issa & his letter to "business owners"=which they made into such a BIG DAM DEAL, but no one says anything when Barrack Hussein Obama, comes around with all of these shady bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall St. Tycoons, which he puts in his cabinet. All of Obama's meeting with Wall Street asking, "What can I do for you?" is never something covered by Keith Oberman or Rachel Maddow.

(Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said.

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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.

Obama Donor-Paymasters GOLDMAN SACHS Biggest Welfare Cheats In American History?

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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OBAMA’S BANKSTER DONORS HAVE DESTROYED THE LIFE SAVINGS, AS INFESTED IN THEIR HOMES, OF MOST OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. NOT EVEN ONE HAS GONE TO PRISON. IN FACT, THESE BANKSTERS HAVE CONTINUED TO MAKE STAGGERING PROFITS, PAY OUT STAGGERING BONUSES, BUY NO REAL REGULATION, AND OWN THIS BANKSTER PRESIDENT!



FROM THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE, RIGHT IN THE FACE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:



“I’m not here to punish banks” BARACK OBAMA



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OBAMA HAS TWO AGENDAS. SERVICING BANKSTER DONORS, AND PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS. HE KNOW WE WON’T BE PUNKED BY HIS PERFORMANCES THE SECOND TIME AROUND!

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“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”







Posted on Tue, Feb. 15, 2011

Critics: Goldman should give back $2.9 billion to taxpayers

Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: February 15, 2011 07:50:45 PM

WASHINGTON — Irked that Goldman Sachs appears to have reaped a $2.9 billion taxpayer-aided windfall on an investment of a mere $20 million, some experts and watchdogs say the Wall Street giant should return the money to the U.S. Treasury.

"It's a very simple call to make," said Sylvain Raynes, a frequent Goldman critic who's an expert in the kinds of deals in which the investment bank landed an apparent jackpot. "They should never have been given this money, and they should give it back."

The assessment by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission also exposed a potentially huge regulatory omission in the rescue of the insurance giant American International Group, which was the conduit for more than $90 billion in tax dollars to U.S. and European banks.

It's now clear that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which quarterbacked the hurried, $182 billion bailout of AIG to avoid a meltdown of global financial markets, did little to guard against windfalls for major banks and investment banks.

The financial crisis panel's final report late last month found that Goldman's $2.9 billion payout came on "proprietary" trades — investments in which the firm used its own money rather than the more typical deals completed on behalf of clients.

The panel, inquiring into a McClatchy report last June, said that Goldman got $1.9 billion of the payoff after the taxpayer bailout of AIG began.

Critics say that in the rush to save AIG and avert systemic collapse of the financial markets, regulators treated Goldman like everyone else. But Goldman was different.

While most banks that got billions of dollars from AIG simply relayed the money to clients they'd insured against losses, Goldman got to collect a more than 100-fold return on a number of securities that soured, because none of its clients was involved.

The prospect of a repayment by Goldman — the firm that drew the most outrage over Wall Street's role in the financial crisis — would be welcome news now as President Barack Obama has been forced to propose huge cuts in federal programs as a way of dealing with a $1.6 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2012.

Steve Ellis, of the government waste watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense, said that "It's up to the federal government to demand accountability and transparency" regarding Goldman's payout.

"We can't afford to shell out cash without asking hard questions and demanding that the very same actors that got the economy into this mess take some of the burden on themselves," he said.

Congress could try to impose a tax on banks' profits from the bailout or adopt some other legislation to "claw back" the money, but it would be difficult because Goldman received it unconditionally, said Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor who specializes in complex securities. The New York Fed attached no strings to the money and let AIG decide how much Goldman would get.

Goldman, which paid a whopping $31.6 billion in employee bonuses in the past two years, denies that the trades in question were proprietary, signaling that it has no plans to send more money back to Washington.

In 2009, Goldman was quick to repay a $10 billion loan from a Treasury Department program to bail out banks. Last summer, the firm paid an additional $550 million to settle a related civil fraud suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally rejected the characterization of the AIG payment as a windfall.

"We used the money we received from AIG to meet our obligations to clients with whom we hedged on the other side of these trades," he said.

Joseph Mason, a finance professor at Louisiana State University-Baton Rouge who has advised federal banking regulatory agencies, said that most large banks manage their risks with so many contrary trades that assertions they profited from a particular deal "can be obviated very quickly."

The issue, however, goes to the heart of the controversy over whether any of the megabanks that helped cause the crisis got sweetheart deals as part of the bailout.

"In the heat of the moment, the Treasury and the Fed weren't worried about who was participating in the housing bubble . . . or their level of involvement" when they shelled out money, Mason said.

"You run up the market, you cause a nationwide crisis and you're given money to continue. That sounds to me like an incentive to go out and do it again."

The New York Fed said in a statement that the bailout protected Americans, as well as AIG's policyholders and trading partners "from the catastrophic consequences of AIG's disorderly failure during the worst financial crisis in generations, (and) allowed AIG to meet its contractual obligations without discrimination." A New York Fed spokesman declined to comment on whether taxpayers backstopped any other proprietary trades

Greenberger, however, sharply criticized the handling of the AIG bailout, naming Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke; Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the former New York Fed president; and Larry Summers, until recently Obama's chief economic adviser.

"This wasn't rocket science, what was going on," said Greenberger, who was a senior staffer at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Clinton administration. "Anybody who understood this market knew that there was the potential for Goldman to later unwind proprietary trades. But the Obama administration and the Fed simply never inquired.

"They had all the power at that point. Goldman needed that money. They were on their knees, and that was the point at which hard bargaining should have been taking place."

However, Greenberger said he worries less about recovering taxpayer money than about preventing a future financial meltdown, because the banking industry is lobbying fiercely against rules implementing recent congressional overhauls by improving market transparency and limiting risk-taking.

AIG's big debts to Wall Street emanated from the decision of its highflying London-based Financial Products unit to write insurance-like protection for major banks and investment banks on some $78 billion in offshore securities, most backed by subprime or similarly dicey home loans. In many cases, the banks had written identical insurance protection for the buyers of the securities.

When the housing crash sank the securities' value, AIG was sent reeling toward bankruptcy by a chorus of banks demanding payment of tens of billions of dollars under the terms of the contracts, known as credit-default swaps.

Geithner, Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke elected to save AIG from bankruptcy, partly to keep banks afloat. As part of the rescue, the New York Fed directed AIG to cover the full face value of $62 billion of most of its swap contracts with Goldman and other U.S. and European banks.

Goldman, which collected $14 billion of those funds, said it merely forwarded the money to investors for whom it had written the same protection.

But the inquiry panel concluded that Goldman cashed in on another $5 billion in more exotic bets on so-called synthetic securities that weren't back-to-back trades. With AIG Financial Products unworried about a housing downturn, Goldman paid 0.1 percent of the securities' face value, or about $5 million annually, to bet in 2005 and 2006 on the default of a set of securities that neither party owned.

DuVally, the Goldman spokesman, said that the deals "were client-related, not proprietary transactions," emphasizing that, "The idea that we received a . . . windfall is wrong."

DuVally declined to detail the hedges — bets in the opposite direction — and wouldn't say whether Goldman had anything close to $2.9 billion at stake.

Another $1 billion in Goldman-AIG trades had yet to be unwound as of July.

It's still unclear whether other banks also collected windfalls for proprietary bets.

The French colossus Societe Generale, investment bank Merrill Lynch (now owned by Bank of America) and Germany's Deutsche Bank collected a combined $22 billion from AIG as part of the 2008 settlements. Deutsche Bank also insured billions of dollars in securities backed by commercial real-estate loans.

Spokesmen for AIG and all three banks declined to comment.



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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.



THE CON JOB THAT IS BARACK OBAMA!



WSWS.org get on their free no ads E-NEWS!

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The media and Obama: Image and reality

28 December 2010

For the past two weeks the US media has been pumping out admiring commentaries on the “comeback” of Barack Obama. As if on signal, the man widely portrayed before and immediately after the November midterm elections as presiding over a failing presidency is being depicted as the protagonist of a political tour de force that has turned defeat at the polls into a triumph of reform legislation.

The key to this remarkable turnabout, according to the media narrative, is Obama’s turn to bipartisan collaboration with the Republicans, who will control the House of Representatives and have a larger presence in the Senate in the incoming 112th Congress. The stroke of genius that set the stage for ensuing legislative victories in the outgoing “lame duck” Congress was Obama’s announcement December 6 of a deal with the Republican leadership in the Senate to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the rich.

Many commentaries go even further, equating the measures enacted by Obama and the Democratic-led 111th Congress—fiscal stimulus, overhaul of health care, financial regulatory reform, repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell” in the military—with the major social reforms enacted under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.

All of this media mythmaking is ludicrously at odds with reality. Ignored is the fact that Obama has embraced a whole series of measures that he himself previously denounced as boondoggles to big business and the rich, including health care “reform” that excludes a public option and the extension of tax cuts to the top 2 percent of American earners.

The actual content of Obama’s supposedly newfound bipartisanship—in reality, Obama has sought from the day of his election to rehabilitate the Republican Party—is his wholesale capitulation to the demand of the ruling class for even bigger cuts in its taxes.

The historical analogies to Roosevelt and Johnson are absurd. All of Obama’s “reform” measures are, in fact, aimed at rolling back the social reforms passed in the 1930s and 1960s. His health care overhaul, for example, will slash health coverage for tens of millions of working people and reduce Medicare spending by $500 billion. It will boost the profits of the insurance companies by compelling people to purchase insurance on the private market.

Roosevelt, under the pressure of an explosive growth of working class struggles, sought to save the discredited capitalist system by instituting massive public works programs that hired hundreds of thousands of workers. He won the hatred of large sections of his own class by establishing government-owned and run enterprises such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought electrical power to large sections of the South and Appalachia.

Obama and the Democratic leadership have adamantly rejected any government hiring programs and insisted on the primacy of the “free market.”

The financial regulatory reforms that Roosevelt instituted have since been dismantled, and nothing in Obama’s overhaul restores them, leaving the big banks free to continue their speculative activities.

One fact says a great deal about the reality of Obama’s policies: the reduction in the estate tax included in his tax-cut deal with the Republicans brings the tax on inherited wealth to its lowest level since 1931, prior to Roosevelt’s coming to power. Roosevelt during World War II pushed for the tax rate on the highest income tax bracket to be raised to 91 percent and imposed a cap on executive salaries.

Obama’s measures will provide an estimated $70 billion a year in tax breaks for the rich and hand over an additional $23 billion in estate tax cuts to 6,600 families.

The shift on Obama exemplifies the ceaseless efforts of the corporate-owned and controlled media to artificially create political realities by means of image making. Obama’s election was largely the result of a media marketing operation, backed and financed by sections of the ruling class that saw the need for a change in image and personnel after the foreign policy disasters of the Bush years and in the face of public hatred for Bush and the Republicans.

Now, the media is seeking to repackage and repair the badly discredited Obama administration. Why? Because it is dutifully doing the bidding of the financial aristocracy.

Obama is presently being built up because he has made clear that his cave-in on tax cuts for the rich is only the prelude to a further shift to the right on social policy. Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program, Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, a multimillionaire Chicago real estate investor who is described as Obama’s liaison to business, said Obama would focus in the immediate future on reining in the deficit and improving his relationship with American business.

The administration has already called for a freeze on non-defense discretionary spending and federal employee pay and backed proposals for cuts in Social Security benefits, increased taxes on consumption, and a broad “reform” of the tax system that will sharply reduce income taxes for the rich as well as corporate taxes.

The content of Obama’s so-called rebound is an accelerated attack on ever-broader sections of the working class.

Not accidentally, the media has in recent days largely dropped the Tea Party movement. Built up by the media in the pre-election period as a mass movement on the right reflecting popular angst over budget deficits and coercive government interference in the market, the Tea Party was used to shift Obama and the Democrats further to the right and engineer the Republican victory in November.

For the present at least, with that mission having been accomplished and Obama making all of the right moves, the Tea Party is being pushed to the background. It stands ready to be revived by the media when the ruling elite deems it politically expedient to do so.

Barry Grey

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ONE OF OBAMA’S GREATEST SUCCESSES FOR HIS WALL ST. BANKSTER PAYMASTERS IS MAKING SURE THERE WOULD BE NO REAL BANKSTER REFORM! ERGO FROM HIS FIRST DAY OBAMA HAD BUSH’S ARCHITECT FOR BANKSTER WELFARE, TIM GEITHNER ON BOARD, AND TWO OF THE BANKERS’ BIGGEST SLUTS, BARNEY FRANK AND CHRIS DODD HAMMERING OUT THE NO REAL REGULATION!

FROM THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE, RIGHT IN THE FACE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:



“I’m not here to punish banks” BARACK OBAMA



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OBAMA HAS TWO AGENDAS. SERVICING BANKSTER DONORS, AND PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS. HE KNOW WE WON’T BE PUNKED BY HIS PERFORMANCES THE SECOND TIME AROUND!

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“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”



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FROM CREOLE FOLKS



Obama Seeks Brother of "Chicago Mob Boss" for Top White House Post

The roaches and con-artist, fake journalist on cable news are all lying about William Daley being all this and all that, this man is an open borders, down with America, free trade globalist. MSNBC and Gretta "the Scientology" Van Susteren from Fox News are knowingly deceiving the public about D. Issa & his letter to "business owners"=which they made into such a BIG DAM DEAL, but no one says anything whenBarrack Hussein Obama, comes around with all of these shady bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall St. Tycoons, which he puts in his cabinet. All of Obama's meeting with Wall Street asking, "What can I do for you?" is never something covered by Keith Oberman or Rachel Maddow.

(Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said.



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Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses



BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY





Editorial Reviews

Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?

Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.

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Next year, I hope to do a better job of annoying ideologues; the people who got rich from doing things that created our financial problems, but are still in power; and Wall Street types who whine about how unfair it is to criticize their eight- and nine-digit pay packages from institutions that wouldn't be alive today were it not for taxpayer support.





Looking back at 2010, writing more about financial 'reform' would have been wise

By Allan Sloan

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, December 28, 2010; 12:00 AM

Ihave performed a painful annual ritual ever since I began writing a column about 20 years ago: rereading my work for the year and telling you, my audience, about the things I got wrong and the things I wish I had done differently.

This past year, I wish I'd written more about financial reform - or as I call it, financial "reform." I use the quotation marks because I don't think the system is close to being reformed.

I suspected all along that there would be more talk than action - that's how things were after the Enron and WorldCom scandals and how they always seem to be - but I'm shocked by how little we've gotten right.

We didn't fix the major problems that led to the financial meltdown that produced the "Great Recession," obliterating millions of jobs and dreams. We've still got undercapitalized financial companies that are too big and too interconnected to be allowed to fail; trillions of dollars in asset-backed securities that no one except a handful of experts with access to ultra-expensive databases can begin to analyze, and an incentive system that gives Wall Street types huge incentives to take risks with shareholder and taxpayer money.

I wished I'd been louder and more shrill about breaking up these institutions, establishing publicly available real-time databases for asset-backed securities, and giving shareholders and the government five-year clawbacks for compensation paid to top executives and board members if a company fails or needs a bailout. It probably wouldn't have made any difference, but I'd feel better.

My only hope for real change is the consumer-protection operation run by Harvard bankruptcy professor Elizabeth Warren. I've stayed away from that topic because so much has been written about it, and I think so highly of Warren, whom I've known for many years, that I'm not sure I can summon up the requisite skepticism about her operation.

If she can, in fact, create and require institutions to use a brief disclosure statement, in readable type, that a high school graduate can understand in 15 minutes, she'll be doing God's work. She'll also be doing Mammon's, because we ultimately won't have capitalism in this country if we don't have fairness.

I've been unusually nice to the Federal Reserve this year, a contrast to my usual Fed-bashing and Fed-sniping. For much of my career, I've focused on the Fed's omissions and mistakes while most of my competitors kissed up to Alan Greenspan. Now, with the move in Washington to micromanage and restrain the Fed, I realized by rereading this year's columns that I've changed sides.

We need to have at least one Washington institution that can act quickly and decisively; God knows the Treasury, Congress and White House don't seem capable of it. Let's not screw up the Fed with political-correctness requirements. During Greenspan's now-not-so-glorious days as chairman, those requirements came from the left. Now, they come primarily from the ultra-right.

Finally, there's Social Security, a subject about which I've written a lot over the years, and I expect to write a lot more.

This year, I've managed to annoy almost everyone interested in the topic because I don't have a fixed ideological position. I think the Social Security trust fund has no economic value, but we should gradually monetize its $2.6 trillion in bonds to buy time while we change its benefit formula and increase its revenue.

I also think that switching to private accounts is nuts, because Social Security is an intergenerational transfer program designed to protect vulnerable old people, the disabled and orphans. It is not an investment program.

Finally, I've written that the program isn't a Ponzi scheme, because Ponzi promoters deceive you, while Social Security tells you everything you need to know about itself and is run by high-grade, honorable people.

Next year, I hope to do a better job of annoying ideologues; the people who got rich from doing things that created our financial problems, but are still in power; and Wall Street types who whine about how unfair it is to criticize their eight- and nine-digit pay packages from institutions that wouldn't be alive today were it not for taxpayer support.

WISCONSIN - Assault On the AMERICAN WORKER

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com


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Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

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WHO IS PUSHING FOR OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY, NO E-VERIFY, OR CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT OF LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS?

1. BARACK OBAMA

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2. U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE

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3. FORTUNE 500, MOST OF WHICH ARE DONORS TO LA RAZA

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4. MEXICO, we are Mexico’s JOBS, WELFARE, FREE BIRTHING CENTERS, AND JAILS PRGRAM.

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5. EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS THAT PAY MISERABLE WAGES

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6. THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA for Mexican supremacy

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7. THE LA RAZA DEMS, who hispander for the illegals’ votes



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Which would yield what? Our unions have already been decimated in the private sector; the results are plain. Corporate profits are soaring, while domestic investment, wages and benefits (particularly at nonunion companies) are flat-lining at best. With nobody to bargain for workers, America increasingly is an economically stagnant, plutocratic utopia. Is everybody happy?



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Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, February 16, 2011;

In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in decades.

The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt's military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal and their fellow workers in steel, textile and bottling factories; in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest their conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that Poland, East Germany and the Philippines had taken, the path where workers join student protesters in the streets and jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.

But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state government in particular was moving to topple workers' organizations here in the United States. Last Friday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's new Republican governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of public employees. Under his legislation, which has moved so swiftly through the newly Republican state legislature that it might come to a vote Thursday, the unions representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the unions representing firefighters and police.) The only thing all other public-sector workers could bargain over would be their base wages, and given the fiscal restraints plaguing the states, that's hardly anything to bargain over at all.

You might think that Walker came to this extreme measure after negotiations with public-sector unions had reached an impasse. In fact, he hasn't held such discussions. "I don't have anything to negotiate," Walker told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week. To underscore just how accompli he considered his fait, he vowed to call in the National Guard if protesting workers walked off the job or disrupted state services.

It's a throwback to 19th-century America, when strikes were suppressed by force of arms. Or, come to think of it, to Mubarak's Egypt or communist Poland and East Germany.

Now, it's not as if our states don't have fiscal crises to address, and Walker insists that it's Wisconsin's empty till that has driven him to curtail workers' rights. But there are other options. Democratic governors such as California's Jerry Brown and New York's Andrew Cuomo have proposed scaling back public services, pay and benefits without going after workers' fundamental rights to bargain. The right to bargain is clearly a separate question. Newly elected Republican governors, however, may reach the same conclusion Walker did and use the recession-induced fiscal crisis to achieve a partisan political objective: removing unions, the most potent force in the Democrats' electoral operation, from the landscape. "If we just stop and cure the pension problem, we have not gone far enough," Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend.

The real goal of the American right is to reduce public employee unions to the level of private-sector unions, which now represent fewer than 7 percent of American workers. Walker's proposal not only confines public-sector unions to annual bargaining over wage increases but restricts the increases for state employees to raises in the consumer price index and compels every such union to hold an annual membership vote to determine whether the union can continue to represent workers. It clearly intends to smash these unions altogether.

Which would yield what? Our unions have already been decimated in the private sector; the results are plain. Corporate profits are soaring, while domestic investment, wages and benefits (particularly at nonunion companies) are flat-lining at best. With nobody to bargain for workers, America increasingly is an economically stagnant, plutocratic utopia. Is everybody happy?

American conservatives often profess admiration for foreign workers' bravery in protesting and undermining authoritarian regimes. Letting workers exercise their rights at home, however, threatens to undermine some of our own regimes (the Republican ones particularly), and shouldn't be permitted. Now that Wisconsin's governor has given the Guard its marching orders, we can discern a new pattern of global repressive solidarity emerging - from the chastened pharaoh of the Middle East to the cheesehead pharaoh of the Middle West.

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Thousands in Wisconsin demonstrate against cuts

By Tom Eley and Andre Damon

16 February 2011

Over the past two days, thousands of workers in a number of cities and towns in Wisconsin have demonstrated against a bill backed by Governor Scott Walker that would force drastic pay cuts on nearly 175,000 state, local and university employees, and effectively outlaw their right to strike. The Republican governor has put the National Guard on alert and has threatened to deploy them in order to implement his demands.

Police estimated 13,000 demonstrated outside the state capitol in Madison on Tuesday, far exceeding the expectations of the public sector unions who called the rally as a lobbying effort to sway a handful of Republican legislators to oppose Walker’s bill. Protesters began arriving at noon, including hundreds of students who walked out of a local high school and marched miles to join the protest.

Tuesday’s Madison demonstration follows a march on the capitol estimated at 1,100, led by University of Wisconsin graduate students, which took place the day before. Another large demonstration is expected to take place in Madison tomorrow, with workers and students busing in from throughout the state. Large protests have also taken place in Milwaukee, Eau Claire and Superior.

The bill, which could pass through the state legislature as early as today, would require workers to almost double their deductions for health care and retirement benefits. According to various analyses, these added contributions would equate to anywhere from an 8 to 20 percent pay cut.

The measure would also make strikes among state workers illegal, giving the governor unilateral authority to fire workers who “participate in an organized action to stop or slow work,” or who “are absent for three days without approval of the employer.” It would remove the right of unions to negotiate pensions, retirement and benefits, and would prohibit the union dues check-off for government workers. These changes would also apply to childcare workers, home health care workers, and employees of the University of Wisconsin system and its hospital arm.

The bill also ends health insurance coverage and retirement benefits for temporary workers hired by the state, apparently including certain categories of graduate student labor.

Both the magnitude of the cuts and the provocative way Walker has demanded them have created a backlash among Wisconsin workers and youth. In announcing his preparations to deploy the National Guard the governor implicitly threatened violence against those opposing the draconian cuts, saying the troops were “prepared ... for whatever the governor, their commander-in-chief, might call for. I am fully prepared for whatever may happen.”

In the face of this provocation the unions that organized the demonstrations—the American, Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Wisconsin Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—have offered no strategy to fight, insisting instead that protesters appeal to state Republicans and Democrats to reign in Walker.

But Democratic governors in New York, California and other states are imposing draconian cuts too, along with the Obama administration on the federal level. Walker’s predecessor, Democrat Jim Doyle, in 2009 demanded massive cuts to the state budget, including a 5 percent across-the-board funding cut to state agencies, reducing aid to public schools by $290 million, laying off hundreds of state workers and imposing a two-year pay freeze on the remainder.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke to two University of Wisconsin graduate students who participated in Tuesday’s Madison demonstration, Scott Prinster of the Department of the History of Science and Jacquelyn Gill of the Geography Department.

“You had the food service workers and the teachers and the childcare providers and Teamsters and pipefitters,” Prinster said. “It’s a reminder of how broadly destructive the budget cuts are. It was inspiring to see how many different people were working for the same thing.”

Gill echoed these sentiments. “What was so powerful to me about today’s rally was that so many people came together from all over Wisconsin,” she said. “The state has a reputation of being blue [Democrat] in Madison, and to a lesser extent Milwaukee, and bright red [Republican] in the rest of the state. I stood with iron workers, Oscar Mayer plant workers, firefighters (who are exempt from the bill, but came out anyway in support), teachers, state and municipal employees, nurses—everyone.”

The mass protests in Egypt that led to the downfall of dictator Hosni Mubarak were very much on the minds of the Wisconsin demonstrators, who held signs with slogans like “Protest Like an Egyptian,” “If Egypt Can Have Democracy, Why Can’t Wisconsin?” and calling the governor “Hosni Walker.”

A day earlier, a protest of several hundred took place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Teaching assistants there could see pay cuts as high as 20 percent, and many research assistants would lose their health insurance coverage completely.

“Some speakers made allusions to the protests this month that forced the president of Egypt to resign,” the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported. “A few in the crowd waved shoes in the air, a sign of disrespect in Arab culture that was used by some of the Egyptian protesters.”

The speed with which the protests have spread and grown is striking. Monday’s protest in Madison saw a crowd estimated at 1,100 march from the University of Wisconsin campus down State Street to the capitol building and to the office door of the governor. The demonstration had originally been called by a union of teaching assistants to protest cuts to the university system’s budget, but it was expanded in the wake of Walker’s provocative statements against state workers. Demonstrators chanted, “Kill this bill.”

The size of the Monday demonstration, only a tenth the size of the Tuesday event, surprised its organizers. It was evidently joined by many undergraduate students as it made its way along State Street. According to the Badger Herald, “The ranks of the protesters continued to swell throughout the march from Memorial Union to the steps of the Capitol.”

“The student body is such a powerful force, and we can contribute one of the strongest voices around that can do something about it,” said Markus Nevil, a university undergraduate.

Also on Monday, over 100 students staged a walkout from the high school in the small industrial town of Stoughton in opposition to Walker’s bill.

In Eau Claire, a standing-room only crowd numbering in the hundreds packed a junior high school auditorium on Monday, again surprising event organizers.

In the town of Superior, in the far northwestern corner of the state, 200 to 300 attended a Monday meeting in opposition to the cuts at the University of Wisconsin, Superior.

“I cannot think of an issue that has touched the nerve of citizens in this state more than this one,” Democratic State Senator Bob Jauch told a newspaper after the Superior meeting. “The torch has been lit,” he warned.

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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.



http://www.FAIRUS.org



http://www.JUDICIALWATCH.org



http://www.ALIPAC.us



*

AMERICA… LAND WHERE NO LEGAL NEED APPLY, STAGGERING POVERTY, BILLIONAIRE BANKSTERS, AND MEXICAN GANGS IN EVERY CITY!





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.

*

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.



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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/



*

Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform

www.CAIRCO.org





http://www.FAIRUS.org



http://www.JUDICIALWATCH.org



http://www.ALIPAC.us



*

http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/mexico/2011/01/getting-over-the-border-fence-fast.html



*

Obama Quietly Erasing Borders (Article)





Article Link:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=240045





CONTACT THE HISPANDERING LA RAZA PARTY PRESIDENT HERE:



You can contact President Obama and let him know of your opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/



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UCLA PROFESSOR CALLS FOR MEXICAN REVOLT IN UNITED STATES

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/7165215?fr=yvmtf



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Wake up America!!! Illegal Immigration has to be stopped. Take a look at this website and see where all your tax dollars are going: http://immigrationcounters.com/



See: CFR’s Plan to Integrate the U.S., Mexico and Canada

http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20050816.htm The Great Alien Invasion - What's Happening Now http://www.rense.com/general69/inva.htm

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"Bush Secret Border Wars" Mayhem and terror in Southern states to protect government drug cartels

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/140805borderwars.htm Mexican/Bush Crime

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“Through love of having children, we are going to take over.” AUGUSTIN CEBADA, BROWN BERETS, THE LA RAZA FASCIST PARTY



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

Does Black American Benefit From OBAMA? Or Only His Bankster Donors & La Raza Illegals???

BLACKS IN MEMPHIS LOSE DECADES OF ECONOMIC GAINS… and yet will vote for OBAMA, THE BANKSTER OWNED HISPANDERER AGAIN!?!




MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

*

Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com



UNDER THE BANKSTER OWNED PRESIDENT, BANKSTERS HAVE CONTINUED TO MAKE MASSIVE PROFITS, PAY OUT BILLIONS IN BONUSES, AND USE THE AMERICAN TAX PAYER AS A FREE ATM MACHINE!



YOU CAN THANK OBAMA! NO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE HAS EVER TAKEN MORE CAMPAIGN BRIBES FROM BANKSTERS THAN OBAMA!

FROM HIS FIRST DAY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, OBAMA HAS SURROUNDED HIMSELF WITH THE MOST CORRUPT OF THE BANKSTER DEMS, AND WALL ST. BANKSTERS.



May 30, 2010

Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains

By MICHAEL POWELL

MEMPHIS — For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.

A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.

Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.

“I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,” said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.”

Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.

The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 — and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times.

Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, White Haven and Cordova. As job losses mount — black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites — many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.

The repercussions will be long-lasting, in Memphis and nationwide. The most acute economic divide in America remains the steadily widening gap between the wealth of black and white families, according to a recent study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study.

The Economic Policy Institute’s forthcoming “The State of Working America” analyzed the recession-driven drop in wealth. As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.

“This cancer is metastasizing into an economic crisis for the city,” said Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr. in his riverfront office. “It’s done more to set us back than anything since the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks — in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans.

The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank’s foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure.

In a recent regulatory filing, Wells Fargo hinted that its legal troubles could multiply. “Certain government entities are conducting investigations into the mortgage lending practices of various Wells Fargo affiliated entities, including whether borrowers were steered to more costly mortgage products,” the bank stated.

Wells Fargo officials are not backing down in the face of the legal attacks. They say the bank made more prime loans and has foreclosed on fewer homes than most banks, and that the worst offenders — those banks that handed out bushels of no-money-down, negative-amortization loans — have gone out of business.

“The mistake Memphis officials made is that they picked the lender who was doing the most lending as opposed to the lender who was doing the worst lending,” said Brad Blackwell, executive vice president for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.

Not every recessionary ill can be heaped upon banks. Some black homeowners contracted the buy-a-big-home fever that infected many Americans and took out ill-advised loans. And unemployment has pitched even homeowners who hold conventional mortgages into foreclosure.

Federal and state officials say that high-cost mortgages leave hard-pressed homeowners especially vulnerable and that statistical patterns are inescapable.

“The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.

The reversal of economic fortune in Memphis is particularly grievous for a black professional class that has taken root here, a group that includes Mr. Wharton, a lawyer who became mayor in 2009. Demographers forecast that Memphis will soon become the nation’s first majority black metropolitan region.

That prospect, noted William Mitchell, a black real estate agent, once augured for a fine future.

“Our home values were up, income up,” he said. He pauses, his frustration palpable. “What we see today, it’s a new world. And not a good one.”

Porch View

“You don’t want to walk up there! That’s the wild, wild west,” a neighbor shouts. “Nothing on that block but foreclosed homes and squatters.”

To roam Soulsville, a neighborhood south of downtown Memphis, is to find a place where bungalows and brick homes stand vacant amid azaleas and dogwoods, where roofs are swaybacked and thieves punch holes through walls to strip the copper piping. The weekly newspaper is swollen with foreclosure notices.

Here and there, homes are burned by arsonists.

Yet just a few years back, Howard Smith felt like a rich man. A 56-year-old African-American engineer with a gray-flecked beard, butter-brown corduroys and red sneakers, he sits with two neighbors on a porch on Richmond Avenue and talks of his miniature real estate empire: He owned a home on this block, another in nearby White Haven and another farther out. His job paid well; a pleasant retirement beckoned.

Then he was laid off. He has sent out 60 applications, obtained a dozen interviews and received no calls back. A bank foreclosed on his biggest house. He will be lucky to get $30,000 for his house here, which was assessed at $80,000 two years ago.

“It all disappeared overnight,” he says.

“Mmm-mm, yes sir, overnight,” says his neighbor, Gwen Ward. In her 50s, she, too, was laid off, from her supervisory job of 15 years, and she moved in with her elderly mother. “It seemed we were headed up and then” — she snaps her fingers — “it all went away.”

Mr. Smith nods. “The banks and Wall Street have taken the middle class and shredded us,” he says.

For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.

Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth — progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.

“We’re wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated — it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation,” said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

The African-American renaissance in Memphis was halting. Residential housing patterns remain deeply segregated. While big employers — FedEx and AutoZone — have headquarters here, wage growth is not robust. African-American employment is often serial rather than continuous, and many people lack retirement and health plans.

But the recession presents a crisis of a different magnitude.

Mayor Wharton walks across his office to a picture window and stares at a shimmering Mississippi River. He describes a recent drive through ailing neighborhoods. It is akin, he says, to being a doctor “looking for pulse rates in his patients and finding them near death.”

He adds: “I remember riding my bike as a kid through thriving neighborhoods. Now it’s like someone bombed my city.”

Banking on Nothing

Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. “I felt like I could help people,” she recalled over coffee.

As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans — for autos, for furniture, for houses — edged into mania. “It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus,” she said.

Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city’s lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.

“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,’ and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren’t so savvy.’ ”

She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.

Several state and city regulators have placed Wells Fargo Bank in their cross hairs, and their lawsuits include similar accusations. In Illinois, the state attorney general has accused the bank of marketing high-cost loans to blacks and Latinos while selling lower-cost loans to white borrowers. John P. Relman, the Washington, D.C., lawyer handling the Memphis case, has sued Wells Fargo on behalf of the City of Baltimore, asserting that the bank systematically exploited black borrowers.

A federal judge in Baltimore dismissed that lawsuit, saying it had made overly broad claims about the damage done by Wells Fargo. City lawyers have refiled papers.

“I don’t think it’s going too far to say that banks are at the core of the disaster here,” said Phyllis G. Betts, director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action at the University of Memphis, which has closely examined bank lending records.

Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining.

Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. “This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks,” he said.

For a $150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan — tacks on $90,000 in interest payments over its 30-year life.

Wells Fargo officials say they rejected the worst subprime products, and they portray their former employees as disgruntled rogues who subverted bank policies.

“They acknowledged that they knowingly worked to defeat our fair lending policies and controls,” said Mr. Blackwell, the bank executive.

Bank officials attribute the surge in black foreclosures in Memphis to the recession. They say that the average credit score in black Census tracts is 108 points lower than in white tracts.

“People who have less are more vulnerable during downturns,” said Andrew L. Sandler of Buckley Sandler, a law firm representing Wells Fargo.

Mr. Relman, the lawyer representing Memphis, is unconvinced. “If a bad economy and poor credit explains it, you’d expect to see other banks with the same ratio of foreclosures in the black community,” he said. “But you don’t. Wells is the outlier.”

Whatever the responsibility, individual or corporate, the detritus is plain to see. Within a two-block radius of that porch in Soulsville, Wells Fargo holds mortgages on nearly a dozen foreclosures. That trail of pain extends right out to the suburbs.

Begging to Stay

To turn into Tyrone Banks’s subdivision in Hickory Ridge is to find his dream in seeming bloom. Stone lions guard his door, the bushes are trimmed and a freshly waxed sport utility vehicle sits in his driveway.

For years, Mr. Banks was assiduous about paying down his debt: he stayed two months ahead on his mortgage, and he helped pay off his mother’s mortgage.

Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low-cost mortgage.

“I thought, ‘This is great! ’ ” Mr. Banks says. “When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings.”

What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to $1,700 from $1,200.

Months later, he ruptured his Achilles tendon playing basketball, hindering his work as a janitor. And he lost his job at FedEx. Now foreclosure looms.

He is by nature an optimistic man; his smile is rueful.

“Man, I should I have stayed ‘old school’ with my finances,” he said. “I sat down my youngest son on the couch and I told him, ‘These are rough times.’ ”

Many neighbors are in similar straits. Foreclosure notices flutter like flags on the doors of two nearby homes, and the lawns there are overgrown and mud fills the gutters.

Wells Fargo says it has modified three mortgages for every foreclosure nationwide — although bank officials declined to provide the data for Memphis. A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation’s four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.

For Mr. Banks, it is as if he found the door wide open on his way into debt but closed as he tries to get out.

“Some days it feels like everyone I know in Memphis is in trouble,” Mr. Banks says. “We’re all just begging to stay in our homes.”

THE MEXICAN LOOTERS CONTEMPT FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM THEY DEMAND

THE JOKE OF MEXICAN ASSIMILATION


They HATE English, HATE literacy, HATE gringos, HATE blacks, HATE streets not drenched in Mex graffiti.



You can contact President Obama and let him know of your opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/



But they love FREE BIRTHING PAID FOR BY GRINGOS, FREE WELFARE, FREE EDUCATION, and FREE STOLEN CARS.



If you’re a sub-teacher working at the Los Angeles high school called SANTEE EDUCATIONAL ANNEX, you will find that the student body is overwhelmingly illegal. They are taught in SPANISH. Books are in SPANISH. Handouts are in SPANISH, and school assemblies end in VIVA MEXICO! VIVA MEXICO!



Here’s one teacher’s report on the illegals in our schools.



TEACHER’S POSTING ON CRAIGSLIST:





Subject: Cheap Labor This should make everyone think, be you Democrat, Republican or Independent From a California school teacher - - -"As you listen to the news about the student protests over illegal immigration, there are some things that you should be aware of: I am in charge of the English-as-a-second-language department at a large southern California high school which is designated a Title 1 school, meaning that its students average lower socioeconomic and income levels. Most of the schools you are hearing about, South Gate High, Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, etc., where these students are protesting, are also Title 1 schools. Title 1 schools are on the free breakfast and free lunch program. When I say free breakfast, I'm not talking a glass of milk and roll -- but a full breakfast and cereal bar with fruits and juices that would make a Marriott proud. The waste of this food is monumental, with trays and trays of it being dumped in the trash uneaten. (OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK) I estimate that well over 50% of these students are obese or at least moderately overweight. About 75% or more DO have cell phones. The school also provides day care centers for the unwed teenage pregnant girls (some as young as 13) so they can attend class without the inconvenience of having to arrange for babysitters or having family watch their kids. (OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK) I was ordered to spend $700,000 on my department or risk losing funding for the upcoming year even though there was little need for anything; my budget was already substantial. I ended up buying new computers for the computer learning center, half of which, one month later, have been carved with graffiti by the appreciative students who obviously feel humbled and grateful to have a free education in America. (OUR TAX DOLLARS A T WORK) I have had to intervene several times for young and substitute teachers whose classes consist of many illegal immigrant students here in the country less then 3 months who raised so much hell with the female teachers, calling them "Putas" _hores and throwing things that the teachers were in tears. Free medical, free education, free food, day care etc., etc., etc. Is it any wonder they feel entitled to not only be in this country but to demand rights, privileges and entitlements? To those who want to point out how much these illegal immigrants contribute to our society because they LIKE their gardener and housekeeper and they like to pay less for tomatoes: spend some time in the real world of illegal immigration and see the TRUE costs.

MEXICO ANCHORS & EXPANDS THEIR OCCUPATION BY BREEDING AT OUR COST

MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com


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Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com

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HOW MEXICO OCCUPIED AMERICAN legally!

SENDING HORDES OF PREGNANT MEXICAN WOMEN OVER OUR BORDERS WITH THE PROMISE OF “FREE” BIRTHING AND 18 YEARS OF WELFARE!

AND YET THESE CHILDREN ARE RAISED BY THE MEXICAN MOMS TO BE MEXICANS. RACIST, AND LOATHING OF AMERICAN CULTURE, LANGUAGE AND FLAG!

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Stop anchor baby benefits /300,000 a year born in US

Most countries don’t even allow that many LEGAL immigrants per year into their country...



A proposition to stop automatic benefits to children of illegals (anchor babies) is coming soon.

The cost to California is 4 to 6 billion a year. This prop is not driven by racism, but by citizen-ism... to prevent people from taking dollars from legal taxpayers to give to another illegal group of non-citizen parents....



It will also help to prevent illegals crossing our border and having a baby for this purpose (and then later complaining about unfair/exploitation) This also will help stop Birth-Tourism.



Illegal immigration will never stop, as long our laws stay the same, are not enforced, and we act like idiots and give our hard earned taxes, freedoms and citizen rights away.



300,000 illegal babies a year are born here.



97 percent of anchor baby births are paid for by US taxpayers - your money that you need for your own kids.



Ted Hilton with the TAXPAYER REVOLUTION has launched a June 2010 ballot initiative to help solve California's budget deficit crisis. The laws address the problems of "birth tourism," welfare dependency and other benefits used by those here unlawfully which are draining U.S. citizens' tax dollars. Mail all petitions to POB 9985, San Diego, CA 92169.



go to this link to DOWNLOAD the petiton for the June 2010 Ballot initiative:

http://www.taxpayerrevolution.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8&Itemid=20



thank you.



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City Journal

Hispanic Family Values?

Runaway illegitimacy is creating a new U.S. underclass.

Heather Mac Donald

Autumn 2006



Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability. Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in the future.

The government social-services sector has already latched onto this new client base; as the Hispanic population expands, so will the demands for a larger welfare state. Since conservative open-borders advocates have yet to acknowledge the facts of Hispanic family breakdown, there is no way to know what their solution to it is. But they had better come up with one quickly, because the problem is here—and growing.

The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high fertility rate—even more than unbounded levels of immigration—will fuel the rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades. By 2050, the Latino population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four Americans will be Hispanic by mid-century, twice the current ratio. In states such as California and Texas, Hispanics will be in the clear majority. Nationally, whites will drop from near 70 percent of the total population in 2000 to just half by 2050. Hispanics will account for 46 percent of the nation’s added population over the next two decades, the Pew Hispanic Center reports.

But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.

As if the unmarried Hispanic birthrate weren’t worrisome enough, it is increasing faster than among other groups. It jumped 5 percent from 2002 to 2003, whereas the rate for other unmarried women remained flat. Couple the high and increasing illegitimacy rate of Hispanics with their higher overall fertility rate, and you have a recipe for unstoppable family breakdown.

The only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns teen births. Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 12th year in a row in 2003, having dropped by more than a third since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics remain a cause for concern. The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. To put these numbers into international perspective, Japan’s teen birthrate is 3.9, Italy’s is 6.9, and France’s is 10. Even though the outsize U.S. teen birthrate is dropping, it continues to inflict unnecessary costs on the country, to which Hispanics contribute disproportionately.

To grasp the reality behind those numbers, one need only talk to people working on the front lines of family breakdown. Social workers in Southern California, the national epicenter for illegal Hispanic immigrants and their progeny, are in despair over the epidemic of single parenting. Not only has illegitimacy become perfectly acceptable, they say, but so has the resort to welfare and social services to cope with it.

Dr. Ana Sanchez delivers babies at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the city of Orange, California, many of them to Hispanic teenagers. To her dismay, they view having a child at their age as normal. A recent patient just had her second baby at age 17; the baby’s father is in jail. But what is “most alarming,” Sanchez says, is that the “teens’ parents view having babies outside of marriage as normal, too. A lot of the grandmothers are single as well; they never married, or they had successive partners. So the mom sends the message to her daughter that it’s okay to have children out of wedlock.”

Sanchez feels almost personally involved in the problem: “I’m Hispanic myself. I wish I could find out what the Asians are doing right.” She guesses that Asian parents’ passion for education inoculates their children against teen pregnancy and the underclass trap. “Hispanics are not picking that up like the Asian kids,” she sighs.

Conservatives who support open borders are fond of invoking “Hispanic family values” as a benefit of unlimited Hispanic immigration. Marriage is clearly no longer one of those family values. But other kinds of traditional Hispanic values have survived—not all of them necessarily ideal in a modern economy, however. One of them is the importance of having children early and often. “It’s considered almost a badge of honor for a young girl to have a baby,” says Peggy Schulze of Chrysalis House, an adoption agency in Fresno. (Fresno has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in California, typical of the state’s heavily Hispanic farm districts.) It is almost impossible to persuade young single Hispanic mothers to give up their children for adoption, Schulze says. “The attitude is: ‘How could you give away your baby?’ I don’t know how to break through.”

The most powerful Hispanic family value—the tight-knit extended family—facilitates unwed child rearing. A single mother’s relatives often step in to make up for the absence of the baby’s father. I asked Mona, a 19-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph’s Church in Santa Ana, California, if she knew any single mothers. She laughed: “There are so many I can’t even name them.” Two of her cousins, aged 25 and 19, have children without having husbands. The situation didn’t seem to trouble this churchgoer too much. “They’ll be strong enough to raise them. It’s totally okay with us,” she said. “We’re very close; we’re there to support them. They’ll do just fine.”

As Mona’s family suggests, out-of-wedlock child rearing among Hispanics is by no means confined to the underclass. The St. Joseph’s parishioners are precisely the churchgoing, blue-collar workers whom open-borders conservatives celebrate. Yet this community is as susceptible as any other to illegitimacy. Fifty-year-old Irma and her husband, Rafael, came legally from Mexico in the early 1970s. Rafael works in a meatpacking plant in Brea; they have raised five husky boys who attend church with them. Yet Irma’s sister—a homemaker like herself, also married to a factory hand—is now the grandmother of two illegitimate children, one by each daughter. “I saw nothing in the way my sister and her husband raised her children to explain it,” Irma says. “She gave them everything.” One of the fathers of Irma’s young nieces has four other children by a variety of different mothers. His construction wages are being garnished for child support, but he is otherwise not involved in raising his children.

The fathers of these illegitimate children are often problematic in even more troubling ways. Social workers report that the impregnators of younger Hispanic women are with some regularity their uncles, not necessarily seen as a bad thing by the mother’s family. Alternatively, the father may be the boyfriend of the girl’s mother, who then continues to stay with the grandmother. Older men seek out young girls in the belief that a virgin cannot get pregnant during her first intercourse, and to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.

The tradition of starting families young and expand- ing them quickly can come into conflict with more modern American mores. Ron Storm, the director of the Hillview Acres foster-care home in Chino, tells of a 15-year-old girl who was taken away from the 21-year-old father of her child by a local child-welfare department. The boyfriend went to jail, charged with rape. But the girl’s parents complained about the agency’s interference, and eventually both the girl and her boyfriend ended up going back to Mexico, presumably to have more children. “At 15, as the Quinceañera tradition celebrates, you’re considered ready for marriage,” says Storm. Or at least for childbearing; the marriage part is disappearing.

But though older men continue to take advantage of younger women, the age gap between the mother and the father of an illegitimate child is quickly closing. Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties tries to teach young fathers to take responsibility for their children. “We’re seeing a lot more 13- and 14-year-old fathers,” says Kathleen Collins, v.p. of health education. The day before we spoke, Scott Montoya, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, arrested two 14-year-old boys who were bragging about having sexual relations with a cafeteria worker from an Olive Garden restaurant. “It’s now all about getting girls pregnant when you’re age 15,” he says. One 18-year-old in the Planned Parenthood fathers’ program has two children by two different girls and is having sex with five others, says health worker Jason Warner. “A lot of [the adolescent sexual behavior] has to do with getting respect from one’s peers,” observes Warner.

Normally, the fathers, of whatever age, take off. “The father may already be married or in prison or doing drugs,” says Amanda Gan, director of operations for Toby’s House, a maternity home in Dana Point, California. Mona, the 19-year-old parishioner at St. Joseph’s Church, says that the boys who impregnated her two cousins are “nowhere to be found.” Her family knows them but doesn’t know if they are working or in jail.

Two teen mothers at the Hillview Acres home represent the outer edge of Hispanic family dysfunction. Yet many aspects of their lives are typical. Though these teenagers’ own mothers were unusually callous and irresponsible, the social milieu in which they were raised is not unusual.

Irene’s round, full face makes her look younger than her 14 years, certainly too young to be a mother. But her own mother’s boyfriend repeatedly forced sex on her, with the mother’s acquiescence. The result was Irene’s baby, Luz. Baby Luz has an uncle her own age, Irene’s new 13-month-old brother. Like Irene, Irene’s mother had her first child at 14, and produced five more over the next 16 years, all of whom went into foster care. Irene’s father committed suicide before she was old enough to know him. The four fathers of her siblings are out of the picture, too: one of them, the father of her seven-year-old brother and five-year-old sister, was deported back to Mexico after he showed up drunk for a visit with his children, in violation of his probation conditions.

Irene is serene and articulate—remarkably so, considering that in her peripatetic early life in Orange County she went to school maybe twice a week. She likes to sing and to read books that are sad, she says, especially books by Dave Pelzer, a child-abuse victim who has published three best-selling memoirs about his childhood trauma. She says she will never get married: “I don’t want another man in my life. I don’t want that experience again.”

Eighteen-year-old Jessica at least escaped rape, but her family experiences were bad enough. The large-limbed young woman, whose long hair is pulled back tightly from her heart-shaped face, grew up in the predominantly Hispanic farming community of Indio in the Coachella Valley. She started “partying hard” in fifth grade, she says—at around the same time that her mother, separated from her father, began using drugs and going clubbing. By the eighth grade, Jessica and her mother were drinking and smoking marijuana together. Jessica’s family had known her boyfriend’s family since she was four; when she had her first child by him—she was 14 and he was 21—her mother declared philosophically that she had always known that it would happen. “It was okay with her, so long as he continued to give her drugs.”

Jessica originally got pregnant to try to clean up her life, she says. “I knew what I was doing was not okay, so having a baby was a way for me to stop doing what I was doing. In that sense, the baby was planned.” She has not used drugs since her first pregnancy, though she occasionally drinks. After her daughter was born, she went to live with her boyfriend in a filthy trailer without plumbing; they scrounged food from dumpsters, despite the income from his illegal drug business. They planned to get married, but by the time she got pregnant again with a son, “We were having a lot of problems. We’d be holding hands, and he’d be looking at other girls. I didn’t want him to touch me.” Eventually, the county welfare agency removed her and put her in foster care with her two children.

Both Jessica and her caddish former boyfriend illustrate the evanescence of the celebrated Hispanic “family values.” Her boyfriend’s family could not be more traditional. Two years ago, Jessica went back to Mexico to celebrate her boyfriend’s parents’ 25th wedding anniversary and the renewal of their wedding vows. Jessica’s own mother got married at 15 to her father, who was ten years her senior. Her father would not let his wife work; she was a “stay-at-home wife,” Jessica says. But don’t blame the move to the U.S. for the behavior of younger generations; the family crack-up is happening even faster in Latin America.

Jessica’s mother may have been particularly negligent, but Jessica’s experiences are not so radically different from those of her peers. “Everybody’s having babies now,” she says. “The Coachella Valley is filled with girls’ pregnancies. Some girls live with their babies’ dads; they consider them their husbands.” These cohabiting relationships rarely last, however, and a new cohort of fatherless children goes out into the world.

Despite the strong family support, the prevalence of single parenting among Hispanics is producing the inevitable slide into the welfare system. “The girls aren’t marrying the guys, so they are married to the state,” Dr. Sanchez observes. Hispanics now dominate the federal Women, Infants, and Children free food program; Hispanic enrollment grew over 25 percent from 1996 to 2002, while black enrollment dropped 12 percent and white enrollment dropped 6.5 percent. Illegal immigrants can get WIC and other welfare programs for their American-born children. If Congress follows President Bush’s urging and grants amnesty to most of the 11 million illegal aliens in the country today, expect the welfare rolls to skyrocket as the parents themselves become eligible.

Amy Braun works for Mary’s Shelter, a home for young single mothers who are homeless or in crisis, in Orange County, California. It has become “culturally okay” for the Hispanic population to use the shelter and welfare system, Braun says. A case manager at a program for pregnant homeless women in the city of Orange observes the same acculturation to the social-services sector, with its grievance mongering and sense of victimhood. “I’ll have women in my office on their fifth child, when the others have already been placed in foster care,” says Anita Berry of Casa Teresa. “There’s nothing shameful about having multiple children that you can’t care for, and to be pregnant again, because then you can blame the system.”

The consequences of family breakdown are now being passed down from one generation to the next, in an echo of the black underclass. “The problems are deeper and wider,” says Berry. “Now you’re getting the second generation of foster care and group home residents. The dysfunction is multigenerational.”

The social-services complex has responded with barely concealed enthusiasm to this new flood of clients. As Hispanic social problems increase, so will the government sector that ministers to them. In July, a New York Times editorial, titled young latinas and a cry for help, pointed out the elevated high school dropout rates and birthrates among Hispanic girls. A quarter of all Latinas are mothers by the age of 20, reported the Times. With the usual melodrama that accompanies the pitch for more government services, the Times designated young Latinas as “endangered” in the same breath that it disclosed that they are one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. “The time to help is now,” said the Times—by which it means ratcheting up the taxpayer-subsidized social-work industry.

In response to the editorial, Carmen Barroso, regional director of International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region, proclaimed in a letter to the editor the “urgent need for health care providers, educators and advocates to join the sexual and reproductive health movement to ensure the fundamental right to services for young Latinas.”

Wherever these “fundamental rights” might come from, Barroso’s call nevertheless seems quite superfluous, since there is no shortage of taxpayer-funded “services” for troubled Latinas—or Latinos. The schools in California’s San Joaquin Valley have day care for their students’ babies, reports Peggy Schulze of Chrysalis House. “The girls get whatever they need—welfare, medical care.” Advocates for young unwed moms in New York’s South Bronx are likewise agitating for more day-care centers in high schools there, reports El Diario/La Prensa. A bill now in Congress, the Latina Adolescent Suicide Prevention Act, aims to channel $10 million to “culturally competent” social agencies to improve the self-esteem of Latina girls and to provide “support services” to their families and friends if they contemplate suicide.

The trendy “case management” concept, in which individual “cases” become the focal point around which a solar system of social workers revolves, has even reached heavily Hispanic elementary and middle schools. “We have a coordinator, who brings in a collaboration of agencies to deal with the issues that don’t allow a student to meet his academic goals, such as domestic violence or drugs,” explains Sylvia Rentria, director of the Family Resource Center at Berendo Middle School in Los Angeles. “We can provide individual therapy.” Rentria offers the same program at nearby Hoover Elementary School for up to 100 students.

This July, Rentria launched a new session of Berendo’s Violence Intervention Program for parents of children who are showing signs of gang involvement and other antisocial behavior. Ghady M., 55 and a “madre soltera” (single mother), like most of the mothers in the program, has been called in because her 16-year-old son, Christian, has been throwing gang signs at school, cutting half his classes, and ending up in the counseling office every day. The illegal Guatemalan is separated from her partner, who was “muy malo,” she says; he was probably responsible for her many missing teeth. (The detectives in the heavily Hispanic Rampart Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, which includes the Berendo school, spend inordinate amounts of time on domestic violence cases.) Though Ghady used to work in a factory on Broadway in downtown L.A.— often referred to as Little Mexico City—she now collects $580 in welfare payments and $270 in food stamps for her two American-born children.

Christian is a husky smart aleck in a big white T-shirt; his fashionably pomaded hair stands straight up. He goes to school but doesn’t do homework, he grins; and though he is not in a gang, he says, he has friends who are. Keeping Ghady and Christian company at the Violence Intervention Program is Ghady’s grandniece, Carrie, a lively ten-year-old. Carrie lives with her 26-year-old mother but does not know her father, who also sired her 12-year-old brother. Her five-year-old brother has a different father.

Yet for all these markers of social dysfunction, fatherless Hispanic families differ from the black underclass in one significant area: many of the mothers and the absent fathers work, even despite growing welfare use. The former boyfriend of Jessica, the 18-year-old mother at the Hillview Acres foster home, works in construction and moonlights on insulation jobs; whether he still deals drugs is unknown. Jessica is postponing joining her father in Texas until she finishes high school, because once she moves in with him, she will feel obligated to get a job to help the family finances. The mother of Hillview’s 14-year-old Irene used to fix soda machines in Anaheim, California, though she got fired because she was lazy, Irene says. Now, under court compulsion, she works in a Lunchables factory in Santa Ana, a condition of getting her children back from foster care. The 18-year-old Lothario and father of two, whom Planned Parenthood’s Jason Warner is trying to counsel, works at a pet store. The mother of Carrie, the vivacious ten-year-old sitting in on Berendo Middle School’s Violence Intervention Program, makes pizza at a Papa John’s pizza outlet.

How these two value systems—a lingering work ethic and underclass mating norms—will interact in the future is anyone’s guess. Orange County sheriff’s deputy Montoya says that the older Hispanic generation’s work ethic is fast disappearing among the gangbanging youngsters whom he sees. “Now, it’s all about fast money, drugs, and sex.” It may be that the willingness to work will plummet along with marriage rates, leading to even greater social problems than are now rife among Hispanics. Or it may be that the two contrasting practices will remain on parallel tracks, creating a new kind of underclass: a culture that tolerates free-floating men who impregnate women and leave, like the vast majority of black men, yet who still labor in the noncriminal economy. The question is whether, if the disposition to work remains relatively strong, a working parent will inoculate his or her illegitimate children against the worst degradations that plague black ghettos.

From an intellectual standpoint, this is a fascinating social experiment, one that academicians are—predictably—not attuned to. But the consequences will be more than intellectual: they may severely strain the social fabric. Nevertheless, it is an experiment that we seem destined to see to its end. Tisha Roberts, a supervisor at an Orange County, California, institution that assists children in foster care, has given up hope that the illegitimacy rate will taper off. “It’s going to continue to grow,” she said.



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AN AMERICAN SEES & SPEAKS

ILLEGALS & TAXES





I am so sick and tired of people using the sales tax defense for illegals. Sales tax in Sacramento is 8.75%. I make $600 a week in gross wages. I bring home $488 a week. Thats $448 a month in taxes which equals 18.6% in taxes I pay. Not to mention I also pay sales tax on everything I buy. Lets say an illegal brings home $2000 a month and all that money is used to buy taxable products (which in real life it is not), that equals $175 he pays in sales tax a month. WHile I pay $488 in payroll taxes a month PLUS the sales tax I pay. Me = $488, ILLEGAL=$175. Does this seem fair to you? On top of all this, I do not qualify for government funded anything and have NEVER been on government funded anything including unemployment. So not only do they get to keep more of their money, they get to spend more of mine in the form of government subsidies. And even if they use a stolen SSN, they are allowed by law to claim 9 exemptions, therefore have little to no payroll taxes taken out of their paycheck. What happened to things being equal? WHy is it that the people who work hard everyday are the ones being abused. Most of the time I feel like a donkey going to work everyday with a whip cracked at my back and some illegal shouting vamanos while a bunch of illegals and their children get their free food, medical, housing from my sweat and blood. Its not fair. Equality for all I say. Like Obama says everyone needs to pay their fair share.

• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests





PostingID: 1764167941

THERE IS NO ONE THAT WORKS HARDER FOR ILLEGALS THAN BARACK OBAMA!

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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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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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Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform

www.CAIRCO.org





http://www.FAIRUS.org



http://www.JUDICIALWATCH.org



http://www.ALIPAC.us



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http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/mexico/2011/01/getting-over-the-border-fence-fast.html



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Obama Quietly Erasing Borders (Article)





Article Link:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=240045





CONTACT THE HISPANDERING LA RAZA PARTY PRESIDENT HERE:



You can contact President Obama and let him know of your opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/



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UCLA PROFESSOR CALLS FOR MEXICAN REVOLT IN UNITED STATES

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/7165215?fr=yvmtf



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Wake up America!!! Illegal Immigration has to be stopped. Take a look at this website and see where all your tax dollars are going: http://immigrationcounters.com/



See: CFR’s Plan to Integrate the U.S., Mexico and Canada

http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20050816.htm The Great Alien Invasion - What's Happening Now http://www.rense.com/general69/inva.htm

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"Bush Secret Border Wars" Mayhem and terror in Southern states to protect government drug cartels

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2005/140805borderwars.htm Mexican/Bush Crime

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“Through love of having children, we are going to take over.” AUGUSTIN CEBADA, BROWN BERETS, THE LA RAZA FASCIST PARTY



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