THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
FOREIGN WORKER VISAS - THE DEMOCRAT PARTY IS HELL BENT ON KEEPING THE FLOODS OF FOREIGNERS INVADING!
Jeff Sessions: Omnibus Spending Bill Explains Why ‘Voters Are in Open Rebellion’
Jeff Sessions says the omnibus spending bill is the latest example of why "voters are in open rebellion." He cited these issues as most problematic: fully funding President Barack Obama's refugee resettlement program, sanctuary cities, and the resettlement of illegal immigrant children and their families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
“H-2B visas are for low-skilled foreign workers who typically compete with people who have a high school diploma or less and these are the people who are struggling the most,” he said.
Funding deal hits backlash over increase in foreign worker visas
The $1.1 trillion omnibus funding bill includes language that would dramatically increase the number of visas available for foreign workers, setting off alarm bells among conservatives and labor unions.
Congressional leaders quietly slipped the provision into the 2,009-page funding bill, with rank-and-file lawmakers only discovering it Wednesday morning. The move immediately sparked protests from across the political spectrum.
The provision could more than triple the number of H-2B visas for foreign workers seeking jobs at hotels, theme parks, ski resorts, golf courses, landscaping businesses, restaurants and bars. The move is intended to boost the supply of non-agricultural seasonal workers.
“These foreign workers are brought in exclusively to fill blue collar non-farm jobs in hotels, restaurants, construction, truck driving, and many other occupations sought by millions of Americans,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), an outspoken critic of President Obama’s immigration policies, in a statement.
“The GOP-led Congress is about to deliver Obama a four-fold increase to one of the most controversial foreign worker programs. The result? Higher unemployment and lower wages for Americans,” he said.
Sessions estimates the number of H-2B visas will soar from 66,000 to 250,000 because of the language in the omnibus. He took to the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon to protest the maneuver.
Chris Chmielenski, a spokesman for NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for less immigration, criticized Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for allowing the provision into the omnibus after pledging to look out for American workers in his first speech to the House after taking the gavel.
Ryan called on Congress to look after working-class families after he won election to the Speaker’s office in October.
“If there were ever a time for us to step up, this would be that time. America does not feel strong anymore because the working people of America do not feel strong anymore,” he told colleagues on the House floor. “I’m talking about the people who mind the store and grow the food and walk the beat and pay the taxes and raise the family.”
Chmielenski said those same working families would be hurt by the visa rider.
“H-2B visas are for low-skilled foreign workers who typically compete with people who have a high school diploma or less and these are the people who are struggling the most,” he said.
“These are the people that Ryan seemed to be referencing in his speech, and yet he sneaks in a provision in the omnibus that’s going to quadruple the number of low-skilled foreign worker visas,” he added.
NumbersUSA plans to mobilize its grassroots activist network in an effort to get the language removed from the spending package.
Conservative Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said in October that Ryan promised the House Republican Conference before being elected that he would not bring a comprehensive immigration reform bill to the floor while Obama was still in the Oval Office.
A House GOP aide said the visa provision was written by the Judiciary Committee, and that the Speaker was not involved.
The aide added that Ryan did not pledge that he wouldn’t touch any programs related to immigration, only to keep major legislation, such as the 2013 Senate bill that included a pathway to citizenship, from moving. The language in the omnibus falls well short of that.
The policy rider comes at a sensitive time for Republicans, with their leading candidates for president engaging in a fierce debate over immigration.
At the presidential debate in Las Vegas Tuesday evening, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) slammed rival Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for co-authoring a comprehensive reform bill in 2013 that would have given a path to citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants.
Rubio shot back by arguing that Cruz at the time supported dramatic increases in the number of visas for foreign workers. He claimed Cruz supported a 500 percent increase in the number of H-1B visas for skilled workers and doubling the number of green cards.
But the uproar over the visa provision isn’t confined to conservatives.
The AFL-CIO and the International Labor Recruitment Working Group, powerhouses in the labor movement, also took aim at the visa provision, warning it would lead to exploitation of foreign workers and Americans losing jobs.
“The language basically rolls back protections for low-wage workers and guest workers and American workers in this industry while lowering the protections for workers,” said Joleen Rivera, a legislative representative at the AFL-CIO.
BLOG: HOW MANY OF THESE FOREIGN SEASONAL WORKERS WOULD SHOW UP, BREED THEIR ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE, AND THEN NEVER LEAVE??? IN MEX-OCCUPIED CA, NEARLY ONE-THIRD DO JUST THAT!
She said that only 66,000 foreign seasonal workers are allowed into the United States per year but predicted the number could swell to 200,000 because of the language in the omnibus.
Rivera said it would also water down workers’ protections in dangerous industries such as forestry and seafood harvesting.
“We’re extremely disappointed that these measures are in the bill,” she said.
Labor groups say the language should go through regular procedural order instead of being thrown into a catchall bill.
“The House language would lead to the admission of almost 200,000 additional low-wage guest workers and would eliminate protections that keep workers from being brought in and idled without work or pay for long periods of time,” the International Labor Recruitment Working Group said in a statement.
The group said the language would prevent U.S. workers from getting “first dibs” on jobs and deny U.S. workers the rights to the rights to the same wages.
THE ENTIRE REASON FOR AMNESTY, NO E-VERIFY AND OPEN BORDERS IS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
THERE IS NOT ONE BILLIONAIRE OUT THERE WHO IS AN ADVOCATE FOR THE AMERICAN WORKER!
THEY ARE ALL FOR OBAMA'S AMNESTY, OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY.
EVERY AMNESTY BILL YET ATTEMPTED INCLUDES LIFTING THE VISAS FOR ENDLESS BOATLOADS OF FOREIGNERS TO TAKE OUR JOBS AND KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED FOR THE LIKSE OF ZUCKERBERG AND BILL GATES!
MARK ZUCKERBERG IS A MAJOR DONOR TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY OF LA RAZA.
"Inseparable from the staggering growth of financial parasitism and social inequality, from which Zuckerberg and his ilk benefit, is the repudiation of the social rights of the working class. Moreover, Zuckerberg’s latest announcement calls into question any democratic input, much less control, over the resources created by the collective labor of society." "Instead of massive public works projects addressing the social problems of our day, we are told that the financial elite—good, caring people—can “get things done,” bypassing the annoying traditional legal and governmental bodies!"
Mark Zuckerberg, philanthrocapitalism and parasitism
By Nancy Hanover 8 December 2015
Last Tuesday Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook and the 16th richest man in America, and his wife Priscilla Chan announced they would be donating 99 percent of their Facebook shares, currently valued at $45 billion, to charity during their lifetime.
The gift was announced in the form of a letter to their newborn child announcing the formation of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a Limited Liability Company (LLC) dedicated to “advancing human potential and promoting equality” by means of “philanthropic, public advocacy, and other activities for the public good.” “Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities,” the billionaires wrote.
The intended and immediate media reaction was gushing praise. The Guardian, for example, referred to Zuckerberg as a “generational superman” and stated, “The rest of us can probably agree, twitticisms aside, that a $45bn donation—more than double the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations put together—is pretty generous.”
“His previous extraordinary philanthropy gives plenty of reason for optimism,” continued the British newspaper, “whatever mis-steps there have been along the way. What will he do now? Can he manage his great gift without letting the political seep into the charitable? How will he change the world next?”
National Public Radio (NPR) enthused, “The letter has a sweeping vision, traversing social and political issues that are controversial.” It quotes Zuckerberg’s concern for those who “wonder whether you’ll have food or rent, or worry about abuse or crime potential,” and report his assurances that “investments in technology in particular can solve these problems.”
On a more somber note, the New Yorker hinted at the nervous worries of the ruling elite, baldly claiming, “Charitable giving on this scale makes modern capitalism, with all of its inequalities and injustices, seem somewhat more defensible.”
To all of this, the WSWS can only reply: far from it! Technology cannot solve the problem of social inequality. The journal Science just published a study entitled “ Democratizing education? Examining access and usage patterns in massive open online courses ” which confirms the fact, well known to public school teachers, that economic class—not technological access—is the overwhelming factor in determining educational success. Science goes even further to state, “Our findings raise concerns that MOOCs and similar approaches to online learning can exacerbate rather than reduce disparities in educational outcomes related to socioeconomic status.”
Access to the Internet does not obliterate class society. And it is absolutely indefensible that “curing disease,” the ability to receive a good education and access to communication technology should become objects of charity.
The phenomenon of “philanthrocapitalism,” the brain-child of “social investors” seeking to “do well by doing good,” has become a credo among some members of the young billionaire set. It is predicated upon what the WSWS has described as the return of the aristocratic principle —the notion that if the population is to have basic rights, it will be at the whim of the very rich.
Inseparable from the staggering growth of financial parasitism and social inequality, from which Zuckerberg and his ilk benefit, is the repudiation of the social rights of the working class. Moreover, Zuckerberg’s latest announcement calls into question any democratic input, much less control, over the resources created by the collective labor of society.
Instead of massive public works projects addressing the social problems of our day, we are told that the financial elite—good, caring people—can “get things done,” bypassing the annoying traditional legal and governmental bodies!
The fact is, and always has been, that charity aims to degrade and demoralize its recipients and undermine class consciousness, while pleasantly easing the conscience of its wealthy patrons. As the great Marxist Frederick Engels put it, such donations amount to “giv[ing] back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them!”
Zuckerberg’s business arrangement, however, was not primarily targeted at convincing the 84 percent of the world’s people who subsist on less than $20 a day, or the three-quarters of the world’s working population which cannot secure a permanent and stable job, or even the 40 percent of young people of Zuckerberg’s generation who lack full-time work, of the wonders of capitalism and the beneficence of its elite.
This time around, it is more about cold, hard cash-management and future business opportunities. As the New Yorker notes, philanthropists “Zuckerberg and [Bill] Gates are placing some very large chunks of wealth permanently outside the reaches of the Internal Revenue Service.” The magazine adds that, “The size and timing of the tax benefits to Zuckerberg and Chan are uncertain, but they are likely to be large.”
Despite this, the liberal editors of the New Yorker add, “by all means, let us praise Zuckerberg and Chan for their generosity. And let us also salute Gates, who started the trend.”
Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica (the investigative journalism web site), however, has aptly pointed out that the “emperor”—or “the generational superman”—has no clothes. Eisinger explained that Zuckerberg’s decision to create a limited liability company for his Facebook shares was essentially “mov[ing] money from one pocket to the other.” Analyses of the Chan Zuckerberg “gift” by business commentators have confirmed this.
• It reduces taxes for the billionaire family. American tax law provides a deduction for stock sales based on “fair market value.” As Facebook stock is presumed to appreciate in value, at the time CZI donates stock to a charity, it will write off—not the cost of the stock when they received it from Zuckerberg—but its price at final sale. Therefore any gain in value is never taxed. Forbes reported that Zuckerberg “can potentially use that to shelter billions of other income.”
Judged by past practice, Zuckerberg’s interest in this aspect of the deal cannot be insubstantial. He already uses a donor-advised fund (the Silicon Valley Community Foundation), a relatively new and wildly popular device that generates an immediate tax deduction but has no requirement for charitable contribution. He also reportedly employs the “Double Irish” loophole to shift profits to the Cayman Islands. Gabriel Zucman, a tax haven specialist at UC Berkeley, dryly remarked, “I applaud their emphasis on ‘promoting equality’ but that starts with paying one’s taxes. A society where rich people decide for themselves how much taxes they pay and to what public goods they’re willing to contribute is not a civilized society.”
• The LLC has no legal responsibility to help anyone. There are no transparency requirements or rules regarding the disbursement of its assets. It is exempt from the “5 percent rule,” which stipulates a minimum of 5 percent of the holdings is to be donated each year. All decisions regarding the new business entity will be under the control of the Chan-Zuckerberg family.
• In fact, commentators have indicated that the LLC appears to be designed to function as a conduit for projects that contribute directly to Facebook’s future success. The company aims to “connect the world so you have access to every idea, person and opportunity,” and make a strong emphasis on the advancement of the “Internet” and “personalized learning”—all goals which tied into Facebook’s interest in better Internet connections and further personalization of the online experience. The education market is now being inundated with companies peddling such ed-tech tools promising individual learning.
• The entity will be entirely free to funnel billions into “education reform,” e.g., opening up the K-12 market by lobbying for legal changes and supporting pro-market politicians. Lobbying, dubbed “participating in policy debates,” is part of CZI’s core mission. Had the entity been set up as a traditional tax-exempt foundation—a 501(c)(3)—it would have been legally barred from these political activities. Zuckerberg has already established himself as a key operator in undermining public education and bringing in profit concerns to the K-12 “market.”
• CZI will invest in for-profit companies and participate in joint ventures, also leveraging Zuckerberg’s efforts to penetrate the highly lucrative “education business.” Last September, Facebook teamed up with a charter school network, Summit Public Schools, to refine its personalized learning plan. Two thousand students and 100 teachers in Summit were involved, but with Facebook on board, the effort is now set to expand. CZI also previously invested in AltSchool, a for-profit private school chain ($20,000 a year tuition) run by venture capitalists and other investors.
Five years ago, Zuckerberg made a similar grand announcement of a cash infusion (the “previous extraordinary philanthropy” referenced by the Guardian, above) into the impoverished Newark, New Jersey school system. Almost 30 percent of the money went into the development of charter schools, which now enroll more than one-third of the city’s schoolchildren. Millions more went to consultants. The school “reform” movement that Zuckerberg financed worked with the American Federation of Teachers local to impose merit pay and scapegoat educators for the problems created by poverty. All in all, there has been no improvement in Newark’s education system.
Characterizing the announcement not as a “gift” but as “an investment vehicle,” ProPublica’s Eisinger concluded, “Instead of lavishing praise on Mr. Zuckerberg … this should be an occasion to mull what kind of society we want to live in. … The point is that we are turning into a society of oligarchs.”
Precisely. The real gift involved has been zero interest rates and quantitative easing—the injections of trillions of dollars into the stock market by the US Federal Reserve—which has fabulously enriched the financial oligarchs and sent the stock market soaring. With the tech-centric NASDAQ hitting all-time highs this year, not just Facebook but all of Silicon Valley is awash with billions of dollars. In a development reminiscent of the dot-com bubble, there are now over 100 US-based “unicorns”—start-ups valued at $1 billion or more—with some “decacorns” valued at $10 billion or more. Private equity firms and venture capitalists control more liquidity than they know what to do with.
A glimpse of this milieu is pointed to in Vanity Fair ’s recent article “Unicorns and Rain Clouds,” which warns that the stock euphoria has created a debauched culture that harkens back to the dot-com collapse of 1999. They note that the skyline says a lot. There’s a new, recently occupied Facebook building, designed by Frank Gehry, with a rooftop park and what it claims is the largest open floor plan in the world. A new, glassy Salesforce Tower is under construction, slated to become the tallest building in San Francisco. And on it goes.
The reporter, Nick Bilton, observes, “Shortly after the Facebook IPO, I learned about a secret group within the social-network company called ‘TNR 250’; it was an abbreviation of ‘The Nouveau Riche 250’ comprising Facebook’s first 250 employees, many of whom had become multi-millionaires. The members of TNR 250 privately discussed things they wanted to buy with their windfall, including boats, planes, Banksy portraits, and even tropical islands. …
“A prominent Facebook employee’s birthday party was orchestrated like an elaborate wedding, with ice sculptures, chocolatiers, and half a dozen women who walked around with card tables hanging off their waists so that guests could play blackjack while staring at their chests.”
Bilton sardonically notes, “In the past, they’ve suggested, [these] people were just trying to get filthy rich. Now they are trying to ‘make the world a better place.’”
Not only is social inequality at levels unseen since the days of Louis XVI, but so is the hubris and hypocrisy of the parasitical elite. But the deeper significance of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is its illustration of the open subordination of all aspects of US society to the capitalist market and the caprice of the new financial aristocracy that rules America.
It is becoming more and more obvious that the obscene wealth of the super-rich is inseparable from the nature of capitalism, a dying system which is conducting a deep-going social counterrevolution: dismantling public education, destroying the cities, water systems, housing, roads and all public infrastructure, systematically impoverishing millions, raping the planet’s resources—and, above all, visiting a perpetual state of imperialist war across the globe.
This demonstrates, once again, the utter incompatibility of present-day capitalism with the most fundamental principles of democracy. Neither charity nor philanthropy is needed from this decadent and outlived capitalist system. The rights of the working class will only be secured by the struggle for socialism.
The authoralsorecommends:
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest
Book Description: The #1 New York Times bestselling author and firebrand syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin sets her sights on the corrupt businessmen, politicians, and lobbyists flooding our borders and selling out America’s best and brightest workers.
In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano reveal the worst perpetrators screwing America’s high-skilled workers, how and why they’re doing it—and what we must do to stop them. In this book, they will name names and expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class, while aiding and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor. Malkin and Miano will explode some of the most commonly told myths spread in the media like these:
Lie #1: America is suffering from an apocalyptic “shortage” of science, technology, engineering, and math workers.
Lie #2: US companies cannot function without an unlimited injection of the most “highly skilled” and “highly educated” foreign workers, who offer intellectual capital and entrepreneurial energy that American workers can’t match.
Lie #3: America’s best and brightest talents are protected because employers are required to demonstrate that they’ve made every effort to hire American citizens before resorting to foreign labor.
For too long, open-borders tech billionaires and their political enablers have escaped tough public scrutiny of their means and motives. Sold Out is an indictment of not only political corruption in Washington, but also the journalistic malpractice that enables it. It’s time to trade the whitewash for solvent. American workers deserve better and the public deserves the unvarnished truth.
Income inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for the bottom 90 percent has been stagnant since the 1980s. The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation. Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs.
The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages. ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions. Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations. Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid.
DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery. Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories. The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events. The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
Income inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for the bottom 90 percent has been stagnant since the 1980s. The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation. Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs. The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages. ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions. Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations. Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid. This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery. Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories. The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events. The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
Overview: In Lawless, George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein offers a scholarly and unsettling account of how the Obama Administration has undermined the Constitution and the rule of law. He documents how the President has presided over one constitutional debacle after another – from Obamacare to unauthorized wars in the Middle East to attempts to strip property owners, college students, religious groups, and conservative political activists of their rights, and more.
Respect for the Constitution’s separation of powers has been violated time and again. Whether in amending Obamacare on the fly or signing a memorandum legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, the current Administration ignores not only Congress, but also the Constitution’s critical checks and balances.
In Lawless, Professor Bernstein shows how the Constitution as well as the President’s own stated principles have been betrayed. In doing so, serious and potentially permanent damage has been done to our constitutional system and repairs must be addressed by the next President of the United States.
Recently, the Justice Department announced it would not be indicting anyone for his or her role in the most serious domestic political scandal since the Nixon years.
Starting in 2010, the IRS, under pressure from congressional Democrats and the White House, engaged in blatant ideologically motivated discrimination against conservative organizations applying for non-profit status.
That the most feared bureaucracy in Washington was making decisions based on illegal political criteria should send a chill down the spine of any American who cares about the First Amendment and the rule of law.
Yet the Department of Justice has refused to indict even IRS official Lois Lerner, who invoked her Fifth Amendment right to silence to avoid incriminating herself in testimony before Congress.
Unfortunately, the failure to prosecute anyone responsible for abusing the IRS’s authority reflects the Obama administration’s broader contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. Consider just a few examples:
Going to war in Libya in blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution, and in defiance of the legal advice of the president’s own lawyers, based on the ridiculous theory that bombing the heck out of Libya did not constitute “hostilities” under the law
Appointing so-called policy czars to high-level positions to avoid constitutionally-required confirmation hearings
Modifying, delaying, and ignoring various provisions of Obamacare in violation of the law itself
Attacking private citizens for engaging in constitutionally protected speech
Issuing draconian regulations regarding sexual assault on campus not through formal, lawful regulation but through an informal, and unreviewable, “dear colleague” letter
Ignoring 100 years of legal rulings and the plain text of the Constitution and trying to get a vote in Congress for the D.C. delegate
Trying to enact massive immigration reform via an executive order demanding that the Department of Homeland Security both refuse to enforce existing immigration law, and provide work permits to millions of people residing in the U.S. illegally
Imposing common core standards on the states via administrative fiat
Ignoring bankruptcy law and arranging Chrysler’s bankruptcy to benefit labor unions at the expense of bondholders
Trying to strip churches and other religious bodies of their constitutional right to choose their clergy free from government involvement.
More generally, the president has abandoned any pretense of trying to work with Congress, as the Constitution’s separation of powers requires. He prefers instead to govern by unilateral executive fiat, even when there is little or no legal authority supporting his power to do so. Presidents trying stretch their power as far as they can is hardly news. What is news, however, is that top Obama administration officials, including the president himself, see this not as something to be ashamed of, but as a desirable way of governing, something to brag about rather than do surreptitiously. Obama behaves as if there is some inherent virtue in a president governing by decree and whim, as if promoting progressive political ends at the expense of the rule of law is proper not simply as a desperate last resort but as a matter of principle. After all, Obama says, democracy is unduly “messy” and “complicated.” “We can’t wait,” the president intones, as he ignores the separation of powers again and again, ruling instead through executive order. “Law is politics,” and only politics, according to a mantra popular on the legal left, and therefore the law should not be an independent constraint to doing the right thing politically. Obama seems to agree. As Obama’s lawlessness has received increased attention from Congress, the (conservative) media, and the general public, the president has been defiant, even petulant. When confronted by allegations of lawlessness, Obama takes no responsibility, and doesn’t even bother to defend the legality of his actions. Harry S. Truman famously said “the buck stops here.” Obama responds to serious concerns about his administration’s lawlessness with a derisive “so sue me.” As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley writes, Obama “acts as if anything a court has not expressly forbidden is permissible.” And in many situations, no one has legal standing to challenge the president’s actions in court—which means that no judge can stop the administration’s lawbreaking. So sue me? If only we could. On Tuesday, Nov. 17, David Bernstein will be at The Heritage Foundation at noon for an event about his book, “Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law.” More details here.
Lawless!
The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law
November 17, 2015 The Heritage Foundation, Lehrman Auditorium 214 Massachusetts Ave NE Washington DC 20002-4999
Overview: In Lawless, George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein offers a scholarly and unsettling account of how the Obama Administration has undermined the Constitution and the rule of law. He documents how the President has presided over one constitutional debacle after another – from Obamacare to unauthorized wars in the Middle East to attempts to strip property owners, college students, religious groups, and conservative political activists of their rights, and more.
Respect for the Constitution’s separation of powers has been violated time and again. Whether in amending Obamacare on the fly or signing a memorandum legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, the current Administration ignores not only Congress, but also the Constitution’s critical checks and balances.
In Lawless, Professor Bernstein shows how the Constitution as well as the President’s own stated principles have been betrayed. In doing so, serious and potentially permanent damage has been done to our constitutional system and repairs must be addressed by the next President of the United States.
Obama to Wannabe Illegals: Do as I Say, Not as I Do
By Mark Krikorian
In response the surge of Central Americans sneaking into Texas in the summer of 2014, the Obama administration launched an ad campaign in the sending countries earlier this year to stem the flow. The radio and TV spots assert that "there are no permits for the people trying to cross the border without papers" and promise "the immediate deportation of those trying to cross the border without documents."
None of it is true. There are permits for illegal-alien minors and families. Formally known as Notices to Appear but known colloquially in Spanish as permisos, they require the aliens to present themselves to immigration authorities by a certain date, until which they have temporary legal status. That gives them time enough to travel to join their relatives and disappear into the existing illegal population. And disappear they do, since, despite the tough promises, virtually none of them are deported, immediately or otherwise.
So it should come as no surprise to read today's AP report, which begins this way:
NO PRESIDENT HAS HAD MORE CONTEMPT FOR LEGALS, OUR LAWS AND BORDERS THAN MEXICO'S LA RAZA SUPREMACIST, BARACK OBAMA!
NOT ONLY DOES OBAMA FUND THE MEX FASCIST MOVEMENT OF LA RAZA "The Race" BUT IT OPERATES OUT OF THE AMERICAN WHITE HOUSE UNDER LA RAZA V.P. CECILIA MUNOZ!
November 3, 2015
Obama set to defy federal court on amnesty
By Rick Moran Once again, President Obama is looking to defy Congress in implementing its immigration reform proposals.
This time, his administration is looking to also defy a federal court to achieve it.
A judge sitting on the 5th Circuit in Texas issued an injunction last June against the administration's regulatory plans to legalize millions of aliens in the U.S. illegally. The injunction was upheld by a federal appeals court in Louisiana, and the president's plan is now stalled while the administration works through the federal court system. Except now there are plans afoot to change the regulations pertaining to green cards that would accomplish almost everything the president can't get from Congress or the courts. A leaked memo from DHS outlines four plans the administration is considering. Ian Smith of the Immigration Reform Law Institute:
The internal memo reveals four options of varying expansiveness, with option 1 providing EADs to “all individuals living in the United States”, including illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, and H-1B guest-workers, while option 4 provides EADsonly to those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Giving EADs to any of the covered individuals, however, is in direct violation of Congress’s Immigration & Nationality Act and works to dramatically subvert our carefully wrought visa system. As mentioned, the first plan the memo discusses basically entails giving EADs to anyone physically present in the country who until now has been prohibited from getting one. A major positive to this option, the memo reads, is that it would “address the needs of some of the intended deferred action population.” Although DHS doesn’t say it expressly, included here would be those 4.3 million people covered by the president’s DAPA and Expanded DACA programs whose benefits were supposed to have been halted in the Hanen decision. On top of working around the Hanen injunction, this DHS plan would also dole out unrestricted EADs to those on temporary non-immigrant visas, such as H-1B-holders (their work authorizations being tied to their employers) and another 5 to 6 million illegal aliens thus far not covered by any of the President’s deferred action amnesty programs. By claiming absolute authority to grant work authorization to any alien, regardless of status, DHS is in effect claiming it can unilaterally de-couple the 1986 IRCA work authorization statutes from the main body of U.S. visa law. While DHS must still observe the statutory requirements for issuing visas, the emerging doctrine concedes, the administration now claims unprecedented discretionary power to permit anyone inside our borders to work.
Get a load of what the DHS bureaucrats think about illegals working in the U.S.:
The anonymous DHS policymakers state that a positive for this option is that it “could cover a greater number of individuals.” In a strikingly conclusory bit of bureaucratese, they state that because illegal aliens working in the country “have already had the US labor market tested” it has been “demonstrat[ed] that their future employment won’t adversely affect US workers.” The labor market, in other words, has already been stress-tested through decades of foreign-labor dumping and the American working-class, which disproportionately includes minorities, working mothers, the elderly, and students, is doing just fine. Apparently, the fact that 66 million Americans and legal aliens are currently unemployed or out of the job-market was not a discussion point at the DHS “Retreat.”
Smith concludes: "Bottom line: The memo foreshadows more tactical offensives in a giant administrative amnesty for all 12 million illegal aliens who’ve broken our immigration laws (and many other laws) that will emerge before the next inaugural in January 2016." I'm not sure that judge in Texas will let the administration get away with this. When the government began handing out green cards anyway in defiance of the injunction, the judge, Andrew Hanen, threatened to arrest the lot of them for contempt. He forced the government to recall the green cards immediately. There will be no circumventing the law in his court. But the plans may be untouchable because they don't directly stem from the series of executive orders currently being adjudicated. Of course, any plan to blanket the country in work permits for illegals will be challenged in court. But eventually, the administration may find a friendly judge who gives it the go-ahead.
Once again, President Obama is looking to defy Congress in implementing its immigration reform proposals. This time, his administration is looking to also defy a federal court to achieve it. A judge sitting on the 5th Circuit in Texas issued an injunction last June against the administration's regulatory plans to legalize millions of aliens in the U.S. illegally. The injunction was upheld by a federal appeals court in Louisiana, and the president's plan is now stalled while the administration works through the federal court system. Except now there are plans afoot to change the regulations pertaining to green cards that would accomplish almost everything the president can't get from Congress or the courts. A leaked memo from DHS outlines four plans the administration is considering. Ian Smith of the Immigration Reform Law Institute:
The internal memo reveals four options of varying expansiveness, with option 1 providing EADs to “all individuals living in the United States”, including illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, and H-1B guest-workers, while option 4 provides EADsonly to those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Giving EADs to any of the covered individuals, however, is in direct violation of Congress’s Immigration & Nationality Act and works to dramatically subvert our carefully wrought visa system. As mentioned, the first plan the memo discusses basically entails giving EADs to anyone physically present in the country who until now has been prohibited from getting one. A major positive to this option, the memo reads, is that it would “address the needs of some of the intended deferred action population.” Although DHS doesn’t say it expressly, included here would be those 4.3 million people covered by the president’s DAPA and Expanded DACA programs whose benefits were supposed to have been halted in the Hanen decision. On top of working around the Hanen injunction, this DHS plan would also dole out unrestricted EADs to those on temporary non-immigrant visas, such as H-1B-holders (their work authorizations being tied to their employers) and another 5 to 6 million illegal aliens thus far not covered by any of the President’s deferred action amnesty programs. By claiming absolute authority to grant work authorization to any alien, regardless of status, DHS is in effect claiming it can unilaterally de-couple the 1986 IRCA work authorization statutes from the main body of U.S. visa law. While DHS must still observe the statutory requirements for issuing visas, the emerging doctrine concedes, the administration now claims unprecedented discretionary power to permit anyone inside our borders to work.
Get a load of what the DHS bureaucrats think about illegals working in the U.S.:
The anonymous DHS policymakers state that a positive for this option is that it “could cover a greater number of individuals.” In a strikingly conclusory bit of bureaucratese, they state that because illegal aliens working in the country “have already had the US labor market tested” it has been “demonstrat[ed] that their future employment won’t adversely affect US workers.” The labor market, in other words, has already been stress-tested through decades of foreign-labor dumping and the American working-class, which disproportionately includes minorities, working mothers, the elderly, and students, is doing just fine. Apparently, the fact that 66 million Americans and legal aliens are currently unemployed or out of the job-market was not a discussion point at the DHS “Retreat.”
Smith concludes: "Bottom line: The memo foreshadows more tactical offensives in a giant administrative amnesty for all 12 million illegal aliens who’ve broken our immigration laws (and many other laws) that will emerge before the next inaugural in January 2016." I'm not sure that judge in Texas will let the administration get away with this. When the government began handing out green cards anyway in defiance of the injunction, the judge, Andrew Hanen, threatened to arrest the lot of them for contempt. He forced the government to recall the green cards immediately. There will be no circumventing the law in his court. But the plans may be untouchable because they don't directly stem from the series of executive orders currently being adjudicated. Of course, any plan to blanket the country in work permits for illegals will be challenged in court. But eventually, the administration may find a friendly judge who gives it the go-ahead.
Obama’s Secret Destruction of Our Immigration System By Arnold Ahlert
Canada Free Press, November 4, 2015
A newly-leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reveals the Obama administration is seeking to sidestep a federal court injunction that suspended portions of the president’s amnesty-based initiatives known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). In short, Obama is determined to impose his transformational agenda on the nation by any means necessary.
According to the Hill, the document outlining the administration’s attempt to thumb its nose at the rule of law was prepared at a DHS “Regulations Retreat” last June, four months after a preliminary injunction was initially imposed by Texas Judge Andrew Hanen and subsequently left in place by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit’s final ruling on that injunction, either confirming or reversing it, is expected to occur in a matter of days.Apparently the Obama administration couldn’t care less.
. . . http://canadafreepress.com/article/76535
TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND BUILD THEIR LA RAZA "The Race" MEXICAN ILLEGAL PARTY BASE, THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS RUTHLESSLY ASSAULTED THE AMERICAN WORKER, OUR LAWS ON HIRING ILLEGALS AND OUR BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
"The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation."
"The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs."
Income inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for the bottom 90 percent has been stagnant since the 1980s. The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation. Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs.
The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages. ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions. Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations. Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid.
DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery. Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories. The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events. The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
Income inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for the bottom 90 percent has been stagnant since the 1980s. The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation. Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs. The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages. ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions. Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations. Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid. This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery. Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories. The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events. The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
Obamacare open enrollment: A widening health care disaster for workers
3 November 2015
“All of Obama’s policies have been geared toward increasing social inequality. … The claim that the health care overhaul is an oasis of progress in this desert of social reaction is simply a lie”— World Socialist Web Site, March 22, 2010
Open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) began November 1 for plans taking effect January 1. The coming year will be the third in which the ACA, signed into law by President Obama in March 2010, will be operational. The World Socialist Web Site’s assessment five years ago that the “reform” commonly known as Obamacare would usher in a frontal assault on the health care available to working people is being richly confirmed.
The ACA has nothing in common with universal health care. That was merely the slogan initially advanced to disguise a corporate-designed scheme to dramatically shift health care costs onto the working class.
The central component of the scheme, the “individual mandate,” requires that individuals and families without health insurance through their employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid obtain insurance or pay a tax penalty. Low-income people can qualify for modest tax subsidies to go toward premiums.
The uninsured are required to purchase coverage from private, for-profit insurance companies on the health care “exchanges” set up under the law. This vastly increases the market for private insurance firms without placing any real restraints on the prices they charge—a formula for windfall profits.
By the government’s own forecast, enrollees will face a 7.5 percent average premium rate increase in 2016. Other sources project rate hikes in excess of 20 percent. A recent study showed that many insurers are requesting double-digit rate increases next year and state insurance commissions are approving them.
A frenzy of mergers in the health care industry will fuel further premium increases. In the space of a few weeks in July, Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. merged in a $37 billion deal, and Anthem Inc. agreed to acquire Cigna Corp. for $54 billion. As a result, the five largest health insurers in the US were consolidated into three.
Drug makers Allergan and Pfizer are in the advanced stages of talks to merge and form the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, valued at $330 billion. The price of top brand name prescription drugs are already surging, having increased by 12.9 percent in 2013, the last year for which data is available.
Last week the giant drug store chain Walgreens announced a deal to take over one of its main competitors, Rite Aid, creating a mega-chain to compete with CVS for total domination of the market.
Premiums and drug costs are only one aspect of the burden to be borne by those purchasing coverage under the ACA. The average deductible for the lowest tier “bronze” plans on the exchanges was $5,200 in 2015, and the prevalence of such “high-deductible” plans is sure to expand in 2016. This means that aside from mandated “essential services,” such as certain forms of wellness care and screenings, no medical care is covered until the entire deductible is paid out of pocket. Co-payments for doctor visits and other services are also required.
Research published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 135 health plans in 34 state marketplaces available during last year’s open enrollment period. The study found that as of April 2015, 18 plans in nine states lacked in-network specialists for at least one specialty. These included obstetricians/gynecologists, dermatologists, cardiologists, psychiatrists, oncologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists and pulmonologists.
What all of this means is that a substantial portion of the 12 million people who have purchased coverage on the health care exchanges will be forced to self-ration medical care due to economic necessity. Workers and their children will forego doctor visits, prescriptions for life-saving medicines will go unfilled, needless suffering and deaths will occur.
This appalling state of affairs is not an unfortunate byproduct of the ACA. By design from its inception, the legislation has been crafted to cut costs for the government and corporations and boost the profits of the health insurers, pharmaceutical corporations and health care chains.
According to the big business parties and their corporate sponsors, Americans are living too long and health care costs are sucking up too much of the national wealth. There is a calculated drive to lower life expectancy for working people.
That is why the introduction of Obamacare has been accompanied by a concerted drive to restrict access to basic medical tests—that is, to ration health care for workers. In recent months, official bodies have called for reducing or delaying mammograms, pap smears, prostate tests and other standard screening procedures.
One indication of the catastrophic implications of the assault on health care is a recent study showing that since 1998, the death rate for middle-income white Americans age 45-54 has risen sharply, resulting in half a million deaths, comparable to the 650,000 Americans who have lost their lives from AIDS since 1981. Researchers point to suicides and substance abuse, driven by increasing financial stress, as the main contributing factors. The ACA will only increase the number of such tragedies.
The implications of Obamacare go far beyond those buying insurance on the ACA exchanges and extend to all segments of health care. The legislation is serving as a model for the assault on employer-sponsored health care coverage as well as the bedrock government-run programs Social Security and Medicare.
Today, approximately half of all Americans receive their health care coverage through their employers. Employer-paid health benefits was an important social gain wrested from the corporations by the struggles of workers in the aftermath of World War II and has been central in raising the living standards of working class families.
But the workings of Obamacare aim to destroy these gains. As Ezekiel Emanuel, a close ally of Obama and key architect of the ACA, predicted in 2009: “By 2025, few private-sector employers will still be providing health insurance.” These plans will give way to vouchers handed out to employees to purchase coverage on insurance exchanges, either those set up under the ACA or others.
In the current contract struggle of US autoworkers, the drive by the auto companies and their union partners to dismantle the “cradle-to-grave” medical coverage won by autoworkers and retirees is in line with the Obama administration’s policy of shifting health care costs to workers.
The recent budget deal between Obama and congressional Republicans rolls back a significant provision in the ACA, the requirement that businesses with more than 200 workers automatically enroll their employees for health insurance. And while employers are basically absolved of responsibility for providing insurance, fines for individuals for not obtaining insurance will rise substantially in 2016—to $695, or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is higher.
Paul Ryan, the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, has advocated transforming Medicare into a voucher program and partially privatizing Social Security. That he is now presented as a “moderate” unifying force by the ruling elite and the media is an indication of how far to the right the political establishment in America has veered. The foundations are already being laid for the dismantling of Medicare and Social Security.
As the real content of Obamacare becomes clear to millions of workers and middle class people, who suddenly discover that they cannot get access to drugs or doctors and standard medical procedures are no longer covered by their insurance plans, there will be an explosive growth of social opposition.
The third year of the Affordable Care Act is the occasion to call the reactionary legislation by its rightful name: a health care counterrevolution. The only rational and progressive solution to the health care crisis in America is to replace the privately owned and controlled system with socialized medicine, in which the health care industry is nationalized, restructured, and placed under the democratic control of a workers government. This will make possible the provision of quality health care for all as a basic social right.
Kate Randall
"Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of
employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious
for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-
Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson
Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4
billion fortune is extracted from his international network of
sports apparel-producing sweatshops."
OBAMA-CLINTONomics is a simple device - Serve the super rich and pass the cost of their looting and Wall Street crimes on to the backs of the last of the American middle-class!
"Of course, the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere. Ultimately, the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by a massive transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks, investors and super-rich.The corollary to rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and pensions."
“As a result, the share of wealth held by the richest 0.1 percent of the population grew from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2012, while the wealth of the 400 richest families in the US has doubled since 2008.”
OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class
"Obama expanded the Wall Street bailout, handing trillions of dollars to the criminals who wrecked the economy. He then utilized the financial meltdown to restructure the auto industry on the basis of brutal pay cuts, setting a precedent for the transformation of the US into a low-wage economy."
"In the midst of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the administration starved state and city governments of resources, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of education and public-sector jobs and the gutting of workers’ pensions. Obama’s Affordable Care Act set in motion the dismantling of employer-paid health insurance and massive cuts in the Medicare insurance system for the elderly."
In 2009, the total net worth of the Forbes 400 was $1.27 trillion. Today, nearly six years into the so-called economic “recovery” fostered by the Obama administration, the wealthiest Americans have nearly doubled their hoard. The total wealth of the richest 400 Americans managed to reach new heights even while financial markets have been roiled by tumultuous swings.
The Forbes report notes that in 2015, “It was
harder than ever to join the 400. The price of
entry this year was $1.7 billion, the highest it’s been in the 33 years that Forbes has racked American wealth.” Forbes makes note that the wealth threshold was so high this year that 145 billionaires failed to make the list.
While a majority of billionaires have prospered, their wealth underwritten by the massive government bailouts of financial institutions and near-zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve, a significant fraction of the wealthy elite have lost ground in the turbulent stock markets of recent months.
The ratio of winners and losers among the billionaires was ten to one last year, but this year was much closer to 50-50. Forbes noted that the top three position-holders on the list, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, each saw a drop in their total net worth of at least 5 percent in the last year. This did nothing to threaten the position of Gates, number one at $76 billion, or Buffett, number two at $62 billion, but Ellison’s third-place position, with $47.5 billion, left him “only” $500 million ahead of the fourth-place multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.
The majority of those on the Forbes list were associated with some form of financial speculation, or with computer software and the Internet. According to the industry breakdown supplied by Forbes, its 400 include 126 engaged in investment, real estate and finance, 81 from computer technology and media, 36 from food and beverage, 32 from retail and fashion (including five members of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart), 31 from oil & gas, 20 from health care, 19 from miscellaneous services (including six members of the Pritzker family, owners of Hyatt Hotels), and 19 from sports and gaming.
This left only 35 listed as making their fortunes in manufacturing, automotive, construction, and logistics. The largest manufacturing fortune is the $7.4 billion of Harold Kohler, whose company makes toilets and other plumbing fixtures. Perhaps that is symbolic, given the state of manufacturing in the United States, once the world leader in industry, but no longer.
The growth of financial parasitism has underwritten the wealth of many on the Forbes 400. In 1982, the first Forbes 400 list saw figures directly involved in finance making up only 4.4 percent of the total wealth on the list. As of today, this group now makes up more than 21 percent of billionaires on the list.
Former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who has held the number one spot on the Forbes 400 for 22 years, has less than 13 percent of his fortune in stock in the company he founded. According toForbes, the majority of Gates’ wealth is bound up in Cascade, the software mogul’s investment firm, which specializes in “investing in stocks, bonds, private equity and real estate.”
Besides the well-known super-rich of Silicon Valley like Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin (with $33.3 billion and $32.6 billion, respectively) and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social media web site Facebook, the seventh wealthiest man in America with $40.3 billion in total assets, there are numerous other newly minted Internet billionaires, including the owners and co-owners of Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, SnapChat, GoPro and GoDaddy.com.
Jeffrey Bezos, owner of the online retailer Amazon, saw the largest gain in wealth for the year, making $16 billion in 2015, placing his total net worth at $47 billion and catapulting him to fourth place. Nearly half of Bezos’ gains came within a single day last July, when his company announced gains in the second quarter, leading to a speculative frenzy which bid up stock values for Amazon by over 18 percent.
Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal- Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4 billion fortune is extracted from his international network of sports apparel-producing sweatshops.
While safeguarding the ill-gotten wealth of the Forbes billionaires remains an ironclad principle of both the Republican and Democratic parties, working people throughout the US continue to suffer the brunt of attacks on their living standards. A US Census report released earlier this month shows that 14.8 percent of the US population lives in poverty; a figure that is unchanged from a year earlier. The Census findings show that 6.6 percent of the population lives in “deep poverty,” or less than half of the already unrealistically low official poverty line in the US.
We understand that Hispanics groups (financed by Mr. Soros) will work to add a million voters to the rolls:
Immigrant rights activists have vowed to sign up 1 million immigrants — mostly Mexicans — for citizenship and then quickly register them to vote in time to punish Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans at the polls in November for their harsh rhetoric.
MEXICANS WILL VOTE FOR ANY CANDIDATE THAT PROMISES LA RAZA SUPREMACY ABOVE LEGALS AND AMERICAN LAWS, OPEN BORDERS, BILLIONS MORE IN ANCHOR BABY WELFARE and CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT OF E-VERIFY!
THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS INVADING ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS MORE THAN A BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR. NOT ONE LEGAL VOTED TO BE MEXICO'S WELFARE OFFICE!
"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."
HILLARY CLINTON HAS HAD A LONG HISTORY OF HISPANDERING FOR THE ILLEGALS' VOTES!
In 2008, Hispanics were a major factor in giving then-senator Obama the keys to the White House.
We understand that Hispanics groups (financed by Mr. Soros) will work to add a million voters to the rolls:
Immigrant rights activists have vowed to sign up 1 million immigrants — mostly Mexicans — for citizenship and then quickly register them to vote in time to punish Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans at the polls in November for their harsh rhetoric.
The advocates say the new voters could make a difference in the presidential race, where most of the Republican field has tacked to the right in word and policy, and in key Senate races in Illinois and Florida, where Republicans will be reaching to hang on to critical seats.
So Hispanics are once again going to show up and vote Democrat? How has that worked out over the years? In 2008, Hispanics were a major factor in giving then-senator Obama the keys to the White House. He walked into the presidency with 60 votes in the U.S. Senate and a nice majority in the House.
Again, how did that work out? "No muy bien," or not very well. Democrat majorities did not pass immigration reform or the DREAM Act, as President Obama promised.
Anyway, the idea is to enroll Hispanics to punish Mr. Trump.
I agree that Mr. Trump often speaks too broadly, whether he is talking about criminals crossing the U.S.-Mexico border or keeping Muslims out of the country for a while.
To be fair, Mr. Trump has identified problems, but his solutions are not sensible, such as shipping back 11 million illegal immigrants. How is he going to do that?
So it's understandable that some Hispanics are offended. Most of the illegals in the U.S. are not rapists or criminals. They are here because someone is hiring them, and the immigration authorities are not going after the employers.
At the same time, shouldn't Hispanics be equally offended with President Obama and Democrats? After all, what's worse? A party that tells you what you want to hear to get your vote, or a guy who speaks before thinking through what he says?
They are both bad.
Last but not least, maybe Hispanics should punish Democrats by considering alternatives to a straight party voting. Why don't they try that first?
We understand that Hispanics groups (financed by Mr. Soros) will work to add a million voters to the rolls:
Immigrant rights activists have vowed to sign up 1 million immigrants — mostly Mexicans — for citizenship and then quickly register them to vote in time to punish Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans at the polls in November for their harsh rhetoric.
The advocates say the new voters could make a difference in the presidential race, where most of the Republican field has tacked to the right in word and policy, and in key Senate races in Illinois and Florida, where Republicans will be reaching to hang on to critical seats.
Amnesty activists are engaged in a new effort to encourage immigrants in the U.S. to naturalize and register to vote.
The Latino Victory Foundation and the National Partnership for New Americans launched the New American Democracy Campaign this week in an effort to increase immigrant participation in elections.
The government estimates there are about 8.8 million legal permanent residents who are eligible to apply for naturalization. According to the groups that launched the NADC Thursday, their goal is to increase the rate of naturalization in 2016 by 38 percent so that 1 million immigrants to become citizens next year.
Once citizens, NADC plans to assist the newly eligible with voter registration. Additionally the group will be encouraging the citizen children of immigrants to register and vote as well.
NADC organizers cited the recent political rhetoric as a mobilizing factor that compels those immigrants — and Latinos in particular — who are eligible to vote.
“Our community is under attack and our future is at stake,” Cristóbal J. Alex, Latino Victory Foundation president, said in a statement. “Now more than ever it’s important that those who are able to naturalize do so and make their voices heard at the polls. Research shows that newly naturalized Latino respondents have a high propensity to vote—67 percent voted at least once and 84 percent registered to vote.”
The organization has a goal of engaging with 750,000 immigrants eligible to naturalize and assisting 98,000 with their naturalization applications as well as registering 45,400 naturalized immigrants to vote.
“Latinos and all immigrants need to use all of their power to defend their communities in this toxic political moment. That means naturalizing, registering and turning out to vote. The time is now,” Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans, added.
According to the groups, they will “be heard” even if only 20 percent of the 8.8 million eligible legal permanent residents, 1.9 million citizen children of immigrants, and the 11.5 million Latino voters who did not turn out to vote show up to the polls.
In conjunction with its launch the campaign released a video using audio from GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS INVADING ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS MORE THAN A BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR. NOT ONE LEGAL VOTED TO BE MEXICO'S WELFARE OFFICE!
"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."
Stopping the Flow of Illegal Immigrants
National Review Online, November 13, 2015
Estimates from the Center for Migration Studies and the Pew
Research Center show that, of the 11 million illegal
immigrants currently residing in the United States,
approximately 2.5 million arrived after Barack Obama’s
inauguration. Yet the overall number of illegal immigrants in
the country has remained fairly static, meaning that illegal
immigrants have been coming and going in about equal
numbers. Why? Because, contrary to much political rhetoric,
many illegal immigrants are not here to stay, and so are very
sensitive to incentives: When the prospect of profitable work
outweighs the risk of falling afoul of law enforcement, they
come; when it doesn’t, they leave.
. . . It is crucial, though, that we end the flow of illegal
immigrants across our borders before dealing with those
already here — otherwise, an amnesty will inevitably only
draw the next population of illegal immigrants. To that end, a
Republican administration should, among other things, seek
to erect physical barriers along the southern border, end
catch-and-release policies, and work with Congress to defund
sanctuary cities.
Only after enforcement measures such as E-Verify are fully
implemented and the illegal population has been actually
declining should any other major measures be considered.
We’re always told that it is urgent to bring illegal immigrants
“out of the shadows.” But the plight of illegal immigrants is
no more urgent now than it was a few years ago, or a few
NONE OF THESE SANCTUARY CITIES (CALIFORNIA IS MEXICO'S FIRST SANCTUARY STATE) ASK THE VOTERS TO APPROVE TAX HIKES TO PAY FOR MEXICO'S WELFARE STATE AND CRIME TIDAL WAVE IN OUR OPEN BORDERS!
THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS INVADING ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS MORE THAN A BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR. NOT ONE LEGAL VOTED TO BE MEXICO'S WELFARE OFFICE!
"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." THE BREEDERS Heather Mac Donald Hispanic Family Values?
Runaway illegitimacy is creating a new U.S. underclass.
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 says, “until we can put birth control in the water.”
Sanctuary City Mayors Condemning Trump Should be Arrested
Well, not for criticizing Trump, but for breaking the law and recklessly endangering their citizens by harboring and shielding from scrutiny illegal aliens among whose number may include assorted Islamic State agents, sympathizers and potential lone wolf recruits, along with assorted criminals like the one charged with the murder of Kate Steinle in the sanctuary city of San Francisco. They are accomplices in crime. That is the suggestion of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who followed the righteous indignation of those condemning Trump for suggesting Muslim immigration be curtailed until we get our terrorist act together, a suggestion not unlike President Jimmy Carter’s halt to Iranian immigration during the hostage crisis. Jindal made the case on Monday on Boston Herald Radio:
“Absolutely, I would hold them as an accomplice. Make them criminally culpable,” the Republican presidential candidate said when asked if he’d arrest mayors of sanctuary cities. “I’d also make them civilly liable so that families, victim’s families could sue. Especially if the prosecutor isn’t taking action or the mayor’s not changing their ways, I’d allow the families to go to court as well to recover damages.”
While mayors that say Trump’s proposal is illegal and immoral are free to criticize the GOP frontrunner, they are not free to break federal immigration law and refuse to cooperate with federal authorities regarding the detention and deportation of illegal aliens. It’s not a small point, but one that is lost on a bunch of mayors led by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who has declared Trump persona non grata in the City of Brotherly Love. Nutter is joined in shunning Trump by Rick Kiseman, mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, and a handful of others. Nutter signed an executive order proclaiming Philadelphia a sanctuary city in 2014, barring city police and prison officials from cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. It was just such a policy that condemned American citizen Kate Steinle to death at the hands of an illegal alien criminal, Juan Francisco Lopez, who had been deported five times and had seven felony convictions. That policy also led to the death of Jamiel Shaw Jr. in Los Angeles. Being a sanctuary city is illegal. State and local authorities cannot refuse to enforce federal law. Of course, who is going to call sanctuary cities to account when the President of the United States refuses to enforce our immigration laws. As Investor’s Business Daily noted in February, President Obama ordered those in charge of border security to obey his executive orders on amnesty and not our immigration laws:
If President Obama, who has warned ICE agents of consequences if they do their job, had a son, he might look like Jamiel Shaw Jr., a young African-American killed by an illegal alien who shouldn't have been here.
Shaw was a Los Angeles high school star dreaming of a good life ahead when he was gunned down on March 2, 2008, while walking home. He was picked at random, police said, possibly as part of a gang loyalty test for the illegal alien who shot him.
The sanctuary policies that led to the murder of Shaw are now full-blown federal policies under Obama. "We're not in the business of deporting millions of people or of breaking up families," he says. We're also not in the business of deporting criminal illegal aliens….
…President Obama was telling employees at Immigration and Customs Enforcement that they had better enforce his executive amnesty orders or else.
Speaking at a Miami town hall meeting sponsored by MSNBC and Telemundo, Obama said "there may be (an) ICE official or Border Patrol agent not paying attention to our new directives. If somebody's working for ICE . . . and they don't follow the policy, there's going to be consequences to it."
Well, there are consequences to following it, crimes up to and including the murder of American citizens. In his Sunday address in which he, like his Attorney General Loretta Lynch, worried more about a backlash against Muslims than about defeating the Islamic State in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre, did not list ending sanctuary cities as a way of protecting the American people from both terror and crime. Why aren’t liberals and sanctuary city mayors outraged at protecting criminal aliens? It is not Donald Trump, whose mouth that roars is not being defended here, who is releasing dangerous criminals en masse to the streets of American cities. As Judicial Watch reports:
As the U.S. Senate considers a bill to slash funding for local governments that protect violent illegal immigrants, a new study reveals that hundreds of sanctuary cities nationwide released thousands of criminal aliens from jail rather than turn them over to federal authorities for deportation…. … in less than a year 340 sanctuary cities, counties and states around the U.S. released 9,295 alien offenders that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was seeking to deport. More than half had significant prior criminal histories and 600 were released at least twice by jurisdictions that protect criminal aliens from deportation by refusing to comply with ICE detainers. The figures were made public recently by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a nonprofit dedicated to researching the consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States…. Of those still at large, 1,377 (20%) had another criminal arrest following the one that resulted in the original ICE detainer. This is why a violent criminal, Francisco Javier Chavez, is on the loose. In August 2015 he was arrested for beating his girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter and, despite an extensive criminal record that includes felony drug and drunk-driving convictions, a California sheriff’s department ignored an ICE detainer and released him.
So the sanctuary city mayors who are condemning Donald Trump are releasing rapists, murders, and assorted predators to harm Americans. Where is the outrage about that? And why shouldn’t Attorney General Lynch show up at City Halll with an arrest warrant? Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
As the U.S. Senate considers a bill to slash funding for local governments that protect violent illegal immigrants, a new study reveals that hundreds of sanctuary cities nationwide released thousands of criminal aliens from jail rather than turn them over to federal authorities for deportation….
… in less than a year 340 sanctuary cities, counties and states around the U.S. released 9,295 alien offenders that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was seeking to deport. More than half had significant prior criminal histories and 600 were released at least twice by jurisdictions that protect criminal aliens from deportation by refusing to comply with ICE detainers. The figures were made public recently by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a nonprofit dedicated to researching the consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States…. Of those still at large, 1,377 (20%) had another criminal arrest following the one that resulted in the original ICE detainer. This is why a violent criminal, Francisco Javier Chavez, is on the loose. In August 2015 he was arrested for beating his girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter and, despite an extensive criminal record that includes felony drug and drunk-driving convictions, a California sheriff’s department ignored an ICE detainer and released him.
So the sanctuary city mayors who are condemning Donald Trump are releasing rapists, murders, and assorted predators to harm Americans. Where is the outrage about that? And why shouldn’t Attorney General Lynch show up at City Halll with an arrest warrant? Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
Sen. Ted Cruz will discuss the national security priorities necessary for keeping America safe while ensuring that we remain free. Watch the event live from The Heritage Foundation at 10 a.m. EST today.
AMNESTY: THE HOAX TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASS ALONG THE REAL COST IN WELFARE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE "The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation." "It is clear that the overarching goal of a succession of administrations and many members of Congress, irrespective of political party affiliation, is to keep our borders open and take no meaningful action to stop that flow of aliens into the United States." 326,000 Native-Born Americans Lost Their Job in November: Why This Remains the Most Important Jobs Chart By Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com, December 5, 2015
. . .
We are confident that one can make the case that there are considerations on both the labor demand-side (whether US employers have a natural tendency to hire foreign-born workers is open to debate) as well as on the supply-side: it may be easier to obtain wage-equivalent welfare compensation for native-born Americans than for their foreign-born peers, forcing the latter group to be much more engaged and active in finding a wage-paying job.
However, the underlying economics of this trend are largely irrelevant: as the presidential primary race hits a crescendo all that will matter is the soundbite that over the past 8 years, 2.7 million foreign-born Americans have found a job compared to only 747,000 native-born. The result is a combustible mess that will lead to serious fireworks during each and every subsequent GOP primary debate, especially if Trump remains solidly in the lead.
Placating Americans with Fake Immigration Law Enforcement How our leaders create fantasy 'solutions' for our immigration-related vulnerabilities.
By Michael Cutler
FrontPageMag.com, December 4, 2015
. . . Therefore the Visa Waiver Program should have been terminated after the terror attacks of 9/11 yet it has continually been expanded.
It is clear that the overarching goal of a succession of administrations and many members of Congress, irrespective of political party affiliation, is to keep our borders open and take no meaningful action to stop that flow of aliens into the United States.
. . .
The obvious question is why the Visa Waiver Program is considered so sacrosanct that even though it defies the advice and findings of the 9/11 Commission no one has the moral fortitude to call for simply terminating this dangerous program.
The answer can be found in the incestuous relationship between the Chamber of Commerce and its subsidiary, the Corporation for Travel Promotion, now doing business as Brand USA.
The Chamber of Commerce has arguably been the strongest supporter of the Visa Waiver Program, which currently enables aliens from 38 countries to enter the United States without first obtaining a visa.
The U.S. State Department provides a thorough explanation of the Visa Waiver Program on its website.
Incredibly, the official State Department website also provides a link, “Discover America,” on that website which relates to the website of The Corporation for Travel Promotion, which is affiliated with the travel industries that are a part of the “Discover America Partnership.”
. . . http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261005/placating-americans-fake-immigration-law-michael-cutler
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest
Book Description: The #1 New York Times bestselling author and firebrand syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin sets her sights on the corrupt businessmen, politicians, and lobbyists flooding our borders and selling out America’s best and brightest workers.
In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano reveal the worst perpetrators screwing America’s high-skilled workers, how and why they’re doing it—and what we must do to stop them. In this book, they will name names and expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class, while aiding and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor. Malkin and Miano will explode some of the most commonly told myths spread in the media like these:
Lie #1: America is suffering from an apocalyptic “shortage” of science, technology, engineering, and math workers.
Lie #2: US companies cannot function without an unlimited injection of the most “highly skilled” and “highly educated” foreign workers, who offer intellectual capital and entrepreneurial energy that American workers can’t match.
Lie #3: America’s best and brightest talents are protected because employers are required to demonstrate that they’ve made every effort to hire American citizens before resorting to foreign labor.
For too long, open-borders tech billionaires and their political enablers have escaped tough public scrutiny of their means and motives. Sold Out is an indictment of not only political corruption in Washington, but also the journalistic malpractice that enables it. It’s time to trade the whitewash for solvent. American workers deserve better and the public deserves the unvarnished truth.
Lawless: The Obama Adminstration’s Uprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law
12:00-1:00 p.m., Tuesday, November 17, 2015
The Heritage Foundation, Lehrman Auditorium
214 Massachusetts Ave NE
Washington DC 20002-4999
Overview: In Lawless, George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein offers a scholarly and unsettling account of how the Obama Administration has undermined the Constitution and the rule of law. He documents how the President has presided over one constitutional debacle after another – from Obamacare to unauthorized wars in the Middle East to attempts to strip property owners, college students, religious groups, and conservative political activists of their rights, and more.
Respect for the Constitution’s separation of powers has been violated time and again. Whether in amending Obamacare on the fly or signing a memorandum legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, the current Administration ignores not only Congress, but also the Constitution’s critical checks and balances.
In Lawless, Professor Bernstein shows how the Constitution as well as the President’s own stated principles have been betrayed. In doing so, serious and potentially permanent damage has been done to our constitutional system and repairs must be addressed by the next President of the United States.
Income inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for the bottom 90 percent has been stagnant since the 1980s. The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation. Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs.
The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages. ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions. Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations. Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid.
DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery. Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories. The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events. The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
Income inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for the bottom 90 percent has been stagnant since the 1980s. The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation. Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs. The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages. ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions. Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations. Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid. This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery. Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories. The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events. The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
The controversy over Donald Trump’s call for a halt to taking in Muslim refugees until they can be adequately vetted brings to mind the question: Why is the U.S. even taking in refugees? Apart from the terrorist dangers surrounding the vetting issues, we certainly no longer have the resources to take in refugees or any new immigrants. Yes, it’s altruistic to welcome newcomers, according to the MSM, the establishment politicians, and the “We care so much” liberals, if you have the ability to take care of them or a job for them. But the reality is, the U.S. cannot take care of its own citizens, much less take care of everyone who wants to come here, whether legally or illegally.
We don’t have enough jobs for the citizens of this country, much less jobs for new arrivals. We have over 94 million working-age adults not working, most because they cannot find jobs. According to John Williams at shadowstats.com, our real unemployment is somewhere around 23 percent if you count those who are without jobs over the long term and have given up looking for work. Millions more, who would like a full-time job, are working one or more part-time jobs. Our welfare and Medicaid rolls are already overflowing with citizens and immigrants. The U.S. government is broke and paying for this welfare with borrowed dollars, all funded on the backs of taxpayers.
Our employment picture is likely to get worse as manufacturing is contracting while inventories are overstocked. Sales, both wholesale and retail are declining, and the transportation of goods by rail and trucking is decreasing even in the Christmas busy retail season. The nosedive in commodities’ prices shows a world and a U.S. that is moving into recession. The economic figures of a growing recession, stacked up against overwhelming private and public debt brought to us via the central banks, are only going to get worse in 2016 when recession layoffs begin in earnest.
The much-touted big business mergers, such as Dow and Dupont, are not signs of financial health, but rather symptoms of the Federal Reserve’s crony capitalism fueled by zero interest rates and the concentration of capital on Wall Street. Such mergers bring their own set of layoffs and an actual decline in jobs and the economy. These mergers only raise the number of big business monopolies while decreasing consumer choices and increasing consumer costs. Wall Street is one giant bubble, a pinprick away from bursting.
We have the lowest homeownership since 1965 because housing prices are back to 2008 levels, or higher, at the same time that wages are stagnant or declining. We have $1.3 trillion bubble in student loan debt, a bubble rise in sub-prime auto loans and extended loan repayment terms, and skyrocketing healthcare costs and tuition. Many Americans are maxed out when it comes to debt and disposable income. Yes, gas prices are lower, but healthcare costs, thanks to ObamaCare, have more than eaten up any savings at the pump.
At some point the federal government and blithely unaware citizens are going to have to face the facts. The federal government is currently borrowing almost a million dollars a minute, making debt slaves and tax slaves of us, our children, and grandchildren to subsidize a bloated nanny state and irresponsible government spending. Social Security and Medicare are both edging closer to insolvency. According to Dr. Lawrence J. Kotlikoff, a former Reagan senior economic advisor, we have over $211 trillion in present and future unfunded government liabilities on top of the much publicized $18.5 trillion debt. To date, few politicians, except Republicans Chris Christie and Ben Carson, have even mentioned this gigantic economic problem or how we will address it. The current baby boomer retirement rolls is spurring the costs of Social Security and Medicare and hastening the day of reckoning, our “Welcome to Greece” moment.\
This perilous economic situation is not confined to the federal government. State and local governments all across the country from California, Illinois, and Kentucky, to the fiscally conservative state of Virginia, are facing deficiencies in funding their public retirement programs. Private retirement programs are facing the same scenarios with some of the unions actually cutting current retiree benefit payments.
Some economists theorize that there is some nebulous “reset” button we can push and all these debt problems will be fixed. But whatever buttons we push or whatever fixes we come up with will entail a great deal of economic pain for the citizens of this country. The average American will pay into infinity for all of this foolish Keynesian monetary economic control and government liberal altruism and irresponsibility.
So, to the establishment politicians and the liberal mouthpieces, keep the immigrants coming. Enjoy your “feel-good moments” that you are saving people from strife. You also might tell these immigrants that their free ride or their hope for a job might not be realized because the U.S. is already way overbooked and heading toward bankruptcy.
The controversy over Donald Trump’s call for a halt to taking in Muslim refugees until they can be adequately vetted brings to mind the question: Why is the U.S. even taking in refugees? Apart from the terrorist dangers surrounding the vetting issues, we certainly no longer have the resources to take in refugees or any new immigrants. Yes, it’s altruistic to welcome newcomers, according to the MSM, the establishment politicians, and the “We care so much” liberals, if you have the ability to take care of them or a job for them. But the reality is, the U.S. cannot take care of its own citizens, much less take care of everyone who wants to come here, whether legally or illegally. We don’t have enough jobs for the citizens of this country, much less jobs for new arrivals. We have over 94 million working-age adults not working, most because they cannot find jobs. According to John Williams at shadowstats.com, our real unemployment is somewhere around 23 percent if you count those who are without jobs over the long term and have given up looking for work. Millions more, who would like a full-time job, are working one or more part-time jobs. Our welfare and Medicaid rolls are already overflowing with citizens and immigrants. The U.S. government is broke and paying for this welfare with borrowed dollars, all funded on the backs of taxpayers.
Our employment picture is likely to get worse as manufacturing is contracting while inventories are overstocked. Sales, both wholesale and retail are declining, and the transportation of goods by rail and trucking is decreasing even in the Christmas busy retail season. The nosedive in commodities’ prices shows a world and a U.S. that is moving into recession. The economic figures of a growing recession, stacked up against overwhelming private and public debt brought to us via the central banks, are only going to get worse in 2016 when recession layoffs begin in earnest.
The much-touted big business mergers, such as Dow and Dupont, are not signs of financial health, but rather symptoms of the Federal Reserve’s crony capitalism fueled by zero interest rates and the concentration of capital on Wall Street. Such mergers bring their own set of layoffs and an actual decline in jobs and the economy. These mergers only raise the number of big business monopolies while decreasing consumer choices and increasing consumer costs. Wall Street is one giant bubble, a pinprick away from bursting.
We have the lowest homeownership since 1965 because housing prices are back to 2008 levels, or higher, at the same time that wages are stagnant or declining. We have $1.3 trillion bubble in student loan debt, a bubble rise in sub-prime auto loans and extended loan repayment terms, and skyrocketing healthcare costs and tuition. Many Americans are maxed out when it comes to debt and disposable income. Yes, gas prices are lower, but healthcare costs, thanks to ObamaCare, have more than eaten up any savings at the pump.
At some point the federal government and blithely unaware citizens are going to have to face the facts. The federal government is currently borrowing almost a million dollars a minute, making debt slaves and tax slaves of us, our children, and grandchildren to subsidize a bloated nanny state and irresponsible government spending. Social Security and Medicare are both edging closer to insolvency. According to Dr. Lawrence J. Kotlikoff, a former Reagan senior economic advisor, we have over $211 trillion in present and future unfunded government liabilities on top of the much publicized $18.5 trillion debt. To date, few politicians, except Republicans Chris Christie and Ben Carson, have even mentioned this gigantic economic problem or how we will address it. The current baby boomer retirement rolls is spurring the costs of Social Security and Medicare and hastening the day of reckoning, our “Welcome to Greece” moment.
This perilous economic situation is not confined to the federal government. State and local governments all across the country from California, Illinois, and Kentucky, to the fiscally conservative state of Virginia, are facing deficiencies in funding their public retirement programs. Private retirement programs are facing the same scenarios with some of the unions actually cutting current retiree benefit payments.
Some economists theorize that there is some nebulous “reset” button we can push and all these debt problems will be fixed. But whatever buttons we push or whatever fixes we come up with will entail a great deal of economic pain for the citizens of this country. The average American will pay into infinity for all of this foolish Keynesian monetary economic control and government liberal altruism and irresponsibility.
So, to the establishment politicians and the liberal mouthpieces, keep the immigrants coming. Enjoy your “feel-good moments” that you are saving people from strife. You also might tell these immigrants that their free ride or their hope for a job might not be realized because the U.S. is already way overbooked and heading toward bankruptcy.
AMNESTY: THE HOAX TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND PASS ALONG THE REAL COST OF WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE "The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation." "It is clear that the overarching goal of a succession of administrations and many members of Congress, irrespective of political party affiliation, is to keep our borders open and take no meaningful action to stop that flow of aliens into the United States." 326,000 Native-Born Americans Lost Their Job in November: Why This Remains the Most Important Jobs Chart By Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com, December 5, 2015
. . .
We are confident that one can make the case that there are considerations on both the labor demand-side (whether US employers have a natural tendency to hire foreign-born workers is open to debate) as well as on the supply-side: it may be easier to obtain wage-equivalent welfare compensation for native-born Americans than for their foreign-born peers, forcing the latter group to be much more engaged and active in finding a wage-paying job.
However, the underlying economics of this trend are largely irrelevant: as the presidential primary race hits a crescendo all that will matter is the soundbite that over the past 8 years, 2.7 million foreign-born Americans have found a job compared to only 747,000 native-born. The result is a combustible mess that will lead to serious fireworks during each and every subsequent GOP primary debate, especially if Trump remains solidly in the lead.
Placating Americans with Fake Immigration Law Enforcement How our leaders create fantasy 'solutions' for our immigration-related vulnerabilities.
By Michael Cutler
FrontPageMag.com, December 4, 2015
. . . Therefore the Visa Waiver Program should have been terminated after the terror attacks of 9/11 yet it has continually been expanded.
It is clear that the overarching goal of a succession of administrations and many members of Congress, irrespective of political party affiliation, is to keep our borders open and take no meaningful action to stop that flow of aliens into the United States.
. . .
The obvious question is why the Visa Waiver Program is considered so sacrosanct that even though it defies the advice and findings of the 9/11 Commission no one has the moral fortitude to call for simply terminating this dangerous program.
The answer can be found in the incestuous relationship between the Chamber of Commerce and its subsidiary, the Corporation for Travel Promotion, now doing business as Brand USA.
The Chamber of Commerce has arguably been the strongest supporter of the Visa Waiver Program, which currently enables aliens from 38 countries to enter the United States without first obtaining a visa.
The U.S. State Department provides a thorough explanation of the Visa Waiver Program on its website.
Incredibly, the official State Department website also provides a link, “Discover America,” on that website which relates to the website of The Corporation for Travel Promotion, which is affiliated with the travel industries that are a part of the “Discover America Partnership.”
. . . http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261005/placating-americans-fake-immigration-law-michael-cutler
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are ScrewingAmerica's Best & Brightest
Book Description: The #1 New York Times bestselling author and firebrand syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin sets her sights on the corrupt businessmen, politicians, and lobbyists flooding our borders and selling out America’s best and brightest workers.
In Sold Out, Michelle Malkin and John Miano reveal the worst perpetrators screwing America’s high-skilled workers, how and why they’re doing it—and what we must do to stop them. In this book, they will name names and expose the lies of those who pretend to champion the middle class, while aiding and abetting massive layoffs of highly skilled American workers in favor of cheap foreign labor. Malkin and Miano will explode some of the most commonly told myths spread in the media like these:
Lie #1: America is suffering from an apocalyptic “shortage” of science, technology, engineering, and math workers.
Lie #2: US companies cannot function without an unlimited injection of the most “highly skilled” and “highly educated” foreign workers, who offer intellectual capital and entrepreneurial energy that American workers can’t match.
Lie #3: America’s best and brightest talents are protected because employers are required to demonstrate that they’ve made every effort to hire American citizens before resorting to foreign labor.
For too long, open-borders tech billionaires and their political enablers have escaped tough public scrutiny of their means and motives. Sold Out is an indictment of not only political corruption in Washington, but also the journalistic malpractice that enables it. It’s time to trade the whitewash for solvent. American workers deserve better and the public deserves the unvarnished truth.
Lawless: The Obama Adminstration’s Uprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law
12:00-1:00 p.m., Tuesday, November 17, 2015
The Heritage Foundation, Lehrman Auditorium
214 Massachusetts Ave NE
Washington DC 20002-4999
Overview: In Lawless, George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein offers a scholarly and unsettling account of how the Obama Administration has undermined the Constitution and the rule of law. He documents how the President has presided over one constitutional debacle after another – from Obamacare to unauthorized wars in the Middle East to attempts to strip property owners, college students, religious groups, and conservative political activists of their rights, and more.
Respect for the Constitution’s separation of powers has been violated time and again. Whether in amending Obamacare on the fly or signing a memorandum legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, the current Administration ignores not only Congress, but also the Constitution’s critical checks and balances.
In Lawless, Professor Bernstein shows how the Constitution as well as the President’s own stated principles have been betrayed. In doing so, serious and potentially permanent damage has been done to our constitutional system and repairs must be addressed by the next President of the United States.
Recently, the Justice Department announced it would not be indicting anyone for his or her role in the most serious domestic political scandal since the Nixon years.
Starting in 2010, the IRS, under pressure from congressional Democrats and the White House, engaged in blatant ideologically motivated discrimination against conservative organizations applying for non-profit status.
That the most feared bureaucracy in Washington was making decisions based on illegal political criteria should send a chill down the spine of any American who cares about the First Amendment and the rule of law.
Yet the Department of Justice has refused to indict even IRS official Lois Lerner, who invoked her Fifth Amendment right to silence to avoid incriminating herself in testimony before Congress.
Unfortunately, the failure to prosecute anyone responsible for abusing the IRS’s authority reflects the Obama administration’s broader contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. Consider just a few examples:
Going to war in Libya in blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution, and in defiance of the legal advice of the president’s own lawyers, based on the ridiculous theory that bombing the heck out of Libya did not constitute “hostilities” under the law
Appointing so-called policy czars to high-level positions to avoid constitutionally-required confirmation hearings
Modifying, delaying, and ignoring various provisions of Obamacare in violation of the law itself
Attacking private citizens for engaging in constitutionally protected speech
Issuing draconian regulations regarding sexual assault on campus not through formal, lawful regulation but through an informal, and unreviewable, “dear colleague” letter
Ignoring 100 years of legal rulings and the plain text of the Constitution and trying to get a vote in Congress for the D.C. delegate
Trying to enact massive immigration reform via an executive order demanding that the Department of Homeland Security both refuse to enforce existing immigration law, and provide work permits to millions of people residing in the U.S. illegally
Imposing common core standards on the states via administrative fiat
Ignoring bankruptcy law and arranging Chrysler’s bankruptcy to benefit labor unions at the expense of bondholders
Trying to strip churches and other religious bodies of their constitutional right to choose their clergy free from government involvement.
More generally, the president has abandoned any pretense of trying to work with Congress, as the Constitution’s separation of powers requires. He prefers instead to govern by unilateral executive fiat, even when there is little or no legal authority supporting his power to do so.
Presidents trying stretch their power as far as they can is hardly news. What is news, however, is that top Obama administration officials, including the president himself, see this not as something to be ashamed of, but as a desirable way of governing, something to brag about rather than do surreptitiously.
Obama behaves as if there is some inherent virtue in a president governing by decree and whim, as if promoting progressive political ends at the expense of the rule of law is proper not simply as a desperate last resort but as a matter of principle.
After all, Obama says, democracy is unduly “messy” and “complicated.” “We can’t wait,” the president intones, as he ignores the separation of powers again and again, ruling instead through executive order.
“Law is politics,” and only politics, according to a mantra popular on the legal left, and therefore the law should not be an independent constraint to doing the right thing politically. Obama seems to agree.
As Obama’s lawlessness has received increased attention from Congress, the (conservative) media, and the general public, the president has been defiant, even petulant. When confronted by allegations of lawlessness, Obama takes no responsibility, and doesn’t even bother to defend the legality of his actions.
Harry S. Truman famously said “the buck stops here.” Obama responds to serious concerns about his administration’s lawlessness with a derisive “so sue me.”
As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley writes, Obama “acts as if anything a court has not expressly forbidden is permissible.” And in many situations, no one has legal standing to challenge the president’s actions in court—which means that no judge can stop the administration’s lawbreaking.
So sue me? If only we could.
On Tuesday, Nov. 17, David Bernstein will be at The Heritage Foundation at noon for an event about his book, “Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law.” More details here.
In response the surge of Central Americans sneaking into Texas in the summer of 2014, the Obama administration launched an ad campaign in the sending countries earlier this year to stem the flow. The radio and TV spots assert that "there are no permits for the people trying to cross the border without papers" and promise "the immediate deportation of those trying to cross the border without documents."
None of it is true. There are permits for illegal-alien minors and families. Formally known as Notices to Appear but known colloquially in Spanish as permisos, they require the aliens to present themselves to immigration authorities by a certain date, until which they have temporary legal status. That gives them time enough to travel to join their relatives and disappear into the existing illegal population. And disappear they do, since, despite the tough promises, virtually none of them are deported, immediately or otherwise.
So it should come as no surprise to read today's AP report, which begins this way:
NO PRESIDENT HAS HAD MORE CONTEMPT FOR LEGALS, OUR LAWS AND BORDERS THAN MEXICO'S LA RAZA SUPREMACIST, BARACK OBAMA!
NOT ONLY DOES OBAMA FUND THE MEX FASCIST MOVEMENT OF LA RAZA "The Race" BUT IT OPERATES OUT OF THE AMERICAN WHITE HOUSE UNDER LA RAZA V.P. CECILIA MUNOZ!
The 2013 Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill is the signature achievement of Marco Rubio's four years and ten months in the U.S. Senate. Yet in the first four Republican presidential debates, in which Rubio has played an increasingly prominent role, he has not been asked even once about the specifics of the legislation.
Despite that omission, it seems likely that if Rubio continues to rise in the GOP race, someone, somewhere will pay attention to his most important accomplishment. The 1,197-page Gang of Eight bill is so far-reaching, and at the same time so detailed, that it provides a sharp picture of where Rubio would like to take the U.S. immigration system. Rubio has renounced parts of his own work, but it's not clear which parts, and it's not clear if he has renounced them for good or only until he determines they are more politically practicable.
So until Rubio faces the inevitable questioning about his work, here are some features of the Gang of Eight legislation that might attract discussion as the Republican race goes forward.
1.) More immigration
Comprehensive immigration reform means more immigrants coming to the United States, and with the Gang of Eight Rubio would have dramatically increased that number. "The legislation would loosen or eliminate annual limits on various categories of permanent and temporary immigration," the Congressional Budget Office wrote in its 2013 assessment of the legislation. "If [the bill] was enacted, CBO estimates, the U.S. population would be larger by about 10 million people in 2023 and by about 16 million people in 2033 than projected under current law."
Those numbers are wildly out of touch with the wishes of Republican voters — and of all voters, for that matter. Recently Pew Research asked Americans whether immigration should be "kept at its present level, increased or decreased." Among Republicans, just 7 percent supported increasing the level of immigration, which is at the heart of the Gang of Eight. Among independents, 17 percent supported increased immigration, along with 20 percent of Democrats. So while huge majorities do not support increasing immigration, the gap is particularly large among Republicans, whose presidential nomination Rubio is seeking.
2.) Immediate legalization of illegal immigrants
A fundamental and, as it turned out, fatal flaw of the Gang of Eight was apparent the first day Rubio and his fellow lawmakers announced the reform project, on Jan. 28, 2013. "On day one of our bill, the people without status who are not criminals or security risks will be able to live and work here legally," Rubio's co-author, Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer, said in a press conference with Rubio and the rest of the Gang.
Conservatives — the ones who remembered the debacle of the 1986 immigration deal, in which legalization of illegal immigrants came first but promised border security measures never happened — were stunned. They demanded that new border security and interior enforcement measures be in place and running before legalization.
oughout the months of writing and promoting the Gang of Eight bill, Rubio reassured skeptics the legislation would be very tough on illegal immigrants who are criminals. They wouldn't be allowed to stay. "They will have to come forward and pass a rigorous background check," Rubio said in April 2013. "If they're criminals, they won't qualify."
When the bill's language was made public, Rubio's promises didn't seem so tough. The legislation forbade the legalization of immigrants who had been convicted of a felony or of three or more misdemeanors. But there were some big exceptions.
First, if breaking the immigration laws was an "essential element" of any criminal conviction, it wouldn't count.
Second, the bill said the three misdemeanors that could disqualify an immigrant would count as three misdemeanors only "if the alien was convicted on different dates for each of the three offenses."
That meant that in the case of a person accused of multiple misdemeanors, and convicted of them during a single court session — a fairly common occurrence — the multiple convictions would count as just one conviction for the purposes of the Gang of Eight bill. Given that in some U.S. jurisdictions, some cases of vehicular manslaughter, drunk driving, domestic violence, sex offenses and theft are all categorized as misdemeanors, an illegal immigrant could be convicted of multiple serious crimes and still stay in the country.
Finally, Rubio gave the Secretary of Homeland Security broad authority to issue waivers to criminal immigrants. "The secretary may waive [the misdemeanor and other requirements] on behalf of an alien for humanitarian purposes, to ensure family unity, or if such a waiver is otherwise in the public interest," the bill said. That could mean almost anything
4.) An unclear enforcement guarantee
During the selling of the Gang of Eight, Rubio pushed back against skeptics who suggested the executive branch — whether the Obama administration or any other administration — would actually enact tough border security. Rubio's trump card was the bill's provision for something called the Southern Border Security Commission. Made up of border state governors plus representatives appointed by the president, the House and the Senate, the commission, according to Rubio, would take charge of border security if an administration failed to do so.
Rubio promised conservatives that the commission would have actual authority to enact security. The bill "requires if the Department of Homeland Security does not achieve 100 percent operational awareness and 90 percent apprehensions on the border, they lose control of the issue, to a commission, not a Washington commission, to a local commission, made up of the governors of the four border states ... where they will then finish the job of securing the border, including the fencing plan," Rubio told radio host Mark Levin in April 2013. Rubio told many other people the same thing.
It wasn't true. When the bill came out, it said the commission's "primary responsibility ... shall be making recommendations" to the president and Congress on "policies to achieve and maintain the border security goal." The bill said the commission would have six months to write a report with security recommendations; after giving its advice, it would be disbanded within 30 days.
The commission was, in other words, just another Washington commission. It had no actual power to do anything, regardless of what Rubio said.
5.) An imbalanced work force
Almost all immigration reformers, Rubio included, argue that the current American immigration system allows in too many unskilled immigrants and too few skilled ones. Rubio used that argument for the Gang of Eight. "I'm a big believer in family-based immigration," he told The Wall Street Journal in January 2013. "But I don't think that in the 21st century we can continue to have an immigration system where only 6.5 percent of people who come here, come here based on labor and skill. We have to move toward merit and skill-based immigration."
When the Gang of Eight bill was released, it became clear that Rubio and the Gang, while increasing high-skilled immigration into the United States, increased low-skilled immigration even more.
"[The bill] would allow significantly more workers with low skills and with high skills to enter the United States — through, for example, new programs for temporary workers and an increase in the number of workers eligible for H-1B visas," the CBO noted. "Taking into account all of those flows of new immigrants, CBO and [the Joint Committee on Taxation] expect that a greater number of immigrants with lower skills than with higher skills would be added to the workforce."
6.) The legalization trigger loophole
Many conservatives worried that the legalization for illegal immigrants, once offered, would inevitably become permanent. Rubio sought to reassure them by explaining that the Gang bill would require a "trigger," by which registered provisional immigrants could attain permanent status only after a long set of border security measures were put into place.
The actual bill, however, directed the secretary of Homeland Security to start the permanent legalization process even if the conditions had not been me. The Gang bill specified that permanent legalization would begin 10 years after passage of the legislation, whether or not the border provisions were in place. Even if the delay was the result of lawsuits tying up progress on border security, the bill said permanent legalization would go forward.
7.) Government micromanagement and special favors
The Gang of Eight bill included page after page of new laws governing the agricultural sector of the economy. After months of delicate negotiations between labor and business, Rubio and his colleagues decided to dictate wages, to the penny, for millions of agricultural workers. The bill specified a number of categories — agricultural products graders and sorters; animal breeders; farmworkers and crop, nursery and greenhouse laborers; agricultural equipment operators, etc.
For each, it laid out specific pay rates for 2014, 2015, 2016 and beyond. For example, farmworkers would be paid $9.17 an hour in 2014, $9.40 an hour in 201, and $9.64 an hour in 2016. Agricultural equipment operators would be paid $11.30 an hour in 2014, $11.58 an hour in 2015 and $11.87 an hour in 2016. And so on. Rubio and the Gang then set out a detailed formula for determining wages in the years after 2016.
As for special favors, Rubio and the Gang gave a number of breaks to specific business areas — tourism, cruise ship operators, meat packing plants and more. Perhaps the most famous is what might be called the Snowboard Exception. The original version of Rubio's bill extended the time limit for visas for "a ski instructor seeking to enter the United States temporarily to perform instructing services."
Not long after the bill was released, an amended version appeared, changing the language to "a ski instructor, who has been certified as a level I, II or III ski and snowboard instructor by the Professional Ski Instructors of America or the American Association of Snowboard Instructors ... seeking to enter the United States temporarily to perform instructing services." The snowboard instructors, ignored in the original bill, got their break in the final version.
8.) Fast tracks on the road to citizenship
During the selling of the Gang of Eight, Rubio repeatedly emphasized that newly-legalized illegal immigrants would have to go through years of procedures — maintaining a clean record, learning English, etc. — and still have to wait 10 years before even having a chance to apply for permanent legal residents, and only then if the border has been certified secure. Citizenship might lie many years beyond.
As it turned out, Rubio's bill contained some much quicker ways for illegal immigrants to gain permanent legal status. A provision in the Gang of Eight allowed immigrants with even a limited connection to the agricultural economy to gain legal status in half the time Rubio said. This is from a piece I wrote in April 2013:
The Gang of Eight bill creates something called a blue card, which would be granted to illegal immigrant farm workers who come forward and pass the various background checks the bill requires for all illegal immigrants. Instead of the 10-year wait Rubio described in media appearances, blue card holders could receive permanent legal status in just five years.
How does an illegal immigrant qualify for a blue card? If, after passing the background checks, he can prove that he has worked in agriculture for at least 575 hours — about 72 eight-hour days — sometime in the two years ending Dec. 31, 2012, he can be granted a blue card. His spouse and children can be granted blue cards, too — it can all be done with one application ...
[After five years], the legislation requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to change the blue card holder's status to that of permanent resident if the immigrant has worked in agriculture at least 150 days in each of three of those five years since the bill became law. A work day is defined as 5.75 hours.
Also, the immigrant can qualify for permanent residence with less than three years, of 150 work days each, if he can show that he was disabled, ill or had to deal with the "special needs of a child" during that time period. He can also shorten the requirement if "severe weather conditions" prevented him for working for a long period of time, or if he was fired from his agricultural job — provided it was not for just cause — and then couldn't find work.
So for many illegal immigrants, there was no 10-year wait. And Rubio and the Gang granted similar fast-track five-year status to so-called Dreamers who came to the U.S. before age 16 — and also to their spouses and children.
9.) An all-powerful Secretary of Homeland Security
For all its specificity, the Gang of Eight bill granted enormous discretionary powers to the secretary of Homeland Security; it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that for many of the seemingly hard-and-fast requirements in the bill there is a provision giving the secretary the authority to grant a waiver.
One way to see that is to search the bill's text for the phrase "the secretary may," which generally means the secretary has been given the authority to ignore or waive some requirement in the bill. The misdemeanor waiver earlier in this article is just one example. Waiving the blue card requirements is another. There are more. For example, the secretary can re-admit to the United States an illegal immigrant who has been deported if the secretary determines it is in the "public interest." And in some cases, Rubio and the Gang gave "sole and unreviewable discretion" to the secretary to decide when an illegal immigrant may stay in the country legally.
THE TAX FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES IS ESTIMATED TO BE MORE THAN $2 BILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR! THIS SAME COUNTY HANDS MEXICO'S ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS MORE THAN A BILLION IN WELFARE!
10.) A disappearing back taxes requirement
During the sales period for the Gang of Eight, Rubio said many times that the bill would require immigrants to pay back taxes. "They would have to ... pay back taxes," Rubio told The Wall Street Journal in that January 2013 interview. But when the bill was released, the requirement wasn't much of a requirement. The legislation did not require illegal immigrants to pay back taxes in order to be given registered provisional immigrant status.
It did say that when, after five or 10 years, that immigrant applied for permanent legal status, he or she would have to have "satisfied any applicable federal tax liability," which the Gang defined as "all federal income taxes assessed." That meant the immigrant had to pay any existing IRS liability — except that as illegal immigrants, many had never filed paperwork with the IRS to pay taxes in the first place and thus had no existing liability in IRS files. No matter what Rubio said, the bill did not require all illegal immigrants to pay back taxes.
The Gang of Eight bill passed the Senate on June 27, 2013. The vote was 68-32; the winning total was reached by unanimous support of the Senate's 54 Democrats, plus 13 of Rubio's fellow Republicans, and of course Rubio himself. After the vote, Rubio turned on his own handiwork, with a spokesman saying he opposed passage in the House. The bill was stopped when Speaker John Boehner rejected efforts to bring it up for a vote and House Republicans declined to pass their own version of comprehensive immigration reform.
This year, Rubio refused to answer the question of whether he would sign the Gang of Eight bill if he were president. Future immigration reform, Rubio now argues, must be done piecemeal, with legalization measures coming after the implementation of security. But the Gang of Eight was a big bill. For many Republicans, and indeed for many in the public at large, its problems went far beyond sequencing. If Rubio continues to play a leading role in the Republican presidential race, those problems will receive renewed attention.
November 3, 2015
Obama set to defy federal court on amnesty
By Rick Moran Once again, President Obama is looking to defy Congress in implementing its immigration reform proposals.
This time, his administration is looking to also defy a federal court to achieve it.
A judge sitting on the 5th Circuit in Texas issued an injunction last June against the administration's regulatory plans to legalize millions of aliens in the U.S. illegally. The injunction was upheld by a federal appeals court in Louisiana, and the president's plan is now stalled while the administration works through the federal court system. Except now there are plans afoot to change the regulations pertaining to green cards that would accomplish almost everything the president can't get from Congress or the courts. A leaked memo from DHS outlines four plans the administration is considering. Ian Smith of the Immigration Reform Law Institute:
The internal memo reveals four options of varying expansiveness, with option 1 providing EADs to “all individuals living in the United States”, including illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, and H-1B guest-workers, while option 4 provides EADsonly to those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Giving EADs to any of the covered individuals, however, is in direct violation of Congress’s Immigration & Nationality Act and works to dramatically subvert our carefully wrought visa system. As mentioned, the first plan the memo discusses basically entails giving EADs to anyone physically present in the country who until now has been prohibited from getting one. A major positive to this option, the memo reads, is that it would “address the needs of some of the intended deferred action population.” Although DHS doesn’t say it expressly, included here would be those 4.3 million people covered by the president’s DAPA and Expanded DACA programs whose benefits were supposed to have been halted in the Hanen decision. On top of working around the Hanen injunction, this DHS plan would also dole out unrestricted EADs to those on temporary non-immigrant visas, such as H-1B-holders (their work authorizations being tied to their employers) and another 5 to 6 million illegal aliens thus far not covered by any of the President’s deferred action amnesty programs. By claiming absolute authority to grant work authorization to any alien, regardless of status, DHS is in effect claiming it can unilaterally de-couple the 1986 IRCA work authorization statutes from the main body of U.S. visa law. While DHS must still observe the statutory requirements for issuing visas, the emerging doctrine concedes, the administration now claims unprecedented discretionary power to permit anyone inside our borders to work.
Get a load of what the DHS bureaucrats think about illegals working in the U.S.:
The anonymous DHS policymakers state that a positive for this option is that it “could cover a greater number of individuals.” In a strikingly conclusory bit of bureaucratese, they state that because illegal aliens working in the country “have already had the US labor market tested” it has been “demonstrat[ed] that their future employment won’t adversely affect US workers.” The labor market, in other words, has already been stress-tested through decades of foreign-labor dumping and the American working-class, which disproportionately includes minorities, working mothers, the elderly, and students, is doing just fine. Apparently, the fact that 66 million Americans and legal aliens are currently unemployed or out of the job-market was not a discussion point at the DHS “Retreat.”
Smith concludes: "Bottom line: The memo foreshadows more tactical offensives in a giant administrative amnesty for all 12 million illegal aliens who’ve broken our immigration laws (and many other laws) that will emerge before the next inaugural in January 2016." I'm not sure that judge in Texas will let the administration get away with this. When the government began handing out green cards anyway in defiance of the injunction, the judge, Andrew Hanen, threatened to arrest the lot of them for contempt. He forced the government to recall the green cards immediately. There will be no circumventing the law in his court. But the plans may be untouchable because they don't directly stem from the series of executive orders currently being adjudicated. Of course, any plan to blanket the country in work permits for illegals will be challenged in court. But eventually, the administration may find a friendly judge who gives it the go-ahead.
Once again, President Obama is looking to defy Congress in implementing its immigration reform proposals. This time, his administration is looking to also defy a federal court to achieve it. A judge sitting on the 5th Circuit in Texas issued an injunction last June against the administration's regulatory plans to legalize millions of aliens in the U.S. illegally. The injunction was upheld by a federal appeals court in Louisiana, and the president's plan is now stalled while the administration works through the federal court system. Except now there are plans afoot to change the regulations pertaining to green cards that would accomplish almost everything the president can't get from Congress or the courts. A leaked memo from DHS outlines four plans the administration is considering. Ian Smith of the Immigration Reform Law Institute:
The internal memo reveals four options of varying expansiveness, with option 1 providing EADs to “all individuals living in the United States”, including illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, and H-1B guest-workers, while option 4 provides EADsonly to those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Giving EADs to any of the covered individuals, however, is in direct violation of Congress’s Immigration & Nationality Act and works to dramatically subvert our carefully wrought visa system. As mentioned, the first plan the memo discusses basically entails giving EADs to anyone physically present in the country who until now has been prohibited from getting one. A major positive to this option, the memo reads, is that it would “address the needs of some of the intended deferred action population.” Although DHS doesn’t say it expressly, included here would be those 4.3 million people covered by the president’s DAPA and Expanded DACA programs whose benefits were supposed to have been halted in the Hanen decision. On top of working around the Hanen injunction, this DHS plan would also dole out unrestricted EADs to those on temporary non-immigrant visas, such as H-1B-holders (their work authorizations being tied to their employers) and another 5 to 6 million illegal aliens thus far not covered by any of the President’s deferred action amnesty programs. By claiming absolute authority to grant work authorization to any alien, regardless of status, DHS is in effect claiming it can unilaterally de-couple the 1986 IRCA work authorization statutes from the main body of U.S. visa law. While DHS must still observe the statutory requirements for issuing visas, the emerging doctrine concedes, the administration now claims unprecedented discretionary power to permit anyone inside our borders to work.
Get a load of what the DHS bureaucrats think about illegals working in the U.S.:
The anonymous DHS policymakers state that a positive for this option is that it “could cover a greater number of individuals.” In a strikingly conclusory bit of bureaucratese, they state that because illegal aliens working in the country “have already had the US labor market tested” it has been “demonstrat[ed] that their future employment won’t adversely affect US workers.” The labor market, in other words, has already been stress-tested through decades of foreign-labor dumping and the American working-class, which disproportionately includes minorities, working mothers, the elderly, and students, is doing just fine. Apparently, the fact that 66 million Americans and legal aliens are currently unemployed or out of the job-market was not a discussion point at the DHS “Retreat.”
Smith concludes: "Bottom line: The memo foreshadows more tactical offensives in a giant administrative amnesty for all 12 million illegal aliens who’ve broken our immigration laws (and many other laws) that will emerge before the next inaugural in January 2016." I'm not sure that judge in Texas will let the administration get away with this. When the government began handing out green cards anyway in defiance of the injunction, the judge, Andrew Hanen, threatened to arrest the lot of them for contempt. He forced the government to recall the green cards immediately. There will be no circumventing the law in his court. But the plans may be untouchable because they don't directly stem from the series of executive orders currently being adjudicated. Of course, any plan to blanket the country in work permits for illegals will be challenged in court. But eventually, the administration may find a friendly judge who gives it the go-ahead.
Obama’s Secret Destruction of Our Immigration System By Arnold Ahlert
Canada Free Press, November 4, 2015
A newly-leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reveals the Obama administration is seeking to sidestep a federal court injunction that suspended portions of the president’s amnesty-based initiatives known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). In short, Obama is determined to impose his transformational agenda on the nation by any means necessary.
According to the Hill, the document outlining the administration’s attempt to thumb its nose at the rule of law was prepared at a DHS “Regulations Retreat” last June, four months after a preliminary injunction was initially imposed by Texas Judge Andrew Hanen and subsequently left in place by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit’s final ruling on that injunction, either confirming or reversing it, is expected to occur in a matter of days.Apparently the Obama administration couldn’t care less.
. . . http://canadafreepress.com/article/76535
TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND BUILD THEIR LA RAZA "The Race" MEXICAN ILLEGAL PARTY BASE, THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS RUTHLESSLY ASSAULTED THE AMERICAN WORKER, OUR LAWS ON HIRING ILLEGALS AND OUR BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
"The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation."
"The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs."
Obamacare open enrollment: A widening health care disaster for workers
3 November 2015
“All of Obama’s policies have been geared toward increasing social inequality. … The claim that the health care overhaul is an oasis of progress in this desert of social reaction is simply a lie”— World Socialist Web Site, March 22, 2010
Open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) began November 1 for plans taking effect January 1. The coming year will be the third in which the ACA, signed into law by President Obama in March 2010, will be operational. The World Socialist Web Site’s assessment five years ago that the “reform” commonly known as Obamacare would usher in a frontal assault on the health care available to working people is being richly confirmed.
The ACA has nothing in common with universal health care. That was merely the slogan initially advanced to disguise a corporate-designed scheme to dramatically shift health care costs onto the working class.
The central component of the scheme, the “individual mandate,” requires that individuals and families without health insurance through their employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid obtain insurance or pay a tax penalty. Low-income people can qualify for modest tax subsidies to go toward premiums.
The uninsured are required to purchase coverage from private, for-profit insurance companies on the health care “exchanges” set up under the law. This vastly increases the market for private insurance firms without placing any real restraints on the prices they charge—a formula for windfall profits.
By the government’s own forecast, enrollees will face a 7.5 percent average premium rate increase in 2016. Other sources project rate hikes in excess of 20 percent. A recent study showed that many insurers are requesting double-digit rate increases next year and state insurance commissions are approving them.
A frenzy of mergers in the health care industry will fuel further premium increases. In the space of a few weeks in July, Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. merged in a $37 billion deal, and Anthem Inc. agreed to acquire Cigna Corp. for $54 billion. As a result, the five largest health insurers in the US were consolidated into three.
Drug makers Allergan and Pfizer are in the advanced stages of talks to merge and form the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, valued at $330 billion. The price of top brand name prescription drugs are already surging, having increased by 12.9 percent in 2013, the last year for which data is available.
Last week the giant drug store chain Walgreens announced a deal to take over one of its main competitors, Rite Aid, creating a mega-chain to compete with CVS for total domination of the market.
Premiums and drug costs are only one aspect of the burden to be borne by those purchasing coverage under the ACA. The average deductible for the lowest tier “bronze” plans on the exchanges was $5,200 in 2015, and the prevalence of such “high-deductible” plans is sure to expand in 2016. This means that aside from mandated “essential services,” such as certain forms of wellness care and screenings, no medical care is covered until the entire deductible is paid out of pocket. Co-payments for doctor visits and other services are also required.
Research published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 135 health plans in 34 state marketplaces available during last year’s open enrollment period. The study found that as of April 2015, 18 plans in nine states lacked in-network specialists for at least one specialty. These included obstetricians/gynecologists, dermatologists, cardiologists, psychiatrists, oncologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists and pulmonologists.
What all of this means is that a substantial portion of the 12 million people who have purchased coverage on the health care exchanges will be forced to self-ration medical care due to economic necessity. Workers and their children will forego doctor visits, prescriptions for life-saving medicines will go unfilled, needless suffering and deaths will occur.
This appalling state of affairs is not an unfortunate byproduct of the ACA. By design from its inception, the legislation has been crafted to cut costs for the government and corporations and boost the profits of the health insurers, pharmaceutical corporations and health care chains.
According to the big business parties and their corporate sponsors, Americans are living too long and health care costs are sucking up too much of the national wealth. There is a calculated drive to lower life expectancy for working people.
That is why the introduction of Obamacare has been accompanied by a concerted drive to restrict access to basic medical tests—that is, to ration health care for workers. In recent months, official bodies have called for reducing or delaying mammograms, pap smears, prostate tests and other standard screening procedures.
One indication of the catastrophic implications of the assault on health care is a recent study showing that since 1998, the death rate for middle-income white Americans age 45-54 has risen sharply, resulting in half a million deaths, comparable to the 650,000 Americans who have lost their lives from AIDS since 1981. Researchers point to suicides and substance abuse, driven by increasing financial stress, as the main contributing factors. The ACA will only increase the number of such tragedies.
The implications of Obamacare go far beyond those buying insurance on the ACA exchanges and extend to all segments of health care. The legislation is serving as a model for the assault on employer-sponsored health care coverage as well as the bedrock government-run programs Social Security and Medicare.
Today, approximately half of all Americans receive their health care coverage through their employers. Employer-paid health benefits was an important social gain wrested from the corporations by the struggles of workers in the aftermath of World War II and has been central in raising the living standards of working class families.
But the workings of Obamacare aim to destroy these gains. As Ezekiel Emanuel, a close ally of Obama and key architect of the ACA, predicted in 2009: “By 2025, few private-sector employers will still be providing health insurance.” These plans will give way to vouchers handed out to employees to purchase coverage on insurance exchanges, either those set up under the ACA or others.
In the current contract struggle of US autoworkers, the drive by the auto companies and their union partners to dismantle the “cradle-to-grave” medical coverage won by autoworkers and retirees is in line with the Obama administration’s policy of shifting health care costs to workers.
The recent budget deal between Obama and congressional Republicans rolls back a significant provision in the ACA, the requirement that businesses with more than 200 workers automatically enroll their employees for health insurance. And while employers are basically absolved of responsibility for providing insurance, fines for individuals for not obtaining insurance will rise substantially in 2016—to $695, or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is higher.
Paul Ryan, the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, has advocated transforming Medicare into a voucher program and partially privatizing Social Security. That he is now presented as a “moderate” unifying force by the ruling elite and the media is an indication of how far to the right the political establishment in America has veered. The foundations are already being laid for the dismantling of Medicare and Social Security.
As the real content of Obamacare becomes clear to millions of workers and middle class people, who suddenly discover that they cannot get access to drugs or doctors and standard medical procedures are no longer covered by their insurance plans, there will be an explosive growth of social opposition.
The third year of the Affordable Care Act is the occasion to call the reactionary legislation by its rightful name: a health care counterrevolution. The only rational and progressive solution to the health care crisis in America is to replace the privately owned and controlled system with socialized medicine, in which the health care industry is nationalized, restructured, and placed under the democratic control of a workers government. This will make possible the provision of quality health care for all as a basic social right.
Kate Randall
"Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of
employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious
for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-
Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson
Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4
billion fortune is extracted from his international network of
sports apparel-producing sweatshops."
OBAMA-CLINTONomics is a simple device - Serve the super rich and pass the cost of their looting and Wall Street crimes on to the backs of the last of the American middle-class!
"Of course, the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere. Ultimately, the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by a massive transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks, investors and super-rich.The corollary to rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and pensions."
“As a result, the share of wealth held by the richest 0.1 percent of the population grew from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2012, while the wealth of the 400 richest families in the US has doubled since 2008.”
OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class
"Obama expanded the Wall Street bailout, handing trillions of dollars to the criminals who wrecked the economy. He then utilized the financial meltdown to restructure the auto industry on the basis of brutal pay cuts, setting a precedent for the transformation of the US into a low-wage economy."
"In the midst of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the administration starved state and city governments of resources, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of education and public-sector jobs and the gutting of workers’ pensions. Obama’s Affordable Care Act set in motion the dismantling of employer-paid health insurance and massive cuts in the Medicare insurance system for the elderly."
In 2009, the total net worth of the Forbes 400 was $1.27 trillion. Today, nearly six years into the so-called economic “recovery” fostered by the Obama administration, the wealthiest Americans have nearly doubled their hoard. The total wealth of the richest 400 Americans managed to reach new heights even while financial markets have been roiled by tumultuous swings.
The Forbes report notes that in 2015, “It was
harder than ever to join the 400. The price of
entry this year was $1.7 billion, the highest it’s been in the 33 years that Forbes has racked American wealth.” Forbes makes note that the wealth threshold was so high this year that 145 billionaires failed to make the list.
While a majority of billionaires have prospered, their wealth underwritten by the massive government bailouts of financial institutions and near-zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve, a significant fraction of the wealthy elite have lost ground in the turbulent stock markets of recent months.
The ratio of winners and losers among the billionaires was ten to one last year, but this year was much closer to 50-50. Forbes noted that the top three position-holders on the list, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, each saw a drop in their total net worth of at least 5 percent in the last year. This did nothing to threaten the position of Gates, number one at $76 billion, or Buffett, number two at $62 billion, but Ellison’s third-place position, with $47.5 billion, left him “only” $500 million ahead of the fourth-place multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.
The majority of those on the Forbes list were associated with some form of financial speculation, or with computer software and the Internet. According to the industry breakdown supplied by Forbes, its 400 include 126 engaged in investment, real estate and finance, 81 from computer technology and media, 36 from food and beverage, 32 from retail and fashion (including five members of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart), 31 from oil & gas, 20 from health care, 19 from miscellaneous services (including six members of the Pritzker family, owners of Hyatt Hotels), and 19 from sports and gaming.
This left only 35 listed as making their fortunes in manufacturing, automotive, construction, and logistics. The largest manufacturing fortune is the $7.4 billion of Harold Kohler, whose company makes toilets and other plumbing fixtures. Perhaps that is symbolic, given the state of manufacturing in the United States, once the world leader in industry, but no longer.
The growth of financial parasitism has underwritten the wealth of many on the Forbes 400. In 1982, the first Forbes 400 list saw figures directly involved in finance making up only 4.4 percent of the total wealth on the list. As of today, this group now makes up more than 21 percent of billionaires on the list.
Former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who has held the number one spot on the Forbes 400 for 22 years, has less than 13 percent of his fortune in stock in the company he founded. According toForbes, the majority of Gates’ wealth is bound up in Cascade, the software mogul’s investment firm, which specializes in “investing in stocks, bonds, private equity and real estate.”
Besides the well-known super-rich of Silicon Valley like Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin (with $33.3 billion and $32.6 billion, respectively) and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social media web site Facebook, the seventh wealthiest man in America with $40.3 billion in total assets, there are numerous other newly minted Internet billionaires, including the owners and co-owners of Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, SnapChat, GoPro and GoDaddy.com.
Jeffrey Bezos, owner of the online retailer Amazon, saw the largest gain in wealth for the year, making $16 billion in 2015, placing his total net worth at $47 billion and catapulting him to fourth place. Nearly half of Bezos’ gains came within a single day last July, when his company announced gains in the second quarter, leading to a speculative frenzy which bid up stock values for Amazon by over 18 percent.
Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal- Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4 billion fortune is extracted from his international network of sports apparel-producing sweatshops.
While safeguarding the ill-gotten wealth of the Forbes billionaires remains an ironclad principle of both the Republican and Democratic parties, working people throughout the US continue to suffer the brunt of attacks on their living standards. A US Census report released earlier this month shows that 14.8 percent of the US population lives in poverty; a figure that is unchanged from a year earlier. The Census findings show that 6.6 percent of the population lives in “deep poverty,” or less than half of the already unrealistically low official poverty line in the US.
'Sold Out' to Lobbyists: A Look at the I-Squared Act
Excerpt: The H-1B program was designed for employers to replace Americans with cheap foreign workers and to allow employers to abuse the system with impunity. In the space of a book, Michelle and I are able to go into the actual legislation to show how this was deliberately done.
Politicians may say one thing, but they do another.We have a good example of that from the man who set the record for going native faster than anyone else after coming to Washington: Marco Rubio.
The hourglass society: Middle-income households no longer the majority in the US
By Andre Damon 11 December 2015
For the first time in more than four decades, “middle-income households” no longer constitute the majority of American society, according to a study published Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. Instead, the majority of households are either low or higher-income.
The study concluded, “Once in the clear majority, adults in middle-income households in 2015 were matched in number by those in lower- and upper-income households combined.” Pew called its findings “a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point” in American society.
The study also found a sharp fall in household incomes and wealth, particularly for low-income households, noting that only “upper-income families realized notable gains in wealth from 1983 to 2013.”
Together with the decline in the relative numbers of middle-income earners, the incomes of households in this group has fallen substantially in recent decades. The median income of middle-income households fell by four percent between 2000 and 2014, while their median wealth fell by 28 percent over approximately the same period.
The study notes that since 1983, the total share of income accruing to high-income households has grown significantly. The study found that “fully 49% of US aggregate income went to upper-income households in 2014, up from 29% in 1970.” Meanwhile the share “accruing to middle-income households was 43% in 2014, down substantially from 62% in 1970.”
These findings reflect the persistent declines in wages for US workers following decades of de-industrialization, which has been accompanied by significant increases in the yields of financial assets, helping to increase the wealth and earnings of the financial elite, along with a section of upper middle-class households.
While the study’s metrics are too broad to capture the enormous concentration of society’s wealth in the hands of the top 1 and 0.1 percent, they reflect the reality that a “middle class” lifestyle is increasingly out of reach for the broad majority of the US population.
The Pew study, an analysis of data from the Census Bureau’s current population survey, defines “middle-income” households as those earning between two-thirds and twice the US median household income, or between $42,000 to $126,000 for a household of three. Those classified as low-income made less than two-thirds the typical income, while those classified as high-income made twice the median income.
The study added that the fastest growing sections of the population were those at the extremes of the income distribution: the very rich and the very poor. “The movement out of the middle has not simply been at the margins—the growth has been at the extreme ends of the income ladder,” with “the fastest-growing numbers… in the very lowest and very highest income tiers.”
The study found that, after dividing US households into fifths based on household income, “In 2015, 20% of American adults were in the lowest income tier, up from 16% in 1971. On the opposite side, 9% are in the highest income tier, more than double the 4% share in 1971.” Meanwhile the share of adults in the lower middle or upper middle income brackets have remained unchanged.
The report added, “The growth at the top is similarly skewed,” as “the share of adults in highest-income households [has] more than doubled, from 4% in 1971 to 9% in 2015. But the increase in the share in upper-middle income households was modest, rising from 10% to 12%.”
The study further noted the impact of the 2008 crisis on the wealth of middle-income households. It stated, “Before the onset of the Great Recession, the median wealth of middle-income families increased from $95,879 in 1983 to $161,050 in 2007, a gain of 68%. But the economic downturn eliminated that gain almost entirely. By 2010, the median wealth of middle-income families had fallen to about $98,000, where it still stood in 2013.”
The wealth of higher income households has largely been protected from the 2008 financial crash. “Upper income families more than doubled their wealth from 1983 to 2007 as it climbed from $323,402 to $729,980. Despite losses during the recession, these families recovered somewhat since 2010 and had a median wealth of $650,074 in 2013, about double their wealth in 1983.”
The Pew figures also show the impact of the persistent economic slump on a broad range of households, noting, “Americans are less well-to-do now than at the start of the 21st century. For all income tiers, median incomes in 2014 were lower than in 2000. These reversals are the result of two recessions—the downturn in 2001 and the Great Recession of 2007-09—and economic recoveries that have been too anemic to fully repair the damage.”
The conclusion that the incomes and wealth of all sections of society have declined since the start of the 2008 crisis is attributable to the fact that the study’s methodology is too broad to encompass the most dramatic change in American society: the enormous concentration of wealth and income in the hands of the financial oligarchy. The handful of multi-millionaires and billionaires in this social group are wealthier than ever.
Figures published last year by professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman showed that the wealthiest 0.5 percent of American society saw their share of the country’s wealth double, from about 17 percent in 1978 to just under 35 percent in 2012. The top 0.1 percent (one one-thousandth of the population) now controls more than 20 percent of all wealth, up from about 8 percent in the late 1970s.
The vast growth of social inequality is not the result of an impartial and merely objective process, but is rather the result of policies pursued by the government for decades aimed at slashing the wages and benefits of American workers while enriching the financial oligarchy that dominates wealth and political power in the US. This process has been dramatically accelerated under the Obama administration.
The persistent growth of social inequality is the most conspicuous and defining characteristic of contemporary American society. It is this process, facilitated by the financialization of the economy and the continuous diversion of resources away from productive investment, that underlies the erosion of democratic forms of government and the endless promotion of war and militarism.
This process expresses, moreover, a deep social crisis to which the financial elite, obsessed with the expansion of its own wealth and social privilege, can offer no solutions.
Heritage experts have combed through the bill's numerous provisions on matters ranging from sanctuary cities to Planned Parenthood.
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