TYSON HAS LONG BEEN IDENTIFED WITH THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR OBVIOUS REASONS.
Tyson Foods Faces Boycott After Firing 1,200 Americans, ‘Would Like to Employ’ 42,000 Migrants - AND BIDEN - MAYORKAS - SCHUMER HAVE USHERED OVER THE BORDER 15 MILLION TO PICK FROM.
"There are the billions of taxpayer dollars used to subsidize illegal
immigrants' health care and education. There's the revenue we lose out
on when illegal immigrants don't pay income taxes. And there's a less
recognized pot of billions — the billions of dollars of earnings that
illegal immigrants wire out of the United States with no tax or penalty."
IN COLLUSION WITH THE DEMOCRAT PARTY, THERE'S NEVER AN END TO MEXICO'S LOOTING.
"Free" gringo-paid healthcare at private hospitals in Mexifornia costs $1.4 BILLION. Mexican consulates stand ready to advise any Mexican how to loot the stupid gringo!
Local Officials Using State Funds To Provide Healthcare To Illegal Aliens
A
new Wall Street Journal Survey showed that 20 out of the 25 counties in
the U.S. with the highest levels of illegal aliens are using state
funds to provide healthcare for local illegal aliens. Participants in
these programs, regardless of immigration status, receive healthcare
services such as doctor visits, shots, prescription drugs, lab tests and
surgeries for free or at an extremely reduced cost paid for by the
local taxpayers.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that around one-quarter of
the approximately 30 million uninsured people in the U.S. are illegal
aliens and federal policies have prohibited illegal aliens from using
the Affordable Care Act to obtain healthcare due to the high costs.
For all 20 counties that were part of the survey it cost them a total
of over $1 billion a year to provide nonemergency care for at least
750,000 illegal aliens. The majority of these bills were paid for from
the local funds of those communities.
Andreas Borgeas, a member of the board of supervisors in Fresno
County, CA, said that providing illegal aliens with healthcare has
“created an ongoing entitlement that’s going to be difficult to
sustain.”
Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education estimates that
California will have around 1.5 million adult immigrants in 2019 and to
provide Medicaid alone to these who meet the program’s low-income
criteria would cost the state $400 million more a year.
This subject has been a huge part of the 2016 presidential debate
with Republican candidate’s Ted Cruz and Donald Trump saying they would
continue the federal policies of not allowing illegal aliens to receive
healthcare coverage while Democrat candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie
Sanders would like to offer illegal aliens healthcare coverage and
eventually citizenship. You can view their
HILLARY CLINTON SAYS MILLIONS MORE VOTING ILLEGAL SHOULD BE HANDED OBAMACARE! CLINTON'S PLATFORM IS SIMPLE: BUILD THE MEX WELFARE STATE ON AMERICA'S BACK TO BUY THEIR ILLEGAL VOTES. THEY ALREADY GET MILLIONS OF OUR JOBS AND BILLIONS IN WELFARE! HILLARY SAYS HAND MY PEOPLE (ILLEGALS) MORE!
OBAMACARE FOR 40 MILLION ILLEGALS IS ON THE WAY THE AMERICAN THINKER
NO ONE SERVES HIS PAYMASTERS ON WALL STREET MORE THAN BARACK OBAMA!
HE SMELLS THOSE SPEECH FEE BRIBES ALREADY!
AND HILLARY IS OBAMA'S CLONE!
Drug prices have also been a theme in the presidential campaign. The
Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, for example, released a campaign
advertisement earlier this month attacking the “predatory pricing” of
Valeant Pharmaceuticals. Like the congressional hearing, this is all for
show. Of all the presidential candidates, Clinton is the top recipient
of donations from the pharmaceutical and health products industry,
taking in $410,460 according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
US drug prices doubled since 2011
By
Brad Dixon
18 March 2016
According to a new report by
the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts, the average price of
brand-name drugs increased by 16.2 percent last year. Between 2011 and
2015, branded prescription drug prices have nearly doubled, rising 98.2
percent. Since 2008, the prices have increased by a whopping 164
percent.
Drug spending rose by 5.2 percent in 2015. This was about half the
increase seen in 2014, the year of the largest hike since 2003.
The report is based upon prescription use data for members with drug
coverage provided by Express Scripts plan sponsors. In assessing changes
in plan costs, the report distinguishes between the relative
contributions from changes in patient utilization (e.g. more patients
being prescribed the drug) and changes in the unit price of the drug
(e.g., price hikes).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, most drug spending was on
traditional drugs (small-molecule, solid drugs) to treat conditions such
as heartburn, depression and diabetes. The recent trend has been a
shift to specialty drugs. Still, within traditional therapy categories
there were significant increases in spending on medications to treat
diabetes, heartburn and ulcers, and skin conditions.
Diabetes medications remain the most expensive of the traditional
drug categories. Drug spending in this category increased by 14 percent,
with the hike being equally influenced by increased utilization of the
drugs and rise in unit cost. Three diabetes treatments—Lantus, Januvia
and Humalog—were among the top five drugs in terms of spending across
all traditional therapy classes.
Although not discussed in the report, an investigation by Bloomberg News last year found evidence
of “shadow pricing” by drug manufacturers, where companies raise their
prices immediately after their competitors do so. The investigation
found that the prices of diabetes drugs Lantus and Lemivir had increased
in tandem 13 times since 2009, and evidence of similar shadow pricing
for the drugs Humalog and Novolog.
Heartburn and ulcer drugs saw a 35.6 percent increase in spending,
almost solely due to the rise in unit cost. Although 92.3 percent of the
medications filled in this category were generic, the price unit trend
was heavily influenced by the increase in prices of branded drugs such
as Nexium, Dexilant and Prevacid.
Treatments for skin conditions also saw a significant increase of
27.8 percent in spending, again due almost completely to rises in the
unit costs of the medications. The report notes that these increases
occurred for both generic and branded therapies, largely due to industry
consolidation through mergers and acquisitions leading to less
competition in the market. While 86.3 percent of the drugs filled were
generic, many of the generic versions saw sharp increases in unit cost,
including the two most widely used corticosteroids, clobetasol (96.2
percent) and triamcinolone (28 percent).
While the overall spending increase for traditional therapy classes
was nominal (0.6 percent), the primary factor for the increase in
spending came from specialty medications. Specialty medications require
special education and close patient monitoring, such as drugs to treat
cancer, multiple sclerosis or cystic fibrosis. Spending on specialty
drugs rose by 17.8 percent in 2015. The report found that 37.7 percent
of drug spending was for specialty drugs in 2015, and the figure is
expected to rise to 50 percent by 2018.
Spending in this category was topped by inflammatory conditions—such
as rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases and psoriasis—which
rose by 25 percent, driven by a 10.3 percent increase in utilization
and 14.7 percent rise in unit cost. The average cost per prescription in
2015 was $3,035.95. The medications Humira Pen and Enbrel, which
captured more than 66 percent of the market share for this class, saw
unit cost increases of more than 17 percent.
Spending on oncology therapies increased by 23.7 percent, due to both
increased use (9.3 percent) and increased unit cost (14.4 percent). New
cancer therapies average $8,000 per prescription and the average cancer
regimen is around $150,000 per patient. Between 2005 and 2015, the
anti-cancer drug Gleevec, manufactured exclusively by Novartis, has seen
its price more than triple, with an annual cost of $92,000. In 2015,
the year prior to the drug’s patent expiration, Novartis increased the
unit cost of the drug by 19.3 percent. This is a common practice for
companies facing patent expiration.
Drug spending on cystic fibrosis treatments rose by a significant
53.4 percent, largely based on increases in unit cost (40.9 percent vs.
13.3 percent from patient utilization). This rise was largely due to use
of the new oral combination therapy, Orkambi, which became available in
mid-2015. The drug costs more than $20,000 per month.
The report forecasts that between 2016 and 2018 spending will
increase annually by 7-8 percent for traditional drugs and around 17
percent for specialty drugs.
The prices of generic drugs have on average decreased, although there
are notable exceptions. Pharmaceutical companies like Horizon Pharma,
Turing Pharmaceuticals, and Valeant Pharmaceuticals have purchased
generic drugs and then significantly hiked their prices.
The report notes the emergence of “captive pharmacies” in 2015 as
another factor responsible for higher drug spending. Captive pharmacies
are owned or operated by pharmaceutical manufacturers and tend to
promote their manufacturer’s drugs, rather than generic or other
low-cost alternatives. The report gives as examples the arrangements
between Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Philidor Rx Services, and between
Horizon Pharma and Linden Care Pharmacy.
The Express Scripts data matches the findings released earlier this
year by the Truveris OneRx National Drug Index, which found that branded
drugs rose by 14.8 percent in 2015.
Despite the widespread media publicity of the notorious drug price
hikes by companies like Turing and Valeant, pharmaceutical companies
have continued to inflate prices in 2016, with Pfizer leading the way with an average price hike of 10.6 percent for 60 of its branded drugs.
Workers are rightly outraged at the skyrocketing price of drugs. A
Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted last year found that 74 percent
of respondents felt that the drug companies put profits before people.
The political establishment, however, has sought both to exploit this
anger for electoral support and to direct it into safe channels that do
not disrupt the status quo.
A congressional hearing held in January placed a spotlight on the price-gouging practices of HYPERLINK Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Turing Pharmaceuticals, whose dubious activities were highlighted in a pair of congressional memos.
The purpose of the hearing, however, was not probe the underlying
causes of the sharp rise in drug prices. Instead, legislators sought to
safeguard the profits of the pharmaceutical industry as a whole through a
verbal lambasting of the industry’s most notorious culprits.
Drug prices have also been a theme in the presidential campaign. The
Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, for example, released a campaign
advertisement earlier this month attacking the “predatory pricing” of
Valeant Pharmaceuticals. Like the congressional hearing, this is all for
show. Of all the presidential candidates, Clinton is the top recipient
of donations from the pharmaceutical and health products industry,
taking in $410,460 according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, who has stated that he will support
Clinton if he loses the Democratic nomination, received $82,094 in
donations from the industry. Sanders has proposed a series of minor
reforms to address drug prices, such as the re-importation of drugs from
Canada, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug manufacturers,
and decreasing the patent life of branded drugs.
None of the candidates, including the “democratic socialist” Sanders,
challenge the private ownership of the pharmaceutical industry in which
everything from research and development and clinical testing to drug
pricing and promotion are subordinated to the profit interests of
corporations.
OF
AMERICAN JOBS WITH STOLEN IDENTITIES. THEY ALSO DRIVE ILLEGALLY,
CONTRACT ILLEGALLY AND SEND BACK TENS OF BILLIONS IN DRUG PROFITS TO
NARCOMEX. THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS LONG BEEN SABOTAGING STATES' ATTEMPT TO CURB LA RAZA FASCIST FROM VOTING. MEXICO KNOWS THAT THE 40 MILLION LOOTING MEXICANS DON'T HAVE TO BE "PERMANENT RESIDENTS" TO GO VOTE FOR MORE! HILLARY CLINTON HAS ALREADY PROMISED THE MEX OCCUPIERS 49 MORE MEXIFORNIAS!
March 21, 2016
Mexican government urging US immigrants to become citizens and vote
Mexican
consulates in the U.S. are hosting citizenship clinics across the
country, hoping to convince permanent residents from Mexico to become
U.S. citizens so they can vote against Donald Trump. The pious declaration from the Mexican government that they are not "interfering" in the U.S. election fails the smell test. Bloomberg:
Joel
Diaz doesn’t want to wait to see how it all turns out. The
Mexican-American, who has been a permanent resident of the U.S. for six
years, arrived at the Mexican consulate in Chicago on Saturday with his
wife and four adult sons to register all of them as U.S. citizens in
order to vote against Trump.
"We’re
very worried," Diaz, 47, an evangelical pastor, said. "If he wins there
will be a lot of damage against a lot of people here, and to us as
Hispanics, as Mexicans."
Laura
Espinosa, deputy consul in Mexico’s consulate in Las Vegas, said the
main goal of the program is citizenship, and while that includes the
right to vote, the government doesn’t press people to do so. "Those who
use this to vote, that’s up to each individual," said Espinosa, who
confirmed that most consulates have begun citizenship campaigns. "We
don’t have any opinion on that, because that would be totally
interfering in internal affairs of the country."
The
government in Mexico City is holding off on engaging the Trump campaign
directly until he becomes the nominee, said Francisco Guzman, chief of
staff to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Speaking with reporters
on March 1, Guzman said the government plans to communicate with the
campaigns of the nominees once they’re chosen and try to dispel what it
considers misinformation about Mexico and Mexicans.
The
public-relations offensive now under way includes using news outlets
and social media to highlight the strides Mexicans have made in
business, the arts and academia in the U.S., said Paulo Carreno, the
former spokesman of Citigroup Inc.’s Mexico unit who oversees the
country’s international branding strategy.
Promoting
Mexico in the U.S., from its scholars to artists, is meant "not to
influence an election, but a whole generation and those that follow,"
Carreno said in an e-mailed response to questions. "The strategy will be
an important anchor in our consular network in the country."
It
should be noted that the chances of the Mexican government succeeding
in getting enough of their people to become U.S. citizens so that they
can make a difference in the 2016 election are low. But over a period
of years, that could change – especially if the Republicans continue to
refuse to compete for the Hispanic vote. Immigration issues are not the
end-all and be-all for Hispanics in the U.S. They have the same
concerns as any American about the economy and the culture.
Not
even trying to persuade Hispanics that the GOP's agenda would be better
for them than the Democrats will continue to make any national election
and uphill climb for the Republican candidate.
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton tells Breitbart News Daily host
Stephen K. Bannon that, in effect, unfettered illegal immigration is
“destroying this experiment” known as America and “the consequences will
come sooner than later and they will be negative in their entirety.”
Beginning the immigration discussion in Europe, said Bolton:
There’s a philosophy out there and it’s the kind of
conventional wisdom on the International Left that International
borders, you know, they’re just kind of there and really people should
be allowed to go anywhere they want. They don’t like to say that so
expressly publicly. And I guess I’m exaggerating for effect to an
extent, but the notion that a given nation – a Spain – can be filled
with, I know this is anachronistic, Spanish people, is something that
they reject. So, if you live in the Middle East and want to live in
Germany, why not?
When asked about America’s Southern border, said Bolton:
I think that after decades of being lectured by our
friends in Europe about out attitude toward illegal immigration, they’re
now seeing the chickens come home to roost. I think citizenship is a
critical concept in a democratic society and America has, over the
years, because of our melting pot phenomenon, our ability to integrate
people from all over the world – it’s our national motto E Pluribus Unum
– it has made us the greatest country in History. If you abandon that
and say that citizenship is for anybody that happens to be on our side
of the border, you’re destroying this experiment. And the consequences
will come sooner than later and they will be negative in their entirety.
Asked if the migrant issue in Europe is starting to become a national security issue for the United States, said Bolton:
Oh, I think it is. I think it’s already a national
security for Europe. I think you could possibly see the results of this
in the british referendum in June on whether they’re going to stay in
the European Union, or not. They’ve seen what happened in Paris in
November. Then back in January of 2015. They saw what happened in
Brussels just last week. They’ve seen people pushing to get on the
trains coming in the tunnel under the English Channel. And I think they
already have their own domestic difficulties in the UK and it’s going to
have an effect on that referendum. And I think it is on elections all
over Europe.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST. Hear the interview:
PEW: MEXICO BREEDS AN ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE OCCUPATION OF AMERICA
A new study
by George Borjas from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University reveals what many have long been concerned about when
it comes to illegal immigration into the United States. According
to Borjas' paper, the "employment rate of undocumented men is 86.6%, as
compared to 73.9% for natives and 77.8% for legal immigrants," and this
gap has been widening since the mid-1990s.
The
study shows that about 10% of all persons in their early 30s are
undocumented. In addition, 23% of illegal immigrants live in California,
7% reside in New York, and 15% live in Texas. Borjas reached the following conclusions:
Even
after the regression exhaustively controls for... skill differences --
and adjusts for the possibility that economic conditions varied
dramatically over time for each of the narrowly defined skill groups, as
well as for the possibility that economic conditions varied
dramatically among the different geographic regions where the three
groups tend to settle -- it is still the case that the employment rate
of immigrants, and particularly that of undocumented immigrant men,
increased dramatically relative to that of native-born persons.
More
evidence that illegal immigrants are both taking jobs away from legal
Americans and undercutting their wage bargaining power.
President Barack Obama seized on
the February employment report, released Friday morning by the Labor
Department, to tout the supposed “success” of his economic policies and
paint a picture of a thriving US economy. The report, which showed a
larger-than-predicted growth in private nonfarm payrolls of 242,000
jobs, confirmed that the US economy was “the envy of the world,” Obama
told reporters at a White House appearance.
“The fact
of the matter is that the plans that we have put in place to grow the
economy have worked,” he boasted.” He derided “an alternative reality
out there from some of the political folks that America is down in the
dumps.” He countered, “America is pretty darn great right now.”
He
did not attempt to explain why the “alternative reality,” which his
labor secretary, Thomas Perez, attributed to “fear-mongers and
fact-deniers,” is believed by tens of millions of Americans, whose anger
over economic injustice is dramatically reflected in the current
election campaign.
One does not have to look too
closely at the Labor Department’s report, however, to get an idea of
what is fueling the social indignation of working people in the eighth
and final year of the Obama administration. Behind the top-line number
for new jobs and the quasi-fictional official unemployment rate of only
4.9 percent, ongoing trends with disastrous consequences for the working
class are evident. They account for two other important indices in the
report: a decline in average earnings from the previous month of 3
cents, or 0.1 percent, to $25.35, bringing the increase for the year
down to just 2.2 percent, and a fall in the average private-sector
workweek of 0.2 hours to 34.4 hours, a two-year low.
These
two figures arise from the fact that the vast bulk of new jobs created
in February were low-wage and a huge percentage were part-time. The
low-paying service sector—retail, bars and restaurants, health
care—accounted for 245,000 jobs. The reality of recession in basic
production was reflected in a 16,000 decline in manufacturing and the
loss of another 19,000 mining jobs, bringing to 171,000 the total
decline in mining since September 2014. The only better-paying
industrial sector that saw an increase was construction, which recorded a
gain of 19,000.
Another figure highlights the hollow
and socially regressive character of Obama’s so-called “recovery.” The
financial cable network CNBC pointed out that according to the Labor
Department’s household survey, which is the basis for the unemployment
rate figure (the figure on payroll growth is derived from a separate
survey of business establishments), full-time jobs increased in February
by only 65,000, while part-time positions increased by 489,000. This
means that a mere 11.7 percent of new jobs in February were full-time!
These
statistics point to the fact that the American ruling class, through
its instrument, the Obama administration, has utilized the financial
crash of 2008, for which it was responsible, to fundamentally reorganize
the US economy, transforming it into a low-wage system. The millions of
decent-paying jobs that were destroyed have been largely replaced by
poverty-wage, part-time and temporary jobs.
The median
household income has fallen sharply. Pensions and health benefits have
been gutted, schools closed by the thousands, teachers and other public
workers laid off by the millions. At the other end, the Federal Reserve
and the US Treasury have pumped trillions of dollars into the financial
markets, driving up the stock market and bringing the concentration of
wealth at the very top to unprecedented levels. This is what Obama lauds
as “success.”
Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain
mired in long-term unemployment. The number of long-term unemployed,
defined as without work for 27 weeks or more, was essentially unchanged
at 2.2 million in February. This number has not shifted significantly
since last June. The long-term jobless accounted last month for 27.7
percent of the unemployed, a far higher percentage than in any previous
period categorized as an economic recovery.
A broader
measure of unemployment that includes people working part-time but
wanting full-time work and those too discouraged to seek employment
registered 9.7 percent last month, nearly double the official jobless
rate. There are, in addition, millions of people who have dropped out of
the labor market and are not even counted in government employment
reports.
While the employment-to-population ratio edged
up to 59.8 percent and the labor force participation rate rose slightly
to 62.9 percent, both measures remain extraordinarily low by historical
standards.
The impact of soaring social inequality and falling
living standards for broad sections of the population is reflected in a
growing crisis in the retail sector. This week, sporting goods chain The
Sports Authority filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and
announced it was closing at least 140 of its 463 stores and laying off
3,400 of its 13,000 employees. This follows recent announcements by
Walmart, Sears/Kmart and Macy’s of hundreds of store closures and
thousands of layoffs.
Hillary
Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the champion of the little guy.
It has always been a risible claim, but if any of her supporters
(including at the Post) are actually paying attention to the scoundrel,
this latest gambit ought to disabuse them of the notion.
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton tells Breitbart News Daily host
Stephen K. Bannon that, in effect, unfettered illegal immigration is
“destroying this experiment” known as America and “the consequences will
come sooner than later and they will be negative in their entirety.”
Beginning the immigration discussion in Europe, said Bolton:
There’s a philosophy out there and it’s the kind of
conventional wisdom on the International Left that International
borders, you know, they’re just kind of there and really people should
be allowed to go anywhere they want. They don’t like to say that so
expressly publicly. And I guess I’m exaggerating for effect to an
extent, but the notion that a given nation – a Spain – can be filled
with, I know this is anachronistic, Spanish people, is something that
they reject. So, if you live in the Middle East and want to live in
Germany, why not?
When asked about America’s Southern border, said Bolton:
I think that after decades of being lectured by our
friends in Europe about out attitude toward illegal immigration, they’re
now seeing the chickens come home to roost. I think citizenship is a
critical concept in a democratic society and America has, over the
years, because of our melting pot phenomenon, our ability to integrate
people from all over the world – it’s our national motto E Pluribus Unum
– it has made us the greatest country in History. If you abandon that
and say that citizenship is for anybody that happens to be on our side
of the border, you’re destroying this experiment. And the consequences
will come sooner than later and they will be negative in their entirety.
Asked if the migrant issue in Europe is starting to become a national security issue for the United States, said Bolton:
Oh, I think it is. I think it’s already a national
security for Europe. I think you could possibly see the results of this
in the british referendum in June on whether they’re going to stay in
the European Union, or not. They’ve seen what happened in Paris in
November. Then back in January of 2015. They saw what happened in
Brussels just last week. They’ve seen people pushing to get on the
trains coming in the tunnel under the English Channel. And I think they
already have their own domestic difficulties in the UK and it’s going to
have an effect on that referendum. And I think it is on elections all
over Europe.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST. Hear the interview:
PEW: MEXICO BREEDS AN ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE OCCUPATION OF AMERICA
A new study
by George Borjas from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University reveals what many have long been concerned about when
it comes to illegal immigration into the United States. According
to Borjas' paper, the "employment rate of undocumented men is 86.6%, as
compared to 73.9% for natives and 77.8% for legal immigrants," and this
gap has been widening since the mid-1990s.
The
study shows that about 10% of all persons in their early 30s are
undocumented. In addition, 23% of illegal immigrants live in California,
7% reside in New York, and 15% live in Texas. Borjas reached the following conclusions:
Even
after the regression exhaustively controls for... skill differences --
and adjusts for the possibility that economic conditions varied
dramatically over time for each of the narrowly defined skill groups, as
well as for the possibility that economic conditions varied
dramatically among the different geographic regions where the three
groups tend to settle -- it is still the case that the employment rate
of immigrants, and particularly that of undocumented immigrant men,
increased dramatically relative to that of native-born persons.
More
evidence that illegal immigrants are both taking jobs away from legal
Americans and undercutting their wage bargaining power.
President Barack Obama seized on
the February employment report, released Friday morning by the Labor
Department, to tout the supposed “success” of his economic policies and
paint a picture of a thriving US economy. The report, which showed a
larger-than-predicted growth in private nonfarm payrolls of 242,000
jobs, confirmed that the US economy was “the envy of the world,” Obama
told reporters at a White House appearance.
“The fact
of the matter is that the plans that we have put in place to grow the
economy have worked,” he boasted.” He derided “an alternative reality
out there from some of the political folks that America is down in the
dumps.” He countered, “America is pretty darn great right now.”
He
did not attempt to explain why the “alternative reality,” which his
labor secretary, Thomas Perez, attributed to “fear-mongers and
fact-deniers,” is believed by tens of millions of Americans, whose anger
over economic injustice is dramatically reflected in the current
election campaign.
One does not have to look too
closely at the Labor Department’s report, however, to get an idea of
what is fueling the social indignation of working people in the eighth
and final year of the Obama administration. Behind the top-line number
for new jobs and the quasi-fictional official unemployment rate of only
4.9 percent, ongoing trends with disastrous consequences for the working
class are evident. They account for two other important indices in the
report: a decline in average earnings from the previous month of 3
cents, or 0.1 percent, to $25.35, bringing the increase for the year
down to just 2.2 percent, and a fall in the average private-sector
workweek of 0.2 hours to 34.4 hours, a two-year low.
These
two figures arise from the fact that the vast bulk of new jobs created
in February were low-wage and a huge percentage were part-time. The
low-paying service sector—retail, bars and restaurants, health
care—accounted for 245,000 jobs. The reality of recession in basic
production was reflected in a 16,000 decline in manufacturing and the
loss of another 19,000 mining jobs, bringing to 171,000 the total
decline in mining since September 2014. The only better-paying
industrial sector that saw an increase was construction, which recorded a
gain of 19,000.
Another figure highlights the hollow
and socially regressive character of Obama’s so-called “recovery.” The
financial cable network CNBC pointed out that according to the Labor
Department’s household survey, which is the basis for the unemployment
rate figure (the figure on payroll growth is derived from a separate
survey of business establishments), full-time jobs increased in February
by only 65,000, while part-time positions increased by 489,000. This
means that a mere 11.7 percent of new jobs in February were full-time!
These
statistics point to the fact that the American ruling class, through
its instrument, the Obama administration, has utilized the financial
crash of 2008, for which it was responsible, to fundamentally reorganize
the US economy, transforming it into a low-wage system. The millions of
decent-paying jobs that were destroyed have been largely replaced by
poverty-wage, part-time and temporary jobs.
The median
household income has fallen sharply. Pensions and health benefits have
been gutted, schools closed by the thousands, teachers and other public
workers laid off by the millions. At the other end, the Federal Reserve
and the US Treasury have pumped trillions of dollars into the financial
markets, driving up the stock market and bringing the concentration of
wealth at the very top to unprecedented levels. This is what Obama lauds
as “success.”
Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain
mired in long-term unemployment. The number of long-term unemployed,
defined as without work for 27 weeks or more, was essentially unchanged
at 2.2 million in February. This number has not shifted significantly
since last June. The long-term jobless accounted last month for 27.7
percent of the unemployed, a far higher percentage than in any previous
period categorized as an economic recovery.
A broader
measure of unemployment that includes people working part-time but
wanting full-time work and those too discouraged to seek employment
registered 9.7 percent last month, nearly double the official jobless
rate. There are, in addition, millions of people who have dropped out of
the labor market and are not even counted in government employment
reports.
While the employment-to-population ratio edged
up to 59.8 percent and the labor force participation rate rose slightly
to 62.9 percent, both measures remain extraordinarily low by historical
standards.
The impact of soaring social inequality and falling
living standards for broad sections of the population is reflected in a
growing crisis in the retail sector. This week, sporting goods chain The
Sports Authority filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and
announced it was closing at least 140 of its 463 stores and laying off
3,400 of its 13,000 employees. This follows recent announcements by
Walmart, Sears/Kmart and Macy’s of hundreds of store closures and
thousands of layoffs.
Hillary
Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the champion of the little guy.
It has always been a risible claim, but if any of her supporters
(including at the Post) are actually paying attention to the scoundrel,
this latest gambit ought to disabuse them of the notion.
...........................
Will Mexico elect America's next President? Didn't LA RAZA FASCIST
PARTY, which is funded by Barack Obama and operates out of the Obama
white house under Cecilia Munoz, reelect Obama???
DON'T BELIEVE THE LIES! IT'S ALL LA RAZA PROPAGANDA TO EXPAND MEXICO'S OCCUPATION! MILLIONS
OF MEXICANS HAVE MILLIONS OF AMERICAN JOBS WITH STOLEN IDENTITIES. THEY
ALSO DRIVE ILLEGALLY, CONTRACT ILLEGALLY AND SEND BACK TENS OF BILLIONS
IN DRUG PROFITS TO NARCOMEX. THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS LONG BEEN SABOTAGING STATES' ATTEMPT TO CURB LA RAZA FASCIST FROM VOTING. MEXICO KNOWS THAT THE 40 MILLION LOOTING MEXICANS DON'T HAVE TO BE "PERMANENT RESIDENTS" TO GO VOTE FOR MORE! HILLARY CLINTON HAS ALREADY PROMISED THE MEX OCCUPIERS 49 MORE MEXIFORNIAS!
March 21, 2016
Mexican government urging US immigrants to become citizens and vote
Mexican
consulates in the U.S. are hosting citizenship clinics across the
country, hoping to convince permanent residents from Mexico to become
U.S. citizens so they can vote against Donald Trump. The pious declaration from the Mexican government that they are not "interfering" in the U.S. election fails the smell test. Bloomberg:
Joel
Diaz doesn’t want to wait to see how it all turns out. The
Mexican-American, who has been a permanent resident of the U.S. for six
years, arrived at the Mexican consulate in Chicago on Saturday with his
wife and four adult sons to register all of them as U.S. citizens in
order to vote against Trump.
"We’re
very worried," Diaz, 47, an evangelical pastor, said. "If he wins there
will be a lot of damage against a lot of people here, and to us as
Hispanics, as Mexicans."
Laura
Espinosa, deputy consul in Mexico’s consulate in Las Vegas, said the
main goal of the program is citizenship, and while that includes the
right to vote, the government doesn’t press people to do so. "Those who
use this to vote, that’s up to each individual," said Espinosa, who
confirmed that most consulates have begun citizenship campaigns. "We
don’t have any opinion on that, because that would be totally
interfering in internal affairs of the country."
The
government in Mexico City is holding off on engaging the Trump campaign
directly until he becomes the nominee, said Francisco Guzman, chief of
staff to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Speaking with reporters
on March 1, Guzman said the government plans to communicate with the
campaigns of the nominees once they’re chosen and try to dispel what it
considers misinformation about Mexico and Mexicans.
The
public-relations offensive now under way includes using news outlets
and social media to highlight the strides Mexicans have made in
business, the arts and academia in the U.S., said Paulo Carreno, the
former spokesman of Citigroup Inc.’s Mexico unit who oversees the
country’s international branding strategy.
Promoting
Mexico in the U.S., from its scholars to artists, is meant "not to
influence an election, but a whole generation and those that follow,"
Carreno said in an e-mailed response to questions. "The strategy will be
an important anchor in our consular network in the country."
It
should be noted that the chances of the Mexican government succeeding
in getting enough of their people to become U.S. citizens so that they
can make a difference in the 2016 election are low. But over a period
of years, that could change – especially if the Republicans continue to
refuse to compete for the Hispanic vote. Immigration issues are not the
end-all and be-all for Hispanics in the U.S. They have the same
concerns as any American about the economy and the culture.
Not
even trying to persuade Hispanics that the GOP's agenda would be better
for them than the Democrats will continue to make any national election
and uphill climb for the Republican candidate.
Today the chairman of the House appropriations
subcommittee in charge of funding the Department of Justice, John
Culberson (R-Texas), put the Obama administration on notice that it must
take steps to rein in sanctuary jurisdictions or risk problems getting
approval for its own budget requests. In addition, Culberson announced
that he will begin requiring local jurisdictions to follow federal law
and stop obstructing communication with immigration agencies as a
condition for receiving certain federal law enforcement funding.
BLOG:
LIKE ALL OF OBAMA'S CABINET, ONE MUST FIRST BE CONNECTED TO THE
BANKSTER SECTOR AND SECONDLY BE AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS, SABOTAGE
E-VERIFY AND PROMOTE THE INTERESTS OF LA RAZA ABOVE LEGALS. THAT IS
EXACTLY WHAT LORETTA LYNCH HAS AND WILL DO.
In a sternly worded letter
to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Culberson said that he has a
responsibility to ensure that state and local law enforcement agencies
are following federal law before they can get federal grants. He said
that sanctuary policies restricting communication between local and
federal officials are a clear violation of Section 1373
of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Among the jurisdictions that
have imposed such policies are San Francisco, Cook County, Ill., and New
York City. In addition to prohibiting local officers from communicating
with immigration authorities, these jurisdictions bar federal officers
from coming into jails to interview or arrest deportable criminals.
State and local sanctuary policies obstruct immigration enforcement
and cause the release of criminal aliens back to the streets of American
communities. According to ICE records that the Center obtained in a
FOIA request, in 2014 more than 9,000 criminal aliens that ICE was
seeking to deport were instead released. More than 2,300 of these
criminal aliens went on to commit additional crimes within just a few
months.
The three law enforcement funding programs that could become
off-limits to sanctuaries currently dispense more than $1 billion a year
to state and local agencies.
Mr. Culberson contacted the Center shortly after the publication of this information
in July, saying that he had long sought concrete information on the
extent of this problem and that he was determined to use his authority
to address it. The Center has compiled a list of over 300 cities,
counties, and states that have laws, ordinances, regulations,
resolutions, policies, or other practices that protect criminal aliens
from deportation — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from
complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on
detainer acceptance, or otherwise impeding open communication and
information exchanges between their employees or officers and federal
immigration officers. These jurisdictions are noted on a map here.
Culberson's letter outlines several steps he expects the Justice Department to take:
Beginning this year, amend the grant application forms for the
Byrne/Justice Assistance Grants (JAG), Community Oriented Policing
Services (COPS) grants, and State Criminal Alien Assistance Program
(SCAAP) reimbursement program to require agencies seeking these funds to
swear that they do not have policies that violate Section 1373; and
Work with sanctuary jurisdictions to change their policies, and if
they do not, take legal action to compel their compliance with federal
law;
Deny funding to any non-compliant sanctuary jurisdictions.
In addition, he asks the attorney general to look at whether
jurisdictions that release criminal aliens sought by ICE are in
violation of 8 USC 1324,
the federal felony statute that prohibits anyone from shielding illegal
aliens from detection. After all, these jurisdictions have been
notified in writing by the detainers (federal Form I-247) that the
aliens' identities and status have been confirmed by biometric
fingerprint matching, and that federal agents wish to take custody of
the aliens, and/or to be notified of the date, time, and place of
release — so the sanctuaries are knowingly releasing deportable aliens
sought by ICE. He said that he will consider applying this section of
the law next year to block funding to jurisdictions that release
criminal aliens sought by ICE. This action could affect the hundreds of
agencies that fail to comply with or accept ICE detainers, for example.
Culberson warned that if the administration stubbornly continues to
tolerate sanctuaries, he will find it hard to look favorably on any
spending requests from DOJ in the coming appropriations season: "I hope
the attorney general will do the right thing here so that I am not
compelled to object to relevant portions of the Department's spending
plan and reprogramming requests. Any refusal by the Department to comply
with these reasonable and timely requests will factor heavily in my
consideration of their 2017 budget requests."
Even following public outcry over a series of cases of murders
committed by criminal aliens after release by sanctuaries, including the
killing of Kate Steinle in San Francisco, the Obama administration has
resisted calls for action to discourage or punish the jurisdictions that
obstruct immigration enforcement. Instead, it has pressed ahead in
implementing the so-called Priority Enforcement Program, which
explicitly allows sanctuary policies that violate federal law. It's
clear that the administration is more interested in protecting criminal
aliens than in protecting the public from their acts; now we'll see if
the Department of Justice is willing to jeopardize its own funding to
spare sanctuaries from being sanctioned, and if the sanctuaries are
willing to sacrifice federal funding in order to protect criminal
aliens.
Surge in Illegal Aliens, 500% Increase in Some U.S. Ports of Entry
Judicial Watch Corruption Chronicles, December 30, 2015
The agency’s own statistics certainly contradict that, showing that the
southern border region is as porous and vulnerable as ever. Other entry
ports that saw large hikes in Central American illegal immigrants during
the first two months of this fiscal year include Del Rio, Texas (269%),
El Centro, California (216%) and Rio Grande Valley, Texas (154%). The
Border Patrol breaks the stats down by “family unit” and illegal
immigrants under the age of 18, referred to as “Unaccompanied Alien
Children” or UAC. The Rio Grande Valley port of entry topped the list in
both categories with 8,537 family units and 6,465 UACs during the
two-month period. In all, the nation’s nine southern border crossings
saw an average of 173% increase in family units and a 106% increase in
minors during the short period considered.
Some of the
illegal immigrants are Mexican nationals, but the overwhelming majority
comes from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The government records
show that somehow 4,450 family units from El Salvador evaded our
topnotch border security and entered the United States in a period of
only two months. Guatemala and Honduras had 3,934 and 3,203
respectively. Mexico had 538 family units. Of interesting note is that,
during this period, the Border Patrol reports 35,234 apprehensions in
the region of foreigners labeled by the government as “Other Than
Mexican” or OTM. This is a term used by federal authorities to refer to
nationals of countries that represent a terrorist threat to the U.S.
. . . http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2015/12/surge-in-illegal-aliens-500-increase-in-some-u-s-ports-of-entry/
Dan Golvach, father of Spencer Golvach, at his son's grave in Houston Tuesday, October 20, 2015.
The
Texas Tribune is taking a yearlong look at the issues of border
security and immigration, reporting on the reality and rhetoric around
these topics. Sign up to get story alerts.
HOUSTON — Julie Golvach remembers that something felt “off” the night she lost her only child.
It was exactly one year ago today, a few minutes before 1 a.m.
Standing in the driveway of her Houston home, waving goodbye to her
sister under a clear winter sky, something didn't feel right. The stars
didn’t look the same.
Golvach tossed and turned in bed for a while but was sound asleep when a knock on the door came at 6 a.m.
“I jumped up and I knew,” she said.
She stopped by her son’s boyhood bedroom, the one with the window
looking out onto the driveway. He’d slept there a week earlier, the
evening they went to see "American Sniper" together. She slipped past
the picture of him and his best childhood friend on the wall, skirting
the bed with the stuffed toy lamb — a baby shower relic — lying on top.
Out the window, Golvach saw three people — two uniformed police
officers and a woman wearing a shirt that read “chaplain.” Her chest
pounded as she made her way to the front door and opened it.
“Is it Spencer?” she asked.
The second those words tumbled out of her mouth, she knew the answer,
just as she had known when she uttered that exact phrase the day he was
born, before anyone told her if the baby was a boy or a girl. She just
knew.
It was Spencer. One night off
Spencer Golvach grew up in the sprawl of northwest Houston,
surrounded by guitars and destined for a career in music, his father’s
passion.
When he turned 16 in 2005 and got his driver’s license, the easygoing
musician started working at a local guitar store in a strip mall not
far from Jersey Village High School, where he excelled in shop class and
anything he could do with his hands.
He had always fiddled with his dad’s guitars, and he developed a
knack for fixing and rebuilding them at the store. A few years later,
when the shop owner announced his retirement, Spencer decided to buy the
Cy-Fair area business.
Spencer Golvach, at the age of three,
pictured with a guitar. Authorities say Golvach was killed by Victor
Reyes, an undocumented immigrant, during a random shooting spree in
January 2015.
With nine employees and a soft economy, life as an entrepreneur
proved tough sledding. He struggled to turn a profit, and he took a
second full-time job as a receiving lead and forklift operator at a
local warehouse.
Even that wasn’t enough to cover the bills. By early 2015, Spencer
was preparing to move into a smaller — and cheaper — space in the same
shopping mall. He could hardly wait for Saturday, Jan. 31 to arrive, the
day the slimmed-down version of Spencer’s Guitar Shop was set to open.
Between giving guitar lessons, working an 8-to-5 day job, building out
the new store and playing bass in his band — The Dead Revolt — Spencer
needed a break.
“The guy was burning the candle at both ends for a long time,”
recalled Dan Golvach, his father. “He takes one night off, to go take
his girlfriend out for her birthday. That was Jan. 30. And he drops her
off ... and 15 minutes later he pulls up to that red light.”
Less than a mile from his apartment, Spencer steered into the left
turn lane at 18th Street and Mangum Road and waited for the green light.
The details of what happened next are captured in the records of two
police agencies, more than a dozen news articles and the unceasing
nightmares of Spencer’s parents and loved ones.
An undocumented Mexican national named Victor Reyes, a native of
Reynosa along the Texas-Mexico border, pulled up next to Spencer's
beloved white Toyota pickup. He pointed a pistol at Spencer’s head and
pulled the trigger.
The bullet went through the passenger side window and into Spencer’s skull, at the top of his right ear.
“I choose to believe it killed him instantly,” his father said in an
interview months later. “I think he was just there and then it’s like
someone turned the lights off. I don’t think he suffered.”
But the Golvach family’s suffering — compounded by the feeling that
Spencer’s death could have been prevented — was just beginning.
Houston police, their report indicates, found 25-year-old Spencer
dead in his truck at 12:56 a.m. — right around the moment Julie Golvach,
waving goodbye to her sister, couldn't shake the feeling that something
was off.
A few hours later, she was phoning her ex-husband to break the news.
“I couldn’t make out what she was saying and I finally just said, ‘is my son dead?’”— Dan Golvach
“She was just inconsolable,” he recalled. “I couldn’t make out what
she was saying and I finally just said, ‘is my son dead?’ She said,
‘yes.’ Then of course I started. I joined the chorus.”
More than a thousand people attended Spencer’s memorial service, a
tribute to his fun-loving nature and penchant for making friends across
generational, ethnic and gender lines.
Those who knew Spencer universally describe him as fun-loving and
strikingly calm. After he died, a family friend ordered up a batch of
commemorative rubber bracelets emblazoned with his laid-back motto:
“Chill Don’t Freeze."
A bloody rampage
More than once since the funeral, Julie Golvach has found herself
wishing that her son’s attacker had gotten to know Spencer. She’s
convinced he never would have pulled the trigger. But the official
evidence of the crime, while scant, suggests Spencer was chosen
randomly. And he wasn’t the only victim.
Police say Reyes shot a man in the face, wounding him, in the
suburban city of Jersey Village minutes before killing Spencer, and they
connected him to at least two more random shootings shortly thereafter.
All told, Reyes shot two dead and wounded three others before a Harris
County Sheriff’s deputy took him down after a violent shootout,
officials say.
John Weston, 67, says he’s lucky to be alive after encountering Reyes
on the Hempstead Highway near Pinemont, about 10 minutes north of where
Spencer had just been killed. He remembers seeing a big, dark truck
driving aggressively behind him. When he got to the stoplight, it pulled
up alongside him.
“All of a sudden I hear this ungodly noise,” Weston recalled. “I
don’t know if you can imagine how fast your mind works, but I saw a
shattered window and I saw a bullet hole in my window. My mind is
thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, somebody’s shooting at me and this guy at
this light.’”
He pressed his foot to the accelerator to get out of the line of
fire, but not soon enough. He heard the second shot, and its impact felt
like someone “hauled off and hit you upside the head,” he said.
Weston realized the truck's driver was the gunman. “I saw blood
everywhere,” he said. His hands were covered in it, so he could only
manage to re-dial on his cell phone. He finally reached his wife, who
told him to go to the nearest toll booth. An ambulance was called.
Doctors found that a bullet had entered his left cheek and stuck in the
other side of his mouth.
A year later, after reconstructive surgery to replace a badly
shattered jaw, his mouth remains completely numb below the tongue. With
his health woes and lost time at work, he’s struggling to keep his
printing business afloat.
“Everything I do now is a little more difficult, but considering I’m
here talking, I’m blessed to be here,” Weston said. “It’s scarred me
forever. I don’t break down and cry, but I think about it all the time.”
Had Reyes been a homegrown criminal, the story might have ended in
the empty field where the deputy shot him — chalked up as another random
act of violence in a city and nation all too used to them.
But as word spread about Reyes’ long criminal record and multiple
deportations, the case was thrust into the volatile debate over illegal
immigration and control of the southern border: first in local news
stories, then at the Capitol in Austin and most recently on the
presidential campaign trail — on a stage in
mid-November with GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump in Beaumont,
where Dan Golvach spoke out and held up a poster of Spencer along with
others killed by undocumented immigrants. Gunman's long record According to the Houston office of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, Reyes had been removed from the country four times between
2003 and 2010, but little is publicly known about what he was doing in
Houston prior to terrorizing its northwest environs — or why he did it. His criminal and illegal entry records stretch back at least to 2002
when, at age 18, he was convicted of burglarizing a building in Hidalgo
County, across the border from Reynosa, which he told police was his
place of birth. He spent a month and a half in jail before a state court
sentenced him to three years' probation, ordered him to pay an $850
fine and mandated 120 hours of community service.
Victor Reyes, shown in 2001 jail mug shot
from Hidalgo County. Authorities say Reyes, an undocumented immigrant,
went on a January 2015 shooting spree in Harris County that killed two
and wounded three.
A year later, he was back in the Hidalgo County Jail for breaking a
beer bottle over a man’s head at the Tejano Saloon in Pharr. He was sent
back to Mexico after serving about a month in the local jail, but he
came back. By then, his previous probation had been revoked, and he
served several months in a state jail in Raymondville. Deported again on Jan. 20, 2004, Reyes was caught trying to cross the
border the next day, triggering a 90-day sentence in federal prison and
yet another deportation — his third. A few months later, on Aug. 10, he was caught again, in McAllen, and
received a one-year federal prison sentence for his fourth known illegal
re-entry. His crimes didn’t end there. A few weeks before his prison
release date, Reyes beat up a fellow inmate — described by his lawyer as
a rival gang member — cutting and fracturing his face, according to
federal court records. Two new assault charges made Reyes eligible for 20 years behind bars.
Despite his history of violence, burglary and repeat illegal crossings,
federal prosecutors offered Reyes a deal: In exchange for a guilty plea
on one of the counts, and in recognition of his “truthful testimony”
and “acceptance of responsibility,” they promised to give him a sentence
“at the lowest end of the applicable guidelines” on a single charge,
court papers show. Under the plea bargain, Reyes' sentence was 63
months, a quarter of the maximum he faced under the two counts. That’s a few more spoonfuls of salt in the wound for Dan and Julie
Golvach. Had Reyes been given even half of his possible sentence on the
two assault counts, he would have been in prison instead of at that
traffic light killing their son.
“The people who agreed to this deal need to be held accountable,”
Julie Golvach said. “The result was the horrific murder of my son.”
The prosecutor who signed the plea agreement, Assistant U.S. Attorney
Tim Hammer, declined to talk about the case, referring questions to
U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Angela Dodge in Houston.
Dodge sent The Texas Tribune a boilerplate description of plea deals,
saying they “ensure a resolution of the case and that someone is
convicted of the crime(s) we believe they committed without going
through the time and expense of a trial,” while providing “justice for
all.” She declined to say whether prosecutors took Reyes' previous
crimes into account, or if they frequently offer plea deals to convicted
criminals who commit additional crimes behind bars.
It’s another official secret in a case with no shortage of them. Family still seeking answers
The Houston Police Department, using its own discretion under the
Public Information Act, blocked release of all but a few details on the
Golvach and Weston shootings. The department cited a provision allowing
it to withhold criminal records absent a final disposition, such as a
conviction or deferred adjudication. Since Reyes is dead and the city’s
case is otherwise closed, that means Houston police likely can withhold
the information indefinitely.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office declined to release its
investigative files, but for an entirely different reason: After every
officer-involved shooting — in this case, a deputy ended Reyes’ deadly
rampage — the Harris County district attorney’s office presents the case
to a grand jury even if no one complains. That happened last week, just
days before the one-year anniversary of the shooting spree.
The federal government holds onto its files with a tight grip, too,
citing the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act. The act covers only U.S. citizens and
lawful permanent residents, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement has
decreed that its protections apply to federal immigration detention
records, even those related to undocumented immigrants convicted of
horrific crimes. The agency voluntarily released a narrative of its
multiple encounters with Reyes, but the Tribune has not yet heard back
from ICE or U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services on its written
request for his entire immigration file.
The secrecy across local and federal
agencies that came into contact with Reyes confounded and frustrated
the people touched by his violence. Weston said his wife became “very
disillusioned” about their quest for even the simplest answers.
Dan Golvach, father of Spencer Golvach,
in Houston Tuesday, October 20, 2015 at the intersection where his son
was killed by an undocumented immigrant in January.
“I mean, we asked them, ‘Who was the guy?’” Weston said. “We had to
fill out paperwork and all that kind of stuff, but we never got any
satisfactory answer. It was almost like it was top secret information.”
Hoping to break through the bureaucratic walls and get some answers
about who killed their son and why, the Golvaches eventually hired a
former investigative reporter, ex-KTRK-TV newsman Wayne Dolcefino. In a
letter last year to then-Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia, Dolcefino
said the sheriff’s office was “doing a disservice to this crime victim
by not responding to this request in a proper manner.” The local
investigative files remained sealed as of late last week, but the Harris
County Sheriff's Office asked the Tribune to resubmit its request for
the records and promised a quick turnaround.
Even with new information beginning to trickle out, the victims and
their families still don't know where Reyes lived or if he had a job,
who owned the truck he was driving that night or — least of all — the
motive for his deadly rampage.
According to Harris County Assistant District Attorney Heyward Carter, some elements of the senseless crime may never be known.
Carter, who handled a single aspect of the case — the
officer-involved shooting — was able to speak about the case for the
first time last week. He revealed that Reyes was "extremely intoxicated"
and had a "significant amount of cocaine" in his system. He also
identified the weapon, a .380 caliber pistol, that he said was legally
purchased at one point, but authorities haven't determined how a
convicted felon and undocumented immigrant, barred from buying or
possessing firearms, obtained it.
“We live in an age of mass shootings, and even though this one didn’t get a whole lot of publicity, that’s what this is."
— Heyward Carter, Harris County Assistant District Attorney
Carter also provided details about the actions of the Harris County
deputy sheriff, Javier Rojas, who finally put an end to the deadly
rampage. By chance, Rojas was patrolling the area and heard shots being
fired. He saw the truck of Reyes' final victim, identified by police as
Juan Garcia, in obvious distress, weaving randomly at an intersection.
Garcia later died from his wounds, and a woman in the car with him was
slightly injured from the broken glass.
Rojas chased after Reyes, who crashed his truck through a barrier at
the end of a dead end street and went another 200 yards or so into an
empty field. Rojas continued the pursuit on foot and found Reyes
crouching behind the truck. He ordered the suspect to drop his weapon
but Reyes stood and fired at the officer instead. Rojas returned fire
and struck him in the chest. When authorities photographed the body his
hand was still gripping the pistol "with his finger on the trigger,"
Carter said.
In terms of a motive, authorities can only speculate based on a
conversation Reyes had with a supposed girlfriend about three hours
before the shooting spree began. He wanted her to go out to a bar or
nightclub with him, and she turned him down. Authorities speculate he
may have been taking out his rage on couples: It's possible he saw
Spencer Golvach dropping off his girlfriend shortly before shooting him
at the red light and then targeted Garcia after seeing he had a woman in
his vehicle.
But it's just a theory.
“We live in an age of mass shootings, and even though this one didn’t
get a whole lot of publicity, that’s what this is," Carter said. "I
don’t understand why he was doing it.”
Carter did confirm what the families had learned from detectives
in the immediate aftermath of the shootings: Reyes still had plenty of
ammunition left in his truck — suggesting that he was planning a more
extensive shooting spree. There were at least 20 live rounds left in the
vehicle, and he appeared to be reloading while driving near the scene
of his final attack.
“Had this officer not been there just coincidentally ... there were
plenty of roads for him to go down. He had plenty of ammo, and it didn't
seem like he was stopping, that's for sure," Carter said. "As horrible
as this situation was, it could have been way worse.”
After the facts were presented to grand jury last Wednesday, the
panel decided not to proceed with any further action related to the
incident. The Golvach family calls Rojas' response heroic. "Why was he allowed to be here?" Julie Golvach burst out into tears
again last week after hearing for the first time some of the details of
the crime that took her son's life. “I really feel I deserve to know
what brought them together at that point in time, what caused him to
shoot my son,” she said. “I think we deserve to know why he was even
here — why he was allowed to be here.”
It’s a common refrain among those who have been victimized by people
in the country illegally. They weren’t supposed to be here in the first
place, and the government's inability to keep them from crossing the
southern border after they’ve been deported — and prevent them from
committing crimes — provokes a unique brand of helplessness and outrage.
Even Weston, a lifelong Democrat who attended both of Barack Obama’s
inaugurations and favors allowing otherwise law-abiding immigrants into
the United States to work and seek a better life, said he had to fight
the urge to call Donald Trump and tell him he was “dead-on” with his
focus on foreigners who commit crimes here.
“Somebody’s got to do something about it,” he said. In the same
breath, Weston emphasized that he doesn’t support Trump for president
and said keeping dangerous felons from crossing the border or entering
the vast illegal workforce defied simplistic solutions.
“If there’s some way to filter out the ones that intend to harm
people, I would be in support of that,” he said. “It may prevent
something like this from happening to somebody else.”
Dan Golvach is more blunt and outspoken. A few weeks after his son’s
murder, he was at the state Capitol testifying in favor of 2015 state
legislation — ultimately doomed — that would have prohibited local law
enforcement authorities in Texas from adopting “sanctuary” policies that
keep police out of immigration matters.
Then late last year, he appeared with Trump at a campaign rally in
Beaumont, saying his son died as “the result of politically correct
politics” — namely, bipartisan policies that he believes go too easy on
undocumented immigrants and the people who hire them.
“When you lose the thing you love the most, you’re not that worried
about being PC,” Golvach said in an interview. “If you’re going to come
here, you need to do it legally on our terms, not your terms.”
Golvach readily admits that anger over his son’s killing sometimes
hits “toxic” levels. He says he’s still haunted by the image of Spencer
in a hastily chosen coffin, still upset he was killed right next to the
stadium where he used to watch baseball as a kid, still mad as hell that
the government won’t cough up the records they have on his son’s
killer.
It would be worse without all the good memories of his son, and
without the certainty that if Spencer were alive today he would say to
him: “chill don’t freeze.”
“He’d tell me, ‘Don’t have a heart attack. You know, clear your mind
and keep it cool,'” he said. “He would tell me not to hate anybody.”
WHAT IS THE IMPACT OF OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS, AMERICA'S SOARING POVERTY RATES, SOARING MURDER RATES, SOARING WEALTH TRANSFERRED TO THE RICHEST AND OBAMA'S OPEN BORDERS ON A NATION MARCHING TO CIVIL WAR?
Since
the beginning of the year, the city of Chicago has experienced
135 homicides, a 71% increase over the same period last year. This puts
the city on pace for more than 500 homicides for the year – a figure
topped only once since 2008.
As
of 6 a.m. Wednesday, homicides totaled 135, a 71 percent jump over the
79 killings in the same year-earlier period, official Police Department
statistics show. That represented the worst first quarter of a year
since 136 homicides in 1999, according to the data.
Shootings
have jumped by comparable numbers as well. As of Wednesday, at least
727 people had been shot in Chicago so far this year, a 73 percent rise
from 422 a year earlier, according to a Tribune analysis of department
data.
Worse
yet, that jump follows two consecutive years in which shootings rose by
double digits, the analysis found. Homicides also rose by about 12.5
percent last year over 2014. If
there was any hopeful sign in the numbers, it would be that for most of
March, homicides rose citywide by a more modest 25 percent from the
same year-earlier period, the department said.
That's a "hopeful sign"? Really?
Crime
experts caution about making year-to-year comparisons, but Arthur
Lurigio, a professor of criminal justice and psychology at Loyola
University Chicago, called the escalating violence at the start of the
year "alarming."
"We
have to go back decades to find jumps of this magnitude in year-to-year
comparisons," he said. "We're on our way to 500 homicides again. We're
going backward."
After
an unrelated news conference Wednesday, new interim police
Superintendent Eddie Johnson found an optimistic note in the recent
slowing of the percentage increase in homicides. "If we can build on that momentum, we'll be doing good," he said.
Johnson
said gang conflicts and the proliferation of guns continue to fuel the
violence. The department also disclosed that more than half of the
homicide victims so far this year had been targeted as likely gun
violence victims or offenders in a novel program in which commanders try
to persuade them to give up the gang life.
Blaming
the violence on an increase in guns is par for the course in urban
environments. Far more at fault is a police department that is
demoralized over scandals and lack of leadership:
In
February, the Tribune reported a precipitous drop in morale among
Chicago police, citing interviews with numerous officers. They told the
newspaper the McDonald shooting had made them less aggressive on the
street out of fear that doing even basic police work would get them into
trouble. Criminals were taking advantage of their passive approach,
they said.
The
Police Department on Jan. 1 also began requiring that cops fill out
detailed reports every time they make a street stop as part of a new
state law and a landmark agreement worked out with the American Civil
Liberties Union. The change — the result of concerns over racial
profiling — has not only kept officers busy with paperwork longer than
before, officers said, but also increased their anxiety about being
second-guessed on whom they've stopped.
The
result was that officers made 6,818 arrests in January, a 32 percent
drop from nearly 10,000 arrests a year earlier. The number of street
stops also has plummeted, with 9,044 investigatory stop reports issued
in January, a fraction of the 61,330 "contact cards" that police issued
during January 2015.
While
officers are filling out idiotic paperwork, gangbangers are running
wild in the streets. In effect, cops have to prove their innocence of
racial profiling every single day.
Perhaps we should be surprised the murder rate isn't higher, given the circumstances.
Chicago has become the most stereotypical example of what many
dream the Wild West was like in the days before the law went west of the
Mississippi. It is already so bad this year that at 144 total
homicides, the city has seen an 84 percent increase over this time last
year.
According to DNAInfo.com
the first three months of 2016 have seen more shootings than the first
three months of any year in over a decade. With 790 shot so far this
year, that is over 80 percent higher then the 419 March ended with in
2015.
“We have a level of shootings and level of gun violence on the South
and the West side that is unacceptable,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said
recently, as he looked for a new top cop earlier this month.
But according to The New York Times, the Chicago police may
have some role in the increased violence, because they’ve pulled back
from random stops policy they had put in place in years past. Many say
these random stops helped reduce the crime rate due to the large number
of guns confiscated by the policy. But since the CPD has pulled way back
on such stops, these guns are not being removed from the streets. As the Times wrote this month:
Since January, officers have recorded 20,908 instances in
which they stopped, patted down and questioned people for suspicious
behavior, compared with 157,346 in the same period last year. Gun
seizures are also down: 1,316 guns have been taken off the streets this
year compared with 1,413 at this time last year.
By contrast, as New York Magazinereports,
with almost three times more citizens than Chicago, New York City has
had only 60 homicides this year. And that is a 20 percent drop over this
time last year.
Still, while an outlier in the huge number of crimes using guns,
Chicago is far from the only large U.S. city seeing a rise in the murder
rate.
A recent report in The Washington Post
found the number of homicides in the country’s 50 largest cities is up
17 percent, the greatest increase in 25 years. The rates are higher over
2015, which itself was a hike over 2014. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com
DURING THE EIGHT YEARS OF OBAMA'S "HOPE AND NO CHANGE", TWO -THIRDS OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN, BOTH LEGALS AND ILLEGALS. THE
MILLIONS OF AMERICAN THAT SUNK INTO POVERTY HAS SOARED, JUST AS THE
CRIMES AND PROFITS OF OBAMA - CLINTON CRONIES ON WALL STREET!
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: Serve the Rich, Obama's Crony
Banksters, and the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA to
keep wages depressed and corporate profits even greater!
CAN WE REALLY AFFORD ANOTHER WALL STREET-OWNED PRESIDENCY THAT CLINTON 2 WOULD ESTABLISH???
Independent news at its best. If it's blacked-out, covered-up or censored, you can find it here!
March 23, 2016
Statistic of the Week:The amount of assets/wealth the average adult has in each country:
Belgium - $150,348
UK - $126,472
Norway - $119,634
Japan - $96,071
France - $86,156
Canada - $74,750
Netherlands - $74,659
USA - $49,787
-from Credit Suisse via Institute for Policy Studies
IT WAS BILL CLINTON WHO UNLEASHED WALL STREET'S BIGGEST CRIMINAL BANKSTERS ON US. IT WAS BILL CLINTON WHO HANDED PARDONS TO NUMEROUS CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRES. IT
IS BILL CLINTON THAT OPERATES THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION WHICH IS
FUNDED BY CRIMINAL CRONY BILLIONAIRES, DICTATORS AND BANKSTERS THAT OWN
HILLARY!
Unless the political establishment is willing to
learn from the anger felt by millions of Americans who feel left
behind, this will not end in November. (Photo: istockphoto)
The Washington political establishment has hit the panic button.
Not because they are afraid of any one individual or candidate, but
because they are afraid of losing their own political power.
The Washington political establishment
has hit the panic button.
This town is filled with well intentioned people who believe they are
doing the right thing, but far too many have lost their way after years
in Washington. Politicians pay more attention to special interests
groups and powerful lobbyists writing checks to their next campaigns
than listening to the people back home who sent them here in the first
place.
This dangerous power vacuum has fueled frustration and
created an
entirely new breed of disenfranchised voters who
are fed up with the
status quo. These are real people, their
anger is palpable, and it’s not
going away anytime soon.
The Daily Signal is the multimedia news
organization of The Heritage Foundation. We’ll respect your inbox and
keep you informed.
A recent survey of likely Republican primary voters showed that 86
percent believe that “people like me don’t have any say about what the
government does.” Another recent exit poll in my home state of Georgia
showed that six in ten Republicans felt “betrayed” by their political
party. >>> To Read More on This, See Conservatives Win When They Run on Conservative Ideas. This sentiment is something I heard
countless times during my campaign for the United States Senate just
over a short year ago. It is what pulled me to get involved personally
to try and make a difference. But this is not just happening in Georgia.
People across America are angry, frustrated, and scared because they
feel as though Washington is not listening to them.
A growing number of Americans are more motivated by this feeling of frustration than any individual political ideology.
A growing number of Americans are more motivated by this feeling of
frustration than any individual political ideology. The rise of career
politicians has completely shifted the political paradigm from just
liberal versus conservative. There is now a disconnect between the
Washington political class and everybody else—the insiders versus the
outsiders.
When most Americans look at the federal government, all
they see
is years of failed policies that have made life harder
for them and
their families, and a political class that is well
connected and
uninterested in giving them a say in how to
right the ship.
People are still hurting, and they are weary of Washington’s penchant
for business as usual.
Georgians sent me—someone who had never run for
elected office—to the United States Senate to try and do something about
it and change the system. In state after state this year, voters have
voiced support for presidential candidates who are not part of the
political class.
This is a growing movement, and it is bigger than any one candidate
or election victory. Unless the political establishment is willing to
learn from the anger felt by millions of Americans who feel left behind,
this will not end in November.
True to form, though, political elites prefer tearing down
individuals to understanding what created this movement. This movement
of Americans wants nothing to do with Washington, and neither
endorsements nor criticisms are going to change that.
No matter who our Republican presidential nominee is at the end of
this process, one thing is clear: We cannot allow Democrats to double
down on the failed policies of the last seven years.
A better course of action would be a candid examination of what can
be done to regain the trust of the American people. Let’s start with
simply listening to them.
"Let’s start with
simply listening to them"
BLOG: EVEN
WITH POLLS DOCUMENTING THAT
ONLY 9% OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
APPROVE OF
CONGRESS, IT IS BUSINESS AS USUAL;
ENDLESS LOOTING FOR THEIR PAYMASTERS
ON WALL
STREET AND SURRENDERING MORE OF OUR BORDERS,
JOBS AND WELFARE TO
INVADING MEXICANS!
HILLARY CLINTON SAYS MILLIONS MORE VOTING
ILLEGAL SHOULD BE HANDED OBAMACARE! CLINTON'S PLATFORM IS SIMPLE: BUILD THE MEX
WELFARE STATE ON AMERICA'S BACK TO BUY THEIR
ILLEGAL VOTES. THEY ALREADY GET MILLIONS OF OUR JOBS AND
NO ONE SERVES HIS PAYMASTERS ON WALL STREET MORE THAN
BARACK OBAMA!
HE SMELLS THOSE SPEECH FEE BRIBES ALREADY!
AND HILLARY IS OBAMA'S CLONE!
Drug
prices have also been a theme in the presidential campaign. The
Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, for example, released a campaign
advertisement earlier this month attacking the “predatory pricing” of
Valeant Pharmaceuticals. Like the congressional hearing, this is all for
show. Of
all the presidential candidates, Clinton is the top recipient of
donations from the pharmaceutical and health products industry,
taking
in $410,460 according to data from the Center for Responsive
Politics.
US drug prices doubled since 2011
By Brad Dixon 18 March 2016
According to a new report by
the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts, the average price of
brand-name drugs increased by 16.2 percent last year. Between 2011 and
2015, branded prescription drug prices have nearly doubled, rising 98.2
percent. Since 2008, the prices have increased by a whopping 164
percent.
Drug spending rose by 5.2 percent in 2015.
This was about half the increase seen in 2014, the year of the largest
hike since 2003.
The report is based upon prescription
use data for members with drug coverage provided by Express Scripts plan
sponsors. In assessing changes in plan costs, the report distinguishes
between the relative contributions from changes in patient utilization
(e.g. more patients being prescribed the drug) and changes in the unit
price of the drug (e.g., price hikes).
In the late
1980s and early 1990s, most drug spending was on traditional drugs
(small-molecule, solid drugs) to treat conditions such as heartburn,
depression and diabetes. The recent trend has been a shift to specialty
drugs. Still, within traditional therapy categories there were
significant increases in spending on medications to treat diabetes,
heartburn and ulcers, and skin conditions.
Diabetes
medications remain the most expensive of the traditional drug
categories. Drug spending in this category increased by 14 percent, with
the hike being equally influenced by increased utilization of the drugs
and rise in unit cost. Three diabetes treatments—Lantus, Januvia and
Humalog—were among the top five drugs in terms of spending across all
traditional therapy classes.
Although not discussed in the report, an investigation by Bloomberg News last year found evidence
of “shadow pricing” by drug manufacturers, where companies raise their
prices immediately after their competitors do so. The investigation
found that the prices of diabetes drugs Lantus and Lemivir had increased
in tandem 13 times since 2009, and evidence of similar shadow pricing
for the drugs Humalog and Novolog.
Heartburn and ulcer
drugs saw a 35.6 percent increase in spending, almost solely due to the
rise in unit cost. Although 92.3 percent of the medications filled in
this category were generic, the price unit trend was heavily influenced
by the increase in prices of branded drugs such as Nexium, Dexilant and
Prevacid.
Treatments for skin conditions also saw a
significant increase of 27.8 percent in spending, again due almost
completely to rises in the unit costs of the medications. The report
notes that these increases occurred for both generic and branded
therapies, largely due to industry consolidation through mergers and
acquisitions leading to less competition in the market. While 86.3
percent of the drugs filled were generic, many of the generic versions
saw sharp increases in unit cost, including the two most widely used
corticosteroids, clobetasol (96.2 percent) and triamcinolone (28
percent).
While the overall spending increase for
traditional therapy classes was nominal (0.6 percent), the primary
factor for the increase in spending came from specialty medications.
Specialty medications require special education and close patient
monitoring, such as drugs to treat cancer, multiple sclerosis or cystic
fibrosis. Spending on specialty drugs rose by 17.8 percent in 2015. The
report found that 37.7 percent of drug spending was for specialty drugs
in 2015, and the figure is expected to rise to 50 percent by 2018.
Spending
in this category was topped by inflammatory conditions—such as
rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases and psoriasis—which
rose by 25 percent, driven by a 10.3 percent increase in utilization and
14.7 percent rise in unit cost. The average cost per prescription in
2015 was $3,035.95. The medications Humira Pen and Enbrel, which
captured more than 66 percent of the market share for this class, saw
unit cost increases of more than 17 percent.
Spending
on oncology therapies increased by 23.7 percent, due to both increased
use (9.3 percent) and increased unit cost (14.4 percent). New cancer
therapies average $8,000 per prescription and the average cancer regimen
is around $150,000 per patient. Between 2005 and 2015, the anti-cancer
drug Gleevec, manufactured exclusively by Novartis, has seen its price
more than triple, with an annual cost of $92,000. In 2015, the year
prior to the drug’s patent expiration, Novartis increased the unit cost
of the drug by 19.3 percent. This is a common practice for companies
facing patent expiration.
Drug spending on cystic fibrosis
treatments rose by a significant 53.4 percent, largely based on
increases in unit cost (40.9 percent vs. 13.3 percent from patient
utilization). This rise was largely due to use of the new oral
combination therapy, Orkambi, which became available in mid-2015. The
drug costs more than $20,000 per month.
The report
forecasts that between 2016 and 2018 spending will increase annually by
7-8 percent for traditional drugs and around 17 percent for specialty
drugs.
The prices of generic drugs have on average
decreased, although there are notable exceptions. Pharmaceutical
companies like Horizon Pharma, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and Valeant
Pharmaceuticals have purchased generic drugs and then significantly
hiked their prices.
The report notes the emergence of
“captive pharmacies” in 2015 as another factor responsible for higher
drug spending. Captive pharmacies are owned or operated by
pharmaceutical manufacturers and tend to promote their manufacturer’s
drugs, rather than generic or other low-cost alternatives. The report
gives as examples the arrangements between Valeant Pharmaceuticals and
Philidor Rx Services, and between Horizon Pharma and Linden Care
Pharmacy.
The Express Scripts data matches the findings
released earlier this year by the Truveris OneRx National Drug Index,
which found that branded drugs rose by 14.8 percent in 2015.
Despite
the widespread media publicity of the notorious drug price hikes by
companies like Turing and Valeant, pharmaceutical companies have
continued to inflate prices in 2016, with Pfizer leading the way with an average price hike of 10.6 percent for 60 of its branded drugs.
Workers
are rightly outraged at the skyrocketing price of drugs. A Kaiser
Family Foundation poll conducted last year found that 74 percent of
respondents felt that the drug companies put profits before people.
The
political establishment, however, has sought both to exploit this anger
for electoral support and to direct it into safe channels that do not
disrupt the status quo.
A congressional hearing held in January placed a spotlight on the price-gouging practices of HYPERLINK Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Turing Pharmaceuticals, whose dubious activities were highlighted in a pair of congressional memos.
The purpose of the hearing, however, was not probe the underlying
causes of the sharp rise in drug prices. Instead, legislators sought to
safeguard the profits of the pharmaceutical industry as a whole through a
verbal lambasting of the industry’s most notorious culprits.
Drug
prices have also been a theme in the presidential campaign.
The
Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, for example, released
a campaign
advertisement earlier this month attacking the
“predatory pricing” of
Valeant Pharmaceuticals. Like the
congressional hearing, this is all for
show. Of all the presidential
candidates, Clinton is the top recipient
of donations from the
pharmaceutical and health products industry,
taking in $410,460
according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Clinton’s
rival, Bernie Sanders, who has stated that he will support Clinton if
he loses the Democratic nomination, received $82,094 in donations from
the industry. Sanders has proposed a series of minor reforms to address
drug prices, such as the re-importation of drugs from Canada, allowing
Medicare to negotiate prices with drug manufacturers, and decreasing the
patent life of branded drugs.
None of the candidates, including
the “democratic socialist” Sanders, challenge the private ownership of
the pharmaceutical industry in which everything from research and
development and clinical testing to drug pricing and promotion are
subordinated to the profit interests of corporations.
..............
what would have happened to this once great nation if
instead of
handing billions in welfare to criminal banksters, and
millions of our
jobs to illegals.... we handed free education to
America's youth. but then we wouldn't need to import boatloads of educated people
to take our tech jobs!!! OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
TRANSFERRING THE NATION'S
WEALTH TO THE 1%, JOBS AND WELFARE TO
ILLEGALS
TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND BUILD THE DEM
PARTY BASE WITH MEX
FLAG WAVERS “My
greatest worry is working all my life, constantly chasing debt
and
never being to own a house or have children,” writes a
millennial named
“Gemma” in a section of the series entitled
Incomes for young people born
between 1980 and 1994 have hit unprecedented low levels in the
aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, according to a recent
investigative series conducted by the UK’s Guardian publication titled “Millenials: The Trials of Generation Y.”
The study draws on income statistics from eight of the world’s 15 most
advanced economies, including the US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia,
France, Italy, Spain and Germany to paint a picture of dimming social
prospects for young people throughout the developed world.
The Guardian cites
as contributing factors “a combination of debt, joblessness,
globalization, demographics and rising house prices” which “have grave
implications for everything from social cohesion to family formation.”
Whereas during the 1970s and 1980s people in their 20s averaged more
than the national income, the study found that young couples and
families in five of the eight countries listed made 20 percent less than
the rest of the population today.
“It is
likely to be the first time in industrialized history, save for periods
of war or natural disaster, that the incomes of young adults have
fallen so far when compared with the rest of society,” the British
newspaper states.
In the US and Italy, incomes were
lower in actual figures than they were a generation ago, with Americans
averaging a yearly salary of $27,757 in 2010 compared to $29,638 in
1979. The study notes that young US workers currently make less than
those in retirement. In France, households headed by individuals under
the age of 50 made less disposable income than recent retirees. In
Italy, an 80-year-old pensioner possesses more income than someone under
the age of 35.
In many cases, the 2008 financial
collapse simply accelerated trends that were already underway. Housing
prices in Great Britain and Australia are among the most expensive in
the developed world. The average price for a home in Sydney, Australia,
is $1 million in Australian dollars, more than 12 times the median
household income in the city. The average home loan for first-time
buyers in New South Wales is A$424,000. This figure has increased by 43
percent in the past four years alone.
According to the Australian
Bureau of Statistics, housing prices have increased more sharply and for
a longer period in the past 20 years than at any time since 1880. The Guardian notes
that housing costs in the UK and Australia have been increasing at a
“neck and neck” pace ahead of the average household income. “We’re
heading for a world where rates of home ownership among young people are
below 50 percent for the first time,” states Alan Milburn of the Social
Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, adding that the UK is heading
toward becoming “a society that is permanently divided.” Income for
those in their late 20s in the UK remain below levels seen in 2004-2005.
A
recent survey by British polling firm Ipsos Mori found that 54 percent
of those questioned thought the next generation was or would be worse
off than the previous. “It’s the highest we’ve measured—it’s completely
flipped around from April 2003,” stated Bobby Duffy, managing director
of Ipsos Mori’s Social Research Institute of the findings.
In
addition, more than a quarter of individuals in this age group live
with their parents. An average woman in this age group today waits 7.1
years longer to become married than in 1981; and the average age of
childbirth for young families is nearly four years later than those in
1974.
“My
greatest worry is working all my life, constantly chasing debt and
never being to own a house or have children,” writes a millennial named
“Gemma” in a section of the series entitled “#Itsnotjustyou: Millenials share their secret fears.”
Continuing, she states: “The cost of renting privately is rising, the
cost of travelling is rising, the cost of living is rising and yet the
salaries don’t reflect this rise. … I am worried that capitalism is
pushing this and creating a greater wealth inequality gap. It seems
unsustainable and to be driving people apart—a recent example is the
demonization of our own NHS service and the junior doctors.” Many others share similar nightmares.
The
study comes amid other findings revealing similar declines in living
standards for youth in the developed world. A 2013 Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report found nearly 30
million youth in the developed capitalist countries without a job or an
education, the basic requirements for functioning in society.
The
circumstances faced by young people throughout the world speak to a
systemic breakdown of the social order in both the so-called developing
and advanced countries, which has been compounded by war and militarism,
consecutive attacks on living standards and cuts to social programs,
which invariably hit the youngest and most vulnerable the hardest.
Though not covered by the study, European nations such as Greece have
been reduced to conditions unseen in the developed world, with youth
unemployment at over 60 percent due to attacks on living standards
demanded by the European Union and enforced by consecutive governments,
both right and “left,” under Syriza.
The authors of the Guardian investigation,
in an effort to divert rising anger away from the social system
responsible for the poverty, destruction of living standards and
attendant social misery, single out the relatively-better off living
conditions of retirees in order to make a case for attacking pensions
and other benefits accruing to the older generation. The publication
quotes a recently published interview with Mario Draghi, head of the
European Central Bank (ECB), who states “in many countries the labor
market is set up to protect older ‘insiders’—people with permanent,
high-paid contracts and shielded by strong labor laws. … The side-effect
is that young people are stuck with lower-paid, temporary contracts and
get fired first in crisis times.”
Rather
than receiving expanded employment, pay and
access to better living
conditions, it is proposed that the
young and the old fight over the
rapidly diminishing
resources made available by bourgeois public
officials and
the wealthy.While Draghi advocates
attacking the pay and benefits of older workers, the ECB head has
funneled billions into the hands of European banking institutions;
recently upping the monthly total of cash infusions to €80 billion from
€60 billion previously and adding to the wealth of the financial elite.
The
fate of retirement benefits and wages under the profit-system is
pointed to when the newspaper notes “pensioners’ incomes are likely to
rise for at least the next decade, after which future generations will
be unlikely to benefit [due to] a drop in home ownership, weaker private
sector pension schemes and the expectation that state pensions will be
less generous in the future.”
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: SERVE THE
RICH, WALL STREET CRONIES AND LA
RAZA, THE MEX FASCIST PARTY of
AMERICA....
Then
hand what is left of the American middle
class the tax bills for
bailouts and Mexico's
crime wave in our open borders and LA
RAZA "The
Race" welfare state on our backs! "The
Clinton family charities have outsourced many U.S. white-collar jobs to
foreign college graduates instead of hiring American college
graduates."
March 11, 2016
Oops! Clinton Foundation outsourced tech jobs to H-1B visa holders
The
Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which does “wonderful
work” (if you ask Hillary), also has sought to hire a lot of foreign
tech workers brought to the country under the H-1B visa program to fill
jobs Americans supposedly can’t be found to perform. Breitbart reports:
The
Clinton family charities have outsourced many U.S. white-collar jobs to
foreign college graduates instead of hiring American college graduates. The
outsourcing started in 2004 and it continues to this year. When asked
if the foundation is still hiring foreign white-collar workers via the
controversial H-1B visa program, Vena Cooper, one of the foundation’s
personnel officers, responded “We do.” The
foundations declined to answer questions from Breitbart News, but
available data shows they sought to hire up to 130 foreign graduates.
That’s roughly half the number of 250 jobs outsourced by Disney last
October, which has reignited political criticism of the middle-class
outsourcing program. The
130 foreign graduates sought by the Clinton’s foundations were and are
not immigrants. Instead, they’re temporary “guest” workers who fill
outsourced professional jobs for up to six years. The
Clintons’ foreign graduates have been hired via the H-1B visa program
that also is used by Disney and U.S. corporations and universities to
employ a population of roughly 650,000 young and cheap foreign
professionals in business, design, healthcare, software, science, education, p.r. and media and pharmaceutical jobs. After their six years in the United States, most H-1Bs return home with the work-experience and connections that help them compete against U.S. professionals in the global marketplace. The
young foreign H-1B professionals are also used to push down average
salaries earned by experienced and older American professionals. In
turn, those salary cuts boost profit margins and company values on Wall
Street.
Hey,
those private jets and 5-star luxury hotels favored by the traveling
Clintons don’t come cheap, so they’ve got to pinch pennies wherever they
can. And besides, a lot of their money comes from foreign sources, so they’re just returning it to some of the home countries.
President Barack Obama seized on
the February employment report, released Friday morning by the Labor
Department, to tout the supposed “success” of his economic policies and
paint a picture of a thriving US economy. The report, which showed a
larger-than-predicted growth in private nonfarm payrolls of 242,000
jobs, confirmed that the US economy was “the envy of the world,” Obama
told reporters at a White House appearance.
“The fact
of the matter is that the plans that we have put in place to grow the
economy have worked,” he boasted.” He derided “an alternative reality
out there from some of the political folks that America is down in the
dumps.” He countered, “America is pretty darn great right now.”
He
did not attempt to explain why the “alternative reality,” which his
labor secretary, Thomas Perez, attributed to “fear-mongers and
fact-deniers,” is believed by tens of millions of Americans, whose anger
over economic injustice is dramatically reflected in the current
election campaign.
One does not have to look too
closely at the Labor Department’s report, however, to get an idea of
what is fueling the social indignation of working people in the eighth
and final year of the Obama administration. Behind the top-line number
for new jobs and the quasi-fictional official unemployment rate of only
4.9 percent, ongoing trends with disastrous consequences for the working
class are evident. They account for two other important indices in the
report: a decline in average earnings from the previous month of 3
cents, or 0.1 percent, to $25.35, bringing the increase for the year
down to just 2.2 percent, and a fall in the average private-sector
workweek of 0.2 hours to 34.4 hours, a two-year low.
These
two figures arise from the fact that the vast bulk of new jobs created
in February were low-wage and a huge percentage were part-time. The
low-paying service sector—retail, bars and restaurants, health
care—accounted for 245,000 jobs. The reality of recession in basic
production was reflected in a 16,000 decline in manufacturing and the
loss of another 19,000 mining jobs, bringing to 171,000 the total
decline in mining since September 2014. The only better-paying
industrial sector that saw an increase was construction, which recorded a
gain of 19,000.
Another figure highlights the hollow
and socially regressive character of Obama’s so-called “recovery.” The
financial cable network CNBC pointed out that according to the Labor
Department’s household survey, which is the basis for the unemployment
rate figure (the figure on payroll growth is derived from a separate
survey of business establishments), full-time jobs increased in February
by only 65,000, while part-time positions increased by 489,000. This
means that a mere 11.7 percent of new jobs in February were full-time!
These
statistics point to the fact that the American ruling class, through
its instrument, the Obama administration, has utilized the financial
crash of 2008, for which it was responsible, to fundamentally reorganize
the US economy, transforming it into a low-wage system. The millions of
decent-paying jobs that were destroyed have been largely replaced by
poverty-wage, part-time and temporary jobs.
The median
household income has fallen sharply. Pensions and health benefits have
been gutted, schools closed by the thousands, teachers and other public
workers laid off by the millions. At the other end, the Federal Reserve
and the US Treasury have pumped trillions of dollars into the financial
markets, driving up the stock market and bringing the concentration of
wealth at the very top to unprecedented levels. This is what Obama lauds
as “success.”
Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain
mired in long-term unemployment. The number of long-term unemployed,
defined as without work for 27 weeks or more, was essentially unchanged
at 2.2 million in February. This number has not shifted significantly
since last June. The long-term jobless accounted last month for 27.7
percent of the unemployed, a far higher percentage than in any previous
period categorized as an economic recovery.
A broader
measure of unemployment that includes people working part-time but
wanting full-time work and those too discouraged to seek employment
registered 9.7 percent last month, nearly double the official jobless
rate. There are, in addition, millions of people who have dropped out of
the labor market and are not even counted in government employment
reports.
While the employment-to-population ratio edged
up to 59.8 percent and the labor force participation rate rose slightly
to 62.9 percent, both measures remain extraordinarily low by historical
standards.
The impact of soaring social inequality and falling
living standards for broad sections of the population is reflected in a
growing crisis in the retail sector. This week, sporting goods chain The
Sports Authority filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and
announced it was closing at least 140 of its 463 stores and laying off
3,400 of its 13,000 employees. This follows recent announcements by
Walmart, Sears/Kmart and Macy’s of hundreds of store closures and
thousands of layoffs.
Hillary
Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the champion of the little guy.
It has always been a risible claim, but if any of her supporters
(including at the Post) are actually paying attention to the scoundrel,
this latest gambit ought to disabuse them of the notion.
Samuel
Johnson’s aphorism that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel
doesn’t apply to Hillary Clinton in her email scandal, because nobody –
not even her die-hard supporters – would believe her if she said that
she set up the private email server in the interests of the United
States. Rather, the last refuge of this scoundrel is to blame everybody
else she dealt with at the State Department, in the process impugning
not only her own close aides, but career diplomats and other
nonpolitical professionals who deserve better.
This
strategy is reflected in the campaign’s current mantra that
“everybody,” including former secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza
Rice, at one time or another sent emails that were later determined to
be classified. A recent Washington Post analysis of Hillary’s released
classified emails demonstrates that she directly sent at least 104 to
various aides and officials, and that they too, including the current
secretary of state, John Kerry, occasionally sent out emails through
nonsecure servers that were later deemed classified. However, what the
analysis also shows is that these government officials, when they did
use unsecured servers, at least used government accounts, which provide a
measure of security, not a private home-brewed server like Mrs.
Clinton’s. The
Post’s news editors must be popping a lot of Thorazine, because their
coverage of Clinton is increasingly schizophrenic. As longtime readers
of the paper know, the news operation is considerably more left-leaning
than the editorial side (which occasionally takes a more centrist
view). News stories are routinely slanted to present the most favorable
liberal perspective and mock or demean opposing outlooks. This
tendency is apparent in the Clinton case as well. The Post has broken
some important stories in the email scandal, like the recent revelation that the Justice Department granted former Clinton I.T. aide Bryan Pagliano immunity. And the Post’s most heroic figures, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein,
have separately suggested that the Clinton scandal is the real thing.
But since Hillary is the Post’s gal, they seeded the Pagliano report
with expert liberal analysis that suggested that the immunity deal is
either nothing to get excited about (a weird way to promote a scoop) or
actually a good thing for Clinton, while omitting contrary interpretations.
The
Post’s analysis of her emails follows the same pattern. On the one
hand, the news that Clinton herself personally authored over 100
classified items cuts against her chosen narrative that she got a lot of
emails and that she can hardly have been expected to actually read and
analyze them all for security issues as she received them or passed them
on. On the other hand, the article goes out of its way to suggest that
this was an endemic problem at State. And strangely again, the
explanation is rather contradictory. We are told that the sending and
receipt of classified information was the result of poor security
procedures that preceded Clinton’s arrival. But we are also told (in
line with claims made by Clinton and her campaign) that there is a
culture of “over-classification” in the government. So which is it?
Were officials at State too lax about security procedures or too anal?
If nothing else, one thing this controversy demonstrates is that the
Clinton State Department was pretty much a mess.
But
besides the country itself, which is now enduring yet more Clintonian
malfeasance in the midst of a critical election, are many individuals
that Clinton is cold-bloodily demeaning in an attempt to exonerate
herself with the “everybody did it” canard. This rests on the weak
premise that other government officials – aides, ambassadors, career
officials – occasionally misidentified information as innocuous or
insufficiently sensitive to merit security classification. There is
little doubt this happened, and continues to happen, as government
employees do their best to protect sensitive information but not bog the
government down in layers of unnecessary security protocol. But none
of the officials identified in the Post analysis did this deliberately
by establishing a private home-brewed email system to avoid State
Department classification procedures entirely – and this no less, by the
head of the State Department itself.
The
Post article anonymously quotes one poor soul (identified as a former
senior official) whose good name has now been impugned as a careless
operator: “I resent the fact that we are in this situation – and we’re
in this situation because of Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private
email server.”
Hillary
Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the
champion of the little guy.
It has always been a
risible claim, but if any of her supporters
(including at the Post) are actually paying
attention to the scoundrel,
this latest gambit ought
BACKED
CLINTON ADMINISTRATION! OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: SERVE THE RICH, CRONY BANKSTERS, AND ILLEGALS.... cash in on speech fee bribes for services well rendered to the 1%.
TO
KEEP PROFITS SOARING, THE DEMOCRAT PARTY IN COLLUSION WITH THE GOP AND
WALL STREET, MUST STICK IT TO WHAT IS LEFT OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.
THAT MEANS ENDLESS HORDES OF ILLEGALS JUMPING OUR BORDERS, JOBS AND
WELFARE OFFICES!
New study says entire regions of US will remain in slump until the 2020s
By
Jerry White
21 March 2016
A new study by a University of California-Berkeley economist says
that at current sluggish levels of job growth, entire regions of the
United States, which were hit hardest by the Great Recession will not
return to “normal” employment levels until the 2020s. This amounts, to
“more than a ‘lost decade’ of depressed employment” for “half of the
country,” wrote economist Danny Yagan.
The new study is one of many showing that the fall of the official
unemployment rate, touted by the Obama administration and the news media
as proof of a robust economic recovery, if not a return to “full
employment,” is largely based on the fact that millions of workers fell
out of the labor force in the years preceding and following the 2008
financial crash.
The labor-force participation rate fell to a 38-year low of 62.4
percent last fall, and only climbed up to 62.9 percent in February.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, February’s official jobless
rate of 4.9 percent—the lowest since the pre-recession level of 4.7
percent in November 2007—would really be 6.3 percent if the country’s
“missing workers” were included. These include 2.4 million workers who
have given up actively looking for work.
Yagan based his findings on a detailed study of some 2 million,
similarly paid workers in the retail industry in order to calculate
employment patterns across different local areas and to account for
occupations that might have been particularly hard hit in one region.
He found that the areas hardest hit by the recession, which began in
December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009, continued to have high
levels of joblessness in 2014. His map of these distressed areas
includes all of Florida and parts of Arizona, Nevada, California,
Colorado, New Mexico, the Dakotas, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia,
Connecticut, New Hampshire and other states.
While different areas of the country are often hit differently by an economic downturn, an article in the Wall Street Journal
on Yagan’s study noted, these economically distressed areas generally
return to normal levels of employment chiefly because workers move to
find work in areas with a higher demand for labor. In the case of the
“Great Recession,” however, the mass layoffs resulted in “muted
migration,” according to other studies cited by the Journal, and workers simply fell out of the labor market.
“Unlike the aftermath of the 1980s and 1990s recessions,” Yagan
wrote, “employment in hard-hit areas remains very depressed relative to
the rest of the country.” Living in areas like Phoenix, Arizona, or Las
Vegas, Nevada means confronting “enduring joblessness and exacerbated
inequality,” Yagan wrote. “If the latest convergence speed continues,
employment differences across the United States are estimated to return
to normal in the 2020s—more than a decade after the Great Recession.”
The lack of decent job opportunities in large swathes of the country
has created a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers who
are competing for a shrinking number of jobs in areas that are more or
less permanently distressed. Last month’s Labor Department employment
report noted that the average annual unemployment rate in 36 states,
plus Washington, D.C. was higher in 2015 than the average unemployment
rate for those states in 2007.
The majority of unemployed people in the US do not receive
unemployment insurance benefits, according to the National Employment
Law Project, with just over one in four jobless workers (27 percent), a
record low, receiving such benefits in 2015.
The details of these studies will come as no surprise for tens of
millions of workers across the United States who face unprecedented
levels of economic insecurity, ongoing mass layoffs, and more than a
decade of stagnating or falling real wages. This has fueled the growth
of enormous discontent and the initial stirrings of class struggle by
American workers, which the trade unions and both big business parties
have sought to channel in the direction of economic nationalism and
hostility to workers in China, Mexico and other countries.
In fact, US workers are being subjected to the same attacks as
workers around the world. The reports on the employment situation in the
US coincide with a continual massacre of jobs in the world’s steel, oil
and mining industries, with 1.2 million steel and coal mining jobs
targeted for destruction in China alone.
Continual layoffs in the US have been driven by the plunging price of
steel, petroleum, coal and other commodities, which has been generated
in large measure by the fall in demand from China and other so-called
emerging economies. Last week, St. Louis, Missouri-based Peabody Energy,
the largest coal mining company in the world, announced it could soon
file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, after its share values fell 46 percent
over the last six months.
Peabody has already cut 20 percent of its global workforce since
2012, while spinning off large sections of its operations in order to
cheat retirees out of their pensions. The company’s announcement follows
bankruptcy filings by both Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources and a
similar threat from coal mining giant Foresight Energy. In its press
release, Peabody pointed to the collapse in the coal market, where the
price per ton has fallen to $40 from $200 in 2008.
The steel industry continues to wipe out jobs, with 12,000
steelworkers already laid off or facing imminent job cuts. The largest
US steelmaker, US Steel, has slashed thousands of jobs in Texas,
Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. The aluminum giant Alcoa is
just weeks away from closing its smelter in Warrick County, Indiana,
wiping out another 600 jobs. Meanwhile, the United Steelworkers (USW)
union is pushing for protectionist measures against China, Brazil,
Russia and other countries, even as it pushes through concession-laden
contracts at US Steel, Allegheny Technologies and now ArcelorMittal.
Early last year, the USW betrayed the strike by thousands of oil
refinery workers, blocking any struggle against the brutal restructuring
of the industry that is now underway. The plunging of oil prices
triggered more than 258,000 layoffs in the global energy industry in
2015—with the number of active oil and gas rigs in the US falling 61
percent. Analysts anticipate a new round of job cuts and bankruptcies in
early 2016.
Texas has lost 60,000 energy-related jobs alone, or one-fifth of the
workforce in that sector in the state, with North Dakota and
Pennsylvania also being hard hit. The current US unemployment rate for
the oil, gas and mining sector is 8.5 percent, but could top 10 percent
by February, double the national jobless rate.
Last month, the air conditioner maker Carrier announced it was
eliminating 1,400 jobs at its Indianapolis plant and a nearby facility,
and shipping production to Monterrey, Mexico where wages are
approximately $6 an hour. A video shot by a worker, capturing the
explosive anger at a meeting of plant workers when a manager makes the
announcement, has been viewed millions of times.
Far from organizing any resistance to the closure of the factory and
destruction of jobs, however, the USW is collaborating with United
Technologies Carrier management to carry out an orderly shutdown and the
retraining of displaced workers for lower-paying jobs.
The USW is hostile to any fight to unite American workers with their
brothers and sisters in Mexico, who have been engaging in growing
resistance to the exploitation by the transnational corporations. USW
officials are telling workers to rely on the Democratic Party to
implement protectionist trade measures to “save jobs” and “take our
country back.” Local and regional union officials have had nothing but
kind words about Donald Trump’s efforts to swindle workers with economic
nationalist appeals.
The unions have long used economic nationalism to undermine the
class-consciousness of workers and to promote the corporatist outlook of
“labor-management partnership.” In the name of making the corporations
“competitive,” the USW and other unions have suppressed every struggle
against plant closings, job cuts and the destruction of wages and
benefits.
This has coincided with the political subordination of workers to the
Democratic Party, which under the Obama administration has spearheaded
the attack on workers’ jobs and wages and the historic transfer of
wealth from the bottom to the top.
USW Local 1999, which claims to represent Carrier workers, is urging
them to support Democrat John Gregg for Indiana governor. A former land
agent for Peabody Coal and lobbyist for Amax Coal Company, Gregg served
as the honorary chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign in Indiana, and
was a proponent of austerity and corporate tax cuts while Speaker of
the state Legislature.
The Hillary Clinton emails: A record of imperialist crimes
By Tom Hall
7 March 2016
Last Monday, the US State
Department published the last batch of declassified emails from a
private, unsecured server used by Democratic
presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state. This
latest release draws to a close a year-long review by US intelligence
agencies of 52,000 pages of Clinton emails, ostensibly motivated by
concerns over possible leaks of classified material.
To
date, more than 30,000 emails dating from Clinton’s four-year tenure as
secretary of state have been released to the public. Clinton played a
central role in the prosecution of aggressive wars in Afghanistan, Syria
and Libya as well as the carrying out of drone assassinations and other
illegal
actions in a number of additional countries, including Pakistan, Yemen
and Somalia. Yet in its extensive reporting of the email scandal, the
American media has virtually ignored the actual content of these emails,
which contain a wealth of information about the day-to-day functioning
of the Clinton State Department.
A review of even a
small sampling of the emails, which are available on the State
Department’s web site, reveals the reason why: the emails are a damning
indictment of the criminal activities of not only Hillary Clinton
herself, but the entire imperialist state apparatus, with the
corporate-controlled media in tow. The emails could easily serve as
evidence in future war crimes trials of Clinton and other top US
officials.
One particularly revealing email from 2010, cited by the Interceptn web
site but not picked up by the national media, recounts the experiences
of former ambassador Joseph Wilson (whose CIA agent wife
Valerie
Plame was outed by the Bush administration in retaliation for his
criticisms of the war in Iraq) during a recent trip to Iraq in his
capacity as an executive for a US engineering firm. The Obama
administration,
elected by exploiting mass anti-war sentiment, continued the US
occupation of Iraq for three years during Obama’s first term in office,
when Clinton was secretary of state, prolonging a conflict that claimed
more than 1 million lives. Since then, US troops have returned to Iraq,
ostensibly to fight ISIS, as part of the US war for regime-change in
neighboring Syria.
Wilson’s email begins: “My trip to Baghdad (September 6-11) has left me slack jawed. I have
struggled
to find the correct historical analogy to describe a
vibrant,historically important Middle Eastern city being slowly bled to
death.Berlin and Dresden in World War II were devastated, but they and
their populations were not subjected to seven years of occupation.”
Describing
the rampant racism and sadism among US occupation troops, Wilson
writes, “Shirts with mushroom clouds [for sale at a gift shop on a US
military base at the Baghdad airport] conveyed the Baghdad weather as
32,000 degrees and partly cloudy. Others referred to Arabs as camel
jockeys
and those were the least offensive… The service people don’t see
themselves there to bring peace, light, joy or even democracy to Iraq.
They are there to kill the ‘camel jockeys.’”
Hundreds more emails deal with the US-led proxy war in Libya, in which Clinton played a
leading role. As a recent series of articles in the New York Times confirmed,
Clinton was the leading advocate in the White House for the clandestine
arming of “rebel” militias comprised largely of Islamic
fundamentalists, which comprised the main fighting force against the
regime of Muammar Gaddafi.
One email from February
2011, written by a veteran diplomat before the launching of the US-NATO
war that ended with the murder of Gaddafi, lays out proposals for the
construction of a future “post-Gaddafi” political order in Libya. The
memo recommends the use of the United Nations to lend political
legitimacy to the imperialist carve-up of the country.
“A
UN ‘hat’ for multinational/international assistance efforts could be
effective,” the author states bluntly. However, the extensive
involvement of Italy, whose participation in the war marked a return to
the scene of its bloody colonial occupation, should, the author
recommends, be “kept relatively low-profile.” Another email chain
discusses how to disburse the tens of billions of dollars of frozen
Libyan assets stolen by the imperialist powers during the regime-change
operation.
Many other emails concern the organization
and coordination of the Obama administration's drone assassination
program, which has killed thousands in Afghanistan and Pakistan alone.
“Twenty-two of the emails on Mrs. Clinton’s server have now been
classified as ‘top secret’ at the demand
of the CIA because they
discuss the program to hunt and kill terrorist suspects using drone
strikes, as well as other intelligence operations and sources,” the New York Times noted two weeks ago, prior to
the
latest release. “The emails [also] contain direct and indirect
references to secret programs,” the newspaper added obliquely.
One
such secret program was the bribing of high-ranking officials in the
Afghan government by the CIA. “[The US embassy in Afghanistan's] line
has been and will be the standard approach--that we refrain from comment
on stories discussing intelligence matters,” one embassy official
writes in a 2010 email, in response to an impending New York Times story
revealing that Muhammad Zia Salehi, head of the Afghan National
Security Council, was on the CIA payroll. Later reports by the Times revealed that former President Hamid Karzai for years received shopping bags full of cash from the CIA on a regular basis.
Dozens
of emails document the collusion between the corporate-controlled media
and the State Department in containing the fallout from the release of
US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks. In one
2010 exchange, Washington Post writer
Craig Whitlock reaches out to the State Department to request “a
mechanism to receive [the] State [Department's] input” before running a
series of articles based on cables revealing the existence of a secret
US drone base in the Seychelles Islands, off the coast of Somalia.
The exchange demonstrates that the major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times,
provided the State Department with advance printed copies of every
cable about which they planned to write, along with drafts to the White
House, to be redacted or censored at their discretion. In a conversation
between Whitlock’s State Department handlers, they note approvingly
that
the practice “was extremely helpful in preparing our redaction
requests, as well as anticipating what damage control we’d need to do in
diplomatic channels.” Another email describes an editorial by the Washington Post calling for the prosecution of Wikileaks editor Julian Assange and
Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning as “helpful,” adding, “We’ll try and get pickup in [the] international media.”
Clinton also received hundreds of emails via her private server from Sidney Blumenthal, a
former
advisor in the Bill Clinton administration, who served as the head of
Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. Blumenthal, then an employee of
the Clinton Family Foundation, functioned as a de facto back channel
intelligence gatherer and advisor for Clinton, despite not
officially
being a member of her staff. It was Blumenthal’s 2015 testimony to the
House Select Committee on Benghazi, the Republican-controlled body set
up for the purpose of torpedoing the
likely presidential run of Clinton, which revealed the existence of Clinton’s private email server.
Blumenthal sent Clinton a wide array of intelligence reports from foreign countries targeted by US
imperialism.
In one email, he passes on concerns that Islamist militias in Libya
might retaliate against the assassination of Osama bin Laden,using
weapons obtained from the United States. In another, he recounts the
furtive dealings between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian
military to smother the Egyptian revolution, writing that the two will
“continue to work together secretly in an effort to establish a stable
government” and create “a secure environment throughout the country” for
investment.
In
another email, Blumenthal advises Clinton on how to orchestrate the
cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the assassination of bin Laden
in a cross-border raid into Pakistan by US Special Forces. As a report
by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later made clear, the official
version of bin Laden’s death was a collection of lies from start to
finish.
“Show [the pictures of bin Laden’s body] to members of Congress in a special secure room,
something
like when members were permitted to view Abu Ghraib pictures,”
Blumenthal writes. “Each of them will emerge speaking to the national
and local press on what they have seen… Having members of Congress
testify to the reality of the photos will suppress any potential
‘Deather’ movement, that the administration has either fabricated the
event or suppressed some aspect of it.”
What the ultimate out come of the Clinton email scandal will be is not yet clear. An FBI criminal
investigation
into the emails is ongoing, with signs that the case might be headed to
a grand jury. On Wednesday, a former employee of Clinton’s 2008
presidential campaign, Bryan Pagliano, who set up the private email
server in Clinton’s home, was granted immunity by federal investigators
as part of the investigation.
TIME TO END MEXICO'S LOOTING? "As
alarming as those numbers are, it's gotten a whole lot worse.
It's the
reason why in both 2013 and 2015 I introduced legislation,
the
"Remittance Status Verification Act," to fix this. I call this the
"Wire
Act" for short."
"My
bill would require a fee on remittances for customers who
wire money to
another country but cannot prove that they are in the
United States
legally. The fee would be used to enhance border
security. Basically, we
would be able to dramatically improve
border security while making
illegal immigrants pay for it." "We
also have evidence that many of those illegals who are
remitting money
are more likely to be illegal immigrant
households receiving Social
Security, health care benefits,
unemployment insurance and/or stimulus
money. Is it really fair for
those individuals to live off our tax
dollars but send untaxed, under-
the-table money abroad?" ON TOP OF THESE FIGURES ADD THE TENS OF BILLIONS HANDED TO INVADING MEXICANS IN THE FORM OF WELFARE. ON THE STATE LEVEL ALONE, MEXIFORNIA HANDS LA RAZA $30 BILLION IN SOCIAL SERVICES. THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES CHIPS IN ANOTHER BILLION FOR THE LA RAZA ANCHOR BABY BREEDING FOR GRINGO WELFARE PROGRAM. NOW..... HOW MUCH DOES THE MEX DRUG CARTELS HAUL BACK? SOME ESTIMATES PUT THE NUMBER AT $40 - $60 BILLION! BLOG: IT IS ESTIMATED THAT THE COUNTY OF LOS
ANGELES HAS A MEXICAN TAX-FREE UNDERGROUND
ECONOMY CALCULATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2
BILLION PER YEAR! There
are the billions of taxpayer dollars used to
subsidize illegal
immigrants' health care and education.
There's the revenue we lose out
on when illegal
immigrants don't pay income taxes. And there's a less
recognized pot of billions — the billions of dollars of
earnings that
illegal immigrants wire out of the United
This town is filled with well intentioned people who believe they are doing the right thing, but far too many have lost their way after years in Washington. Politicians pay more attention to special interests groups and powerful lobbyists writing checks to their next campaigns than listening to the people back home who sent them here in the first place.
This dangerous power vacuum has fueled frustration and
created an entirely new breed of disenfranchised voters who
are fed up with the status quo. These are real people, their
anger is palpable, and it’s not going away anytime soon.