Monday, April 4, 2016

SOARING POVERTY IN MEXIFORNIA FOR LEGALS..... AS THE STATE HANDS OUT BILLIONS IN WELFARE TO LOOTING MEXICANS THAT VOTE DEM! - Poverty among California seniors rising despite economic “recovery”

UNDER BARACK OBAMA (OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS) TWO-THIRDS OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGALS.


"Under the Obama administration, the Democrats have spearheaded the attack on wages and benefits for higher paid workers as  part of an overall transfer of wealth to the financial elite."

CAN WE REALLY AFFORD ANOTHER WALL STREET-OWNED PRESIDENCY THAT CLINTON 2 WOULD ESTABLISH???

Whiteout Press

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


HOW MANY ILLEGALS IN YOUR STATE?

State Map: Number of Immigrants and Their Minor Children

By Steven Camarota and Bryan Griffith, CIS Map, March 28, 2016


http://cis.org/Camarota/Map-Number-Immigrants-Minor-Children

Details: The Center recently released an analysis of December 2015 government data indicating that more than 61 million immigrants and their American-born children under age 18 now live in the United States. The numbers represent a complete break with the recent history of the United States. As recently as 1970, there were only 13.5 million immigrants and their young children in the country, accounting for one in 15 U.S. residents.

CIS has produced two interactive maps from the report, creating a state level graphic of the number of immigrants by share in the years 1970, 2000, and 2010 as well as a state level growth of immigrants and their minor children.





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!


Strike 2: Bill Clinton again hits Obama and his 'awful legacy': For the second time this month, Bill Clinton has slammed President Obama's economy, the latest ajunking of his whole seven-plus years in office as an awful legacy. In comments video-captured and distributed by the Republican National Committee, Hillary Clinton's hubby said, If you believe we've finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us, and the seven years before that...then you should vote for her. A quick calculation of his years would mean that the gravy years were when he was president.


AT THE SAME TIME THE SUPER RICH BECAME EVEN 

RICHER AND POVERTY FOR LEGALS HAS SOARED.

HILLARY WILL KEEP THE TRAIN MOVING IN THE SAME 

DIRECTION


IT WAS BILL CLINTON THAT UNLEASHED HIS WALL 

STREET CRONIES, LOOTING BANKTERS AND CRIMINAL 

BILLIONAIRES TO LOOT US!




BUSH AND OBAMA (BUSH'S THIRD AND FOURTH 

TERMS ON STEROIDS) SIMPLY CONTINUED THE

TRANSFER OF AMERICA'S ECONOMY TO THE SUPER 

RICH, AND OUR BORDERS AND JOBS TO LOOTING 

MEXICANS! 


HILLARY CLINTON IS WALL STREET'S BOUGHT SUCCESSOR TO BILL CLINTON AND OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS!

"Sanders has criticized Hillary Clinton repeatedly for giving speeches to Wall Street audiences in return for six-figure fees, as well as raking in campaign contributions from the financial and fossil fuel industries. But he has not sought to make a connection between Clinton’s close ties to the super-rich and the record of the first Clinton administration, particularly its attack on the poorest sections of the working class."

 
ON THE STATE LEVEL ALONE, CA HANDS ILLEGALS $30 BILLION IN SOCIAL SERVICES. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE WITH LA RAZA-OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES TOPPING THE LIST AT ONE BILLION FOR MEXICO'S ANCHOR BABY BREEDING FOR 18 YEARS OF WELFARE PROGRAM! 


BLOG: LA RAZA GOV JERRY BROWN HAS SIGNED EACH AND EVERY BILL THE LA RAZA CONTROLLED STATE LEGISLATURE HAS PUT BEFORE HIM THAT BENEFITED THE MEXICAN OCCUPIERS!


"The Brown administration has also implemented cuts to food stamps and affordable housing programs. All of these measures doubtless contributed to rising poverty rates among California seniors."


Poverty among California seniors rising despite economic “recovery”

Poverty among California seniors rising despite economic “recovery”

By Adam Mclean
4 April 2016
According to a recent Sacramento Bee review of US census data for the year 2014, the number of California seniors living in poverty has nearly doubled between 1999 and 2014, to a total of 520,000 in poverty today.

As of 2014, about 16 percent of Californians live under the federal poverty line ($11,880 in 2016). For a retired individual, the poverty line is as low as $11,400, qualifying some 520,000 seniors as living in poverty. However a newer measure, called the Supplemental Poverty Measure, first used by the US census for the year 2010, tracks additional factors such as prices and taxes and is generally considered to give a more realistic picture of the degree of economic hardship. The 2014 census found that the California poverty rate using this measure was 23.4 percent– around 1 in 4, the highest rate in the nation.

According to this measure, of California’s 39 million people, nearly 10 million are in poverty.
Most of the seniors in question live primarily off of social security income, sometimes with a small pension, and many are even homeless. But with a high cost of living in many areas, an income of less than several thousand dollars per month is often not enough to cover even basic necessities such as rent, food, and medication.

When she was growing up, Faye Duncan (80) told the Bee, “There never was a question whether you’re going to have a place to live.” Emphasizing the poor state of housing for the elderly, she reported having to wait “a year and a half to get in here,” referring to an affordable housing complex. Describing her quality of life, she said tearfully, “I’m in pain 90 percent of the time. And I mean pain.”

Shannon Stevens, an intake specialist at the Maryhouse women’s shelter in Sacramento, stressed, “There’s no housing available for them because of the lack of affordable housing.” Speaking of the vulnerable conditions for the elderly, she noted: “And then there’s also the issue of physical health issues that come with a great expense for prescription medications.”

Especially in the larger cities, rent in California is notoriously high. A full third of the seniors who live in rental units find themselves spending over half of their income on rent. It is no accident that poverty rates are greater in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where rents are higher.

Add to this the increasing price of food, plus, according to the AARP, an increase in real terms of common prescription drugs used by seniors by more than 100 percent since 2005, and it becomes nearly impossible to get by on many incomes. Given that increasing prices are among the more immediate sources of impoverishment, the figure of 520,000 seniors in poverty in California is likely a conservative estimate.

Gary Passmore, the director of the Congress of California Seniors, said, “People who are turning 65 over the next two decades are generally going to be worse off than people who are retired today. … The average 70-year-old today has fewer assets because of the recession and typically is less likely to have retirement income than their counterparts 15 years ago.”

Rather than implement measures to reverse these disastrous trends, Democrats and Republicans in California are pursuing policies aimed at codifying these conditions as the new normal.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the state pension fund CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the US, registered losses. Unlike the major banks, which were promptly bailed out, CalPERS’ losses were used as a lever to further attack pensions. The administration of governor Arnold Schwarzenegger responded to the crisis by implementing a two-tier pension structure in which newer pensioners contribute more and receive less. His administration also cut employer and state contributions, putting more of the burden on workers.

A few years later, under the administration of Democrat Jerry Brown, new attacks on pensions came in the form of increasing the retirement age from 55 to 67 for the majority of new public employees. The Brown administration has also implemented cuts to food stamps and affordable housing programs. All of these measures doubtless contributed to rising poverty rates among California seniors.

Today, CalPERS does not have the funds needed to meet its pension obligations, and has unfunded liabilities of over $70 billion.

More recently, the Obama administration moved to slash defined benefit plans for the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, a move that marks a dramatic escalation in the drive to dismantle pension benefits.

At local and municipal levels, the Democratic Party has been no less severe than the Republicans in the drive to dismantle pension and social programs. Chuck Reed, the ex-mayor of San Jose, and a Democrat, has twice proposed pension reform bills that would eliminate constitutional protections for pensioners in the state.

The cities of Stockton and San Bernardino have both been taken into Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy proceedings, and the San Bernardino proceedings are still ongoing. As in the case of Detroit, municipal bankruptcies have been used to undermine obligations to pay retiree benefits such as pensions and health care.

The doubling of the poverty rate for California seniors exposes the claims by the Obama administration that the United States is in the midst of an “economic recovery.” Instead, the economic crisis is reflected in deteriorating conditions for the most vulnerable sections of society.
Copyright © 1


AMNESTY: IT'S ONLY ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED, LEGALIZING MEXICO'S LOOTING OF AMERICA, BUILDING THE DEM PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS and DESTROYING THE GOP


Democrats silent as one million lose food stamp benefits in the US

Democrats silent as one million lose food stamp benefits in the US

By Patrick Martin
4 April 2016
Some 22 states began terminating benefits for “Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents,” or ABAWDs, in the jargon of the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the federally funded food stamp program, or Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as it is formally known.

BLOG: IN AMERICA, NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!!!!

These adults, aged 18 to 49 years and without children, are generally the poorest section of the working class, earning only 17 percent of the official poverty rate, an average of barely $150-170 per month in income. But they are eligible for only 90 days of food stamp benefits unless they have paid employment or job training for at least 80 hours in a month. The 90-day clock began running January 1, so adults who no longer qualify under this rule began being terminated in state after state April 1.
The 22 states include Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington and West Virginia.

Another 22 states (see map) had already enforced work requirements to cut food stamp benefits for ABAWDs in 2015 or earlier. Those states account for 30 percent of the US population, while the states that are imposing work requirements this year account for another 35 percent.
\
The numbers in some of the larger states are staggering. Florida alone will cut off benefits to an estimated 300,000 childless adults; Tennessee 150,000 and North Carolina 110,000. New York state will cut off more than 50,000, including 3,000 people in Manhattan, home to the world’s biggest concentration of billionaires. Missouri cuts off 60,000; Alabama 40,000 and Massachusetts 23,000.
The work requirements for food stamp recipients were waived for most states during the deep recession that followed the 2008 financial crash. States had to have an official unemployment rate above 10 percent, or at least 20 percent above the national average, or demonstrate a weak labor market under other criteria set down by the Department of Labor.

The number of childless adults eligible for food stamps jumped from 1.7 million in 2007 to 4.9 million in 2013, then began to decline to 4.7 million in 2014, largely because states like Kansas and Ohio began to impose work requirements.

The harsh “work for food” requirements were first introduced for food stamps under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. This is the notorious “welfare reform” bill sponsored by then-US Rep. John Kasich, who is now Ohio’s governor and a Republican candidate for president, and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, husband of the current frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

It is particularly noticeable that none of the presidential candidates of either capitalist party, including the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, has made an issue of the food stamp cutoff that is plunging hundreds of thousands overnight into hunger and destitution.

Senator Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are in the midst of a campaign in the April 19 New York primary, but neither has said a word on behalf of the more than 50,000 New Yorkers who began losing their food stamp benefits Friday.

On Tuesday, Bill Clinton will campaign for his wife in Erie County, which includes the city of Buffalo, devastated by the collapse of the steel industry. Some 2,800 Erie County residents were cut off food stamps April 1, but it is unlikely that the former president, who has raked in more than $100 million in income since he left the White House, will have anything to say about it.

Hillary Clinton gloried in the “welfare reform” legislation in her 2003 memoir Living History (for which she was paid $8 million). She wrote that Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the program the bill abolished, “had helped to create generations of welfare-dependent Americans … I strongly argued that we had to change the system, although my endorsement of welfare reform came at some personal cost.” The “cost,” of course, was to her political credibility as a supposed advocate of the poor.

Clinton claimed that the legislation her husband signed “was a critical first step to reforming our nation’s welfare system. I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage—though he and the legislation were roundly criticized by some liberals, advocacy groups for immigrants and most people who worked with the welfare system.”

Sanders has criticized Hillary Clinton repeatedly for giving speeches to Wall Street audiences in return for six-figure fees, as well as raking in campaign contributions from the financial and fossil fuel industries. But he has not sought to make a connection between Clinton’s close ties to the super-rich and the record of the first Clinton administration, particularly its attack on the poorest sections of the working class.

Nor has Sanders, in general, made an issue of the cuts in vital social programs, particularly those implemented with the collaboration of the Obama administration, like the $8.7 billion cut in food stamp benefits pushed through in 2014 as part of a bipartisan deal with congressional Republicans, or this year’s drastic cutback in food stamp eligibility for childless adults.

Food stamp recipients, and particularly childless adults on food stamps, have become targets of abuse for big business politicians of both parties. Several of the states now implementing work requirements have gone well beyond the regulations set down by the federal Department of Agriculture or the provisions of the welfare reform law.

State governments are permitted to seek exemptions from benefit cutoffs for regions of the state with particularly high concentrations of unemployment, even if the state as a whole no longer qualifies. In New York state, for example, the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx have such exemptions, although Manhattan does not.

But many states, like Florida, have refused to seek such exemptions. The Missouri legislature even passed a bill last year prohibiting the state government from seeking a waiver, with legislators claiming it was easy for the unemployed to find at least 20 hours work per week.

In Mississippi, with one of the highest unemployment rates and highest poverty rates in the country, Republican Governor Phil Bryant chose not to extend the waiver of the work requirement. “We want people to go to work in Mississippi,” he said in a statement. “We want these individuals to get a good job and live the American dream, not just be dependent on the federal government.”



PEW: MEXICO BREEDS AN ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE OCCUPATION OF AMERICA

more here:

In late 2015, the Pew Research Center came out with a population projection that "non-Hispanic whites are projected to become less than half of the US population by 2055." Similarly, during 2014, researchers working with U.S. Census Bure...


New study says entire regions of US will remain in slump until the 2020s

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

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 States with no tax or penalty.

 more here:

We need to crack down on illegal immigrants wiring money out of the U.S.: We need to crack down on illegal immigrants wiring money out of the U.S.



http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/why_is_everything_amnesty.html

Why is everything amnesty?

Senator Cruz and Rubio will argue a lot about amnesty in the next few days.  I guess that standing against amnesty has become the new flag that every GOP candidate wants to carry.

Yet who is actually calling for amnesty?  Or something like what President Reagan did in 1986?
Have they changed the definition of the word amnesty?  According to the dictionary, amnesty is "the act of an authority (as a government) by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals."

Who is pardoning any group or letting people stay here without consequences?

The GOP should be for an immigration solution that enforces the law against employers and protects the border.  At the same time, what is wrong with offering some of those here a chance to stay here?  It would go like this:

BLOG: THAT JOB THAT "ALREADY EXISTS" BELONGS TO AN UNEMPLOYED LEGAL!

1) The illegal immigrant would be given a chance to apply for a work visa supported by an employer's letter that a job actually exists.

BLOG: LET US REVIEW OBAMA'S SABOTAGE OF OUR LAWS AND PROMISE OF NON-ENFORCEMENT!
2) He or she would undergo a full criminal background check including fingerprints.  We will also check with the home country to verify that the applicant is not married here and back home.

BLOG: LET US REVIEW OBAMA'S SABOTAGE OF OUR LAWS AND PROMISE OF NON-ENFORCEMENT!
3) The applicant will pay a fine for violating the law and or not filing tax returns.

BLOG: MEXICANS ARE A CRIME TIDAL WAVE AND OBAMA LETS THEM LOSE ON US WEEKLY!
4) He or she will be under a period of probation where the person could be deported in case of any violation of law.
5) No path to citizenship or green card will be available to this person.

BLOG: UNDER OBAMA AND HISPANDERING HOLDER, THE DEMS HAVE SABOTAGED E-VERIFY NATIONWIDE. AMNESTY IS ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED AND BUYING THE ILLEGALS' VOTES WITH OUR JOBS AND BILLIONS IN WELFARE!
6) Employers will be harshly punished, including jail time, for hiring someone without papers.
How is that amnesty?  Who is getting off free for violating the law?

BLOG: "HUMAN ENFORCEMENT" HALF THE MURDERS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED MEXIFORNIA ARE BY MEXICANS! THERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 2,000 CALIFORNIANS MURDERED BY MEXICANS WHO FLED BACK OVER THE BOARD TO AVOID PROSECUTION. WE WILL NOT HEAR FROM THE PRO-AMNESTY GROUPS ABOUT THE VIOLENCE OF THE OCCUPYING MEXICANS!


We have been arguing about immigration for too long.  It's time to fix the problem rather than just shout at each other.  As Newt Gingrich said in 2012:
And I'm prepared to take the heat for saying, let's be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.
So let's stop shouting about immigration, settle the issue, and move to other topics, like ISIS and the U.S. economy.
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.



"More evidence that illegal immigrants are both taking jobs away from legal Americans and undercutting their wage bargaining power."



March 26, 2016

Study: Employment rate of illegal immigrant men far higher than for legal immigrants and natives

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.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/study_employment_rate_of_illegal_immigrant_men_far_higher_than_for_legal_immigrants_and_natives.html#ixzz442MOR82B
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook


US employment report: Payrolls rise, wages fall

By Barry Grey
5 March 2016
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.  


In late 2015, the Pew Research Center came out with a population projection that "non-Hispanic whites are projected to become less than half of the US population by 2055." Similarly, during 2014, researchers working with U.S. Census Bure...

........................... 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. 

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/mexican_government_urging_us_immigrants_to_become_citizens_and_vote.html#ixzz43YgSdKgy
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook



AMERICA'S DRIFT TO REVOLUTION OR CIVIL WAR


To this, we say: we hear you. 
The system is corrupt. The economy is rigged. 
Big campaign contributors do pull the strings in 
Washington. Working people are right to be 
angry about trade policy and the betrayal of 
the middle class, working families, and the 
poor by an elite establishment that profits 

from the status quo.




"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 AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS 

VS

THE BANKSTER-OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY and GOP

THE LA RAZA MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY BASE OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY

WALL STREET'S LOOTING CRIMINALS

THE FAILED POLICIES OF OBAMA'S OPEN BORDERS AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY PHONY RECOVERY




THE DAILY SIGNAL

Why Washington’s Political Class Is Losing Control

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"

Money's leaving California in a hurry

Over the last few years, we've heard stories of people leaving California and moving to Texas.  At the same time, we've all seen lots of California license plates around town.
I saw some rather staggering numbers about all of this:
The number of Californians leaving the state and moving to Texas is at its highest level in nearly a decade, according to datafrom the Internal Revenue Service.

According to IRS migration data, which uses individual income tax returns to record year-to-year address changes, over 250,000 California residents moved out of the state between 2013 and 2014, the latest period for which data was available. The tax returns reported more than $21 billion in adjusted gross income to the IRS.

Of the returns, 33,626 reported address changes from California to Texas, which has been the top destination for individuals leaving California since 2007. Californians who moved to Texas between 2013 and 2014 reported $2.19 billion in adjusted gross income.

The number of returns showing address changes from California to Texas hasn't been this high since the period 2006-07. During that period, 34,078 returns were filed showing address changes to Texas.
Fewer Texans moved to California during the 2013-14 period. The IRS reported 21,391 returns with address changes from Texas to California. The returns reported $1.56 billion in adjusted gross income.

"California's taxes and regulations are crushing businesses, and there are more opportunities in Texas for people to start new companies, get good jobs, and create better lives for their families," said Nathan Nascimento, the director of state initiatives at Freedom Partners. "When tax and regulatory climates are bad, people will move to better economic environments—this phenomenon isn't a mystery, it's how marketplaces work. Not only should other state governments take note of this, but so should the federal government."

According to Tom Gray of the Manhattan Institute, people may be leaving California for the employment opportunities, tax breaks, or less crowded living arrangements that other states offer.
"States with low unemployment rates, such as Texas, are drawing people from California, whose rate is above the national average," Gray wrote. "Taxation also appears to be a factor, especially as it contributes to the business climate and, in turn, jobs."

"Most of the destination states favored by Californians have lower taxes," Gray wrote. "States that have gained the most at California's expense are rated as having better business climates. The data suggest that may cost drivers—taxes, regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs—are prompting businesses to locate outside California, thus helping to drive the exodus."

And California wants to raise the minimum wage to $15?  How is that going to help its citizens?

As the article points out, we are watching productive people vote with their feet.  They are moving here, and other places, because California has become uninhabitable for people who pay taxes or create jobs.   

Last, but not least, doesn't the Democrat leadership understand that they are losing billions of dollars to other states?  Are they that ideological or irresponsible about the financial stability of their state?\

P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.


"More evidence that illegal immigrants are both taking jobs away from legal Americans and undercutting their wage bargaining power."



March 26, 2016

Study: Employment rate of illegal immigrant men far higher than for legal immigrants and natives

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.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/study_employment_rate_of_illegal_immigrant_men_far_higher_than_for_legal_immigrants_and_natives.html#ixzz442MOR82B
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook


US employment report: Payrolls rise, wages fall

By Barry Grey
5 March 2016
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.  


California Democrats, unions announce deal on $15 minimum wage

OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: TRANSFERRING THE ECONOMY TO THE RICHEST, KEEPING THE BORDERS WIDE OPEN TO FOR ENDLESS FLOODS OF ILLEGALS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND ENDLESS CORPORATE WELFARE AND BAILOUT FOR THEIR CRONIES ON WALL STREET. 



"Under the Obama administration, the Democrats have spearheaded the attack on wages and benefits for higher paid workers as  part of an overall transfer of wealth to the financial elite."

California Democrats, unions announce deal on $15 minimum wage

By Marc Wells


30 March 2016
On Monday, California Governor Jerry Brown praised a tentative agreement reached two days earlier between state legislators and trade union leaders that, if finalized by the state assembly, would gradually increase California’s minimum wage to $15 by 2022.

The deal, which has many loopholes and conditions, is aimed at containing deep opposition to poverty-level wages. Its basic political purpose is to bolster support for the Democratic Party in the run-up to November’s elections. Under the Obama administration, the Democrats have spearheaded the attack on wages and benefits for higher paid workers as  part of an overall transfer of wealth to the financial elite.

The agreement in California would raise the state-wide minimum wage from its current level of $10 an hour to $10.50 in 2017, $11 in 2018, and one dollar more per year through 2022. Businesses with fewer than 25 employees would have an additional year to comply.


Stressing the conditional character of the proposed measure, Brown said on Monday, “This plan raises the minimum wage in a careful and responsible way and provides some flexibility if economic and budgetary conditions change.” The governor can suspend any wage increase in the
event of a recession, an increase in the state budget deficit or higher official unemployment.


In other words, the measure would be subordinated to “the vagaries of the capitalist economy,” as Brown put it. This includes no guarantee that workers currently making minimum wage will not be fired by the companies they work for.


If adopted, the deal would likely be followed by the suspension of two ballot initiatives sponsored by different sections of the union apparatus, particularly the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU), for the November elections. These measures would have increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021 or 2022. By removing the issue from the ballot, legislators can ensure that the details can becarefully crafted behind closed doors in consultation with businesses.

BLOG: CA HANDS ILLEGALS $30 BILLION IN SOCIAL SERVICES ON THE STATE LEVEL ALONE. COUNTIES PAY OUT EVEN MORE.

HALF THE POPULATION OF CA IS MEXICAN AND LA RAZA NOW CONTROLS BOTH HOUSES OF THE STATE LEGISLATURE.

Poverty-level wages are pervasive throughout California and nationally, and the current minimum wage is grossly inadequate to meet basic necessities.


According to Rainmaker Insights, average monthly housing costs in San Francisco are $3,770, and in Los Angeles $2,094. That is, average housing costs in these two cities are the equivalent of a full-time job paying $21.75 and $12.08 an hour, respectively, before taxes.


California’s cost of living is 151 percent of the national average, making it the fifth most expensive state. More than 40 percent of the state’s population lives either in poverty (earning less than about
$24,000 per year for a family of four) or near poverty, according to Census data released in 2013. Children are worse off: nearly 50 percent were poor or near poor in 2013.


Under these conditions, the trade unions—closely allied with the Democratic Party and supported by various organizations that operate in its orbit—have advanced campaigns like “Fight for $15” and “Raise the Wage” to keep opposition within a framework acceptable to the ruling class.


In the presidential elections, Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders has backed a $15 nationwide minimum wage, while Clinton has supported raising the national rate to $12 an hour. Sanders’ role in
particular has been to appeal to sections of youth and poorer workers in an effort to bolster the Democratic Party, after more than seven years of the Obama administration presiding over continuing austerity for the working class.


The Obama administration and the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, have supported the overall assault on wages for the working class as a whole. Tellingly, in California the median wage earner saw a decline of 6.2 percent in their annual income between 2006 and 2011, triple the national average. This included the years of Obama’s so-called economic recovery.


Nationally, the White House sounded the signal for a nationwide attack on wages through the restructuring of the auto industry in 2009, crafting a deal that halved wages for new hires and relieved companies of their health care obligations to retirees. This has been combined with the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which have encouraged companies to eliminate health care plans and force workers to purchase insurance from private companies.


Increasingly, $15 is seen by the ruling class not so much as a minimum but as a maximum. What were formerly higher paying jobs, including in manufacturing, are now paying rates equivalent to low-wage service work.


In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, moreover, low-wage employment has been replacing jobs that once paid a decent salary. In an earlier period, minimum wage jobs were mostly reserved for those initially entering the workforce. Recent data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, however, shows that now only 12 percent of minimum wage workers are teenagers.


From the standpoint of the unions, a major aim is not only to promote the Democratic Party but also to ensure their own position as junior partners benefiting from the exploitation of the working class. In the last few years, the unions have negotiated agreements with companies that contain “escape clauses” relating to the minimum wage. Through these contractual or legal mechanisms, the unions have been able to bypass minimum wage requirements, thus leaving unionized workers earning
less than the minimum wage.


The process is so effective that even the US Chamber of Commerce admitted its advantages for employers. In a recent report, it noted that the escape clause “is often designed to encourage unionization by making a labor union the potential ‘low-cost’ alternative to new wage mandates, and it raises serious questions about whom these minimum wage laws are actually intended to benefit.”


Lastly, an increase in wages to above poverty levels is seen as beneficial by sections of the ruling class insofar as it will force reduce eligibility for social programs such as Medi-Cal, the medical program for the poor, whose threshold is set to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Workers not qualifying for Medi-Cal would then be subject to the requirements of Obama’s Affordable Care Act that they purchase insurance from private companies on state-run exchanges.


Michigan Kids Count report shows drastic rise in child poverty over last decade


PEW: MEXICO BREEDS AN ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE OCCUPATION OF AMERICA

more here:

In late 2015, the Pew Research Center came out with a population projection that "non-Hispanic whites are projected to become less than half of the US population by 2055." Similarly, during 2014, researchers working with U.S. Census Bure...

"More evidence that illegal immigrants are both taking jobs away from legal Americans and undercutting their wage bargaining power."


US employment report: Payrolls rise, wages fall

By Barry Grey
5 March 2016
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.

 
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook

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???

Whiteout Press

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!



Strike 2: Bill Clinton again hits Obama and his 'awful legacy': For the second time this month, 

Bill Clinton has slammed President Obama's economy, the latest a 

junking of his whole seven-plus years in office as an awful legacy. 

In comments video-captured and distributed by the Republican 

National Committee, Hillary Clinton's hubby said, If you believe 

we've finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy

 of the last eight years behind us, and the seven years before 

that...then you should vote for her. A quick calculation of his years 

would mean that the gravy years were when he was president.



AMERICA'S DRIFT TO CIVIL WAR or 

REVOLUTION 

The strangled American middle class

vs 


Wall Street's Looters, the Mexican Fascist 

Party of LA RAZA "The Race", and both 

corporate bought and owned political parties!



more here:
 
http://mexicanoccupation.blogs...



AMERICA'S DRIFT TO REVOLUTION OR 

CIVIL WAR


 AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY PHONY RECOVERY









THE DAILY SIGNAL

Why Washington’s Political Class Is Losing Control

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 


BILLIONS IN WELFARE!


THE AMERICAN THINKER

 MORE HERE

More free stuff for people who violate our immigration laws! Hillary Clinton and her daughter have teed up a ball for the Republican nominee, whether Trump or Cruz, to hit 400 yards down the fairway.  Just over a week ago, Hillary reversed her f...


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 

#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.”



Study: Worsening conditions for young people throughout the developed world

Study: Worsening conditions for young 

 

people throughout the developed world

By Nick Barrickman
15 March 2016
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."


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 businessdesignhealthcaresoftwarescienceeducationp.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.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/oops_clinton_foundation_outsourced_tech_jobs_to_h1b_visa_holders.html#ixzz42cTZSzX3

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US employment report: Payrolls rise, 

wages fall

 

By Barry Grey
5 March 2016
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.  

The last refuge of the scoundrel Hillary

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 

to disabuse them of the notion.  

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/the_last_refuge_of_the_scoundrel_hillary.html#ixzz42F4IlYvd


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The Hillary Clinton emails: A record of imperialist crimes

visit judicial watch org for more on hillary's 

crimes and corruption


ALL HILLARY CLINTON DID AS 

SECRETARY of STATE, ARGUABLY ALL 

SHE DOES PERIOD, IS SUCK UP TO MUSLIM

DICTATORS, OBAMA'S CRONY 

BANKSTERS AND CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRE 

ONYIES OF BILLARY.... SO SHE AND 

BILLARY CAN SUCK IN THOSE BIG BRIBES 

TO THEIR PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION!




OTHER THAN THE TENS OF MILLIONS IN 


BRIBES SHE SUCKED UP AS SEC. OF STATE,


HER TENURE WAS AN UTTER DISASTERS 

AS WOULD BE ANOTHER WALL STREET 

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%.



New study says entire regions of US will 


remain in slump until the 2020s

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

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 

States with no tax or penalty.



more here:

We need to crack down on illegal immigrants 

wiring money out of the U.S.: We need to 

crack down on illegal immigrants wiring 

money out of the U.S.






http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/why_is_everything_amnesty.html

Why is everything amnesty?

Senator Cruz and Rubio will argue a lot about amnesty in the next few days.  I guess that standing against amnesty has become the new flag that every GOP candidate wants to carry.

Yet who is actually calling for amnesty?  Or something like what President Reagan did in 1986?
Have they changed the definition of the word amnesty?  According to the dictionary, amnesty is "the act of an authority (as a government) by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals."

Who is pardoning any group or letting people stay here without consequences?

The GOP should be for an immigration solution that enforces the law against employers and protects the border.  At the same time, what is wrong with offering some of those here a chance to stay here?  It would go like this:

BLOG: THAT JOB THAT "ALREADY EXISTS" BELONGS

TO AN UNEMPLOYED LEGAL!

1) The illegal immigrant would be given a chance to apply for a work visa supported by an employer's letter that a job actually exists.

BLOG: LET US REVIEW OBAMA'S SABOTAGE OF OUR LAWS AND PROMISE OF NON-ENFORCEMENT!
2) He or she would undergo a full criminal background check including fingerprints.  We will also check with the home country to verify that the applicant is not married here and back home.

BLOG: LET US REVIEW OBAMA'S SABOTAGE OF 

OUR LAWS AND PROMISE OF NON-ENFORCEMENT!

3) The applicant will pay a fine for violating the law and or not filing tax returns.

BLOG: MEXICANS ARE A CRIME TIDAL WAVE AND OBAMA LETS THEM LOSE ON US WEEKLY!
4) He or she will be under a period of probation where the person could be deported in case of any violation of law.
5) No path to citizenship or green card will be available to this person.

BLOG: UNDER OBAMA AND HISPANDERING 

HOLDER, THE DEMS HAVE SABOTAGED E-VERIFY 

NATIONWIDE. AMNESTY IS ALL ABOUT KEEPING 

WAGES DEPRESSED AND BUYING THE ILLEGALS' 

VOTES WITH OUR JOBS AND BILLIONS IN 

WELFARE!

6) Employers will be harshly punished, including jail time, for hiring someone without papers.
How is that amnesty?  Who is getting off free for violating the law?


BLOG: "HUMAN ENFORCEMENT" HALF THE 

MURDERS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED MEXIFORNIA ARE 

BY MEXICANS! THERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 2,000

CALIFORNIANS MURDERED BY MEXICANS WHO FLED 

BACK OVER THE BOARD TO AVOID 

PROSECUTION. WE 

WILL NOT HEAR FROM THE PRO-AMNESTY GROUPS 

ABOUT THE VIOLENCE OF THE OCCUPYING 

MEXICANS!


We have been arguing about immigration for too long.  It's time to fix the problem rather than just shout at each other.  As Newt Gingrich said in 2012:
And I'm prepared to take the heat for saying, let's be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.
So let's stop shouting about immigration, settle the issue, and move to other topics, like ISIS and the U.S. economy.
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.


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