WASHINGTON, DC (May 31, 2016) — An analysis of new government data by the Center for Immigration Studies shows more than 3 million new legal and illegal immigrants settled in the United States over the course of 2014 and 2015 – a 39 percent increase over the prior two-year period. (The Census Bureau groups data like this to preserve anonymity.) The number of arrivals fell to a low in 2010-2011, but has dramatically rebounded and is now above pre-recession levels. The Center estimates that 1.1 million of the arrivals are new illegal immigrants and 2 million are new legal immigrants. Cutbacks in enforcement, an improved economy, and the expansive nature of our legal immigration system likely have all contributed to the rebound.
The Center for Immigration Studies’ Director of Research and the lead author of the report, Dr. Steven Camarota, observes, “The numbers show that Mexican immigration has rebounded somewhat and there has been a dramatic rise in immigration from Asia and the rest of Latin America.” Camarota also points out that, “Given the enormous number of immigrants settling in the country, it is certainly understandable that immigration levels are a central issue in the presidential election.”
View the entire report at: http://cis.org/New-Data-Immigration-Surged-in-2014-and-2015.
Among the findings in the new study:
The Center for Immigration Studies’ Director of Research and the lead author of the report, Dr. Steven Camarota, observes, “The numbers show that Mexican immigration has rebounded somewhat and there has been a dramatic rise in immigration from Asia and the rest of Latin America.” Camarota also points out that, “Given the enormous number of immigrants settling in the country, it is certainly understandable that immigration levels are a central issue in the presidential election.”
View the entire report at: http://cis.org/New-Data-Immigration-Surged-in-2014-and-2015.
Among the findings in the new study:
- New data collected by the Census Bureau shows that 3.1 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) entered the country in 2014 and 2015, an average of more than 1.5 million annually.
- In 2012 and 2013, 2.3 million immigrants arrived, or about 1.1 million annually. In 2010-2011, 2.1 new immigrants arrived, or about 1 million annually.
- All of these numbers are based on publically available information in Census Bureau data; no adjustments have been made for those missed by the bureau. But even without adjusting for undercount, the scale of new immigration is enormous.
- The big increase in new arrivals in the last two years was driven by a rise in immigration from Latin America (particularly countries other than Mexico), South Asia (e.g. Pakistan and India) and East Asia (e.g. China and Vietnam).
- Of the 3.1 million immigrants who arrived in the last two years, we estimate about one-third – 1.1 million, or 550,000 annually – were new illegal immigrants, a 57 percent increase from the 700,000 (350,000 annually) who entered in 2012-2013.
- The above estimate of illegal immigration represents the flow of new illegal aliens surreptitiously crossing the border or overstaying a temporary visa or released into the country after a short detention, such as families from Central America. The numbers do not represent the net increase in the total illegal immigrant population.
The available evidence also indicates that the number of new legal immigrants arriving from abroad has increased, both temporary and permanent. Our best estimate is that the arrival of legal immigrants increased about 30 percent, from 1.6 million in 2012-2013 to 2 million in 2014-2015.
We’ve got an even more ominous enemy within
our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan”
or the reconquest of California, Arizona, New
Mexico and Texas into the country of Mexico.
our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan”
or the reconquest of California, Arizona, New
Mexico and Texas into the country of Mexico.
THE LA RAZA MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE half the prison population in CA and half the murders are by MEXICANS
The Narrative Collapse on
Immigration
The numbers of arrivals, legal and illegal alike, are rising, not falling.
By Mark Krikorian
National Review Online, June 2, 2016
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436138/immigration-rising-legal-illegal-2016-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-republicans?target=author&tid=982
‘The immigration crisis that has roiled American politics for decades has faded into history.”
That was the lede of a New York Times op-ed four years ago that neatly summarized the preferred narrative of supporters of amnesty and unlimited immigration. This was reinforced by a Pew study that found “More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S.” (though it arrived at that headline only by counting the U.S.-citizen children of the immigrants as “Mexicans”).
The storyline was that mass immigration was a phase we’d now finished with. Thus any continued agitation about amnesty or border enforcement or job competition could only be naked racism.
Oops.
The newest data from the Census Bureau show a surge in total immigration over the past two years. In 2014 and 2015, 3.1 million new foreign-born people moved here, or about 1.5 million per year. This is up from the 2.3 million in the prior two-year period, and 2.1 million in 2010–2011.
Of the 3.1 million who immigrated over the past two years, about a third were illegal aliens — about 550,000 per year (up from 350,000 illegals entering per year in 2012–13). Two-thirds, or 1 million a year, were legal, up from about 750,000 a year in the prior two-year period.
(The total number of immigrants grows inexorably, but not by as much; new arrivals are always partly offset by departures and deaths, and the number of specifically illegal immigrants is also checked by the number who attain legalization.)
One element of the narrative remains true: Mexican immigration is way down. From a million new arrivals from Mexico, legal and illegal, in 2004–05, the number for the past two years has fallen to about a third of that. But that hasn’t translated into a drop in immigration overall, because there’s a whole world of potential migrants beyond Mexico; the number of arrivals from the rest of Latin America has more than doubled since 2010–11, and the number from Asia has risen nearly 40 percent.
The Census Bureau data doesn’t tell us why immigration has increased so dramatically, but it’s probably been caused by the combination of modest improvement in the U.S. economy and Obama’s dramatic cutback in enforcement.
Several conclusions flow from these new numbers. First, the illegal-immigration problem isn’t magically going away on its own. The assumption that it was led to the argument for tying up the remaining loose ends with an amnesty and forgoing enforcement measures such as border fences, E-Verify, and the rest. The claim was never plausible to begin with, but a lot of amnesty-pushers seem to have actually believed it. Even the slowdown in immigration from Mexico isn’t necessarily permanent; it’s up about a third from the low point of 2010–11 and will probably jump a lot more the next time there’s an economic crisis there, unless we put in place the necessary preventive measures now.
Second, immigration is not a purely economic phenomenon driven simply by the business cycle. The weakest recovery in generations, with record numbers of Americans having dropped out of the labor market altogether, is still accompanied by dramatic growth in new immigration. As Europe is also discovering, there are hundreds of millions of people abroad who want to get to the civilized world regardless of the state of the economy there.
Finally, a related myth that is debunked is the claim by supporters of increased immigration that, if only legal admissions were increased, illegal ones would drop. The new numbers show that illegal settlement rose dramatically in 2014–2015 at the same time as the number of legal arrivals did. Legal and illegal immigration are complements, not competitors. The only way to really get rid of illegal immigration is to abolish immigration limits altogether — that way, everyone who wants to come will be able to do so. This scenario, unlimited immigration, is implicit in all “market-driven” immigration proposals, but their backers won’t admit to it because they know that the public would recoil. In fact, there is no plausible level of legal immigration that can eliminate illegal immigration.
These numbers suggest how narrow the debate over immigration is in the presidential campaign. While Trump’s written immigration platform is pretty sophisticated, in his public appearances he focuses almost exclusively on the “wall,” when most immigration is actually legal, and even most of the new illegal immigration comes from visa overstays, not border jumpers. Hillary, of course, is hopeless, embracing what amounts to Angela Merkel’s immigration platform by explicitly saying that she would deport no one who hasn’t been convicted of a violent crime.
Whatever the outcome of the campaign, these immigration numbers make clear that we can never “put the issue behind us” or “get it off the table” or whatever cliché timorous Republican politicians turn to next. As much as tax policy and foreign policy, immigration policy is a permanent feature of political debate.
40% of Federal Criminal Cases in 2013 Were in
Districts on Mexican Border
Districts on Mexican Border
Border Surge Solution: Send ‘Em to Camp
David!
By Michelle Malkin
Human Events Online, February 17, 2016
. . .
As Brandon Judd of the National Border Patrol Council testified on Capitol Hill recently: “The cartels understood that the unaccompanied minors would force the Border Patrol to deploy Agents to these crossing areas in order to take the minors into custody. I want to stress this point because it has been completely overlooked by the press,” he told the House Judiciary Committee. The unaccompanied minors could have walked right up to the port of entry and requested asylum if they were truly escaping political persecution or violence. “Why did the cartels drive them to the middle of the desert and then have them cross over the Rio Grande only to surrender to the first Border Patrol Agent they came across?” Judd challenged.
“The reason is that it completely tied up our manpower and allowed the cartels to smuggle whatever they wanted across our border.”
This is just another maddening example of Obama’s warped priorities at work. Instead of building effective walls and enforcing our borders to prevent the coming illegal immigration waves manufactured by criminal racketeers, this administration rushes to build welcome center magnets that shelter the next generation of Democrat voters.
. . .
U.S. Failed Three Times to Deport Illegal
Alien Who Murdered Woman
Judicial Watch Corruption Chronicles,
February 18, 2016
. . .
Here’s what we already know from local media reports in Norwich, the city of about 40,000 residents where the murder occurred; the DHS agency responsible for deporting illegal immigrants, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), failed to remove Jacques at least three times dating back to 2002. As if this weren’t atrocious enough, Jacques spent 17 years in prison for attempted murder before authorities released him—instead of deporting him—in January of 2015, the Norwich Bulletin reports. Six months later the 41-year-old illegal alien convict stabbed 25-year-old Casey Chadwick to death. Police said Chadwick died of sharp forced injuries to the head and neck. Jacques is being held on a $1 million bond.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. In the last few years illegal immigrants with lengthy criminal histories have been allowed to remain in the U.S. despite being repeat offenders. Judicial Watch has investigated several of the cases and obtained public records from the government. For instance, back in 2008 JW launched a California public records request with the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department to obtain he arrest and booking information on Edwin Ramos, an illegal alien from El Salvador who murdered three innocent American citizens. Ramos was a member of a renowned violent street gang and had been convicted of two felonies as a juvenile (a gang-related assault on a bus passenger and the attempted robbery of a pregnant woman) yet he was allowed to remain in the country.
. . .
JUDICIAL WATCH
DHS Quietly Moving, Releasing Vanloads of Illegal Aliens Away from Border
The Obama administration is a menace to the rule of law and our nation’s sovereignty. A strong statement but, arguably, a charitable one in light of today’s exclusive report on the border chaos from our Corruption Chronicles blog:
In 1980, Miami low-skilled wages (blue line) were already trending at 94% of those in the rest of the USA. (orange line). Then Miami wages were hammered down by the Mariel boatlift. If that event had not occurred, Miami wages presumably would have followed the gold line (Reference), which is 94% below wages outside of Miami. If so, we get the following wage gap (Gap) between the gold (Reference) and blue (Miami) lines:
Gap = (Miami - Reference) / Reference
The wage gap (Gap, blue line) hits -0.35 in 1986, which means wages dropped 35% below where they would have been if the Mariel event had not happened. Then the Gap closes back up near zero by 1990.
The red line is the output of my Gap predictor, which I described in a previous article. Also, see my notes. The simple Gap predictor assumes an immediate reaction in wages, but in reality the reaction takes several years to occur (6 years in this case). The predictor also assumes almost all the resident low-skilled workers will take a 39% pay cut without moving out of the job market. That is not going to happen for long in an American city like Miami, surrounded by higher-paying job markets.
The Gap predictor works fairly well for the US as a whole because there is no foreign country where a low-skill worker can get enough of a pay raise to make it worth the move. So, the wages stay depressed for about 40 years, until the immigrant workers retire.
It is easy to say that immigrants can upgrade their schooling and training and thus reduce the surplus of low-skill labor. In practice, it is usually very difficult, especially while raising kids. For example, Senator Marco Rubio’s father spent his career mostly as a hotel bartender. He was also a street vendor, security guard, apartment building manager and crossing guard. Rubio’s mother worked as a maid and Kmart store clerk.
They stayed in low-skill jobs over their entire working careers. Their children did very well, however. If the children of immigrants do as well as the children of natives, then the depression of low-skill wages goes away unless more low-skill workers are brought into the country.
If the children and grandchildren of a large class of immigrants remain low-skill workers like their parents, then my simple Gap predictor no longer works and we are left with a persistent underclass of people who continue to cause a surplus of low-skill workers and thus continue to depress low-skill wages.
Unfortunately, this is the case for most of the illegal immigrants that are continuing to pour into the country.
Another Permanent Underclass?
If the illegals are allowed to stay, the effects will be dire, according to the findings of Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. “Immigration to the United States … rarely changes one’s social status,” he concludes after extensive study and many published works. His recent book is about the tendency of descendants within a family to stay in the same social class as their ancestors.
Clark writes,
This means that my simple wage formula will underestimate the negative wage effects of illegal immigration, because the formula assumes that the effect is limited to the 40-year career of immigrants but not their descendants. A society over-loaded with low-skill workers will have lower wages in that category until the surplus disappears, which in this case might be generations away.
I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world.
I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world.
The Justice Department is resisting a judge’s order to provide ethics training for its lawyers and is objecting to turning over to the court the names of illegal aliens who were granted what amounts to administrative amnesty (“deferrals”) in stark violation of an injunction issued by the court.
On May 19, Judge Andrew Hanen of the of the Southern District of Texas issued an order imposing sanctions on the Justice Department and its lawyers for unethical conduct, which included repeatedly lying to him in court.
U.S. v. Texas is the immigration lawsuit filed by 26 states against the Obama administration over its plan to provide deferrals, work permits, and other government benefits to almost 5 million illegal aliens. Hanen issued a preliminary injunction in February 2015 preventing implementation of the plan.
His decision was upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Hanen issued his sanction order because of the misbehavior of Justice Department lawyers when the case was before him. He severely rebuked the DOJ for claiming that the president’s plan was not being implemented prior to his issuing his injunction order when the government knew that it was being implemented—to the tune of over 100,000 aliens. When he found out, he ordered the government to reverse its behavior and void these deferrals.
Amongst the sanctions Hanen ordered on May 19 was yearly ethics training for five years for every DOJ lawyer stationed in Washington who appear in any of the courts of the states who filed the lawsuit. He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to provide him (under seal) with a list of all of the aliens who had been given benefits under the amnesty plan in violation of his injunction.
However, on May 31, the Justice Department filed a motion with Hanen asking him to stay (or suspend) his sanctions order while DOJ appeals his decision to the 5th Circuit. The Justice Department claims in its brief that with regards to the required ethics training, Hanen’s determination that the DOJ’s lawyers engaged in “intentional misrepresentation” was reached “without proper procedural protections” and that there was not “sufficient” evidence of the misrepresentations.
Given the extensive evidence that Hanen cited in his order of the misrepresentations made by the government lawyers, as well as the extensive opportunity he gave the DOJ to present its side in the briefs it filed with the court, the claim that the DOJ was somehow unfairly judged or unable to present its defense is extremely dubious.
The DOJ also claims that the “sanctions imposed exceed the court’s authority.” Given the severity of the violations of the code of professional conduct that govern lawyers, including government lawyers, this is another problematic claim by the department.
Given that the judge could have imposed even more severe sanctions, such as dismissing the defensive pleadings filed by the government (which would have caused them to lose the case) or making the government pay the attorneys’ fees of the states, the sanctions imposed seem almost mild.
Of course, they are highly embarrassing given what they reflect about the behavior of DOJ lawyers. But according to the Justice Department, Hanen is interfering “with the attorney general’s executive authority” in imposing ethics training and the other requirements that Hanen laid out, such as filing a comprehensive plan within 60 days “to prevent this unethical conduct from ever occurring again.” Apparently, that is too much to ask of the attorney general.
The strangest claim made by the Justice Department is that Hanen’s order to produce a state-by-state list of all of the illegal aliens unlawfully granted deferrals would “breach the confidence of these individuals (and of others who submit information to USCIS) in the privacy of such records.”
An affidavit filed by León Rodriguez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security, claims this would violate the internal privacy policy of DHS even though he admits the federal Privacy Act “does not apply to non-U.S. persons.”
Not only does the Privacy Act not apply to “non-U.S. persons” (Illegal aliens), but federal law (8 U.S.C. §1373) specifically requires the federal government to provide “citizenship or immigration status” information on any individual in response “to an inquiry by a federal, state, or local government agency.” And this requirement applies “notwithstanding any other provision of federal, state, or local law.”
Thus, states are statutorily entitled to this information and the DOJ’s claim that it is confidential has no basis in the law whatsoever. Of course, this very inconvenient federal provision is not mentioned in the Justice Department’s brief.
This action by the Justice Department makes it clear it intends to appeal Hanen’s sanctions order. Whether he will grant the requested stay is unknown, but he had ordered a hearing on the DOJ’s request for June 7.
So far in this litigation, the Justice Department and the Obama administration have had a steadily losing hand. We will have to see if that continues.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents, Border Patrol sources tell Judicial Watch. The government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road.
(The pictures are available here. )
The OTMs are from Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala and Border Patrol officials say this week’s batch was in custody for a couple of days and ordered to call family members in the U.S. so they could purchase a bus ticket for their upcoming trip from Phoenix. Authorities didn’t bother checking the identity of the U.S. relatives or if they’re in the country legally, according to a Border Patrol official directly involved in the matter. American taxpayers pick up the fare for those who claim to have a “credible fear,” Border Patrol sources told JW. None of the OTMs were issued official court appearance documents, but were told to “promise” they’d show up for a hearing when notified, said federal agents with firsthand knowledge of the operation.
A security company contracted by the U.S. government is driving the OTMs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector where they were in custody to Phoenix, sources said. The firm is called G4S and claims to be the world’s leading security solutions group with operations in more than 100 countries and 610,000 employees. G4S has more than 50,000 employees in the U.S. and its domestic headquarters is in Jupiter, Florida. Judicial Watch is filing a number of public records requests to get more information involving the arrangement between G4S and the government, specifically the transport of illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to other parts of the country. The photo accompanying this story shows the uniformed G4S guard that transported the OTMs this week from Tucson to Phoenix.
Outraged Border Patrol agents and supervisors on the front lines say illegal immigrants are being released in droves because there’s no room to keep them in detention. “They’re telling us to put them on a bus and let them go,” said one law enforcement official in Arizona. “Just move those bodies across the country.” Officially, DHS denies this is occurring and, in fact, earlier this year U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske blasted Border Patrol union officials for denouncing this dangerous catch-and-release policy. Kerlikowske’s scolding came in response to the congressional testimony of Bandon Judd, chief of the National Border Patrol Council, the labor union that represents line agents. Judd told lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee that illegal immigrants without serious criminal convictions can be released immediately and disappear into the shadows. Kerlikowske shot back, telling a separate congressional committee: “I would not stand by if the Border Patrol was — releasing people without going through all of the formalities.”
Yet, that’s exactly what’s occurring. This report, part of an ongoing Judicial Watch investigation into the security risks along the southern border, features only a snippet of a much broader crisis in which illegal aliens are being released and vanishing into unsuspecting American communities. The Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest addressed this issue just a few weeks ago in a hearing called Declining Deportations and Increasing Criminal Alien Releases – The Lawless Immigration Policies of the Obama Administration. Judd, the Border Patrol Union chief, delivered alarming figures at the hearing. He estimated that about 80% of apprehended illegal immigrants are released into the United States. This includes unaccompanied minors who are escorted to their final destination, family units and those who claim to have a credible fear of persecution in their native country. Single males that aren’t actually seen crossing into the U.S. by Border Patrol agents are released if they claim to have been in the country since 2014, Judd added.
The rule of law has collapsed on our border and the Obama administration, along with a do-nothing Congress run by Republicans, is responsible for it. Innocent Americans, taxpayers, the victims of human trafficking, and our nation’s sovereignty all suffer as a result. Through our investigations, lawsuits, and independent journalism, your Judicial Watch will continue to stand for the rule of law and for honest Americans who want the government to enforce the law, not to subvert the law.
I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world.
Illegal Immigration and the Wage Gap
There is a close long-term correlation between low-skill wages and illegal immigration. An influx of low-skilled labor drives down wages at the bottom of the income scale, aggravating the wage gap and social divisions, providing fodder for left wing demonization of the prosperous and successful.
The normal equilibrating capacity of a market economy is short circuited when the influx of low-skill illegal immigrants is nationwide. If American workers could easily escape to another country offering higher wages, then wages in the USA would quickly recover from a surge of immigrant workers, and employers would gain only a short-lived benefit. So, it might not be worth paying off politicians to import cheap labor from poor countries.
The normal equilibrating capacity of a market economy is short circuited when the influx of low-skill illegal immigrants is nationwide. If American workers could easily escape to another country offering higher wages, then wages in the USA would quickly recover from a surge of immigrant workers, and employers would gain only a short-lived benefit. So, it might not be worth paying off politicians to import cheap labor from poor countries.
Miami Wages after the Mariel BoatliftHarvard professor George J. Borjas has been called "America’s leading immigration economist" by BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal. The good professor recently surprised himself and outraged many of his pro-immigration colleagues with a study measuring the dive in wages for low-skill natives in Miami after the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Private boats brought more than 100,000 Cubans to Miami within 5 months. The data displayed in the graph below shows what happened.
Gap = (Miami - Reference) / Reference
The red line is the output of my Gap predictor, which I described in a previous article. Also, see my notes. The simple Gap predictor assumes an immediate reaction in wages, but in reality the reaction takes several years to occur (6 years in this case). The predictor also assumes almost all the resident low-skilled workers will take a 39% pay cut without moving out of the job market. That is not going to happen for long in an American city like Miami, surrounded by higher-paying job markets.
The Gap predictor works fairly well for the US as a whole because there is no foreign country where a low-skill worker can get enough of a pay raise to make it worth the move. So, the wages stay depressed for about 40 years, until the immigrant workers retire.
It is easy to say that immigrants can upgrade their schooling and training and thus reduce the surplus of low-skill labor. In practice, it is usually very difficult, especially while raising kids. For example, Senator Marco Rubio’s father spent his career mostly as a hotel bartender. He was also a street vendor, security guard, apartment building manager and crossing guard. Rubio’s mother worked as a maid and Kmart store clerk.
They stayed in low-skill jobs over their entire working careers. Their children did very well, however. If the children of immigrants do as well as the children of natives, then the depression of low-skill wages goes away unless more low-skill workers are brought into the country.
If the children and grandchildren of a large class of immigrants remain low-skill workers like their parents, then my simple Gap predictor no longer works and we are left with a persistent underclass of people who continue to cause a surplus of low-skill workers and thus continue to depress low-skill wages.
Unfortunately, this is the case for most of the illegal immigrants that are continuing to pour into the country.
Another Permanent Underclass?
If the illegals are allowed to stay, the effects will be dire, according to the findings of Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. “Immigration to the United States … rarely changes one’s social status,” he concludes after extensive study and many published works. His recent book is about the tendency of descendants within a family to stay in the same social class as their ancestors.
Clark writes,
“... the social status of Latinos, even those born in the United States, is persistently low… they are often the people who found themselves in such desperate economic circumstances at home that they preferred to live as illegal immigrants in the United States. (Latinos constitute nearly half of the foreign born in the United States, but four in five of illegal migrants.) The effects have been dire: there can be no doubt that immigration is widening social inequality in the United States.”Professor Clark suggests a less disastrous immigration policy:
“To avoid having a substantially poorer and less educated Latino underclass for many future generations, [the US] should considering policies to increase the number of highly educated Latino immigrants.”But if current immigration policy is continued, the “United States is likely to soon have the unprecedented situation of fostering a semi-permanent underclass.” This lack of social mobility from one generation to the next is a result that no government uplift program has been able to erase, according to Clark’s study of government efforts in Sweden, the US, and elsewhere.
This means that my simple wage formula will underestimate the negative wage effects of illegal immigration, because the formula assumes that the effect is limited to the 40-year career of immigrants but not their descendants. A society over-loaded with low-skill workers will have lower wages in that category until the surplus disappears, which in this case might be generations away.
I estimate that enforcing the law and deporting all illegals would raise real low-skill wages by about 20% to 40% within 6 years, providing immediate relief to the oppressed low-skill citizens of our country. (See my notes.) Allowing in more high-skill people and few low-skill people would have long-term benefits that would eventually tower over this short-term benefit. A more skilled population would increase the historical trend of economic growth in this country. We might even become the richest per capita country in the world.
There is a close long-term correlation between low-skill wages and illegal immigration. An influx of low-skilled labor drives down wages at the bottom of the income scale, aggravating the wage gap and social divisions, providing fodder for left wing demonization of the prosperous and successful.
The normal equilibrating capacity of a market economy is short circuited when the influx of low-skill illegal immigrants is nationwide. If American workers could easily escape to another country offering higher wages, then wages in the USA would quickly recover from a surge of immigrant workers, and employers would gain only a short-lived benefit. So, it might not be worth paying off politicians to import cheap labor from poor countries.
The Mariel Boatlift event provides a demonstration of this. Wages were hammered down in a local economy (Miami) by a flood of refugees and then recovered as workers scattered to surrounding areas with higher wages. The whole process took 10 years.
Miami Wages after the Mariel Boatlift
Harvard professor George J. Borjas has been called "America’s leading immigration economist" by BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal. The good professor recently surprised himself and outraged many of his pro-immigration colleagues with a study measuring the dive in wages for low-skill natives in Miami after the Mariel boatlift of 1980.
Private boats brought more than 100,000 Cubans to Miami within 5 months. The data displayed in the graph below shows what happened.
In 1980, Miami low-skilled wages (blue line) were already trending at 94% of those in the rest of the USA. (orange line). Then Miami wages were hammered down by the Mariel boatlift. If that event had not occurred, Miami wages presumably would have followed the gold line (Reference), which is 94% below wages outside of Miami. If so, we get the following wage gap (Gap) between the gold (Reference) and blue (Miami) lines:
Gap = (Miami - Reference) / Reference
The wage gap (Gap, blue line) hits -0.35 in 1986, which means wages dropped 35% below where they would have been if the Mariel event had not happened. Then the Gap closes back up near zero by 1990.
The red line is the output of my Gap predictor, which I described in a previous article. Also, see my notes. The simple Gap predictor assumes an immediate reaction in wages, but in reality the reaction takes several years to occur (6 years in this case). The predictor also assumes almost all the resident low-skilled workers will take a 39% pay cut without moving out of the job market. That is not going to happen for long in an American city like Miami, surrounded by higher-paying job markets.
The Gap predictor works fairly well for the US as a whole because there is no foreign country where a low-skill worker can get enough of a pay raise to make it worth the move. So, the wages stay depressed for about 40 years, until the immigrant workers retire.
It is easy to say that immigrants can upgrade their schooling and training and thus reduce the surplus of low-skill labor. In practice, it is usually very difficult, especially while raising kids. For example, Senator Marco Rubio’s father spent his career mostly as a hotel bartender. He was also a street vendor, security guard, apartment building manager and crossing guard. Rubio’s mother worked as a maid and Kmart store clerk.
They stayed in low-skill jobs over their entire working careers. Their children did very well, however. If the children of immigrants do as well as the children of natives, then the depression of low-skill wages goes away unless more low-skill workers are brought into the country.
If the children and grandchildren of a large class of immigrants remain low-skill workers like their parents, then my simple Gap predictor no longer works and we are left with a persistent underclass of people who continue to cause a surplus of low-skill workers and thus continue to depress low-skill wages.
Unfortunately, this is the case for most of the illegal immigrants that are continuing to pour into the country.
Another Permanent Underclass?
If the illegals are allowed to stay, the effects will be dire, according to the findings of Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. “Immigration to the United States … rarely changes one’s social status,” he concludes after extensive study and many published works. His recent book is about the tendency of descendants within a family to stay in the same social class as their ancestors.
Clark writes,
“... the social status of Latinos, even those born in the United States, is persistently low… they are often the people who found themselves in such desperate economic circumstances at home that they preferred to live as illegal immigrants in the United States. (Latinos constitute nearly half of the foreign born in the United States, but four in five of illegal migrants.) The effects have been dire: there can be no doubt that immigration is widening social inequality in the United States.”
Professor Clark suggests a less disastrous immigration policy:
“To avoid having a substantially poorer and less educated Latino underclass for many future generations, [the US] should considering policies to increase the number of highly educated Latino immigrants.”
But if current immigration policy is continued, the “United States is likely to soon have the unprecedented situation of fostering a semi-permanent underclass.” This lack of social mobility from one generation to the next is a result that no government uplift program has been able to erase, according to Clark’s study of government efforts in Sweden, the US, and elsewhere.
This means that my simple wage formula will underestimate the negative wage effects of illegal immigration, because the formula assumes that the effect is limited to the 40-year career of immigrants but not their descendants. A society over-loaded with low-skill workers will have lower wages in that category until the surplus disappears, which in this case might be generations away.
DOJ Wants to Hide the Names of Illegal Aliens Granted Amnesty
Hans von Spakovsky /The Justice Department is resisting a judge’s order to provide ethics training for its lawyers and is objecting to turning over to the court the names of illegal aliens who were granted what amounts to administrative amnesty (“deferrals”) in stark violation of an injunction issued by the court.
On May 19, Judge Andrew Hanen of the of the Southern District of Texas issued an order imposing sanctions on the Justice Department and its lawyers for unethical conduct, which included repeatedly lying to him in court.
U.S. v. Texas is the immigration lawsuit filed by 26 states against the Obama administration over its plan to provide deferrals, work permits, and other government benefits to almost 5 million illegal aliens. Hanen issued a preliminary injunction in February 2015 preventing implementation of the plan.
His decision was upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Hanen issued his sanction order because of the misbehavior of Justice Department lawyers when the case was before him. He severely rebuked the DOJ for claiming that the president’s plan was not being implemented prior to his issuing his injunction order when the government knew that it was being implemented—to the tune of over 100,000 aliens. When he found out, he ordered the government to reverse its behavior and void these deferrals.
Amongst the sanctions Hanen ordered on May 19 was yearly ethics training for five years for every DOJ lawyer stationed in Washington who appear in any of the courts of the states who filed the lawsuit. He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to provide him (under seal) with a list of all of the aliens who had been given benefits under the amnesty plan in violation of his injunction.
However, on May 31, the Justice Department filed a motion with Hanen asking him to stay (or suspend) his sanctions order while DOJ appeals his decision to the 5th Circuit. The Justice Department claims in its brief that with regards to the required ethics training, Hanen’s determination that the DOJ’s lawyers engaged in “intentional misrepresentation” was reached “without proper procedural protections” and that there was not “sufficient” evidence of the misrepresentations.
Given the extensive evidence that Hanen cited in his order of the misrepresentations made by the government lawyers, as well as the extensive opportunity he gave the DOJ to present its side in the briefs it filed with the court, the claim that the DOJ was somehow unfairly judged or unable to present its defense is extremely dubious.
The DOJ also claims that the “sanctions imposed exceed the court’s authority.” Given the severity of the violations of the code of professional conduct that govern lawyers, including government lawyers, this is another problematic claim by the department.
Given that the judge could have imposed even more severe sanctions, such as dismissing the defensive pleadings filed by the government (which would have caused them to lose the case) or making the government pay the attorneys’ fees of the states, the sanctions imposed seem almost mild.
Of course, they are highly embarrassing given what they reflect about the behavior of DOJ lawyers. But according to the Justice Department, Hanen is interfering “with the attorney general’s executive authority” in imposing ethics training and the other requirements that Hanen laid out, such as filing a comprehensive plan within 60 days “to prevent this unethical conduct from ever occurring again.” Apparently, that is too much to ask of the attorney general.
The strangest claim made by the Justice Department is that Hanen’s order to produce a state-by-state list of all of the illegal aliens unlawfully granted deferrals would “breach the confidence of these individuals (and of others who submit information to USCIS) in the privacy of such records.”
An affidavit filed by León Rodriguez, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at the Department of Homeland Security, claims this would violate the internal privacy policy of DHS even though he admits the federal Privacy Act “does not apply to non-U.S. persons.”
Not only does the Privacy Act not apply to “non-U.S. persons” (Illegal aliens), but federal law (8 U.S.C. §1373) specifically requires the federal government to provide “citizenship or immigration status” information on any individual in response “to an inquiry by a federal, state, or local government agency.” And this requirement applies “notwithstanding any other provision of federal, state, or local law.”
Thus, states are statutorily entitled to this information and the DOJ’s claim that it is confidential has no basis in the law whatsoever. Of course, this very inconvenient federal provision is not mentioned in the Justice Department’s brief.
This action by the Justice Department makes it clear it intends to appeal Hanen’s sanctions order. Whether he will grant the requested stay is unknown, but he had ordered a hearing on the DOJ’s request for June 7.
So far in this litigation, the Justice Department and the Obama administration have had a steadily losing hand. We will have to see if that continues.
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:
THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF AMERICA'S ECONOMY
TO THE RICH SINCE BILL CLINTON.
at the University of California, Berkeley,
estimates that the top 1 percent of American
households now controls 42 percent of the
nation’s wealth, up from less than 30 percent
two decades ago. The top 0.1 percent
accounts for 22 percent, nearly double the
1995 proportion."
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!
The system is corrupt. The economy is rigged.
Apple, with $181 billion held offshore.
General Electric had the second-largest
stash, at $119 billion, enough to repay four
times over the $28 billion GE received in
federal guarantees during the 2008 Wall
Street crash. Microsoft had $108 billion in
overseas accounts, with companies like
Exxon Mobil, Pfizer, IBM, Cisco Systems,
Google, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson
rounding out the top ten.
DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE
CLASS
Sharp rise in US suicide rate
Eighty percent increase among middle-
aged white women
By Kate Randall
23 April 2016
US corporate tax cheats hiding $1.4 trillion
in profits in offshore accounts
By Patrick Martin
15 April 2016
Apple, with $181 billion held offshore. General
Electric had the second-largest stash, at $119
billion, enough to repay four times over the
$28 billion GE received in federal guarantees
during the 2008 Wall Street crash. Microsoft
had $108 billion in overseas accounts, with
companies like Exxon Mobil, Pfizer, IBM,
Cisco Systems, Google, Merck, and Johnson
& Johnson rounding out the top ten.
* The top 50 companies made nearly $4
trillion in profits globally, but paid only $412
billion in federal income tax, for an effective
tax rate of barely 10 percent, compared to the
statutory rate of 35 percent.
influence the federal government, while
reaping nearly $11.2 trillion in federal support,
for an effective return of 400,000 percent on
their lobbying expenses.
* The overseas cash stashed by the 50
companies, nearly $1.4 trillion, is larger than
the Gross Domestic Product of Russia,
Mexico, Spain or South Korea.
* US multinationals reported 43 percent of
their foreign earnings from five tax havens,
countries that accounted for only 4 percent of
their foreign workforce and 7 percent of
foreign investment. All told, US companies
shifted between $500 billion and $700 billion
n in profits from countries where economic
activity actually took place to countries where
tax rates were low.
* In the year 2012 alone, US firms reported
$80 billion in profits in Bermuda, more than
their combined reported profits in the four
largest economies (after the US itself): China,
Japan, Germany and France. This figure was
nearly 20 times the total GDP of the tiny
island country.
THE MILLIONS OF AMERICAN THAT SUNK INTO POVERTY HAS SOARED, JUST AS THE CRIMES AND PROFITS OF OBAMA - CLINTON CRONIES ON WALL STREET!
Banksters, and the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA to
keep wages depressed and corporate profits even greater!
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:
New study says entire regions of US will
remain in slump until the 2020s
By Jerry White
21 March 2016
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.
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
his'awful legacy':
economy, the latest a junking of his whole
seven-plus years in office as an awful legacy.
REVOLUTION
Commentary By
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.
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. 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.
EVEN WITH POLLS DOCUMENTING THAT
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.
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: FEEDING THEIR
BIG PHARMA CRONIES!
US drug prices doubled since 2011
By Brad Dixon
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.18 March 2016
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
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.15 March 2016
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
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
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.5 March 2016
“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
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
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
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
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?"
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.
"As alarming as those numbers are, it's gotten a whole lot worse.
"My bill would require a fee on remittances for customers who
"We also have evidence that many of those illegals who are
There are the billions of taxpayer dollars used to
We need to crack down on illegal immigrants
TSA Airport Credentialing Process
By Michelle Malkin
Judicial Watch Corruption Chronicles,
UNIVISION: MOUTHPEICE FOR LA RAZA
Univision News Howls 'Anti-Immigrant' at
By Jorge Bonilla
Largest Civil Disobedience Action of the Century isn’t Anti-Trump, It’s Pro-Democracy
In an article published here Wednesday, Aaron Klein wrongly characterized Democracy Spring as an “Anti-Trump” campaign organized by “radicals…involved in shutting down Donald Trump’s Chicago rally.”
The message of Wisconsin
"The Sanders campaign represents a
historical milestone in American politics.
Some seven million people have gone to the
polls or attended caucuses to vote for a
candidate identified as a socialist, who calls
for a “political revolution” to end the
domination of billionaires over American
political life."
"The 2016 election campaign is unfolding against the
backdrop of eight years of economic upheaval and slump in
the wake of the Wall Street crash, and eight years of the
Obama administration, which bailed out the banks
at the expense of working people and presided over a
further concentration of wealth at the top alongside
a further deterioration of jobs and living standards
for the vast majority."
The message of Wisconsin
7 April 2016
In the wake of Senator Bernie Sanders’ crushing victory over former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, the corporate-controlled media and the political establishment have been at pains to dismiss the significance of half a million people voting for a candidate claiming to be a socialist.Sanders outpolled Clinton in 79 of the state’s 82 counties and dominated nearly every demographic and income group. He won more than 80 percent of the vote among those aged 18 to 29, more than 70 percent of the vote among independents, and defeated Clinton by 54 percent to 44 percent among nonwhite voters under 45 years of age. He has now won seven of the last eight contests for the Democratic presidential nomination.
In its election night coverage, the American media barely reported these figures, showing far greater interest in the fortunes of billionaire demagogue Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner. The media portrayed the victory of Texas Senator Ted Cruz over Trump as a political earthquake while downplaying Sanders’ more sweeping victory over Clinton.
The media consensus was that the Wisconsin result meant little in terms of the Democratic presidential contest. The Washington Post headlined its report, “Sanders wins in Wisconsin, keeping alive his improbable bid for the nomination,” referring in the second paragraph to “Clinton’s still-overwhelming lead in delegates.”
The New York Times wrote off the across-the-board rout of the Democratic frontrunner, declaring, “Mrs. Clinton’s defeat does not significantly dent her comfortable lead in the race for the 2,383 delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination.”
Neither the major newspapers nor the television networks have attempted to grapple with the political implications of a candidate claiming to be socialist locked in an increasingly tight race with the near-unanimous choice of the Democratic Party establishment. On Wednesday, a McClatchy-Marist poll found that Sanders has taken a two-point lead over Clinton among likely Democratic voters nationwide, 49 percent to 47 percent.
The Sanders campaign represents a historical
milestone in American politics. Some seven
million people have gone to the polls or
attended caucuses to vote for a candidate
identified as a socialist, who calls for a
“political revolution” to end the domination of
billionaires over American political life.
Two million people have donated to the Sanders campaign, and his rallies routinely attract crowds of 15,000 to 25,000 people. Among young people, in particular, support for Sanders is immense. More people aged 18-29 have voted for Sanders than for Clinton and Trump combined.
The media silence on the subject of the Sanders surge is an expression of political nervousness in the ruling elite. Its concern is not over the messenger, a Vermont senator who has long functioned as a reliable Democratic Party ally. Rather, it is deeply shaken by the message of social and political discontent delivered by millions of people in the United States who are voting for a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist.”
The mass vote for a candidate claiming to be socialist discredits what has become a foundational narrative of American politics: that the United States is a country where the working class is unalterably hostile to any alternative to the “free enterprise” system. Not only socialism, but even liberalism has been virtually banned from official politics, referred to by cowering Democrats as the “L-word,” from which they seek to distance themselves.
Marxists have always insisted that “American exceptionalism” was of a historically limited and relative character. The slow political development of the American working class was bound up with the privileged position of American capitalism, which made possible steadily rising living standards for the working class and thus encouraged illusions in the viability of the profit system.
The change in the objective situation is beginning to produce a corresponding change in consciousness. It is of enormous significance that Sanders has won his greatest support among working class voters under the age of 45. This generation is being politically radicalized by the protracted decay of American capitalism--its decline on the world market and the resulting devastating impact on the jobs and living standards of American workers.
It required social processes maturing over many years to create the conditions where a somewhat anomalous figure, a little-known senator from a tiny state, could disrupt the planned coronation of the Democratic presidential frontrunner.
The 2016 election campaign is unfolding against the backdrop of eight years of economic upheaval and slump in the wake of the Wall Street crash, and eight years of the Obama administration, which bailed out the banks at the expense of working people and presided over a further concentration of wealth at the top alongside a further deterioration of jobs and living standards for the vast majority. It comes as well after 25 years of nearly uninterrupted imperialist war, with vast resources squandered, human and material.
Sanders is riding a wave of economic anger and hostility over social inequality. Despite all efforts to cover it up, it has proven impossible to conceal the deeply rooted sickness of American society: the ever-widening economic gulf between the top one percent (or one-tenth of one percent) and the broad masses who work for a living and produce the wealth. By now, the economic figures are familiar: the financial aristocracy has seized virtually the entire increase in national income over the past two decades; wages and living standards for working people have stagnated or declined; temporary and contract jobs account for all the increase in employment since the 2008 financial crash.
It is under these conditions that there is such a broad popular response to Sanders’ critique of Wall Street and corporate greed. Millions of young people and workers are looking for a way to fight back against the attacks on jobs, living standards and democratic rights, and the mounting threat of war, and they have seized on the Sanders campaign as a means of doing so. As it moves to the left, the American working class is beginning to take up political questions.
Nowhere is this process clearer than in Wisconsin. This is the state where in 2011 a mass movement erupted in the working class and among young people, triggered by the reactionary anti-worker legislation pushed by Governor Scott Walker and enacted by the Republican-controlled state legislature. Demonstrators flooded the state capitol and there was a growing movement for a general strike. This was forestalled only by the intervention of the AFL-CIO unions, which blocked any direct action by the working class and diverted the mass opposition into a campaign to recall Walker and replace him with a Democrat committed to similar cuts in wages, benefits and jobs, only carried out in collaboration with the unions.
The Democratic Party cannot be an instrument for combating the social crisis. Like the Republicans, it is unalterably committed to the defense of the profit system and shares responsibility for the bipartisan assault on the working class. The Democrats have moved steadily to the right over the past four decades, abandoning whatever remained of the reformist policies of New Deal liberalism and the social-welfare programs of the 1960s.
The Clintons are the personification of this process. Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 as the candidate of the Democratic Leadership Council, the right-wing formation that embraced the reactionary policies of the Reagan-Bush era. He notoriously pledged to “end welfare as we know it,” eliminating the federal program dating from the 1930s that provided financial support for the long-term unemployed, while unleashing a law-and-order campaign that ended with more black men in prison than attending college.
Hillary Clinton continues this tradition, running as the continuator of the policies of the Obama administration, which has escalated US military aggression in the Middle East while preparing for war with China and Russia, massively expanded the surveillance state, and single-mindedly promoted the interests of Wall Street and the super-rich.
Sanders is likewise a defender of American capitalism, and no one has been more surprised than the candidate himself at the mass response to his campaign. He initially intended to serve as a lightning rod, drawing discontented workers and young people back into the embrace of the Democratic Party, following in the footsteps of Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, Howard Dean and Jesse Jackson.
His “socialism” goes no further than 1960s liberalism. While he criticizes Clinton for having supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he explicitly backs the war policies of the Obama administration.
Throughout his political career as mayor of Burlington, congressman and US senator from Vermont, Sanders has never supported any wider challenge to the domination of the corporate-controlled two-party system. He has caucused and voted with the Democrats in both the House and Senate and has supported every Democratic presidential candidate since Walter Mondale in 1984. He is committed to backing Hillary Clinton if she staggers across the finish line ahead of him, telling the New York Daily News this week that Clinton was “far, far preferable to any of the Republican candidates.”
Sanders has won the support of millions not despite, but because of his professions of “democratic socialism.” These have been taken seriously by an electorate that sees socialism as an alternative to the conditions of life created by capitalism. But there is nothing genuinely anti-capitalist in Sanders’ perspective. This was shown most recently in his interview with the Daily News. When asked about his repeated calls to break up the Wall Street banks, Sanders could not explain how it was to be done, in the end declaring that the banks would be allowed to decide how to break themselves up.
It is one thing to recognize the objective significance of the mass support for Sanders. It is quite another to adapt to Sanders politically. The Socialist Equality Party opposes his campaign for president and warns that if he were elected, a Sanders administration would be an instrument of the American ruling elite to confuse and disorient the working class and prepare new attacks, while defending the worldwide interests of American imperialism.
The task of the SEP is to prepare the working class by making clear what it means to fight for socialism, combating illusions in Sanders and all other efforts to divert working people away from a struggle against the capitalist system, and advancing a genuine revolutionary alternative.
Patrick Martin
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."
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: