AMERICA: ONE PAYCHECK AND TWELVE
ILLEGALS AWAY FROM HOMELESSNESS!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/rick-moran-los-angeles-mexicos-second.html
A dashcam video of downtown Los Angeles on
Christmas day reveals a stunning sight: hundreds of tents and lean-tos on the
sidewalks that serve as shelter for the homeless. The scene is reminiscent of a
third-world country. RICK MORAN / AMERICANTHINKER
com
HOMELESS CRISIS IN LOS ANGELES,
MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST
CITY, WORSENS BY THE DAY…. Approximates the great depression
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/homeless-crisis-in-mexicos-second.html
93% of the murders in Los Angeles are by
Mexicans
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a 11 TRILLION
DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created
more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also
had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s
terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
On eve of teachers’ protests in North Carolina and South Carolina
Profits, stock buybacks soar, but “no money” for wages or school books
By Niles Niemuth
14 May 2018
The wave
of strikes and protests by US teachers against cuts in funding for public
education is set to hit North and South Carolina this week. At the same time,
reports on record stock buybacks and soaring corporate profits are exposing the
fraud pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike that there is “no money” to
meet teachers’ demands for higher wages, guaranteed pensions and adequate
funding for basic school supplies such as text books.
Bolstered by windfalls from Trump’s tax cuts, corporations have
spent at least $158 billion in stock buybacks in the first three months of
2018, according to a recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal,
rewarding their shareholders, including their own executives and large
investment firms, and artificially inflating stock prices.
Analysts
from Goldman Sachs expect that corporate spending on buybacks and dividends
will continue at the current record pace, topping $1.2 trillion by the end of
the year. The 500 largest corporations in the US will funnel more money into
the pockets of wealthy investors than they will allocate for capital
expenditures and research and development.
Apple,
which led the way by spending more than $22 billion on buybacks between January
and February, announced earlier this month that it would use its tax windfall
on overseas profits to give $100 billion to investors by the end of the year.
The company is also sitting on a cash hoard exceeding $280 billion.
Corporate
profits have gotten a major boost from the tax cuts, rising by 25 percent since
last year. Almost half of business income growth is due to the slashing of
corporate taxes under the bill passed in December. Apple, which has also led
the way in profit growth, has seen its effective tax rate fall from 25.5
percent last year to just 14.5 percent this year.
• With
3.2 million full-time teachers in the United States, the amount spent on
corporate stock buybacks in the first three months of 2018 would suffice to
give each a bonus of $49,000.
•
Alternately, each of the nation’s 98,200 public schools could be given an
additional $1.6 million in funding.
• Or each
of the 13,600 school districts could receive an additional $11.6 million.
• Or
per-student funding for each of the 50.7 million public school students across
the country could be increased by more than $3,000.
• The
record total expected to be sunk into stock buybacks is double the $620 billion
that will be spent nationally on public education this year.
Concurrent
with the bonanza for big business is a growing movement of the American working
class for higher wages and better working conditions, with teachers and other
public school employees leading the way. There have already been more major
work stoppages in the first five months of this year than in all of 2017, with
many more struggles on the horizon.
Since the
beginning of the year, tens of thousands of teachers across the US, from West
Virginia and Kentucky to Oklahoma, Arizona and Colorado, have gone on strike
against low wages and years of inadequate funding for even the most basic supplies,
only to be rebuffed by state governments and union leaders who claim their
demands are impractical.
On
Wednesday, thousands of teachers in North Carolina are set to strike and rally
at the state capitol in Raleigh to demand better pay and working conditions in
what is expected to be the largest protest by educators in that state’s
history. More than 15,000 teachers have indicated on Facebook that they plan to
attend the rally. The walkout in North Carolina will be followed on Saturday by
a rally of teachers and public-sector workers at the state capitol in Columbia,
South Carolina over the same issues.
Adjusted for inflation, per-student funding in North Carolina is
still nearly 8 percent less than it was a decade ago, before the Great
Recession of 2007-2009. The state ranks 45th in school funding, according to a
recent survey by Education Week. Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has
proposed to allocate less than $100 million to increase teachers’ salaries this
year, promising only that their pay might reach parity with the national
average over the next four years.
In every
state where they have carried out strikes and protests, educators have found it
necessary to rebel against the corporatist unions and the wealthy officials who
run them. The National Education Association and the American Federation of
Teachers have worked with their local affiliates to limit the teachers’ demands
and isolate and betray each struggle state by state. In the case of Pueblo,
Colorado, they have restricted strike activity to a single school district.
Everywhere, the unions are working to prevent or suppress strikes and direct
workers into the dead end of voting for the Democrats in the November midterm
elections.
While
teachers in North Carolina have forced the closure of 37 school districts
across the state by calling in sick or taking a personal day, the North
Carolina Association of Educators has sought to limit Wednesday’s strike to a
single day to be devoted to lobbying the Republican-controlled legislature.
Seeking to demobilize the teachers as quickly as possible, the union is telling
teachers to focus on electing Democrats in November.
The
skepticism and hostility of teachers toward this diversion is growing, because
wherever they have been in control, the Democrats have been no less brutal than
the Republicans in attacking public education and the rights of teachers. At
the national level, Republican George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program,
aimed at boosting privately owned charter schools, was followed by Obama’s
“Race to the Top,” which was even more aggressive in promoting charters. These
reactionary programs set the stage for the anti-public education policies of
Donald Trump’s education secretary, the billionaire Betsy DeVos.
Last
week, Colorado’s Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper signed sweeping cuts to
teacher and public employee pensions, including a significant increase in the
retirement age and a two-year freeze in the cost-of-living adjustment. A
weeklong strike by 900 educators in Pueblo, Colorado was brought to an end with
the local union claiming a victory on the basis of a miserable two percent
raise for teachers.
Anger
among teachers across the country is growing over the betrayal of their strikes
by the unions, which have sought to portray every sellout as a victory. It is
becoming increasingly clear that the struggle needs to be broadened into a
national fight against both big-business parties and the corporate interests
that control them. Such a fight will be possible only through a break with the
unions and the formation of democratically elected rank-and-file committees to
organize the broadest possible appeal to workers throughout the country and
internationally for united industrial and political action.
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