U.S. Spends $90 Million to Help a few Dozen Afghan Women Get Jobs
The U.S. government has blown almost $90 million on a doomed project to help Afghan women enter the workforce with a big chunk of the money going to a Clinton-aligned “development” company that reaped big bucks from Uncle Sam while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.
The cash flows through the famously corrupt U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID), which is charged with providing global economic, development and humanitarian assistance. In this case USAID allocated $216 million to supposedly help tens of thousands of Afghan women get jobs and gain promotions over five years. Known as “Promoting Gender Equity in National Priority Programs,” the endeavor was launched in 2014 and tens of millions of dollars later it’s proven to be a major failure.
Someone must be pocketing the cash because the costly program has helped between zero and 60 women. This isn’t a joke, though it sounds like a bad one. All the dirty details are laid out in a scathing federal audit released this month by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).
Investigators found that around 55 women got “new or better” jobs in three years and they can’t even fully credit the U.S.-backed program for the women’s prosperities. SIGAR writes that it found “multiple problems” in the program, including security, staffing and economic conditions in Afghanistan.
“In addition, SIGAR found that USAID/Afghanistan’s records on the contractors’ required deliverables were incomplete and inaccurate because the agency’s management did not give contracting officer’s representatives enough guidance on record keeping,” the report states. Of interesting note is that one of the biggest contracts went to a company, Chemonics International, with close ties to the Clintons. The Washington-based development firm was awarded $38 million, according to the figures included in the SIGAR report.
“Chemonics thrived during Clinton’s tenure, nabbing more contracts during the Haiti reconstruction effort than any other company,” a 2015 news report reveals. “Peter Schweizer noted the extensive Clinton connections to development failures in Haiti in his book, Clinton Cash.”
Here’s a nugget from this month’s SIGAR report that illustrates how poorly this boondoggle was planned by the government; even when the Afghan women complete the program, there are not jobs waiting for them. The audit reveals that the Afghan government won’t sustain the program, referred to as Promote, because it can’t hire all the graduates.
“It is also unclear whether the graduates will obtain jobs in the private sector in large numbers due to the country’s low projected economic growth rate,” the report states. “This raises questions about whether Promote is sustainable at all and could put USAID’s investment in the program in jeopardy.” So, the U.S. government is spending enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars to train women in a crime-infested, third-world country for jobs that don’t exist. Afghanistan has a poverty rate of 39.1 %, according to the World Bank, and an unemployment rate of 22.6%.
The security situation has worsened and civilian casualties are at their highest since 2002, with an unprecedented level of conflict-induced displacement.
Nevertheless, in the summer of 2013 the Obama administration announced it was launching the “largest women’s empowerment program in [USAID] history.” The goal was to advance opportunities for Afghan women to become political, private sector, and civil society leaders and to build upon existing and previous programs for women and girls. Of course, this requires a lot of money so the administration allocated the $216 million to get the job done.
The money was supposed to educate, promote and train a new generation of Afghan women in order to increase their contributions to the country’s development. “Promote strengthens women’s rights groups,” USAID proclaims, and boosts female participation in the economy while increasing the number of women in decision making positions within the Afghan government. It also helps women gain business and management skills. The SIGAR report identifies Promote as the “largest single investment to advance women globally.”
A few years ago, Judicial Watch reported on another scandalous USAID program aimed at helping women in Afghanistan escape repression. After spending a whopping $64.8 million on 652 projects, programs and initiatives, a federal audit determined lack of accountability and follow up made it impossible to know if they made a difference. That disastrous project was also funded by the departments of State and Defense and federal investigators found that none of the three agencies had effective mechanisms for tracking the funding associated with the projects.
America: The garrison state
20 September 2018
This week, America witnessed a scene that has become all too familiar in recent years: facing record-breaking floods, tens of thousands of men, women, and children in some of the poorest areas of the country were left with inadequate food, shelter and water, waiting for hours for gasoline and turned away from over-filled shelters as they fled toxic flood waters.
As the waters recede, they will return to their damaged or
destroyed homes needing tens of thousands of dollars in repairs
—in a country where the average household cannot cover an
unforeseen $500 expense. When they ask why the government
will do next to nothing to help them cover the expenses, they will
be told: there is no money. When they ask why the
government cannot build adequate flood-
prevention mechanisms, they will be told:
there is no money.
But as the television news breathlessly reported every step of the catastrophe, the US Senate gave a very different answer to demands by the Trump Administration and the Pentagon for a major expansion of military spending.
The Senate, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 93-7, passed a bill to fund almost the entire US federal government for the coming year. And 80 percent of that bill—$675 out of $854 billion—consisted of military spending, a $60 billion increase over last year’s military budget.
Given that the passage of the bill was neither mentioned on any of the national evening news programs, nor appeared on the front pages of any major newspaper, it would be surprising if one in a hundred Americans knew about its passage. And this is exactly as intended.
In a revealing statement, Republican Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby hailed the passage of the bill, declaring, “We are going to make the appropriations trains run again.” It was, to say the least, a peculiar metaphor. A Google search for the phrase “make the trains run” brings up only references to the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who, as the saying goes, “made the trains run on time” by trampling democratic procedures underfoot.
In an equally revealing statement, Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Senate appropriations panel, declared: “We did our job and focused on what we should be doing—making responsible, thoughtful decisions about how to fund these federal agencies and leaving controversial policy issues out of it.”
In other words, for the “opposition” Democratic party—whose members in the Senate voted unanimously for the bill—one of the largest military spending buildups in American history is not a “controversial policy issue,” but is accepted without question.
Among the expenditures included in the bill are nearly $150 billion for new and upgraded military hardware. This includes some $24.2 billion for the construction of 13 new navy ships, including two brand new nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines, costing $2.4 billion apiece.
This massive figure does not include the costs for the construction of America’s two new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers, costing $13 billion apiece, which is currently underway.
Another $9.3 billion is set aside for military contractor Lockheed Martin for the purchase of 93 new F-35 fighters, arguably the most over-priced, incompetently managed project in the history of war profiteering. The funding of this program is, according to the Democrats, not a “controversial policy issue.”
The massive expansion in military spending expressed in the passage of the bill represents the practical implementation of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, which declared that “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.”
The various branches of the military have concluded from this document that they must be prepared to fight a war with either Russia or China or both as soon as 2025. On Monday, the Air Force presented its proposal for meeting this goal.
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told the Air Force Association’s conference in Maryland this week that the US Air Force would need to grow by 25 percent, adding roughly 1,500 aircraft to its current active fleet of about 6,000.
“We must see the world as it is,” said Wilson. “That is why the National Defense Strategy explicitly recognizes that we have returned to an era of great power competition. We must prepare,” she said, to “win against a major power.”
“The Air Force is too small for what the nation expects of us,” she said.
The Air Force “needs five more bomber squadrons… and seven additional space squadrons so that we can dominate in space, where we have not been threatened in the past…. we’ll need 14 more tanker squadrons… 22 squadrons need to be added to our command and control, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance,” and so on and so forth.
She made clear to the assembled defense contractors in the audience that there is money to be made as the Air Force begins “buying things faster.” She teased them with the prospect of “one-day contract awards” for contractors, who would be invited to “give their pitch, and if the program manager likes it, the company walks out that day with funding, and a one-day signed contract.”
In other words, with tens of billions of dollars of cash in hand, the Air Force will be doling it out hand over fist to the war profiteers, all but throwing it out the window.
Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, will be there to catch it. Speaking at the same Air Force Association conference as Wilson, Bezos, who has all but clinched the largest technology contract in the Pentagon’s history, worth some $10 billion, declared, "It’s so important for the DoD, for the Air Force, for every government institution—when they can—to use commercial solutions,” like the one he came to peddle.
Wilson capped her speech with the declaration, “Our dominance as a global power is not a birthright. It is a choice.”
A listener might ask: who’s doing the choosing? No one has asked the American people whether they want to rush into a war with one—or even two—nuclear powers, a war that would inevitably entail the use of nuclear weapons, killing millions, or billions, of people.
Wilson added ominously, “It is an obligation to our countrymen, to tell them… what should be done, what must be done” to make the Air Force, which she referred to as America’s “clenched fist,” more “lethal.”
The use of language reminiscent of fascism—“making the trains run,” the “clenched fist,” the military telling the public “what must be done”—expresses something essential about the Pentagon’s plan for “great-power conflict.”
It is not compatible with democracy. Indeed, the Pentagon’s strategy paper makes this clear, declaring the “homeland” a battleground, vulnerable to “political subversion” by “non-state actors”—a euphemism for political dissidents.
And, true to this prescription, the military buildup is accompanied by the construction of a regime of state censorship by the technology companies, all of whom have lined up at the Pentagon’s trough for lucrative contracts.
One conclusion is inescapable: Capitalism and war are incompatible with democracy. The struggle against war, and against political censorship, requires a socialist program.
Andre Damon
TRUMP'S AMNESTY
Neil Munro
https://www.breitbart.com/2018-elections/2018/09/19/trump-promises-imminent-agency-action-on-immigration/
Trump’s immigration reforms are being blocked in the Senate and House, and his push for $5 billion in wall funding has been stopped by the GOP leadership. The funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security has been punted until December and is being combined with several cheap-labor programs, including a plan to quickly convert 300,000 Indian white-collar workers and their 300,000 family members into immigrants. The plan will further flood the white-collar labor market and force down salaries or college-graduate Americans.
AMERICA: NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!!!
“Part of the problem, Santorum said, has been the arrival of millions of unskilled immigrants — legal and illegal — in the United States. "American workers deserve a shot at [good] jobs," Santorum said. "Over the last 20 years, we have brought into this country, legally and illegally, 35 MILLION mostly unskilled workers. And the result, over that same period of time, workers' wages and family incomes have flatlined." SEN. RICK SANTORUM
What will America stand for in 2050?
The US should think long and hard about the high number of Latino immigrants.
By Lawrence Harrison
It's not just a short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment approaches 10 percent or the number of uninsured straining the quality of healthcare. Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.
FINISHING AMERICA OFF: THE FOREIGN INVASION FOR “CHEAP” LABOR
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-fall-of-america-by-invitation-tens.html
Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone. JOHN BINDER
But many less-skilled migrants play their largest role by simply shifting small slices of wealth from person to person, for example, by competing up rents in their neighborhood or by competing down wages in their workplace. The crudest examples can be seen in agriculture.
Overall, the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
"Critics argue that giving amnesty to 12 to 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. would have an immediate negative impact on America’s working and middle class — specifically black Americans and the white working class — who would be in direct competition for blue-collar jobs with the largely low-skilled illegal alien population." JOHN BINDER
A worker at the Hollywood Bed Frame Company factory in Commerce, Calif., on April 14, 2017. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
Hispanic Middle-Class Incomes Rise Again, to Highest Ever
Households headed by Hispanic Americans significantly increased their incomes in 2017, reaching a record median of $50,486—an increase of almost 3.7 percent.
The figure, released with 2017 Census data on Sept. 12, shows Hispanic households overtaking other groups in middle-class income growth.
Overall, median incomes rose by 1.8 percent, including 2.6 percent for whites. Black middle incomes stagnated while the incomes of Asians went down by 2.2 percent, although that group maintained the highest median incomes by a large margin.
Hispanic Americans have notably improved their economic well-being over the past year and a half.
Hispanic unemployment over the past 12 months has fallen, to about 4.8 percent in August, breaking one record after another since December 2017. The lowest point prior to that was 5.2 percent in 2007.
Nearly 350,000 Hispanic Americans have risen out of poverty in 2017, compared to the year before.
Hispanics and Trump
President Donald Trump has been credited with accelerating U.S. economic growth through tax cuts, deregulation, convincing companies to expand production in the United States, and other policies. His carrot-and-stick approach to trade negotiations also has started to bear fruit in recent months.
It’s not clear, however, whether his economic message sufficiently reaches Hispanic voters.
While Trump repeatedly cheered for the record-low Hispanic unemployment, major Spanish-language news media outlets Univision and Telemundo omitted the historical significance of the numbers from their reports both for June and July.
Trump’s policies on some issues seem to resonate with Hispanic Americans, according to a June Harvard-Harrison poll, which focused on immigration.
More than half of Hispanic people polled said current border security is inadequate and immigration law enforcement needs to be stricter, rather than looser. About 70 percent also prefer secure borders to “basically open borders.”
About two-thirds support the Republican proposal for immigration reform, described to the respondents as “a congressional deal that gives undocumented immigrants brought here by their parents work permits and a path to citizenship in exchange for increasing merit preference over preference for relatives, eliminating the diversity visa lottery, and funding barrier security on the U.S.–Mexico border.”
A majority of Hispanics said that those crossing U.S. borders illegally should be sent home, even if they are parents with children.
Among Hispanic registered voters, Trump’s job approval reached 35 percent in September, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.
THE NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS: Illegals!
This is why you work From Jan - May paying taxes to the government ....with the rest of the calendar year is money for you and your family.
Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, with his fake Social Security number, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200..... free.
He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.
He qualifies for food stamps.
He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.
His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.
He requires bilingual teachers and books.
He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.
If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.
Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our) taxpayer's expense.
He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.
Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.
He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.
Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after Paying their bills and his.
The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.
Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people!
Every CEO in every company sees the business opportunity: Will I earn higher profits by replacing my American staff with cheaper H-1B workers? The answer is an obvious yes.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
PRINCETON REPORT:
American middle-class is addicted, poor, jobless and suicidal…. Thank the corrupt government for surrendering our borders to 40 million looting Mexicans and then handing the bills to middle America?
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
PRINCETON REPORT:
American middle-class is addicted, poor, jobless and suicidal…. Thank the corrupt government for surrendering our borders to 40 million looting Mexicans and then handing the bills to middle America?
Ten years after the financial crash
Wall Street pay up 13 percent while workers’ wages stagnate
By Barry Grey
19 September 2018
The Office of the New York State Comptroller reported Monday that both profits and pay at Wall Street securities firms soared at double-digit rates last year and are continuing their spectacular rise in 2018. The report is the latest in a series of financial surveys showing that 10 years after the Wall Street crash of September 2008, the concentration of wealth at the very top of society continues to increase.
Announcing the release of the report, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli boasted, “Wall Street profited every year since the end of the recession in 2009, and compensation last year reached its highest point since the financial crisis.”
The average bonus paid to the stock traders and speculators in New York City rose by 17 percent last year to $184,220, the highest in a decade. The average salary, including bonuses, increased by 13 percent to $422,500, also the highest since 2008. This figure, well within America’s top 1 percent income bracket, is 5.5 times higher than the rest of the private sector in New York City.
Pretax profits in the securities industry totaled $24.5 billion in 2017, the highest level since 2010. This is an increase of 42 percent over 2016, which saw a 21 percent rise in profits. In the first half of 2018, profits totaled $13.7 billion, a rise of 11 percent and the highest level since 2010.
The “recovery” from the 2008 crash and the Great Recession engineered by both Republican and Democratic administrations (Bush, Obama and Trump) has been a systematic effort to utilize the crisis triggered by the criminal actions of Wall Street bankers and speculators to restructure the economy for the benefit of the financial oligarchs and at the expense of the working class.
By means of a vast transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich and the super-rich, the losses suffered by the financial elite in the global meltdown have not only been fully recouped, its wealth has been massively increased. In 2008, the 400 wealthiest people in America had a net worth of $1.5 trillion. That figure has since doubled to nearly $3 trillion.
Ten years ago, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, today the richest man in the world, had a net worth of $8.7 billion. It now stands at over $160 billion, an 18-fold increase.
Workers’ wages have stagnated or declined. Between 2016 and 2017 the wage of a typical US worker grew by a negligible 0.3 percent. This year, wages are barely keeping pace with inflation. Meanwhile, according to a report published last month by the Economic Policy Institute, average CEO pay at America’s 350 largest companies grew by 17.6 percent between 2016 and 2017. The typical chief executive received $18.9 million in compensation.
The average CEO in the US now makes 312 times what the typical worker makes, up from the 20-to-1 ratio that prevailed in the 1960s. This means that, on average, a CEO receives in a single day almost as much as the average worker makes in an entire year.
This vast diversion of wealth and resources to the bank accounts of a parasitic elite has untold human consequences. America is today a country where life expectancy is on the decline, infant mortality and maternal mortality are on the rise, drug abuse and suicide are at record highs, major storms routinely devastate entire regions lacking basic infrastructure, and millions of workers are forced to work two or three poverty-wage and often part-time or temporary jobs.
The baseline for workers is becoming the brutal sweatshop conditions of Amazon, which has grown massively since the 2008 crash by exploiting the systematic destruction of decent-paying, secure jobs. In 2018 America there is the growing phenomenon of the homeless Amazon worker.
The growth of social inequality is the result of a bipartisan assault on the working class. The redistribution of wealth was greatly accelerated under the Obama administration, which responded to the financial crash of 2008 by instituting a series of policies whose net result was the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom layers of society to the top in history.
These policies included the multi-trillion-dollar bank bailout, near-zero percent interest rates and the money-printing operation known as “quantitative easing.” These measures pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets and provided the banks and hedge funds with virtually free credit, enabling them to mount new speculative operations similar to those that triggered the financial meltdown and Great Recession in 2008.
The vast inflation of stocks and other financial assets was made possible by the continuing suppression of the class struggle and workers’ wages by the trade unions, which all but banned strikes in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash. Wage-cutting and the growth of low-paying part-time and temporary jobs dramatically lowered the social position of the working class. This was combined with cuts in healthcare, pensions, education, housing, food stamps and other vital social programs.
The orgy of self-enrichment of the financial oligarchy has continued and accelerated under Trump with the enactment last December of a multi-trillion-dollar package of tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Trump’s tax cuts have triggered a new round of mergers and acquisitions, stock buybacks and dividend payments that will increase the wealth of CEOs and investors by an estimated $2.5 trillion by the end of 2018.
Obama shielded the bankers whose fraudulent activities led to the Great Recession. In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a 650-page report on the Wall Street crash that documented the criminal practices of major banks and the collusion of rating agencies and government regulators. The chairman of the subcommittee, Michigan Senator Carl Levin, told a press conference that Senate investigators had found “a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing.”
The report was a dead letter from the day it was released. Not a single top banker was criminally charged, let alone prosecuted and jailed. Instead, they were made even wealthier. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein have both become billionaires, despite playing key roles in creating the sub-prime mortgage Ponzi scheme and then profiting off of its collapse in 2008.
The United States is ruled by a corporate-financial oligarchy, which controls both major parties and all of the official institutions—Congress, the courts, academia and the media. This year has already seen a resurgence of class struggle and a growth of anti-capitalist and pro-socialist sentiment in the working class, not just in the US, but around the world.
The response of the ruling class is two-fold. First is a turn to authoritarian forms of rule, seen both in Trump’s fascistic attacks on immigrants and encouragement of far-right political forces, and the Democrats’ promotion of the FBI, the CIA and the military as the supposed alternative to Trump. There is not a trace of democratic or progressive content in the ongoing political warfare in Washington. Both sides are pro-war, anti-democratic and anti-working class.
The Democrats, for their part, are opposing Trump on the basis of his supposed reluctance to confront Russia militarily and expand the US war in Syria. They are running dozens of former CIA agents and military officers in the midterm elections. Their heroes are the former CIA director and drone assassination mastermind John Brennan and the late war-monger John McCain. They are spearheading the censorship of left-wing and anti-war websites on the internet in the fraudulent name of combating Russian “meddling” and “fake news.”
The other prong of the ruling class response to the growth of working class militancy and anti-capitalist sentiment is the promotion of fake “progressives” and “socialists” such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, which are aligned with the Democratic Party and seek to channel working class opposition back behind that party of American imperialism.
The alternative for workers and young people is being advanced by the Socialist Equality Party, which alone is fighting to mobilize the working class in opposition to the capitalist two-party system on the basis of a socialist program. The campaign of SEP candidate Niles Niemuth for US Congress in the 12th Congressional District of Michigan is aimed at broadening the growth of working class resistance and providing it with an independent and revolutionary program. Workers and youth across the country should support the campaign and join and build the SEP.
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