Saturday, November 10, 2018

PELOSI'S OPEN BORDERS - WHAT IS AT STAKE WHEN THE BANGLADESHIS INVADE OUR OPEN BORDERS?

What's at Stake when Bangladeshis Arrive at the U.S. Border, in a Migrant Caravan or Not

Washington, D.C. (November 5, 1018) – Bangladesh is a hotbed for Islamic terror. But, when Bangladeshis were spotted moving northward in the migrant caravan alongside Central Americans, many in the media brushed it off as not technically supportive of the president's much-scorned claim that "unknown Middle Easterners" added an extra touch of risk to the migrant caravan.
Todd Bensman, the Center's Senior National Security Fellow and author of a recent post, said, "Some in the media downplayed the presence of Bangladeshis in the caravan because they're not Middle Eastern. This is a mistake.  Bangladesh is ground zero for Islamic extremist recruitment, and we have detained a Bangladeshi associated with terror groups before. With the current catch-and-release policies at the border due to asylum loopholes, this means that migrants with potential links to terrorist groups could be allowed entry to the interior of the country."
Bangladesh is a country that is highly trammeled with ISIS and al-Qaeda sympathizers, brooding members of a radical Islamist party now out of power, homegrown jihadists of various strands, mosques where extremism is preached, and returning foreign terrorist fighters with combat experience in Syria. Al-Qaeda and ISIS have committed nearly 40 terror attacks in the country since 2015.

In 2010, one of two Bangladeshi migrants traveling together who reached the Mexico-Arizona border admitted to membership in a U.S.-designated terrorist group back home. He was deported while his partner applied for asylum and absconded without ever showing up for the hearing.


Video: Sanctuary Policies and Their Impact

Washington, D.C. (November 7, 2018) – The practice of shielding criminal aliens in violation of U.S. law has gone from an isolated practice to one that is widespread in jurisdictions across the country. Dan Cadman, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, highlights the policies, the impacts, and the myths.
View the sanctuary cities fact sheet: https://www.cis.org/Fact-Sheet/Sanctuary-Cities


The Cult City Triumphant



Daniel J. Flynn has produced a truly remarkable work detailing San Francisco’s descent into multicultural madness in the 1970s. In Cult City. Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days that Shook San francisco, the prolonged orgy that characterized San Francisco civic life resulted in two disasters. It culminated in the Jonestown massacre in November 1978, claiming 918 lives, including 287 children, and then a few days later, in the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk at the hands of a dismissed public employee Dan White.  Flynn shows incontrovertibly that these events went together as a form of cosmic justice. Moscone and gay activist Harvey Milk had been among the biggest boosters of the mentally unhinged Jim Jones, who had pushed his followers into committing suicide in Guyana on November 17.
Since the early 1970s, Jones had been a celebrity in California Democratic politics and prefigured the culturally leftist course that his party would take nationwide in the ensuing decades. Jones was well-connected to black radicals like Angela Davis; he identified with the rising gay insurgency championed by his friend Milk; and he led a cult that combined New Age features with devotion to Jones as a leader with supernatural powers. By the way, it was only by reading Flynn’s book and then interviewing him in a podcast that I became aware that Jones was white. His charismatic power over blacks, who comprised most of his following, made me assume that he too was black. When he took his devotees to Guyana, where he conspicuously starved and abused them, he continued to enjoy the fervent support of the entire Democratic establishment. Whenever a complaint began to circulate, his highly placed army of defenders would spring to his aid. These included President Jimmy Carter, California Governor Jerry Brown, who succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1975, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally,  U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Speaker of the California House of Representatives Willie Brown, Mayor Moscone of San Francisco to City Supervisor Milk. Prominent journalists like Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times, were also found among Jones’s legion of political admirers.
Before Jones dragged off his crowd to Guyana, he ran the Peoples Temple in San Francisco. There, no matter what scam he engaged in to increase his private wealth as a “religious and civic leader,” (and Flynn is not hesitant to reveal these misdeeds) he always had political allies who covered his back. Had Jones stayed in California and not fallen prey to murderous and suicidal tendencies, he might have remained a force in Democratic politics and possibly been elected to high state office. After he killed himself and got his followers to “drink the kool aid,” what happened was described in misleading terms, as Flynn carefully explains. It was made to appear (and this was my impression too in 1978) that Jones was a fundamentalist religious fanatic, who because of his (presumably Christian) fanaticism planned and assisted in the deaths of hundreds of people. Flynn demonstrates that Jones was anything but a devout Christian. He was an admirer of Soviet communism and encouraged his followers to donate money to the Soviet state. He also tore up copies of the Bible, which he considered unacceptable competition for his own evolving belief system. Not surprisingly, all of Jones’s erstwhile friends went along with this doctored narrative and explained the Jonestown massacre accordingly.
Equally mendacious were the ideologically tailored reports about the assassinations of Milk and Moscone by a former city employee. In what Flynn describes facetiously as “sanitized facts,” the two victims of assassination died as martyrs to the gay cause. Nothing of the sort took place. They died over an issue of patronage, which seems to be an inconvenient fact that filmmakers and LGBT advocates have worked their way around. The murderer of Moscone, who was heterosexual, and of Milk, who was gay, was apparently -- like his victims -- on the political left. The media and the city of San Francisco were both expeditious about airbrushing both Jones’ Peoples Temple (which has been supplanted by a post office) and his relations with prominent Democrats out of the received historical accounts. Even the hapless Democratic congressman Leon Ryan, who went to Jonestown to report on what was happening and had his plane shot down by Jones’s hit squad, has been pushed down the memory hole. The very mention of Ryan might recall unpleasant memories that the media has worked to remove.
The larger picture that Flynn reveals in his scrupulously researched account of San Francisco’s tumultuous history in the 1970s is one of transformational politics. What seemed goofy in this “cult city” during that decade, such as love fests, widespread drug usage, and the celebration of alternative lifestyles and bizarre New Age movements, would spread to the rest of the country. There was also a political change going in simultaneously that Flynn notices, and it affected the Democratic Party fundamentally. Before “Governor Moonbeam” won his first term in 1975 (Jerry Brown, now in his eighties, is still governor of the state), Reagan had served in that office for two terms. His predecessor and Jerry Brown’s father, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, had served as governor from 1959 to 1967 and unlike his son, was a very traditional Irish-Catholic Democrat. Pat was sympathetic to organized labor and other Democratic constituencies but left it to his Republican successor to pass what was then considered a liberal abortion-rights law. Indeed Pat rose to statewide fame as a district attorney who prosecuted an abortion provider. It was not Pat but Jerry and figures like Dianne Feinstein and George Moscone who would preview the new Democratic Party of expressive freedoms and minority grievance. Flynn provides a detailed picture of how this was already taking place, with disastrous consequences, in Jim Jones’ San Francisco. Equally important, he reveals how the media even back then had already begun to tamper grievously with facts that didn’t suit its political purpose. It didn’t start with MSNBC.        


San Francisco Spends More Than $385,000 to Register 61 Non-Citizen Voters









File - In this Nov. 8, 2016, file photo, voters cast ballots at City Hall in San Francisco. San Francisco will become the first city in California and one of only a handful nationwide to allow noncitizens to vote in a local election in November. They’re only allowed to vote …

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
   191
2:15

The city of San Francisco spent more than $385,000 to register non-citizen voters, but only 61 of those voters signed up to vote Tuesday in time for the midterm elections.

John Arntz, the director of the San Francisco Department of Elections, confirmed with Breitbart News on Tuesday morning that the city registered 61 non-citizens to vote in local school board races, and reports say those votes came with a hefty price tag.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported last week that the city spent $6,326 per non-citizen voter— a total of $385,886 for 61 voters—to get them to vote in the school board elections.
Part of the high price tag for votes came from having to set up a separate registration for non-citizens who cannot under federal law vote in federal elections.
“We had to create a separate database,” Arntz said, according to the Sacramento Bee. “We created a separate ballot for these folks. We have separate roster pages for the polling places, we have a separate registration affidavit. We have a separate vote by mail ballot application, we have a separate website page.”
The city’s department of elections began registering non-citizens to vote in July, after residents approved “Proposition N” in 2016, giving non-citizens—including illegal aliens— the ability to vote in some local elections.
But the San Francisco Department of Elections website warned potential voters that their voter registration information might be shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“In addition, if you apply for naturalization, you will be asked whether you have ever registered or voted in a federal, state, or local election in the United States,” the website says.
San Francisco followed the lead of Chicago, Illinois; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and several cities in Maryland in allowing non-citizens to vote in school board or municipal elections.

STEALING AMERICA!


Here’s how California surrendered to Mexico… OR WAS HANDED TO MEXICO BY NANCY PELOSI, DIANNE FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS, JERRY BROWN and GAVIN NEWSOM!


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/california-under-mex-occupation-do-not.html


 


THIS IS WHAT THE DEMOCRAT PARTY OF CORRUPTION AND OPEN BORDERS HAS DONE TO ONE CITY!


SANCTUARY CITY SAN FRANSICO

AMERICA’S DUMPSTER CITY OF FILTH AND DRUG DEALERS

 

HOME TO SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN, SENATOR KAMALA HARRIS, REP. NANCY PELOSI and GAVEN NEWSOM

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/10/monica-showalter-sanctuary-city-san.html

“It’s almost impossible to get convicted in this city,” said [Sgt. Kevin] Healy, who works in the Police Department’s narcotics division. “The message needs to be sent that it’s not OK to be selling drugs. It’s not allowed anywhere else. Where else can you walk up to someone you don’t know and purchase crack and heroin? Is there such a place?”…

Police say drug dealers from the East Bay ride BART into San Francisco every day to prey on the addicts slumped on our sidewalks, and yet the city that claims to so desperately want to help those addicts often looks the other way.

 

Steinle’s murderer, Jose Zarate and been deported 5xs!
"While walking with her father on a pier in San Francisco in 2015, Steinle was shot by the illegal alien. Steinle pleaded with her father to not let her die, but she soon passed in her father’s arms."

 

THE STAGGERING COST OF THE WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE BUILT BORDER to OPEN BORDER’
According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s 2017 report, illegal immigrants, and their children, cost American taxpayers a net $116 billion annually -- roughly $7,000 per alien annually. While high, this number is not an outlier: a recent study by the Heritage Foundation found that low-skilled immigrants (including those here illegally) cost Americans trillions over the course of their lifetimes, and a study from the National Economics Editorial found that illegal immigration costs America over $140 billion annually. As it stands, illegal immigrants are a massive burden on American taxpayers.

 

 Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California   


A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. 
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. 
                                                                                                                
BLOG: MANY DISPUTE CALIFORNIA’S EXPENDITURES FOR THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE IN MEXIFORNIA JUST AS THEY DISPUTE THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS. APPROXIMATELY HALF THE POPULATION OF CA IS NOW MEXICAN AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE LIKE BUNNIES. THE $22 BILLION IS STATE EXPENDITURE ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE WITH LOS ANGELES COUNTY LEADING AT OVER A BILLION DOLLARS PAID OUT YEARLY TO MEXICO’S ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS. NOW MULTIPLY THAT BY THE NUMBER OF COUNTIES IN CA AND YOU START TO GET AN IDEA OF THE STAGGERING WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE ERECTED SANS ANY LEGALS VOTES. ADD TO THIS THE FREE ENTERPRISE HOSPITAL AND CLINIC COST FOR LA RAZA’S “FREE” MEDICAL WHICH IS ESTIMATED TO BE ABOUT $1.5 BILLION PER YEAR.

Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. 
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." 
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. 
And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.



If Immigration Creates Wealth, Why Is California America's Poverty Capital?




California used to be home to America's largest and most affluent middle class.  Today, it is America's poverty capital.  What went wrong?  In a word: immigration.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Official Poverty Measure, California's poverty rate hovers around 15 percent.  But this figure is misleading: the Census Bureau measures poverty relative to a uniform national standard, which doesn't account for differences in living costs between states – the cost of taxes, housing, and health care are higher in California than in Oklahoma, for example.  Accounting for these differences reveals that California's real poverty rate is 20.6 percent – the highest in America, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent.

Likewise, income inequality in California is the second-highest in America, behind only New York.  In fact, if California were an independent country, it would be the 17th most unequal country on Earth, nestled comfortably between Honduras and Guatemala.  Mexico is slightly more egalitarian.  California is far more unequal than the "social democracies" it emulates: Canada is the 111th most unequal nation, while Norway is far down the list at number 153 (out of 176 countries).  In terms of income inequality, California has more in common with banana republics than other "social democracies."

More Government, More Poverty
High taxes, excessive regulations, and a lavish welfare state – these are the standard explanations for California's poverty epidemic.  They have some merit.  For example, California has both the highest personal income tax rate and the highest sales tax in America, according to Politifact.

Not only are California's taxes high, but successive "progressive" governments have swamped the state in a sea of red tape.  Onerous regulations cripple small businesses and retard economic growth.  Kerry Jackson, a fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, gives a few specific examples of how excessive government regulation hurts California's poor.  He writes in a recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times:
Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor.  By some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50% higher than the national average.  Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics ... found that "in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ... energy expenditures exceeding 10% of household income."
Some government regulation is necessary and desirable, but most of California's is not.  There is virtue in governing with a "light touch."
Finally, California's welfare state is, perhaps paradoxically, a source of poverty in the state.  The Orange Country Register reports that California's social safety net is comparable in scale to those found in Europe:
In California a mother with two children under the age of 5 who participates in these major welfare programs – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), housing assistance, home energy assistance, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children – would receive a benefits package worth $30,828 per year.
... [Similar] benefits in Europe ranged from $38,588 per year in Denmark to just $1,112 in Romania.  The California benefits package is higher than in well-known welfare states as France ($17,324), Germany ($23,257) and even Sweden ($22,111).
Although welfare states ideally help the poor, reality is messy.  There are three main problems with the welfare state.  First, it incentivizes poverty by rewardingthe poor with government handouts that are often far more valuable than a job.  This can be ameliorated to some degree by imposing work requirements on welfare recipients, but in practice, such requirements are rarely imposed.  Second, welfare states are expensive.  This means higher taxes and therefore slower economic growth and fewer job opportunities for everyone – including the poor.
Finally, welfare states are magnets for the poor.  Whether through domestic migration or foreign immigration, poor people flock to places with generous welfare states.  This is logical from the immigrant's perspective, but it makes little sense from the taxpayer's.  This fact is why socialism and open borders arefundamentally incompatible.

Why Big Government?
Since 1960, California's population exploded from 15.9 to 39 million people.  The growth was almost entirely due to immigration – many people came from other states, but the majority came from abroad.  The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that 10 million immigrants currently reside in California.  This works out to 26 percent of the state's population.

This figure includes 2.4 million illegal aliens, although a recent study from Yale University suggests that the true number of aliens is at least double that.  Modifying the initial figure implies that nearly one in three Californians is an immigrant.  This is not to disparage California's immigrant population, but it is madness to deny that such a large influx of people has changed California's society and economy.

Importantly, immigrants vote Democrat by a ratio higher than 2:1, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies.  In California, immigration has increased the pool of likely Democrat voters by nearly 5 million people, compared to just 2.4 million additional likely Republican voters.  Not only does this almost guarantee Democratic victories, but it also shifts California's political midpoint to the left.  This means that to remain competitive in elections, the Republicans must abandon or soften many conservative positions so as to cater to the center.
California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there.  Immigration turned California blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.

REALITIES OF A STATE IN MELTDOWN:


THE INVISIBLE CALIFORNIA

De facto apartheid world in the Golden State.


https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270265/invisible-california-bruce-thornton


Reprinted from Hoover.org.
In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York, the customs agent rifling my bag looked at my passport and said, with a Bronx sneer, “Bruce Thornton, huh. Must be one of them Hollywood names.”
Hearing that astonishing statement, I realized for the first time that California is as much an idea as a place. There were few regions in America more distant from Hollywood than the rural, mostly poor, multiethnic San Joaquin Valley where my family lived and ranched. Yet to this New Yorker, the Valley was invisible.

BLOG: FEINSTEIN & BOXER THREE TIMES ATTEMPTED TO INSERT IN VARIOUS BILLS AN AMNESTY FOR FARM WORKERS TO REPAY THEIR BIG AG BIG DONORS.
ONE-THIRD OF ALL FARM WORKERS END UP ON WELFARE AS SOON AS THE ANCHOR BABIES START COMING
Coastal Californians are sometimes just as blind to the world on the other side of the Coast Range, even though its farms, orchards, vineyards, dairies, and ranches comprise more than half the state’s $46 billion agriculture industry, which grows over 400 commodities, including over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts.
Granted, Silicon Valley is an economic colossus compared to the ag industry, but agriculture’s importance can’t be measured just in dollars and cents. Tech, movies, and every other industry tends to forget that their lives and businesses, indeed civilization itself, all rest on the shoulders of those who produce the food. You can live without your iPhone or your Mac or the latest Marvel Studios blockbuster. But you can’t live without the food grown by the one out of a 100 people who work to feed the other 99.
A Politically Invisible Valley
Living in the most conservative counties in the 
deepest-blue state, Valley residents constantly see 
their concerns, beliefs, and needs seldom taken 
into account at the state or federal level.
Registered Democrats in California outnumber registered Republicans by over 19%, and the State Legislature seats about twice as many Democrats as Republicans (California’s one of only eight states nationwide with a trifecta of a Democratic and two Democratic controlled legislative bodies).
California’s Congressional delegation is even more unbalanced: in the House of Representatives, currently there are fourteen Republicans compared to thirty-nine House Democrats (at least half of those GOP districts are in danger of turning blue this fall); half the Republicans represent Central Valley districts, none bordering the Pacific Ocean. The last elected Republican US Senator left office in 1991. The last Republican governor was the politically light-pink action-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose second term ended in 2011.
This progressive dominance of the state has led to policies and priorities that has damaged its agricultural economy and seriously degraded the quality of life in the Valley.
Despite a long drought that has diminished the run-off of snow from the Sierra Nevada, projects for dams and reservoirs are on hold, seriously impacting the ag industry that relies on the snowmelt for most of its water. Worse yet, since 2008, a period including the height of the drought, 1.4 trillion gallons of water have been dumped into the Pacific Ocean to protect the endangered Delta Smelt, a two-inch bait-fish. Thousands of agricultural jobs have been lost and farmland left uncultivated, all to satisfy the sensibilities of affluent urban environmentalists. And even after a few years of abundant rain, Valley farmers this year are receiving just 20% of their South-of-the-Delta water allocation.
Or take California’s high-speed rail project, currently moribund and $10 billion over budget just for construction of the easiest section, through the flat center of the Valley. Meanwhile, State Highway 99, which bisects the Valley from north to south for 500 miles, is pot-holed, inefficient, and crammed with 18-wheel semis. It is the bloodiest highway in the country, in dire need of widening and repair. Yet to gratify our Democratic governor’s
high-tech green obsession, billions of dollars are 
being squandered to create an unnecessary link 
between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. That’s $10 billion that could have been spent building more reservoirs instead of dumping water into the ocean because there’s no place to store it.
The common thread of these two examples of 
mismanagement and waste is the romantic 
environmentalism of the well-heeled coastal left. 
They serially support government projects and 
regulations that impact the poor and the aged, who
are left to bear their costs.
The same idealized nature-love has led to regulations and taxes on energy that have made California home of the third-worst energy poverty in the country. In sweltering San Joaquin Valley counties like Madera and Tulare, energy poverty rates are 15% compared to 3–4% in cool, deep-blue coastal enclaves. Impoverished Kings County averages over $500 a month in electric bills, while tony Marin Country, with an average income twice that of Kings County, averages $200. Again, it’s the poor, aged, and working class who bear the brunt of these costs, especially in the Valley where temperatures regularly reach triple digits in the summer; unlike the coast, where the clement climate makes expensive air-conditioning unnecessary.
Deteriorating Quality of Life
It’s no wonder then that Fresno, in the heart of the 
Valley, is the second most impoverished city in the
poorest region of a state that has the highest 
poverty levels in the country and one of the 
highest rates of income inequality. Over one-fifth 
of its residents live below the poverty line, and it 
The greatest impact on the Valley’s 
deteriorating quality of life, however, has been 
the influx of illegal aliens. Some are attracted by 
plentiful agriculture and construction work, and 
others by California’s generous welfare transfers
— California is home to one in three of the 
country’s welfare recipients— all facilitated by 
California’s status as a “sanctuary state” that 
regularly releases felons rather than cooperate 
with Immigration and Customs Enforcement 
(ICE). As a result, one-quarter of the country’s 
illegal alien population lives in California, many 
from underdeveloped regions of Mexico and Latin
America that have different social and cultural 
mores and attitudes to the law and civic 
responsibility.
The consequences of these feckless policies are 
found throughout the state. But they are 
especially noticeable in rural California. There 
high levels of crime and daily disorder—from 
murders, assaults, and drug trafficking, to 
driving without insurance, DUIs, hit-and-runs, 
and ignoring building and sanitation codes—
have degraded or, in some cases, destroyed the 
once-orderly farming towns that used to be 
populated by earlier immigrants, including 
many legal immigrants from Mexico, who over 
a few generations of sometimes rocky 
coexistence assimilated to American culture 
and society.
Marginalized Cultural Minorities
More broadly, the dominant cultures and mores of the dot.com north and the Hollywood south are inimical to those of the Valley. Whether it is gun-ownership, hunting, church-going, or military service, many people in the San Joaquin Valley of all races are quickly becoming cultural minorities marginalized by the increasingly radical positions on issues such as abortion, guns, and religion.
Despite the liberal assumption that all Hispanics favor progressive policies, many Latino immigrants and their children find more in common with Valley farmers and natives with whom they live and work than they do with distant urban elites.
Indeed, as a vocal conservative professor in the local university (Fresno State), I have survived mainly because my students, now more than half Latino and Mexican immigrants or children of immigrants, are traditional and practical in a way that makes them impatient with the patronizing victim-politics of more affluent professors. They have more experience with physical labor, they are more religious and, like me, they are often the first in their families to graduate from college. As I did with the rural Mexican Americans I grew up with, I usually have more in common with my students than I do with many of my colleagues.
And this is the great irony of the invisibility of the “other” California: the blue-coast policies that suit the prejudices and sensibilities of the affluent have damaged the prospects of the “others of color” they claim they want to help. Over-
represented on the poverty and welfare rolls, many
migrants both legal and illegal have seen water 
policies that destroy agricultural jobs, building 
restrictions that drive up the cost of housing, 
energy policies that increase their cost of living, “sanctuary city” policies that put back on the 
streets thugs and criminals who prey mainly on 
their ethnic fellows, and economic policies that 
favor the redistribution rather than the creation of wealth and jobs.
Meanwhile, the coastal liberals who tout a cosmetic diversity live in a de facto apartheid world, surrounded by those of similar income, taste, and politics. Many look down on the people whom they view as racists and xenophobes at worst, and intellectually challenged rubes at best. This disdain has been evident in the way the media regularly sneer that House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes is a “former dairy-farmer” from Tulare County, an origin that makes “the match between his backstory and his prominence” seem “wholly incongruous,” per Roll Call's David Hawkings.
Finally, those of us who grew up and live in the rural Valley did so among a genuine diversity, one that reflected the more complex identities beyond the crude categories of “white” or “black” or “Hispanic.”
Italians, Basques, Portuguese, Armenians, Swedes, Mexicans, Filipinos, Southern blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Volga Germans, Scotch-Irish Dust Bowl migrants—all migrated to the Valley to work the fields and better their lives. Their children and grandchildren went to the same schools, danced together and drank together, helped round up each other’s animals when they got loose, were best friends or deadly enemies, dated and intermarried, got drafted into the Army or joined the Marines—all of them Americans who managed to honor their diverse heritages and faiths, but still be a community. Their most important distinctions were not so much between races and ethnicities, though those of course often collided, but between the respectable people––those who obeyed the law, went to church, and raised their kids right––­ and those we all called “no damned good.” Skin-color or accents couldn’t sort one from the other.  
What most of us learned from living in real diversity in the Valley is that being an American means taking people one at a time.
That world still exists, but it is slowly fading away—in part because of the policies and politics of those to our west, who can see nothing on the other side of the Coast Range.

ABOUT BRUCE THORNTON

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.
   

Billionaires, corporate money swing toward Democrats

By our reporter 
7 November 2018
The 2018 midterms have been the most expensive congressional elections in US history, with an estimated $5.2 billion raised and spent by Election Day, according to data collected and reported by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). The total not only rose 35 percent over the previous midterm record in 2014, it exceeds the money spent on congressional races during the 2016 presidential election year.
Significantly, the Democratic Party and affiliated political action committees raked in the lion’s share of the record fundraising. Of the $4.7 billion spent by the latest reporting period, Democrats accounted for $2.5 billion, compared to $2.2 billion for Republican candidates and committees. Republicans have traditionally enjoyed a massive fundraising edge.
Democrats enjoyed a huge fundraising advantage in the contests for 435 seats in the House of Representatives, raising $951 million compared to $637 million for the Republicans, who held the majority of seats, 242 to 193. The Democratic advantage was particularly notable in the 29 seats considered “toss-ups,” where Democratic candidates raised an average of $5.5 million apiece, nearly twice the $3 million average for the Republicans.
Democrats also held the fundraising advantage in the Senate, $513 million to $361 million, but that was a smaller edge than in the House and actually represents a significant gain for the Republicans, since the Democrats had the advantage of incumbency in 26 of the 35 Senate seats that were at stake.
Overall, spending by the Democratic Party and associated groups was projected by the CRP to rise 44 percent over 2014, while the Republican Party and associated groups boosted their spending by only 21 percent.
Despite the claims that small-dollar donors were the driving force in the Democratic fundraising advantage, on the model of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2016, donations of under $200 accounted for only 16 percent of the funds raised by House candidates and 27 percent of the money raised by Senate candidates—with the latter figure swelled mainly by the small-donor fundraising for Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who raised a colossal $70 million for his campaign, more than double the cost of a typical presidential campaign 30 years ago.
Among the most significant changes in big-

money fundraising is the shift by Wall Street, 

with the securities and investment sector 

raising its spending by $100 million compared

to 2014 and favoring Democratic 

congressional candidates over Republicans 

by 52 percent to 46 percent. This is the first 

time Wall Street has favored congressional 

Democrats since 2006, the last time the 

Democratic Party won control of the House of

Representatives. Finance also backed the 

Democratic Party in 2008, by a margin of 58 

percent to 42 percent, but the bulk of that 

funding went to the presidential campaign of 

Barack Obama.
In 2010, Wall Street swung its funding back to the Republicans, who raked in 69 percent of the funds from stockbrokers and hedge fund bosses.
According to the CRP report, “Sixteen of the top 20 recipients of investment group affiliates are now Democrats, with Sen. Claire McCaskill taking the top spot at nearly $2 million.”
Other industries shifting towards the Democrats include hospitals and nursing homes, health professionals (doctors) and retail, while software services firms and law firms, already pro-Democratic, increased their contributions as well.
The top individual financial supporter of the Republicans was casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who spent $113 million in 2018, more than the $93 million he spent in support of Republicans in 2012. The second-ranking Republican moneyman was Richard Uihlein, who gave $39 million to Republican candidates.
These Republican billionaires were matched nearly dollar for dollar by two Democratic billionaires, hedge fund boss Tom Steyer, who spent $51 million, and media mogul Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, who pledged $100 million and had delivered $38 million by the time of the latest filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Self-funding candidates were led by Democratic House candidate David Trone in Maryland, who effectively bought a safe Democratic seat vacated by retirement, spending $16 million of his liquor fortune, and Republican Senate candidates Rick Scott in Florida (an estimated $50 million) and Bob Hugin in New Jersey ($27 million).
The amounts of money spent on individual races underscores the oligarchic character of American politics. What passes for democracy in America is actually the monopoly of the super-rich. For example, Senate contests in Florida and Texas have cost more than $100 million, those in Nevada, Arizona, Missouri and Indiana more than $30 million.

"A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”



"The ruling class was particularly terrified by the teachers’ 

walkouts earlier this year because the biggest strikes were 

organized by rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the 

unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the pro-corporate 

organizations that have suppressed the class struggle for 

decades."

“The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a 

massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 

2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve 

Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents

a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further 

concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”

"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an 

ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, 

while the economy is starved of productive investment, the 

social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living 

standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, 

wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a 

broader global process."


"A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."

White House report on socialism

The specter of Marx haunts the American ruling class

6 November 2018
Last month, the Council of Economic Advisers, an agency of the Trump White House, released an extraordinary report titled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” The report begins with the statement: “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the younger electorate.”
The very fact that the US government 
officially acknowledges a growth of popular 
support for socialism, particularly among the 
nation’s youth, testifies to vast changes taking
place in the political consciousness of the 
working class and the terror this is striking 
within the ruling elite. America is, after all, a 
country where anti-communism was for the 
greater part of a century a state-sponsored 
secular religion. No ruling class has so 
ruthlessly sought to exclude socialist politics 
from political discourse as the American ruling
class.

The 70-page document is itself an inane right-wing screed. It seeks to discredit socialism by identifying it with capitalist countries such as Venezuela that have expanded state ownership of parts of the economy while protecting private ownership of the banks, and, with the post-2008 collapse of oil and other commodity prices, increasingly attacked the living standards of the working class.
It identifies socialism with proposals for mild social reform such as “Medicare for all,” raised and increasingly abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of “economic freedom,” i.e., the unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all social reforms, business regulations, tax increases or anything else that impinges on the oligarchy’s self-enrichment.
The report’s arguments and themes find expression in the fascistic campaign speeches of Donald Trump, who routinely and absurdly attacks the Democrats as socialists and accuses them of seeking to turn America into another “socialist” Venezuela.
What has prompted this effort to blackguard socialism?
A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”
Last November, a poll conducted by YouGov showed that 51 percent of Americans between the ages of 21 and 29 would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country.
In August of this year, a Gallup poll found that for the first time 
since the organization began tracking the figure, fewer than half 
of Americans aged 18–29 had a positive view of capitalism, while
more than half had a positive view of socialism. The 
percentage of young people viewing 
capitalism positively fell from 68 percent 
in 2010 to 45 percent this year, a 23-
percentage point drop in just eight years.

This surge in interest in socialism is bound up with a resurgence of class struggle in the US and internationally. In the United States, the number of major strikes so far this year, 21, is triple the number in 2017. The ruling class was particularly terrified by the teachers’ walkouts earlier this year because the biggest strikes were organized by rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the pro-corporate organizations that have suppressed the class struggle for decades.
The growth of the class struggle is an objective process that is driven by the global crisis of capitalism, which finds its most acute social and political expression in the center of world capitalism—the United States. It is the class struggle that provides the key to the fight for genuine socialism.
Masses of workers and youth are being driven into struggle and politically radicalized by decades of uninterrupted war and the staggering growth of social inequality. This process has accelerated during the 10 years since the Wall Street crash of 2008. The Obama years saw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in history, the escalation of the wars begun under Bush and their spread to Libya, Syria and Yemen, and the intensification of mass surveillance, attacks on immigrants and other police state measures.
This paved the way for the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and backwardness of the ruling oligarchy.
Under conditions where the typical CEO in the US now makes in a single day almost as much as the average worker makes in an entire year, and the net worth of the 400 wealthiest Americans has doubled over the past decade, the working class is looking for a radical alternative to the status quo. As the Socialist Equality Party wrote in its program eight years ago, “The Breakdown of Capitalism and the Fight for Socialism in the United States”:
The change in objective conditions, however, will lead American workers to change their minds. The reality of capitalism will provide workers with many reasons to fight for a fundamental and revolutionary change in the economic organization of society.
The response of the ruling class is two-fold. First, the abandonment of bourgeois democratic forms of rule and the turn toward dictatorship. The run-up to the midterm elections has revealed the advanced stage of these preparations, with Trump’s fascistic attacks on immigrants, deployment of troops to the border, threats to gun down unarmed men, women and children seeking asylum, and his pledge to overturn the 14th Amendment establishing birthright citizenship.
That this has evoked no serious opposition from the Democrats and the media makes clear that the entire ruling class is united around a turn to authoritarianism. Indeed, the Democrats are spearheading the drive to censor the internet in order to silence left-wing and socialist opposition.
The second response is to promote phony socialists such as Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and other pseudo-left organizations in order to confuse the working class and channel its opposition back behind the Democratic Party.
In 2018, with Sanders totally integrated into the Democratic Party leadership, this role has been largely delegated to the DSA, which functions as an arm of the Democrats. Two DSA members, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Rashida Tlaib in Detroit, are likely to win seats in the House of Representatives as candidates of the Democratic Party.
The closer they come to taking office, the more they seek to distance themselves from their supposed socialist affiliation. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, joined Sanders in eulogizing the recently deceased war-monger John McCain, refused to answer when asked if she opposed the US wars in the Middle East, and dropped her campaign call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

OBAMA: SERVANT OF THE 1%


Richest one percent controls nearly half of global wealth


The richest one percent of the world’s population now controls 48.2 percent of global wealth, up from 46 percent last year.



The report found that the growth of global inequality has accelerated sharply since the 2008 financial crisis, as the values of financial assets have soared while wages have stagnated and declined.

Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019

By Gabriel Black
18 June 2015
Households with more than a million (US) dollars in private wealth are projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth in 2019 according to a new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

This large percentage, however, only includes cash, savings, money market funds and listed securities held through managed investments—collectively known as “private wealth.” It leaves out businesses, residences and luxury goods, which comprise a substantial portion of the rich’s net worth.

At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.

In total, the world added $17.5 trillion of new private wealth between 2013 and 2014. The report notes that nearly three quarters of all these gains came from previously existing wealth. In other words, the vast majority of money gained has been due to pre-existing assets increasing in value—not the creation of new material things.

This trend is the result of the massive infusions of cheap credit into the financial markets by central banks. The policy of “quantitative easing” has led to a dramatic expansion of the stock market even while global economic growth has slumped.

While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.

In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.

Those families with wealth between $20 and $100 million also rose substantially in 2014—seeing a 34 percent increase in their wealth in twelve short months. They now own $9 trillion. In five years they will surpass $14 trillion according to the report.

Coming in last in the “high net worth” population are those with between $1 million and $20 million in private wealth. These households are expected to see their wealth grow by 7.2 percent each year, going from $49 trillion to $70.1 trillion dollars, several percentage points below the highest bracket’s 12 percent growth rate.

The gains in private wealth of the ultra-rich stand in sharp contrast to the experience of billions of people around the globe. While wealth accumulation has sharply sped up for the ultra-wealthy, the vast majority of people have not even begun to recover from the past recession.

An Oxfam report from January, for example, shows that the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population went from having about 56 percent of the world’s wealth in 2010 to having 52 percent of it in 2014. Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise from 44 to 48 percent of the world’s wealth.
In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.

As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noted, in the United States “between 2007 and 2013, net wealth fell on average 2.3 percent, but it fell ten-times more (26 percent) for those at the bottom 20 percent of the distribution.” The 2015 report concludes that “low-income households have not benefited at all from income growth.”

Another report by Knight Frank, looks at those with wealth exceeding $30 million. The report notes that in 2014 these 172,850 ultra-high-net-worth individuals increased their collective wealth by $700 billion. Their total wealth now rests at $20.8 trillion.

The report also draws attention to the disconnection between the rich and the actual economy. It states that the growth of this ultra-wealthy population “came despite weaker-than-anticipated global economic growth. During 2014 the IMF was forced to downgrade its forecast increase for world output from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent.”

Record high income in 2017 for top one percent of wage earners in US
By Gabriel Black
20 October 2018
In 2017, the top one percent of US wage earners received their highest paychecks ever, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Based on newly released data from the Social Security Administration, the EPI shows that the top one percent of the population saw their paychecks increase by 3.7 percent in 2017—a rate nearly quadruple the bottom 90 percent of the population. The growth was driven by the top 0.1 percent, which includes many CEOs and corporate executives, whose pay increased eight percent and averaged $2,757,000 last year.
The EPI report is only the latest exposure of the gaping inequality between the vast majority of the population and the modern-day aristocracy that rules over them.
The EPI shows that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners have increased their pay by 22.2 percent between 1979 and 2017. Today, this bottom 90 percent makes an average of just $36,182 a year, which is eaten up by the cost of housing and the growing burden of education, health care, and retirement.
Meanwhile, the top one percent has increased its wages by 157 percent during this same period, a rate seven times faster than the other group. This top segment makes an average of $718,766 a year. Those in-between, the 90th to 99th percentile, have increased their wages by 57.4 percent. They now make an average of $152,476 a year—more than four times the bottom 90 percent.
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
Even more, while the bottom 90 percent of the population may take in 61 percent of the wages, large sections of the workforce today barely pull in any income at all. For example, Social Security Administration data found that the bottom 54 percent of wage earners in the United States, 89.5 million people, make an average of just $15,100 a year. This 54 percent of the population earns only 17 percent of all wages paid in America.
However unequal, these wage inequalities still do not fully present the divide between rich and poor. The ultra-wealthy derive their wealth not primarily from wages, but from assets and equities—principally from the stock market. While the bottom 90 percent of the population made 61 percent of the wages in 2017, they owned even less, just 27 percent of the wealth (according to the World Inequality Report 2018 by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman).
The massive increase in the value of the stock market, which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last year.
Wages are so low in the United States that roughly half of the population falls deeper into debt every year. A Reuters report from July found that the pretax net income (that is, income minus expense) of the bottom 40 percent of the population was an average of negative $11,660. Even the middle quintile of the population, the 40th to 60th percentile, breaks even with an average of only $2,836 a year.
As the Social Security Administration numbers show, 67.4 percent of the population made less than the average wage, $48,250 a year in 2017, a sum that is inadequate to support a family in many cities—especially, with high housing costs, health care, education, and retirement factored in.
For the ruling class, though, workers’ wages are already too much. The volatility of the stock market and the deep fear that the current bull market will collapse has made politicians and businessmen anxious of any sign of wage increases.
In August, wages in the US rose just 0.2 percent above the inflation rate, the highest in nine years. Though the increase was tiny, it was enough to encourage the Federal Reserve to increase the interest rate past two percent for the first time since 2008. Raising interest rates helps to depress workers’ wages by lowering borrowing and spending. As the Financial Times noted, stopping wage growth was “central” to the Federal Reserve’s move.
Further analysis of the Social Security Administration data shows that in 2017, 147,754 people reported wages of 1 million dollars or more—roughly, the top 0.05 percent. Their combined total income of $372 billion could pay for the US federal education budget five times over.
These wages, however large, still pale in comparison to the money the ultra-rich acquire from the stock market. For example, share buybacks and dividend payments, a way of funneling money to shareholders, will eclipse $1 trillion this year.
Whatever the immediate source, the wealth of the rich derives from the great mass of people who do the actual work. Across the United States and around the world, workers, young people, and students have entered into struggle this year over pay, education, health care, immigration, war and democratic rights. This growing movement of the working class must set as its aim confiscating the wealth and power of this tiny parasitic oligarchy. Society’s wealth must be democratically controlled by those who produce it.

Democrats care about illegal aliens, not you


A buddy shared a heart-wrenching story with me during dinner.  His mom was killed Christmas Eve by a drunk-driving illegal alien.  The illegal had been caught four times driving drunk by police, never deported.  My buddy is number nine of his amazing mom's thirteen kids.  She was old-school Italian, waking up 3 A.M. five days a week to bake fresh bread and prepare meals for their family.  Dad cooked on weekends.
Christmas Eve 2002, she decided to make a quick run to the store for a few ingredients she needed to bake pies.  You can imagine the devastating horror their family felt upon being notified by police that their mother had been killed.
The illegal alien drunk driver received seven years and served only three and a half.  Two of my buddy's brothers attended the illegal alien's parole hearing to keep him behind bars, to no avail.  The multiple-offender illegal alien drunk driver was set free to roam the streets of America, not deported.
As I watched my buddy struggle to maintain his composure, my heart went out to him.  I thought, "Why are all of mainstream media's and Democrats' compassion and sympathy always given to illegals and nothing for Americans?"
While strolling with her dad on a San Francisco pier, 32-year-old Kate Steinle was shot and killed by an illegal alien.  Kate's killer had a long criminal record.  The sanctuary city repeatedly welcomed back the illegal, deported five times and a seven times convicted felon, with open arms.  A liberal San Francisco jury found Kate's killer not guilty.  President Trump said their verdict was disgraceful.  Kate's dad recalls her last words as he held her in his arms: "help me, Dad." 
San Francisco politicians, mainstream media, and Democrats celebrated the leftist jury's outrageous not guilty verdict.  These leftists did not express an ounce of sympathy for American citizen Kate Steinle and her family.
Sixteen-year-old Kayla Cuevas was brutally murdered by MS-13 gang members who illegally invade our country.  Did Democrat Nancy Pelosi express an ounce of sympathy for Kayla's mom, Evelyn Rodriguez?  No.  Pelosi angrily attackedTrump for calling MS-13 gang members animals.  No compassion or sympathy for Americans.
Folks, I could fill this article with incidences in which American lives have been devastated by illegal repeat criminals and illegal gangs coddled by Democrats who run sanctuary cities.
Democrat California governor Jerry Brown actually signed a bill making California a "sanctuary state."  Brown's bill says his state will not cooperate with federal immigration law enforcement, putting American lives at risk.  Why is Brown gifting illegals rights while denying the rights of his American constituents?  While Californians struggle to find housing, Brown is assisting illegals with housing.  Illegals in California receive college tuition and numerous other benefits unavailable to legal citizens. 
So why are mainstream media and Democrats obsessed with opening our borders for the free flow of illegals and getting them addicted to government freebies?  One reason is that we have allowed old hippies to indoctrinate our kids in public schools for decades.  This has created a generation that believes that America is the greatest source of evil in the world, founded by white straight Christian men who stole everything from the rest of the world.  Our youths believe that it is morally unjust for America to have borders.  We must share what we stole.
Insidiously, the second reason why Democrats desire to flood the country with illegals is to gain political power.  Immigrants have contributed greatly to our culture.  The vast majority of illegals are unskilled workers easily seduced by Democrat politicians who promise to take care of them.  Democrats will do to illegals what they have done to blacks for decades: give them just enough to keep them poor, on welfare, and faithfully voting for Democrats.
This is why mainstream media and Democrats pretend to have all the compassion and sympathy in the world for illegals while ignoring the dire consequence coddling illegals has on the lives of Americans.
Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American
Help Lloyd spread the Truth: http://bit.ly/2kZqmUk
http://LloydMarcus.com

THE CRONY CLASS:

OBAMACLINTONOMICS was created by BILLARY CLINTON!

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.



“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”

*

“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON EXAMINER


WALL STREET and the LOOTING of AMERICA

The corporate cash hoard has likewise reached a new record, hitting an 

estimated $1.79 trillion in the fourth quarter of last year, up from $1.77 

trillion in the previous quarter. Instead of investing the money, however, 

companies are using it to buy back their own stock and pay out record 

dividends.

Megan McArdle Discusses How America's Elites Are Rigging the Rules - Newsweek/The Daily Beast special correspondent Megan McArdle joins Scott Rasmussen for a discussion on America's new Mandarin class.



WEST HOLLYWOOD WELCOME MAT FOR ILLEGALS… Not a single employer of illegals ever prosecuted in this LA RAZA SANCTUARY CITY where they print voting ballots in Spanish so illegals can vote for more! 

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/11/does-reformation-hardware-in-west.html

The Democrats' Leadership Crisis



As we approach the midterm elections, the "leaders" of the Democratic Party sign on to a variety of hard-left proposals, including "Medicare for All."  The fact that many of the proposals are brutally expensive and would lead us into a brave new Venezuela seem completely lost in the woods.  One must also wonder at the ludicrous speed at which previously "rational" Democrats have swung from working across the aisle to become feet-in-stone resisters.  What is the source of the rage that turned mere humans into Green Hulks?
One might look at the occupants of senatorial and congressional seats for the answer.  After all, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are all members of "congressional leadership."  With varying degrees of extremism and volume, they all espouse pretty much the same rhetorical territory staked out by Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the oblivious (to facts and history) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
We should have Medicare for All and a "living wage," regardless of work skills or industriousness, and we should relegate the police and prisons to the dustbin of the history of "justice."  Only Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum has gone that far to date, and the Pittsburgh massacre has led to that rhetoric being momentarily shelved.
To say these proposals are scary to Republicans would be an understatement.  As Peggy Noonan notes regarding the Kavanaugh cabaret, Republican senators are "amazed" and "terrified" that “seemingly, and without very much thought, nearly half the United States Senate has abandoned the presumption of innocence in this country, all to achieve a political goal.”
This isn't happening in a vacuum.
To any thoughtful observer, it is painfully clear that there are two distinct parts of the Democrat plantation: the D.C. swamp and the useful idiots in the streets.  The relationship between the two is intuitively obvious but seldom exposed.  The swamp exists because it has enough vocal support, both on the streets and in the press.  The very air it breathes is on the pages of the New York Times and commentary on CNN, fed by cameras in Berkeley and on the steps of the Supreme Court.
That brings us to the key question.  Which came first: the useful idiots, or the swamp?
No politician can survive without votes.  To get those votes, he takes positions he thinks will attract the maximum number of voters.  His problem is to identify just what those voters want and put on political clothes that make him look like a member of their movement, whatever that might be.  Thus, the joke that you can tell when a politician is lying when his lips are moving is usually a close representation of truth.
Today, a loud youth movement rebels against norms.  That's what juveniles do.  They push boundaries.  They haven't developed either an accurate vocabulary or an effective BS-detector.  In a solid family, they'd get called out for misbehaving like "Young Sheldon."  But when kids don't have firm parents (like Ben Carson's mother), they act out, searching for boundaries.  If parents enforce rules, children learn that they are safe inside those rules.  If there are no limits, kids push farther and farther looking for them.
In a mollycoddling society, where success is not rewarded and failure isn't punished, there are no safe spaces.  This creates fear.  No one is safe, because no one knows quite how far you can stray without lions and tigers and bears coming for you.
You can be a boy today, and a girl tomorrow.  No one can call you out on it, because that might somehow harm your psyche.  So now we have large numbers of completely confused young adults pushing boundaries, looking for limits, not realizing that their movement has declared limits to be off limits.  The safety they crave has been completely destroyed by the unfettered license they've been granted.  The result is chaos.
We should not be surprised when this mob of self-absorbed lemmings uses language badly while wielding batons against otherwise inoffensive adults.  These people have been trained to do this by their minimally more mature peer group, who is holding down claw-footed chairs inside the stone walls of academia.  That group has been certified in underwater basket-weaving and social activism as a reward for its own rebellion.  And its checks are signed by barely more mature administrators, whose own rudderless lives create total fear of that uncontained critical mass of effluvium called a student body.
In short, we have a huge mass of people who have, as Pat Paulsen noted, "a right to go to high school and end up with a third grade education."  Their "enthusiasm is exceeded only by their extreme lack of judgment."  And they vote.  Or at least enough of them voted to help elect Barack Obama.  Pat Paulsen was right.
Because of this uncritical mass of low-hanging fruit, the Political Pandas of the Left imagine an easy electoral win if they can convince the great unwashed that the Democrats are their saviors.  So instead of standing on any principle, they listen to the dumb masses and their echo chambers in the press.  Perceiving that the wind is blowing in a particular direction, they declare that they are, and have always been, totally in tune with them.  That's the very definition of Panda-ing.  If the masses don't wake up and Walk Away, those votes are in the bag.
Paul Joseph Watson puts it this way.  "Hello fellow humans.  I am celebrity No. 2932, I believe in everything that is safe and popular with people aged 18-35.  You may now praise me on the social media platform of your choice..."  "I agree.  Our agreement with each other's views means we are right and the other side's evil hatred must be stopped!"  In short, the Democrat "leaders" are in fact NPCs – Non Player Characters in video games, controlled by the program, with no vestige of real humanity.  The masses are equally NPCs.  "Well, I got all of the accounts suspended, but why do I still feel so empty and pathetic?"  You have to ask?
Dianne Feinstein used to support corporate bailouts and restrictions on union organizing.  As mayor of San Francisco, she vetoed domestic partner legislation and refused to march in a gay rights parade.  Now she is firmly in the LGBTQ corner and strongly supports labor unions.  This is typical of the left.  As long as leftists can keep themselves seated in the U.S. Capitol, they will take any stance whatever, as long as it looks as if it aligns with the loudest voices.
We can easily add example after example, but it's clear that the "leaders" of the left are no such thing.  A leader stands up for principles and propositions.  He defends them and works to achieve results consistent with them.  With the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, the left's "leaders" are NPCs.
Those "leaders" are people who, whether by accident of circumstance or political skill, have managed to position themselves to surf the current wave of loud emotion.  With rare exceptions, they have no established positions of their own.  So when all the rage is "against," they become "The Resistance."  When Ocasio-Cortez pushes for "Medicare for All," the other "leaders" follow the sound of the shouting.
The number of actual leaders on the left is small.  Bernie Sanders took a (misguided) position in favor of outright socialism long ago and has stuck with it.  He had little charisma to attract followers nationally, but when his longstanding convictions came in sync with the street, he came within an eyelash of winning the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.
The Schumers and Pelosis of the Democratic Party are leaders, but not of the party.  Rather, they are organizational leaders of the Democrat caucus in D.C.  To have a voice in that caucus, you must toe the line they establish.  But even they shift their stances when the wind changes.  So they are followers of the mob.  They are the ultimate groupies, willing to surrender all principle in order to keep their positions of power in the halls of Congress.
"Where are they?  What are they doing?  I must find them!  I am their leader!"
Image credit: Amio Cajander.

The left is desperate and floundering badly



Readers of AT are likely to have seen the many, many clips of deranged leftists who spew their anti-Trump venom 24-7 on CNN and MSNBC.  No reason to name them all – they all say exactly the same things.  Each one of them morphs seamlessly into the next one.
It is hard to imagine the level of their rhetoric being worse than it was throughout the 2016 campaign, but it is.  They have gone off the rails, out of their minds.  While the published polls show most races in the midterms as very, very close, they may suspect that they are going to lose badly.  So bedeviled by Trump's success in all aspects of the government except illegal immigration, thanks to the Democrats and RINO republicans, they are melting down like the Wicked Witch of the West.
The left's accusations have ramped up beyond calling Trump Hitler, Stalin, tyrant, dictator, etc.  They call him racist a thousand times a day, even though the man has never said or done a racist thing in his life.  You can Google him with Rosa Parks and countless other African-American leaders with whom he has had long and close relationships.  These people who are pontificating all day long about Trump's "racism" are idiots spewing talking points with which they've been up-armored in order to turn Americans against the man.
It's not working.  The more they spout their groundless allegations of racism, homophobia, etc., the more they alienate the Americans who are gladly aware, day after day, of how much Trump has accomplished in just under two years.  Their lives are better.  The formerly jobless have jobs.  The tax cuts have let workers keep more of the money they earn.
Trump's detractors are embarrassing themselves, and most Americans are paying no attention to them.  These talking heads of the left have rendered themselves irrelevant.  So invested in destroying the president, they've lost their minds and any sense of journalistic ethics they might once have had.
There are only four days left before the midterm elections, and the bad behavior of the left media has escalated: fake mailers, fake threats (if you're a hunter, don't vote), etc.  There is no end, no low too low, for the Democrats; they mean to win by any means necessary.  Will all their dirty tricks (false allegations against Kavanaugh as a last-ditch effort to derail his nomination, find a dupe to charge with fake mail bombs) help them win on November 6?  Let us hope to God that Americans are not that gullible.  Let us pray they realize that the left today hopes for Trump's failure.  His successes are killing them.  They are horrified by every economic triumph.  These wins make them angrier and more desperate. 
We now know one thing for certain: The left does not care one bit about the daily lives or the prosperity of the 300-plus million American citizens who actually work for their livings, who are happy but not wealthy, who love their families and their country.  So desperate now, they are encouraging, fomenting the invasion of thousands of migrants from Central America.  This invasion has been organized, choreographed, and funded by leftists, here, there, and everywhere, including the ubiquitous George Soros, whose mission it has been for decades to destroy capitalism.
It was not so long ago that these same Democrats opposed exactly what they are promoting now – Clinton, Harry Reid, Feinstein, all of them.  Desperate now, they've changed their tune in order to create a permanent underclass and guaranteed votes.  These people, our leftists, are loathsome, and they are anti-American.
Those of us who are horrified by what the American left has become are terrified by the possibility that the Democrats retake the House.  They have made clear their plans for the destruction of Trump, the economy, and the country; they want revenge for his electoral victory.
Oleaginous Adam Schiff is still stuck on stupid regarding the claim that Trump colluded with Russia.  Maxine Waters, the most corrupt and moronic member of the House, is planning all manner of Trump harassment once head of the Banking and Financial Services Committee.  Demented Nancy Pelosi?  One can only speculate as to her plans to prevent Trump from governing.
If this possibility does not send voters toward an all Republican ticket, then we are fatally gullible.  These Democrats who are salivating at the prospect of wreaking havoc on the Trump administration are enemies of the state.  What they plan, if they win, will negatively affect all of our lives.  They want to undo the tax cuts and increase taxes on all of us.  They want to bring back all the purposefully destructive regulations Obama imposed on businesses across the board that hamstrung the economy.  They will make worse the damage already done to our health and medical care by Obamacare.  Trump has eased some of that pain; they want to make it painful again.  They will again engage with the worst actors on the world stage, as Obama did.  They will torment Israel, as Obama did.
Every bit of their campaign promises and slogans is a lie.  The left, as demonstrated by all the videos posted by Project Veritas, prove that the Democrats dissemble, lie, and cheat to win, and they are proud of their fakery.  They must not prevail, must not win on Tuesday.  They mean to ruin America as founded.  They mean to turn us into something the Founders meant to preclude: a class-based tyranny of the elite.  They mean to control every aspect of our lives, especially how we vote.
Don't fall for their treachery.  Let them flounder like the fish out of water they are.

ELECTION DAY: THE CLEAR-CUT CHOICE AMERICANS FACE

The stark contrast between the two parties.




Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
This year’s midterm election offers the starkest contrast between the two parties in recent memory, making the choice of which to vote for obvious. We have reached a critical point in the long-developing transformation of our country from a democratic republic to the concentrated power and “soft despotism” of a technocratic elite. This year’s vote will determine whether Donald Trump’s pushback against that transformation will continue, or whether it will stall.
Democrats, of course, have been the main engine of that transformation. For over a century their politics and policies have relentlessly shifted further and further toward the progressive left. They have embraced and institutionalized the doctrines of technocracy based on a rejection of the Constitutional order and its philosophical assumptions that common sense, practical experience, virtue, and traditional wisdom are sufficient to make people capable of self-rule.
Democrats also rejected the Founders’ deep-seated fear of concentrated and centralized power, a lesson taught on every page of political history for 2500 years: No amount of technical training or knowledge can change a flawed human nature and its permanent vulnerability to the lust for power that always ends in tyranny. Hence the Founders’ separation and dispersal of power among the sovereign states and the three branches of the federal government. Protected by divided powers, the liberty of self-reliant and self-governing citizens became the bulwark against the self-aggrandizement of power by elites, and the tyranny that follows.
The more the Democrat Party moved toward progressive technocracy, the more it abandoned ordered liberty as the most important reason for government to exist in the first place. Instead it endorsed the grand narrative of modernity: The inevitable progress and improvement of people and society, based on “human sciences” presumably as successful as physics and mathematics at effecting improving changes, would create the brave new world that avoided the miseries and sufferings of the benighted past. Technological progress became the model for this dream, its success in the material world now to be achieved in the human, social, and political realm. Of course, such a regime required “experts” to be installed in the centralized bureaus and agencies of the federal government, and to be given the power over policy once the purview of the representatives elected by the sovereign people and accountable to them at the ballot box. Now divided and balanced power was scorned as an 18th century anachronism and systematically degraded.
Accelerating under Franklin D. Roosevelt, this ideological program relentlessly moved forward, bringing along many Republicans who accepted the inevitability of the technocratic, redistributive state, and found that the centralization of power and privilege served their own interests as well. They embraced the Democrats’ underlying technocratic assumptions, and ceded their legislative authority to the cadres of unelected, unaccountable federal workers, and to the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, which now essentially legislate laws, enforce them, and determine their legitimacy.
Eventually, this bipartisan progressive paradigm provided the foundations of the “ruling center” in which Democrats set the bounds of acceptable policy and political discourse, and Republicans practice the “preemptive cringe” in the face of Democrat overreach. This dynamic is lauded as “bipartisanship,” the preferred method of progressive rule by political technicians, who see citizens as their wards and clients, and dismiss the Constitution’s separation and balancing of power and factions as inefficient “partisanship” that keep us from “solving problems.”
What accelerated this long-developing transformation of the political order and brought us to this momentous choice was Barack Obama. Exploiting our dysfunctional racial narrative of indelible white racism and guilt, Obama was twice elected on the hope of racial redemption on the cheap, and the promise of technocratic expertise and “science-based” government. All voters had to do was ignore his public record of leftist progressivism, and whites would be forgiven. Then the races could start coexisting like human beings in a world with “no white Americans, no black Americans,” rather than remain trapped in an eternal racial melodrama in which whites always have to pay.
But the Democrats’ true intensions soon became clear. Racial reconciliation was a pipe-dream, as Obama and his Attorney General interfered in racial conflicts and stoked the fires. Policies like Obamacare well beyond the progressive-lite center began to emerge. Crackpot ideas of the cultural left escaped from the universities and began an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights in service to an illiberal identity politics. Political correctness, imposed on the country and enforced by the technocratic federal overlords, grew ever more intrusive and totalitarian. Citizens who resisted their patronizing tutelage were insulted as “bitter clingers to guns and religion,” “deplorables,” or “wacko-birds,” as the Dems’ favorite conservative John McCain called them. Protesting the admission of nearly two million poorly vetted immigrants a year was decried as “xenophobia” and “racism.” Patriotism and national pride were demonized, and American sovereignty subordinated to the global technocratic elite and its “rules-based order” alleged to be superior to a toxic American exceptionalism.
But typical of all tyrants, the Democrats overreached. Obamacare, growth-killing regulations, and higher taxes at home; and a foreign policy of retreat, “leading from behind,” and apology for America’s sins abroad marked the progressives’ hubristic certainty that they could ride roughshod over the bipartisan consensus that at least had checked some of the left’s ambitions by reminding them––in 1968 1972, and 1980–– that the US remained a center-right country most of whose citizens self-identified as conservatives or moderates. The political success of “New Democrat” Bill Clinton followed his recognition of this truth, which he brilliantly exploited as a “Third Way” and more cynically, as “triangulation.”
The Dems’ arrogance at ignoring Clinton’s strategy during the Obama years was punished with the loss of the House and then the Senate, along with most of the state governments. A sluggish recovery and foreign policy debacles like Benghazi, the rise of ISIS, and the catastrophic Iran deal showed starkly the failure of the technocratic elite when its utopian delusions and ideological pretensions met the stern taskmaster of a world of hard, cruel men who respected only brutal force. The wages of progressive statism––more intrusive federal power, illiberal policies backed by executive fiat and the courts, the corruption of federal agencies by partisan interests, and a worsening of race relations­­–– had earlier fueled the Tea Party, which galvanized the discontent and helped the Republicans take the House in 2010.
Then came Donald Trump.
Trump launched an all-fronts assault on the bipartisan consensus. The establishment Republicans, who used the Tea Party for electoral gain but didn’t address the larger discontents it gave voice to, revealed with some exceptions their fealty to the social and cultural shibboleths that marked the elite apart from the middling classes and non-college educated working class of flyover country. In contrast, Trump spoke in the direct, earthy, and at times vulgar idiom that has been part of American folkways since the Republic’s beginning. His disdain both for totalitarian censorship by politically correct commissars, and for the illiberal neo-tribalism of identity politics, captured the citizens’ anger at the double-standards and hypocrisy of the holier-than-thou nomenklatura virtue-signaling as it grubbed for more privilege and power. The progressives helped stoke the anger even more with their eternal media savaging of the president that culminated in the still festering Russia collusion show-trial and the shameful slandering of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Equally important, on issues such as hyper-regulation of the economy, the relentlessly metastasizing federal bureaucracy, the addiction to high taxes, the excesses of activist federal courts, and the dysfunctions of our immigration policies, Trump expressed the common sense that many ordinary people used to understand just how much our government has failed the people.
And, so far, his policies have worked. Trump is reshaping the courts, appointing 84 federal judges, including two Supreme Court Justices, who promise to rein in for decades the judicial activism the progressives have relied on to implement their policy preference without having to face the voting citizens. On the economic front, wages and salaries have the highest year-to-year gain, 3.1%, in a decade. Economic growth has reached 3.5% this quarter, a rise that progressive economic savants had announced impossible. Unemployment is the lowest in decades, and more new jobs have been created than people available to fill them. Consumer confidence is at an 18-year high. Tax reform has put more money in people’s pockets. Repatriated corporate taxes have fueled investment in the domestic economy rather than abroad.
Finally, Trump has returned common sense to our foreign policy. He has backed out of multinational treaties like the Paris Climate Accords, and the disastrous agreement to bribe Iran into delaying for less than a decade its development of nuclear weapons. Both were manifestations of the long failure of the decrepit “rules-based international order” that served mainly the transnational global elites at the expense of national sovereignty and the people. He has moved our country closer to the traditional mission of foreign policy, which is to serve the interests and security of American citizens and put them first, not the interests of some fantasy “global community” or the “cosmopolitan” functionaries of transnational institutions. This credo of putting America first, and his full-throated expression of this sentiment has revived and celebrated the patriotism and national pride that progressives and Davos Man have long scorned and slandered as the nursery of fascism rather than of democratic freedom for distinct and diverse national identities.
On Tuesday we will face the choice: continue to push back against the progressive agenda to “fundamentally transform America,” or continue to feed the progressive Leviathan at the cost of our freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, and national identity of a people who have never been perfect, but have advanced and inspired prosperity and freedom more than any other country in history.
Common sense tells us the choice is obvious. Vote for freedom, and vote for America.

OBAMANOMICS: IS IT WORKING???


Millionaires projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth by 2019


By Gabriel Black
18 June 2015

Households with more than a million (US) dollars in private wealth are projected to own 46 percent of global private wealth in 2019 according to a new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

This large percentage, however, only includes cash, savings, money market funds and listed securities held through managed investments—collectively known as “private wealth.” It leaves out businesses, residences and luxury goods, which comprise a substantial portion of the rich’s net worth.



At the end of 2014, millionaire households owned about 41 percent of global private wealth, according to BCG. This means that collectively these 17 million households owned roughly $67.24 trillion in liquid assets, or about $4 million per household.


In total, the world added $17.5 trillion of new private wealth between 2013 and 2014. The report notes that nearly three quarters of all these gains came from previously existing wealth. In other words, the vast majority of money gained has been due to pre-existing assets increasing in value—not the creation of new material things.

This trend is the result of the massive infusions of cheap credit into the financial markets by central banks. The policy of “quantitative easing” has led to a dramatic expansion of the stock market even while global economic growth has slumped.

While the wealth of the rich is growing at a breakneck pace, there is a stratification of growth within the super wealthy, skewed towards the very top.

In 2014, those with over $100 million in private wealth saw their wealth increase 11 percent in one year alone. Collectively, these households owned $10 trillion in 2014, 6 percent of the world’s private wealth. According to the report, “This top segment is expected to be the fastest growing, in both the number of households and total wealth.” They are expected to see 12 percent compound growth on their wealth in the next five years.

Those families with wealth between $20 and $100 million also rose substantially in 2014—seeing a 34 percent increase in their wealth in twelve short months. They now own $9 trillion. In five years they will surpass $14 trillion according to the report.

Coming in last in the “high net worth” population are those with between $1 million and $20 million in private wealth. These households are expected to see their wealth grow by 7.2 percent each year, going from $49 trillion to $70.1 trillion dollars, several percentage points below the highest bracket’s 12 percent growth rate.

The gains in private wealth of the ultra-rich stand in sharp contrast to the experience of billions of people around the globe. While wealth accumulation has sharply sped up for the ultra-wealthy, the vast majority of people have not even begun to recover from the past recession.

An Oxfam report from January, for example, shows that the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population went from having about 56 percent of the world’s wealth in 2010 to having 52 percent of it in 2014. Meanwhile the top 1 percent saw its wealth rise from 44 to 48 percent of the world’s wealth.

In 2014 the Russell Sage Foundation found that between 2003 and 2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from $87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back. Between 2009 and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1 percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.

As the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has noted, in the United States “between 2007 and 2013, net wealth fell on average 2.3 percent, but it fell ten-times more (26 percent) for those at the bottom 20 percent of the distribution.” The 2015 report concludes that “low-income households have not benefited at all from income growth.”

Another report by Knight Frank, looks at those with wealth exceeding $30 million. The report notes that in 2014 these 172,850 ultra-high-net-worth individuals increased their collective wealth by $700 billion. Their total wealth now rests at $20.8 trillion.

The report also draws attention to the disconnection between the rich and the actual economy. It states that the growth of this ultra-wealthy population “came despite weaker-than-anticipated global economic growth. During 2014 the IMF was forced to downgrade its forecast increase for world output from 3.7 percent to 3.3 percent.”

THE CRONY CLASS:

OBAMACLINTONOMICS was created by BILLARY CLINTON!

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.


“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”


“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON EXAMINER


GOOD TIME FOR AMNESTY FOR MILLIONS OF LOOTING MEXICANS?

MORE HERE:

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/09/and-still-democrat-party-wants-millions.html

“The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a 

massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 

2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve 

Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents

a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further 

concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”


"A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."
Federal Reserve documents stagnant state of US economy

Federal Reserve documents stagnant state of US economy

By Barry Grey
21 July 2015
The US Federal Reserve Board last week released its semiannual Monetary Policy Report to Congress, providing an assessment of the state of the American economy and outlining the central bank’s monetary policy going forward. The report, along with Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s testimony before both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a speech by Yellen the previous week in Cleveland, present a grim picture of the reality behind the official talk of economic “recovery.”
In her prepared remarks to Congress last Wednesday and Thursday, Yellen said, “Looking forward, prospects are favorable for further improvement in the US labor market and the economy more broadly.”

She reiterated her assurances that while the Fed would likely begin to raise its benchmark federal funds interest rate later this year from the 0.0 to 0.25 percent level it has maintained since shortly after the 2008 financial crash, it would do so only slowly and gradually, keeping short-term rates well below historically normal levels for an indefinite period.
This was an expected, but nevertheless welcome, signal to the American financial elite, which has enjoyed a spectacular rise in corporate profits, stock values and personal wealth since 2009 thanks to the flood of virtually free money provided by the Fed.

"But as Yellen’s remarks and the Fed report indicate, the explosion of asset values and wealth accumulation at the very top of the economic ladder has occurred alongside an intractable and continuing slump in the real economy."
In her prepared testimony to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen noted the following features of the performance of the US economy over the first six months of 2015:
* A sharp decline in the rate of economic growth as compared to 2014, including an actual contraction in the first quarter of the year.
* A substantial slackening (19 percent) in average monthly job-creation, from 260,000 last year to 210,000 thus far in 2015.
* Declines in domestic spending and industrial production.
In her July 10 speech to the City Club of Cleveland, Yellen cited an even longer list of negative indices, including:
* Growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) since the official beginning of the recovery in June, 2009 has averaged a mere 2.25 percent per year, a full one percentage point less than the average rate over the 25 years preceding what Yellen called the “Great Recession.”
* While manufacturing employment nationwide has increased by about 850,000 since the end of 2009, there are still almost 1.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs than just before the recession.
* Real GDP and industrial production both declined in the first quarter of this year. Industrial production continued to fall in April and May.
* Residential construction (despite extremely low mortgage rates by historical standards) has remained “quote soft.”
* Productivity growth has been “weak,” largely because “Business owners and managers… have not substantially increased their capital expenditures,” and “Businesses are holding large amounts of cash on their balance sheets.”
* Reflecting the general stagnation and even slump in the real economy, core inflation rose by only 1.2 percent over the past 12 months.
The Monetary Policy Report issued by the Fed includes facts that are, if anything, even more alarming, including:
* “Labor productivity in the business sector is reported to have declined in both the fourth quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015.”
* “Exports fell markedly in the first quarter, held back by lackluster growth abroad.”
* “Overall construction activity remains well below its pre-recession levels.”
* “Since the recession began, the gains in… nominal compensation [workers’ wages and benefits] have fallen well short of their pre-recession averages, and growth of real compensation has fallen short of productivity growth over much of this period.”
* “Overall business investment has turned down as investment in the energy sector has plunged. Business investment fell at an annual rate of 2 percent in first quarter… Business outlays for structures outside of the energy sector also declined in the first quarter…”

The report incorporates the Fed’s projections for US economic growth, published following the June meeting of the central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee. They include a downward revision of the projection for 2015 to 1.8 percent-2.0 percent from the March projection of 2.3 percent to 2.7 percent.

That the US economy continues to stagnate and even contract is indicated by two surveys released last week while Yellen was testifying before Congress. The Fed reported that factory production failed to increase in June for the second straight month and output in the auto sector fell 3.7 percent. The Commerce Department reported that retail sales unexpectedly fell in June, declining by 0.3 percent.
These statistics follow the employment report for June, which showed that the share of the US working-age population either employed or actively looking for work, known as the labor force participation rate, fell to 62.6 percent, its lowest level in 38 years.
 During the month, some 432,000 people in the US gave up looking for a job.

The disastrous figures on business investment are perhaps the most telling indicators of the underlying crisis of the capitalist system. The Fed report attributes the sharp decline so far this year primarily to the dramatic fall in oil prices and resulting contraction in investment and construction in the energy sector. But the plunge in oil prices is itself a symptom of a general slowdown in the world economy.
Moreover, a dramatic decline in productive investment is common to all of the major industrialized economies of Europe and North America. In its World Economic Outlook of last April, the International Monetary Fund for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis acknowledged that there was no prospect for an early return to pre-recession levels of economic growth, linking this bleak prognosis to a general and pronounced decline in productive investment.
The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process.
The economic crisis in the US and internationally is not simply a conjunctural downturn. It is a systemic crisis of global capitalism, centered in the US. 
A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself.

While the economy is starved of productive investment, entirely parasitic and socially destructive activities such as stock buybacks, dividend hikes and mergers and acquisitions return to pre-crash levels and head for new heights. US corporations have spent more on stock buybacks so far this year than on factories and equipment.
The intractable nature of this crisis, within the framework of capitalism, is underscored by the IMF’s updated World Economic Outlook, released earlier this month, which projects that 2015 will be the worst year for economic growth since the height of the recession in 2009.

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