Friday, November 2, 2018

TRUMP DECLARES DEMS ARE ENCOURAGING THE INVASION SO THEY CAN SIGN UP FOR ANCHOR BABY WELFARE AND VOTE DEMOCRAT FOR MORE

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


Trump: Democrats Encouraging Illegals to Break Our Laws So They Can Sign Up for Welfare and the Right to Vote





By Melanie Arter | November 1, 2018 | 3:31 PM EDT


President Donald Trump (Screenshot)
(CNSNews.com) – During a rally in Estero, Fla., President Donald Trump accused the Democrat Party of “openly encouraging millions of illegal aliens to break our laws” and violate the U.S. border, because they want to sign them up for free welfare, health care, education and the right to vote.

He said a win for Democrats will send “a bright flashing invitation to traffickers, smugglers, and gang members all over the world” to come to the United States.



“The Democrat Party is openly encouraging millions of illegal aliens to break our laws, violate our borders – you see what’s happening right now, because they won’t give us any votes on border security – and overwhelm our country, and they want to sign them up for free health care, free welfare, free education, and the right to vote,” the president said.

While illegal immigrants are not allowed to vote in national U.S. elections, some jurisdictions in the state of Maryland for instance, allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.

According to a Sept. 16, 2017 Washington Post article, “Unlike most other states, Maryland allows towns and cities to decide who can vote in local elections. In recent years, Hyattsville, Mount Rainier, Takoma Park and several smaller towns have extended that privilege to noncitizens.”


Trump also touched on the issue of birthright citizenship, which has been given the children of illegal aliens automatic U.S. citizenship the second they’re born in America. He said the Constitution does not actually allow for it and that former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) even recognized that “no sane country” would give automatic citizenship to the children of illegals.

“And the Democrats want to continue giving automatic birthright citizenship to every child born to an illegal alien even if they’ve been on our soil for only a matter of seconds,” the president said.

“Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant children are made automatic citizens every year because of this crazy policy, and they are all made instantly eligible for every privilege and benefit of American citizenship at a cost of billions of dollars a year. That’s what it cost – billion,” he said.

“Back before the Democrat Party went crazy, they also opposed this practice. Harry Reid said, ‘No sane country would grant automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.’ That’s what he said. That’s before he went crazy. Under this policy, anyone who breaks into this country and has a child, the very next moment that child would be made a citizen for life,” Trump said.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that in a speech on the Senate floor in 1993, Reid made the statement to which Trump was referring. “He regrets it again,” the Post reported.

The then-Nevada senator had recently introduced the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993, which challenged the clause in the 14th Amendment that grants automatic citizenship to any child born within U.S. borders.
“If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward to be an illegal immigrant. No sane country would do that, right?" Reid, a Democrat, asked his peers on Sept. 20, 1993. "Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides — and that’s a lot of services.”

Trump said the birthright citizenship policy has “created an entire industry of birth tourism … where pregnant mothers travel to America to make their children instant American citizens.”

“Congress has never passed a law requiring birthright citizenship for illegal aliens, and the Constitution does not – I say that to the media – does not require it - read it – because illegal aliens are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” the president explained.

“Democrats also support the insane policy of catch and release, which has created our border crisis, or it certainly helped. A Democrat victory on Election Day would be a bright flashing invitation to traffickers, smugglers, and gang members all over the world – come on in. That’s what you say. Republicans believe our country should be a sanctuary for law-abiding Americans, not for criminal aliens,” he said.

“And the Republican Party will always stand proudly with the heroes – that’s what they are – heroes of ICE, Border Patrol, and law enforcement, and I saw that yesterday in Pittsburgh. And yes, we will finish the wall,” Trump added.


Pence: 'We Have More Than 1,000 People Attempting to Come Into Our Country Every Day'



By Susan Jones | October 31, 2018 | 9:29 AM EDT


Vice President Pence says Americans are greatly concerned about illegal immigration, not just the current caravans. (Photo: Screen capture/C-SPAN)
(CNSNews.com) - Recent moves by the Trump administration to combat illegal immigration at the Southwest border are not just an election ploy, Vice President Mike Pence told a gathering in Washington hosted by Politico on Tuesday.
Pence said the current caravans are "a source of great concern" for many Americans; and it's not just the caravans, he added:
"The truth is that we have more than 1,000 people attempting to come into our country every day."

"Let's recognize that we have a crisis on our southern border," Pence said when he was asked about President Trump's suggestion that he might try to end birthright citizenship by executive order.
Pence noted that President Trump has been campaigning against illegal immigration since he announced his run for president:
And one of the things the president articulated on the campaign trail two years ago was that we want to look in the broadest way possible about an American law that may be used as a magnet to draw people into our country.
Some of those loopholes are like catch-and-release. Some of those loopholes are in other categories. There are things that human traffickers actually use to entice vulnerable families to make the long and dangerous trip north of the peninsula, often at great risk to themselves, and frankly, birthright citizenship is a part of that.
And what I think the president has made clear is that we are looking at action that would reconsider birthright citizenship. We all know what the 14th Amendment says. We all cherish the language of the 14th Amendment. But the Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on whether or not the language of the 14th Amendment -- "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" -- applies specifically to people who are in the country illegally, and I think the president's looking at executive action.
Pence said the "broad objective" is to "fix a broken immigration system" that is being exploited by people who entice others to pay money to make the long, difficult journey north.
"We need to have a system where people know how to come into the United States legally," Pence said. He said that system needs to work first and foremost for the American people, as it did for Pence's own grandfather.
"The system is not working today and we've got to reform it," he said.
Caravan concerns 'not' an election ploy
"Is this just an election ploy?" Politico's Anna Palmer asked the vice president.
"Anna, it is not," Pence replied:
The caravan that's making its way north was organized in Honduras, according to what the president of Honduras told me. It was organized by left-wing groups, political organizations within Honduras. It was likely financed in part by Venezuela; and people brought together many vulnerable families, including elderly, families with children, for the purpose of coming up to the border of the United States, to come into our country illegally.
That's the objective here. It was -- whatever the motivation of many people in the caravan, and we happen to know there are people with serious criminal histories in the caravan. We've been told by law enforcement in the region that there are individuals from the Middle East in the caravan. The simple fact is that human traffickers and political leftist organizations in Central America are driving this forward. That started weeks ago.
It is a source of great concern to millions of Americans. I've been traveling, like the president has, all over the country, and I can tell you, being out among the American people, there's great concern, great alarm among many Americans to see this vast throng of people coming up for the express purpose of coming into our country illegally.
And the president is simply determined to make sure that we've got the manpower at the border to provide the support as appropriate to the Border Patrol, to continue to harden our border, to ensure that the people that are applying into our country are doing so through ports of entry and under the color of the law.
President Trump sounded off again on Wednesday morning, writing in five tweets:
-- The World is using our laws to our detriment. They laugh at the Stupidity they see!
--  Harry Reid was right in 1993, before he and the Democrats went insane and started with the Open Borders (which brings massive Crime) “stuff.” Don’t forget the nasty term Anchor Babies. I will keep our Country safe. This case will be settled by the United States Supreme Court!
-- Our military is being mobilized at the Southern Border. Many more troops coming. We will NOT let these Caravans, which are also made up of some very bad thugs and gang members, into the U.S. Our Border is sacred, must come in legally. TURN AROUND!
-- So-called Birthright Citizenship, which costs our Country billions of dollars and is very unfair to our citizens, will be ended one way or the other. It is not covered by the 14th Amendment because of the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Many legal scholars agree.....
-- The Caravans are made up of some very tough fighters and people. Fought back hard and viciously against Mexico at Northern Border before breaking through. Mexican soldiers hurt, were unable, or unwilling to stop Caravan. Should stop them before they reach our Border, but won’t!

STILL ACTING LIKE A NAZI, MAXINE WATERS VOWS RETRIBUTION

MAXINE WATERS USES NAZIS TACTICS TO HARASS TRUMP…. But where was her big mouth when Obama and the Clinton were sucking in bribes and looting the poor of Haiti, or operating a fraudulent slush fund charity????

"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now."  ----  Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com

MAXINE WATERS, LOUIS FARRAKHAN, ERIC HOLDER and BARACK OBAMA – RACIST, VIOLENT HATE MONGERS!

Rep. Maxine Waters is fine with Farrakhan. And the left is fine with Waters. Eric Holder recently posed with Farrakhan. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONTPAGE MAG


Maxine Waters Vows 

Retribution if Dems Take 

House



1:55






Speaking this week at Black Women Network Breakfast, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) told voters that payback is coming if the Democrats take back the House.
Waters told the attendees how “important” the upcoming midterm election is.
“[W]e have an election November 6,” Waters said. “This is big. This may be the most important one that you’ve ever had to experience. This is the midterm election and, often times, people only vote in the presidential election because they don’t think this is important enough. But this is absolutely important.”
She then listed off what would happen when she became Financial Services Committee chairwoman.
“First of all, if we take back the House, most of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus will be chairs of the committees of the Congress of the United States of America,” Waters told the group. I will be the first African-American, the first woman to chair the powerful Financial Services Committee. That’s all of Wall Street. That’s all the insurance companies, that’s all the banks. And so, of course, the CEOs of the banks now are saying, ‘What can we do to stop Maxine Waters? Because if she gets in, she’s going to give us a bad time.'”
She continued, “I have not forgotten you foreclosed on our houses. I have not forgotten that you undermined our communities. I have not forgotten that you sold us those exotic products, had us sign on the dotted line for junk, and for mess that we could not afford. And in doing that, I have people who are homeless who have never gotten back into a home. What am I going to do to you? What I am going to do to you is fair. I’m going to do to you what you did to us.”
Waters’ comments were met with applause and agreement.
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent


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.







Endorsing Decline

A New Jersey newspaper’s backing of Bob Menendez illuminates the Garden State’s long economic slide.
October 31, 2018
Politics and law
Economy, finance, and budgets


New Jersey’s largest newspaper, the Star-Ledger, is facing intense criticism for its reelection endorsement of New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, who was “severely admonished” by a bipartisan Senate ethics panel for accepting gifts from a donor and advocating for the donor’s personal interests. Menendez’s actions “reflected discredit upon the Senate,” the committee wrote. Nonetheless, the Star-Ledger said that voters should “Choke it down, and vote for Menendez” because he’s a reliable opponent of President Trump’s agenda. The paper itself has been a reliable, if somewhat shrill, opponent of Trump policies on immigration, Obamacare, and the appointment of federal judges. It opposed Trump’s tax reform, though 80 percent of Jersey residents will see a tax cut, and even as the national economy’s growth spurt in the wake of that legislation has increased tax collections in the perpetually budget-challenged Garden State.
But appearances aside, the paper’s editorial decision is not all about Trump. Like many local newspapers, the Star-Ledger has a reliably left-leaning editorial board that has consistently supported big-government Democrats who spend their state and local governments into economic oblivion. It’s convenient to justify the Menendez endorsement as an effort to resist Trump, but even critics of the president (like myself) have no doubt that the paper would have made the same move had Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio been in the White House.
Many left-leaning newspapers lament the economic forces shrinking their industry, gobbling up jobs and newspapers with startling speed. But few see a link between the corrosive economic impact of big government and their own troubles. Their faith in taxing-and-spending blinds them to the inevitable consequences of that policy.
An episode in recent New Jersey history illustrates this point. Advance Publications, which owns the Star-Ledger, announced that the paper might shut down in 2008 because it was bleeding $30 million a year; the publisher cited declining ad revenues from department stores as one of its big problems. What the publisher didn’t mention: when Governor Jim McGreevey raised corporate taxes in New Jersey in 2002, the Star-Ledger editorial board praised the increase as a necessary “compromise” for a state government that had taken in “only” $22.4 billion in revenues but had allocated $23.4 billion in projected spending. Apparently, it hadn’t occurred to the paper that Trenton, which even then collected more revenue per resident than almost any other state government, had alternatives to raising taxes on local companies as a means of dealing with its budget shortfall. 
A few days after the budget passed, the CEO of Federated Department Stores, which operated Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s in New Jersey, said that the new tax was so onerous that it threatened local profitability, and that the company would probably open no more stores in the state—and might actually close some. Critics pilloried him, pointing out his own high compensation, and asking why a profitable company couldn’t afford to pay more to support state government. But department stores, like newspapers, were under intensifying economic pressures at the time. Since the tax increase was instituted, Federated has continued to cut back in Jersey, from 32 Macy’s stores to 24 today, and from 10,000 employees to 6,300. Other retailers, facing a difficult selling environment, have also shrunk.
Newspapers have retreated even more rapidly. Since 2008, the Star-Ledger has downsized several times, and it continues to rack up big losses. Despite deep concessions by workers in 2008, for instance, the paper was still losing $20 million some six years later, when it laid off newsroom staff, sold its headquarters, and moved to smaller offices. It hasn’t helped the newspaper or the state’s retailers that, since McGreevey’s tax increases (he raised taxes 33 times, and his successor, Jon Corzine, added billions of dollars in sales and income-tax increases), New Jersey’s economy, once a model of growth and productivity, has consistently lagged the national economy, creating an almost perpetual state of budgetary crisis in Trenton.
It's easy for a left-leaning paper to attribute its own retrenchment to the powerful forces undermining local newspapers, without drawing any connection between the kind of big government it embraces and the decline of the area economy. This is why it’s hard for small-government advocates to feel much sympathy for the decline of papers like the Ledger. But it’s also hard to feel a sense of schadenfreude over the economic conditions that exacerbate the problems for newspapers, because those same conditions hurt many other businesses, including some in vibrant industries that should be thriving.
The Menendez endorsement might be the story today, but in New Jersey and elsewhere, there’s an older, more telling story—about economic decline.


Nearly 40 percent of New Jersey households struggle to make ends meet

By Erik Schreiber 
31 October 2018
The proportion of households in New Jersey that cannot afford daily necessities reached 38.5 percent in 2016, according to a report published by the non-profit charity United Way. These necessities include food, housing, transportation, medical care, child care, and a smartphone. The percentage of these households falling into this category has increased by 15 percent since 2010, the year that the recovery from the recession of 2008 is alleged to have begun.
This proportion of struggling households includes 10.5 percent who lived in poverty in 2016, along with an additional 28 percent in a category that the report calls “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed” (ALICE). ALICE households, sometimes called the working poor, earn more than the federal poverty level. This official figure is absurdly low, especially in a state with a cost of living as high as New Jersey’s. Although not classed as poor, members of these households find themselves skipping meals, sharing rooms with friends or relatives, and forgoing regular doctor’s appointments.
United Way has tracked households in poverty and ALICE households every two years since 2010. The percentage of households in poverty has remained relatively stable, at 10.5 percent. The proportion of ALICE households, however, has increased steadily from 23.8 percent in 2010 to 28 percent in 2016. Rather than sharing in the much-touted economic recovery, these families have seen their situations worsen.
People aged 65 and older account for much of the growth in the number of ALICE households. From 2010 to 2016, the growth rate in the number of senior households (15 percent) and that in the number of senior ALICE households (12 percent) have been almost identical. “Even with Social Security benefits, 46 percent of New Jersey seniors have income below the ALICE Threshold,” according to the report.
People between ages 45 and 64 also have contributed to the growth in ALICE households overall. Although the number of households in this age group did not change significantly between 2010 and 2016, the number that earned less than the ALICE Threshold increased by 22 percent. “For a group in their prime earning years, it is surprising to see one-third (33 percent) with income below the ALICE Threshold,” said the researchers.
The percentage of households below the ALICE threshold increased from 2010 to 2016 in nearly all of the 20 largest cities in New Jersey. Clifton and Passaic are the two exceptions. Some of the greatest increases occurred in two of the towns that suffered most during and after Superstorm Sandy. In Toms River, ALICE households increased by 66 percent. In Sayreville, the increase was 31 percent.
But the factor that unites ALICE households is not gender, race, age, or location. “The data on ALICE households show that hardship in New Jersey exists across boundaries of race, age, and geography,” said the researchers. Rather, ALICE status is a problem of every section of the working class. “Today, ALICE workers primarily hold jobs in occupations that build and repair our infrastructure and educate and care for the workforce,” in the words of the report.
The report provides a detailed picture of the situation that workers face in New Jersey, which in turn reflects national trends. Low-wage jobs are the rule, rather than the exception. Approximately 51 percent of jobs in the state pay less than $20 per hour. What is worse, more than two-thirds of such jobs pay less than $15 per hour. About 36 percent of jobs pay between $20 and $40 per hour, a wage that is itself insufficient, in a state with housing that is among the most expensive in the country—to say nothing of New Jersey’s notoriously high property taxes.
Since 2010, the unemployment rate has fallen. Although capitalist economists would predict that wages would therefore rise, they have stayed low for most workers. In addition, job stability has decreased following companies’ growing reliance on contract work and on-demand jobs. Under these conditions, it is no surprise that many households are unable to meet expenses. The idea of saving money to establish even a modest financial cushion is unimaginable.
While wages have stayed low, the prices of everyday necessities in New Jersey have increased. From 2010 to 2016, the monthly cost of housing increased by 9 percent for a family of two adults, one infant, and one preschooler. The cost of childcare increased by 14 percent, the cost of food by 10 percent, the cost of transportation by 25 percent, and the cost of health care by an enormous 99 percent.
The cost of the family budget overall rose by 28 percent from 2010 to 2016, and by 16 percent for a single adult. These increases have occurred despite low national inflation (9 percent). In 2016, basic household expenses in New Jersey cost $74,748 for a family of four and $26,640 for a single adult. In contrast, the federal poverty level is a derisory $24,300 for a family of four and $11,880 for a single adult.
The data in the United Way report lay bare the ruling class’s intensified post-recession efforts to suppress wages and increase the rate of exploitation to produce greater profits. Construction workers and public employees such as teachers have been among the main victims in New Jersey. As the researchers themselves note, companies have transferred ever more risk to their workers, keeping wages low and schedules irregular, and making it difficult for workers to arrange for child care, let alone pay their bills.
The report also singles out “the increasing importance of short-term productivity gains” as a reason for the increase in ALICE households. On this subject, it is worth quoting the report at length:
Instead of sharing gains in productivity with employees, companies have chosen to spend more on capital and, more recently, on profits and dividends to increase stock prices. Since most corporate leaders’ compensation is directly linked to stock prices, they have benefited hugely from this practice; the compensation of top US executives has doubled or tripled since the first half of the 1990s, while workers’ wages have remained flat.
The report thus documents the shift to an economy dominated by financial parasitism. This is not a simple matter of “choice” by companies opting for greed, however. It is part of the structure of global capitalism. Far from being unique to New Jersey, this shift can be observed throughout the country and the world.

JOHN DEMPSEY - CITIZEN BIRTHRIGHT CAN BE DEFEATED AND JUDGE KAVANAUGH WILL BE INSTRUMENTAL - Is that why advocate for open borders FEINSTEIN, PELOSI, KAMALA HARRIS and CHUCK SCHUMER attempted to defeat Kavanaugh's nomination?

Citizen Birthright Can Be Defeated and Kavanaugh Will Be Instrumental

https://townhall.com/columnists/johndempsey/2018/11/02/citizen-birthright-can-be-defeated-and-kavanaugh-will-be-instrumental-n2533952


John Dempsey
Immigration is still at the top of the political discussion, especially after President Trump’s recent comments about citizen birthright. A common talking point for those who are in favor of illegals jumping the border to have a child and stay in the United States is “well, that is just what the Fourteenth Amendment allows.” Does it, however?