Monday, June 17, 2019

A NATION UNRAVELS - SUICIDE RATES FOR DOCTORS SOARS - HIGHEST IN U.S. POPULATION

Suicide rates for doctors and young physicians among highest in the US population

Doctors in the United States confront a high suicide rate as a result of stressful working conditions and excessively long work hours.
Director and chairman of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, Dr. Edward Wilson, told CNBC that it is estimated that one doctor dies every day by suicide in the US due to “stress and rigorous work schedules.”
Doctors and health professionals within the US, according to Ellison, are “stressed to the breaking point” due to stifling work schedules and mounting pressures that stem from patient care.
Depression, the primary cause of suicidal ideation, affects an estimated 12 percent of male physicians and 19.5 percent of female physicians, but doctors are often hesitant to seek treatment due to the stigma associated with mental health problems.
As a result, doctors have the highest suicide rate among any profession in the country: 28 to 40 per 100,000 persons compared to 12.3 per 100,000 for the general population.
According to Ellison, recent data shows that 44 percent of physicians show signs of physical and emotional exhaustion, or “burnout,” which can lead to further mental health problems as doctors have difficulty adequately taking care for themselves, such as eating and sleeping properly.
Changes made to the way hospitals and medical centers operate in recent years may have improved the efficiency of the American healthcare system, but at the cost of longer and more exhaustive work schedules for doctors. Doctors are now spending less time with patients in traditional care settings and more time fulfilling extraneous tasks traditionally performed by adjunct staff and employees.
As a result, the suicide rate among physicians has exploded in recent decades. The suicide rate among male and female physicians is 1.41 and 2.27 times higher than that of the general male and female population, respectively.
For example, Dr. Benjamin Shaffer, a renowned surgeon from Washington D.C., hung himself in 2015 after taking his son to school. He had struggled his entire life with anxiety and a severe form of insomnia, which afforded him little time to sleep before operating on and treating patients.
Just days before he committed suicide and in the face of growing personal turmoil, his psychiatrist prescribed two new drugs which merely exacerbated his anxiety and insomnia and even led to paranoia. After he was told that he would need medication for the rest of his life, he concluded that he could never live a normal life again and decided to kill himself.
High suicide rates are also prevalent among medical students. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for medical students. They are three times more likely to kill themselves than their peers in the same age group. As many as 30 percent of medical students suffer from depression.
The work schedules for young doctors transitioning from medical school, customarily referred to as “residents,” are extremely onerous. Residents are expected to work up to 80 hours a week with single shifts that can last up to 28 hours.
These grueling schedules are largely the result of the centralized matching system for residency applicants in the hospital labor market and the monopoly held by a handful of hospital chains. Although employer-controlled labor markets are typically prohibited by anti-trust laws, the system remains the only avenue for residents to become fully licensed doctors.
Centralized matching, commonly referenced as “the match,” allows a handful of employers to select residency applicants without them having any legal right or ability to negotiate the terms of their contracts. This grants hospital conglomerates free rein to implement excessive hours and lower pay.
In 2002, a group of residency students filed a lawsuit against the for-profit selection system, deeming it an unlawful “contract” or “conspiracy” designed to undermine federal antitrust laws. After a federal district court initially ruled that “the match” may be illegal and give an unfair advantage to healthcare institutions, Congress passed legislation immunizing medical training programs from antitrust lawsuits.
Thus, residency programs give hospital employers access to a well-educated, but super-exploited and over-burdened workforce. As a 2017 article in The Atlantic noted, “while residency-program administrators no doubt take their educational obligations seriously, residents are also a cheap source of skilled labor that can fill gaps in coverage.” Resident salaries are generally equivalent to those of the hospital cleaning staff and about half of what nurse practitioners get paid even though residents typically work much longer hours.
The long hours residents are compelled to work causes tremendous physical and psychological stress. In response, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (AGGME) implemented a “duty-hour” reform policy in 2003, which lowered the maximum weekly hospital working hours from 120 to 80 and the length of single shifts from 48 to 28 hours.
However, this change did little to lessen the severity of residents’ schedules. Surveys show that the reforms led to virtually no changes in work and sleep hours.
A large reason behind the failure of the reforms is that hospitals have not increased the rate of new hires to keep up with the rising demands of healthcare operations. Between 1990 and 2010, the number of patients admitted to teaching hospitals rose 46 percent, but the number of residency spots only increased 13 percent.


SUICIDE IN AMERICA
May 29, 2019 
The Social Order
Kay Hymowitz joins City Journal editor Brian Anderson to discuss a challenge facing aging populations in wealthy nations across the world: loneliness. Her essay in the Spring 2019 issue, “Alone,” will be released online this Sunday.
“Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness,” Hymowitz writes. “Foundering social trust, collapsing heartland communities, an opioid epidemic, and rising numbers of ‘deaths of despair’ suggest a profound, collective discontent.”
Evidence of the loneliness epidemic is dramatic in other countries, too. Japan, for example, has seen a troubling rise in “lonely deaths.” The challenge, Hymowitz says, is to teach younger generations the importance of family and community before they make decisions that will further isolate them.

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blogs podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Kay Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a longtime contributing editor at the magazine. Her latest piece in City Journal is called “Alone: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness.” That's the subtitle. It's one of the great pieces she's ever written in City Journal and I encourage you to find it on our website. Lastly, just one more announcement. We created a new email address for the show, so if listeners want to get in touch and drop a comment or share an idea, you can now email us at podcast@city-journal.org. That's podcast@city-journal.org. That's it for the introduction. We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Kay Hymowitz.
Brian Anderson: Hello again everyone. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal and joining us in the studio now is Kay Hymowitz. She's a contributing editor at City Journal and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. You can follow her on Twitter @KayHymowitz. And she's the author of many books, most recently the New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back, which came out in 2017. And prior to that, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, which came out in 2011. We're here today though to talk about her latest piece in City Journal called Alone. Kay, thanks very much for joining us.
Kay Hymowitz: I'm happy to be here, Brian.
Brian Anderson: So let's just start off. What made you want to write about the topic of loneliness, and what is the state of loneliness in America?
Kay Hymowitz: Well, let me start by saying I didn't actually set out to write about loneliness. I knew it was a great topic, but I wasn't exactly sure how to approach it. And I stumbled across an article that inspired me by two social scientists, I think they're demographers. And they described something called a rise of kinlessness, that is a rise in the number of people who have no kin, older people who have no kin. And it was very eye opening and I began to see that the breakdown of the family that I've been studying for maybe 15 years now and that I had mostly talked about in relation to its impact on children was also having quite an impact on older people, particularly aging adults. And that some of the despair that we were hearing about, the deaths of despair, the opioid crisis and so on so forth, are actually disproportionately made up of divorced and single, well, of men, in particular. So I realized that we're looking at something big here in terms of the family breakdown and its ultimate impact is something that I hadn't quite foreseen or thought of.
Brian Anderson: It's probably worth rehearsing some of the numbers in terms of this breakdown in family. Divorce rates for married couples, I think, are probably double what they were back in the 50s.
Kay Hymowitz: They are indeed.
Brian Anderson: But in some ways the picture's even darker. You have a 40% of kids, I think, are born to unmarried mothers now. That's up from 5% in 1960. And strikingly the rate of women who don't give birth at all, I think, has doubled or is much higher. Yeah. And you could go on and on in this vein. This is obviously the core of your argument that's having a big impact on loneliness and kinlessness and this whole phenomenon. So say a bit more about that and what do you think is driving it?
Kay Hymowitz: Well, I think that a lot of what's happening is due to a change in our understanding of what the family is, what its purpose is. I talk a lot in the article about the beginnings of what I see is the unraveling of the family, or shall we say, a kind of assault on, on the traditional family. I want to clarify that as we go on. I see the beginnings of it in something that demographers call the Second Demographic Transition. We sometimes talk about the, in ordinary parlance, we talk about the 60s or the Sexual Revolution. But those were actually an American reflection of something that has, as I said, demographers have been studying. The second demographic transition they believe is partly the result of affluence as he, as the societies in the west in particular, but also over time Japan and others, as they got richer, families were not as essential to mere survival as they had one been. Now this was intensified this fact by the introduction of the birth control pill, obviously because you could control sexual reproduction without worrying about whether you're married or not. And what the theory is that this would introduce a different set of values, anti-authoritarian, and little bit of anti-tradition. Individualistic. As people began to see they could be freer to find other ways of living than to depend entirely on family or depend mostly on their families. And in fact, following the second demographic transition, um, there was a huge increase as you, just as you just pointed out in your numbers in the percentage of divorces, the percentage of non-marital births. And this by the way, is not just true in the United States, but in other developed countries. Not all of them, but many. And also of fatherlessness. So I think that these ideas that emerged with affluence and the second demographic transition made it possible for people to think very differently about how they were going to live. And I should say now, because I'll be talking about the downsides of this, what followed from the second demographic transition. But it did really give people a lot of freedom. And there's no question that there were many people for relieved from very miserable and even violent marriages. As a result of the second demographic transition. There were many different ways to think about letting the people, it was possible to not be married if you really didn't want to. Which I think has worked nicely for some individuals. And of course it opened up the door to gay marriage, for much more freedom for gays and lesbians. So there is a tremendous upside and I don't want to discount that. But what I try to do in this article or show that there's some real downsides that we haven't quite understood.
Brian Anderson: What are some of those downsides? Why is it a problem for society that people are increasingly alone? And what are some of the manifestations of that that are negative?
Kay Hymowitz: Right. So one of the things that I try to do in the article is to remind people that kinship, those close family relations, blood and marital relations, have been kind of the linchpin of societies practically since we came out of the caves. It is absolutely fundamental to every society. The relationship between kin and what it does is... Those relationships define certain kinds of obligations. We tend to be more protective of kin and to understand our roles better when in relation to kin. Everything else, all of our other relationships may be very important to us, but we're making those up pretty much as we go along. And the kinship... As we've sort of gotten rid of that basic building block, or we've sort of undermined it through the divorce revolution, the sexual revolution in the second demographic transition, we've undermined the way kin work. So one point I make is that there's been a huge rise in cohabitation and particularly among less educated and lower income people. Cohabitation has become a kind of substitute for marriage. And the hope among, social scientists and sociologists and economists was always that gradually people would realize that you could cohabit, but you really ought to stay together. That it would be a kind of it, that it would be a kind of marriage or marriage light. But in fact, that's not what's happened. What's happened is that the, the norm of cohabitation is much more transitory, impermanent, fragile, and unpredictable. And those couples who were cohabitating and do not go onto marry tend to break up much, much more quickly.
Brian Anderson: This is even true when they have children?
Kay Hymowitz: Oh yes, definitely. The children of cohabiting couples are having a very, very different upbringing than the children of married couples. Now, it's true. we do have higher rates of divorce than we used to, although it's stabilized. And one of the reasons it's stabilized is that so many people are not getting married anymore, they are cohabiting. The upshot is that there are an awful lot of children, as I've pointed out many times before growing up in very unstable environments, but then an awful lot of parents, particularly men, who are losing direct contact with their kids. Now most men, after a divorce or after a child out of marriage, try to maintain some contact. But that tends to, it's not always true, that tends to fade out over time. Remember a lot of the people who are cohabiting, having children as their cohabiting are young, and understandably if that relationship doesn't work out, that go on and seek out another one. Well, what often happens is that there is a new family that develops out of that second union and possibly even a third or forth. So the child is faced with a, and fathers too, are faced with this rolling cast of people, none of whom have quite the connection of the kin of the old fashioned can relationships so that those men are frequently on their own as they get older. And if I could just add a little personal observation here that some people might not agree with, men just don't make homes or, you know make even make friends quite the way that women do. And we do have some data on this as well.
Brian Anderson: Looking around the world, and you noted this earlier, we know that the US isn't the only country facing problems of loneliness. One of the most striking examples in your story is Japan, which was seen just an incredible rise in what they call "lonely deaths." Maybe you could describe a little bit the situation there and how Japan is dealing with it?
Kay Hymowitz: Japan is an interesting contrast. to the United States in some ways in other western countries because non marital childbearing, single motherhood is relatively rare, unlike here. And also divorce is, relatively rare. It's getting, it's getting more common. What's happening instead is that an awful lot of people are not having children, so therefore their fertility rates are very, very low.
Brian Anderson: Well below replacement rate, I believe?
Kay Hymowitz: Well below replacement. Ours are low, but this is lower. I read one a social Japanese social scientists who said that the basic concept of the family in Japan is dead. So there's an awful lot of elderly people on their own, living alone. And by the way, dependent on the state to support them because they don't have any family to speak of. Or their family has moved away, or is extremely busy with work. We know that the Japanese are workaholics. But they started to see this rise in lonely deaths, which, we're beginning to see here too. And it became such a phenomenon in Japan that the newspapers started to cover, local newspapers would start to cover these stories that were happening very frequently. And in addition, this was the part that kind of, caused me to sit up and wonder. There are businesses now, there are cleanup companies, to take care of apartments after a lonely death because what happens is that when somebody dies and they're alone and nobody's really watching out for them, they often die in their apartment. Nobody knows they're dead. Nobody finds them until the telltale smell of decaying body. And it makes a huge mess for building owners or landlords. So they've started these companies, these cleanup companies. And I believe I mentioned the name of one of them, which is kind of grim. It's called Next.
Brian Anderson: Yeah.
Kay Hymowitz: But these companies, there are a fair number of them and they've become an essential, essential part of Japanese life.
Brian Anderson: It's a very, very grim reality. I've been reading a book by Cal Newport called Digital Minimalism, and it's an argument against being immersed in social media and other forms of technologically driven distraction. He says, we need to set more time for our sanity sake to be alone or at least off of the Internet and this constant bombardment of, of connection with other people. In other words, he's saying technology is making us constantly exposed to other people in ways that can harm us. At least if it goes too far. How does social media and the constant judgment that people sometimes feel themselves under through social media if they're participating in it, how does that intersect with the argument that you're making?
Kay Hymowitz: Well social media, I'm thinking of Facebook in particular was supposed to bring us all together. Right? It was the social network. We were going to create all these new social networks and you know, I think some people have been able to use it that way. I have ordered up to make contact with old high school friends or whatever, but it has also added to a sense of anxiety as people post pictures of their happy family occasions. They can look like things are just so wonderful and peachy keen for everybody else while you're feeling down in the dumps. So what does that expression, "fomo," fear of missing out? You're missing parties that you might've been invited to... People are taking wonderful trips that you, you know, don't have anybody to travel with or whatever. So I think it can exacerbate loneliness in that way because you're constantly comparing yourself to other people at their peak moments because that's when people post their pictures. And there is something about, aside from the fomo, aside from that, the kinds of connections you make through social media don't seem to be the same as those should make in real life. I haven't seen wonderful research on this yet, but it seems to me an area ripe for exploration. It seems so clear somehow that you can be online, communicating, even playing games with people, from all over the world, and seemingly making new friends and still feel quite lonely and be lonely because you turn off the computer or walk into another room and you're alone.
Brian Anderson: A lot's been written, especially since the election of Donald Trump, about the state of rust belt communities. The opioid crisis, which you mentioned earlier. How much in your view is the family breakdown you're describing having an impact on those communities? And is it part of what's causing the problem or is it an outgrowth of the breakdown in those communities? Economic breakdown.
Kay Hymowitz: Yeah, there's no question that family breakdown exacerbates and intensifies the loss of these communities, or rather the jobs, the factories that have left. If you lose your job and you lose your wife or husband because to opioids, or they've just left, then you've got real trouble. You don't have anybody to support you through difficult times. One of the things I argue in that piece is that the breakdown in the family has not affected educated and well off people anywhere near to the extent that it has... well, blacks, and also now the white working class that came a little bit later. And I think what we underestimated, we who lived through the second demographic transition and played a role in pushing it actually because I was in college in the 1960s when a lot of these ideas were being tested out and promulgated. If the educated classes, the more well to do classes, were able to figure out a way to maintain their families, what they didn't anticipate, or that none of us anticipated, was that it would be much harder for people who were living more on the edge, who had evictions to worry about or layoffs or a factory closing. You need, in those cases, a culture that really supports, a cultural environment, that really supports the idea of the family and of kinship as people... as people that are there for you in hard times.
Brian Anderson: Providing a network of support...
Kay Hymowitz: That's right. That's right. And in those communities instead, we saw a more and more of a collapse of the family. Now was it possible that, we could have, in a different cultural environment, it could have been different? Maybe, maybe. It's very hard to disentangle the cause and effect here, but there's no question that they go hand... the loss of the working class or the manufacturing jobs, has definitely been related to the breakdown of the family in the working class. Now I should mention that one of the things that's happened as a result, well, related again to the breakdown of the family in those communities, is this opioid crisis. Opioids, as you may know, is now killing more people than traffic accidents, than car accidents. And I was amazed to see in a recent study that the victims or the people who die of opioid death are much more likely to be single, unmarried or divorced men. And that speaks of exactly what I've been trying to describe. I think that women are better at creating their own social networks. This was something that the sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, who wrote a book called Going Solo, about people living alone. It's something he noticed as he started to interview people who were living alone. Even among the elderly women were more likely to want to live alone. They didn't want to remarry if there were widowed or divorced. But who kept fairly rich lives, they were still able to... they volunteered. They had friends, networks of friends that they could go out with, and that sort of thing. So, and if there were children, they were closer to the kids than a single father. So they had all those supports. Men seem to suffer much more loneliness than women. And you know, we can debate from here to eternity why that is. But there it is.
Brian Anderson: Well, to ask a final question, and it's how you conclude your piece: What might be necessary to start re-knitting the social fabric in a way that might address this problem. You mentioned Tom Wolfe's idea of a "Great Re-learning." Say a little bit about that?
Kay Hymowitz: Well first, I should say that there are a lot of government programs for seniors, a lot of, on the federal level and the city and local level. There are all kinds of ways that civil society jumps in. Seniors Helping Seniors is one group, Meals on Wheels, organizations like that. They are absolutely essential and beneficial and I don't want to knock them at all, but they don't begin to address the loss that a lot of people are feeling, or the loneliness. So one of the things that struck me in thinking about all this was how much joy and pleasure so many of my friends, and I should say I'm 70 years old, so many of my friends now with grandchildren, would mostly worry when their kids were growing up about their careers. They would focus so much on their education. Starting from early on, we were the beginning of helicopter parents, not quite as bad as today, but it did begin quite a while ago. But never talking about this other, what I consider to be the other big goal in life: to find a spouse, a kind and reliable and giving spouse who will make a good mother or father for your children. Because most people are going to want children. And society's depend on them wanting children. Those parents didn't talk to their kids about these things. And yet here I was going to weddings and watching these grandchildren being born and the parents were going nuts. I thought, well, why wouldn't they ever talk about the joy of this stage of life and of the connection that we now have with our children. And this is one lovely thing of the that has followed the second demographic transition is, I think, there's a much, much less of a generation gap between me and my kids then there was between me and my own parents because,
Brian Anderson: Yeah, I think that's true.
Kay Hymowitz: And there's a kind of companionship and friendship that I didn't see in my day so much. We have that, and it's a source of great comfort and pleasure. I think for most of the people that are able to experience it. So I note all that because I want readers to realize that this is something we don't talk about to our kids very much. And so we have another generation, growing up, who have never heard those words or any of those concepts from their parents or from anybody.
Brian Anderson: Well maybe it's a time for a different kind of conversation. In any case, don't forget to check out Kay's brilliant essay in City Journal, it's called Alone. It's in our latest issue you can find it on our website and we will link to it in the description. You can follow Kay on Twitter @KayHymowitz. You can also find City Journal on Twitter, @CityJournal and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI, and always, if you like what you've heard on the podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and thanks, Kay Hymowitz, for joining us.

EYE ON THE NEWS

An Addiction Crisis Disguised as a Housing Crisis

Opioids are fueling homelessness on the West Coast.
June 14, 2019 
The Social Order
California
By latest count, some 109,089 men and women are sleeping on the streets of major cities in California, Oregon, and Washington. The homelessness crisis in these cities has generated headlines and speculation about “root causes.” Progressive political activists allege that tech companies have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets. Declaring that “no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the same reasons,” Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans. These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.
Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.
For drug cartels and low-level street dealers, the 
business of supplying homeless addicts with 
heroin, fentanyl, and other synthetic opioids is 
extremely lucrative. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average heavy-opioid user consumes $1,834 in drugs per month. Holding rates constant, we can project that the total business of supplying heroin and other opioids to the West Coast’s homeless population is more than $1.8 billion per year. In effect, Mexican cartels, Chinese fentanyl suppliers, and local criminal networks profit off the misery of the homeless and offload the consequences onto local governments struggling to get people off the streets.
West Coast cities are seeing a crime spike associated with homeless opioid addicts. In Seattle, police busted two sophisticated criminal rings engaged in “predatory drug dealing” in homeless encampments (they were found in possession of $20,000 in cash, heroin, firearms, knives, machetes, and a sword). Police believe that “apartments were serving as a base of operations that supplied drugs to the streets, and facilitated the collection and resale of stolen property.” In other words, drug dealers were exploiting homeless addicts and using the city’s maze of illegal encampments as distribution centers. In my own Fremont neighborhood, where property crime has surged 57 percent over the past two years, local business owners have formed a group to monitor a network of RVs that circulate around the area to deal heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamines. Dealers have become brazen—one recently hung up a spray-painted sign on the side of his RV with the message: “Buy Drugs Here!”
What are local governments doing to address this problem? To a large extent, they have adopted a strategy of deflection, obfuscation, and denial. In her  #SeattleForAll public relations campaign, Mayor Jenny Durkan insists that only one in three homeless people struggle with substance abuse, understating the figures of her own police department as well as the city attorney, who has claimed that the real numbers, just for opioid addiction, rise to 80 percent of the unsheltered.
The consequences of such denial have proved disastrous: no city on the West Coast has a solution for homeless opioid addicts. Los Angeles, which spent $619 million on homelessness last year, has adopted a strategy of palliative care—keeping addicts alive through distribution of the overdose drug naloxone—but fails to provide access to on-demand detox, rehabilitation, and recovery programs that might help people overcome their addictions. The city has been cursed, in this sense, with temperate weather, compounded by permissive policies toward public camping and drug consumption that have attracted20,687 homeless individuals from outside Los Angeles County.
No matter how much local governments pour into affordable-housing projects, homeless opioid addicts—nearly all unemployed—will never be able to afford the rent in expensive West Coast cities. The first step in solving these intractable issues is to address the real problem: addiction is the common denominator for most of the homeless and must be confronted honestly if we have any hope of solving it.

Opioid Crackdown Could Lead To More Drug 

Company Bankruptcies


BRIAN MANN
Two years ago, the drug company Insys Therapeutics posted a quarter-billion dollars in annual sales. But the Arizona-based firm's fortunes plummeted so far that on Monday its leaders declared bankruptcy. It was the latest fall-out from the nation's prescription opioid epidemic, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans and triggered hundreds of lawsuits against Big Pharma.

Insys marketed an opioid pain medication called Subsys that included fentanyl. It generated tens of millions of dollar in annual sales. But like other prescription opioids marketed aggressively by the drug industry, it turned out to be highly addictive.

Insys Files For Chapter 11, Days After Landmark Opioid Settlement Of $225 Million
Many of the drug industry's biggest companies are tangled up in a wave of opioid litigation, including name brand companies Johnson & Johnson and CVS. It's unlikely large firms will follow Insys' lead and seek Chapter 11 protection, but smaller firms including Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, have already floated the possibility.

Attorneys representing hundreds of communities that hoped to win compensation from Insys issued a statement Monday saying they'll work to determine whether the company is actually insolvent. "We will actively pursue full financial disclosure for Insys and any other defendant that files for bankruptcy," the plaintiff group said.

New York Lawsuit Claims Sackler Family Illegally Profited From Opioid Epidemic
They added that their goal in targeting 21 other 

drug firms isn't to put them out of business but to 

"abate the current opioid epidemic and seek long-

term, sustainable solutions." State and local 

officials hope to recoup some of the billions of 

dollars they've spent responding to the opioid 

crisis.

One major state opioid trial is underway now in Oklahoma against Johnson & Johnson, with a second consolidated trial against other firms set to begin in October in Ohio. Judge Dan Polster, who's presiding over that federal case, has urged the parties to reach a settlement so communities receive some compensation without disrupting the pharmaceutical industry.

Sources tell NPR negotiations are underway but no deal has been reached.
In all, more than 1,800 state and local governments have filed opioid-related lawsuits. Penalties and settlements could run into the tens of billions of dollars, rivaling big tobacco payouts of the 1990s. The move by Insys came a week after the firm pleaded guilty to felony charges that it bribed doctors to prescribe its Subys fentanyl medication to patients who shouldn't have been using it.

The company agreed to pay the federal government $225 million in penalties. Last month, company founder John Kapoor, once a towering figure in the drug-tech industry, was found guilty on federal racketeering charges along with four other Insys executives. The company still faced numerous other opioid-related lawsuits.
In his statement, Insys CEO Andrew Long, said in a statement those "legacy legal challenges" contributed to the firm's decision to enter bankruptcy proceedings.
He said bankruptcy proceedings would allow the company to negotiate with creditors.



AMERICAN BIG PHARMA, RED CHINA and NARCOMEX PARTNER FOR THE BIG BUCKS
“The drug epidemic is the product of capitalism and the policies of the capitalist parties, both Democrats and Republicans. There is, first of all, the role of the pharmaceutical companies, which have amassed huge profits from the deceptive marketing of opioid pain killers, which they claimed were not addictive. Prescriptions for opioids such as Percocet, Oxycontin and Vicodin skyrocketed from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 259 million in 2012. What are the numbers and profits now?

 MEXICO KILLS AMERICA TWICE OVER!

DHS Secretary: ‘ICE Interdicted Enough Fentanyl Last Year to

 Kill Every American Twice Over’

Fentanyl is a synthetic opiate that according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. The illicit drug has been attributed to the alarming increase in opioid overdose deaths throughout the United States.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/03/dhs-secretary-ice-interdicted-enough.html

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“Mexican Border States Net 320 Pounds of Meth in Two Days” BREITBART

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“Eight-Time Deportee Accused of Trafficking $850,000 in Meth, Cocaine.”

                                                                                  MICHAEL CUTLER

JUDICIAL WATCH:

“The greatest criminal threat to the daily lives of American citizens are the Mexican drug cartels.”


“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant Islamists have the goal of destroying the United States. Mexican drug cartels are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually every community across this country.” JUDICIALWATCH

OPIOID AMERICA: CHINA AND MEXICO PARTNER TO ADDICT AMERICA

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-opioid-war-on-america-chin

 

PRINCETON REPORT:
American middle-class is addicted, poor, jobless and suicidal…. Thank the corrupt government for surrendering our borders to 40 million looting Mexicans and then handing the bills to middle America?

OPIOID MURDERS BY BIG PHARMA

“While drug distributors have paid a total of $400 million in fines over the past 10 years, their combined revenue during this same period was over $5 trillion.”


“Opioids have ravaged families and devastated communities across the country. Encouraging their open use undermines the rule of law and will do nothing to quell their continued abuse, let alone the problems underlying mass addiction.”






Quarter-Ton of Meth Seized in Southern Arizona



190606yuma1
CBP
ROBERT ARCE
  62
2:48

At least 527 pounds of methamphetamine worth $7.2 million was seized in southern Arizona this past weekend during a joint investigation by local police and federal agents.

The incident began last Saturday after police in San Luis conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle observed speeding westbound on Juan Sanchez Boulevard and 10th Avenue. Police reportedly discovered 95 pounds of methamphetamine and arrested the driver identified as Angel Leon-Camberos, 26.
The San Luis Police Department contacted Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) for further follow up investigation and later developed probable cause to obtain and serve a search warrant for the residence belonging to Leon-Camberos. Investigators say they then seized an additional 432 pounds of methamphetamine, one AR-15 style rifle, a magazine, 14 pounds of high-grade marijuana, “numerous wax (marijuana extract) products,” and THC vape pens with an estimated street value of $103,930. Other items seized were packaging materials indicative of possession for sale purposes, multiple cell phones, and $15,295 cash. The total amount of methamphetamine seized related to the traffic stop and search warrant at the residence was 527.3 pounds with an estimated street value of $7.2 million, according to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security media release.
Leon-Camberos was charged with various drug and weapons offenses. The Yuma County Attorney’s Office will be handling the prosecution.
Breitbart News reported this week on the seizure of a major meth lab in Sinaloa, where an estimated $170 million in finished product and precursor chemicals were collected by Mexican security personnel. Since 2018, Mexican officials busted 20 similar labs in the state.
Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a three-year assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for Northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.) You can follow him on Twitter. He can be reached at robertrarce@gmail.com









Migrant Apprehensions at Border Hit 144K in May, Says CBP



This May 29, 2019 photo released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) shows some of 1,036 migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, the largest that the Border Patrol says it has ever encountered. Video shows them going under a chain-link fence to the U.S., where …
File Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection via AP
BOB PRICE
   1,019
4:07

The apprehension of migrants along the southwest border with Mexico jumped to more than 144,000 in May. Between ports of entry, Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 132,000 migrants who illegally crossed the border illegally between ports of entry.

Chart: U.S. Customs and Border Protection - May Southwest Border Migration Report
Chart: U.S. Customs and Border Protection – May Southwest Border Migration Report
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Chief (CBP) Operating Officer John P. Sanders told reporters on a Wednesday afternoon conference call that Border Patrol agents and CBP officers apprehended 144,278 migrants in May. Over 100,000 of those taken into custody were unaccompanied minors and family units. This represents a 44 percent increase over the April’sapprehensions of families and minors, Sanders said.
U.S. Border Patrol Chief of Law Enforcement Operations Brian Hastings said that Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 132,000 migrants who illegally crossed the border between ports of entry. Of those, Hastings said more than 84,000 were family units, more than 11,000 were unaccompanied minors and more than 36,000 were single adults. He said agents apprehended an average of 4,286 per day in May.
“The numbers for May prove the crisis is only getting worse,” Hastings stated. “As of today, the Border Patrol has apprehended, as of this morning, more than 610,000 subjects on the southwest border alone. That’s exceeding the last decade of fiscal year totals… and there’s still four months remaining in this fiscal year.”
“If the current apprehension levels remain the same, we will surpass all physical year totals dating back to 2006,” he explained. “For the month of May, Border Patrol has apprehended over 132,000 subjects on the southwest border alone. That’s an average of 4,285 apprehensions per day.”
Hastings discussed how these numbers differ radically from those in the past due to the demographics of the migrants being taken into custody. “For May, over 36,000 Border Patrol apprehensions were single adults, over 11,000 apprehensions were unaccompanied alien children, a 29 percent increase over our already record numbers in April. Over 84,000 or nearly 64 percent of our apprehensions were family units.”
The May Southwest Border Migration Report, released on Wednesday afternoon by CBP officials, states that Border Patrol agents apprehended 132,887 total migrants in May. Of those, 84,542 were family unit, 11,507 were unaccompanied minors, and 36,838 were single adults.
The Rio Grande Valley Sector continues to be the busiest sector in terms of total migrant apprehensions for May. RGV Sector agents apprehended 49,855 migrants who illegally crossed the border into South Texas in May. Of those, nearly 50,000 were unaccompanied minors and family units.
The El Paso Sector follows closely with 36,830 total apprehensions consisting of 29,832 family units and 3,255 unaccompanied minors.
Hastings said that up to 60 percent of Border Patrol agents are being pulled from law enforcement duties to provide housing, food, and transportation of these migrants. Without help from Congress, Sanders said CBP would exhaust its budget well before the end of the fiscal year.
Border Patrol agents normally witness a drop-off in apprehensions during the summer months, Hastings said in response to a question from the Los Angeles Times. “With the dynamic change in the demographics that we have seen, we’re not seeing any signs of anything dropping off. For the first few days in June, we’re already seeing large groups continue to go up and we’ve had high entry days as well.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for the Breitbart Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.


Billionaire Kochs to Financially Back Democrats Pushing Amnesty, Free Trade


The Associated Press
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
JOHN BINDER
    9,625
5:15

The pro-mass immigration Koch brothers’ network of billionaire, donor-class organizations is readying to financially back Democrats, so long as they promise to support amnesty for illegal aliens and vote to advance free trade at all costs.

In a memo to its staff, the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) organization announced that the economic libertarian group is set to back any elected official in Washington, DC, — including Democrats — who support their agenda of amnesty for illegal aliens and endless free trade, and oppose the GOP voter-preferred economic nationalist agenda of less immigration and tariffs to protect American jobs.
The memo read:
The threat of being primaried prevents policymakers from leading on difficult issues and driving principled policy reforms. AFP or AFP Action will be ready to engage contested U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and state-level primary races, including Republican, Democrat, Independent or otherwise, to support sitting legislators who lead by uniting with others to pass principled policy and get good things done. [Emphasis added]
The Koch effort to financially support pro-amnesty, anti-economic nationalist Democrats would come to fruition through the creation of multiple issue-specific Political Action Committees (PACs), all under the larger Koch network umbrella.
Support for free trade absolutism, amnesty for illegal aliens, and an anti-economic nationalist voting record are basic requirements for Democrats and Republicans who want financial support from the Koch brothers, as outlined in AFP’s memo:
Four new issue specific Political Action Committees (PACs) will be created to make contributions directly to candidates. We know that candidates will seldom agree with Americans for Prosperity on every issue. But for those who do the politically difficult job of leading on a critical issue, these issue specific PACs will make it clear why millions of Americans support them on that issue, even if they have principled disagreements on others. The PACs, which will launch in the coming weeks as new entities working with our broader community, are: Uniting for Economic Opportunity, Uniting for Free Expression, Uniting for Free Trade, and Uniting for Immigration Reform. [Emphasis added]
The initiative is set to put the Koch brothers’ network of donor class organizations in line with Democrats such as Joe Biden — who has backed amnesty for all illegal aliens and continues to support the NAFTA free trade deal that eliminated nearly five million American jobs — and Republicans such as Justin Amash who opposes the use of tariffs and has previously suggested support for an amnesty for illegal aliens shielded from deportation by President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Meanwhile, the Kochs’ doubling down on amnesty and free trade puts them not only at odds with economic nationalists such as President Donald Trump and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — both of whom support tariffs on foreign imports and cracking down on multinational corporations who outsource U.S. jobs — but also with the overwhelming majority of Republican voters, conservatives, and Trump supporters.
The latest Harvard/Harris Poll revealed that the vast majority, nearly 8-in-10, Republican voters support tariffs on Chinese imports. Likewise, close to 85 percent of Trump supporters said they support tariffs on China and 76 percent of conservative voters said the same. A majority, 53 percent, of all U.S. voters said they support tariffs on Chinese imports.
On immigration, the billionaire donor class continues to be out of step with Republican voters.
While the Koch brothers, U.S. Chamber of Commercecorporate CEOs, and Silicon Valley elites have continuously demanded amnesty for illegal aliens and increased levels of legal immigration, Republican voters have said their top priorities are building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to stop illegal immigration and reducing all legal immigration to the country.
The Koch network’s economic libertarian, anti-populist agenda of free trade, mass legal immigration, and entitlement reform has little-to-no support among the American electorate. The economic libertarian agenda, once fronted by former House Speaker Paul Ryan, failed to sway voters in the 2018 midterm elections.









Still one of the most telling charts of voter-profiles from recent election. The results: There is no support for economic libertarianism across U.S. Source: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/new-study-shows-what-really-happened-in-the-2016-election.html 




Previously, the Kochs and their network have opposed any reductions to legal immigration to raise American workers’ wages, reforms to save U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars by ending welfare-dependent legal immigration, and an end to the country’s birthright citizenship policy that rewards illegal aliens’ U.S.-born children with American citizenship.
The nation’s Washington, DC-imposed mass legal and illegal immigration policy — whereby at least 1.5 million unskilled foreign nationals are admitted to the U.S. every year — is a boon to corporate executives, Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates, as America’s working and middle class have their wealth redistributed to the country’s top earners through wage stagnation.
Research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has discovered that immigration to the country shifts about $500 billion in wages away from working and middle-class Americans toward new arrivals and economic elites.
Meanwhile, decades of free trade has spurred mass layoffs, unemployment, and offshoring of high-paying American jobs while surging trade deficits. Since China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. trade deficit with China has eliminated at least 3.5 million American jobs from the American economy. Millions of American workers in all 50 states have been displaced from their jobs, which have been lost due to U.S.-China trade relations.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

Homelessness surges in southern California

A report released this week by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) chronicles a drastic rise in homelessness in the Los Angeles area over the last year. In 2019, the homeless population of the city increased by 16 percent to 36,000, while the homeless population of the county increased by 12 percent to 59,000. The figures in the report contradict the official narrative that the economy has recovered and that the working class is, despite this or that issue, faring well.
In Los Angeles the growth of homelessness is driven by an exorbitantly high cost of living, dominated by rent. The majority of the homeless people surveyed in this study pointed to economic hardship as the main cause of their vagrancy. Because of the high cost of living, a worker earning the minimum wage of $13.75 per hour would need to work 79 hours per week for a median one-bedroom apartment in the city to be considered “affordable”—defined as costing no more than one third of an individual or family’s income.
Many of those on the streets today have only recently lost their homes, with a quarter of the homeless people in the city reporting becoming homeless for the first time in 2018. Young people have been disproportionately affected by the housing crisis, with homelessness increasing among the youth by 24 percent. A net 1 million people have left the state in the last decade for cheaper destinations like Texas, Arizona or Nevada, with the majority of them being working class youth. In 2017, the Los Angeles Unified School District estimated that over 17,000 of its students were homeless.
However, it is not only the scale of the housing crisis that has expanded. It has done so in spite of much vaunted programs promoted as the solution to the crisis. With programs enacted in the last few years such as measure H and proposition HHH, a sales tax and a loan program meant to fund homeless assistance, the LAHSA expanded its activity and provided record levels of support this year.
They were able to provide permanent housing to 21,600 people in 2018, more than double the number for 2014 and up by 4,000 since last year. In a number of other categories including prevention and interim housing, their work has also markedly expanded. In 2018 homelessness in the county decreased by 4 percent.
However, the expansion of the housing crisis has far outpaced relief efforts. The LAHSA says that 1,400 units are scheduled to open this year and that 10,000 will open in the coming years, in accordance with the initial targets of these funding programs. This is barely enough to support a sixth of the county’s homeless population.
But despite this modest goal, homelessness has still grown significantly this year. While unemployment is officially low, many workers find themselves in multiple, low-paid, and casual jobs, one reversal away from finding themselves on the streets.
Perhaps more telling than the conditions in Los Angeles are those in the neighboring counties, where the rise in homelessness has been even more drastic. In these less urban areas, statistics are not methodically collected in the same detail, but figures are still available: In neighboring Ventura County the number of homeless people increased this year by 28 percent, in Orange 43 percent, and in Kern 50 percent.
The LAHSA report is also a devastating indictment of the politics of the Democratic Party. Despite being the wealthiest state in the US, and in addition to that being home to more billionaires than any other state, California has the highest poverty rate when the cost of living is accounted for. There is no question that there is an enormous amount of wealth locked up in the bank accounts of the super-rich, but the Democratic Party rejects any moves to use this wealth for the benefit of the working class.
Instead, as prices are driven up, workers are unable to afford to continue living in their old neighborhoods, and many leave the state. Any relief that exists is funded primarily through regressive taxes and loans whose repayments will come from the city’s coffers, and ultimately from the working class. Any serious attempt to deal with the housing crisis will by necessity have to confront the ruling class and threaten its immense wealth.

US job growth down 

sharply, wages stagnate

The US jobs report for May, released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), showed an increase in non-farm payrolls of only 75,000, far below the 223,000 jobs added in April. While the official unemployment rate remained at 3.6 percent, the lowest figure in half a century, this has not translated into significantly higher wages.
Wages continue to stagnate, with workers seeing an average hourly pay raise of only six cents, or 0.2 percent, in May, the same as in April. Over the last 12 months, average hourly wages have grown by only 3.1 percent. With an annual inflation rate of two percent, the increase in real wages for US workers over the past year is a mere 1.1 percent.
The virtual freeze in real wages has been constant feature of the so-called economic recovery since the Great Recession. In fact, real wages for American workers peaked 46 years ago, in 1973.
The reported net gain of 75,000 jobs in May was offset by a reduction of 75,000 in the BLS’ job estimates for April and March. Factory employment is up just 30,000 this year, compared to a gain of 110,000 in the first five months of last year. Overall job increases are likewise sharply down in 2019. In the first five month of this year, the US economy added an average of 164,000 jobs, down from an average gain of 223,000 for all of 2018.
“Following an overly strong April, May marked the smallest gain since the expansion began,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute, which surveys the payroll data of nearly half a million employers.
ADP said goods-producing employers cut 43,000 jobs in April, including 4,000 in mining and natural resources, 36,000 in construction and 3,000 in manufacturing. The retail sector lost jobs for the fourth month in a row and employment in that sector has dropped by 50,000 since January. Gains in employment were limited to professional and business services and health care.
In a separate report released last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that non-farm business sector labor productivity increased 3.4 percent in the first quarter of 2019, while unit labor costs decreased by 1.6 percent due to negligible increases in wages. Labor productivity rose less in the manufacturing due to a fall in overall output and fewer hours worked, both signs that the US economy is slowing.
Despite the claims of “full employment,” the number of workers officially listed as unemployed remained unchanged at 5.9 million in May. Just short of a quarter of these workers—1.3 million—are listed as long-term unemployed because they have been jobless for 27 weeks or more.
Not included in the official unemployed numbers are the 4.4 million workers who were forced to work part-time in May because their hours were reduced or they were unable to find full-time work. Another 1.4 million workers, also not counted as jobless, were those defined by the government as marginally attached to the work force because they had not searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey, although they wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.
Anemic job growth in the US and a decline in retail sales and factory orders in April all point to a slowing of the US economy. This, along with slowing growth in Europe and China, have led to mounting predictions of a looming global recession. These trends have been exacerbated by the trade war the Trump administration has launched against China, the world’s second largest economy, along with protectionist threats against Mexico, Germany, Japan, Australia and other countries.
The US Federal Reserve has made clear its willingness to reduce interest rates to keep the speculative bubble on Wall Street inflated. Last Tuesday, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell signaled that the central bank was prepared to cut rates if trade conflicts adversely affected the stock market. This triggered a jump of 512 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average that day and further gains on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday, the markets responded to the unexpectedly poor jobs report with another surge, confident that the Fed would use the slowdown in job growth to justify a rate cut, possibly as soon as its next meeting later this month.

what does it say about a 

country that encourages and 

abets a foreign invasion???











Nancy Pelosi Opposes Mexico’s Promise to Keep Migrants


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 17, 2019 (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
NEIL MUNRO
        8,194
6:16

The top Democrat in the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, is opposing Mexico’s comprehensive immigration reform deal with U.S. President Donald Trump.

The deal expands the “Remain in Mexico” policy which returns illegal migrants back to Mexico until they can be bussed to their asylum-court hearings in the United States. The policy is now keeping just 8,000 migrants in Mexico, out of roughly 330,000 who crossed the border in the last three months.
“We are deeply disappointed by the Administration’s expansion of its failed Remain-in-Mexico policy, which violates the rights of asylum seekers under U.S. law and fails to address the root causes of Central American migration,” said the statement from House Speaker Pelosi.
But it is not clear how Pelosi can block Mexico’s agreement with the “Remain in Mexico” policy. It has already survived one review by judges, and Mexico’s offer of jobs and healthcare to the migrants will make it difficult for pro-migration lawyers to argue that Trump’s deal violates the legal asylum rights of illegal immigrants.
The expanded Remain in Mexico plan is a political blow to Democrats, who welcomed the Central American migration because it pressured Trump to get a fix with a deal that also offered some form of amnesty for the millions of illegals in the United States.
Trump has used his power over tariffs to cut the deal with the Mexican government, so denying political leverage to Democrats and the cheap-labor lobbies in Capitol Hill’s many disputes over migration and wages.
Pelosi’s statement showed frustration over the Democrats’ loss of political leverage:
President Trump must stop sabotaging good-faith, constructive, and bipartisan efforts in Congress to address this complex problem in a humane manner that honors and respects our most cherished national values.
Pelosi also complained about Trump’s successful use of tariffs to cut Democrats out of the deal with Mexico, saying ,”President Trump undermined America’s preeminent leadership role in the world by recklessly threatening to impose tariffs on our close friend and neighbor to the south … Threats and temper tantrums are no way to negotiate foreign policy.”
The Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer, sneered at Trump’s success:


Pelosi wrapped her partisan complaint in high-minded claims about Trump’s supposed refusal to resolve a “humanitarian” emergency. The deal “fails to address the root causes of Central American migration … [so] Congress will continue to hold the Trump Administration accountable for its failures to address the humanitarian situation at our southern border.”
In fact, the humanitarian emergency in Central America is subsidiary to the rational recognition by the migrants that the D.C. establishment is inviting them to enter the United States via the various catch-and-release policies.
Trump’s deal with the Mexican government likely will allow border officials to end the catch-and-release of Central American migrants.
Ending catch-and-release is a huge win for Americans and Trump because it means border officials now have a legal alternative to the catch-and-release rules that normally allow migrants to legally enter the United States if they bring children and claim asylum.
Those catch-and-release rules are set by Congress and the courts, and they allow the migrants to get work permits before their asylum court hearings, which are now backlogged for two or more years. Instead of catch-and-release, border agencies can now return migrants to Mexico until their asylum claims can be heard by a judge.
The end of catch-and-release will likely wreck the cartels’ labor trafficking business, which depends on migrants getting U.S. jobs to repay their smuggling debts. Few poor people in Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala will go into debt with the cartels, or mortgage their farms and homes to the cartels, once they know they will be forced to remain in Mexico prior to their asylum hearings.
In 2017 and again in 2018, the cartel’s labor trafficking business provided U.S. businesses with roughly 400,000 extra low-wage workers.
That is a ten percent inflation of the nation’s annual new labor supply, on top of the four million young Americans who enter the workforce each year.
If Trump blocks the flow of illegal migrant workers, then companies will face greater pressure to compete for American workers by offering higher wages, more training, and better conditions.
Trump’s compromise deal allows Mexico to dodge the escalating tariffs that he promised, and it also means that Mexico does not have to formally declare itself a “safe third country.”
Trump and his deputies wanted Mexico to declare itself a safe third country because that would give U.S. border officials the permanent legal authority to reject migrants who cross through Mexico. But the Mexican government strongly feared and opposed the “safe third country” proposal, yet their agreement to host the migrants before their U.S. court hearings provide similar legal authority to U.S. border agencies.
Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal citiesexplodes rents and housing costsshrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.


WHERE WAS PELOSI'S BIG MOUTH WHILE OBAMA WAS 

TRANSFERRING THE AMERICAN ECONOMY TO HIS 

CRONY BANKSTERS AND THE RICH????

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican 

alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-

world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its

elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER

CRONY CAPITALISM

Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.


OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to

the top 1% of the world’s wealthy. 

*

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER

CRONY CAPITALISM

Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US

history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.


OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy. 

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER


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.


PATHOLOGICAL LIAR BARACK OBAMA MOCKS TRUMP

Obama orchestrated the greatest transfer of wealth to the rich in U.S. history!

THE WALL STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY
SERVING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER


THE CRONY CLASS:

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama-Biden and their bankster regime 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.”

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ----Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER


AMERICA: THE RICH GET MUCH RICHER AND THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS BLUDGEONED…. Illegals get the jobs!

*
Why do the billionaire class all want wider open borders and hordes more “cheap” labor illegals? It’s all about keeping wages depressed for greater profits!

*

“Today’s society benefits those who shaped it, and it has been shaped not by working men and women, but by the new aristocratic eliteBig banks, big tech, big multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media—these are the aristocrats of our age. They live in the United States, but they consider themselves citizens of the world” Sen. Josh Hawley 

*
*
"This is how they will destroy America from within.  The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants.  They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of 
our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human 
traffickers.  These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY

*
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
*

"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

*
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."
*

"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income bracket."

*

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.
*

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


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.

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.
By Gabriel Black
*
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.

America Created Just 20,000 Jobs in February ...and those all went to foreign born!

 https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/03/mo-brooks-billionaires-want-america.html

Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’
Consequently, the pumping of ultra-cheap money into the financial system, fueling speculation and parasitism, together with ever-widening social inequality, is not a temporary measure but must be made permanent.
The declining living standards of the working class are feeding directly into the retail apocalypse and mass layoffs of retail workers will only exacerbate the issue. 
Workers’ wages have seen little to no growth in the last four decades, and any economic growth experienced since 2008 has gone to 
*
“US household net worth sees biggest fall since crisis”
*
“Trump Touts Legal Immigration System for ‘Our Corporations’ at Expense of 
American Workers “– JOHN BINDER

Trump’s shift from a wage-boosting legal immigration system to one that benefits corporations and their shareholders coincides with recent big business lobby influence over his White House, at the behest of advisers Jared Kushner and Brooke Rollins.
*
“Trump Abandons ‘America First’ Reforms: ‘We Need’ More Immigration to Grow Business Profits”  JOHN BINDER
*

Additionally, Koch spokespeople at the donors’ conference said the network has its sights set on pushing amnesty for millions of illegal aliens this year.

Why do all global billionaires want wider open borders, amnesty and no E-VERIFY?
AMERICA: THE ECONOMY IS RIGGED BY COGRESS SO THE RICH BECOME SUPER RICH.
The American middle class gets the tax bills for Wall Street’s crimes and bottomeless bailouts!

Wealth concentration increases in US.


*
*
The latest research on wealth inequality by University of California economics professor Gabriel Zucman underscores one of the key social and economic trends since the global financial crisis of 2008. Those at the very top of society, who benefited directly from the orgy of speculation that led to the crash, have seen their wealth accumulate at an even faster rate, while the mass of the population has suffered a major decline.
*
The past 40 years have seen the consolidation of a plutocratic elite, which has subordinated every aspect of American society to a single goal: amassing ever more colossal amounts of personal wealth. The top one percent have captured all of the increase in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in national wealth since the 2008 crash.
*

“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER




Pelosi: Trump’s ‘Special Interest Agenda’ ‘Jeopardizing the Financial Security of Working Families’




















By CNSNews.com Staff | June 7, 2019 | 3:43 PM EDT


(Getty Images/Andrew Burton)
(CNSNews.com) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) put out a statement todayin response to the May employment report—that showed the unemployment rate holding steady at a 50-year-low of 3.6 percent—in which she said the Trump administration is pursuing a “special interest agenda” that is “jeopardizing the financial security of working families across America.”
“The May jobs report is a disturbing sign that the Administration’s disastrous special interest agenda is hollowing out our economy, fueling instability and jeopardizing the financial security of working families across America,” Pelosi said.
“While the wealthy and well-connected enjoy massive windfalls from the GOP Tax Scam for the rich, countless hard-working Americans are one unexpected expense away from financial ruin,” she said.
“Families across the country need decisive action to strengthen their health and financial well-being, not more special interest giveaways and reckless threats from the President that threaten to sow chaos in our economy,” she said.
Pelosi Statement on May Jobs Report
June 7, 2019
Washington, D.C. – Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued this statement after the Department of Labor issued its May jobs report, which showed that the economy created just 75,000 jobs:
“The May jobs report is a disturbing sign that the Administration’s disastrous special interest agenda is hollowing out our economy, fueling instability and jeopardizing the financial security of working families across America.
“While the wealthy and well-connected enjoy massive windfalls from the GOP Tax Scam for the rich, countless hard-working Americans are one unexpected expense away from financial ruin. Families across the country need decisive action to strengthen their health and financial well-being, not more special interest giveaways and reckless threats from the President that threaten to sow chaos in our economy.
“House Democrats are fighting For The People, delivering results on issues that matter in their lives. Our House Majority is acting to lower the price of prescription drugs and protect health benefits for Americans with pre-existing conditions, to raise wages by rebuilding America with bold investments in green, modern, job-creating infrastructure, and to clean up corruption to make Washington work for the public interest, not the special interests. We will continue to advance progress so that our communities, our economy and our nation can grow and thrive.”
THEY REALLY HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY HAVE INVADED!


"Meanwhile, Acting Department of Homeland Security 

(DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan has admitted that his 

agency is merely acting as a checkpoint for illegal aliens, with 

all adult border crossers arriving with children getting 

released into the interior of the U.S. mere months’ time, these

adult border crossers — now living freely in the country — 

are receiving work permits to take U.S. jobs."


PUT EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS IN PRISONS BUILT ALONG THE OPEN BORDER WITH NARCOMEX AND WE END THE INVASION OF ILLEGALS AND HEROIN


*
“Birthright citizenship should end, and the law against immigrant welfare use must be enforced. But over the long run, preventing illegal aliens from taking jobs from Americans and lawful immigrants will be the best means of restoring control of U.S. borders and sovereignty.” HEATHER MAC DONALD
*
“If Trump wants to demolish the Democrats’ playbook, he should offer to switch federal funding in this round of budget talks from the wall to E-Verify. Doing so would force Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to go on record opposing a legal workforce.” HEATHER MAC DONALD

Foreign Workers See Nearly 5X Job Growth of Americans

 



YOU EVER HEARD THE TERM E-VERIFY COME OUT OF TRUMP’S BIG MOUTH?

*
“While legal immigrants continued being admitted to the U.S. to take blue-collar working-class jobs and many white-collar, high-paying jobs, there remain about six million Americans who are unemployed, 12 percent of whom are teenagers and nearly six percent of whom are black Americans.” JOHN BINDER
In 2017, visa overstays outnumbered illegal border crossings, leading many restrictionists to prioritize policies such as E-Verify that would discourage overstayers from remaining in the country. THEODORE KUPFER. 
The U.S. Created Just 75,000 Jobs in May, Much Worse Than Expected
















Workers at the Hollywood Bed Frame Company attend an event to mark the company's upcoming expansion which will double the manufacturer's workforce, adding 100 new local jobs, at the company's factory in Commerce, California, seven miles (11 km) southeast from downtown Los Angeles, April 14, 2017. Hollywood Bed Frame says …
ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
JOHN CARNEY
        513
2:05

The U.S. economy created only 75,000 jobs in May and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.6 percent, the Labor Department said Friday.

Economists had expected the pace of job creation to moderate to 180,000 after April’s extremely hot initial report of 263,000. The unemployment rate was expected to rise to 3.7 percent.
The estimate for jobs created in March was revised down to 153,000 from the previously reported 189,000. April was revised down to 224,000.
After revisions, the economy has added 151,000 over the past three months. For the entire year, payroll gains have averaged 164,000, a much slower rate than 2018’s 223,000.
Wages gains slightly lagged forecasts. Average hourly earnings were up 3.1 percent compared with a year ago, just below the 3.2 percent expected, and 0.2 percent compared with April. The average work week held steady at 34.4 hours.
Unemployment is at the lowest rate since December 1969. The rate for African Americans declined sharply to 6.2 percent from 6.7 percent.
The lower than expected figure for job creation, however, is likely to intensify expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut its interest rate target sooner rather than later.
Professional and business services was the strongest category for the month, adding 33,000 positions. Health care grew by 16,000. Construction added 4,000. Manufacturing and mining added 3,000.
Retail shrank by 15,000. There was no noticeable bump from Census jobs, which many economists had expected to show up in May’s numbers.
















Pelosi: If We Close the Door to Immigrants We Won’t Be the Country that Leads the World



PAM KEY
         895
0:52

Thursday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) argued Americans place as leader of the world was dependent on immigration.
Pelosi said, “We always have to be optimistic and positive because what they did was so monumental and enables us to have are our debates and differences of opinion. But we do have to remember the values that freedom isn’t free. So, and part of that freedom is who we are as Americans. And who we are as Americans no one said it better than Ronald Reagan; Ronald Reagan had the biggest voice for welcoming people to our country and that we cannot close the door or else we won’t be the country that leads the world.”
(h/t Grabien)
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

















ILLEGALS & WELFARE

WE CAN’T TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN, AND YET WE LET MEXICO BUILD THEIR BILLION DOLLAR WELFARE STATE ON OUR BACKS!!!

70% OF ILLEGALS GET WELFARE!
 “According to the Centers for Immigration Studies, April '11, at least 70% of Mexican illegal alien families receive some type of welfare in the US!!! cis.org”

So when cities across the country declare that they will NOT be sanctuary, guess where ALL the illegals, criminals, gang members fleeing ICE will go???? straight to your welcoming city. So ironically the people fighting for sanctuary city status, may have an unprecedented crime wave to deal with along with the additional expense.
*
$17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
*
$12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English.
*
$22 billion is spent on (AFDC) welfare to illegal aliens each year.
*
$2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as (SNAP) food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
*
$3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. Does not include local jails and State Prisons.
*
2012 illegal aliens sent home $62 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. This is why Mexico is getting involved in our politics.
*
$200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.



THE DISUNITED STATES: The world’s welfare office!


America is a nation with a severe housing crisis, a million legals who are homeless, tens of millions of legals who have given up finding a job that pays living wages and yet the borders are wide open to keep the hordes coming simply to keep wages DEPRESSED.

THE SLOW DEATH OF CALIFORNIA, A WELFARE STATE AND COLONY OF MEXICO

With crime soaring, rampant homelessness, sanctuary state status attracting the highest illegal immigrant population in the country and its “worst state in the U.S. to do business” ranking for more than a decade, California and its expansive, debt-ridden, progressive government is devolving into a third-world country. JANET LEVY

AMERICA: THE WORLD’S WELFARE OFFICE

With crime soaring, rampant homelessness, sanctuary state status attracting the highest illegal immigrant population in the country and its “worst state in the U.S. to do business” ranking for more than a decade, California and its expansive, debt-ridden, progressive government is devolving into a third-world country. JANET LEVY

"This is how they will destroy America from within.  The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants.  They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers.  These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY

"Most Californians, who have seen their taxes increase while public services deteriorate, already know the impact that mass illegal immigration is having on their communities, but even they may be shocked when they learn just how much of a drain illegal immigration has become." FAIR President Dan Stein
WE SAT AND WATCHED WHILE THEY DESTROYED OUR COUNTRY!
We are now in the process of destabilizing our own country. FROSTY WOOLDRIGE

Welfare for Refugees Cost Americans $123 Billion in 10 Years ….YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/10/frosty-wooldridge-let-us-open-us.html

 

THE CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY

The Democrat Party’s secret agenda for wider open borders, more welfare for invading illegals, more jobs and free anything they illegally vote for…. All to destroy the two-party system and build the GLOBALISTS’ DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/11/frontpage-hidden-agenda-of-pueblo-sin.html

 

Demonstrably and irrefutably the Democrat Party became the party whose principle objective is to thoroughly transform the nature of the American electorate by means of open borders and the mass, unchecked importation of illiterate third world peasants who will vote in overwhelming numbers for Democrats and their La Raza welfare state. FRONTPAGE MAG
AMERICA, THE ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE STATE
“Through love of having children we're going to take over."  Augustin Cebada, Information Minister of Brown Berets, militant para-military soldiers of Aztlan shouting at U.S. citizens at an Independence Day rally in Los Angeles, 7/4/96
*
“The children of illegal aliens are commonly known as “anchor babies,” as they anchor their illegal alien and noncitizen parents in the U.S. There are at least 4.5 million anchor babies in the country, a population that exceeds the total number of annual American births.”   JOHN BINDER
MARK LEVIN:

‘Unbridled Immigration, Legal and Illegal, Is Taking the Country Down’


 “Through love of having children we're going to take over."  Augustin Cebada, Information Minister of Brown Berets, militant para-military soldiers of Aztlan shouting at U.S. citizens at an Independence Day rally in Los Angeles, 7/4/96

This annual income for an impoverished American family is $10,000 less than the more than $34,500 in federal funds which are spent on each unaccompanied minor border crosser.

study by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25 percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER
  “As Breitbart News recently reported, there are more anchor baby births in the Los Angeles, California metro area than the total U.S. births in 14 states and the District of Colombia. Every year, American taxpayers are billed about $2.4 billion to pay for the births of illegal aliens.” JOHN BINDER
THE INVASION:

“The radicals seek nothing less than secession from the United States whether to form their own sovereign state or to reunify with Mexico. Those who desire reunification with Mexico are irredentists who seek to reclaim Mexico's "lost" territories in the American Southwest.” Maria Hsia Chang Professor of Political Science, University of Nevada Reno

"Mexican president candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador called for mass immigration to the United States, declaring it a "human right". We will defend all the (Mexican) invaders in the American," Obrador said, adding that immigrants "must leave their towns and find a life, job, welfare, and free medical in the United States."

"Fox’s Tucker Carlson noted Thursday that Obrador has previously proposed ranting AMNESTY TO MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS. “America is now Mexico’s social safety net, and that’s a very good deal for the Mexican ruling class,” Carlson added."

All that “cheap” labor is staggeringly expensive!
"Most Californians, who have seen their taxes increase while public services deteriorate, already know the impact that mass illegal immigration is having on their communities, but even they may be shocked when they learn just how much of a drain illegal immigration has become." FAIR President Dan Stein.
*
Californians bear an enormous fiscal burden as a result of an illegal alien population estimated at almost 3 million residents. The annual expenditure of state and local tax dollars on services for that population is $25.3 billion. That total amounts to a yearly burden of about $2,370 for a household headed by a U.S. citizen.
THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES CHIPS IN MORE THAN ONE BILLION PER YEAR FOR MEX ANCHOR BABY BREEDING OF FUTURE DEMS!

JUDICIAL WATCH:

America builds the La Raza “The Race” Mexican welfare state

Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion a Year


AMNESTY: THE HOAX TO KEEP WAGES FOR LEGALS DEPRESSED!

 "Critics argue that giving amnesty to 12 to 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. would have an immediate negative impact on America’s working and middle class — specifically black Americans and the white working class — who would be in direct competition for blue-collar jobs with the largely low-skilled illegal alien population." JOHN BINDER

*
"Additionally, under current legal immigration laws, if given amnesty, the illegal alien population would be allowed to bring an unlimited number of their foreign relatives to the U.S. This population could boost already high legal immigration levels to an unprecedented high. An amnesty for illegal aliens would also likely triple the number of border-crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border." JOHN BINDER
*
“At the current rate of invasion (mostly through Mexico, but also through Canada) the United States will be completely over run with illegal aliens by the year 2025. I’m not talking about legal immigrants who follow US law to become citizens. In less than 20 years, if we do not stop the invasion, ILLEGAL aliens and their offspring will be the dominant population in the United States”…. Tom Barrett 

HERITAGE FOUNDATION:
AMNESTY WILL ADD ANOTHER 100 MILLION IMMIGRANTS TO AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS


HEAR THAT SUCKING SOUND?
IT’S MEXICO SUCKING THE BLOOD OF AMERICA…. HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS FOR WELFARE, “FREE” HEALTHCARE, HEROIN SALES, CRIME COST AND THEN THEY SEND TENS OF BILLIONS BACK TO NARCOMEX


“In the U.S. the remittances that come of illegal immigration drive down U.S. wages, particularly of those on the lowest-skilled parts of the ladder, and as money flows out from local communities, leaves them underinvested and run-down. Nobody can live two places at once. Illegal immigrants live here but their money lives in Mexico. And it's often untaxed.” MONICA SHOWALTER
Who ultimately really pays for all the true cost of all that "cheap" labor?

THE DEVASTATING COST OF MEXICO’S WELFARE STATE IN AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS


“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”.  DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE 
LA RAZA DOUBLED U.S. POPULATION AND VOTED TO SURRENDER AMERICAN BORDERS FOR EASY PLUNDERING BY NARCOMEX.
*
“Through love of having children we're going to take over." Augustin Cebada, Information Minister of Brown Berets, militant para-military soldiers of Aztlan shouting at U.S. citizens at an Independence Day rally in Los Angeles, 7/4/96
 “The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”

THE NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS: Illegals!

This is why you work From Jan - May paying taxes to the government ....with the rest of the calendar year is money for you and your family.

Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, with his fake Social Security number, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200..... free.

He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.

He qualifies for food stamps.

He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.

His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.

He requires bilingual teachers and books.

He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.

If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.

Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our) taxpayer's expense.

He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.

Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.

He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.

Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after Paying their bills and his.

The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.



Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people! 

MEX MURDERS MOTHER IN PELOSI, FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS, GAVIN NEWSOM'S ! SANCTUARY ! CITY OF SAN FRANCISCO!


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."

*

In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 s ex crimes, and 4,000 violent k illings. Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally k illed by those who illegally entered our country, and thousands more lives will be lost if we don't act right now.

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.

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

 

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.

 


BARACK OBAMA, LA RAZA FASCISM and the CULTURE of DEM CORRUPTION

They Destroyed Our Country

“They knew Obama was an unqualified crook; yet they promoted him. They knew Obama was a train wreck waiting to happen; yet they made him president, to the great injury of America and the world. They understood he was only a figurehead, an egomaniac, and a liar; yet they made him king, doing great harm to our republic (perhaps irreparable.)”


'Incompetent' and 'liar' among most frequently used words to describe the president: Pew Research Center


The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.



CRONY CAPITALISM ...the rise of Barack Obama and the fall of America!
OBAMA'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA -WHY WALL STREET, ILLEGALS, CRIMINAL BANKSTERS and the 1% LOVE HIM, AND THE MIDDLE CLASS GETS THE SHAFT TO PAY FOR HIS CRONY CAPITALISM
CEO pay is higher than ever, as is the chasm separating the rich and super-rich from everyone else. The incomes of the top 1 percent grew more than 11 percent between 2009 and 2011—the first two years of the Obama “recovery”—while the incomes of the bottom 99 percent actually shrank.
Meanwhile, Obama is pressing forward with his proposal, outlined in his budget for the next fiscal year, to slash $400 billion from Medicare and $130 billion from Social Security… AS WELL AS WIDER OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED APPLY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
In the July/August version of the Atlantic, columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”


“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”


Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York TimesNew York Review of BooksHaaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”

llustration by Lincoln Agnew*


The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.

Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.

But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to  be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
Former President Barack Obama (L) listens to Eliseo Medina and other people taking part in the Fast for Families on the National Mall in Washington on Nov. 29, 2013. Obama offered support for those fasting for immigration reform. (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)




Eliseo Medina: Revolution Through Illegal Immigration



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 “Before immigration debates took place in Washington, I spoke with Eliseo Medina and SEIU members,” said then-Sen. Barack Obamaaddressing the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) at a stop for his 2008 presidential campaign.
Eliseo Medina, Obama’s informal immigration adviser, has dedicated his life to obtaining citizenship and voting rights for America’s illegal aliens—now at an estimated 22 million—with the expressed goal of transforming the United States into a one-party state.
As a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) supporter and former honorary chair of the largest Marxist organization in the United States, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Medina is undeniably the leader of today’s amnesty movement.
At the far-left “America’s Future Now!” conference in Washington on June 2, 2009, Medina, then SEIU’s international executive vice president, addressed attendees on the vital importance of “comprehensive immigration reform”—a code phrase for amnesty.
Medina failed to mention the plight of illegal aliens, focusing instead on how—if given amnesty—they would eventually vote for Democrats.
Speaking of Latino voting patterns in the 2008 election, Medina said:
“When they [Latinos] voted in November, they voted overwhelmingly for progressive candidates. Barack Obama got two out of every three voters that showed up.
“So, I think there’s two things that matter for the progressive community:
“Number one: If we are to expand this electorate to win, the progressive community needs to solidly be on the side of immigrants. That will solidify and expand the progressive coalition for the future.
“Number two: [If] we reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters. Can you imagine if we have—even the same ratio—two out of three?
“If we have 8 million new voters … we will create a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.”
Medina’s “governing coalition” refers to Democrats having control of the federal government for the foreseeable future, “not just for an election cycle.”

Who Is Eliseo Medina?

Medina‘s road to power began in 1965 when, as a 19-year-old grape-picker, he participated in the United Farm Workers’ strike in Delano, California. Over the next 13 years, Medina worked alongside labor leader and beloved socialist Cesar Chavez, eventually surpassing his mentor as a skilled union organizer and political strategist. Medina met his future wife Liza Hirsch during this period.
Medina had met Chicago DSA comrades in the 1970s when he was in the Windy City organizing a grape boycott for Chavez. From 2004 until 2016, Medina served as an honorary chairman for the organization.
Like many DSA members, Medina also worked closely with the CPUSA.
Medina gave the keynote speech at the CPUSA publication’s People’s Weekly World (PWW) banquet in Berkeley, California, on Nov. 18, 2001.
The PWW quoted Medina praising the communist publication: “’Wherever workers are in struggle,’ Medina said, ‘they find the PWW regularly reporting issues and viewpoints that are seldom covered by the regular media. For us, the PWW has been and always will be the people’s voice.’”
In 2007, Medina personally endorsed the People’s World (by then renamed from People’s Weekly World).

Medina’s Wife and Flexible Socialist Ethics

Medina’s wife, Liza, is the daughter of Fred Hirsch, a self-described “communist plumber” and his even-more-radical wife, Virginia, known as Ginny. In the early 1960s, Ginny Hirsch left her husband and young children in San Jose while she drove to Guatemala with nearly a ton of smuggled ammunition destined for leftist rebels.
From the age of 12, Liza Hirsch was partially raised by Cesar Chavez and, at his personal request, committed herself at an early age to earning a law degree so she could serve as an attorney for the movement.
Though a sometimes-socialist himself, Chavez had no time for illegal aliens (who he dubbed “wet-backs”) fearing they would “scab” against his strikes and take jobs from his members. Chavez even launched an “Illegals Campaign”—an organized program to identify illegal alien workers in the fields and turn them in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).
Hirsch was put in charge of this program. In 1974, just before she went to law school, she “distributed forms printed in triplicate to all union offices and directed staff members to document the presence of illegal immigrants in the fields and report them to the INS,” according to the book “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez” by Miriam Pawel.
Hirsch would later marry New York DSA member Paul Du Brul. After his untimely death, she married Medina, also a card-carrying DSA member by then.
Socialist ethics can be very flexible.

Changing the Democrat Position to Pro-Amnesty

 

Medina joined the SEIU in 1986, where he helped revive a local union in San Diego, building its membership from 1,700 to more than 10,000 in five years. Medina became international executive vice president of the 2.2 million-member SEIU in 1996.
The SEIU has a huge number of illegal alien workers in its ranks. Medina used that leverage to promote amnesty in the union movement, as well as in the organized left and in the Democratic Party.
In the mid-1990s, most unions were still hostile to illegal alien workers who worked at a much lower rate, taking jobs away from union members. But in 1994, several far-left union leaders led by DSA member John Sweeney took over the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), setting the stage for a major policy change for the unions—and ultimately for the Democrats.
Claiming U.S. immigration policy was “broken and [needed] to be fixed,” the AFL-CIO on Feb. 16, 2000, called for a new amnesty for millions of undocumented workers and the repeal of the 1986 legislation that criminalized hiring them.
According to the DSA website in 2004, Medina was “widely credited with playing a key role in the AFL-CIO’s decision to adopt a new policy on immigration a few years ago.”
From his union position, Medina reached across the labor movement into the social movements and the Catholic Church to create the widest possible pro-amnesty coalition.
According to the SEIU:
“Working to ensure the opportunity to pass comprehensive immigration reform does not slip away, Medina led the effort to unite the unions of the Change to Win federation and AFL-CIO around a comprehensive framework for reform. Serving as a leading voice in Washington, frequently testifying before Congress, Medina has also helped to build a strong, diverse coalition of community and national partners that have intensified the call for reform and cultivated necessary political capital to hold elected leaders accountable.
“Medina has also helped strengthen ties between the Roman Catholic Church and the labor movement to work on common concerns such as immigrant worker rights and access to health care.”
In August 2008, the Obama campaign announced the formation of its National Latino Advisory Council. The new body consisted of several Democratic Congress members, a Catholic bishop, a former ambassador, two former cabinet members, and Medina.
After the election, Medina became Obama’s informal adviser on issues concerning immigration and amnesty. The fact that a DSA member and CPUSA supporter was advising the U.S. president on issues of vital national security importance appeared to concern no one.
Eventually, Medina and his movement were able to get an amnesty bill passed through the U.S. Senate. If they could only pass a bill through the House, the United States would be set on an irreversible path to socialism.
Fortunately, Tea Party-aligned Republican Congress members refused to sell out their nation. They held the line against intense pressure, and no amnesty bill was passed through the House in Obama’s eight years in the White House.

‘Fast for Families’

In November 2013, Medina, along with Cristian Avila of amnesty advocacy group Mi Familia Vota and Dae Jung Yoon of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium (a hard-left group that supports communist North Korea), started a 22-day “fast for families” in front of Capitol Hill “to demand Congress approve comprehensive immigration reform,” according to People’s World.
The staged protest gained worldwide media attention. Several Democratic members of Congress dropped by to offer support, along with then-President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, and Vice President Joe Biden.
Still, House Republicans did not budge.
On May 17, 2016, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign announced that long-time DSA activist Dolores Huerta and Medina would join the team as senior advisers in California.
“Huerta and Medina will build on the campaign’s robust outreach to the Latino community in California and work with the campaign’s senior team to organize and engage Californians in conversations about Hillary Clinton’s plans to break down barriers and help move the country forward.
“’We are thrilled to be joined by two incredibly accomplished and admired leaders in the Latino, immigrant and labor communities, Dolores Huerta and Eliseo Medina,’ said Buffy Wicks, State Director for Hillary for California. ‘Their advocacy and leadership … will go a long way in continuing the important work of reaching every California voter in advance of the June 7 primary.’”
Clinton promised to introduce a “pathway to full and equal citizenship” to legalize and grant voting rights to every illegal alien in the country “within 100 days of taking office” if she were to be elected president.
Had President Donald Trump not won his shocking victory on Nov. 6, 2016, Medina’s dream of a permanent, unbeatable progressive “governing coalition” would today be a reality, making it virtually impossible to elect another Republican president.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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