Two Illegal Aliens Accused of Beating 28-Year-Old to Death at Restaurant
Two illegal aliens are among four men accused of murdering a 28-year-old resident of Queens, New York outside of a cheesesteak restaurant in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Omar Arce, a 32-year-old illegal alien, and Jose Alberto Flores-Huerta, a 33-year-old illegal alien, Breitbart News has learned, were arrested and charged with murdering 28-year-old Isidro Cortes on September 16 outside of South Philadelphia’s Pat’s King of Steaks restaurant.
Isidro Cortez, 28-years-old, was allegedly murdered by two illegal aliens, as well as two other men still at large, on September 16. (Photo via GoFundMe)
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency confirmed with Breitbart News that they have issued detainers for Arce and Flores-Huerta, indicating their illegal alien status. An ICE detainer is a formal request by the agency to local law enforcement, asking that a suspect be turned over to their custody for arrest and deportation if they are released at any time.
According to the Philadelphia Police Department, Arce and Flores-Huerta, along with two other men whom police are searching for, 34-year-old Osvaldo “Willie” Pedraza and 32-year-old Victor Pedraza, beat Cortez to death outside of the restaurant following an argument.
Surveillance footage captured the incident, where Cortez can be seen being hit with a metal trash can. Two other men, Cortez’s 64-year-old father and his 28-year-old friend were also punched and kicked in the head by Arce, Flores-Huerta, and the Pedraza brothers, according to police.
The Philadelphia Police Department is are offering a $20,000 reward for any information that leads to the arrest of the Pedraza brothers. Meanwhile, Arce and Flores-Huerta have been charged with murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault, and other crimes.
Cortez’s family has set up a GoFundMe account to fund funeral costs.
“Isidro was full of life, happiness, and laughter,” Cortez’s cousin wrote. “Those that knew him, knew his passion for soccer, especially for his beloved Mexican fútbol Club America.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Report: Toy Shortage Threatens Christmas Joy
Shortage of toys, holiday gifts, Halloween costumes, and Christmas decorations are threatening to steal the joy from Christmas this year.
A report from the Daily Mail claims that some of the CEOs from large manufacturers are facing the tough calls on filling their stores with supplies, while the continuous backlog of cargo ships have been waiting to dock in one of the many large ports along the coast of the United States:
The cost of shipping is reaching exorbitant heights as a result of the kinks in the normally-functioning system. Last month, the median average cost of shipping a metal container from China to the West coast soared 10-fold from $2,000 to a high of more than $20,000 and the cost of shipping from Europe to the North Coast of America also soared.
As of Monday morning, 63 ships were anchored off LA and Long Beach Ports with wait times of up to four weeks.
There are two cargo ships sitting off the coast of Long Island, waiting for port entry and there are 23 ships at anchor near Savannah, Georgia, with 80,000 shipping containers stacked at the city’s huge port – 50% more than usual.
Mega-chains in the United States such as Walmart, Home Depot, Costco, and Target have reportedly chartered their own ways to transport some goods stuck on cargo ships waiting to dock.
Cargo ships filled with containers dock at the Port of Los Angeles on September 28, 2021, in Los Angeles, California. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)
“Walmart chartered a ship that normally transports grain to retrieve some of the goods from a backed-up ship at the L.A. port and move it to a nearby dock,” Daily Mail reported, noting, “Home Depot has chartered its own ship, filled with Halloween and Christmas decorations.”
Ed Desmond, executive vice president of the Toy Association, said during an announcement last week that parents should be going out now to buy Christmas gifts for their children while there are plenty of supplies instead of waiting till the last moment.
Empty shelves are seen at Mary Arnold Toys, New York city oldest toy store on August 2, 2021. – It’s always “better to shop a little early” for the holidays, but this year, Judy Ishayik, co-owner of a New York toy store says, “We are telling people to shop for Christmas in September.”
Global shipping snags are causing shortages, delivery delays and price increases — all headaches for toy stores and manufacturers. (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
“Get out and buy toys now. If you see toys you think the kids are going to want for Christmas, pick them up now and tuck them away to make sure you have them,” Desmond said. “Right now, stores have a pretty healthy supply. We just don’t know what’s going to happen when we get down the road closer to Christmas,’ said Ed Desmond, executive vice president of the Toy Association during an announcement last week.”
“We’re certainly hoping that more containers come in both for the major retailers and to help some of these small stores,” he added. “But one issue that we do fear is you may not see the same breadth of selection.”
Jay Foreman, the CEO of Basic Plus! toys claimed that he has eight million dollars worth of goods sitting in a warehouse but cast doubt over the toys being able to dock in time for the holidays. “I got Tonka trucks in the south and Care Bears in the north. We’ll blow last year’s numbers away, but the problem is we don’t know if we’ll get the last four months of the year shipped.”
Foreman told Bloomberg, “The supply chain is a disaster, and it’s only getting worse.”
Follow Jacob Bliss on Twitter @jacobmbliss.
Bidenomics is a Biden-made disaster, just like the border crisis he created and his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Inflation Expectations Hit Record High in Fed Survey
The expectations for inflation among American consumers continued to climb in September, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey showed Tuesday.
U.S. household expectations for inflation one year from now rose to 5.3 percent in September, up a tenth of a percentage point from the prior month, the New York Fed’s monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations revealed.
Both marked the year ahead and three-year readings are the highest on record in the survey’s eight-year history.
The results indicate that Americans do not believe the current bout of inflation is likely to fade quickly
Federal Reserve officials watch inflation expectations closely because they believe expectations are a key factor in determining the course of prices in the future.
In a speech to the Peterson Institute for International Economics on inflation on Tuesday, Atlanta Fed president Raphael Bostic said that it is becoming increasingly clear that the intense and widespread supply chain disruptions that have animated price pressures will not be brief. As a result, inflation is likely to stay elevated for quite some time.
What’s more, the longer the supply bottlenecks and attendant price pressures last, the more likely they will shape the expectations of consumers and businesspeople, shifting their views on pricing and wages in particular.
“We have not seen this sort of broad-based and sudden surge in inflation readings since the Great Inflation of the 1970s,” Bostic said. “Certainly, it’s too early to proclaim we are witnessing a wage-price spiral like the one that led to the Great Inflation. But conditions merit watching, and my staff and I are doing just that.”
Inflation expectations are highest among those over 59 years old but are extremely elevated among all age groups.
How things are going from bad to worse.
Bidenomics consists of President Joe Biden’s radical progressive prescriptions for transforming the American economy, including massive wealth redistribution, focus on “equity” and “social justice” rather than merit and economic opportunity, disincentives for work, and cradle-to-grave entitlements. It’s not working.
President Biden tried his best to put a positive spin on last Friday’s dismal September jobs report. Biden said that “when you take a step back and look at what’s happening, we’re actually making real progress.”
That’s right up there with Biden’s claim that his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan - leaving Americans, Afghan allies, and many billions of dollars of advanced weaponry behind under Taliban control - was an "extraordinary success."
The total nonfarm payroll employment rose by the paltry amount of 194,000 this September – about 300,000 short of consensus estimates. To put this pitiful number in perspective, the total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 661,000 in September 2020 – while the coronavirus was still raging, and no vaccines were available yet.
Biden focused on the decline of the unemployment rate to 4.8 percent. But that decline occurred largely because the labor force itself diminished by nearly 200,000 people. In other words, more and more people of prime working age have given up looking for a job and dropped out of the labor force altogether. They are not counted in calculating the nation’s unemployment rate.
There are plenty of job openings today that remain unfilled. After all, why work if you can sit back and be taken care of by the entitlement state that Biden and the Democrat-controlled Congress are creating, which bestows generous welfare benefits with no work requirements?
Average hourly earnings rose 0.6 percent in September from August. The year-over-year increase rose to 4.6 percent. Biden seized on this statistic to claim that “we saw one of the largest increases in average wages paid to workers on — of working Americans on record.”
However, this is of little comfort to people trying to make ends meet as inflation continues to escalate on Biden’s watch. Since May 2021, the annual inflation rate has averaged over 5 percent year-to-year. It is rising at a faster rate than the increase in average hourly wages, which means that workers are falling more and more behind every month. Their wallets are being squeezed.
Inflation hurts poor and working-class people most of all – the people Biden claims he is most concerned about.
Oil prices are at a near 7-year high. Americans are paying for it at the pump. Biden has reversed Trump administration policies that made the U.S. energy independent. He has put OPEC back in the driver’s seat.
Food prices are rising at a breakneck pace. Meat, poultry, fish, and eggs are up nearly six percent over the last year and nearly 15 percent since July 2019, with no sign of easing any time soon.
Out-of-control spending by the Biden administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress has been a significant contributor to today’s inflation problem. If passed on a partisan basis through the reconciliation process, Biden’s multi-trillion dollar “Build Back Better” tax-and-spend extravaganza will add further fuel to the inflation fire while killing good-paying jobs with strangling business taxes. Biden’s claim that “My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars” earned Two Pinocchios from the Washington Post.
No wonder Biden is getting such poor marks from the American people on the economy. The most recent Quinnipiac University national poll showed that when it comes to Biden’s handling of the economy, 39 percent approved, while 55 percent disapproved. Overall, he received “a negative 38 - 53 percent job approval rating,” according to Quinnipiac.
Joe Biden ran for president promising to successfully tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Get the pandemic under control, Biden assured Americans, and the economy will rebound sharply. Supposedly, people will rush out to fill the millions of jobs that would open up. Biden has failed on both counts.
“We’re making real progress on COVID-19,” Biden said with a straight face during his remarks on October 8th. A majority of the American people do not agree. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, 48 percent approved of the job that Biden was doing in responding to the coronavirus pandemic, while 50 percent disapproved. That is being overly generous to Biden, considering that he had three coronavirus vaccines handed to him on a silver platter as a result of former President Donald Trump’s highly successful Project Warp Speed.
More than 300,000 Americans were reported to have died because of COVID-19 since Biden took office less than nine months ago. That’s more than 40 percent of the total number of American deaths attributed to COVID-19 since the first cases of coronavirus in the United States were reported on Jan. 21, 2020.
After failing to effectively use his presidential bully pulpit to persuade more Americans to be vaccinated, Biden decided to resort to imposing a nationwide vaccine mandate on businesses with more than 100 employees. However, Biden’s lax approach in allowing untested and unvaccinated illegal aliens into the country and releasing them undercuts his credibility on the critical importance of vaccinating all Americans.
Moreover, vaccine mandates can adversely affect employment. Some businesses, as well as state and local governments, have already put mandates in place, which have led to thousands of unvaccinated workers either quitting themselves or being fired. Other individuals looking for work who are unvaccinated – including some people with natural antibodies from having been infected with the coronavirus – are being barred from working at jobs of their choice.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed to the vaccine mandates as one reason for labor shortages that are holding back the economy’s growth as we emerge from the pandemic. Added to that are inflation, higher taxes, more regulations, and disincentives to work, courtesy of the Biden administration and their allies in Congress.
Even with the end of the supplemental unemployment benefits, the Wall Street Journal editors noted, “there are still many other federal financial payments that don’t require work, including a $300 monthly allowance per child, food stamps and rental assistance.” The reconciliation bill would add much more.
Bidenomics is a Biden-made disaster, just like the border crisis he created and his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
AMERICANS ARE ABOUT TO GET HAMMERED, DEBT HEAVY POPULATION, PRICES RISING, ENERGY, UTILITIES, FOOD
Biden downplays disastrous September jobs report, touts pandemic “success”
In response to another disastrous jobs report, President Joe Biden sought to present the payroll numbers, which were below even the anemic totals for August, as indicators of steady progress toward economic recovery.
Nonfarm payrolls in the US grew by a seasonally adjusted 194,000, down from 235,000 in August and far below the 500,000 jobs widely predicted by economists. The slack hiring came despite desperate attempts by the ruling class to “normalize” the pandemic by ending federal support for unemployed workers, including self-employed workers, and reopening the schools to enable parents to return to work.
Biden attributed the slower than expected hiring to the impact of the Delta variant, as though the horrific spread of the disease, which is killing close to 2,000 people every day across the US, was an entirely external event, unconnected to the homicidal reopening policy and abandonment of mitigation measures pursued by his administration since taking office.
He then tried to take credit for the recent modest fall in the number of COVID-19 cases and recent rises in wages, without mentioning the rising death toll or the sharp increase in the cost of living.
While the official unemployment rate fell to 4.8 percent in September, down from 5.2 percent in August, a more significant measure, the labor force participation rate, showed a slight decline from August. Significantly, this includes workers of prime working years, defined as 25 to 54 years old.
The leisure and hospitality sector, which had been a major driver of job growth since February, added only 74,000 jobs in September after an increase of just 38,000 in August. This is despite the fact that average hourly wages for restaurant workers now surpass $15 for the first time, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Average hourly wages for leisure and hospitality workers rose to $18.95 in September, up 10 cents from August.
The number of manufacturing jobs increased by just 26,000, down from 31,000 in August. Overall, the number of manufacturing jobs is down by 353,000 since February 2020, reflecting both the shortage of workers and global supply chain disruptions.
The August jobs report came as a shock to financial markets, which had counted on a resurgence of hiring to boost profits and underpin the massive debt bubble. The poor hiring numbers served only to intensify the drive by the ruling class to end any pandemic mitigation measures and drive workers back into the schools and factories.
To the horror of the corporate-financial oligarchy, not only are workers still refusing to accept low-wage jobs under unsafe conditions, a surge of workers’ struggles has broken out across the US, as workers reject miserable contract terms that employers and unions are trying to shove down their throats. Thousands of workers are already on strike, including 1,400 workers at Kellogg’s, Warrior Met miners in Alabama, and nurses in Massachusetts and Buffalo, New York. Tens of thousands more have taken or are taking strike votes, including 60,000 television and movie production workers and 24,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses in Northern California.
In contrast to the president’s sanguine talk, the financial press reacted with alarm to the September jobs figures. The New York Times wrote: “The combination of stagnant labor force participation and rising wages creates an alarming picture for economists and investors, one in which costs are increasing as the outlook for growth is increasingly grim. With fewer people working and earning paychecks, the economy can produce less over time. And as employers must pay more to attract workers, they may have to increase prices to cover their rising costs, feeding into high inflation.”
The herd immunity policy of the Biden administration and all sections of the US ruling class has had the inevitable consequence of driving up the rate of infection and death, including among the most vulnerable layer of the population—children. According to one report, there were over 2,000 school closings due to COVID-19 across 470 school districts in 39 states through the middle of September, a number that has only increased since. State of Michigan health officials report that last week an average of 375 children under age 12 contracted the virus every day.
Despite the best efforts of the corporate media propagandists to present the pandemic as virtually over, the reality of widespread infection and death is generating continuing hostility and resistance to a return to unsafe workplaces. Compounding the difficulties faced by the ruling class in reopening factories are far-ranging disruptions to the global supply chain related to the pandemic, from the lack of computer microchips to the scores of ships sitting outside the port of Los Angeles, unable to unload.
Reports indicate the pandemic is the main reason that employers are having a hard time recruiting workers, both because workers are afraid of contracting COVID-19 and because of difficulties in securing childcare. According to US Labor Department figures, there were nearly 11 million unfilled jobs at the end of July, the highest on record and more than the number of unemployed workers seeking jobs. Total US employment is still down roughly five million jobs compared with February 2020. Some 2.7 million workers have been out of work for six months or longer.
The stock markets were mixed in response to the jobs report, ending a highly volatile week that saw large swings. The fear is that rising inflation may force the US Federal Reserve to raise interest rates despite stagnant job growth, potentially destabilizing the financial house of cards created by the endless pumping of government cash into the markets.
The signs of economic dislocation caused by the pandemic belie the empty-headed talk by the Biden administration of an economic recovery. They also refute the rationale for ending pandemic-related assistance programs and the moratorium on evictions. As inadequate as these measures were, including expanded and extended unemployment benefits and a $300 weekly supplement, they were all that were keeping many families above water.
Trying to change the subject from the jobs report, Biden boasted of the “progress” being made on his social welfare and climate bill. He noted the dismal state of infrastructure in the US as well as indices of social distress, such as lack of access to early childhood education. However, he failed to mention that his administration had capitulated to right-wing forces by massively scaling back the already inadequate $3.5 trillion measure ostensibly aimed at addressing these ills.
Biden’s pitching of his budget and infrastructure bills was couched in stridently nationalist terms, directed largely against China. “These bills are not about left versus right, or modern [moderate] versus progressive, or anything else that pits Americans against one another,” he said. “These bills are about competitiveness versus complacency.”
As workers have learned through bitter experience, “competitiveness” is a catch-word for the sweating of ever greater levels of production out of workers and the evisceration of social benefits.
Every concessions contract rammed through by the unions has been defended on the grounds of the need for greater “competitiveness.”
The jobs report is a further sign of the deepening crisis of US and world capitalism. The Biden administration and the US ruling class have no response except to deepen their attacks on the working class while they step up their plans for confrontation with their overseas competitors, in the first place China.
No comments:
Post a Comment