ALEX BALDWIN - What Occupy Wall Street Has Taught Me

IN THE LA RAZA-OCCUPIED STATE KNOWN AS MEXIFORNIA, UNEMPLOYMENT IS 15% TO 30% IN SOME COUNTIES.

THERE ARE ONLY EIGHT STATES WITH A POPULATION GREATER THAN LOS ANGELES COUNTY WHERE NEARLY HALF OF ALL JOBS ARE HELD BY ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. THIS SAME COUNTY PUTS OUT $600 MILLION PER YEAR IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS! THIS SAME COUNTY IS CALCULATED TO HAVE A TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION!

YOU REALLY WANT TO EXPAND LA RAZA SUPREMACY?

OH, AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN MEXICO IS BELOW…… 6%....!

THREE OF THE MAJOR CULPRITS OF THE LA RAZA OCCUPATION ARE ALSO THREE OF THE MOST CORRUPT POLITICIANS IN HISTORY, LA RAZA ENDORSED ADVOCATES FOR OPEN BORDERS BARBARA BOXER, DIANNE FEINSTEIN AND NANCY PELOSI.

PELOSI HAS LONG HIRED ILLEGALS TO WORK HER ST. HELENA, NAPA WINERY.

FEINSTEIN HAS LONG HIRED ILLEGALS TO WORK HER S.F. HOTEL.

ALEC BALDWIN’S FRIEND, BOXER WAS REELECTED, AS OBAMA HOPES TO BE, WITH THE VOTES OF LA RAZA!

YES, ILLEGALS DON’T STOP BREAKING OUR LAWS AND ORDINANCES WITH VOTING!

What Occupy Wall Street Has Taught Me

11/16/11

Have you seen Hard Times: Lost on Long Island? The film won the Audience Award/Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October. The documentary follows a group of unemployed men and women, ranging in age from their late thirties into their sixties, who are looking for work while living in certain middle class suburbs on Long Island. I had not seen the film during the festival itself, but when I screened it the other day, I realized the true meaning, for me, of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Hard Times is a disturbing film that puts a face to the unemployment crisis in America in a rather effective way. At times, talk radio broadcasts play over footage of the principals as they trundle off to another day of staring down their own obsolescence. Over the airwaves, voices of people like Rush Limbaugh can be heard exhorting his listeners about the evil of unemployment benefits and how such programs only encourage procrastination and sloth.

In America today, we are told that unemployment now hovers at around nine percent, while other sources insist that those statistics are underreported and are closer to 12.5 percent. At nine percent, we are confronted with a situation where one in eleven working Americans is without an income. At 12.5 percent, we are talking about one in eight.

The rest of us try to go about our business. We wish those who are suffering our very best. We hope that they succeed in finding work. We are grateful, on a daily if not twice daily basis, to have jobs and to be able to pay our bills and to support our families. Then we put our heads down and try not to think about what it would be like to be one of those unemployed people. Especially the long term unemployed.

It is somewhat easier to sidestep the raw helplessness of one in eleven or even one in eight. It's similar to the way we sidestep the homeless or indigent on the street, believing that they got there like a leaf falls from a tree; as if they belonged there through some law of nature, and that we are not responsible in any way. Nor are any of our decisions. But what happens if unemployment reaches twenty percent? What would it be like for one in five Americans to be in serious, bordering on irreversible, financial trouble? How do you overlook one in five people in contemporary society?

We have learned many lessons in the past three years. One important lesson, I believe, is that bailouts of major corporations in any and all industries is counterproductive to long term economic health. And not simply direct infusions of cash as loans, tossed like gargantuan life preservers, in moments of greatest perceived dread. I'm talking about the bailouts the US government gives major corporations every day. The excessive fees forced on customers by certain banks, not to mention the predatory lending practices of the mortgage industry (coupled with the remarkably stupid borrowing of certain homeowners).

Another example is that we have no high speed rail in this country. Typically, you fly or you drive. So airlines are free to tack on fees to remain profitable the way that oil companies are free to manipulate oil production, and thus the price of gasoline. You bailed out the airlines every time you did not demand more effective, intermediate range travel, i.e. high speed rail. You bailed out the oil companies every time you watched (were you watching?) as American troops went to Iraq to fight a war for oil. You bail out American business, and help them maintain an often false veneer of profitability, every time you send nearly every member of the current Congress back to Washington. Maintaining US corporate profitability is the single goal of this Congress. Because that is what the corporations who own the Congress paid for when they bought the Congress.

Every thing I have put forth here, I have heard articulated from the Occupy Wall Street movement. Some of it was not news to me. I have grown up in the latter half of the 20th Century. When the Greatest Generation was replaced by the greediest generation and what was known as the Protestant Work Ethic became a quaint chestnut. The definition of success became getting the most for doing the least. It became about getting away with what you can and the only issue was getting caught. Which pretty much defines the Wall Street culture of today. Never have the world's greatest financial markets been controlled by such dangerously short-sighted people as they are today. And never has this country been cursed by a more incompetent and derelict Securities and Exchange Commission as we are today. In the wake of 9/11, America attacked a perceived terrorist community with all it had. In the wake of some of the worst financial scandals in US history, the SEC took a dive, throwing the fight in the first round.

Occupy Wall Street people understand that not only are more difficult times possibly around the corner, they know that the current government will likely do as it has historically done, which is to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of the long term interests of the middle class. Some of the most financially successful people in America continually remind us all that capitalism is a contest. There are winners and losers. And the winners want to enjoy their success and they want the losers to keep it down. The noise of the vanquished is spoiling the victors' fun.

OWS talks a lot, too much in fact, about One Percent versus Ninety Nine Percent. As if success itself were a crime. That's a mistake. But what OWS has helped to remind me is that One in Five is a far more unsettling ratio. Twenty percent unemployment. In the 21st Century United States.

There won't be enough cops any where in this country to rip down all the tents that are going to pop up in places you never imagined if we hit that figure. That's what OWS has taught me.

In my next post, let's talk about how Ray Kelly is running for Mayor of New York and how he'll never get there without paddy wagons full of Wall Street money, which is why he had the boys hose down Zuccotti Park.

*

HOW MANY ILLEGALS HAVE CLIMBED OUR BORDERS SINCE 2005?

December 7, 2005

Most Mexican Immigrants in New Study Gave Up Jobs to Take Their Chances in U.S.

By NINA BERNSTEIN

A report about the work lives of recent Mexican immigrants in seven cities across the United States suggests that they typically traded jobs in Mexico for the prospect of work here, despite serious bouts of unemployment, job instability and poor wages.

The report, released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, was based on surveys of nearly 5,000 Mexicans, most of them here illegally.

Those surveyed were seeking identity documents at Mexican consulates in New York, Atlanta and Raleigh, N.C., where recent arrivals have gravitated toward construction, hotel and restaurant jobs, and in Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Fresno, Calif., where they have been more likely to work in agriculture and manufacturing.

Unlike the stereotype of jobless Mexicans heading north, most of the immigrants had been employed in Mexico, the report found.

Once in the United States, they soon found that their illegal status was no barrier to being hired here. And though the jobs they landed, typically with help from relatives, were often unstable and their median earnings only $300 a week, that was enough to keep drawing newcomers because wages here far exceeded those in Mexico.

Among respondents to the survey, those who settled in Atlanta and Dallas were the best off, with 56 percent in each city receiving a weekly wage higher than the $300-a-week median. The worst off were in Fresno, where more than half of the survey respondents worked in agriculture and 60 percent reported earning less than $300 a week. The lowest wages were reported by women, people who spoke little or no English, and those without identification.

To some scholars of immigration, the report underlines the lack of incentives for employers to turn to a guest worker program like the one proposed by President Bush because their needs are met cheaply by illegal workers - and all without paperwork or long-term commitment.

Guest workers might instead appeal to corporations like Wal-Mart, the scholars said, where service jobs are now the target of union organizing drives.

"You can't plausibly argue that immigrant-dominated sectors have a labor shortage," said Robert Courtney Smith, a sociologist and author of "Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants." Instead, he said, the report and evidence of falling wages among Mexican immigrants over time point to an oversupply of vulnerable workers competing with each other.

But Brendan Flanagan, a spokesman for the National Restaurant Association, which supports a guest worker program, disagreed. "In many places it is difficult to fill jobs with domestic workers," Mr. Flanagan said. "We've seen a simple lack of applicants, regardless of what wage is offered."

Although the survey, conducted from July 2004 to January 2005, was not random or weighted to represent all Mexican immigrants, it offers a close look at a usually elusive population.

Those surveyed were not questioned directly about their immigration status, but they were asked whether they had any photo identification issued by a government agency in the United States. Slightly more than half over all, and 75 percent in New York, said they did not.

The migration is part of a historic restructuring of the Mexican economy comparable to America's industrial revolution, said Kathleen Newland, director of the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization based in Washington.

The institute released its own report on Tuesday, arguing that border enforcement efforts have failed. Workplace enforcement, which has been neglected, would be a crucial part of making a guest worker program successful.

For now, Mexicans keep arriving illegally.