Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire - By Alfred W. McCoy - TomDispatch

SHOULD OBAMA REALLY BE WORKING SO HARD TO TURN OUR COUNTRY INTO A NATION AS FAILED AS MEXICO?


SEEMS LIKE HE COULD FIND OTHER THINGS TO DO OTHER THAN ENDLESS HISPANDERING AND PROMOTING THE INTERESTS OF HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS!



WE ALREADY HAVE 40 MILLION ILLEGALS THAT HOPPED OUR BORDERS TO LOOT, TAKE OUR JOBS, VOTE AND WAVE THEIR MEXICAN FLAG IN VICTORY!



http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/obamas-hispanicazation-of-america-push.html



This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch [1].



Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

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The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Alfred W. McCoy
December 6, 2010

This piece originally appeared at TomDispatch [1].



A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to US global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Significantly, in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports [2], Global Trends 2025, the Council cited [3] “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States' relative strength—even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the US would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.

No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered [4] the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed [5] the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away [6] talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in US global power was underway.

Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found [7] that 65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.” Already, Australia [8] and Turkey [9], traditional US military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline summed the moment up [10] this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge US, Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.”

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, US global power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today). The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States had already fallen [11] to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union. There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.

Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the US was still number two [12] behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the US hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed [13] by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said [14] one US expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence that the US education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank [15] to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked [16] the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the US are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the US knows best on economic policy,” observed [17] Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in US Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted [18] that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”

Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested [19] that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the US dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued [18], “to hasten the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the US dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls US forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge US dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the US had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued [20] that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned [3], in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls [21] “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise—and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling [22] its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen [23] from 36% of energy consumed in the US to 66% [24].

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar's plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of US oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the US Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the US lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the US Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” [25] by which US military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region—logistics, exchange rates, and naval power—evaporate. At this point, the US can still cover only an insignificant 12% [26] of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, US military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the US is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the US occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment [27] to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014

So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the US military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.

It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down US garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while US aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at US garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, US helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.

Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the US to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the UN to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America's Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the US and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the US to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the US Navy. In August, after Washington expressed [28] a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official Global Times responded angrily [29], saying, “The US-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported [30] that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [US] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyberwarfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch [31] of two satellites in January 2010 and another [32] in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones—reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching [33] the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used [34] in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, US Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope [35] (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the US CyberCommand's operations center [36] in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints [37] of China's People's Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered US “Vulture” drone [38] as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 [39] “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles [40] at China's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle [41] into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate US supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of US ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the US Air Force has long called [42] “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the US and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

As US power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the US.

In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.

In Planet of Slums [43], Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.

Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region—Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded UN Security Council or some ad hoc body.

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.

If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted [44] trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/156851/decline-and-fall-american-empire



THE AMERICAN WORKER - END OF THE VERY LONG OF ILLEGALS THAT GET JOBS FIRST

THERE ARE ONLY EIGHT STATES WITH A GREATER POPULATION THAN LOS ANGELES COUNTY. HERE, HALF THOSE WITH A JOB ARE ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. BIG CHAINS LIKE TARGET, ROSS STORES, 99CENT ONLY STORES APPEAR TO ONLY HAVE HISPANIC EMPLOYEES, SOME OF WHICH CAN SPEAK NO ENGLISH, OR PREFER NOT TO.


THIS SAME COUNTY PAYS OUT (OF PROPERTY TAXES) $600 MILLION PER YEAR IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS (source: JUDICIAL WATCH)



http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-mceconomy-bombed-american-worker-by.html

How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker

The Hollowing Out of the Middle Class

By Andy Kroll

Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald's hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries.

On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald's appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of "McJob" as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement."

Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward, from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month (not including those 62,000 McJobs), beating economists' expectations.

Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery?

The Rise of the McWorker

The evidence points to the latter. According to a recent analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the biggest growth in private-sector job creation in the past year occurred in positions in the low-wage retail, administrative, and food service sectors of the economy. While 23% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession that followed the economic meltdown of 2008 were “low-wage” (those paying $9-$13 an hour), 49% of new jobs added in the sluggish “recovery” are in those same low-wage industries. On the other end of the spectrum, 40% of the jobs lost paid high wages ($19-$31 an hour), while a mere 14% of new jobs pay similarly high wages.

As a point of comparison, that's much worse than in the recession of 2001 after the high-tech bubble burst. Then, higher wage jobs made up almost a third of all new jobs in the first year after the crisis.

The hardest hit industries in terms of employment now are finance, manufacturing, and especially construction, which was decimated when the housing bubble burst in 2007 and has yet to recover. Meanwhile, NELP found that hiring for temporary administrative and waste-management jobs, health-care jobs, and of course those fast-food restaurants has surged.

Indeed in 2010, one in four jobs added by private employers was a temporary job, which usually provides workers with few benefits and even less job security. It's not surprising that employers would first rely on temporary hires as they regained their footing after a colossal financial crisis. But this time around, companies have taken on temp workers in far greater numbers than after previous downturns. Where 26% of hires in 2010 were temporary, the figure was 11% after the early-1990s recession and only 7% after the downturn of 2001.

As many labor economists have begun to point out, we're witnessing an increasing polarization of the U.S. economy over the past three decades. More and more, we're seeing labor growth largely at opposite ends of the skills-and-wages spectrum -- among, that is, the best and the worst kinds of jobs.

At one end of job growth, you have increasing numbers of people flipping burgers, answering telephones, engaged in child care, mopping hallways, and in other low-wage lines of work. At the other end, you have increasing numbers of engineers, doctors, lawyers, and people in high-wage "creative" careers. What's disappearing is the middle, the decent-paying jobs that helped expand the American middle class in the mid-twentieth century and that, if the present lopsided recovery is any indication, are now going the way of typewriters and landline telephones.

Because the shape of the workforce increasingly looks fat on both ends and thin in the middle, economists have begun to speak of "the barbell effect," which for those clinging to a middle-class existence in bad times means a nightmare life. For one thing, the shape of the workforce now hinders America’s once vaunted upward mobility. It’s the downhill slope that’s largely available these days.

The barbell effect has also created staggering levels of income inequality of a sort not known since the decades before the Great Depression. From 1979 to 2007, for the middle class, average household income (after taxes) nudged upward from $44,100 to $55,300; by contrast, for the top 1%, average household income soared from $346,600 in 1979 to nearly $1.3 million in 2007. That is, super-rich families saw their earnings increase 11 times faster than middle-class families.

What's causing this polarization? An obvious culprit is technology. As MIT economist David Autor notes, the tasks of "organizing, storing, retrieving, and manipulating information" that humans once performed are now computerized. And when computers can't handle more basic clerical work, employers ship those jobs overseas where labor is cheaper and benefits nonexistent.

Another factor is education. In today's barbell economy, degrees and diplomas have never mattered more, which means that those with just a high school education increasingly find themselves locked into the low-wage end of the labor market with little hope for better. Worse yet, the pay gap between the well-educated and not-so-educated continues to widen: in 1979, the hourly wage of a typical college graduate was 1.5 times higher than that of a typical high-school graduate; by 2009, it was almost two times higher.

Considering, then, that the percentage of men ages 25 to 34 who have gone to college is actually decreasing, it's not surprising that wage inequality has gotten worse in the U.S. As Autor writes, advanced economies like ours "depend on their best-educated workers to develop and commercialize the innovative ideas that drive economic growth."

The distorting effects of the barbell economy aren't lost on ordinary Americans. In a recent Gallup poll, a majority of people agreed that the country was still in either a depression (29%) or a recession (26%). When sorted out by income, however, those making $75,000 or more a year are, not surprisingly, most likely to believe the economy is in neither a recession nor a depression, but growing. After all, they’re the ones most likely to have benefited from a soaring stock market and the return to profitability of both corporate America and Wall Street. In Gallup's middle-income group, by contrast, 55% of respondents claim the economy is in trouble. They're still waiting for their recovery to arrive.

The Slow Fade of Big Labor

The big-picture economic changes described by Autor and others, however, don't tell the entire story. There's a significant political component to the hollowing out of the American labor force and the impoverishment of the middle class: the slow fade of organized labor. Since the 1950s, the clout of unions in the public and private sectors has waned, their membership has dwindled, and their political influence has weakened considerably. Long gone are the days when powerful union bosses -- the AFL-CIO's George Meany or the UAW's Walter Reuther -- had the ear of just about any president.

As Mother Jones' Kevin Drum has written, in the 1960s and 1970s a rift developed between big labor and the Democratic Party. Unions recoiled in disgust at what they perceived to be the "motley collection of shaggy kids, newly assertive women, and goo-goo academics" who had begun to supplant organized labor in the Party. In 1972, the influential AFL-CIO symbolically distanced itself from the Democrats by refusing to endorse their nominee for president, George McGovern.

All the while, big business was mobilizing, banding together to form massive advocacy groups such as the Business Roundtable and shaping the staid U.S. Chamber of Commerce into a ferocious lobbying machine. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Party drifted rightward and toward an increasingly powerful and financially focused business community, creating the Democratic Leadership Council, an olive branch of sorts to corporate America. "It's not that the working class [had] abandoned Democrats," Drum wrote. "It's just the opposite: The Democratic Party [had] largely abandoned the working class."

The GOP, of course, has a long history of battling organized labor, and nowhere has that been clearer than in the party's recent assault on workers' rights. Swept in by a tide of Republican support in 2010, new GOP majorities in state legislatures from Wisconsin to Tennessee to New Hampshire have introduced bills meant to roll back decades' worth of collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions, the last bastion of organized labor still standing (somewhat) strong.

The political calculus behind the war on public-sector unions is obvious: kneecap them and you knock out a major pillar of support for the Democratic Party. In the 2010 midterm elections, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) spent nearly $90 million on TV ads, phone banking, mailings, and other support for Democratic candidates. The anti-union legislation being pushed by Republicans would inflict serious damage on AFSCME and other public-sector unions by making it harder for them to retain members and weakening their clout at the bargaining table.

And as shown by the latest state to join the anti-union fray, it's not just Republicans chipping away at workers' rights anymore. In Massachusetts, a staunchly liberal state, the Democratic-led State Assembly recently voted to curb collective bargaining rights on heath-care benefits for teachers, firefighters, and a host of other public-sector employees.

Bargaining-table clout is crucial for unions, since it directly affects the wages their members take home every month. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union workers pocket on average $200 more per week than their non-union counterparts, a 28% percent difference. The benefits of union representation are even greater for women and people of color: women in unions make 34% more than their non-unionized counterparts, and Latino workers nearly 51% more.

In other words, at precisely the moment when middle-class workers need strong bargaining rights so they can fight to preserve a living wage in a barbell economy, unions around the country face the grim prospect of losing those rights.

All of which raises the questions: Is there any way to revive the American middle class and reshape income distribution in our barbell nation? Or will this warped recovery of ours pave the way for an even more warped McEconomy, with the have-nots at one end, the have-it-alls at the other end, and increasingly less of us in between?

Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a firmly -- and happily -- middle-class household. His email is andykroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Kroll discusses what grim news lurks under the monthly unemployment figures, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

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From Two Breadwinners to One

Louis Uchitelle

This article appeared in the May 23, 2011 edition of The Nation.



Keith Baudendistel counts himself lucky. The reason is convoluted. He is, after all, unemployed, having lost his factory job in East St. Louis nearly three and a half years ago.That puts him easily among the 6.1 million Americans labeled by the government as long-term unemployed. What makes Baudendistel lucky is that his wife works. And her second income, which once made the couple comfortable, is now in effect their unemployment insurance.

Louis Uchitelle writes on economics for the New York Times and other publications.

Born of the women’s movement and the income stagnation that started in the 1970s—soon making one income inadequate—the two-income family became a means of staying in the middle class or striving for that status. Now, one of those incomes is rapidly disappearing as more and more husbands or wives lose a job and, in a period of minimal job creation, can’t get back into the workforce. Once the unemployment benefits expire for the jobless husband or wife, the working spouse’s income then becomes the couple’s jobless pay, sustaining them, but at a lower—sometimes much lower—standard of living.

“We started out after World War II telling people that one person could support a family, and after a while that one income was not enough,” notes Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, in Washington. “Then we said that if the husband and wife both worked, they would get into the middle class. And now more and more the second person is not working.”

It is painful to note that the Government actually stops counting these longer term unemployed people in its overall employment numbers. They do not deserve to disappear.

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Keith and Rhonda Baudendistel, in their late 40s, fit this pattern. They married as teenagers twenty-nine years ago, raised three daughters (the youngest is 15) and for much of their married life, he worked on the assembly line at Cerro Flow Products, a pipe and tube manufacturer not far from the family home. His pay had risen to $17.50 an hour when the company started furloughing workers. At first there were callbacks; then in 2007 the callbacks stopped. “I look for factory work; that’s all I’ve ever done. But I can’t find any,” Baudendistel says.

The army of the unemployed, in the Great Depression, would undoubtedly have included Baudendistel. He might have ended up on a bread line, one of the expressionless faces in the bleak photographs from that era. The formal designation did not exist in those days, but like many of those forebears, Baudendistel is “long-term unemployed,” which the Labor Department defines as being out of work for at least twenty-seven weeks. The modern-day army of the long-term unemployed rose a bit in March, to 45.5 percent of the nation’s 13.5 million jobless workers. Rarely since the 1930s has the percentage been so high. Still, Baudendistel is better off than his ’30s counterparts. He at least collected a year’s worth of unemployment pay, which was nonexistent until 1935. And perhaps most important, his wife has a job, a common fallback now—and a crucial one, given that men are falling out of work more frequently than women.

Rhonda Baudendistel joined the workforce while her husband’s job seemed secure. She still works for her first employer, a company that repairs and services vending machines in a St. Louis suburb, across the Mississippi River. For a while, his pay and the $9 an hour she earned in the shipping department lifted the family’s income to more than $50,000 a year. When he lost his job, her boss allowed her to go to fifty-five hours a week from forty, with the additional fifteen at time-and-a-half pay. It meant a twelve-hour workday, including the commute, to bring home just $400 a week, after deductions, the largest of which covered the health insurance her husband once got on the job. “After Keith lost his job, I begged my boss for the overtime,” Rhonda says.

They scrape by on her meager pay, but all the extras and some of the basics are gone—the occasional night out, meat for dinner more often than pasta, a used car that is newer than the 1996 Pontiac she drives on her long commute, a warmer house in the winter. “I work the thermostat to use less fuel,” he says.

Yet for all the family’s hardship, Keith resists additional help from the government, beyond the unemployment insurance he has already exhausted, and perhaps disability pay, if he qualified for it because of a bad knee. (He hasn’t applied, preferring to use the knee, as is, in another factory job, if he can get one.) Like millions of Americans, Keith Baudendistel subscribes almost reflexively to the view—promoted by Democratic and Republican administrations and many economists—that the victim is somehow responsible for his unemployment. “The only solution is to get another job,” he says, arguing in effect that the unfilled jobs are out there and the responsibility is his to land one.

Meanwhile, Rhonda’s long working days—she leaves at around 5 am and is gone until early evening—have altered her role in the family, not to mention his. She still views him—and he views himself—as the chief provider, if not today then in the long run, when her income, they hope, will once again become secondary. Until that happens, covering just the necessities leaves roughly $5 a week for him to spend on himself; and lacking pocket money, he rarely leaves the family’s two-bedroom house. (Bunk beds in one bedroom accommodate the two daughters living at home, the youngest a high school freshman, the other attending a nearby college on full scholarship.) Rhonda manages to cook a lot, mainly because she is better at it, her husband says, but Keith does the shopping and the rest of the housework.

“He sweeps the floors, makes the beds, does the dishes, takes out the trash—the kind of stuff that helps me out,” Rhonda says. “I’m gone all day and the children are in school, so basically he’s the mom and I’m the dad. He takes the 15-year-old back and forth to school.”

When Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the City University of New York, noticed this role reversal in data from the 1930s, she thought it was a move toward gender equality. “But because the role reversal was strongly associated with economic deprivation, it was not welcome,” Milkman says. Seventy-five years later, Keith Baudendistel certainly does not welcome it. “I want to be the head of the household again,” he says, “but until that can happen, we have to manage as best we can.”

There were more than 58 million “married-couple families” in the United States in 2007, on the eve of the recession, and in more than 30 million of those families, or 51.7 percent, the husband and wife both worked, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since then, the percentage of two-earner families in which either the husband or wife became unemployed in a given year has doubled, from roughly 1.5 percent in 2007 to 3.1 percent in 2010 for wives and 3.7 percent for husbands, according to analysis of government data by Boushey at the Center for American Progress. In 2010 alone, more than 1 million two-earner married couples were reduced to one earner. That loss helps to explain the rise in mortgage defaults and home foreclosures, and the likelihood that both will continue at an abnormally high rate well into the recovery, as the unemployed in two-earner families re-enter the workforce, in many cases not at their old wages but at jobs that pay less.

An accurate census of two-earner families would almost certainly produce more lost jobs than the published numbers, which cover only those husbands and wives who listed themselves as unemployed. There is another layer of data that count men and women (some married, some not) who are out of work but no longer searching for jobs and therefore no longer qualify as “unemployed.” In many cases, they have given up the hunt and dropped out because of the widespread reluctance of employers to hire until they are more confident that the mild upturn in the economy won’t give way to another recession. Indeed, with so many out-of-work Americans no longer trying to find a job, the labor force participation rate—the percentage of the population either employed or actively seeking work—dropped to 64.2 percent at the end of March, its lowest level in over twenty-five years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Given the stresses—particularly the stress inflicted on couples who had come to accept their two incomes as the norm—couples might be expected to be divorcing more, but the divorce rate isn’t higher. Tension and stress, yes; there is plenty of that and irreversible damage to many marriages, particularly when the husband remains out of work for a long time. But not divorce, with its promise of a plunge into poverty for husband and wife as the two go their separate ways.

The Baudendistels, in fact, say his extended unemployment has brought them closer together, and there is some academic research suggesting this is true for other couples as well. “When a husband can’t get work,” says Kerwin Charles, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, the wife “learns, or believes she learns, something about him—in particular his discipline and his ability to snap back.”

By that standard, Gordon Stevenson in Westford, Massachusetts, like Keith Baudendistel, is adjusting. A pilot, he worked for a management company that supplied crews for privately owned jet aircraft—the sort of luxury jets the chief executives of the Big Three automakers flew in to Washington to plea for a government bailout. The imagery—corporate chieftains stepping out of royal coaches holding tin cups—produced a public backlash, and in response some companies cut back on the use of corporate jets. That was in November 2008. Six months later, the fallout reached Stevenson and he lost his job.

His $100,000 salary disappeared and now, at 62, he finds his unemployment pay—$628 a week; $32,656 a year—is about to run out. Except for a couple of short stints as a pilot, he hasn’t found work in his profession, he says, mainly because too many pilots are unemployed, most of them younger than he is.

Fortunately, Stevenson’s wife, Helen, is employed, and has been for twenty-three years. She earns in the mid–five figures as the director of a music school in a Boston suburb. The Stevensons’ two grown children are successful in their professions and, if necessary, they could subsidize their parents in old age. The parents don’t want that. But their resistance comes at a price. Stevenson calculates that when the layoff came, he and his wife were five years shy of having enough saved to afford retirement. Now the savings have stopped. “That was the most significant impact of my job loss,” Stevenson says.

But not the only one. “We don’t go out to eat very often anymore,” he explains, “and we seldom travel now.” On the one recent trip they did take, to Puerto Rico, their children paid the airfare and the hotel bill, as a sixtieth-birthday present for their mother. “We wouldn’t have been able to pay for that,” their father says.

Now his concern is that his wife, too, could lose her job. “She is aware that she serves at the pleasure of a board of directors,” he says, “and she has seen music school directors who were seemingly serving with great approval from their boards being asked all of a sudden to leave.”

Her schedule is 9-to-5, but student performances, which she attends, are mostly in the evenings and on weekends. Stevenson usually doesn’t accompany her, staying in the background in his new role as “Mr. Mom,” as he puts it. “Gordon will help put lunch together for me,” Helen says, “and he helps me out to the car with all my paraphernalia—my computer and such—and when I get home he has dinner waiting.”

There is in this role reversal a significant upside in her eyes. Her husband is home, which he often wasn’t as a commercial pilot. “I tend to be open about my emotions,” she says, “and I wondered whether we would fight more than when he was employed. I asked him that, and I think we both feel that we fight less, that we are pulling together more. Our big disagreement was that he was gone so much.”

Still, Gordon Stevenson, like Keith Baudendistel, yearns to work again. “The solution is to find work,” he says, rejecting the idea of state or federal supplemental income programs as “too subject to abuse.” Without his pilot’s income, however, the Stevensons say they might sell their three-bedroom house sooner than they had intended, moving to smaller quarters. And then there are the lost conversations with other pilots. “You have a social interaction,” Stevenson says, “and you don’t get that alone at home.”

The isolation pushes him to keep up his search for a job, preferably as a pilot but if not, then at something less prestigious and lower-paying. “I have a cousin,” Stevenson says, “who was a corporate lawyer for years and was working as a lawyer for a Florida real estate firm when it went out of business. He is a well-trained, intellectually capable individual. And he couldn’t find work. So he is working as a clerk in a Home Depot. I might have to do that, too.”



HOW the McECONOMY BOMBED the AMERICAN WORKER - By Andy Kroll

How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker


The Hollowing Out of the Middle Class

By Andy Kroll



Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.



It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald's hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries.



On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald's appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of "McJob" as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement."



Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward, from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month (not including those 62,000 McJobs), beating economists' expectations.



Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery?



The Rise of the McWorker



The evidence points to the latter. According to a recent analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the biggest growth in private-sector job creation in the past year occurred in positions in the low-wage retail, administrative, and food service sectors of the economy. While 23% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession that followed the economic meltdown of 2008 were “low-wage” (those paying $9-$13 an hour), 49% of new jobs added in the sluggish “recovery” are in those same low-wage industries. On the other end of the spectrum, 40% of the jobs lost paid high wages ($19-$31 an hour), while a mere 14% of new jobs pay similarly high wages.



As a point of comparison, that's much worse than in the recession of 2001 after the high-tech bubble burst. Then, higher wage jobs made up almost a third of all new jobs in the first year after the crisis.



The hardest hit industries in terms of employment now are finance, manufacturing, and especially construction, which was decimated when the housing bubble burst in 2007 and has yet to recover. Meanwhile, NELP found that hiring for temporary administrative and waste-management jobs, health-care jobs, and of course those fast-food restaurants has surged.



Indeed in 2010, one in four jobs added by private employers was a temporary job, which usually provides workers with few benefits and even less job security. It's not surprising that employers would first rely on temporary hires as they regained their footing after a colossal financial crisis. But this time around, companies have taken on temp workers in far greater numbers than after previous downturns. Where 26% of hires in 2010 were temporary, the figure was 11% after the early-1990s recession and only 7% after the downturn of 2001.



As many labor economists have begun to point out, we're witnessing an increasing polarization of the U.S. economy over the past three decades. More and more, we're seeing labor growth largely at opposite ends of the skills-and-wages spectrum -- among, that is, the best and the worst kinds of jobs.



At one end of job growth, you have increasing numbers of people flipping burgers, answering telephones, engaged in child care, mopping hallways, and in other low-wage lines of work. At the other end, you have increasing numbers of engineers, doctors, lawyers, and people in high-wage "creative" careers. What's disappearing is the middle, the decent-paying jobs that helped expand the American middle class in the mid-twentieth century and that, if the present lopsided recovery is any indication, are now going the way of typewriters and landline telephones.



Because the shape of the workforce increasingly looks fat on both ends and thin in the middle, economists have begun to speak of "the barbell effect," which for those clinging to a middle-class existence in bad times means a nightmare life. For one thing, the shape of the workforce now hinders America’s once vaunted upward mobility. It’s the downhill slope that’s largely available these days.



The barbell effect has also created staggering levels of income inequality of a sort not known since the decades before the Great Depression. From 1979 to 2007, for the middle class, average household income (after taxes) nudged upward from $44,100 to $55,300; by contrast, for the top 1%, average household income soared from $346,600 in 1979 to nearly $1.3 million in 2007. That is, super-rich families saw their earnings increase 11 times faster than middle-class families.



What's causing this polarization? An obvious culprit is technology. As MIT economist David Autor notes, the tasks of "organizing, storing, retrieving, and manipulating information" that humans once performed are now computerized. And when computers can't handle more basic clerical work, employers ship those jobs overseas where labor is cheaper and benefits nonexistent.



Another factor is education. In today's barbell economy, degrees and diplomas have never mattered more, which means that those with just a high school education increasingly find themselves locked into the low-wage end of the labor market with little hope for better. Worse yet, the pay gap between the well-educated and not-so-educated continues to widen: in 1979, the hourly wage of a typical college graduate was 1.5 times higher than that of a typical high-school graduate; by 2009, it was almost two times higher.



Considering, then, that the percentage of men ages 25 to 34 who have gone to college is actually decreasing, it's not surprising that wage inequality has gotten worse in the U.S. As Autor writes, advanced economies like ours "depend on their best-educated workers to develop and commercialize the innovative ideas that drive economic growth."



The distorting effects of the barbell economy aren't lost on ordinary Americans. In a recent Gallup poll, a majority of people agreed that the country was still in either a depression (29%) or a recession (26%). When sorted out by income, however, those making $75,000 or more a year are, not surprisingly, most likely to believe the economy is in neither a recession nor a depression, but growing. After all, they’re the ones most likely to have benefited from a soaring stock market and the return to profitability of both corporate America and Wall Street. In Gallup's middle-income group, by contrast, 55% of respondents claim the economy is in trouble. They're still waiting for their recovery to arrive.



The Slow Fade of Big Labor



The big-picture economic changes described by Autor and others, however, don't tell the entire story. There's a significant political component to the hollowing out of the American labor force and the impoverishment of the middle class: the slow fade of organized labor. Since the 1950s, the clout of unions in the public and private sectors has waned, their membership has dwindled, and their political influence has weakened considerably. Long gone are the days when powerful union bosses -- the AFL-CIO's George Meany or the UAW's Walter Reuther -- had the ear of just about any president.



As Mother Jones' Kevin Drum has written, in the 1960s and 1970s a rift developed between big labor and the Democratic Party. Unions recoiled in disgust at what they perceived to be the "motley collection of shaggy kids, newly assertive women, and goo-goo academics" who had begun to supplant organized labor in the Party. In 1972, the influential AFL-CIO symbolically distanced itself from the Democrats by refusing to endorse their nominee for president, George McGovern.



All the while, big business was mobilizing, banding together to form massive advocacy groups such as the Business Roundtable and shaping the staid U.S. Chamber of Commerce into a ferocious lobbying machine. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Party drifted rightward and toward an increasingly powerful and financially focused business community, creating the Democratic Leadership Council, an olive branch of sorts to corporate America. "It's not that the working class [had] abandoned Democrats," Drum wrote. "It's just the opposite: The Democratic Party [had] largely abandoned the working class."



The GOP, of course, has a long history of battling organized labor, and nowhere has that been clearer than in the party's recent assault on workers' rights. Swept in by a tide of Republican support in 2010, new GOP majorities in state legislatures from Wisconsin to Tennessee to New Hampshire have introduced bills meant to roll back decades' worth of collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions, the last bastion of organized labor still standing (somewhat) strong.



The political calculus behind the war on public-sector unions is obvious: kneecap them and you knock out a major pillar of support for the Democratic Party. In the 2010 midterm elections, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) spent nearly $90 million on TV ads, phone banking, mailings, and other support for Democratic candidates. The anti-union legislation being pushed by Republicans would inflict serious damage on AFSCME and other public-sector unions by making it harder for them to retain members and weakening their clout at the bargaining table.



And as shown by the latest state to join the anti-union fray, it's not just Republicans chipping away at workers' rights anymore. In Massachusetts, a staunchly liberal state, the Democratic-led State Assembly recently voted to curb collective bargaining rights on heath-care benefits for teachers, firefighters, and a host of other public-sector employees.



Bargaining-table clout is crucial for unions, since it directly affects the wages their members take home every month. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union workers pocket on average $200 more per week than their non-union counterparts, a 28% percent difference. The benefits of union representation are even greater for women and people of color: women in unions make 34% more than their non-unionized counterparts, and Latino workers nearly 51% more.



In other words, at precisely the moment when middle-class workers need strong bargaining rights so they can fight to preserve a living wage in a barbell economy, unions around the country face the grim prospect of losing those rights.



All of which raises the questions: Is there any way to revive the American middle class and reshape income distribution in our barbell nation? Or will this warped recovery of ours pave the way for an even more warped McEconomy, with the have-nots at one end, the have-it-alls at the other end, and increasingly less of us in between?



Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a firmly -- and happily -- middle-class household. His email is andykroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Kroll discusses what grim news lurks under the monthly unemployment figures, click here, or download it to your iPod here.



OBAMA'S HISPANICAZATION of AMERICA - PUSH 2 FOR ENGLISH

OBAMA’S AMERICA: Open & Undefended Borders!


“What we're seeing is our Congress and national leadership dismantling our laws by not enforcing them. Lawlessness becomes the norm, just like Third World corruption. Illegal aliens now have more rights and privileges than Americans. If you are an illegal alien, you can drive a car without a driver's license or insurance. You may obtain medical care without paying. You may work without paying taxes. Your children enjoy free education at the expense of taxpaying Americans.”


THE LA RAZA PRESIDENT’S SABOTAGE OF OUR COUNTRY’S BORDERS FOR ILLEGALS’ VOTES!

“PUNISH OUR ENEMIES”… does that mean assault the legals of Arizona that must fend off the Mexican invasion, occupation, growing criminal and welfare state, as well as Mex Drug cartels???

OBAMA TELLS ILLEGALS “PUNISH OUR ENEMIES”

Friends of ALIPAC,

Each day new reports come in from across the nation that our movement is surging and more incumbents, mostly Democrats, are about to fall on Election Day. Obama's approval ratings are falling to new lows as he makes highly inappropriate statements to Spanish language audiences asking illegal alien supporters to help him "punish our enemies."

“While the declining job market in the United States may be discouraging some would-be border crossers, a flow of illegal aliens continues unabated, with many entering the United States as drug-smuggling “mules.”

As the liberal news media, far-left Democrats, and labor unions push for the “Hispanicazation” of U.S. culture, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the U.S. border has never been more secure.

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HISPANDERING LA RAZA ENDORSED HILLARY BLAMES AMERICAN AGAIN FOR MEX INVASION SHE AND BILLARY HELPED CREATE!

In Mexico City, she announced that the U.S. appetite for illegal drugs and the easy acquisition of guns from the United States by Mexicans are the root causes of the Mexican crime wave. “Blame America” has become the global agenda of the Democratic Party.

Newsmax

Obama's 'Hispanicazation' of America

Monday, January 10, 2011 08:28 AM

By: James Walsh

Casting a shadow on economic recovery efforts in the United States is the cost of illegal immigration that consumes U.S. taxpayer dollars for education, healthcare, social welfare benefits, and criminal justice. Illegal aliens (or more politically correct, “undocumented immigrants”) with ties to Mexican drug cartels are contributing to death and destruction on U.S. lands along the southern border.

While the declining job market in the United States may be discouraging some would-be border crossers, a flow of illegal aliens continues unabated, with many entering the United States as drug-smuggling “mules.”

Increasingly vicious foot soldiers of the Mexican drug cartels are taking control of U.S. lands along the border, especially since U.S. Border Patrol units have been reassigned, some to offices 60 to 80 miles inland.

The U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) early last year posted signs warning citizens to avoid Interstate 8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, Ariz., because of criminal activity in the area, an area that includes protected natural areas precious to the nation.
In reaction to public outrage over the signs, the BLM removed the offensive wording in October 2010, replacing it with the following: Visitor Information Update—Active Federal Law Enforcement Patrol Area.


As the liberal news media, far-left Democrats, and labor unions push for the “Hispanicazation” of U.S. culture, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the U.S. border has never been more secure.

Perhaps she is basing this on the reduced number of apprehensions, which result, of course, from reassigning Border Patrol agents inland.

In a recent New York Times article, Nicholas Kristof criticized U.S. citizens for not speaking a foreign language and suggested that “Every child in the United States should learn Spanish.” He concluded that as the United States increasingly integrates economically with Latin America, Spanish will be crucial for the United States.

For decades, the liberal left has argued that Latin America is essential for U.S. business and trade. Kristof states that Latin America “is finally getting its act together” but fails to mention the Obama administration’s $2 billion loan of U.S. taxpayer money in 2009 to Brazil’s Petrobras oil company for deep off-shore oil drilling. Obama confidant George Soros, through the Soros Fund Management LLC, until recently owned millions of dollars of Petrobras stock.

Kristof suggests that one day Spanish-speaking Americans will be part of daily life in the United States and that workmen such as mechanics will be able to communicate easily with Spanish-speaking customers.

He fails to explain why these customers will not be speaking English. After all, the ability to speak, read, and write English remains a requirement for U.S. citizenship.

President Barack Obama gives lip service to increasing border control resources with limited funding and personnel. Many officials, including the governors of Texas and Arizona, are skeptical regarding the Obama administration’s resolve. They resent that the United States is being blamed for the killing fields on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. Border.

For instance, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March 2009, during her first official visit to Mexico, placed the blame for the Mexican drug cartels’ vicious murders on the United States.

In Mexico City, she announced that the U.S. appetite for illegal drugs and the easy acquisition of guns from the United States by Mexicans are the root causes of the Mexican crime wave. “Blame America” has become the global agenda of the Democratic Party.

The Obama administration’s plan to resolve the immigration chaos is to offer amnesty to all comers. President Obama re-affirms his support of a “pathway to citizenship” (amnesty) for illegal aliens in 2011.

The administration, however, has announced no plans to control the influx of future waves of illegal aliens or their skyrocketing costs to the nation. The administration, which condones U.S. sanctuary cities and states, has no plans to file charges against them for violations of federal immigration law. Nor does the administration seem concerned about the environmental impact that illegal aliens have on the ecology of the United States.

Many national forests, parks, monuments, wilderness areas, and wildlife refuges — once the pride of the nation — are serving today as marijuana fields for illegal alien gangs.

Former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reportedly said to a gathering of illegal aliens in California in 2009 that U.S. immigration laws were “un-American,” suggesting that they need not be obeyed. Concerned citizens can only trust that the new speaker of the House, John Boehner, as part of congressional oversight of federal agencies, will demand enforcement of existing immigration laws.
When will President Obama recognize that illegal immigration is slowing economic recovery? Can he resolve the chaos while still appeasing his Hispanic base?

To maintain his populist aura, the president is in the habit of saying one thing to one audience and the opposite to another.

One Obama apologist explained, “Campaign rhetoric is one thing,” suggesting that governing is another. The deliberate Hispanicazation of the United States to secure a block of votes is quite another.
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Immigration Invasion - View From A Border Patrol Officer

What we're seeing is our Congress and national leadership dismantling our laws by not enforcing them. Lawlessness becomes the norm, just like Third World corruption. Illegal aliens now have more rights and privileges than Americans. If you are an illegal alien, you can drive a car without a driver's license or insurance. You may obtain medical care without paying. You may work without paying taxes. Your children enjoy free education at the expense of taxpaying Americans.

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Article by Frosty Wooldridge

May 25, 2004

Published on The Washington Dispatch.

After 30 years in the Border Patrol as a special agent and highly decorated veteran, John W. Slagle wrote an expose' ripping the pants off Tom Ridge's Homeland Security charade. Slagle exposes Congress' complete assistance of illegal immigration. Finally, he uncovers President Bush's unending support for this massive invasion that will, in the end, prove more catastrophic to this nation than dozens of 9/11's.

Interviewing John W. Slagle at his home in the Arizona desert brings to mind what an interview with Harry S. Truman might have been like. The buck stops here! Slagle, a certified second degree black belt instructor in Japanese sword fighting, is not the kind of man that plays a casual game of chess. He's a warrior. He's defended America in the Navy and as a border patrol officer for most of his life.

After watching the accelerating illegal alien invasion for three decades, he wrote, Illegal Entries as an expose' of America's failed immigration policy. You won't be disappointed as it reads like a James Bond novel. But I this case, Slagle illustrates how the United States loses its national sovereignty via the past five presidents and Congress. What defines this invasion? Power and money at the highest levels! It involves corporations and politicians representing illegal aliens more than American citizens. It exposes reasons for the downright violation of the rule of law by our own lawmakers.

America's downfall, Slagle writes, began with the surreptitious passing by Teddy Kennedy and LBJ's 1965 Immigration Reform Act. This little known document was not voted on or asked for by American citizens. It opened the floodgates to one million immigrants annually. Previously, only 178,000 annually were allowed. At first, they arrived without fanfare. But today, 60 million immigrants later and rising like a dangerous tidal wave; they crash upon our shores without pause. Where we were once a stable population, we are now the fastest growing country behind China and India.

Once the corporations realized huge profits from cheap labor immigrants, they busted unions and lowered wages. A few elites profited while the rest of us paid the bills. Soon, illegals trickled into America. Now, they 'pour' in at one million annually. The total of 2.3 million people yearly has become an endless human monsoon. "Due to the fact that illegals work for far less money that US citizens, greedy employers hired illegals for maximum profits," Slagle said. "Taxes did not have to be paid, nor employee benefits."

Legal immigrant costs alone to American taxpayers exceed $68 billion annually. But American citizens started paying benefits for illegals such as aid to dependent children, billions for schooling, medical services, free lunch programs, assisted housing and higher insurance rates. Along the way, illegals drove cars without insurance or licenses. With them came crime, diseases and prisons. Legal and illegal immigrants fill an astounding 29% of state and federal prisons at a taxpayer cost of $1 billion annually.

"Illegal immigration and the ruthless nature of alien smugglers who transport human cargo by vehicles is a serious concern," Slagle said. "Smugglers will pack a pick-up three deep. Aliens, stacked like cordwood, are covered with tarps as smugglers proceed to staging areas." Where do they obtain the vehicles? In 2003, Phoenix became the car-jacking capital of the world with 57,600 stolen SUV's and pick-ups. And who among you thinks a head of lettuce or handpicked strawberry was cheap?

What does a 'coyote' make? "A smuggler easily makes $5,000.00 a week tax free," Slagle said.

At first in the 70s, the flow included 8,000 arrests of illegals per month in one sector of Arizona with an estimated 16,000 'got aways', but they were all cheap labors and prospective voters. How safe are Americans from this invasion? "The sale of false documents are available worldwide," Slagle said. "A criminal can look like an ordinary citizen in the blink of an eye."

In contrast, in 2004, Border Patrol apprehensions reached 96,521 in January which was up from 86,925 in January, 2003. More sobering is the fact that agents catch only one in five aliens.

"For a price, anyone can be smuggled into the USA by human traffickers whether cheap labor, wanted criminals or terrorist cells," Slagle said.

In 1979, Daryl Gates, in Los Angeles, created the perfect cover for illegal aliens with his 'Special Order 40'. It gave illegal aliens immunity from police arrest. Unfortunately, that 'sanctuary order' also provided cover for the 20,000 member 18th Street Gang in LA as well as the MS-13 Salvadoran gangs that now operate in 28 American cities. Worse, Governor Baldacci of Maine signed the first statewide sanctuary law into being this year.

What we're seeing is our Congress and national leadership dismantling our laws by not enforcing them. Lawlessness becomes the norm, just like Third World corruption. Illegal aliens now have more rights and privileges than Americans. If you are an illegal alien, you can drive a car without a driver's license or insurance. You may obtain medical care without paying. You may work without paying taxes. Your children enjoy free education at the expense of taxpaying Americans.

As Slagle chronicles in his book, Illegal Entries, the United States suffers a hemorrhaging of its sovereignty, rule of law, single language and cohesiveness as the onslaught of this immigration juggernaut sweeps like a deadly plague across this country.

Next: Part II-Incredible Money and Drugs Being Imported and Exported



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ARE WE ONLY A COLONY FOR MEXICO TO LOOT? DO YOU DENY WE ARE MEXICO’S WELFARE, “FREE” BIRTHING CENTERS, JOBS AND JAILS PROGRAM?

Immigrating America Into a Colony of Mexico

Article by Frosty Wooldridge

2004

Published on The Washington Dispatch.

America faces a greater and more dangerous threat from within than from without. While our armed forces secure Afghanistan and Iraq, our own borders stand unguarded 24 hours a day. Al-Qaeda insurgents plan their next attacks somewhere inside our country. They advocate a violent overthrow of America.

We’ve got an even more ominous enemy within our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan” or the reconquest of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas into the country of Mexico. With 9.2 million Mexicans now living in America, their goal of colonizing our country back into Mexico moves forward. A more sobering reality stems from the evidence that it’s Mexican-American citizens in the forefront of this disintegration of our country.

What is the evidence? Because of massive immigration from south of the border, more Mexican flags brazenly fly in Los Angeles and surrounding cities than Old Glory. More Spanish speaking radio stations broadcast than English speaking. More people speak foreign languages than English in the City of Angels. More school kids can’t speak our national language in California. It’s so bad in the Golden Bear State, last year 800,000 Americans fled abrasive conditions growing like a cancer in southern California. Worse, the “18th Street Gang” in Los Angeles features 20,000 members with 60 percent of them being illegal aliens. They coordinate drug traffic, robberies and extortion. Finally, the corruption is so great, ‘Special Order 40,’ augmented by the Los Angeles Police Department, makes it impossible to arrest, detain or deport illegal aliens. Little wonder more than three million operate in California.

But as their numbers grow and their allegiance remains with Mexico, this country is at risk of an internal coup. But the worst danger comes from our own citizens of Mexican heritage. They want our southwestern United States back. Will they take it by violence? Use an army? No! They are colonizing us by sheer numbers. They are the fastest growing ethnic group in America, but they have no allegiance to our country.

They are organized, too. The following are two speeches from a dozen others: 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: "Augustin Cebada, Brown Berets, we're here today to show LA, show the minority people here, the Anglo-Saxons, that we are here, the majority. We do the work in this city, we take care of the spoiled brat children, we clean their offices, we pick the food, we do the manufacturing in the factories of LA, we are the majority here. We're here in Westwood, this is the fourth time we've been here in the last two months, to show white Anglo-Saxon Protestant LA, the few of you who remain, that we are the majority, and we claim this land as ours, it's always been ours, and we're still here, and none of the talk about deporting. If anyone's going to be deported it's going to be you! Go back to Simi Valley, you skunks! Go back to Boston! To back to the Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You're old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you, leave like beaten rats. You old white people, it is your duty to die. Right now we're already controlling those elections by violence or nonviolence. Through love of having children we're going to take over." Other demonstrators: "Raza fuerza (brown race power), this is Aztlan, this is Mexico. They're the pilgrims on our land. Go back to the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria."

If you don’t think he’s serious about taking over our border states, try this guy on for size: Jose Angel Gutierrez, Professor, University of Texas at Arlington, founder La Raza Party at UC Riverside: "The border remains a military zone. We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we're a new Mestizo nation. And they want us to discuss civil rights. Civil rights. What law made by white men to oppress all of us of color, female and male. This is our homeland. We are not immigrants that came from another country to another country. We are migrants, free to travel the length and breadth of the Americas because we belong here. We are millions. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It's a matter of time. The explosion is in our population."

For a sleepy American public and a politically correct Congress, the colonization of America by a foreign country proceeds quietly, pervasively, methodically and perversely. Forty-six Mexican consulates operate and dictate in major cities across our country. Mexico’s President Fox visits and makes demands. They’re pouring over our borders like water over a broken dam.

Our resources are being drained at $56 billion annually. Immigrants send $15 billion back to Mexico. They send $25 billion back to South America and $16 billion back to Asia. Our annual trade deficit exceeds $400 billion. Over $100 billion in cash flows out of our borders for drugs. We pay billions for illegals in our medical systems, schools and ESL classes. According to Professor Borgas of Harvard, American workers lose $133 billion in wages to illegal aliens taking over American jobs.

“Immigrant advocacy groups no longer promote legal immigration, citizenship, learning English or any other assimilation into this country. Hispanic-rights groups talk of reoccupation and repatriation of the southwestern United States,” wrote Linda Bentley in “Paving the Way to Aztlan: With Propaganda, Politics, Racism.”

Do you want America to be split up? Do you want Texas to become a state of Mexico? Do you want America to become as corrupt as Mexico? Do you want the filth, squalor and diseases of Mexico to become a part of America’s reality? Do you want to give up California to Aztlan? Do you want America to become a part of the Third World?

Keep doing nothing about this immigration invasion and you’ll get your wish.

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WAS FROSTY WOOLDRIDGE’S PREDICTION ACCURATE?

"An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide." SURRENDERING OUR NATION TO THE MEXICAN INVASION

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Even with the facade of Tom Ridge's Homeland Security, 800,000 illegal aliens continue walking, crawling or tunneling across the Mexican border annually. Their accelerating numbers undermine America's ability to function.

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Another speaker told a packed audience how 'offshoring' and 'outsourcing', fully supported by the president and congress have cost over three million American jobs in the past six years.

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How to Destroy America

Article by Frosty Wooldridge

(DO YOU THINK THE MEXICAN INVASION, OCCUPATION AND EVER EXPANDING WELFARE “SANCTUARY” STATE IS GREATER THAN 2003?

October 31, 2003

Published in MichNews.com.

In Washington, DC, several weeks ago, an immigration-overpopulation conference was filled to capacity by many of America’s finest minds and leaders. Writers, speakers, CEO's, representatives from Congress such as Tom Tancredo as well as former governors graced the podium. Bonnie Eggle, mother of the national parks ranger Kris Eggle, slain by Mexican drug runners last year on our unguarded southern border--gave a compelling speech that left not one dry eye in the place. Peter Gadiel, father of Jamie Gadiel, spoke powerfully on how the World Trade Center took his son and how nothing has been done since--to stop the flow of illegal immigration into the United States. Even with the facade of Tom Ridge's Homeland Security, 800,000 illegal aliens continue walking, crawling or tunneling across the Mexican border annually. Their accelerating numbers undermine America's ability to function.

During the conference, speaker after speaker astounded the audience with facts on how fast the present administration and congress continue dismantling the American Dream for average citizens. Mr. Rob Sanchez of Arizona, showed how H-1b and L-1 visas have ripped one million high tech jobs out of American worker's hands. Another speaker told a packed audience how 'offshoring' and 'outsourcing', fully supported by the president and congress have cost over three million American jobs in the past six years. His prediction was even more depressing: "In excess of three million more jobs will be 'outsourced' within four years. Those American jobs are headed to Mexico, India, China, Pakistan and Brazil."







The Obama administration has also cut worksite enforcement efforts by 70%, allowing illegal immigrants to continue working in jobs that rightfully belong to citizens and legal workers.



THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!

 "We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers," said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. "President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws."



FROM JUDICIAL WATCH

get on their free E-NEWS list! DON'T WAIT FOR OUR GOVERNMENT TO DEFEND OUR BORDERS. OUR GOVERNMENT IS THE ENEMY. THEY WANT OPEN BORDERS BY COMMAND OF WALL ST TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED!

Illegal Immigration


Today, between eight and fourteen million illegal aliens reside in the United States, draining our nation’s economy, while presenting a security threat to the people of the United States. Public officials have not only repeatedly failed to protect our borders from this illegal alien invasion, but they have also been complicit in the effort to undermine our nation’s immigration laws.

Judicial Watch has an active investigation into the Obama administration’s policies and actions on immigration. For instance, Judicial Watch had uncovered documents indicating collusion between the Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union with respect to legal challenges of Arizona’s SB 1070. Recently, Judicial Watch obtained documents revealing that administration officials misled Congress regarding the scope of deportation dismissals in Houston, Texas. Additional documents were obtained that detail a behind-the-scenes effort by the administration to suspend deportation proceedings against “DREAM” Act aliens and other illegal immigrants. Judicial Watch also routinely obtains smuggling statistics and has revealed details of a shocking sex slave trafficking operation in Houston, Texas.

From our Newsletter













·  U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Law Punishing Businesses that Hire Illegal Aliens! - July 2011 (OBAMA NOMINATED SONIA SOTOMAYER TO THE HIGH COURT BECAUSE SHE PANDERS TO THE INTERESTS OF BIG BUSINESS, AS DOES OBAMA, AND SHE'S A MEMBER OF THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA. SHE REFERS TO HERSELF AS A "WISE LATINA". HER REPUTAION ON THE LOWER COURT WAS THAT SHE WAS A TOTAL BITCH. SOTOMAYER REFERS TO ILLEALS AT "UNDOCUMENTED ALIANS".

·  SOTMAYER VOTED AGAINST E-VERIFY! VIVA LA RAZA?





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·  Judicial Watch Members Speak Out - September 2010






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Special Reports, Information and Statistics



·  “Local Government and Illegal Immigration”: Judicial Watch Educational Panel (February 28, 2007) - Watch(mp4)

·  “Directo a Mexico:” U.S. Government Subsidizes Money Transfer Program to Mexico

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·  A Line in the Sand:Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border - Report by the House Committee on Homeland Security about illegal aliens







·  Totalization Agreement with Mexico – U.S.-Mexican agreement, signed June 29, 2004, obtained from the Social Security Administration (SSA) under the Freedom of Information Act. The cover letter from the SSA states that the agreement has not been “finalized.”