Saturday, July 23, 2011

Rasmussen Consumer Index

Rasmussen Consumer Index

REALITY ON OBAMAnomics... THE RICH GET RICHER, PILLAGE MORE, JOBS GO TO ILLEGALS, and the American Middle Class is fucked up the ass to pay for it all!



http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/07/obamanomics-wall-st-profits-soar-so.html


WALL ST PROFIT SOAR! SO DOES FORECLOSURES, UNEMPLOYMENT, POVERTY FOR AMERICANS… AND ILLEGALS OVER OUR BORDERS!

ONE WAY OBAMA SERVICES HIS CORPORATE PAYMASTERS IS TO ASSURE THEM THAT HE WILL SABOTAGE E-VERIFY, HOLD OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR HORDES OF ILLEGALS HEADED FOR OUR JOBS, AND CONTINUE NON-ENFORCEMENT OF LAW PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS. IN FACT, OBAMA’S SEC. of LABOR IS A LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILDA SOLIS WORKING FOR ILLEGALS, MEXICANS THAT IS.
THERE IS A REASON WHY OBAMA, THE LA RAZA DEMS, MEXICO AND THE U. S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE WANT OPEN BORDERS…it’s all about keeping wages DEPRESSED!
*
As dozens of major corporations announced increased second-quarter profits this week, the US working class was hit with a disastrous new round of mass layoffs.

*
Profits soar amid mass layoffs
By Andre Damon
23 July 2011
As dozens of major corporations announced increased second-quarter profits this week, the US working class was hit with a disastrous new round of mass layoffs.

Profits soar amid mass layoffs

Profits soar amid mass layoffs

OBAMAnomics: WALL ST. PROFITS SOAR! SO DOES FORECLOSURES, UNEMPLOYMENT & the NUMBER OF ILLEGALS GETTING JOBS!

WALL ST PROFIT SOAR! SO DOES FORECLOSURES, UNEMPLOYMENT, POVERTY FOR AMERICANS… AND ILLEGALS OVER OUR BORDERS!

ONE WAY OBAMA SERVICES HIS CORPORATE PAYMASTERS IS TO ASSURE THEM THAT HE WILL SABOTAGE E-VERIFY, HOLD OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR HORDES OF ILLEGALS HEADED FOR OUR JOBS, AND CONTINUE NON-ENFORCEMENT OF LAW PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS. IN FACT, OBAMA’S SEC. of LABOR IS A LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILDA SOLIS WORKING FOR ILLEGALS, MEXICANS THAT IS.
THERE IS A REASON WHY OBAMA, THE LA RAZA DEMS, MEXICO AND THE U. S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE WANT OPEN BORDERS…it’s all about keeping wages DEPRESSED!
*
As dozens of major corporations announced increased second-quarter profits this week, the US working class was hit with a disastrous new round of mass layoffs.

*
Profits soar amid mass layoffs
By Andre Damon
23 July 2011
As dozens of major corporations announced increased second-quarter profits this week, the US working class was hit with a disastrous new round of mass layoffs.
On Monday, book seller Borders announced that it would liquidate all of its stores, laying off 10,700 workers. That same day, Cisco, the telecom equipment maker, said it would cut its workforce by 11,500. Within 24 hours, Lockheed Martin, the aerospace company, announced that it would eliminate 6,500 jobs.
At the same time, Caterpillar, the maker of construction equipment, said its profits were up 44 percent in the second quarter compared to last year. Office equipment maker Xerox saw its profits grow 41 percent in the same time.
General Electric’s profits were up 17 percent, PepsiCo’s were up by 18 percent, and McDonald’s, the fast food company, saw a 19 percent increase, reaching a new record.
The energy and mining companies did even better, benefiting from rising gas prices, which reduced the real incomes of American workers by billions of dollars. Halliburton, the oil contractor, said its profits were up by 53 percent in the second quarter compared to a year earlier, while fellow oil contractor Schlumberger said its profits were up by 64 percent.
Most of the major banks likewise said their profits were up significantly in the second quarter. Goldman Sachs announced $1.09 billion in profits, up 57 percent from last year. But even this huge increase was considered a “disappointment” for traders.
JPMorgan said its second-quarter profit was up by 13 percent, despite setting aside a $1.3 billion charge-off for lawsuits it expects in relation to its trafficking of fraudulent mortgages. Citigroup reported a profit of $3.34 billion, up 24 percent from a year ago.
This renewed growth in profits comes at the same time as the sharpest growth in unemployment since 2009. Between March and June, the unemployment rate grew by 0.4 percentage points, to 9.2 percent. In the same period, the number of unemployed people grew by 545,000.
Apple, the world’s largest music retailer and a leading manufacturer of mobile electronics, announced a 95 percent increase in profitability. In its earnings statement, the company said that it was sitting on a cash hoard of $76 billion. This staggering sum, amassed by a single company controlled by a few large shareholders, could put two million people to work full-time for a year.
US corporations have combined cash reserves of $2 trillion. That is enough money to put all the unemployed people in the United States to work for four years, even without any profit generated from their labor.
But fresh off of what is for many a record-breaking second quarter, the companies are refusing to use their newly accumulated cash to hire. In fact, planned mass layoffs have only accelerated.
Even after the disastrous second quarter, the jobs situation is getting worse. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc, the executive placement company, said earlier this week that the number of planned job cuts grew by 11.6 percent, reaching 41,432 last month. This was the second consecutive monthly increase in planned mass layoffs.
New claims for unemployment benefits have likewise moved upwards. After dipping in April to 385,000, the lowest level since 2007, they have steadily grown, reaching 418,000 last week.
The disastrous employment conditions in the private sector are only exacerbated by the aggressive budget cutting carried out by state and local governments, under the whip of cuts to federal assistance.
State and local governments have cut 165,000 jobs so far this year, on top of the quarter million workers they laid off in 2010. But this is only the beginning: analysts expect hundreds of thousands more layoffs this year as cuts in federal aid intensify.
These planned layoffs will only be compounded by the massive federal spending cuts currently being discussed between the Congress and the White House, which would eliminate between $3 and $4 trillion from federal spending. This would mean hundreds of thousands of federal job cuts.
The fact that American corporations were able to accumulate record profits while hundreds of thousands were thrown into the ranks of unemployment is not a coincidence. These profits were generated through the impoverishment of workers, who, desperate for any work available, have increasingly accepted lower wages and worse conditions.
Despite the abysmal employment conditions, mass joblessness has disappeared as a political issue in the United States, with the entire political establishment pushing for cuts to government spending. This absurd and irrational setup is a product of the monopolization of political life in the United States by the super-rich, who are carrying out a full-scale assault on the social conditions of the working class.
In contrast to the ruling class’s anti-social and destructive policy, the working class must present its own political program. The trillions of dollars sitting on the balance sheets of the corporations must be expropriated and used to provide jobs and desperately-needed social services.
This program requires a new mass political movement, completely independent of the Democrats and Republicans, to break the political stranglehold of the corporations, and reorganize society on the basis of social need, not private profit.
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/07/jobs-crisis-really-good-time-to.html
OBAMA’S AMERICA: Open & Undefended Borders!
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/07/jobs-crisis-really-good-time-to.html
*
OBAMA HAS FILLED HIS ADMINSTRATION WITH PRIMARILY LA RAZA PARTY MEMBERS.
Here’s his Sec. Labor, HILDA SOLIS:
While in Congress, she opposed strengthening the border fence, supported expansion of illegal alien benefits (including driver's licenses and in-state tuition discounts), embraced sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate with federal homeland security officials to enforce immigration laws, and aggressively championed a mass amnesty. Solis was steeped in the pro-illegal alien worker organizing movement in Southern California and was buoyed by amnesty-supporting Big Labor groups led by the Service Employees International Union. She has now caused a Capitol Hill firestorm over her new taxpayer-funded advertising and outreach campaign to illegal aliens regarding fair wages:

*

Michelle Malkin
The U.S. Department of Illegal Alien Labor

President Obama's Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is supposed to represent American workers. What you need to know is that this longtime open-borders sympathizer has always had a rather radical definition of "American." At a Latino voter registration project conference in Los Angeles many years ago, Solis asserted to thunderous applause, "We are all Americans, whether you are legalized or not."
That's right. The woman in charge of enforcing our employment laws doesn't give a hoot about our immigration laws -- or about the fundamental distinction between those who followed the rules in pursuit of the American dream and those who didn't.

* Obama Administration Challenges Arizona E-Verify Law
The Obama administration has asked the Supreme Court to strike down a 2007 Arizona law that punishes employers who hire illegal aliens, a law enacted by then-Governor Janet Napolitano. (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief). Called the “Legal Arizona Workers Act,” the law requires all employers in Arizona to use E-Verify and provides that the business licenses of those who hire illegal workers shall be repealed. From the date of enactment, the Chamber of Commerce and other special interest groups have been trying to undo it, attacking it through a failed ballot initiative and also through a lawsuit. Now the Chamber is asking the United States Supreme Court to hear the case (Chamber of Commerce v. Candelaria), and the Obama Administration is weighing in against the law.
To date, Arizona’s E-Verify law has been upheld by all lower courts, including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit, in particular, viewed it as an exercise of a state’s traditional power to regulate businesses. (San Francisco Chronicle, June 2, 2010). Obama’s Justice Department, however, disagrees. Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said in his filing with the Supreme Court that the lower courts were wrong to uphold the statute because federal immigration law expressly preempts any state law imposing sanctions on employers hiring illegal immigrants. Mr. Katyal argues that this is not a licensing law, but “a statute that prohibits the hiring of unauthorized aliens and uses suspension and revocation of all state-issued licenses as its ultimate sanction.” (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief, p. 10). This is the administration’s first court challenge to a state’s authority to act against illegal immigration, and could be a preview of the battle brewing over Arizona’s recent illegal immigration crackdown through SB 1070.
Napolitano has made no comment on the Department of Justice’s decision to challenge the 2007 law, but federal officials said that she has taken an active part in the debate over whether to do so. (Politico, May 28, 2010). As Governor of Arizona, Napolitano said she believed the state law was valid and became a defendant in the many lawsuits against it. (Id.).
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/sonia-sotomayer-la-raza-party-member-on.html
*
Sonia Sotomayor opposes E-Verify requirement
True to form, she said it was illegal to make employers e-verify citizen status of new hires.

Interesting, she says a state cannot force employers to check if employees they are hiring are illegal. Thankfully the court ruled 5-3 supporting law. But now we know for sure just how extreme far left Obama's choice was. We cannot afford Obama to get another term, or you can bet this country will be overrun by illegals. I don't want this country to be poor and corrupt like Mexico, which it will if illegals overrun the country.
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/06/obamanomics-how-barack-obama-is.html

Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His
Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses

BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY


Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
Congressman Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market conservative needs to read Obamanomics.” And Johan Goldberg, columnist and bestselling author says, “Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best and an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”
If you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.
*

Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers.
Investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:
* The Great Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell corporate profits and more government control
* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics

OBAMA'S ASSAULT on BLACK AMERICA - CALL IT PUTTING LA RAZA ILLEGALS IN OUR JOBS!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/07/obama-works-so-hard-for-illegals.html


BARACK OBAMA’S AGENDA IN THE WHITE HOUSE IS KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED TO BENEFIT HIS CORPORATE DONORS. HE HAS PUSHED FOR OPEN BORDERS, HABITUALLY SABOTAGED E-VERIFY THAT MIGHT PREVENT ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS FROM GETTING OUR JOBS, PROMISED LA RAZA CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT, AND DONE NOTHING ABOUT THE MEXICAN INVASION, OCCUPATION, AND EVER EXPANDING WELFARE STATE.

WHO HAS BEEN MORE HARMED BY THE MEXICAN INVASION THAN BLACK AMERICA????

Blacks' economic gains wiped out in downturn
A generation that played by the rules and saw progress falls out of the middle class
By JESSE WASHINGTON


7/10/2011 12:13:44 PM ET
BALTIMORE — Growing up black in the segregated 1960s, Deborah Goldring slept two to a bed, got evicted from apartment after apartment, and watched her stepfather climb utility poles to turn their disconnected lights back on. Yet Goldring pulled herself out of poverty and earned a middle-class life — until the Great Recession.
First, Goldring's husband fell ill, and they drained savings to pay for nursing homes before he died. Then Goldring lost her executive assistant job in the Baltimore hospital where she had worked for 17 years. The cruelest blow was a letter from the bank, intending to foreclose on her home of almost three decades.
Millions of Americans endured similar financial calamities in the recession. But for Goldring and many others in the black community, where unemployment is still rising, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. Some even see a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.
Goldring remembers her mother taping the blinds to the wall so no one could see them stealing electricity. She remembers each time she sat on the curb with her three brothers, surrounded by her family's belongings, waiting for a new place to live. Sitting on those curbs, she promised to always pay her bills on time.
Now, after finding herself poor again, "the only word I can say is devastated," says Goldring, 58.
"For me to live that life we were so comfortable in, we never had to worry about finances, we always had money where I can help my kids and my grandchildren — to go to calling my daughter to borrow $100 because I can't pay a bill ..." Goldring's voice trails off as she struggles to hold back tears.
Economists say the Great Recession lasted from 2007 to 2009. In 2004, the median net worth of white households was $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median black net worth had fallen 83 percent to $2,170, according to the EPI.
Algernon Austin, director of the EPI's Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, described the current wealth gap this way: "In 2009, for every dollar of wealth the average white household had, black households only had two cents."
Since the end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate has fallen from 9.4 to 9.1 percent, while the black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 to 16.2 percent, according to the Department of Labor.
"I would say the recession is not over for black folks," Austin says. He believes more black people than ever before could fall out of the middle class, because the unemployment rate for college-educated blacks recently peaked and blacks are overrepresented in state and local government jobs that are being eliminated due to massive budget shortfalls.
Advertise | AdChoices
Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion, says the anti-discrimination laws passed in the 1960s took decades to translate into an increase in black economic security — and that was before the recession.
"History is going to say that the black middle class was decimated" over the past few years, Wiley says. "But we're not done writing history."
Cleaning hotel rooms
Goldring was born and raised in Baltimore, and her mother was single for much of Goldring's childhood. At 16, she dropped out of school and went to work cleaning hotel rooms.
"That's when I first met white people. Some of them would stay a month at the hotel. They would have all their children with them," she remembers. "I thought, one day I'd like to hang out at a hotel."
She didn't know any middle-class people in her all-black neighborhood. "Where we lived, everyone struggled. We just struggled a little harder," she says. "If the lights stayed on for a whole year, if we didn't get put out, I thought we were doing really, really well."
At 21, pregnant with her second child, Goldring decided to get her GED. Then she went to community college, got a degree in secretarial work, and began a career.
She met her husband in 1983. He had a steady job as a heating and air-conditioning installer, and owned a brick two-bedroom home in Morgan Park, a leafy, integrated neighborhood.
With two incomes, money was not a problem. He liked to travel. She had never been out of Maryland.
"I thought, 'Is this how rich people live?'" Goldring remembers. "From where I was to where I ended up, it was way different."
Her husband had been married before. As a condition of the divorce, his daughter's name was added to the deed of the house. After Goldring's husband died in 2007, Goldring took out a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, with a 6.5 percent interest rate, to purchase the house outright.
Everything was fine until her hospital "restructured" in 2009. Her boss, a senior vice president, was transferred to the corporate office. Executives were now sharing secretaries. A few months later, they let Goldring go.
Advertise | AdChoices
No more family vacations. No more trips to the mall. No more filling the grocery cart.
But what Goldring misses the most is her checkbook. Her unemployment payments arrive on a debit card.
"Just being able to pull out my checkbook and pay a bill, even though there might not be much left in there," she says. "I really miss that checkbook with my name on it."
Spike in unemployment
Last April, black male unemployment hit the highest rate since the government began keeping track in 1972. Only 56.9 percent of black men over age 20 were working, compared with 68.1 percent of white men.
Chris Wilder, a Philadelphia journalist, lost his job in 2008 as the media industry suffered huge losses. Unemployment benefits amounted to about one-third of his salary. Ever since they ran out, his income has been near zero, other than sporadic freelance work.
If not for a policy in his apartment co-op to assist people who lose their jobs, "I might be living with my mother," he says.
He has felt depression and anxiety. He's gone from a six-figure salary to having to check his balance before using his bank card. "I miss being able to go into a store and go off budget," he says. "Now, when I go to shop for something, I have to stick to exactly what I came to get. I never have money to buy anything else."
Wilder, 43, grew up solidly middle class, the son of a newspaper editor and a college administrator. Now the single parent of a 15-year-old, he has managed to keep his son in cleats and baseball camps, but thoughts of dying poor have crept into his mind. All of his savings are gone.
"It's definitely harder for black people to get jobs," Wilder says. "With the economy as bad as it is, people are hiring nephews and family friends and friends of friends. It's hard for black people to break that cycle. We don't own or even run the big companies."
"It's hard to keep jobs as well, because they're gonna 'last hired/first fired' you," he adds.
Wilder isn't giving up on finding a job in his field, "but I should."
Advertise | AdChoices
"I call everyone. I send resumes. It is extremely rare that I get a call back," he says. "When I was growing up, I never imagined there would be a time when I was out of work for three years."
College-educated blacks fared worse than their white counterparts in the recession. In 2007, unemployment for college-educated whites was 1.8 percent; for college-educated blacks it was 2.7 percent. Now, the college-educated unemployment rate is 3.9 percent for whites and 7 percent for blacks.
"I've definitely played by the rules," Wilder says.
He's not desperate enough to break the law, but "I see why people become drug dealers."
Becoming a drug dealer
Horace Davis did become a drug dealer. He illustrates another dimension of the recession's impact on blacks: While law-abiding folks are falling out of the middle class, those who got in trouble with the law are further than ever from a second chance.
After serving four years for drug trafficking, Davis walked out of prison into the middle of the recession in 2008. "I thought to myself, I'm older, I need to get a job, move on. The dope game was dead to me," Davis says, sitting on a concrete porch in an Asheville, N.C., housing project.
In the past few decades of the "War on Drugs," harsh drug sentencing laws have sent a disproportionate number of black people to prison, even though blacks are not more likely than whites to sell or use drugs, according to a 2008 report by the Sentencing Project. Today, about 280,000 African-Americans exit prison each year. They are often the last of the last to be hired.
After Davis got out, he spent months applying for dozens of jobs mopping floors or flipping burgers. He carried a letter from the state offering a $2,500 tax credit for hiring ex-offenders. He got one call back, from a chicken restaurant. "We'll be in touch," Davis remembers them saying. They weren't.
"Nobody wants black felons in their businesses," says Davis, 26.
A 2003 University of Chicago study by Devah Pager sent young white and black "testers" to apply for real low-wage jobs. Some of the testers were randomly assigned felony convictions. The study found that whites with felonies were slightly more likely to get callbacks than black applicants without criminal records.
"The penalty of a criminal record is more disabling for black job seekers than whites," Pager and other researchers wrote in a follow-up study in 2009.
Advertise | AdChoices
Davis says he learned skills in prison: "How to cook, clean, horticulture, janitorial. I can do it. I've been trained. Tile, carpentry, mortar, edging and trimming, all that. I can operate a backhoe, a roller. Any opportunity to do something that would show my talents, I'd do it. It would be my ticket out the streets.
"I just need someone to give me that chance. A nice construction job, anything. I would hold onto that until I die."
Some economists say the real black unemployment rate is as high as 25 or 30 percent, because government figures don't count "discouraged" workers who have stopped looking for jobs and dropped out of the labor force.
Davis now falls into that category — partly due to societal forces and partly, he knows, because of his own bad decisions.
Recently, police said they caught Davis with a half-ounce of marijuana. His trial date is approaching. As a habitual felon, he could get a 10-year sentence.
Bitter irony
Some see a bitter irony in soaring black unemployment and the decline of the black middle class on the watch of the first black president.
"I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone," Princeton professor Cornel West told truthdig.com recently.
He said Obama had sold out the poor and become "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats ... I don't think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama."
Yet many jobless blacks do not blame their plight on the president.
"I have no problem with Obama when I look at what the alternatives are," Wilder says.
Goldring doesn't think Obama is doing a bad job either. "The unemployment situation is not the best, but I don't think it has a lot to do with him," she says. "Fixing this economy, it's going to take time.
Advertise | AdChoices
Wiley, the Center for Social Inclusion director, says Obama should be applauded for several initiatives that have helped the black middle class, such as programs to modify certain mortgages and forestall foreclosure due to job loss.
She would have liked Obama to aggressively counter the suggestion that first black president would be showing favoritism if he specifically helped black people.
"It's the right thing to do for the nation," she says. "Black people are a huge segment of the population, they're especially hard-hit, and the country cannot recover if the black community — as well as the white community and others — does not recover."
Homeownership hits record
Black homeownership hit an all-time high in 2004, with 50 percent of African-Americans owning their homes, according to census data.
Today, the black homeownership rate is 45 percent, compared with 74 percent for whites. Nearly 8 percent of African-Americans who bought homes from 2005-2008 have lost them to foreclosure, compared with 4.5 percent of whites, according to an estimate by the Center for Responsible Lending.
Goldring remembers that when she got a foreclosure notice from the bank, "I bawled."
Her son, Chris Fredericks, says she was "vulnerable, more than I have ever seen her, but she still kept moving."
He was incredulous that his mother was in such a position. "At any point, you can slip back. It's just the way the economy is going," he says. "Once you get into a spiral, there's no telling how far down you could go."
One day, at a counseling session on how to prevent foreclosure, Goldring learned about a new Maryland program that offered help to people who were behind on their mortgages due to layoffs or medical bills.
She thought it was too good to be true. It wasn't.
The Emergency Mortgage Assistance program, financed by federal money, offered a zero-interest loan of up to $50,000. The money would pay off up to a year of back mortgage payments, plus up to two years of regular payments. All Goldring had to do was pay 31 percent of her current gross income, or the full mortgage payment if she got a new job close to her original salary.
Story: Black workers' crisis may linger after upturn
Advertise | AdChoices
And so on a sweltering June day, Goldring stood before a podium in her freshly mulched back yard, flanked by a congressman, the mayor, the lieutenant governor, and other officials. The sound of chirping birds filled the air. Cameras rolled as the dignitaries told Goldring's story, using her as an example to spread word of the Emergency Mortgage Program to other struggling homeowners.
"I want to thank you for your courage," said the lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown.
"I know you did everything right," Brown said. "You worked hard, you saved diligently, but challenges never overtaking our will sometimes overtake our wallets."
Goldring stood in front of the microphone and exhaled.
"After this," she said, "the only good thing would be to be employed, once again."
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
*
Please report, broadcast, distribute, deliver to lawmakers, post, forward, and relay far and wide!
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/alipac-william-gheen-exposes-wikileaks.html
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/wikileaks-exposed-obamas-la-raza-open.html
“What's needed to discourage illegal immigration into the United States has been known for years: Enforce existing law.” ….. CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR


*
*
“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” Christian Science Monitor
*
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Jobs
How Racism, Global Economics, and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black America's Crippling Jobs Crisis
By Andy Kroll
Like the country it governs, Washington is a city of extremes. In a car, you can zip in bare moments from northwest District of Columbia, its streets lined with million-dollar homes and palatial embassies, its inhabitants sporting one of the nation's lowest jobless rates, to Anacostia, a mostly forgotten neighborhood in southeastern D.C. with one of the highest unemployment rates anywhere in America. Or, if you happen to be jobless, upset about it, and living in that neighborhood, on a crisp morning in March you could have joined an angry band of protesters marching on the nearby 11th Street Bridge.
They weren't looking for trouble. They were looking for work.
Those protesters, most of them black, chanted and hoisted signs that read "D.C. JOBS FOR D.C. RESIDENTS" and "JOBS OR ELSE." The target of their outrage: contractors hired to replace the very bridge under their feet, a $300 million project that will be one of the largest in District history. The problem: few D.C. citizens, which means few African Americans, had so far been hired. "It's deplorable," insisted civil rights attorney Donald Temple, "that... you can find men from West Virginia to work in D.C. You can find men from Maryland to work in D.C. And you can find men from Virginia to work in D.C. But you can't find men and women in D.C. to work in D.C."
The 11th Street Bridge arches over the slow-flowing Anacostia River, connecting the poverty-stricken, largely black Anacostia neighborhood with the rest of the District. By foot the distance is small; in opportunity and wealth, it couldn’t be larger. At one end of the bridge the economy is booming even amid a halting recovery and jobs crisis. At the other end, hard times, always present, are worse than ever.
Live in Washington long enough and you'll hear someone mention "east of the river." That's D.C.'s version of "the other side of the tracks," the place friends warn against visiting late at night or on your own. It's home to District Wards 7 and 8, neighborhoods with a long, rich history. Once known as Uniontown, Anacostia was one of the District's first suburbs; Frederick Douglass, nicknamed the "Sage of Anacostia," once lived there, as did the poet Ezra Pound and singer Marvin Gaye. Today the area's unemployment rate is officially nearly 20%. District-wide, it’s 9.8%, a figure that drops as low as 3.6% in the whiter, more affluent northwestern suburbs.
D.C.'s divide is America's writ large. Nationwide, the unemployment rate for black workers at 16.2% is almost double the 9.1% rate for the rest of the population. And it's twice the 8% white jobless rate.
The size of those numbers can, in part, be chalked up to the current jobs crisis in which black workers are being decimated. According to Duke University public policy expert William Darity, that means blacks are "the last to be hired in a good economy, and when there's a downturn, they're the first to be released."
That may account for the soaring numbers of unemployed African Americans, but not the yawning chasm between the black and white employment rates, which is no artifact of the present moment. It's a problem that spans generations, goes remarkably unnoticed, and condemns millions of black Americans to a life of scraping by. That unerring, unchanging gap between white and black employment figures goes back at least 60 years. It should be a scandal, but whether on Capitol Hill or in the media it gets remarkably little attention. Ever.
The 60-Year Scandal
The unemployment lines run through history like a pair of train tracks. Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held remarkably, if grimly, steady at twice the rate for whites. The question of why has vexed and divided economists, historians, and sociologists for nearly as long.
For years the sharpest minds in academia pointed to upheaval in the American economy as the culprit. In his 1996 book When Work Disappears, the sociologist William Julius Wilson depicted the forces of globalization, a slumping manufacturing sector, and suburban flight at work in Chicago as the drivers of growing joblessness and poverty in America's inner cities and among its black residents.
He pictured the process this way: as corporations outsourced jobs to China and India, American manufacturing began its slow fade, shedding jobs often held by black workers. What jobs remained were moved to sprawling offices and factories in outlying suburbs reachable only by freeway. Those jobs proved inaccessible to the mass of black workers who remained in the inner cities and relied on public transportation to get to work.
Time and research have, however, eaten away at the significance of Wilson's work. The hollowing-out of America's cities and the decline of domestic manufacturing no doubt played a part in black unemployment, but then chronic black joblessness existed long before the upheaval Wilson described. Even when employment in the manufacturing sector was at its height, black workers were still twice as likely to be out of work as their white counterparts.
Another commonly cited culprit for the tenaciousness of African-American unemployment has been education. Whites, so the argument goes, are generally better educated than blacks, and so more likely to land a job at a time when a college degree is ever more significant when it comes to jobs and higher earnings. In 2009, President Obama told reporters that education was the key to narrowing racial gaps in the US. "If we close the achievement gap, then a big chunk of economic inequality in this society is diminished," he said.
Educational levels have, in fact, steadily climbed over the past 60 years for African Americans. In 1940, less than 1% of black men and less 2% of black women earned college degrees; jump to 2000, and the figures are 10% for black men and 15% for black women. Moreover, increased education has helped to narrow wage inequality between employed whites and blacks. What it hasn't done is close the unemployment gap.
Algernon Austin, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., crunched data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found that blacks with the same level of education as whites have consistently lower employment levels. It doesn’t matter whether you compare high-school dropouts or workers with graduate degrees, whites are still more likely to have a job than blacks. Degrees be damned.
Academics have thrown plenty of other explanations at the problem: declining wages, the embrace of crime as a way of life, increased competition with immigrants. None of them have stuck. How could they? In recent decades, the wage gap has narrowed, crime rates have plummeted, and there's scant evidence to suggest immigrants are stealing jobs that would otherwise be filled by African Americans.
Indeed, many top researchers in this field, including several I interviewed, are left scratching their heads when trying to explain why that staggering jobless gap between blacks and white won't budge. "I don't know if there's anybody out there who can tell you why that ratio stays at two to one," Darity says. "It's a statistical regularity that we don't have an explanation for."
Behind Bars, the Invisible Unemployed
So what keeps blacks from cutting into those employment figures? Among the theories, one that deserves special attention points to the high incarceration rate among blacks -- and especially black men.
In 2009, 7.2 million Americans -- or 3.1% of all adults -- were under the jurisdiction of the U.S. corrections system, including 1.6 million Americans incarcerated in a state or federal prison. Of that population, nearly 40% percent were black, even though blacks make up only 13% percent of the American population. Blacks were six times as likely to be in prison as whites, and three times as likely as Hispanics. For some perspective, consider what author of The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander wrote last year: "There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began."
Incarceration amounts to a double whammy when it comes to African-American unemployment. Rarely mentioned in the usual drumbeat of media reports on jobs is the fact that the Labor Department doesn't include prison populations in its official unemployment statistics. This automatically shrinks the pool of blacks capable of working and in the process lowers the black jobless rate.
In the mid-1990s, academics Bruce Western and Becky Pettit discovered that the American prison population lowered the jobless rate for black men by five percentage points, and for young black men by eight percentage points. (Of course, this applies to whites, Asians, and Hispanics as well, but the figures are particularly striking given the overrepresentation of blacks in the prison population.)
Even that vast incarcerated population pales, however, in comparison to the number of ex-cons who have rejoined the world beyond the prison walls. In 2008, there were 12 million to 14 million ex-offenders in the U.S. old enough to work, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). So many ex-cons represent a serious drag on our economy, according to CEPR, sucking from it $57 billion to $65 billion in output.
Of course, such research tells us how much, not why -- as in, why are ex-cons so much more likely to be out of work? For an answer, it’s necessary to turn to an eye-opening and, in some circles, controversial field of study that may offer the best explanation for the 60-year scandal of black unemployment.
Twice as Hard, Half as Far
In 2001, a pair of black men and a pair of white men went hunting for work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Each was 23 years old, a local college student, bright and articulate. They looked alike and dressed alike, had identical educational backgrounds and remarkably similar past work experience. From June to December, they combed the Sunday classified pages in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and searched a state-run job site called "Jobnet," applying for the same entry-level jobs as waiters, delivery-truck drivers, cooks, and cashiers. There was one obvious difference in each pair: one man was a former criminal and the other was not.
If this sounds like an experiment, that's because it was. Watching the explosive growth of the criminal justice system, fueled largely by ill-conceived "tough on crime" policies, sociologist Devah Pager took a novel approach to how prison affected ever growing numbers of Americans after they'd done their time -- a process all but ignored by politicians and the judicial system.
So Pager sent those two young black men and two young white men out into the world to apply for perfectly real jobs. Then she recorded who got callbacks and who didn't. She soon discovered that a criminal history caused a massive drop-off in employer responses -- not entirely surprising. But when Pager started separating out black applicants from white ones, she stumbled across the real news in her study, a discovery that shook our understanding of racial inequality and jobs to the core.
Pager's white applicant without a criminal record had a 34% callback rate. That promptly sunk to 17% for her white applicant with a criminal record. The figures for black applicants were 14% and 5%. And yes, you read that right: in Pager's experiment, white job applicants with a criminal history got more callbacks than black applicants without one. "I expected to find an effect with a criminal record and some with race," Pager says. "I certainly was not expecting that result, and it was quite a surprise."
Pager ran a larger version of this experiment in New York City in 2004, sending teams of young, educated, and identically credentialed men out into the Big Apple's sprawling market for entry-level jobs -- once again, with one applicant posing as an ex-con, the other with a clean record. (As she did in Milwaukee, Pager had the teams alternate who posed as the ex-con.) The results? Again Pager's African-American applicants received fewer callbacks and job offers than the whites. The disparity was particularly striking for ex-criminals: a drop off of 9 percentage points for whites, but 15 percentage points for blacks. "Employers already reluctant to hire blacks,” Pager wrote, “appear particularly wary of blacks with known criminal histories."
Other research has supported her findings. A 2001-2002 field experiment by academics from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, uncovered a sizeable gap in employer callbacks for job applicants with white-sounding names (Emily and Greg) versus black-sounding names (Lakisha and Jamal). They also found that the benefits of a better resume were 30% greater for whites than blacks.
These findings proved a powerful antidote to the growing notion, mostly in conservative circles, that discrimination was an illusion and racism long eradicated. In The Content of Our Character (1991), Shelby Steele argued that racial discrimination no longer held black men or women back from the jobs they wanted; the problem was in their heads. Dinesh D'Souza, a first-generation immigrant of Indian descent, published The End of Racism in 1995, similarly claiming racial discrimination had little to do with the plight of black America.
Not so, insist Pager, Darity, Harvard's Bruce Western, and other academics using real data with an unavoidable message: racism is alive and well. It leads to endemic, deeply embedded patterns of discrimination whose harmful impact has barely changed in 60 years. And it cannot be ignored. As the old African-American adage puts it, "You've got to work twice as hard to get half as far as a black person in white America."
Is There a Solution for Black America?
Tracing black unemployment in America since World War II, there are two moments when, briefly, the gap between black and white joblessness narrowed ever so slightly -- in the 1940s and again in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example in 1970, unemployment was at 5.8% for blacks and 3.3% for whites, a sizeable gap but significantly better than what followed in the Reagan era. Those are moments worth revisiting, if only to understand what began to go right.
According to University of Chicago professors William Sites and Virginia Parks, those periods were marked by a flurry of civil rights and anti-discrimination activity on the federal level. A series of actions ranging from the creation of the Fair Employment Practice Committee in 1941 to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which mandated the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, write Sites and Parks, had "dramatic impacts on employment discrimination."
But those gains of the 1970s were soon wiped out. The thinning of union membership and the dwindling power of organized labor didn't help either, after decades of pressure on employers to end discrimination against workers of color.
Today, in terrible times, with the possibility of social legislation off the table in Washington, the question remains: What, if anything, can be done to close the jobless gap between blacks and whites? When I asked Devah Pager, she called this the "million-dollar question." This form of discrimination, she pointed out, is especially difficult to deal with. As she noted in 2005, many employers who discriminate don't even realize they're doing so; they're just going with "gut feelings." "It's not that these employers have decided that they are not going to hire workers from a particular group," Pager told me.
What won't work is relying on discrimination watchdogs to crack down more often. The way federal anti-discrimination law works, it's up to the person who was discriminated against to raise an alarm. As Duke's William Darity points out, that’s a near impossibility for a job applicant who must convincingly read the mind of a person he or she doesn’t know. Worse than that, the applicant who wants to lodge charges of discrimination also has to prove that the discrimination was intentional, which, as Pager’s experiments make clear, is no small feat. Under the circumstances, as Darity told me, perhaps no one should be surprised to discover that blacks "grossly underreport their exposure to discrimination and whites grossly overreport it."
Of course, fixing a problem first requires acknowledging it -- something the nation has yet to do, says the Economic Policy Institute's Algernon Austin. To put blacks back to work, lawmakers should invest federal money directly in job creation, especially for black workers. Other avenues for putting people back to work, like a payroll tax credit won't do the trick. "We've spent billions in trying to build jobs overseas" in war zones, Austin told me. "But if we invested that money here in our cities, we wouldn't have this racial gap."
But how likely is that at a moment when, in a Washington gripped by paralysis, any discussion of spending in Washington begins and ends at how much to cut? The painful reality of permanent crisis for black workers is here to stay. That’s how it seems to blacks in D.C., especially those who live east of the river. In April, another group of protesters took to the 11th Street Bridge to demand more D.C. hires, and the following month, the group D.C. Jobs or Else took their complaints to City Hall. But progress is slow. "We're being pushed out economically," said William Alston El, a 63-year-old unemployed resident who grew up in D.C. "They say it’s not racism, but the name of the game is they have the money. You can’t live [in] a place if you can’t pay the rent.”
Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine, and an associate editor at TomDispatch. He's appeared on MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, Current TV, and Democracy Now! to discuss the economy and its ills.
Copyright 2011 Andy Kroll
*
UNDER OBAMA, THE RICH GET RICHER, AND ILLEGALS GET OUR JOBS
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/07/obamanomics-rich-get-richer-and.html
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/07/e-verify-obama-continues-to-sabotage-e.html
*
Indicating he wanted an amnesty attached to the E-Verify legislation, the President added, “We may not be able to get everything that I would like to see in a package, but we have to have a balanced package.”
*
OBAMA’S HISPANICAZATION OF AMERICA FOR THE LA RAZA VOTE:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/obamas-hispanicazation-of-america-push.html
*
WIKI LEAKS EXPOSES OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS AGENDA – BUILDING A BORDERLESS TERRITORY WITH NARCOMEX:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/wikileaks-exposed-obamas-la-raza-open.html
*
OBAMA’S LA RAZA PARTY INFESTED ADMINISTRATION:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/06/obamas-administration-infested-with.html

OBAMA'S FUNDING of MEXICAN LA RAZA SUPREMACY From White House

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/06/obama-expand-la-raza-party-base-from.html

OBAMA AND THE FUNDING OF MEXICAN FASCISM FROM THE WHITE HOUSE
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/06/obama-funds-radical-la-raza-fascism.html

FROM JUDICIAL WATCH
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2011/jun/nclr-funding-skyrockets-after-obama-hires-its-vp

NCLR Funding Skyrockets After Obama Hires Its VP
06/17/2011
A Judicial Watch investigation reveals that federal funding for a Mexican La Raza group that for years has raked in millions of taxpayer dollars has skyrocketed since one of its top officials got a job in the Obama White House.
The influential and politically-connected National Council of La Raza (NCLR) has long benefitted from Uncle Sam’s largess but the group has made a killing since Obama hired its senior vice president (Cecilia Muñoz) in 2009 to be his director of intergovernmental affairs.
Ignored by the mainstream media, Judicial Watch covered the appointment because the president issued a special “ethics waiver” to bring Muñoz aboard since it violated his own lobbyist ban. At the pro illegal immigration NCLR, Muñoz supervised all legislative and advocacy activities on the state and local levels and she was heavily involved in the congressional immigration battles that took place in the George W. Bush Administration.
She also brought in a steady flow of government cash that’s allowed the Washington D.C.-based group to expand nationwide and promote its leftist, open-borders agenda via a network of community organizations dedicated to serving Latinos.Among them are a variety of local groups that provide social services, housing counseling and farm worker assistance as well as publicly-funded charter schools that promote radical Chicano curriculums. Judicial Watch published a special report on this a few years ago.
This week a JW probe has uncovered details of the alarming increase in federal funding that these NCLR groups have received since Muñoz joined the Obama Administration. In fact, the government cash more than doubled the year Muñoz joined the White House, from $4.1 million to $11 million.
Not surprisingly, a big chunk of the money (60%) came from the Department of Labor, which is headed by a former California congresswoman (Hilda Solis) with close ties to the La Raza movement. Since Obama named her Labor Secretary, Solis has launched a nationwide campaign to protect illegal immigrant workers in the U.S. Just this week Solis penned declarations with Guatemala and Nicaragua to preserve the rights of their migrants.
The NCLR also received additional taxpayer dollars from other federal agencies in 2010, the JW probe found. The Department of Housing and Urban Development doled out $2.5 million for housing counseling, the Department of Education contributed nearly $800,000 and the Centers for Disease Control a quarter of a million.
Additionally, NCLR affiliates nationwide raked in tens of millions of government grant and recovery dollars last year thanks to the Muñoz factor. An offshoot called Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC) saw its federal funding nearly double to $18.3 million following Muñoz’ appointment.
A social service and legal assistance organization (Ayuda Inc.) that didn’t receive any federal funding between 2005 and 2008 got $600,000 in 2009 and $548,000 in 2010 from the Department of Justice. The group provides immigration law services and guarantees confidentiality to assure illegal aliens that they won’t be reported to authorities.

*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/hispandering-obamas-push-for-la-raza.html
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/obama-continues-to-push-la-raza-agenda.html
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/alipac-william-gheen-exposes-wikileaks.html
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/wikileaks-exposed-obamas-la-raza-open.html
*
OBAMA’S AMERICA: Open & Undefended Borders!
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/07/jobs-crisis-really-good-time-to.html
OBAMA’S AMERICA: Open & Undefended Borders!
*
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/07/jobs-crisis-really-good-time-to.html