Tuesday, September 6, 2011

ISN'T OBAMA MERELY GEORGE W. BUSH'S THIRD FAILED TERM?

POSSIBLY THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BUSH AND OBAMA’S TWO FAILED AND CORRUPT ADMINISTRATIONS, IS THAT OBAMA HAS FILLED HIS WITH LA RAZA SUPREMACIST. EVEN HIS APPOINTEE TO THE COURT, SONIA SOTOMAYER IS A LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER!
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http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/09/isnt-barack-obama-merely-george-w-bushs.html
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Tomgram: David Bromwich, George W. Obama?

By David Bromwich

August 18, 2011, Printed on September 6, 2011

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175432/

Those first acts of that first shining full day in the Oval Office are now so forgotten, but on January 21, 2009, among other things, Barack Obama promised to return America to “the high moral ground,” and then signed a straightforward executive order “requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.” It was an open-and-shut case, so to speak, part of what CNN called “a clean break from the Bush administration.” On that same day, as part of that same break, the president signed an executive order and two presidential memoranda hailing a “new era of openness,” of sunshine and transparency in government. As the president put it, "Every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known."
Of course, nothing could have been more Bushian, if you were thinking about “clean breaks,” than America’s wars in the Greater Middle East. When it came to the Iraq War, at least, President Obama arrived in office with another goal and another promise that couldn’t have been more open and shut (or so his supporters thought), not just drawing down Bush’s disastrous war in Iraq, but “ending” it “responsibly.” (Admittedly, he was also muttering quietly about “residual forces” there, but who noticed?)
Two and a half years later, Guantanamo remains thrivingly open, while all discussion of ever closing it has long since ended; the administration has, in those same years, gained a fierce reputation as an enforcer of government secrecy and, while it has prosecuted neither torturers, nor financial titans, it has gone after government whistleblowers with a passion. In the meantime, the Iraq War was indeed wound down “responsibly” (which turned out to mean incredibly slowly), but in recent months, as U.S. casualties again rose, the Obama administration and the U.S. military have visibly been in a desperate search for ways to keep sizeable numbers of American forces there as “trainers,” while also militarizing a vast State Department mission in Baghdad and outfitting it for the long haul with more than 5,000 armed mercenaries as well as a mini-air force.
Promises? As Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman used to say: What? Me worry? As it happens, though, David Bromwich, TomDispatch regular (and essayist for the Huffington Post and the New York Review of Books) does worry. In today’s ambitious post, he offers a new yardstick for measuring the promises, the acts, and the nature of the Obama administration -- as well as the nature of its “break” with the Bush era. Tom
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Symptoms of the Bush-Obama Presidency


The Saved and the Sacked


By David Bromwich
Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?
The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of “force projection” in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in Iraq, but another doubled in size and stretching across borders in Afghanistan; with an expanded program of drone killings and black-ops assassinations, the latter glorified in special ceremonies of thanksgiving (as they never were under Bush); with the number of prisoners at Guantanamo having decreased, but some now slated for permanent detention; with the repeated invocation of “state secrets” to protect the government from charges of war crimes; with the Patriot Act renewed and its most dubious provisions left intact -- the Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.
The significance of this development has been veiled in recent mainstream coverage of the national security state and our larger and smaller wars. Back in 2005-2006, when the Iraqi insurgency refused to die down and what had been presented as “sectarian feuding” began to look like a war of national liberation against an occupying power, the American press exhibited an uncommon critical acuteness. But Washington’s embrace of “the surge” in Iraq in 2007 took that war off the front page, and it -- along with the Afghan War -- has returned only occasionally in the four years since.
This disappearance suited the purposes of the long double-presidency. Keep the wars going but normalize them; make them normal by not talking about them much; by not talking about them imply that, while “victory” is not in sight, there is something else, an achievement more realistic and perhaps more grown-up, still available to the United States in the Greater Middle East. This other thing is never defined but has lately been given a name. They call it “success.”
Meanwhile, back at home...
The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s “debt deal” -- a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.
Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.
One of the last good times that President Obama enjoyed before the frenzy of debt negotiations began was a chuckle he shared with Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric and now head of the president’s outside panel of economic advisers. At a June 13th meeting of the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a questioner said he assumed that President Obama knew about the difficulties caused by the drawn-out process of securing permits for construction jobs. Obama leaned into the microphone and offered a breezy ad-lib: “Shovel ready wasn’t as, uh, shovel-ready as we expected” -- and Immelt got off a hearty laugh. An unguarded moment: the president of “hope and change” signifying his solidarity with the big managers whose worldly irony he had adopted.
A certain mystery surrounds Obama’s perpetuation of Bush’s economic policies, in the absence of the reactionary class loyalty that accompanied them, and his expansion of Bush’s war policies in the absence of the crude idea of the enemy and the spirited love of war that drove Bush. But the puzzle has grown tiresome, and the effects of the continuity matter more than its sources.
Bush we knew the meaning of, and the need for resistance was clear. Obama makes resistance harder. During a deep crisis, such a nominal leader, by his contradictory words and conduct and the force of his example (or rather the lack of force in his example), becomes a subtle disaster for all those whose hopes once rested with him.
The philosopher William James took as a motto for practical morality: “By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots.”
Suppose we test the last two and a half years by the same sensible criterion. Translated into the language of presidential power -- the power of a president whose method was to field a “team of rivals” and “lead from behind” -- the motto must mean: by their appointments shall ye know them.
Let us examine Obama, then, by the standard of his cabinet members, advisers, and favored influences, and group them by the answers to two questions: Whom has he wanted to stay on longest, in order to profit from their solidity and bask in their influence? Which of them has he discarded fastest or been most eager to shed his association with? Think of them as the saved and the sacked. Obama’s taste in associates at these extremes may tell us something about the moral and political personality in the middle.
The Saved
Advisers whom the president entrusted with power beyond expectation, and sought to keep in his administration for as long as he could prevail on them to stay:
1. Lawrence Summers: Obama’s chief economic adviser, 2009-2010. As Bill Clinton’s secretary of the treasury, 1999-2001, Summers arranged the repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated the commercial banks -- holders of the savings of ordinary people -- from the speculative action of the brokerage houses and money firms. The aim of Glass-Steagall was to protect citizens and the economy from a financial bubble and collapse. Demolition of that wall between savings and finance was a large cause of the 2008 meltdown. In the late 1990s, Summers had also pressed for the deregulation of complex derivatives -- a dream fully realized under Bush. In the first years of the Obama era, with the ear of the president, he commandeered the bank bailouts and advised against major programs for job creation. He won, and we are living with the results.
In 2009-2010, the critical accessory to Summers’s power was Timothy Geithner, Obama’s treasury secretary. Most likely, Geithner was picked for his position by the combined recommendations of Summers and Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The latter once described Geithner as “a very unusually talented young man,” and worked with him closely in 2008 when he was still president of the New York Fed. At that time, he concurred with Paulson on the wisdom of bailing out the insurance giant AIG and not rescuing Lehman Brothers. Obama for his part initiated several phone consultations with Paulson during the 2008 campaign -- often holding his plane on the tarmac to talk and listen. This chain is unbroken. Any tremors in the president’s closed world caused by Summers’s early departure from the administration have undoubtedly been offset by Geithner’s recent reassurance that he will stay at the Treasury beyond 2011.
Postscript: In 2011, Summers has become more reformist than Obama. On The Charlie Rose Show on July 13th, he criticized the president’s dilatoriness in mounting a program to create jobs. Thus he urged the partial abandonment of his own policy, which Obama continues to defend.
2. Robert Gates: A member of the permanent establishment in Washington, Gates raised to the third power the distinction of massive continuity: First as CIA director under George H.W. Bush, second as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and third as Obama’s secretary of defense. He remained for 28 months and departed against the wishes of the president. Gates sided with General David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen in 2009 to promote a major (called “moderate”) escalation of the Afghan War; yet he did so without rancor or posturing -- a style Obama trusted and in the company of which he did not mind losing. In the Bush years, Gates was certainly a moderate in relation to the extravagant war aims of Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative circle. He worked to strengthen U.S. militarism through an ethic of bureaucratic normalization.
His approach has been endorsed and will be continued -- though probably with less canniness -- by his successor Leon Panetta. Without a career in security to fortify his confidence, Panetta is really a member of a different species: the adaptable choice for “running things” -- without regard to the nature of the thing or the competence required. Best known as the chief of staff who reduced to a semblance of order the confusion of the Clinton White House, he is associated in the public mind with no set of views or policies.
3. Rahm Emanuel: As Obama’s White House chief of staff, Emanuel performed much of the hands-on work of legislative bargaining that President Obama himself preferred not to engage in. (Vice President Joe Biden also regularly took on this role.) He thereby incurred a cheerless gratitude, but he is a man willing to be disliked. Obama seems to have held Emanuel’s ability in awe; and such was his power that nothing but the chance of becoming mayor of Chicago would have plucked him from the White House. Emanuel is credited, rightly or not, with the Democratic congressional victory of 2006, and one fact about that success, which was never hidden, has been too quickly forgotten. Rahm Emanuel took pains to weed out anti-war candidates.
Obama would have known this, and admired the man who carried it off. Whether Emanuel pursued a similar strategy in the 2010 midterm elections has never been seriously discussed. The fact that the category “anti-war Democrat” hardly exists in 2011 is, however, an achievement jointly creditable to Emanuel and the president.
4. Cass Sunstein: Widely thought to be the president’s most powerful legal adviser. Sunstein defended and may have advised Obama on his breach of his 2008 promise (as senator) to filibuster any new law that awarded amnesty to the telecoms that illegally spied on Americans. This was Obama’s first major reversal in the 2008 presidential campaign: he had previously defended the integrity of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act against the secret encroachment of the National Security Agency (NSA).
At that moment, Obama changed from an accuser to a conditional apologist for the surveillance of Americans: the secret policy advocated by Dick Cheney, approved by President Bush, executed by NSA Director Michael Hayden, and supplied with a rationale by Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington. In his awkward public defense of the switch, Obama suggested that scrutiny of telecom records and their uses by the inspectors general in the relevant agencies and departments should be enough to restore the rule of law.
When it comes to national security policy, Sunstein is a particularly strong example of Bush-Obama continuity. Though sometimes identified as a liberal, from early on he defended the expansion of the national security state under Cheney’s Office of the Vice President, and he praised the firm restraint with which the Ashcroft Justice Department shouldered its responsibilities. “By historical standards,” he wrote in the fall of 2004, “the Bush administration has acted with considerable restraint and with commendable respect for political liberty. It has not attempted to restrict speech or the democratic process in any way. The much-reviled and poorly understood Patriot Act, at least as administered, has done little to restrict civil liberty as it stood before its enactment.” This seems to have become Obama’s view.
Charity toward the framers of the Patriot Act has, in the Obama administration, been accompanied by a consistent refusal to initiate or support legal action against the “torture lawyers.” Sunstein described the Bush Justice Department memos by John Yoo and Jay Bybee, which defended the use of the water torture and other extreme methods, in words that stopped short of legal condemnation: "It's egregiously bad. It's very low level, it's very weak, embarrassingly weak, just short of reckless." Bad lawyering: a professional fault but not an actionable offense.
The Obama policy of declining to hold any high official or even CIA interrogators accountable for violations of the law by the preceding administration would likely not have survived opposition by Sunstein. A promise not to prosecute, however, has been implicit in the findings by the Obama Justice Department -- a promise that was made explicit by Leon Panetta in February 2009 when he had just been named President Obama’s new director of the CIA.
As head of the president’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, with an office in the White House, Sunstein adjudicates government policy on issues of worker and consumer safety; yet his title suggests a claim of authority on issues such as the data-mining of information about American citizens and the government’s deployment of a state secrets privilege. He deserves wider attention, too, for his 2008 proposal that the government “cognitively infiltrate” discussion groups on-line and in neighborhoods, paying covert agents to monitor and, if possible, discredit lines of argument which the government judges to be extreme or misleading.
5. Eric Holder: Holder once said that the trial of suspected 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City courtroom would be “the defining event of my time as attorney general.” The decision to make KSM’s a civilian trial was, however, scuttled, thanks to incompetent management at the White House: neither the first nor last failure of its kind. The policy of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts seems to have suffered from never being wholeheartedly embraced by the administration’s inside actors. Local resistance by the New York authorities was the ostensible reason for the failure and the change of venue back to a military tribunal at Guantanamo. No member of the administration besides Holder has been observed to show much regret.
During his 30-month tenure, in keeping with Obama’s willingness to overlook the unpleasant history of CIA renditions and “extreme interrogations,” Holder has made no move to prosecute any upper-level official of any of the big banks and money firms responsible for the financial collapse of 2008. His silence on the subject has been taken as a signal that such prosecutions will never occur. To judge by public statements, the energies of the attorney general, in an administration that arrived under the banner of bringing “sunshine” and “transparency” to Washington, have mainly been dedicated to the prosecution of government whistle-blowers through a uniquely rigorous application of the Espionage Act of 1917. More people have been accused under that law by this attorney general than in the entire preceding 93 years of the law’s existence.
Again, this is a focus that Bush-era attorney generals John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Michael Mukasey might have relished, but on which none would have dared to act so boldly. Extraordinary delays in grand jury proceedings on Army Private Bradley Manning, suspected of providing government secrets to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, who ran that website, are said to have come from a protracted attempt to secure a legal hold against one or both potential defendants within the limits of a barbarous and almost dormant law.
6. Dennis Ross: Earlier in his career, Obama seems to have cherished an interest in the creation of an independent Palestinian state. In Chicago, he was a friend of the dissident Middle East scholar Rashid Khalidi; during his 2007 primary campaign, he sought and received advice from Robert Malley, former special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Both were “realist” opponents of the expansionist policy of Israel’s right-wing coalition government, which subsidizes and affords military protection to Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank.
Under pressure from the Israel lobby, however, Obama dissociated himself from all three chosen advisers.
Ross, as surely as Gates, is a member of Washington’s permanent establishment. Recruited for the Carter Defense Department by Paul Wolfowitz, he started out as a Soviet specialist, but his expertise migrated with a commission to undertake a Limited Contingency Study on the need for American defense of the Persian Gulf. An American negotiator at the 2000 Camp David summit, Ross was accused of being an unfair broker, having always “started from the Israeli bottom line.”
He entered the Obama administration as a special adviser to Hillary Clinton on the Persian Gulf, but was moved into the White House on June 25, 2009, and outfitted with an elaborate title and comprehensive duties: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the Central Region, including all of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia. Ross has cautioned Obama to be “sensitive” to domestic Israeli concerns.
In retrospect, his installation in the White House looks like the first step in a pattern of concessions to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that undid Obama’s hopes for an agreement in the region. Here, caution precluded all inventiveness. It could have been predicted that the ascendancy of Ross would render void the two-state solution Obama anticipated in his carefully prepared and broadly advertised speech to the Arab world from Cairo University in June 2009.
7. Peter Orszag: Director of the Office of Management and Budget from January 2009 to August 2010, Orszag was charged with bringing in the big health insurers to lay out what it would take for them to support the president’s health-care law. In this way, Orszag -- along with the companies -- exerted a decisive influence on the final shape of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. In January 2011, he left the administration to become vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup. A few days out of the White House, he published an op-ed in the New York Times advising the president to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans -- adding that Obama should indicate that the cuts would continue in force only through 2012. Obama took the advice.
8. Thomas Donilon: National Security Adviser and (after the departure of Gates) Obama’s closest consultant on foreign policy. Donilon supported the 34,000 troop-escalation order that followed the president’s inconclusive 2009 Afghanistan War review. He encouraged and warmly applauded Obama’s non-binding “final orders” on Afghanistan, which all the participants in the 2009 review were asked formally to approve. (The final orders speak of “a prioritized comprehensive approach” by which the U.S. will “work with [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai when we can” to set “the conditions for an accelerated transition,” to bring about “effective sub-national governance,” and to “transfer” the responsibility for fighting the war while continuing to “degrade” enemy forces.)
Donilon comes from the worlds of business, the law, and government in about equal measure: a versatile career spanning many orthodoxies. His open and unreserved admiration for President Obama seems to have counted more heavily in his appointment than the low opinion of his qualifications apparently held by several associates. As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs during the Clinton administration, he helped arrange the eastward expansion of NATO after the Cold War: perhaps the most pointless and destructive bipartisan project of the epoch. He was Executive Vice President for Law and Policy at Fannie Mae, 1999-2005.
The Sacked
Advisers and nominees with views that were in line with Obama's 2008 election campaign or his professed goals in 2009, but who have since been fired, asked to resign or step down, or seen their nominations dropped:
1. General James Jones: Former Marine Corps Commandant and a skeptic of the Afghanistan escalation, Jones became the president’s first National Security Adviser. He was, however, often denied meetings with Obama, who seems to have looked on Gates as a superior technocrat, Petraeus as a more prestigious officer, and Donilon as a more fervent believer in the split-the-difference war and diplomatic policies Obama elected to pursue. Jones resigned in October 2010, under pressure.
A curious point: Obama had spoken to Jones only twice before appointing him to so high a post and seems hardly to have come to know him by the time he resigned.
2. Karl Eikenberry: Commander of Combined Forces in Afghanistan before he was made ambassador, Eikenberry, a retired Lieutenant General, had seniority over both Petraeus and then war commander General Stanley McChrystal when it came to experience in that country and theater of war. He was the author of cables to the State Department in late 2009, which carried a stinging rebuke to the conduct of the war and unconcealed hostility toward any new policy of escalation. The Eikenberry cables were drafted in order to influence the White House review that fall; they advised that the Afghan war was in the process of being lost, that it could never be won, and that nothing good would come from an increased commitment of U.S. troops.
Petraeus, then Centcom commander, and McChrystal were both disturbed by the cables -- startled when they arrived unbidden and intimidated by their authority. Obama, astonishingly, chose to ignore them. This may be the single most baffling occasion of the many when fate dealt a winning card to the president and yet he folded. Among other such occasions: the 2008-2009 bank bailouts and the opening for financial regulation; the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the opportunity for a revised environmental policy; the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns and a revised policy toward nuclear energy; the Goldstone Report and the chance for an end to the Gaza blockade. But of all these as well as other cases that might be mentioned, the Eikenberry cables offer the clearest instance of persisting in a discredited policy against the weight of impressive evidence.
Ambassador Eikenberry retired in 2011, and Obama replaced him with Ryan Crocker, the Foreign Service officer brought into Iraq by Bush to help General Petraeus manage the details and publicity around the Iraq surge of 2007-2008.
3. Paul Volcker: Head of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, Volker had a record (not necessarily common among upper-echelon workers in finance) entirely free of the reproach of venality. A steady adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign, he lent gravity to the young candidate's professions of competence in financial matters. He also counseled Obama against the one-sidedness of a recovery policy founded on repayment guarantees to financial outfits such as Citigroup and Bank of America: the policy, that is, favored by Summers and Geithner in preference to massive job creation and a major investment in infrastructure. "If you want to be a bank,” he said, “follow the bank rules. If Goldman Sachs and the others want to do proprietary trading, then they shouldn’t be banks.” His advice -- to tighten regulation in order to curb speculative trading -- was adopted late and in diluted form. In January 2010, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which paid no federal taxes that year, replaced him.
4. Dennis Blair: As Director of National Intelligence, Blair sought to limit the expansion of covert operations by the CIA. In this quest he was defeated by CIA Director Leon Panetta -- a seasoned infighter, though without any experience in intelligence, who successfully enlarged the Agency’s prerogatives and limited oversight of its activities during his tenure. Blair refused to resign when Obama asked him to, and demanded to be fired. He finally stepped down on May 21, 2010.
Doubtless Blair hurt his prospects irreparably by making clear to the president his skepticism regarding the usefulness of drone warfare: a form of killing Obama favors as the most politic and antiseptic available to the U.S. Since being sacked, Blair has come out publicly against the broad use of drones in Pakistan and elsewhere.
On his way out, he was retrospectively made a scapegoat for the November 2009 Fort Hood, Texas, killing spree by Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan; for the “underwear” bomber’s attempt to blow up a plane on its way to Detroit on Christmas day 2009; and for the failed Times Square car bombing of May 2010 -- all attacks (it was implied) that Blair should have found the missing key to avert, even though the Army, the FBI, and the CIA were unable to do so.
5. James Cartwright: As vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cartwright passed on to Obama, and interpreted for him, a good deal of information that proved useful in the Afghanistan War review. Their friendship outlasted the process and he came to be known as Obama’s “favorite general,” but Cartwright stirred the resentment from both Petraeus and Mullen for establishing a separate channel of influence with the president. Like Eikenberry, he had been a skeptic on the question of further escalation in Afghanistan. His name was floated by the White House as the front-runner to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs after the retirement of Mullen. Informed of the military opposition to the appointment, Obama reversed field and chose Army Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey, a figure more agreeable to Petraeus and Mullen.
6. Dawn Johnsen: Obama’s first choice to head the Office of Legal Counsel, a choice generally praised and closely watched by constitutional lawyers and civil libertarians. Her name was withdrawn after a 14-month wait, and she was denied a confirmation process. The cause: Republican objections to her writings and her public statements against the practice of torture and legal justifications for torture.
This reversal falls in with a larger pattern: the putting forward of candidates for government positions whose views are straightforward, publicly available, and consistent with the pre-2009 principles of Barack Obama -- followed by Obama’s withdrawal of support for the same candidates. A more recent instance was the naming (after considerable delay) of Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to organize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, followed by the decision in July not to nominate her as the first director of the bureau.
Avoidance of a drag-out fight in confirmation hearings seems to be the recurrent motive here. Of course, the advantage of such a fight, given an articulate and willing nominee, is the education of public opinion. But in every possible instance, President Obama has been averse to any public engagement in the clash of ideas. “Bottom line is that it was going to be close,” a Senate Democratic source told ABC’s Jake Tapper when Johnsen’s name was withdrawn. "If they wanted to, the White House could have pushed for a vote. But they didn't want to 'cause they didn't have the stomach for the debate."
Where the nomination of an “extreme” candidate might have hardened the impression of Obama as an extremist, might not a public hearing have helped eradicate the very preconception that a frightened withdrawal tends to confirm? This question is not asked.
7. Greg Craig: For two years special counsel in the Clinton White House, he led the team defending the president in the impeachment proceedings in Congress. Craig’s declaration of support for Obama in March 2007 was vital to the insurgent candidate, because of his well-known loyalty to the Clintons. Obama made him White House Counsel, and his initial task was to draw up plans for the closing of Guantanamo, a promise made by the president on his first day in the Oval Office. But once the paper was signed, Obama showed little interest in the developing plans. Others were more passionate. Dick Cheney worked on a susceptible populace to resurrect old fears. The forces against closure rallied and spread panic, while the president said nothing. Craig was defeated inside the White House by the “realist” Rahm Emanuel, and sacked.
8. Carol Browner: A leading environmentalist in the Clinton administration, Browner was given a second shot by Obama as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy. She found her efforts thwarted within the administration as well as in Congress: in mid-2010 Obama decided that -- as a way to deal with global warming -- cap-and-trade legislation was a loser for the midterm elections. Pressure on Obama from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to heed business interests served as a strong incitement in forcing Browner’s resignation after the Democratic “shellacking” in midterm elections, a result that his quiet abandonment of cap-and-trade had failed to prevent. The White House had no backup plan for addressing the disaster of global warming. After Browner’s resignation in March 2011, her position was abolished. Since then, Obama has seldom spoken of global warming or climate change.
Moral and Political Limbo
The Obama presidency has been characterized by a refined sense of impossibility. A kind of suffocation sets in when a man of power floats carefully clear of all unorthodox stimuli and resorts to official comforters of the sort exemplified by Panetta. As the above partial list of the saved and the sacked shows, the president lives now in a world in which he is certain never to be told he is wrong when he happens to be on the wrong track. It is a world where the unconventionality of an opinion, or the existence of a possible majority against it somewhere, counts as prima facie evidence against its soundness.
So alternative ideas vanish -- along with the people who represent them. What, then, does President Obama imagine he is doing as he backs into one weak appointment after another, and purges all signs of thought and independence around him? We have a few dim clues.
A popular book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, seems to have prompted Obama to suppose that Lincoln himself “led from behind” and was committed to bipartisanship not only as a tactic but as an always necessary means to the highest good of democracy. A more wishful conceit was never conceived; but Obama has talked of the book easily and often to support a “pragmatic” instinct for constant compromise that he believes himself to share with the American people and with Lincoln.
A larger hint may come from Obama’s recently released National Strategy for Counterterrorism, where a sentence in the president’s own voice asserts: "We face the world as it is, but we will also pursue a strategy for the world we seek." If the words "I face the world as it is" have a familiar sound, the reason is that they received a trial run in Obama’s 2009 Nobel Prize speech. Those words were the bridge across which an ambivalent peacemaker walked to confront the heritage of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King with the realities of power as experienced by the leader of the only superpower in the world.
Indeed, Obama’s understanding of international morality seems to be largely expressed by the proposition that "there's serious evil in the world" -- a truth he confided in 2007 to the New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks, and attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr -- combined with the assertion that he is ready to "face the world as it is." The world we seek is, of course, the better world of high morality. But morality, properly understood, is nothing but a framework for ideals. Once you have discharged your duty, by saying the right words for the right policies, you have to accommodate the world.
This has become the ethic of the Bush-Obama administration in a new phase. It explains, as nothing else does, Obama’s enormous appetite for compromise, the growing conventionality of his choices of policy and person, and the legitimacy he has conferred on many radical innovations of the early Bush years by assenting to their logic and often widening their scope. They are, after all, the world as it is.
Obama’s pragmatism comes down to a series of maxims that can be relied on to ratify the existing order -- any order, however recent its advent and however repulsive its effects. You must stay in power in order to go on “seeking.” Therefore, in “the world as it is,” you must requite evil with lesser evil. You do so to prevent your replacement by fanatics: people, for example, like those who invented the means you began by deploring but ended up adopting. Their difference from you is that they lack the vision of the seeker. Finally, in the world as it is, to retain your hold on power you must keep in place the sort of people who are normally found in places of power.
David Bromwich writes on civil liberties and America's wars for the Huffington Post. A TomDispatch regular, as well as contributor to the New York Review of Books, his latest essay, "How Lincoln Explained Democracy," appeared recently in the Yale Review.

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SHOCKING FACTS ON OBAMA’S FUNDING OF THE MEXICAN SUPREMACIST MOVEMENT OF LA RAZA
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/09/obamas-la-raza-supremacist-infested.html
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http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/06/obama-operates-la-raza-supremacy-out-of.html
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http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/06/obama-mexican-supremacist-party-of-la.html
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http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/04/history-of-mexican-fascist-party-of-la.html
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http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/wikileaks-exposed-obamas-la-raza-open.html

Workers and youth speak at Detroit Labor Day - OBAMA IS NOTHING MORE THAN BUSH'S FAILED THIRD TERM! THE RICH GET RICHER, WE GET THE TAX BILLS FOR THEIR CRIMES!

Workers and youth speak at Detroit Labor Day

OBAMA: Bush's THIRD TERM? OR LA RAZA FIRST PRESIDENT?

FACE IT PEOPLE! OBAMA CONED US! HE’S NOTHING BUT A WALL ST. BACKED CON MAN! A BUSH THIRD TERM! HE WILL BE REELECTED WITH THE VOTES OF ILLEGALS! * “Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).” OBAMA HAS DONE NOTHING WHILE IN ELECTED OFFICE BEYOND RUNNING AROUND FOR RED CARPET PHOTO OPS, SERVICING HIS BANKSTER DONORS SO THEY REMAIN GENEROUS TO HIM, AND HISPANDER FOR THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES! NO ADMIN IN HISTORY IS SO LA RAZA INFESTED AS OBAMA’S! “I’m not here to punish (THE FUCKING BANKSTERS THAT HAVE DESTROYED THE VALUE OF YOUR HOMES, THE ECON AND FUCKED YOU RAW!) my bankster donors!” BARACK OBAMA ON THE SENATE FLOOR, IN THE FACE OF THE NATION! OBAMA, NOTHING MORE THAN BUSH’S THIRD TERM, HAS NEVER HAD A JOBS PLAN BEYOND AMNESTY, NO E-VERIFY, ENDLESS LA RAZA WRITTEN DREAM ACTS, SABOTAGED BORDERS and CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT! THERE IS A REASON WHY THE U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE WANTS OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY AND NO E-VERIFY! IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED WITH A STEADY FLOW OF HORDES OF ILLEGALS! * The bailout of the banks overseen by Obama has preserved the wealth of the financial elite, while the living conditions of the working class have suffered a historic collapse. Corporations, which have slashed worker wages and laid off millions, are sitting on record cash reserves, refusing to put it to productive use. * Obama on Labor Day: No measures to address historic jobs crisis By Joseph Kishore 6 September 2011 In remarks yesterday at a Labor Day demonstration in Detroit, President Obama made it clear that the federal government would take no serious steps to address the worst unemployment crisis in the United States since the Great Depression. In remarks presented as a preview of an address to Congress scheduled for Thursday, Obama praised the many “sacrifices” of workers, i.e., the disastrous decline in the living standards of the working class produced by the policies of his administration. He used the speech to reaffirm his pledge to work with the unions in enforcing the attack on workers, while union officials, led by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, pledged their support for Obama’s reelection in 2012. The background to Monday’s speech was the announcement by the government Friday that there was zero net growth in US payrolls in August. European markets fell precipitously on Monday in response to the US jobless figures, an ongoing European banking crisis and clear signs of a decline in global growth, particularly in manufacturing. The sharp slowdown of the past month and the indications of another looming financial collapse make it clear that the measures adopted since 2008 by the major capitalist powers, led by the United States, have solved nothing. The bailout of the banks overseen by Obama has preserved the wealth of the financial elite, while the living conditions of the working class have suffered a historic collapse. Corporations, which have slashed worker wages and laid off millions, are sitting on record cash reserves, refusing to put it to productive use. The reality of the economic crisis and the social catastrophe facing millions of people found no reflection in Obama’s remarks, which did not even refer to Friday’s jobs report. He confined himself to stating that the “recovery” was not yet “fully” complete and that “times are tough.” He added blithely, “I’m not scared of tough times.” Obama’s remarks took on a surreal character when referring to the supposed accomplishments of his administration. “We helped keep our teachers on the job,” he said, even as state and local governments have overseen the elimination of tens of thousands of teacher jobs over the past year. “We’re fighting for health care when you get sick,” he declared. Corporations, in accordance with the administration’s health care “reform” are eliminating or reducing benefits. At the same time, Obama is working with Republicans to slash trillions of dollars in federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid, the principle government health care programs. Referring to Detroit, Obama declared, “I see a city that is coming back.” The real unemployment rate in Detroit, including those who have fallen out of the workforce or are underemployed, is 50 percent. A third of the population lives below the official poverty line, including half of all children. Obama praised his “strong cities” initiative, in which the federal government is working closely with the city administration, led by Detroit Mayor David Bing, to “downsize” Detroit and cut off services for thousands of residents. Obama referred to a series of proposals that supposedly address the jobs crisis but will in fact do nothing. These include the continuation of long-term unemployment benefits, the extension of payroll tax cuts, and new trade deals. He stressed that any proposals would be based on agreement with Republicans. “Both parties can come together to solve our problems,” he said. “Folks got to get together.” The administration is also set to propose an “infrastructure bank” on Thursday, a measure that is backed by both the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce, the main corporate lobbying organization. The bank would provide funds to private companies involved in construction projects and would amount to another boondoggle for big business. Part of Obama’s supposed infrastructure plan is urging Congress to pass a routine funding bill authorizing projects already planned. Last week, Obama spoke in favor of this, flanked by Chamber of Commerce Chief Operating Officer David Chavern and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. The administration has also backed calls from businesses to use the jobs crisis as a pretext for eliminating any remaining regulations on corporate profiteering. Last week, Obama rejected a proposal from his own Environmental Protection Agency to limit smog emissions, a move that scientists calculate would save thousands of lives but would hurt company profits. As Obama’s support in the working class has waned—his poll numbers are at record lows—the president is relying even more on the trade unions, to promote illusions in the Democratic Party and suppress any struggles by the working class. In his speech, Obama highlighted the central role played by the unions in reducing working class living standards. “The recession had a terrible effect on state and local budgets, we all understand that,” Obama said. “The unions recognize that; they have already made tough concessions. In the private sector, we live in a more competitive global economy, so unions like the UAW understand that unions have to work with management to revamp business models, to innovate.” He also praised the role of the teachers’ unions in supporting his anti-teacher “reform” measures and the attack on public education as a whole. For their part, union officials, led by Trumka, praised Obama’s role in the restructuring of the auto industry beginning in 2009. This had supposedly saved thousands of “middle class” jobs and laid the foundation for the revitalization of Detroit. In fact, the forced bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler was used as an opportunity to enforce deep concessions on auto workers, including poverty-level wages for new hires, while tens of thousands of jobs were wiped out. The total number of auto workers in the US has fallen from about one million in 2008 to about 700,000 today—a decline of nearly one third. Trumka declared in his opening remarks that Obama had “worked with the auto workers and the companies to save the American auto industry.” By this is meant the administration’s collaboration with the United Auto Workers in enforcing the concessions, which have produced a surge in profits for the Big Three. “We stood by the auto industry, and we made some tough choices that were necessary to make it succeed,” Obama said. “And now the Big Three are turning a profit…” In exchange for the collaboration of the unions, Obama declared the support of the administration for “collective bargaining,” by which is meant not the right of workers to fight for better wages and conditions but the defense of the narrow institutional and financial interests of the union executives. There were several references to Wisconsin, where the unions have sought to defend “collective bargaining” by agreeing to all the budget cuts demanded by the Republican Governor, while channeling working class opposition behind the Democratic Party. Obama’s praise for the role of the unions in enforcing attacks on workers comes as the UAW is in negotiations with the auto companies to impose a new round of concessions, including the elimination of all hourly wage increases. The media has been compelled to acknowledge the growing opposition among auto workers, that the main point of conflict is not between the union and the companies, but between the union and the workers. * http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/08/barack-obama-one-of-greatest-tragedies.html * OBAMA HAS TWO AGENDAS. SERVICING BANKSTER DONORS, AND PUSHING OUR BORDERS OPEN FOR MORE ILLEGALS. HE KNOW WE WON’T BE PUNKED BY HIS PERFORMANCES THE SECOND TIME AROUND! * “Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).” * An initial term sheet outlining a possible settlement emerged in March, with institutions including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo being asked to pay about $20 billion that would go toward loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners. In exchange, the attorneys general participating in the deal would have agreed to sign broad releases preventing them from bringing further litigation on matters relating to the improper bank practices. * (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said. * YOU HAVE TO BE A BANKSTER OR LA RAZA SUPREMACIST FOR OPEN BORDERS TO WORK IN OBAMA’S CORRUPT WHITE HOUSE. FROM CREOLE FOLKS Obama Seeks Brother of "Chicago Mob Boss" for Top White House Post The roaches and con-artist, fake journalist on cable news are all lying about William Daley being all this and all that, this man is an open borders, down with America, free trade globalist. MSNBC and Greta "the Scientology" Van Susteren from Fox News are knowingly deceiving the public about D. Issa & his letter to "business owners"=which they made into such a BIG DAM DEAL, but no one says anything when Barrack Hussein Obama, comes around with all of these shady bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall St. Tycoons, which he puts in his cabinet. All of Obama's meeting with Wall Street asking, "What can I do for you?" is never something covered by Keith Oberman or Rachel Maddow. (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said. * 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 If you’ve wondered what’s happening to our country, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages” that create make-work government jobs, 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. * Praise for Obamanomics “The notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free market is one of progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to demonize corporations by day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is exploiting the big business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it to entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.” —Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author “‘Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.’ With this astute observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare the Obama administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the president’s populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Washington really works.” —David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama “Every libertarian and free-market conservative who still believes that large corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic liberty needs to read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who believes that expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit the common people.” —Congressman Ron Paul “It’s understandable for critics to condemn President Obama for his ‘socialism.’ But as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once more subtle and more sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while disproportionately punishing everyone else. So-called progressives are too clueless to notice, as usual, which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.” —Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History * • Hardcover: 256 pages • Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30, 2009) • Language: English • ISBN-10: 1596986123 • ISBN-13: 978-1596986121 * MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com * http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com http://www.FAIRUS.org http://www.JUDICIALWATCH.org http://www.ALIPAC.us

HHS: Obamacare-Funded Health Centers for 'Migrants' Won't Check Immigration Status | CNSnews.com - SO, OBAMA DID LIE! HIS OBAMACARE DOES INCLUDE LA RAZA!

HHS: Obamacare-Funded Health Centers for 'Migrants' Won't Check Immigration Status | CNSnews.com







YES! OBAMA DID LIE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THAT HIS OBAMACARE DID NOT INCLUDE ILLEGALS! OBAMA AND PELOSI HAD IT RIGGED SO THAT WHILE IT READS THAT IT PRECLUDES ILLEGALS, IT IS ILLEGAL TO ASK THE ILLEGAL WHAT THEIR STATUS IS! DEMS ARE THE PARTY of ILLEGALS!



HERE’S HOW IT WORKS: THE FEDERAL GOV REFUSES TO DEFEND OUR BORDERS AGAINST THE MEX INVASION, BUT THEN CUTS STATES’ REIMBURSEMENT FOR THE MEXICAN OCCUPATION.

PRIVATE HOSPITALS IN MEX-OCCUPIED CA ALONE MUST PAY OUT $1.3 BILLION PER YEAR IN MEDICAL TO ILLEGALS. MANY COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE. LOS ANGELES PAYS OUT $600 MILLION IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS, SOME OF WHICH IS “FREE” MEDICAL!

NOT  ONE LEGAL VOTED TO BE LOOTED BY MEXICO! AND IT ONLY GETS WORSE YEAR AFTER YEAR!

WASHINGTON STATE IS A SANCTUARY STATE THAT ENCOURAGES ILLEGALS TO OCCUPY SO THE  STATE CAN PAY MISERABLE WAGES. HOW MUCH DOES ALL THAT “CHEAP” MEXICAN LABOR REALLY COST LEGALS? IN MEXIFORNIA, ONE-THIRD OF ILLEGALS END UP ON WELFARE (SEE THE CASE STUDY BELOW FOR THE STAGGERING COST OF JUST ONE FAMILY).

They include small rural outposts like Othello Community Hospital in Washington State, which receives a steady flow of farmworkers who live in the country illegally.

NEW YORK TIMES

July 26, 2012

Hospitals Are Worried About Cut in Fund for the Uninsured


President Obama’s health care law is putting new strains on some of the nation’s most hard-pressed hospitals, by cutting aid they use to pay for emergency care for illegal immigrants, which they have long been required to provide.

The federal government has been spending $20 billion annually to reimburse these hospitals — most in poor urban and rural areas — for treating more than their share of the uninsured, including illegal immigrants. The health care law will eventually cut that money in half, based on the premise that fewer people will lack insurance after the law takes effect.

But the estimated 11 million people now living illegally in the United States are not covered by the health care law. Its sponsors, seeking to sidestep the contentious debate overimmigration, excluded them from the law’s benefits.

As a result, so-called safety-net hospitals said the cuts would deal a severe blow to their finances.

The hospitals are coming under this pressure because many of their uninsured patients are illegal immigrants, and because their large pools of uninsured or poorly insured patients are not expected to be reduced significantly under the Affordable Care Act, even as federal aid shrinks.

The hospitals range from prominent public ones, like Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, to neighborhood mainstays like Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn and Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego. They include small rural outposts like Othello Community Hospital in Washington State, which receives a steady flow of farmworkers who live in the country illegally.

No matter where they are, all hospitals are obliged under federal law to treat anyone who arrives at the emergency room, regardless of their immigration status.

“That’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and not just in New York — in Texas, in California, in Florida,” Lutheran’s chief executive, Wendy Z. Goldstein, said.

Lutheran Medical Center is in the Sunset Park neighborhood, where low-wage earning Chinese and Latino communities converge near an expressway. Hospitals are not allowed to record patients’ immigration status, but Ms. Goldstein estimated that 20 percent of its patients were what she called “the undocumented — not only uninsured, but uninsurable.”

She said Congressional staff members acknowledged that the health care law would scale back the money that helps pay for emergency care for such patients, but were reluctant to tackle the issue.

“I was told in Washington that they understand that this is a problem, but immigration is just too hot to touch,” she said.

The Affordable Care Act sets up state exchanges to reduce the cost of commercial health insurance, but people must prove citizenship or legal immigration status to take part. They must show similar documentation to apply for Medicaid benefits that are expanded under the law.

The act did call for increasing a little-known national network of 1,200 community health centers that provide primary care to the needy, regardless of their immigration status. But that plan, which could potentially steer more of the uninsured away from costly hospital care, was curtailed by Congressional budget cuts last year.

That leaves hospitals like Lutheran, which is nonprofit and has run a string of such primary care centers for 40 years, facing cuts at both ends.

On a recent weekday in Lutheran’s emergency room, a Chinese mother of two stared sadly through the porthole of an isolation unit. The woman had active tuberculosis and needed surgery to drain fluid from one lung, said Josh Liu, a patient liaison.

The disease had been discovered during a checkup at one of Lutheran’s primary care centers, where the sliding scale fee starts at $15. But the woman, an illegal immigrant, had no way to pay for the surgery.

Another patient, a gaunt 44-year-old man from Ecuador, had been in New York eight years, installing wood floors, one in Rockefeller Center. The man had been afraid to seek care because he feared deportation. Finally, the pain in his stomach was too much to bear.

Dr. Daniel J. Giaccio, leading the residents on their rounds, used the notches on the man’s worn belt to underscore his diagnosis, severe B-12 deficiency anemia. The woodworker had lost 30 pounds in a month, and his hands and feet were numb. Reversing the damage could take months.

“This is a severe case of sensory loss,” Dr. Giaccio said. “Usually we pick it up much sooner.”

In some states, including New York, hospitals caring for illegal immigrants in life-threatening situations can seek payment case by case, from a program known as emergency Medicaid. But the program has many restrictions and will not make up for the cuts in the $20 billion pool, hospital executives said.

Groups that favor more restrictive immigration policies said they agreed that the cuts in the $20 billion fund were a burden. They said hospitals obviously had a duty to provide emergency care for everybody, including illegal immigrants.

“I kind of like living in a society where we don’t let people die on the steps of the emergency room,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of one such group, the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.

But he said the answer lay in enforcing laws, so that illegal immigrants leave the country, not in extending health coverage.

“There is no ideal resolution to the problem, other than reducing the illegal population,” he said. “Incorporating illegal immigrants into health exchanges or directly taxpayer-funded health care legitimizes their presence.”

The Obama administration said the Affordable Care Act supported safety-net hospitals in other ways, pointing to measures that raise payments for primary care and give bonuses for improvements in quality.

“We are taking important steps to make health care more affordable and accessible for millions of Americans,” Erin Shields Britt, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an e-mail. “Health reform isn’t the place to fix our broken immigration system.”

With illegal immigration an issue in the presidential campaign, many politicians continue to steer clear of addressing the cuts.

Hospitals in New York State now receive $2.84 billion of the nation’s $20 billion in so-called disproportionate share hospital payments.

Those payments start shrinking in 2014 under the law, and drop to $10 billion by 2019.

“It is a difficult time to really advocate around this issue, because there is so much antipathy against new immigrants,” said Alan Aviles, president and chief executive of the Health and Hospitals Corporation.

The corporation runs New York City’s public hospitals, which treated 480,000 uninsured patients last year, an estimated 40 percent of them illegal immigrants. The same worries haunt tiny Othello Community Hospital, in Washington state’s rural Adams County, where it is the only hospital for miles around.

Last year, the state began requiring that participants in a basic health plan prove that they are citizens or legal residents.

As a consequence, 4,000 out of the 4,400 patients at the nearby primary care center, mostly immigrant farmworkers, lost their coverage, leaving Othello more financially vulnerable when those people need emergency care.

In Central California, Harry Foster, director of the Family HealthCare Network, another primary care center, called the Affordable Care Act “a double-edged sword.”

Many low-wage earning citizens now lack employer-sponsored health insurance, and the health care industry is already competing for those who will gain coverage through the law. But no one is competing to treat those it leaves out, he said.

“We will receive more and more of those patients,” he said, estimating that 40 percent of the area’s residents were illegal immigrant farmworkers. “But financially, we can’t take on all the uninsured patients in the area, to the exclusion of all the others, and survive.”

In many ways Lutheran, a century-old hospital that refurbished a defunct factory to serve as its hub in the 1960s, has been a prototype of the law’s new model: coordinating primary and preventive care to improve health outcomes while curbing costs. Yet it stands to lose $25 million from the cuts.

“This is an unintended consequence of the law,” said Ms. Goldstein, the hospital’s chief executive. “But so far, nobody is doing anything to resolve it.”

*

MEXIFORNIA



STUDY OF MEXICANS FEEDING OFF THE AMERICAN GRAVY TRAIN:



Jose Herria emigrated illegally from Mexico to Stockton, Calif., in 1997 to work as a fruit picker. He brought with him his wife, Felipa, and three children, 19, 12 and 8 – all illegals. When Felipa gave birth to her fourth child, daughter Flor, the family had what is referred to as an "anchor baby" – an American citizen by birth who provided the entire Silverio clan a ticket to remain in the U.S. permanently. But Flor was born premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator and cost the San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, oldest daughter Lourdes married an illegal alien gave birth to a daughter, too. Her name is Esmeralda. And Felipa had yet another child, Cristian. The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding for the family. Flor gets $600 a month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. While the Silverios earned $18,000 last year picking fruit, they picked up another $12,000 for their two "anchor babies." While President Bush says the U.S. needs more "cheap labor" from south of the border to do jobs Americans aren't willing to do, the case of the Silverios shows there are indeed uncalculated costs involved in the importation of such labor – public support and uninsured medical costs. In fact, the increasing number of illegal aliens coming into the United States is forcing the closure of hospitals, spreading previously vanquished diseases and threatening to destroy America's prized health-care system, says a report in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. "The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences," writes Madeleine Pelner Cosman, author of the report. "We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen." According to her study, 84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbursed tax on the system. "Anchor babies," the author writes, "born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income." In addition, the report says, "many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease." While politicians often mention there are 43 million without health insurance in this country, the report estimates that at least 25 percent of those are illegal immigrants. The figure could be as high as 50 percent. Not being insured does not mean they don't get medical care. Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985, hospitals are obligated to treat the uninsured without reimbursement. "Government imposes viciously stiff fines and penalties on any physician and any hospital refusing to treat any patient that a zealous prosecutor deems an emergency patient, even though the hospital or physician screened and declared the patient's illness or injury non-emergency," says the report. "But government pays neither hospital nor physician for treatments. In addition to the fiscal attack on medical facilities and personnel, EMTALA is a handy truncheon with which to pummel politically unpopular physicians by falsely accusing them of violating EMTALA." According to the report, between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed because half their services became unpaid. Another 24 California hospitals verge on closure, the author writes. "American hospitals welcome 'anchor babies,'" says the report. "Illegal alien women come to the hospital in labor and drop their little anchors, each of whom pulls its illegal alien mother, father, and siblings into permanent residency simply by being born within our borders. Anchor babies are citizens, and instantly qualify for public welfare aid: Between 300,000 and 350,000 anchor babies annually become citizens because of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside." Among the organizations directing illegal aliens into America's medical systems, according to the report, are the Ford Foundation-funded Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association's Commission on Immigration Policy, Practice, and Pro Bono, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the National Council of La Raza, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Migration Policy Institute, the National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Because drug addiction and alcoholism are classified as diseases and disabilities, the fiscal toll on the health-care system rises.

*

WILL MEXICO BANKRUPT THE UNITED STATES? HASN’T IT ALREADY BANKRUPTED MEXIFORNIA?... AND MURDERED THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS (LEGALS)!


BOOK: Mexifornia: SHATTERING OF AN AMERICAN DREAM (illegals call it their DREAM ACT)



http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/book-mexifornia-shattering-of-american.html


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LOS ANGELES ANCHOR BABY WELFARE PROGRAM:


THESE FIGURES ON WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY ARE DATED. IT NOT EXCEEDS $600 MILLION PER YEAR!!! (source: Los Angeles County & JUDICIAL WATCH)



http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1949085/posts



*



Where To Go When Your Local Emergency Room Goes Bankrupt?"

THE QUESTION SHOULD BE WHERE DO ILLEGALS GO FOR “FREE”MEDICAL.

During the past ten years 84 California hospitals have declared bankruptcy and closed their Emergency Rooms forever. Financially crippled by legislative and judicial mandates to treat illegal aliens have bankrupted hospitals! In 2010, in Los Angeles County alone, over 2 million illegal aliens recorded visits to county emergency rooms for both routine and emergency care. Per official figures, the cost is $1,000 dollars for every taxpayer in Los Angeles County.

http://justcommonsense-lostinamerica.blogspot.com/2011/03/where-to-go-when-your-local-emergency.html

*



MEXICAN SUPREMACY



Joe Legal vs. Jose Illegal



Joe Legal vs. Jose Illegal

Here is an example of why hiring illegal aliens is not economically productive for the State of California...
You have 2 families..."Joe Legal" and "Jose Illegal". Both families have 2 parents, 2 children and live in California.

"Joe Legal" works in construction, has a Social Security Number, and makes $25.00 per hour with payroll taxes deducted...."Jose Illegal" also works in construction, has "NO" Social Security Number, and gets paid $15.00 cash "under the table".


Joe Legal...$25.00 per hour x 40 hours $1000.00 per week, $52,000 per year
Now take 30% away for state and federal tax
Joe Legal now has $31,231.00

Jose Illegal...$15.00 per hour x 40 hours $600.00 per week, $31,200.00 per year
Jose Illegal pays no taxes...
Jose Illegal now has $31,200.00

Joe Legal pays Medical and Dental Insurance with limited coverage
$1000.00 per month
$12,000.00 per year
Joe Legal now has $19,231.00

Jose Illegal has full Medical and Dental coverage through the state and local clinics at a cost of $0.00 per year
Jose Illegal still has $31,200.00

Joe Legal makes too much money is not eligible for Food Stamps or welfare
Joe Legal pays for food
$1,000.00 per month
$12,000.00 per year
Joe Legal now has $ 7,231.00

Jose Illegal has no documented income and is eligible for Food Stamps and Welfare
Jose Illegal still has $31,200.00

Joe Legal pays rent of
$1,000.00 per month
$12,000.00 per year
Joe Legal is now in the hole... minus (-) $4,769.00

Jose Illegal receives a $500 per month Federal rent subsidy
Jose Illegal pays rent
$500.00 per month
$6,000.00 per year
Jose Illegal still has $25,200.00

Joe Legal now works overtime on Saturdays or gets a part time job after work.

Jose Illegal has nights and weekends off to enjoy with his family.

Joe Legal's and Jose Illegal's children both attend the same school. Joe Legal pays for his children's lunches while Jose Illegal's children get a government sponsored lunch.

Jose Illegal's children have an after school ESL program. Joe Legal's children go home.
Joe Legal and Jose Illegal both enjoy the same Police and Fire Services, but Joe paid for them and Jose did not pay.


Don't vote/support any politician that supports illegal aliens...
Its WAY PAST time to take a stand for America and Americans!



LOS ANGELES UNDER MEX OCCUPATION:



Additionally, the county spends $550 million on public safety and nearly $500 million on healthcare for illegal aliens.



Welfare for illegals, aka, Obama’s“Unregistered voters” soars!





JUDICIAL WATCH.org



County’s Monthly Welfare Tab For Illegal Aliens $52 Million



09/07/2010





As the mainstream media focuses on a study that reveals a sharp decline in the nation’s illegal immigrant population, monthly welfare payments to children of undocumented aliens increased to $52 million in one U.S. county alone.



The hoopla surrounding last week’s news that the annual flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. dropped by two-thirds in the past decade overlooked an important matter; the cost of educating, incarcerating and medically treating illegal aliens hasn’t decreased along with it, but rather skyrocketed to the tune of tens of billions of dollars annually.





THIS FIGURE DOES NOT INCLUDE EXTRA MILLIONS PAID FOR ANCHOR BABIES



Those figures don’t even include the extra millions that local municipalities dish out on welfare payments to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, commonly known as anchor babies. In Los Angeles County alone that figure increased by nearly $4 million in the last year, sticking taxpayers with a whopping $52 million tab to provide illegal immigrants’ offspring with food stamps and other welfare benefits for just one month.



That means the nation’s most populous county, in the midst of a dire financial crisis, will spend more than $600 million this year to provide families headed by illegal immigrants with welfare benefits. In each of the past two years Los Angeles County taxpayers have spent about half a billion dollars just to cover the welfare and food-stamp costs of illegal immigrants. Additionally, the county spends $550 million on public safety and nearly $500 million on healthcare for illegal aliens.



About a quarter of the county’s welfare and food stamp issuances go to parents who reside in the United States illegally and collect benefits for their anchor babies, according to the figures from L.A. County’s Department of Social Services. Nationwide, Americans pay around $22 billion annually to provide illegal immigrants with welfare perks that include food assistance programs such as free school lunches in public schools, food stamps and a nutritional program (known as WIC) for low-income women and their children.



MEXICO EXPORTS THEIR POOR. OUR GOVERNMENT SENDS OUT INVITATIONS IN THE FORM OF OUR JOBS, WELFARE, AND “FREE” BIRTHING.

IT’S WORKED OUT QUITE NICELY AND ENABLES THE MEXICAN RULING OLIGARCHY TO KEEP THE MEXICAN ECONOMY IN THE HANDS OF RICH MEXICANS. IT’S NEVER BEEN DIFFERENT IN MEXICO!

THERE ARE MORE BILLIONAIRES IN MEXICO THAN IN SAUDI ARABIA OR SWITZERLAND.

THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD IS NO LONGER LA RAZA DONOR BILL GATES, BUT MEX CARLOS SLIM. SLIM OWNS THE MEX PHONE MONOPOLY, WHICH IS WHY MEXICAN PAY THE HIGHEST PHONE RATES IN THE HEMISPHERE!

CARLOS SLIM ALSO OWNS NEARLY 10% OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, WHICH IS WHY YOU WILL NEVER READ AN ARTICLE IN THAT PAPER WHICH IS NOT PRO-AMNESTY, OPEN BORDERS, ILLEGALS ARE “GOOD” CITIZENS!

IT’S THE SAME ON THIS SIDE OF THE BORDER! OUR GOVERNMENT FRONTS FOR THE CORPORATE INTERESTS. MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY OF LA RAZA “THE RACE”. THE U.S. CHAMBER of COMMERCE, FRONTING FOR WALL STREET’S DEMAND FOR EVER DEPRESSED WAGES, FOR EVER HIGHER CORPORATE PROFITS, DEMANDS OPEN BORDERS, HORDES MORE ILLEGALS, AMNESTY, AND SURE AS HELL NO E-VERIFY!

THE MEXICAN INVASION AND OCCUPATION DEPRESSES WAGES FOR LEGALS $300 TO $400 BILLION PER YEAR!!!

IT’S ALL ABOUT FLOODING THE COUNTRY WITH ILLEGALS FOR ALL THAT STAGGERINGLY EXPENSIVE “CHEAP” MEXICAN LABOR!

WE ARE MEXICO’S WELFARE AND PRISON SYSTEM! HERE IT’S MERELY ONE MORE FORM OF CORPORATE WELFARE!

Illegal immigrants drain the tax dollars

Congressional study shows illegal immigrants sap tax dollars

The Business Journal of Phoenix - by Ty Young Phoenix Business Journal

A study by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday backs up the view that undocumented immigrants sap more tax dollars than they provide, especially in education, health care and law enforcement.

The study pulled together reports from the past five years, using data from sources including the Pew Hispanic Center, the Rand Corp., the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and various universities. The Congressional study also incorporated facts from states, including Arizona, but its authors acknowledged there was no aggregate estimate that could be applied to the entire country.

The report says that in 1990, 90 percent of undocumented immigrants primarily were in six states: California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Texas.

By 2004, undocumented immigrants had increased tenfold in other states, most notably Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, according to statistics from the Pew Hispanic Center.

The report estimates there are 12 million undocumented immigrants nationwide. Of those, 60 percent are uninsured and 50 percent of the children are uninsured. Again using 2004 statistics from the Pew Hispanic Center the average income of undocumented immigrants was $27,400 while Americans earned $47,800. The difference puts undocumented immigrants in a lower tax bracket, thus reducing the amount of federal and state income taxes generated.

The study also showed that while undocumented workers represented just 5 percent of state and federal service costs, their tax revenue did not offset the amount spent by government. The authors of the study stated that, "the general consensus is that unauthorized immigrants impose a net cost on state and local budgets. However, no agreement exists as to the size of, or even the best way of measuring, that cost at a national level."

In education, which the study notes is the largest single expenditure in state and local budgets, multiple states reported 20 to 40 percent higher costs educating non-English speaking students, many of whom come from the homes of undocumented immigrant parents. Using New Mexico statistics from 2004 as a model, education spending on undocumented immigrants comprised $67 million of the state's $3 billion education budget.

The study estimates there are 53.3 million school-age children in the U.S., 2 million of whom are undocumented immigrants and another 3 million who are legal citizens, but whose parents are not.

Undocumented immigrants are more likely to access emergency rooms and urgent care facilities because most do not have health care, the study said. In Arizona and other border areas, states paid nearly $190 million in health care costs for undocumented immigrants in 2000, the study reported. The amount, which the study says likely has risen since then, represented one-quarter of all uncompensated health care costs in those states that year.

While the report found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than American natives, it said states still bear a large cost for the legal process. Based on a report from the U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition from 2001, counties from the four states that border Mexico spent more than $108 million on law enforcement activities involving undocumented immigrants. San Diego County in California spent nearly half of that, with more than $50 million going into law enforcement activities involving undocumented immigrants.


“In his state of the union address to the Mexican nation, Calderon established his imperialistic imperatives: "I have said that Mexico does not stop at its border, that wherever there is a Mexican, there is Mexico. And, for this reason, the government action on behalf of our countrymen is guided by principles, for the defense and protection of their rights."

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"We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him." --- La Raza early founders, Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez.

LOS ANGELES COUNTY, WHERE HALF OF ALL JOBS GO TO ILLEGALS, PUTS OUT $600 MILLION PER YEAR IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS, PRIMARILY ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS.

MEXICO ANCHORS THEIR WELFARE SYSTEM IN OUR BORDERS WITH ANCHORS.

“Through love of having children, we are going to take over.” AUGUSTIN CEBADA, BROWN BERETS, THE LA RAZA FASCIST PARTY


WE ARE MEXICO’S WELFARE SYSTEM…

MEXICO ANCHORS THEIR OCCUPATION OF OUR COUNTRY BY BREEDING “ANCHORS” AT GRINGO COST!

“What the Pew estimate underlines is that this is a big problem,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a research group in Washington that advocates reduced immigration.“It really is a subversion of national independence for people who break into your country then to demand that their kids be U.S. citizens.”


August 11, 2010

Study Looks at Babies Born to Illegal Immigrants


About 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 — or 8 percent — had at least one parent who was an illegal immigrant, according to a study published Wednesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

Because they were born in this country, the babies of illegal immigrants are United States citizens. In all in 2008, four million children who were American citizens had at least one parent who was in the country illegally, the Pew study found.


Children of illegal immigrants make up 7 percent of all people in the country younger than 18 years old, according to the study, which is based on March 2009 census figures, the most recent data on immigrant families. Nearly four out of five of those children — 79 percent —are American citizens because they were born here.


About 85 percent of the parents who are illegal immigrants are Hispanic, the Pew Center reported.


The Pew study comes as lawmakers in Washington have been debating whether to consider changing the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The controversy erupted after Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said in July that he might offer an amendment to revoke birthright citizenship for the American-born children of illegal immigrants.


Mr. Graham’s comments touched a nerve with many Americans, who called in to talk shows to question whether the children of immigrants who have violated the law by remaining in the United States should be granted citizenship. But it was less clear that there was strong support for altering the Constitution to address the problem.


A nationwide survey in June by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a group affiliated with the Hispanic Center, found that 56 percent of those polled opposed changing the 14th Amendment, while 41 percent supported it.


The study by the Pew Hispanic Center casts light on an issue raised by Mr. Graham that prompted the current debate. In an interview with Fox News last month, Mr. Graham said that many illegal immigrants were crossing the border to have babies in this country to gain citizenship for their children. “They come here to drop a child,” Mr. Graham said.


The Pew figures showed that over 80 percent of mothers in the country illegally had been here for more than a year, and that more than half had been in the country for five years or more, said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center and the co-author of the study, along with Paul Taylor, the center’s director.


“The combination of the growing undocumented population through 2007, with more staying in the country longer, creates a situation where we have seen increasing numbers of these births over the last six or seven years,” Mr. Passel said. “Because the immigrants are staying here, this is a young population, and they get married and form families.”

Republican leaders and conservatives have been divided over Mr. Graham’s proposal for a constitutional amendment.

“What the Pew estimate underlines is that this is a big problem,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a research group in Washington that advocates reduced immigration.“It really is a subversion of national independence for people who break into your country then to demand that their kids be U.S. citizens.”

But Mr. Krikorian, a conservative, does not favor an immediate effort to amend the citizenship clause of the Constitution. He said he wants to see tougher enforcement to reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the country.


“The point is to shrink the illegal population and prevent new illegals from coming in,” he said, “before it’s appropriate to have the constitutional debate.”



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For some, a struggle WHO THINKS ABOUT THE STRUGGLE OF THE AMERICANS?


Some illegal immigrants have used stolen Social Security numbers to qualify for health programs -- a form of medical identity theft increasingly on hospital radars. Many more scramble to pay for their medicine and doctors visits in cash, a challenge in an economy where day-laborer work has dried up.
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HERE’S HOW WELL MEXICO’S WELFARE SYSTEM IN OUR BORDERS WORKS!

AN AMERICAN SEES & SPEAKS – Illegals and the MELTDOWN OF OUR HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS ACROSS THE COUNTRY – The Ever Expanding Mexican Welfare System



WHY WE ARE IN SUCH A MONEY SQUEEZE


Florida ER doctor's notes


Having spent three weeks in a hospital in Naples, Florida with my wife I couldn’t help noticing what was going on in the hospital and I had a lot of time to talk to the doctors and nurses about what I had observed. Below is a commentary from an ER Doctor. Do you think this might be a big reason our health care system and our social security system are so screwed up? Do you think this might be a big reason our taxes keep going up? Who do you think these people are going to vote for?


From a Florida ER doctor:


"I live and work in a state overrun with illegals. They make more money having kids than we earn working full-time. Today I had a 25-year old with 8 kids - thats right 8; all illegal anchor babies and she had the nicest nails, cell phone, hand bag, clothing, etc. She makes about $1,500 monthly for each; you do the math. I used to say, We are the dumbest nation on earth. Now I must say and sadly admit: WE are the dumbest people on earth (that includes ME) for we elected the idiot idealogues who have passed the bills that allow this. Sorry, but we need a revolution. Vote them all out in 2010. "



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Mexico Promotes Free U.S. Healthcare For Illegal Immigrants



Time to wake up people! With unemployment at 12% and the state going broke, our tax dollars are going to pay for healthcare for hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens. To the tune of over a billion dollars a year!

Read on:

Mexico's government operates programs in about a dozen American cities that refers its nationals--living in the U.S. illegally--to publicly funded health centers where they can get free medical care without being turned over to immigration authorities.
The program is called Ventanillas de Salud (Health Windows) in Spanish and its mission is to help illegal immigrants find U.S. hospitals, clinics and other government programs where they can get free services without being deported for violating federal immigration laws.

Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego and Indiana are among the cities where Mexican consulates operate the health referral system which annually costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars. In Los Angeles County alone, illegal immigrants cost taxpayers nearly $440 million in health services annually and a whopping $1.1 billion statewide.

(THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES PUTS OUT $600 MILLION PER YEAR IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS)

The Mexican consul in Los Angeles proudly announced that nearly 300,000 Mexicans in the area have benefited from his government's health referral program, which he says actually saves the county money by encouraging immigrants to seek preventive care rather than waiting for more expensive emergency treatment.

The Southern California operation promises to assess "consulate clients" for eligibility to government-funded health insurance and other primary care services and offers free legal assistance to those who are denied coverage. Its goal is to improve access to health services for immigrants of Mexican origin by formalizing a health education, medical home referral and insurance enrollment program.

In Chicago, the Mexican consul's Spanish-language web site heavily promotes the Illinois Department of Health's low-cost prescription medicine program for illegal aliens and various free medical services throughout the state. It encourages all Mexicans in the area to pursue the valuable U.S. government-financed services for their entire family.

The Indiana-based program boasts that it serves thousands of "Mexican nationals" living in that state as well as Ohio, Kentucky and southern Illinois. Mexican officials claim that its highly successful pro-health program sends out a clear message to other Mexican consulates throughout the country and the world.

Although these programs facilitate people to remain in the country illegally, Mexico is working hard to expand them to all 47 U.S. consulates to better serve its nationals. In the meantime, U.S. taxpayers will keep picking up the exorbitant tab of medically treating the millions who live in the country illegally.



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SURGE OF HEAVY BREEDING MEXICANS

More immigrants

While the census information did not include demographic breakouts, immigration groups were quick to claim that immigrants, and particularly Latinos, accounted for much of the population growth, both here and across the country.

"Today's data, coupled with recently released Census Bureau estimates, demonstrate that the Latino population has significantly influenced how congressional seats are apportioned among the states," the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said in a statement.

But the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports controlled immigration, called the population increase "enormous and unwelcome" and a further strain on the country's natural resources.

"It is increasingly clear that our immigration policies are divorced from the social, economic and environmental realities that face our nation," said its president, Dan Stein.

Latinos represent the fastest-growing demographic group in the United States as well as in Washington state. Census estimates for the 2005-2009 period released this month show the Latino population in Washington grew 41 percent since 2000.

Nationally, one-quarter of all births are to Latino mothers, compared with 19 percent in Washington state, according to state figures.