More than 500,000 homeless in the US
By
Kate Randall
21 November 2015
More than a half million people were homeless in the United States
this year, nearly a quarter of them children, according to a new report.
The homelessness crisis is a stark indicator of the social reality in
2015 America and corresponds to a scarcity of affordable housing and
dwindling wages for low-income workers and their families.The report from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released Thursday counted 564,708 people homeless, both sheltered and unsheltered. These figures, gathered by volunteers on a given night in January 2015, are undoubtedly an undercount. Many of those living in motels, doubling up with relatives and friends or living on the streets are likely not represented in the tally.
Twenty-three percent, or 127,787, of the nation’s homeless are children under the age of 18, according to HUD. However, this figure is at odds with statistics from another branch of the federal government. According to the Department of Education, there are 1.36 million homeless students in the nation’s K-12 public schools, double the number in 2006, before the onset of the financial collapse.
According to HUD, 206,286 people were in homeless families with children, or 36.5 percent of the HUD total. Six percent of these homeless families are chronically homeless, in which the head of household has a disability and has been homeless for a year, or has experienced at least four episodes of homelessness over the past three years.
The HUD figures show homelessness declining by 2 percent between 2014 and 2015. But even if these numbers are taken as good coin, this represents a minuscule decline that hardly makes a dent in the homeless population.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there is a shortage of 7 million units of affordable housing throughout the US, creating a desperate situation for workers and their families as they search for decent and affordable accommodations.
As the majority of working people feel the housing squeeze, they face declining real wages. According to a recent National Employment Law Projet report, workers’ wages have declined by 4 percent, after adjusting for inflation, between 2009 and 2014.
The vast majority of the US population has not experienced the benefits of the “economic recovery,” proclaimed by the Obama administration in mid-2009. Homelessness is one of the brutal consequences of these conditions.
Of the 564,708 people counted as homeless by HUD in January 2015, 69 percent were staying in sheltered locations, and 31 percent were unsheltered, living in places unfit for human habitation, such as under bridges, in cars or in abandoned buildings.
More than half of the homeless population is concentrated in five states:
· California: 21 percent or 115,738 people
· New York: 16 percent or 88,250 people
· Florida: 6 percent or 35,900 people
· Texas: 4 percent or 23,678 people
· Massachusetts: 4 percent or 21,135 people
While homelessness declined in 33 states and the District of Columbia between 2014 and 2015, according to the report, 17 states experienced an increase. New York State experienced an explosion of homelessness, rising by 7,660 people, or by 9.5 percent in one year. Since 2007, New York has seen a staggering 41 percent rise, with 25,649 people added to the homeless ranks.
More than one in five homeless people are located in the nation’s two largest urban areas: New York City, with 75,323 (14 percent of US total); Los Angeles (city and county), with 41,174 (7 percent). These are followed by Seattle/King County, Washington with 10,122; San Diego (city and county), 8,742; Las Vegas/Clark County, Nevada, 7,509; and the District of Columbia, 7,298.
Sixty-three percent of the homeless population are individuals without children. Of these 358,422 people, 57 percent were in emergency shelters, transitional housing programs, or safe havens. The remaining 43 percent were living rough—on the streets, in parks, abandoned buildings and vehicles. Most homeless individuals are men (72 percent).
Nine of every 10 homeless individuals are over 24 years of age. Fifty-four percent are white, while African Americans are disproportionately represented, accounting for 36 percent of the total. About 17 percent of homeless individuals are Hispanic or Latino.
HUD defines unaccompanied youths as persons under age 25 who are not accompanied by a parent or guardian and do not reside with their children. There were 36,907 unaccompanied homeless youth in January 2015, including 87 percent ages 18-24 and 13 percent under age 18. More than half of unaccompanied youth under age 18 were counted in unsheltered locations.
A quarter of all unaccompanied youth, 8,964, live in five major US cities: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco and San Jose, California.
HUD added a new category for 2015—parenting youth—defined as an individual under age 25 who is the parent or legal guardian of one or more children who sleep in the same place with him/her. There were 9,901 parenting youth in January 2015.
Homeless unaccompanied youth and parenting youth are those hardest hit by unemployment, low wages and student loan debt. This segment of the population, with or without children, is the most likely to live with relatives or friends and go uncounted by HUD and other surveys.
More than one in ten homeless adults are veterans. There were 47,725 homeless veterans on a single night in January 2015, or 11 percent of the 436,921 homeless adults. Veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea and the countless US imperialist exploits are included in this total.
Returning veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, brain injuries, substance abuse and other maladies struggle to find housing. Twenty-four percent of homeless veterans (11,311) live in California. Three other states had at least 2,000 homeless veterans: Florida (3,926), New York (2,399), and Texas (2,393).
In January 2015, 83,170 individuals were chronically homeless in the US. Two-thirds of these individuals, or 54,815 people, were staying in unsheltered locations, more than twice the national rate for all homeless people.
The number of unsheltered people with chronic patterns of homelessness increased by 4 percent over the past year, the first such rise since 2011. The number of unsheltered chronically homeless rose by 4,409 in Los Angeles alone.
Despite the massive increase in homelessness since the beginning of the financial crisis, funding for public housing has been repeatedly slashed in the post-2009 period. A report by the San Francisco-based Western Regional Advocacy Project noted that “HUD funding for new public housing units...has been zero since 1996,” while “Capital available to perform maintenance in 2012 [was] $1,875 billion,” representing a fall of $625 million over three years.
Mass homelessness is only the most acute manifestation of America’s housing crisis. According to a study published by Harvard University’s Joint Center For Housing Studies in June, the homeownership rate for 35-44 year-olds, which has been plunging for decades, has hit the lowest levels since the 1960s. Only slightly more than one-third of households headed by those aged 25-35 own their own homes.
The persistence of mass homelessness in the United States, despite six years of “economic recovery,” is an expression of the persistence of mass unemployment, falling wages, the slashing of social services, and the increasingly unaffordable living costs in America’s major cities, including Los Angeles and New York, that are home to a disproportionate share of America’s billionaires.
According to a poll released earlier this month, half of New Yorkers are “either just getting by or finding it difficult to manage financially.” More than one in five said they did not have enough money to buy food over the past year, and 17 percent said that they “have had times over the last year when they lacked the money to provide adequate shelter for their family.”
In the New York borough of Manhattan, median rent prices have grown by 9.5 percent over the past year. To afford a typical Manhattan apartment, one would have to pay over $40,000 a year in rent alone, 30 percent higher than the median wage in the United States. Not surprisingly, one recent study found that it is impossible for any worker making the minimum wage of $8.75 per hour to afford an apartment in any part of New York City—defined as spending no more than 30 percent of monthly income on rent.
The response of the “progressive” administration of Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio to the deepening housing crisis in New York has been to further privatize public housing and drive up costs for low-income residents. De Blasio’s public housing plan, dubbed NextGen NYCHA, would jack up housing fees, such as parking, by up to several thousand dollars a year for low-income residents, while turning over more than 10,000 apartments and 11 acres of prime real estate to private developers.
BLOG: THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS OUT $2 BILLION PER YEAR FOR THE LA RAZA MEXICAN- DEMOCRAT PARTY'S ANCHOR BABY BREEDING FOR WELFARE PROGRAM.
THIS SAME COUNTY HAS A TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY CALCULATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION.
THE CITY AND COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HAVE MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS. THEY HAVE NO PROBLEM GETTING JOBS.
LOS ANGELES IS THE WESTERN GATEWAY FOR THE MEX DRUG CARTELS.
L.A. tops nation in chronic homeless population
L.A.'s chronically homeless population has grown 55%, to 12,536, since 2013, accounting for almost 15% of all people in that category, HUD reported. More than one-third of the nation's chronically homeless live in California, the agency added.
L.A.'s spike outpaced New York City's one-year increase, the second largest, 3 to 1, the report said. The number of chronically homeless people nationwide remained basically flat, rising 1%, the report said.
"We have a long way to go," HUD Secretary Julian Castro said during a conference call with reporters.
The spread of long-term homelessness in L.A. County has alarmed communities from Sylmar to San Pedro, where residents complain that their quality of life is threatened by crime and trash from unsightly encampments.
"I have found out that my homeless neighbors can move in and set up their shelters on the sidewalk outside of my house," San Pedro resident Elaine Jenkins told the City Council during a hearing this week on the homeless crisis. "They can drag up old mattresses, sofas and spread trash everywhere. They can use the streets as their public restroom."
The nationwide numbers came as a disappointment to HUD, which had extended a goal of ending chronic homelessness from the end of the year to 2017.
"We are aggressively pursuing every tool, including actively engaging our state and federal partners, to help save lives with El Niño on the horizon," Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement.
The government classifies disabled people who go without housing for a year, or who land in the street several times over three years, as chronically homeless. These individuals are the most vulnerable and visible among the ranks of the homeless. They are also the most expensive and the most difficult to dislodge.
Some bounce back and forth between ambulance trips, hospital jailings or mental health confinements. Outreach workers can spend months coaxing them out of the street life to which they have adapted, and counseling, substance abuse treatment and case management can be required for months or even years to keep them in housing.
The HUD data was largely derived from a street count conducted over three days last January. Castro and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert A. McDonald joined Garcetti in taking part in the skid row count. Los Angeles city and county figures exclude statistics from Pasadena, Long Beach and Glendale, which administer their homeless programs separately.
Castro blamed the agency's failure to reach its target on rising rents and federal funding cutbacks.
"The U.S. is experiencing an affordable housing crisis and shrinking federal budgets," Castro said. "These resource constraints have slowed down the progress."
Mike Neely, a commissioner with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, said the city had fallen behind on building affordable housing.
"We're working very hard to get these units developed, but man," Neely said. "Who is taking up all the units are the millennials, the middle-class and upper middle-class individuals."
The City Council this week declared a shelter crisis, and laid plans for expanding its winter shelter program and for authorizing people who live in their cars and RVs to sleep in church parking lots.
Garcetti ruled out an immediate declaration of a state of emergency, which some council members had sought. Garcetti said he was waiting for more information from the city attorney.
Subject to council approval, an emergency declaration would empower the mayor to requisition resources and issue orders that he deems "necessary for the protection of life and property," according to a report from City Atty. Mike Feuer's office. The city twice declared emergencies in the 1980s to provide shelter to homeless people.
The mayor could also call on the governor and the president to issue emergency proclamations for Los Angeles, but officials said that requesting more state and federal funding to address the homeless problem was a long shot. The city attorney said his office had not found one instance of a presidential declaration in response to a "chronic, ongoing situation such as the homeless crisis."
ON THE STATE LEVEL ALONE, MEXIFORNIA PAYS OUT $30 BILLION YEARL IN SOCIAL SERVICES TO ILLEGALS. NOT A SINGLE LEGAL VOTED TO BE MEXICO'S WELFARE OFFICE.
COUNTIES PAY OUT EVEN MORE WITH LOS ANGELES COUNTY LEADING. L.A. COUNTY PAYS OUT MORE THAN A BILLION PER YEAR IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS. IT'S THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND MEXICO'S ANCHOR BABY BREEDING FOR WELFARE PROGRAM.
HALF THE MURDERS IN CA ARE ALSO BY MEXICANS.
"The Times reported this month that by one federal benchmark, California's poverty rate of 23.4% is tops in the nation, taking the high cost of housing into account. And since 2006, median wages declined 6.2% in the state while wages increased 4.8% for the top 10%."
Column
Rosy jobs numbers blind us to the bleak reality of the 'real economy'
Once again, the employment numbers in California look pretty good.
And once again, those numbers are deceiving.
All you have to do is look at the case of Martin Saldana.
In February, I watched Saldana walk out of the Boeing C-17 plant in Long Beach for the last time. Demand for the military transport plane had dried up after 25 years of production, and a workforce of thousands had dwindled to a few hundred following one wave of layoffs after another.
Saldana, then 51, got choked up the day he walked away.
The Air Force veteran with a love of aeronautics had been on the job for 29 years, working in various capacities on the assembly line. He'd had it good in his union job, making close to $40 an hour with benefits, and he knew it would be tough to match that deal anywhere else.
"I've been fortunate for the last 29 years," he said at the time, "and now I'm going to get a taste of the real economy."
Ten months later, it's an even fouler taste than he'd imagined.
Saldana's priority was to stay in aeronautics or go to work for a railroad company. He'd always had a passion for trains. But air and space jobs in Southern California have evolved from blue-collar assembly work to more technical positions in rockets, satellites and drones. And as for the railroad, Saldana had already missed the cut on five job applications before he even left Boeing.
"Status: Not qualified," said one blunt rejection letter he shared with me.
Saldana didn't panic in the early stages of life after Boeing. He'd cleared about $13,000 in severance pay and believed he'd land something solid, even if it came with a pay cut.
A couple of halfway decent prospects came up, but Saldana has shared custody of two kids, and the hours would have run him into scheduling conflicts.
Before long, the picture dimmed. Saldana was strong and able, but he began to fear that his age and even his Boeing salary were working against him. A new employer might balk, fearing that Saldana would bolt as soon as he found something closer to what he used to make.
He saw a lot of emails containing the words "we regret to inform you."
"A lot of this is done online. You don't talk to a live person. You're really lucky to get a phone interview," said Saldana.
"I would say I've been to like 40 job fairs … not to mention the countless workshops I've been to."
He thinks he got close at Gulfstream, but then came the bad news.
He was in the hunt at Northrop Grumman, but that didn't work out.
When nothing clicked, he signed up for unemployment, but that eventually ran out.
Along the way, Saldana said he did more shopping at 99 Cent Only stores and fell behind in his child support payments, and now he's worried about whether he can make his December mortgage payment.
"It belittles me because that's not how I was brought up," said Saldana, whose father worked at StarKist tuna and helped his son with the down payment on the Carson house he lives in.
If he sold the house, Saldana says, "my parents would roll over in their graves. I'm better than that, but I'm doing my best. I'm trying to keep my head above water, but it's like standing in the pool and the water is right up to my chin."
Finally, though, someone threw Saldana a lifeline.
Early last month, a temp agency lined him up with a job in aerospace. It pays only about one-third what he made at Boeing, with no benefits, but Saldana jumped at it.
He now sandblasts aircraft landing gear parts at a plant in Torrance, from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. six days a week, with no guarantees from one week to the next. But at least it's work, he says, and he's hoping the adage is true about needing to have one job in order to find another.
"I was in the middle class. Upper middle class, I would say, and now I've fallen into I guess the upper lower class," he said.
And he's not alone, of course.
Saldana stays in touch with other former C-17 employees, and most of them who've found work are making far less than they used to.
Ron Magee, a Saldana colleague I wrote about in January, had 34 years at Boeing when he was laid off. He told me he still hasn't found a job, he's now on disability with multiple health issues, and he was forced to sell the house he intended to retire in.
When you see news that unemployment in California has dipped to 5.8%, said Chris Hoene of the California Budget & Policy Center, it's not as rosy as it sounds.
"There are more and more sectors in which people are being paid less than they were before … or they're having to work several jobs," said Hoene.
The Times reported this month that by one federal benchmark, California's poverty rate of 23.4% is tops in the nation, taking the high cost of housing into account. And since 2006, median wages declined 6.2% in the state while wages increased 4.8% for the top 10%.
Hoene said temp agencies, which take a cut when they find a job for a client, represent a trend from full-time work to part-time work that benefits everyone but the employee. Some people, like Saldana, end up tapping unemployment and Medi-Cal and applying for food stamps.
"One way to think about it is that the corporate sector is shifting the responsibility for taking care of its workers to the public sector," said Hoene.
Saldana still has some prospects in play. There's another railroad job he heard about, and he's looking beyond planes and trains to anything that gets him back on top of his bills.
One day soon he'll go back to where he used to work for 29 years, to where he always felt camaraderie and the fullest sense of the pride that comes with being able to provide for family. The few remaining Boeing workers are putting the finishing touches on the last C-17, and when it flies away, Saldana intends to bear witness to the end of an era.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
“You can’t make enough money for what you spend,” Montes says in Spanish while waiting with other farmworkers for her number to be called. Today she’ll take home a box of bagged greens and other produce distributed by a local non-profit.
“Sometimes, you don’t earn enough to buy things for what the children need for school, or food for the house, or personal expenses … like house payments or bills.”
Montes is part of a growing economic problem in California: Low-wage workers are getting poorer, and there are more of them.
There were about 354,800 Californians working full-time and year-round in 2013 living under the federal poverty limit, according to the nonprofit California Budget and Policy Center. That’s 3.1 percent of California’s full-time workforce, double the rate it was 35 years ago.
“A low-wage worker today earns less than a similar worker would a generation ago,” said Luke Reidenbach, policy analyst with the center, which researches how state policy affects low- and middle-income Californians. “Even as the economy grows, that’s not resulting in an increase of their hourly wages, and so over time the value of their wages has eroded.”
Pay for California’s bottom 20 percent of wage-earners has declined by 11.3 percent since 1979, when adjusted for inflation, according to the center.
Other research has tried to calculate the tax cost of California’s working poor. UC Berkeley Labor Center, a liberal-leaning research group, estimates low-wage California workers and their dependents received $14.3 billion a year in cash assistance, health care, food stamps and tax credits between 2007 and 2012.
The California Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t have its own estimate on how much the state spends on public assistance for working people and declined to comment on the accuracy of the labor center’s estimate.
Looking at another measure that takes public assistance benefits and regional costs of living into account, almost 8 in 10 Californians considered poor by the government’s standards in 2012 lived in a family where someone worked, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.
“At the very least, we would expect work to lift people out of poverty,” Reidenbach said.
These economic trends are part of what has ignited a movement among labor and policymakers to raise the minimum wage beyond California’s scheduled $1 increase to $10 an hour on Jan. 1.
Researchers say the new $10 minimum is expected to bump a family of three with one full-time, year-round worker above the federal poverty limit. But others say when regional living expenses are considered, a family of three living in the Los Angeles region, the San Francisco Bay Area and other expensive parts of the state will have trouble making ends meet on one person’s minimum wage job.
Overall, more low-wage workers are older than they were in 1979, although on average they are younger than the workforce as a whole, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
More than half of today’s low-wage workers in California are Latino, according to the labor center, and 40 percent were born outside the United States. As a whole, the share of the working poor that had some college education is 9 percent more than it was a generation ago. The majority of low-wage workers, 53 percent, have only a high school education or less.
Increasingly, the working poor live in urban areas, where they work as cashiers, cooks, waitresses, maids, gardeners and nursing aides.
Fausto Hernandez Garcia, 56, of Los Angeles is one of them. He searches for cardboard and scrap metal on his days off to supplement the $9 an hour he is paid at a car wash. He claims he’s not always paid for the hours he works.
Juan Valentin, 26, of Stockton says he, his wife and his two young children are “living by the day,” scraping by on his $10.50-an-hour job at a bagged lettuce company. His savings are only enough to buy a dress for his 5-year-old daughter, he said.
Kazoua Yang, 23, is paid $9.25 an hour as a cashier at a grocery store in Fresno. Before her boyfriend got a steady job, their family of three needed food stamps and qualified for Medi-Cal.
“Part of this problem is the quality of low-wage work,” Reidenbach said. “It’s not just about effort; it’s not just about family conditions; it’s about whether or not the jobs that are available to people are paying enough to allow them to make ends meet.”
The top five occupations that are projected to grow the highest number of jobs by 2022 will be low wage — under $12 an hour, according to California’s Employment Development Department. That includes personal care aides, retail workers, and food prep and service staff.
According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, some of those workers may need public assistance. The labor center says more than half of fast-food workers and nearly half of home care and child care workers rely on some form of public assistance.
“When jobs don’t pay enough for people to survive and support their families, it means we have a lot of (taxpayer) money targeted into those working families,” said Ken Jacobs of the labor center.
The struggles of the working poor have received new attention at the state Capitol; anti-poverty committees have formed and this past legislative session, another minimum wage increase was proposed, as well as bills to ease the burden of bankruptcy, wage garnishment and to remove a cap on cash assistance.
Now, two competing state ballot proposals to raise the minimum wage to $15 statewide, one by 2020 and the other by 2021, are trying to qualify for the 2016 election.
Meanwhile, 15 local governments from San Diego to Emeryville in the San Francisco Bay Area have voted to raise the minimum wage to as high as $15 an hour over the next five years.
The California Business Roundtable, a Sacramento-based lobbying group for large employers in the state, hasn’t yet taken a position on raising the minimum wage.
“We’re taking our time,” said Robert Lapsley, president of the business roundtable, which says its membership doesn’t employ a lot of low-wage workers.
Lapsley said the business community understands there’s a large “underclass” in California, and it’s still evaluating its role in reducing poverty. “We have to be able to figure out a way to provide some balance.”
Lapsley said the state — not individual cities — needs to take the lead in figuring out the right approach to raising the minimum wage, including accounting for regional economic differences.
“What may be good in one spot in terms of $15 does not necessarily apply in another spot,” he said. “L.A. has a much higher cost of living even (compared) to Northern California.”
Lapsley says policy discussions about raising the minimum wage so that one worker’s earnings could keep a family out of poverty is “the wrong debate.” Instead, he said, the focus should be on strengthening the state’s manufacturing sector and creating higher-paying jobs that low-wage workers can move into.
“A minimum-wage job has always been the role of an entry-level position into the workforce,” Lapsley said. “(Those jobs are) to help get people initially trained and then move into a … different job so that they have a long-term future.”
The Rural Foundation for Community Advancement organizes food giveaways several times a month in Earlimart. Produce is given on “vegetable day”; the rest of the time, it’s packaged goods. Organizers make sure the event takes place in the late afternoon.
“If we give it from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., we catch everybody that’s coming from work,” said Domingo Trevino, vice president of the nonprofit foundation. “Even if they’re working, they’re barely surviving.”
Forty-four percent of workers in the southern Central Valley earn a low wage, the highest percentage among all California regions, according to UC Berkeley.
Food aid from the Fresno-based Community Food Bank serves an average of 285,000 people monthly in Fresno, Madera, Kings, Tulare and Kern counties. The food bank is funded through a mix of taxpayer dollars and private donations, including from Wal-Mart.
“It has moved from being supplemental (food) assistance, so just a couple days, to individuals really reliant on it for weeks at a time,” says Natalie Caples, program director of the food bank.
Maria Veronica Manriquez joined dozens of others in Earlimart on a hot day to wait for some of the food bank giveaways. Manriquez’s husband is a seasonal agricultural worker, and the family earns between $16,000 and $24,000 a year. The mother of two said she recently had to stop working to take care of a sick child and is now receiving food stamps.
“To survive here, you have to both work,” Manriquez said. “When only one person works, it is more difficult.
“They need to raise the wages, not the (price) of products,” said Manriquez, noting the high cost of eggs. “It’s not enough for us … that’s the truth.”
CALmatters is a nonprofit journalism venture dedicated to explaining state policies and politics.
EARLIMART, Tulare County >> After a day of picking grapes for $9.25 an hour, Eva Montes waits in line for food aid in the parking lot of the Veterans Memorial building in Earlimart, a community of 8,537 people.
And once again, those numbers are deceiving.
In February, I watched Saldana walk out of the Boeing C-17 plant in Long Beach for the last time. Demand for the military transport plane had dried up after 25 years of production, and a workforce of thousands had dwindled to a few hundred following one wave of layoffs after another.
Saldana, then 51, got choked up the day he walked away.
The Air Force veteran with a love of aeronautics had been on the job for 29 years, working in various capacities on the assembly line. He'd had it good in his union job, making close to $40 an hour with benefits, and he knew it would be tough to match that deal anywhere else.
"I've been fortunate for the last 29 years," he said at the time, "and now I'm going to get a taste of the real economy."
Ten months later, it's an even fouler taste than he'd imagined.
Saldana's priority was to stay in aeronautics or go to work for a railroad company. He'd always had a passion for trains. But air and space jobs in Southern California have evolved from blue-collar assembly work to more technical positions in rockets, satellites and drones. And as for the railroad, Saldana had already missed the cut on five job applications before he even left Boeing.
"Status: Not qualified," said one blunt rejection letter he shared with me.
Saldana didn't panic in the early stages of life after Boeing. He'd cleared about $13,000 in severance pay and believed he'd land something solid, even if it came with a pay cut.
A couple of halfway decent prospects came up, but Saldana has shared custody of two kids, and the hours would have run him into scheduling conflicts.
Before long, the picture dimmed. Saldana was strong and able, but he began to fear that his age and even his Boeing salary were working against him. A new employer might balk, fearing that Saldana would bolt as soon as he found something closer to what he used to make.
He saw a lot of emails containing the words "we regret to inform you."
"A lot of this is done online. You don't talk to a live person. You're really lucky to get a phone interview," said Saldana.
"I would say I've been to like 40 job fairs … not to mention the countless workshops I've been to."
He thinks he got close at Gulfstream, but then came the bad news.
He was in the hunt at Northrop Grumman, but that didn't work out.
When nothing clicked, he signed up for unemployment, but that eventually ran out.
Along the way, Saldana said he did more shopping at 99 Cent Only stores and fell behind in his child support payments, and now he's worried about whether he can make his December mortgage payment.
"It belittles me because that's not how I was brought up," said Saldana, whose father worked at StarKist tuna and helped his son with the down payment on the Carson house he lives in.
If he sold the house, Saldana says, "my parents would roll over in their graves. I'm better than that, but I'm doing my best. I'm trying to keep my head above water, but it's like standing in the pool and the water is right up to my chin."
Finally, though, someone threw Saldana a lifeline.
Early last month, a temp agency lined him up with a job in aerospace. It pays only about one-third what he made at Boeing, with no benefits, but Saldana jumped at it.
He now sandblasts aircraft landing gear parts at a plant in Torrance, from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. six days a week, with no guarantees from one week to the next. But at least it's work, he says, and he's hoping the adage is true about needing to have one job in order to find another.
"I was in the middle class. Upper middle class, I would say, and now I've fallen into I guess the upper lower class," he said.
And he's not alone, of course.
Saldana stays in touch with other former C-17 employees, and most of them who've found work are making far less than they used to.
Ron Magee, a Saldana colleague I wrote about in January, had 34 years at Boeing when he was laid off. He told me he still hasn't found a job, he's now on disability with multiple health issues, and he was forced to sell the house he intended to retire in.
When you see news that unemployment in California has dipped to 5.8%, said Chris Hoene of the California Budget & Policy Center, it's not as rosy as it sounds.
"There are more and more sectors in which people are being paid less than they were before … or they're having to work several jobs," said Hoene.
The Times reported this month that by one federal benchmark, California's poverty rate of 23.4% is tops in the nation, taking the high cost of housing into account. And since 2006, median wages declined 6.2% in the state while wages increased 4.8% for the top 10%.
Hoene said temp agencies, which take a cut when they find a job for a client, represent a trend from full-time work to part-time work that benefits everyone but the employee. Some people, like Saldana, end up tapping unemployment and Medi-Cal and applying for food stamps.
"One way to think about it is that the corporate sector is shifting the responsibility for taking care of its workers to the public sector," said Hoene.
Saldana still has some prospects in play. There's another railroad job he heard about, and he's looking beyond planes and trains to anything that gets him back on top of his bills.
One day soon he'll go back to where he used to work for 29 years, to where he always felt camaraderie and the fullest sense of the pride that comes with being able to provide for family. The few remaining Boeing workers are putting the finishing touches on the last C-17, and when it flies away, Saldana intends to bear witness to the end of an era.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
California’s working poor grow poorer
“You can’t make enough money for what you spend,” Montes says in Spanish while waiting with other farmworkers for her number to be called. Today she’ll take home a box of bagged greens and other produce distributed by a local non-profit.
“Sometimes, you don’t earn enough to buy things for what the children need for school, or food for the house, or personal expenses … like house payments or bills.”
Montes is part of a growing economic problem in California: Low-wage workers are getting poorer, and there are more of them.
There were about 354,800 Californians working full-time and year-round in 2013 living under the federal poverty limit, according to the nonprofit California Budget and Policy Center. That’s 3.1 percent of California’s full-time workforce, double the rate it was 35 years ago.
“A low-wage worker today earns less than a similar worker would a generation ago,” said Luke Reidenbach, policy analyst with the center, which researches how state policy affects low- and middle-income Californians. “Even as the economy grows, that’s not resulting in an increase of their hourly wages, and so over time the value of their wages has eroded.”
Pay for California’s bottom 20 percent of wage-earners has declined by 11.3 percent since 1979, when adjusted for inflation, according to the center.
Other research has tried to calculate the tax cost of California’s working poor. UC Berkeley Labor Center, a liberal-leaning research group, estimates low-wage California workers and their dependents received $14.3 billion a year in cash assistance, health care, food stamps and tax credits between 2007 and 2012.
The California Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t have its own estimate on how much the state spends on public assistance for working people and declined to comment on the accuracy of the labor center’s estimate.
Looking at another measure that takes public assistance benefits and regional costs of living into account, almost 8 in 10 Californians considered poor by the government’s standards in 2012 lived in a family where someone worked, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.
“At the very least, we would expect work to lift people out of poverty,” Reidenbach said.
These economic trends are part of what has ignited a movement among labor and policymakers to raise the minimum wage beyond California’s scheduled $1 increase to $10 an hour on Jan. 1.
Researchers say the new $10 minimum is expected to bump a family of three with one full-time, year-round worker above the federal poverty limit. But others say when regional living expenses are considered, a family of three living in the Los Angeles region, the San Francisco Bay Area and other expensive parts of the state will have trouble making ends meet on one person’s minimum wage job.
Who Are the Working Poor?
Overall, more low-wage workers are older than they were in 1979, although on average they are younger than the workforce as a whole, according to the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
More than half of today’s low-wage workers in California are Latino, according to the labor center, and 40 percent were born outside the United States. As a whole, the share of the working poor that had some college education is 9 percent more than it was a generation ago. The majority of low-wage workers, 53 percent, have only a high school education or less.
Increasingly, the working poor live in urban areas, where they work as cashiers, cooks, waitresses, maids, gardeners and nursing aides.
Fausto Hernandez Garcia, 56, of Los Angeles is one of them. He searches for cardboard and scrap metal on his days off to supplement the $9 an hour he is paid at a car wash. He claims he’s not always paid for the hours he works.
Juan Valentin, 26, of Stockton says he, his wife and his two young children are “living by the day,” scraping by on his $10.50-an-hour job at a bagged lettuce company. His savings are only enough to buy a dress for his 5-year-old daughter, he said.
Kazoua Yang, 23, is paid $9.25 an hour as a cashier at a grocery store in Fresno. Before her boyfriend got a steady job, their family of three needed food stamps and qualified for Medi-Cal.
“Part of this problem is the quality of low-wage work,” Reidenbach said. “It’s not just about effort; it’s not just about family conditions; it’s about whether or not the jobs that are available to people are paying enough to allow them to make ends meet.”
Forecasting more low-wage jobs
The top five occupations that are projected to grow the highest number of jobs by 2022 will be low wage — under $12 an hour, according to California’s Employment Development Department. That includes personal care aides, retail workers, and food prep and service staff.
According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, some of those workers may need public assistance. The labor center says more than half of fast-food workers and nearly half of home care and child care workers rely on some form of public assistance.
“When jobs don’t pay enough for people to survive and support their families, it means we have a lot of (taxpayer) money targeted into those working families,” said Ken Jacobs of the labor center.
The struggles of the working poor have received new attention at the state Capitol; anti-poverty committees have formed and this past legislative session, another minimum wage increase was proposed, as well as bills to ease the burden of bankruptcy, wage garnishment and to remove a cap on cash assistance.
Now, two competing state ballot proposals to raise the minimum wage to $15 statewide, one by 2020 and the other by 2021, are trying to qualify for the 2016 election.
Meanwhile, 15 local governments from San Diego to Emeryville in the San Francisco Bay Area have voted to raise the minimum wage to as high as $15 an hour over the next five years.
The California Business Roundtable, a Sacramento-based lobbying group for large employers in the state, hasn’t yet taken a position on raising the minimum wage.
“We’re taking our time,” said Robert Lapsley, president of the business roundtable, which says its membership doesn’t employ a lot of low-wage workers.
Lapsley said the business community understands there’s a large “underclass” in California, and it’s still evaluating its role in reducing poverty. “We have to be able to figure out a way to provide some balance.”
Lapsley said the state — not individual cities — needs to take the lead in figuring out the right approach to raising the minimum wage, including accounting for regional economic differences.
“What may be good in one spot in terms of $15 does not necessarily apply in another spot,” he said. “L.A. has a much higher cost of living even (compared) to Northern California.”
Lapsley says policy discussions about raising the minimum wage so that one worker’s earnings could keep a family out of poverty is “the wrong debate.” Instead, he said, the focus should be on strengthening the state’s manufacturing sector and creating higher-paying jobs that low-wage workers can move into.
“A minimum-wage job has always been the role of an entry-level position into the workforce,” Lapsley said. “(Those jobs are) to help get people initially trained and then move into a … different job so that they have a long-term future.”
Farmworkers on the food line
The Rural Foundation for Community Advancement organizes food giveaways several times a month in Earlimart. Produce is given on “vegetable day”; the rest of the time, it’s packaged goods. Organizers make sure the event takes place in the late afternoon.
“If we give it from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., we catch everybody that’s coming from work,” said Domingo Trevino, vice president of the nonprofit foundation. “Even if they’re working, they’re barely surviving.”
Forty-four percent of workers in the southern Central Valley earn a low wage, the highest percentage among all California regions, according to UC Berkeley.
Food aid from the Fresno-based Community Food Bank serves an average of 285,000 people monthly in Fresno, Madera, Kings, Tulare and Kern counties. The food bank is funded through a mix of taxpayer dollars and private donations, including from Wal-Mart.
“It has moved from being supplemental (food) assistance, so just a couple days, to individuals really reliant on it for weeks at a time,” says Natalie Caples, program director of the food bank.
Maria Veronica Manriquez joined dozens of others in Earlimart on a hot day to wait for some of the food bank giveaways. Manriquez’s husband is a seasonal agricultural worker, and the family earns between $16,000 and $24,000 a year. The mother of two said she recently had to stop working to take care of a sick child and is now receiving food stamps.
“To survive here, you have to both work,” Manriquez said. “When only one person works, it is more difficult.
“They need to raise the wages, not the (price) of products,” said Manriquez, noting the high cost of eggs. “It’s not enough for us … that’s the truth.”
CALmatters is a nonprofit journalism venture dedicated to explaining state policies and politics.
12:00-1:00 p.m., Tuesday, November 17, 2015
The Heritage Foundation, Lehrman Auditorium
214 Massachusetts Ave NE
Washington DC 20002-4999
http://www.heritage.org/events/2015/11/lawless
Overview: In Lawless, George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein offers a scholarly and unsettling account of how the Obama Administration has undermined the Constitution and the rule of law. He documents how the President has presided over one constitutional debacle after another – from Obamacare to unauthorized wars in the Middle East to attempts to strip property owners, college students, religious groups, and conservative political activists of their rights, and more.
Respect for the Constitution’s separation of powers has been violated time and again. Whether in amending Obamacare on the fly or signing a memorandum legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, the current Administration ignores not only Congress, but also the Constitution’s critical checks and balances.
In Lawless, Professor Bernstein shows how the Constitution as well as the President’s own stated principles have been betrayed. In doing so, serious and potentially permanent damage has been done to our constitutional system and repairs must be addressed by the next President of the United States.
A Pattern of Executive Overreach
Recently, the Justice Department announced it would not be indicting anyone for his or her role in the most serious domestic political scandal since the Nixon years.
Starting in 2010, the IRS, under pressure from congressional Democrats and the White House, engaged in blatant ideologically motivated discrimination against conservative organizations applying for non-profit status.
That the most feared bureaucracy in Washington was making decisions based on illegal political criteria should send a chill down the spine of any American who cares about the First Amendment and the rule of law.
Yet the Department of Justice has refused to indict even IRS official Lois Lerner, who invoked her Fifth Amendment right to silence to avoid incriminating herself in testimony before Congress.
Unfortunately, the failure to prosecute anyone responsible for abusing the IRS’s authority reflects the Obama administration’s broader contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law.
Consider just a few examples:
Presidents trying stretch their power as far as they can is hardly news. What is news, however, is that top Obama administration officials, including the president himself, see this not as something to be ashamed of, but as a desirable way of governing, something to brag about rather than do surreptitiously.
Obama behaves as if there is some inherent virtue in a president governing by decree and whim, as if promoting progressive political ends at the expense of the rule of law is proper not simply as a desperate last resort but as a matter of principle.
After all, Obama says, democracy is unduly “messy” and “complicated.” “We can’t wait,” the president intones, as he ignores the separation of powers again and again, ruling instead through executive order.
“Law is politics,” and only politics, according to a mantra popular on the legal left, and therefore the law should not be an independent constraint to doing the right thing politically. Obama seems to agree.
As Obama’s lawlessness has received increased attention from Congress, the (conservative) media, and the general public, the president has been defiant, even petulant. When confronted by allegations of lawlessness, Obama takes no responsibility, and doesn’t even bother to defend the legality of his actions.
Harry S. Truman famously said “the buck stops here.” Obama responds to serious concerns about his administration’s lawlessness with a derisive “so sue me.”
As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley writes, Obama “acts as if anything a court has not expressly forbidden is permissible.” And in many situations, no one has legal standing to challenge the president’s actions in court—which means that no judge can stop the administration’s lawbreaking.
So sue me? If only we could.
On Tuesday, Nov. 17, David Bernstein will be at The Heritage Foundation at noon for an event about his book, “Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law.” More details here.
Starting in 2010, the IRS, under pressure from congressional Democrats and the White House, engaged in blatant ideologically motivated discrimination against conservative organizations applying for non-profit status.
That the most feared bureaucracy in Washington was making decisions based on illegal political criteria should send a chill down the spine of any American who cares about the First Amendment and the rule of law.
Yet the Department of Justice has refused to indict even IRS official Lois Lerner, who invoked her Fifth Amendment right to silence to avoid incriminating herself in testimony before Congress.
Unfortunately, the failure to prosecute anyone responsible for abusing the IRS’s authority reflects the Obama administration’s broader contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law.
Consider just a few examples:
- Going to war in Libya in blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution, and in defiance of the legal advice of the president’s own lawyers, based on the ridiculous theory that bombing the heck out of Libya did not constitute “hostilities” under the law
- Appointing so-called policy czars to high-level positions to avoid constitutionally-required confirmation hearings
- Modifying, delaying, and ignoring various provisions of Obamacare in violation of the law itself
- Attacking private citizens for engaging in constitutionally protected speech
- Issuing draconian regulations regarding sexual assault on campus not through formal, lawful regulation but through an informal, and unreviewable, “dear colleague” letter
- Ignoring 100 years of legal rulings and the plain text of the Constitution and trying to get a vote in Congress for the D.C. delegate
- Trying to enact massive immigration reform via an executive order demanding that the Department of Homeland Security both refuse to enforce existing immigration law, and provide work permits to millions of people residing in the U.S. illegally
- Imposing common core standards on the states via administrative fiat
- Ignoring bankruptcy law and arranging Chrysler’s bankruptcy to benefit labor unions at the expense of bondholders
- Trying to strip churches and other religious bodies of their constitutional right to choose their clergy free from government involvement.
Presidents trying stretch their power as far as they can is hardly news. What is news, however, is that top Obama administration officials, including the president himself, see this not as something to be ashamed of, but as a desirable way of governing, something to brag about rather than do surreptitiously.
Obama behaves as if there is some inherent virtue in a president governing by decree and whim, as if promoting progressive political ends at the expense of the rule of law is proper not simply as a desperate last resort but as a matter of principle.
After all, Obama says, democracy is unduly “messy” and “complicated.” “We can’t wait,” the president intones, as he ignores the separation of powers again and again, ruling instead through executive order.
“Law is politics,” and only politics, according to a mantra popular on the legal left, and therefore the law should not be an independent constraint to doing the right thing politically. Obama seems to agree.
As Obama’s lawlessness has received increased attention from Congress, the (conservative) media, and the general public, the president has been defiant, even petulant. When confronted by allegations of lawlessness, Obama takes no responsibility, and doesn’t even bother to defend the legality of his actions.
Harry S. Truman famously said “the buck stops here.” Obama responds to serious concerns about his administration’s lawlessness with a derisive “so sue me.”
As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley writes, Obama “acts as if anything a court has not expressly forbidden is permissible.” And in many situations, no one has legal standing to challenge the president’s actions in court—which means that no judge can stop the administration’s lawbreaking.
So sue me? If only we could.
On Tuesday, Nov. 17, David Bernstein will be at The Heritage Foundation at noon for an event about his book, “Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law.” More details here.
Obama's 'Shameful' Policy Toward Middle Eastern Christians | The Weekly Standard
America is at War Right Now, With or Without Obama | The Weekly Standard
America is at War Right Now, With or Without Obama | The Weekly Standard
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What ISIS Really Wants
The
Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious
group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key
agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its
strategy—and for how to stop it.
To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)
NOW ADD UP THE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS THAT THE BUSH LIBRARY AND HILLARY AND BILLARY FOR BILLARY'S PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND PHONY FOUNDATION HAVE TAKEN IN BRIBES FROM MUSLIM DICTATORSHIPS.
WATCH OBAMA GO GROVELING FOR DIRTY MUSLIM MONEY NOW FOR HIS PHONY FOUNDATION.
Lawless!
The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law
November 17, 2015
The Heritage Foundation, Lehrman Auditorium
214 Massachusetts Ave NE
Washington DC 20002-4999
http://www.heritage.org/events/2015/11/lawless
Overview: In Lawless, George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein offers a scholarly and unsettling account of how the Obama Administration has undermined the Constitution and the rule of law. He documents how the President has presided over one constitutional debacle after another – from Obamacare to unauthorized wars in the Middle East to attempts to strip property owners, college students, religious groups, and conservative political activists of their rights, and more.
Respect for the Constitution’s separation of powers has been violated time and again. Whether in amending Obamacare on the fly or signing a memorandum legalizing millions of illegal immigrants, the current Administration ignores not only Congress, but also the Constitution’s critical checks and balances.
In Lawless, Professor Bernstein shows how the Constitution as well as the President’s own stated principles have been betrayed. In doing so, serious and potentially permanent damage has been done to our constitutional system and repairs must be addressed by the next President of the United States.
Obama to Wannabe Illegals: Do as I Say, Not as I Do
By Mark Krikorian
CIS Blog, October 30, 2015
http://cis.org/krikorian/obama-wannabe-illegals-do-i-say-not-i-do
In response the surge of Central Americans sneaking into Texas in the summer of 2014, the Obama administration launched an ad campaign in the sending countries earlier this year to stem the flow. The radio and TV spots assert that "there are no permits for the people trying to cross the border without papers" and promise "the immediate deportation of those trying to cross the border without documents."
None of it is true. There are permits for illegal-alien minors and families. Formally known as Notices to Appear but known colloquially in Spanish as permisos, they require the aliens to present themselves to immigration authorities by a certain date, until which they have temporary legal status. That gives them time enough to travel to join their relatives and disappear into the existing illegal population. And disappear they do, since, despite the tough promises, virtually none of them are deported, immediately or otherwise.
So it should come as no surprise to read today's AP report, which begins this way:
Once again, President Obama is looking to defy Congress in implementing its immigration reform proposals. This time, his administration is looking to also defy a federal court to achieve it. A judge sitting on the 5th Circuit in Texas issued an...
NO PRESIDENT HAS HAD MORE CONTEMPT FOR LEGALS, OUR LAWS AND BORDERS THAN MEXICO'S LA RAZA SUPREMACIST, BARACK OBAMA!
NOT ONLY DOES OBAMA FUND THE MEX FASCIST MOVEMENT OF LA RAZA "The Race"
BUT IT OPERATES OUT OF THE AMERICAN WHITE HOUSE UNDER LA RAZA V.P. CECILIA MUNOZ!
November 3, 2015
Obama set to defy federal court on amnesty
This time, his administration is looking to also defy a federal court to achieve it.
A
judge sitting on the 5th Circuit in Texas issued an injunction last
June against the administration's regulatory plans to legalize millions
of aliens in the U.S. illegally. The injunction was upheld by a federal
appeals court in Louisiana, and the president's plan is now stalled
while the administration works through the federal court system.
Except now there are plans afoot to change the regulations pertaining to green cards that would accomplish almost everything the president can't get from Congress or the courts. A leaked memo from DHS outlines four plans the administration is considering.
Ian Smith of the Immigration Reform Law Institute:
I'm not sure that judge in Texas will let the administration get away with this. When the government began handing out green cards anyway in defiance of the injunction, the judge, Andrew Hanen, threatened to arrest the lot of them for contempt. He forced the government to recall the green cards immediately. There will be no circumventing the law in his court.
But the plans may be untouchable because they don't directly stem from the series of executive orders currently being adjudicated. Of course, any plan to blanket the country in work permits for illegals will be challenged in court. But eventually, the administration may find a friendly judge who gives it the go-ahead.
Except now there are plans afoot to change the regulations pertaining to green cards that would accomplish almost everything the president can't get from Congress or the courts. A leaked memo from DHS outlines four plans the administration is considering.
Ian Smith of the Immigration Reform Law Institute:
The internal memo reveals four options of varying expansiveness, with option 1 providing EADs to “all individuals living in the United States”, including illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, and H-1B guest-workers, while option 4 provides EADsonly to those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Giving EADs to any of the covered individuals, however, is in direct violation of Congress’s Immigration & Nationality Act and works to dramatically subvert our carefully wrought visa system.Get a load of what the DHS bureaucrats think about illegals working in the U.S.:
As mentioned, the first plan the memo discusses basically entails giving EADs to anyone physically present in the country who until now has been prohibited from getting one. A major positive to this option, the memo reads, is that it would “address the needs of some of the intended deferred action population.” Although DHS doesn’t say it expressly, included here would be those 4.3 million people covered by the president’s DAPA and Expanded DACA programs whose benefits were supposed to have been halted in the Hanen decision. On top of working around the Hanen injunction, this DHS plan would also dole out unrestricted EADs to those on temporary non-immigrant visas, such as H-1B-holders (their work authorizations being tied to their employers) and another 5 to 6 million illegal aliens thus far not covered by any of the President’s deferred action amnesty programs. By claiming absolute authority to grant work authorization to any alien, regardless of status, DHS is in effect claiming it can unilaterally de-couple the 1986 IRCA work authorization statutes from the main body of U.S. visa law. While DHS must still observe the statutory requirements for issuing visas, the emerging doctrine concedes, the administration now claims unprecedented discretionary power to permit anyone inside our borders to work.
The anonymous DHS policymakers state that a positive for this option is that it “could cover a greater number of individuals.” In a strikingly conclusory bit of bureaucratese, they state that because illegal aliens working in the country “have already had the US labor market tested” it has been “demonstrat[ed] that their future employment won’t adversely affect US workers.” The labor market, in other words, has already been stress-tested through decades of foreign-labor dumping and the American working-class, which disproportionately includes minorities, working mothers, the elderly, and students, is doing just fine. Apparently, the fact that 66 million Americans and legal aliens are currently unemployed or out of the job-market was not a discussion point at the DHS “Retreat.”Smith concludes: "Bottom line: The memo foreshadows more tactical offensives in a giant administrative amnesty for all 12 million illegal aliens who’ve broken our immigration laws (and many other laws) that will emerge before the next inaugural in January 2016."
I'm not sure that judge in Texas will let the administration get away with this. When the government began handing out green cards anyway in defiance of the injunction, the judge, Andrew Hanen, threatened to arrest the lot of them for contempt. He forced the government to recall the green cards immediately. There will be no circumventing the law in his court.
But the plans may be untouchable because they don't directly stem from the series of executive orders currently being adjudicated. Of course, any plan to blanket the country in work permits for illegals will be challenged in court. But eventually, the administration may find a friendly judge who gives it the go-ahead.
Once again, President Obama is looking to defy Congress in implementing its immigration reform proposals.
This time, his administration is looking to also defy a federal court to achieve it.
A judge sitting on the 5th Circuit in Texas issued an injunction last June against the administration's regulatory plans to legalize millions of aliens in the U.S. illegally. The injunction was upheld by a federal appeals court in Louisiana, and the president's plan is now stalled while the administration works through the federal court system.
Except now there are plans afoot to change the regulations pertaining to green cards that would accomplish almost everything the president can't get from Congress or the courts. A leaked memo from DHS outlines four plans the administration is considering.
Ian Smith of the Immigration Reform Law Institute:
I'm not sure that judge in Texas will let the administration get away with this. When the government began handing out green cards anyway in defiance of the injunction, the judge, Andrew Hanen, threatened to arrest the lot of them for contempt. He forced the government to recall the green cards immediately. There will be no circumventing the law in his court.
But the plans may be untouchable because they don't directly stem from the series of executive orders currently being adjudicated. Of course, any plan to blanket the country in work permits for illegals will be challenged in court. But eventually, the administration may find a friendly judge who gives it the go-ahead.
This time, his administration is looking to also defy a federal court to achieve it.
A judge sitting on the 5th Circuit in Texas issued an injunction last June against the administration's regulatory plans to legalize millions of aliens in the U.S. illegally. The injunction was upheld by a federal appeals court in Louisiana, and the president's plan is now stalled while the administration works through the federal court system.
Except now there are plans afoot to change the regulations pertaining to green cards that would accomplish almost everything the president can't get from Congress or the courts. A leaked memo from DHS outlines four plans the administration is considering.
Ian Smith of the Immigration Reform Law Institute:
The internal memo reveals four options of varying expansiveness, with option 1 providing EADs to “all individuals living in the United States”, including illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, and H-1B guest-workers, while option 4 provides EADsonly to those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Giving EADs to any of the covered individuals, however, is in direct violation of Congress’s Immigration & Nationality Act and works to dramatically subvert our carefully wrought visa system.Get a load of what the DHS bureaucrats think about illegals working in the U.S.:
As mentioned, the first plan the memo discusses basically entails giving EADs to anyone physically present in the country who until now has been prohibited from getting one. A major positive to this option, the memo reads, is that it would “address the needs of some of the intended deferred action population.” Although DHS doesn’t say it expressly, included here would be those 4.3 million people covered by the president’s DAPA and Expanded DACA programs whose benefits were supposed to have been halted in the Hanen decision. On top of working around the Hanen injunction, this DHS plan would also dole out unrestricted EADs to those on temporary non-immigrant visas, such as H-1B-holders (their work authorizations being tied to their employers) and another 5 to 6 million illegal aliens thus far not covered by any of the President’s deferred action amnesty programs. By claiming absolute authority to grant work authorization to any alien, regardless of status, DHS is in effect claiming it can unilaterally de-couple the 1986 IRCA work authorization statutes from the main body of U.S. visa law. While DHS must still observe the statutory requirements for issuing visas, the emerging doctrine concedes, the administration now claims unprecedented discretionary power to permit anyone inside our borders to work.
The anonymous DHS policymakers state that a positive for this option is that it “could cover a greater number of individuals.” In a strikingly conclusory bit of bureaucratese, they state that because illegal aliens working in the country “have already had the US labor market tested” it has been “demonstrat[ed] that their future employment won’t adversely affect US workers.” The labor market, in other words, has already been stress-tested through decades of foreign-labor dumping and the American working-class, which disproportionately includes minorities, working mothers, the elderly, and students, is doing just fine. Apparently, the fact that 66 million Americans and legal aliens are currently unemployed or out of the job-market was not a discussion point at the DHS “Retreat.”Smith concludes: "Bottom line: The memo foreshadows more tactical offensives in a giant administrative amnesty for all 12 million illegal aliens who’ve broken our immigration laws (and many other laws) that will emerge before the next inaugural in January 2016."
I'm not sure that judge in Texas will let the administration get away with this. When the government began handing out green cards anyway in defiance of the injunction, the judge, Andrew Hanen, threatened to arrest the lot of them for contempt. He forced the government to recall the green cards immediately. There will be no circumventing the law in his court.
But the plans may be untouchable because they don't directly stem from the series of executive orders currently being adjudicated. Of course, any plan to blanket the country in work permits for illegals will be challenged in court. But eventually, the administration may find a friendly judge who gives it the go-ahead.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/11/obama_set_to_defy_federal_court_on_amnesty.html#ixzz3qSG6XCr3
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
Obama’s Secret Destruction of Our Immigration System
By Arnold Ahlert
Canada Free Press, November 4, 2015
A newly-leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reveals the Obama administration is seeking to sidestep a federal court injunction that suspended portions of the president’s amnesty-based initiatives known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). In short, Obama is determined to impose his transformational agenda on the nation by any means necessary.
According to the Hill, the document outlining the administration’s attempt to thumb its nose at the rule of law was prepared at a DHS “Regulations Retreat” last June, four months after a preliminary injunction was initially imposed by Texas Judge Andrew Hanen and subsequently left in place by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit’s final ruling on that injunction, either confirming or reversing it, is expected to occur in a matter of days.Apparently the Obama administration couldn’t care less.
. . .
http://canadafreepress.com/article/76535
TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND BUILD THEIR LA RAZA "The Race" MEXICAN ILLEGAL PARTY BASE, THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS RUTHLESSLY ASSAULTED THE AMERICAN WORKER, OUR LAWS ON HIRING ILLEGALS AND OUR BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
"The U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation."
"The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs."
Income inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for the bottom 90 percent ...
November 3, 2015
The Causes of Income Inequality
Income
inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights
last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small
fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for
the bottom 90 percent has been stagnant since the 1980s. The
U.S. now ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income
inequality. Job creation has lagged far behind population growth.
Automation has erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government
leadership is responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage
situation.
Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs.
Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs.
The
federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration
that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for
American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot
exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of
workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and
visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with
immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who
were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no
coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously
with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage
and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger
national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages.
ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions.
Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations.
Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid.
This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories.
The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events.
The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions.
Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations.
Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid.
DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories.
The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events.
The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
Income
inequality has risen during the last several decades to heights
last seen in the 1920s. Most of the income growth has gone to a small
fraction of the population, the ultra-rich elites, while real wages for
the bottom 90 percent has been stagnant since the 1980s. The U.S. now
ranks at, or near, the top of developed countries for income inequality.
Job creation has lagged far behind population growth. Automation has
erased some jobs, but corrupt, inept government leadership is
responsible for the deplorable job- deficit-low wage situation.
Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs.
The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages.
ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions.
Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations.
Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid.
This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories.
The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events.
The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
Trade agreements are one cause of job and wage reduction. Over the last twenty years, we’ve amassed $10 trillion in trade deficits and exported 12 million manufacturing jobs, forcing workers to move into lower-wage service jobs. Government brags about the free trade agreements, CAFTA, NAFTA, KORUS, and TPP. But the “free” applies only to the foreign trading partners, which manipulate their currencies, pay sweatshop workers low wages, manufacture under environmentally-toxic conditions, and restrict U.S. imports. We hand over our technology, good-paying jobs, product labeling, and safety guarantees -- all to enrich multinational corporations and foreign industry. Industrial research and development have been decimated as companies move overseas or outsource jobs, leaving the nation a future of little technological innovation. The U.S. is left with hollowed-out industries and service jobs.
The federal government encourages the massive illegal and legal immigration that plays a huge role in job scarcity and income suppression for American workers. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a viable economy cannot exist with open borders and unrestricted immigration. An oversupply of workers willing to work for less pay, the outsourcing of jobs, and visa-immigrant hiring allow companies to replace American workers with immigrants for reduced labor and benefit costs. A well-known example is that of Disney IT workers who were forced to train their cheaper immigrant replacements. It is no coincidence that the rise in immigration has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the welfare state. People unemployed, or in low-wage and part-time jobs, rely on government subsidies. The result is larger national debt, more corporate wealth, and declining wages.
ObamaCare influences, and will influence to greater degrees, the lowering of incomes for Americans as healthcare costs rise. Higher premiums and deductions for health insurance are being shifted to employees, reducing benefits and wages. Medical care costs already have risen much faster than wages, leaving many struggling to pay for necessities. Ever-higher deductions mean that people can’t afford to use the insurance they are forced to buy because they can’t even pay the deductions.
Another contributor to job deficiency and wage stagnation is the increased regulation and taxation of small businesses instituted by Obama’s executive orders, EPA overreach, and ObamaCare. Small businesses traditionally have created two-thirds of new jobs annually. The bright spot in the economy, small businesses have created 78.7 percent of new jobs since the recession. Today, faced with these government anti-business policies, small businesses are closing their doors at a faster rate than new businesses are opening. The small businesses that remain open often don’t expand because of Obamacare and government regulations.
Income inequality is greatly impacted by the Federal Reserve’s policies of money-printing and zero interest rates, which have led to the funding of the financial and corporate markets while ignoring the needs of smaller businesses. The money supply and cheap lending has gone to the government, large corporations, and Wall Street, leaving the rest of the economy to sputter along with little capital and fewer jobs. The Fed’s policies of crony capitalism favor big business and big banks over that of smaller entities and are responsible for the increasing number of big business deals such as Walgreen's purchase of Rite Aid.
This government-driven, crony-capitalist economy defined by job scarcity and wage stagnation is the reason college graduates are burdened by $1.3 trillion debt, living with parents, can’t afford to marry or buy homes, and working as waitresses and bartenders. Job scarcity and low wages are the reasons we’re becoming a nation of renters rather than homeowners. They are the reasons that 51 percent of workers earn less than $30,000 a year. They are the reasons for the demise of the middle class and the burgeoning welfare rolls, the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
Income inequality and its devastating consequences are seldom mentioned on the nightly news. The media and bogus government statistics paint rosy pictures about economic recovery, and government masks the bad economy with welfare so that we don’t see Great Depression bread lines. But the only recovery has been in the Federal Reserve’s inflated stock market, not in the main street economy, where 94 million working-age adults are unemployed and 47 million are on some welfare program. The “Made in America” displays weekly touted by ABC news are the few exceptions, rather than the rule, in an American economy of boarded-up stores and factories.
The political implications of income inequality are most evident in the increasing rise and entrenchment of career politicians, supported by big donor funding and media favoritism. The integrity of the electoral process is endangered as election propaganda, funded by big money and hyped by corporate media bias, become more prominent in spreading lies, distortions, and innuendos to the voting public. Unrestricted campaign funding has given the moneyed elites first access to elected officials. At the same time, private-sector unions, small businesses, and citizens find their influence dwindling or irrelevant. This crony capitalism, resembling dictatorships and communist oligarchies, seriously threatens our democracy because money, power, and media control are consolidated in the hands of a few at the top. Voter apathy prevails, as voters feel increasingly powerless to change the course of events.
The United States, a once great economic powerhouse and the largest creditor nation, has become the largest debtor nation, and is fast becoming a banana republic. Past and present elected authorities and public officials have stripped bare our industries, put the nation under a mountain of debt, and turned the U.S. into a welfare depository. Government leaders have intentionally failed to protect our borders, jobs, and freedoms. These public “servants” and the wealthy elites have garnered riches for themselves, and purposely impoverished citizens and future generations. The greatest threats to our economy and national security are not foreign countries or terrorists; they are the enemies inside, corrupt government leaders and the money masters they serve.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/the_causes_of_income_inequality.html#ixzz3qSBDYQVs
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
Obamacare open enrollment: A widening health care disaster for workers
Obamacare open enrollment: A widening health care disaster for workers
3 November 2015
“All of Obama’s policies have been geared toward increasing social inequality. … The claim that the health care overhaul is an oasis of progress in this desert of social reaction is simply a lie”— World Socialist Web Site, March 22, 2010Open enrollment for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) began November 1 for plans taking effect January 1. The coming year will be the third in which the ACA, signed into law by President Obama in March 2010, will be operational. The World Socialist Web Site’s assessment five years ago that the “reform” commonly known as Obamacare would usher in a frontal assault on the health care available to working people is being richly confirmed.
The ACA has nothing in common with universal health care. That was merely the slogan initially advanced to disguise a corporate-designed scheme to dramatically shift health care costs onto the working class.
The central component of the scheme, the “individual mandate,” requires that individuals and families without health insurance through their employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid obtain insurance or pay a tax penalty. Low-income people can qualify for modest tax subsidies to go toward premiums.
The uninsured are required to purchase coverage from private, for-profit insurance companies on the health care “exchanges” set up under the law. This vastly increases the market for private insurance firms without placing any real restraints on the prices they charge—a formula for windfall profits.
By the government’s own forecast, enrollees will face a 7.5 percent average premium rate increase in 2016. Other sources project rate hikes in excess of 20 percent. A recent study showed that many insurers are requesting double-digit rate increases next year and state insurance commissions are approving them.
A frenzy of mergers in the health care industry will fuel further premium increases. In the space of a few weeks in July, Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. merged in a $37 billion deal, and Anthem Inc. agreed to acquire Cigna Corp. for $54 billion. As a result, the five largest health insurers in the US were consolidated into three.
Drug makers Allergan and Pfizer are in the advanced stages of talks to merge and form the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, valued at $330 billion. The price of top brand name prescription drugs are already surging, having increased by 12.9 percent in 2013, the last year for which data is available.
Last week the giant drug store chain Walgreens announced a deal to take over one of its main competitors, Rite Aid, creating a mega-chain to compete with CVS for total domination of the market.
Premiums and drug costs are only one aspect of the burden to be borne by those purchasing coverage under the ACA. The average deductible for the lowest tier “bronze” plans on the exchanges was $5,200 in 2015, and the prevalence of such “high-deductible” plans is sure to expand in 2016. This means that aside from mandated “essential services,” such as certain forms of wellness care and screenings, no medical care is covered until the entire deductible is paid out of pocket. Co-payments for doctor visits and other services are also required.
Research published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at 135 health plans in 34 state marketplaces available during last year’s open enrollment period. The study found that as of April 2015, 18 plans in nine states lacked in-network specialists for at least one specialty. These included obstetricians/gynecologists, dermatologists, cardiologists, psychiatrists, oncologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists and pulmonologists.
What all of this means is that a substantial portion of the 12 million people who have purchased coverage on the health care exchanges will be forced to self-ration medical care due to economic necessity. Workers and their children will forego doctor visits, prescriptions for life-saving medicines will go unfilled, needless suffering and deaths will occur.
This appalling state of affairs is not an unfortunate byproduct of the ACA. By design from its inception, the legislation has been crafted to cut costs for the government and corporations and boost the profits of the health insurers, pharmaceutical corporations and health care chains.
According to the big business parties and their corporate sponsors, Americans are living too long and health care costs are sucking up too much of the national wealth. There is a calculated drive to lower life expectancy for working people.
That is why the introduction of Obamacare has been accompanied by a concerted drive to restrict access to basic medical tests—that is, to ration health care for workers. In recent months, official bodies have called for reducing or delaying mammograms, pap smears, prostate tests and other standard screening procedures.
One indication of the catastrophic implications of the assault on health care is a recent study showing that since 1998, the death rate for middle-income white Americans age 45-54 has risen sharply, resulting in half a million deaths, comparable to the 650,000 Americans who have lost their lives from AIDS since 1981. Researchers point to suicides and substance abuse, driven by increasing financial stress, as the main contributing factors. The ACA will only increase the number of such tragedies.
The implications of Obamacare go far beyond those buying insurance on the ACA exchanges and extend to all segments of health care. The legislation is serving as a model for the assault on employer-sponsored health care coverage as well as the bedrock government-run programs Social Security and Medicare.
Today, approximately half of all Americans receive their health care coverage through their employers. Employer-paid health benefits was an important social gain wrested from the corporations by the struggles of workers in the aftermath of World War II and has been central in raising the living standards of working class families.
But the workings of Obamacare aim to destroy these gains. As Ezekiel Emanuel, a close ally of Obama and key architect of the ACA, predicted in 2009: “By 2025, few private-sector employers will still be providing health insurance.” These plans will give way to vouchers handed out to employees to purchase coverage on insurance exchanges, either those set up under the ACA or others.
In the current contract struggle of US autoworkers, the drive by the auto companies and their union partners to dismantle the “cradle-to-grave” medical coverage won by autoworkers and retirees is in line with the Obama administration’s policy of shifting health care costs to workers.
The recent budget deal between Obama and congressional Republicans rolls back a significant provision in the ACA, the requirement that businesses with more than 200 workers automatically enroll their employees for health insurance. And while employers are basically absolved of responsibility for providing insurance, fines for individuals for not obtaining insurance will rise substantially in 2016—to $695, or 2.5 percent of income, whichever is higher.
Paul Ryan, the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives, has advocated transforming Medicare into a voucher program and partially privatizing Social Security. That he is now presented as a “moderate” unifying force by the ruling elite and the media is an indication of how far to the right the political establishment in America has veered. The foundations are already being laid for the dismantling of Medicare and Social Security.
As the real content of Obamacare becomes clear to millions of workers and middle class people, who suddenly discover that they cannot get access to drugs or doctors and standard medical procedures are no longer covered by their insurance plans, there will be an explosive growth of social opposition.
The third year of the Affordable Care Act is the occasion to call the reactionary legislation by its rightful name: a health care counterrevolution. The only rational and progressive solution to the health care crisis in America is to replace the privately owned and controlled system with socialized medicine, in which the health care industry is nationalized, restructured, and placed under the democratic control of a workers government. This will make possible the provision of quality health care for all as a basic social right.
Kate Randall
"Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of
employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious
for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-
Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson
Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4
billion fortune is extracted from his international network of
sports apparel-producing sweatshops."
OBAMA-CLINTONomics
is a simple device - Serve the super rich and pass the cost of their
looting and Wall Street crimes on to the backs of the last of the
American middle-class!
"Of
course, the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere.
Ultimately, the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by
a massive transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks,
investors and super-rich. The
corollary to rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over
the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and
pensions."
“As
a result, the share of wealth held by the richest 0.1 percent of the
population grew from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2012, while the
wealth of the 400 richest families in the US has doubled since 2008.”
OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class
"Obama
expanded the Wall Street bailout, handing trillions of dollars to the
criminals who wrecked the economy. He then utilized the financial
meltdown to restructure the auto industry on the basis of brutal pay
cuts, setting a precedent for the transformation of the US into a
low-wage economy."
"In
the midst of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the
administration starved state and city governments of resources, leading
to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of education and
public-sector jobs and the gutting of workers’ pensions. Obama’s
Affordable Care Act set in motion the dismantling of employer-paid
health insurance and massive cuts in the Medicare insurance system for
the elderly."
Wealth of America’s super-rich grows to $2.34 trillion
By Nick Barrickman
3 October 2015
The wealth of the 400 richest Americans
continues to soar, according to the results of
the new Forbes 400 list, published annually
by the business magazine of the same name.
At
$2.34 trillion, the total net worth for the multi-billionaires on the
list set new records, displacing last year’s all-time high of $2.29
trillion.
OBAMA-CLINTONomics: MELTDOWN!
Did their crony banksters ultimately destroy the global economy?
Richest one percent controls
nearly half of global wealth
In
2009, the total net worth of the Forbes 400 was $1.27 trillion. Today,
nearly six years into the so-called economic “recovery” fostered by the
Obama administration, the wealthiest Americans have nearly doubled their
hoard. The total wealth of the richest 400 Americans managed to reach
new heights even while financial markets have been roiled by tumultuous
swings.
The Forbes report notes that in 2015, “It was
harder than ever to join the 400. The price of
entry this year was $1.7 billion, the highest
it’s been in the 33 years that Forbes has
racked American wealth.” Forbes makes note
that the wealth threshold was so high this year that 145 billionaires failed to make the list.
it’s been in the 33 years that Forbes has
racked American wealth.” Forbes makes note
that the wealth threshold was so high this year that 145 billionaires failed to make the list.
While
a majority of billionaires have prospered, their wealth underwritten by
the massive government bailouts of financial institutions and near-zero
interest rates from the Federal Reserve, a significant fraction of the
wealthy elite have lost ground in the turbulent stock markets of recent
months.
The ratio of winners and losers among the billionaires was ten to one last year, but this year was much closer to 50-50. Forbes noted
that the top three position-holders on the list, Microsoft’s Bill
Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Larry Ellison,
each saw a drop in their total net worth of at least 5 percent in the
last year. This did nothing to threaten the position of Gates, number
one at $76 billion, or Buffett, number two at $62 billion, but Ellison’s
third-place position, with $47.5 billion, left him “only” $500 million
ahead of the fourth-place multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.
The
majority of those on the Forbes list were associated with some form of
financial speculation, or with computer software and the Internet.
According to the industry breakdown supplied by Forbes, its 400 include
126 engaged in investment, real estate and finance, 81 from computer
technology and media, 36 from food and beverage, 32 from retail and
fashion (including five members of the Walton family, owners of
Wal-Mart), 31 from oil & gas, 20 from health care, 19 from
miscellaneous services (including six members of the Pritzker family,
owners of Hyatt Hotels), and 19 from sports and gaming.
This
left only 35 listed as making their fortunes in manufacturing,
automotive, construction, and logistics. The largest manufacturing
fortune is the $7.4 billion of Harold Kohler, whose company makes
toilets and other plumbing fixtures. Perhaps that is symbolic, given the
state of manufacturing in the United States, once the world leader in
industry, but no longer.
The
growth of financial parasitism has underwritten the wealth of many on
the Forbes 400. In 1982, the first Forbes 400 list saw figures directly
involved in finance making up only 4.4 percent of the total wealth on
the list. As of today, this group now makes up more than 21 percent of
billionaires on the list.
Former
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who has held the number one spot on the
Forbes 400 for 22 years, has less than 13 percent of his fortune in
stock in the company he founded. According toForbes,
the majority of Gates’ wealth is bound up in Cascade, the software
mogul’s investment firm, which specializes in “investing in stocks,
bonds, private equity and real estate.”
Besides
the well-known super-rich of Silicon Valley like Google’s Larry Page
and Sergey Brin (with $33.3 billion and $32.6 billion, respectively) and
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social media web site Facebook, the
seventh wealthiest man in America with $40.3 billion in total assets,
there are numerous other newly minted Internet billionaires, including
the owners and co-owners of Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter,
SnapChat, GoPro and GoDaddy.com.
Jeffrey
Bezos, owner of the online retailer Amazon, saw the largest gain in
wealth for the year, making $16 billion in 2015, placing his total net
worth at $47 billion and catapulting him to fourth place. Nearly half of
Bezos’ gains came within a single day last July, when his company
announced gains in the second quarter, leading to a speculative frenzy
which bid up stock values for Amazon by over 18 percent.
Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of
employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious
for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-
Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson
Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4
billion fortune is extracted from his international network of
sports apparel-producing sweatshops.
employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious
for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-
Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson
Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4
billion fortune is extracted from his international network of
sports apparel-producing sweatshops.
While
safeguarding the ill-gotten wealth of the Forbes billionaires remains
an ironclad principle of both the Republican and Democratic parties,
working people throughout the US continue to suffer the brunt of attacks
on their living standards. A US Census report released earlier this
month shows that 14.8 percent of the US population lives in poverty; a
figure that is unchanged from a year earlier. The Census findings show
that 6.6 percent of the population lives in “deep poverty,” or less than
half of the already unrealistically low official poverty line in the
US.
Obama’s crony banksters face the guillotine
AMERICA’S DRIFT TOWARDS
REVOLUTION:
REVOLUTION:
The
American people stand up to crooked politicians’ cronies, crooked
unions and the Mexican occupation, crime TIDAL WAVE and welfare state in
our open borders.
"The
American elites, comfortable in their current lifestyle, had better
wake up to the rumbling beneath their feet before the volcano erupts."
The nation’s population has grown by 35% since 1988;
however the number of employed Americans has only
increased by 27% while those who have dropped out and are
no longer in the labor force has escalated by 50%. Further
the number of Americans living in poverty has increased by
61%.
however the number of employed Americans has only
increased by 27% while those who have dropped out and are
no longer in the labor force has escalated by 50%. Further
the number of Americans living in poverty has increased by
61%.
OBAMA-CLINTONomics…. will it destroy this
nation or will they simply hand us the tax bills for
their newest bailouts and crimes?
nation or will they simply hand us the tax bills for
their newest bailouts and crimes?
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.
socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate
America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory
robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
These are only the most striking of a barrage of
numbers reported in recent weeks,
demonstrating that for the US financial
aristocracy, the Crash of 2008 has been
used to engineer a historic redistribution of
wealth.
numbers reported in recent weeks,
demonstrating that for the US financial
aristocracy, the Crash of 2008 has been
used to engineer a historic redistribution of
wealth.
THE COMING GLOBAL MELTDOWN:
a nation pays the ultimate price for OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the death of the American middle-class
OBAMA-CLINTONomics: Their cronies loot…
“This
is Obama’s new “middle class,” working for half the wages of their
grandparents and barely keeping one step out of a homeless shelter.”
"Corporate
profits are at their highest share of GDP since World War II, while the
portion of national economic output going to labor has fallen to the
lowest postwar level."
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE:
BUILD A DICTATORSHIP BY DESTROYING THE AMERICAN
MIDDLE-CLASS.
MIDDLE-CLASS.
HIS CRONY BANKSTERS DESTROYED TRILLIONS IN HOME
EQUITY, HIS ILLEGALS HAVE BUILT A TRILLION DOLLAR LA
RAZA WELFARE STATE ON OUR BACKS…. AND ALL JOBS GO TO
NON-AMERICANS!
EQUITY, HIS ILLEGALS HAVE BUILT A TRILLION DOLLAR LA
RAZA WELFARE STATE ON OUR BACKS…. AND ALL JOBS GO TO
NON-AMERICANS!
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES
FASTER under Obama than Bush.
FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By
the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had
completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal
and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an
ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS
AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and
passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes”
provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the
world.”
2014
By Niles Williamson
19 September 2015
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/millions-of-jobs-for-illegals-along.html
The report found that 14.8 percent of the country’s population lived in poverty in 2014, statistically unchanged from a year prior. Blacks had the highest poverty rate in 2014 at 26.2 percent, which was a one percentage point increase over 2013. Among children and teenagers under the age of 18, approximately 15.5 million, or 21.1 percent, lived in poverty.
OBAMANOMICS:
How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street
Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses…and Muslim Dictators
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/11/obamas-crony-capitalism-obama-was.html
OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class
"Obama
expanded the Wall Street bailout, handing trillions of dollars to the
criminals who wrecked the economy. He then utilized the financial
meltdown to restructure the auto industry on the basis of brutal pay
cuts, setting a precedent for the transformation of the US into a
low-wage economy."
"In the midst of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the administration starved state and city governments of resources, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of education and public-sector jobs and the gutting of workers’ pensions. Obama’s Affordable Care Act set in motion the dismantling of employer-paid health insurance and massive cuts in the Medicare insurance system for the elderly."
OBAMA-CLINTONomics
is a simple device - Serve the super rich and pass the cost of their
looting and Wall Street crimes on to the backs of the last of the
American middle-class!
"Of course, the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere.
Ultimately,
the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by a massive
transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks, investors and
super-rich. The
corollary to rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over
the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and
pensions."
“As a result, the share of wealth held by the richest 0.1 percent of the population grew from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2012, while the wealth of the 400 richest families in the US has doubled since 2008.”
THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON OUR PENSIONS
BIGGER PROFITS FOR HIS WALL STREET DONORS IF PENSIONS ARE SLASHED
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-obama-doctrine-destroy-american.html
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-obama-doctrine-destroy-american.html
“Feinberg, who as the Obama administration’s “pay tsar” rubber- stamped multimillion-dollar executive bonuses to Wall Street banks bailed out with taxpayer funds, will now be given power to slash workers’ benefits at his discretion.”
Top 1 percent own more than half of world’s wealth
By Patrick Martin
14 October 2015
A new report issued
by the Swiss bank Credit Suisse finds that global wealth inequality
continues to worsen and has reached a new milestone, with the top 1
percent owning more of the world’s assets than the bottom 99 percent
combined.
Of
the estimated $250 trillion in global assets, the top 1 percent owned
almost exactly 50 percent, while the bottom 50 percent of humanity owned
collectively less than 1 percent. The richest 10 percent owned 87.7
percent of the world’s wealth, leaving 12.3 percent for the bottom 90
percent of the population.
The
Credit Suisse report focused not on the top 1 percent, but on a
slightly smaller group, the 0.7 percent of adults with assets of more
than 1 million US dollars. This figure includes both financial assets
and real assets, such as homes, small businesses and other physical
property.
The
report’s eye-catching “Global Wealth Pyramid” divides the human race
into four categories by wealth: 3.4 billion adults with net assets of
less than $10,000; 1 billion with net assets from $10,000 to $100,000;
349 million with net assets from $100,000 to $1 million; and 34 million
with net assets over $1 million.
The
lowest category comprises 71 percent of all adults and owns only 3
percent of total wealth; the next-poorest group comprises 21 percent of
adults and owns 12.5 percent of the wealth; above this is a group
comprising 7.4 percent of adults and owning 39.4 of the wealth; and
finally the top layer, 0.7 percent of adults owning 45.2 percent of the
wealth.
This
top layer, defined by the report as “high-net-worth individuals,” is
itself divided very unequally, as shown in a second pyramid: 29.8
million with assets of $1 million to $5 million; 2.5 million with assets
of $5 million to $10 million; 1.34 million with assets of $10 million
to $50 million; and finally, 123,800 with assets over $50 million.
These
123,800 “ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” as the report calls them,
are the true global financial aristocracy, exercising decisive sway not
only over banks and corporations, but over governments and international
institutions as well. Of these, nearly 59,000, almost half the total,
live in the United States. Another quarter live in Europe (mainly
Britain, Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy), followed by China and
then Japan.
The
Credit Suisse report notes the particularly rapid rise in inequality
since the Wall Street crash of 2008 and relates it directly to the stock
market boom that followed the bailout of the banks, initiated by the
Bush administration and greatly expanded by the Obama administration. A
key passage reads:
“There
are strong reasons to think that the rise in wealth inequality since
2008 is mostly related to the rise in equity prices and to the size of
financial assets in the United States and some other high-wealth
countries, which together have pushed up the wealth of some of the
richest countries and of many of the richest people around the world.
The jump in the share of the top percentile to 50 percent this year
exceeds the increase expected on the basis of any underlying upward
trend. It is consistent, however, with the fact that financial assets
continue to increase in relative importance and that the rise in the USD
(US dollar) over the past year has given wealth inequality in the
United States—which is very high by international standards—more weight
in the overall global picture.”
In
other words, deepening global economic inequality is being driven above
all by American capitalism, with the United States being both the
wealthiest and by far the most unequal country in the world. The US has
less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but a staggering 46
percent of the world’s millionaires.
Far
from demonstrating the health of the US economy, this disproportionate
growth of the super-rich resembles the spread of a cancer that is
rapidly metastasizing, with fatal consequences for the entire social
organism.
Never
have the rich increased their wealth so quickly as in America since the
financial crash of 2008. But side by side with the amassing of
previously unthinkable private fortunes, the infrastructure of America
is crumbling, education, health care and other social services are
starved of funding, and the living standards of the vast majority of the
population, the working people who produce the wealth, are declining.
The
Credit Suisse report also calls attention to significant regional
differences within the structure of global capitalism, focusing on the
diverging fortunes of three main regions: North America, Europe and the
Asia-Pacific.
Total
global wealth declined slightly in 2015, according to the report, but
only because the bank’s calculations were in US dollars, and thus were
affected by the depreciation of the euro, the Japanese yen, the Russian
ruble, the Canadian dollar and many other currencies against the US
dollar.
US
wealth rose $4.6 trillion, despite a global decline of $12.7 trillion,
with Japan, Russia and the European Union countries showing the biggest
drops, largely because of currency depreciation. Australia and Canada
lost $1.5 trillion in wealth between them, a substantial drop for the
two mid-sized economies, which are heavily dependent on resource
extraction.
China,
whose currency is loosely pegged to the dollar, saw a $1.5 trillion
gain. But this has likely already evaporated, since the report is based
on figures ending June 30, 2015 and the Chinese financial markets have
plunged 25 percent since then, as the report’s foreword notes.
These
disparities between countries, like the growing social disparities
within countries, have immense significance for world politics. They are
a major factor in the increasingly explosive character of international
relations, particularly the conflicts between the major imperialist
powers—the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain—and countries
like Russia, China and Iran that are being targeted for their huge
natural and human resources.
US
imperialism uses both its preeminent military position and the role of
the dollar, still the world’s main reserve currency, as weapons in
seeking to offset its economic decline relative to its major rivals.
America is both a social powder keg, with class tensions at home
approaching the breaking point, and the most destabilizing force in
world politics, seeking to maintain its position of global dominance by
increasingly reckless and militaristic methods.
National Review Online, November 13, 2015
Estimates from the Center for Migration Studies and the Pew Research Center show that, of the 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States, approximately 2.5 million arrived after Barack Obama’s inauguration. Yet the overall number of illegal immigrants in the country has remained fairly static, meaning that illegal immigrants have been coming and going in about equal numbers. Why? Because, contrary to much political rhetoric, many illegal immigrants are not here to stay, and so are very sensitive to incentives: When the prospect of profitable work outweighs the risk of falling afoul of law enforcement, they come; when it doesn’t, they leave.
. . .
It is crucial, though, that we end the flow of illegal immigrants across our borders before dealing with those already here — otherwise, an amnesty will inevitably only draw the next population of illegal immigrants. To that end, a Republican administration should, among other things, seek to erect physical barriers along the southern border, end catch-and-release policies, and work with Congress to defund sanctuary cities.
Only after enforcement measures such as E-Verify are fully implemented and the illegal population has been actually declining should any other major measures be considered. We’re always told that it is urgent to bring illegal immigrants “out of the shadows.” But the plight of illegal immigrants is no more urgent now than it was a few years ago, or a few years before that.
. . .
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427000/illegal-immigration-modest-but-comprehensive-solution-editors
Stopping the Flow of Illegal Immigrants
National Review Online, November 13, 2015
Estimates from the Center for Migration Studies and the Pew Research Center show that, of the 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States, approximately 2.5 million arrived after Barack Obama’s inauguration. Yet the overall number of illegal immigrants in the country has remained fairly static, meaning that illegal immigrants have been coming and going in about equal numbers. Why? Because, contrary to much political rhetoric, many illegal immigrants are not here to stay, and so are very sensitive to incentives: When the prospect of profitable work outweighs the risk of falling afoul of law enforcement, they come; when it doesn’t, they leave.
. . .
It is crucial, though, that we end the flow of illegal immigrants across our borders before dealing with those already here — otherwise, an amnesty will inevitably only draw the next population of illegal immigrants. To that end, a Republican administration should, among other things, seek to erect physical barriers along the southern border, end catch-and-release policies, and work with Congress to defund sanctuary cities.
Only after enforcement measures such as E-Verify are fully implemented and the illegal population has been actually declining should any other major measures be considered. We’re always told that it is urgent to bring illegal immigrants “out of the shadows.” But the plight of illegal immigrants is no more urgent now than it was a few years ago, or a few years before that.
. . .
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427000/illegal-immigration-modest-but-comprehensive-solution-editors
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