Sunday, November 15, 2015

AMERICA: NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!!! - Michelle Malkin - The Myth of H-1B Job Creation

The Myth of H-1B Job Creation

The Myth of H-1B Job Creation

A Commentary By Michelle Malkin
in Political Commentary

        
Friday, November 13, 2015
 
Every day brings new headlines, ignored by the Washington press corps, of U.S. workers losing their livelihoods to cheap H1-B visa replacements.

Just this week, Computerworld reported: "Fury and fear in Ohio as IT jobs go to India."
Yet, it remains an article of faith among Big Business flacks and Beltway hacks that H-1B not only protects American jobs, but also fuels miraculous job growth.

The myths are recycled and regurgitated by the likes of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who claims that "foreign-born STEM workers complement the American workforce, they don't take American jobs."
Bill Gates, citing the National Foundation for American Policy, which is run by one-man Beltway advocacy research shop operative Stuart Anderson, testified before Congress that "a recent study shows for every H-1B holder that technology companies hire, five additional jobs are created around that person."

Citing another NFAP study by economics professor Madeline Zavodny of Agnes Scott College, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asserted: "2.62 MORE JOBS are created for U.S.-born workers for each foreign-born worker in the U.S. with a U.S. STEM graduate degree."

But even the reliably pro-immigration expansionist Wall Street Journal had to call out Bill Gates on his misleading testimony to Congress regarding oft-cited NFAP job-creation figures. First off, the data set was confined to S&P 500 technology companies, which "excludes the leading users" of H-1B visas -- offshore outsourcing companies from India such as Infosys, Wipro and Tata.

Moreover, Carl Bialik, the newspaper's "Numbers Guy," reported that the study Gates cited to claim amazing H-1B job generation "shows nothing of the kind. Instead, it finds a positive correlation between these visas and job growth. These visas could be an indicator of broader hiring at the company, rather than the cause."

University of California, Davis professor Norm Matloff explained that Gates' false conclusion is a common analytical error known as Simpson's Paradox, "in which the relation between two variables is very misleading, due to their mutual relation to a third variable."

NFAP's Zavodny study was published by the American Enterprise Institute, sponsored by open-borders billionaire Michael Bloomberg's Partnership for a New American Economy and touted by the open-borders U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the pro-H-1B FWD.us.

Zavodny's study initially examined data from the years 2000 to 2010. She hypothesized that states with more foreign-born workers would have higher rates of employment among native-born Americans. Initially, she was unable to find a significant effect of foreign-born workers on U.S. jobs.
So what changed? In correspondence with John Miano, co-author of our new book "Sold Out" on the foreign guest-worker racket, and I, Zavodny revealed that when she showed her initial results to the study sponsor, the backers came up with the idea of discarding the last three years of data -- ostensibly to eliminate the effects of the economic recession -- and trying again.

Voila! After re-crunching the numbers at the sponsor's request, Zavodny found the effect the study sponsor was hoping to find.

Standard research practice is to formulate a research hypothesis and specify a study sample before the analysis has been completed. The practice of "data dredging" -- that is, tweaking the sample data until one gets rid of "anomalous results" -- is frowned upon.

To her credit, Zavodny provided her data to a curious software developer in Silicon Valley who was interested in immigration policy. The blogger, R. Davis, discovered a number of serious methodological deficiencies in Zavodny's work.

Most importantly, he documented that Zavodny's results are highly sensitive to the date range selected. When she studied the years 2000-2007, she found 100 foreign-born workers in STEM fields with advanced degrees from U.S. universities were associated with 262 additional jobs for native-born Americans. But change the date range a little bit to 2002-2008, and the exact same regression model shows the destruction of 110 jobs for natives, according to the independent researcher.
Also, Zavodny's "262 additional jobs" factoid deals not with H-1B visa holders but with foreign-born workers in so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) who have advanced degrees (that is, a master's or doctorate) from U.S. universities. About 45 percent of H-1B visa holders do not have advanced degrees (as noted above), let alone advanced degrees from U.S. universities.

According to public policy professor Ron Hira of Howard University, only 1 in 206 of H-1B workers at offshore outsourcing giant Infosys holds an advanced degree from a U.S. university. Even fewer of Tata Consultancy Services H-1B workers do -- just 1 in 222. So there is almost no overlap between the highly educated workers in Zavodny's "262 additional jobs" analysis and the mostly entry-level workers who actually come to the U.S. on H-1B visas.

While industry lobbyists have to employ dubious and convoluted means to show H-1B creates jobs, it is brutally simple to show that H-1B workers take American jobs. Just ask the folks who trained their H-1B replacements at Disney, Southern California Edison, Toys R Us, Fossil and countless other companies across the nation.

This column is adapted from Malkin and Miano's new book, How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers (Mercury Ink/Simon & Schuster).

Michelle Malkin is author of the new book "Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs." Her email address is malkinblog@gmail.com.

Immigration Policy is Being Used to Pink-Slip American Workers

 By Jon Feere

 TheHill.com, November 11, 2015

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/259790-immigration-policy-is-being-used-to-pink-slip-american-workers

Excerpt: Immigration policy impacts Americans of all skillsets and education levels. It is often incorrectly assumed that our immigration system only brings in low-skilled laborers who compete with blue collar Americans in an increasingly difficult job market. Many politicians, whose jobs are not threated by foreign labor, often welcome mass immigration; in their minds, high levels of immigration means cheaper landscapers, housekeepers and au pairs. Elites in the halls of Congress and in many of the nation's newsrooms simply don't care about the impact low-skilled immigration has on American workers.

But some are starting to take notice about the impact of our nation's immigration policy on high-skilled Americans who work in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.



THERE IS NO GREATER IMPACT ON KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED THAN THE
DEMOCRAT PARTY'S CONSPIRACY OF OPEN BORDERS, ENDLESS HORDES OF
ILLEGALS JUMPING OUR BORDERS AND JOBS, AND THE ASSAULT ON E-VERIFY!

Obama’s low-wage “recovery”

31 January 2014
President Obama’s State of the Union address this week coincided with the release of several year-end profit reports. Profits for the firms listed on the S&P 500 stock market index jumped 11 percent in 2013, in large part because of declining wages and the increased exploitation of American workers.
In his national address Tuesday night, Obama acknowledged that “corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened.” The “cold, hard fact,” he added, “is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by—let alone get ahead.”
As is his wont, the president posed as an innocent bystander, suggesting that some sections of the population had unfortunately missed out on “four years of economic growth.” In fact, the explosion of social inequality the president paid lip service to is the product of quite deliberate policies spearheaded by his administration.
Obama’s principal task on coming to office was to initiate the largest transfer of wealth—from the working class to the corporate and financial elite—in US history. This began with the bailout of the financial system. It continued through the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler, premised on the halving of wages for new hires and a shift in the burden of health care expenses from employers to workers.
Billions have been slashed from social programs, including the cut-off of long-term unemployment benefits and cuts in food stamps, and the administration has backed the bankruptcy of Detroit, which is seen as a national model for forcing through pension cuts and other measures.
The surge in corporate profits is one consequence of these policies. According to Bloomberg, US corporations’ after-tax profits have grown by more than 170 percent under Obama, more than any president since World War II. They have reached their highest level relative to the size of the economy since the government began keeping records in 1947. Profits are more than twice as high as their peak during the Reagan administration, which, beginning with the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981, initiated a class war against workers.
Since Reagan, the American ruling class has waged an unrelenting campaign, utilizing the services of the trade unions, which abandoned any defense of the working class. Deindustrialization and financialization has been accompanied by the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of entire industries. To the extent that any jobs are created, it is on the basis of poverty level wages.
Labor’s share of the Gross Domestic Product has now fallen to 57 percent, the lowest portion of the country’s output since 1950. Since the recession officially ended in January 2009, wages for auto workers have fallen by 10 percent in real terms, and for manufacturing as a whole they have fallen by 2.4 percent.
Although the global economic crisis resulted in losses or slower profits in Europe, China and the so-called emerging markets, multinational manufacturing firms reaped huge profits in the US. Aircraft manufacturer Boeing saw its profits rise 18 percent to $4.6 billion last year, while Ford saw profits rise 26 percent to $7.2 billion. Caterpillar beat analyst expectations with a 44 percent jump in fourth quarter profits, due primarily to “aggressive cost-cutting,” i.e., mass layoffs and wage cuts, which its CEO promised would accelerate in 2014.
US corporations are holding on to a record $1.5 trillion in cash reserves, according to Moody’s credit rating agency. Rather than investing in new plants or hiring, let alone raising wages and benefits, corporations are chiefly spending this stockpile of cash on dividend payouts to their investors and stock buybacks to drive up share values, like Caterpillar’s $10 billion program.
Talk of a manufacturing “renaissance” is largely a fraud. Only 568,000 manufacturing positions have been added since January 2010, a small fraction of the nearly six million lost between 2000 and 2009, according to a New York Times column published last week by Obama’s former “car czar,” Steven Rattner.
Employers that have moved production to the US have been lured through wage reductions and massive tax cuts, like the $280,000 a job credit given to Volkswagen for its Chattanooga, Tennessee plant. Pointing to the German auto company, Rattner noted that it “moved production from a high-wage country (Germany) to a low-wage country (the United States).”
As Obama boasted in his address, “for the first time in over a decade, business leaders around the world have declared that China is no longer the world’s number one place to invest; America is.” The president added that, “over half of big manufacturers say they’re thinking of in-sourcing jobs from abroad.”
As a model of success, the president pointed to Detroit Manufacturing Systems, a business that hires welfare recipients and the long-term unemployed to produce components for Ford. A Washington Post article noted that the workers, who are members of the United Auto Workers union, are hired “at far lower wages than many had been earning in their previous jobs.”
The Obama administration and the ruling class have counted on the UAW, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and other trade unions, whose executives and their financial advisors see “in-sourcing” as a growth strategy. Manufacturers making some of the largest profits have relied on the treachery of the unions to impose wage-cutting contracts and suppress struggles when they did erupt.
This included the UAW’s collaboration in the restructuring of the auto industry, which reduced wages of new hires to the equivalent, in real terms, of what was earned by workers in 1914, when Henry Ford first established the $5 day. The UAW was rewarded with corporate shares and millions more in dues money from newly hired workers, who, on top of suffering the indignation of poverty wages, are soon to be hit with a 25 percent dues increase.
Most recently at Boeing, the IAM rammed through a contract extension originally defeated by rank-and-file workers that allowed the jet manufacturer to end company paid pensions, won in 1947, and ban strikes for the next decade.
The experience of the Obama administration, which has overseen the greatest explosion of social inequality in US history, while accelerating the attack on democratic rights and war-mongering policies of his Republican predecessor, has provoked widespread disgust and anger. The president’s election-year rhetoric about “equality” and his proposals for token “reforms” is largely falling on deaf ears.
The historic reversal in living standards for the working class in the United States and around the world is producing enormous levels of social anger, which the capitalist parties, the trade unions and their apologists will not be able to contain. It is only a matter of time for these tensions to erupt into massive struggles. When they do, however, they must be guided by a new leadership and political program, based on the international unity of the working class, its political independence from the corporate-backed parties and the fight to replace the capitalist profit system with socialism, that is genuine social equality.
Jerry White

BILLIONAIRE TRUMP VOWS HE WILL CONTINUE OBAMA'S ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER! - “Wages are too high,” declares billionaire Trump


THERE IS NO GREATER IMPACT ON KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED THAN THE
DEMOCRAT PARTY'S CONSPIRACY OF OPEN BORDERS, ENDLESS HORDES OF
ILLEGALS JUMPING OUR BORDERS AND JOBS, AND THE ASSAULT ON E-VERIFY!

Obama’s low-wage “recovery”

31 January 2014
President Obama’s State of the Union address this week coincided with the release of several year-end profit reports. Profits for the firms listed on the S&P 500 stock market index jumped 11 percent in 2013, in large part because of declining wages and the increased exploitation of American workers.
In his national address Tuesday night, Obama acknowledged that “corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened.” The “cold, hard fact,” he added, “is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by—let alone get ahead.”
As is his wont, the president posed as an innocent bystander, suggesting that some sections of the population had unfortunately missed out on “four years of economic growth.” In fact, the explosion of social inequality the president paid lip service to is the product of quite deliberate policies spearheaded by his administration.
Obama’s principal task on coming to office was to initiate the largest transfer of wealth—from the working class to the corporate and financial elite—in US history. This began with the bailout of the financial system. It continued through the 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler, premised on the halving of wages for new hires and a shift in the burden of health care expenses from employers to workers.
Billions have been slashed from social programs, including the cut-off of long-term unemployment benefits and cuts in food stamps, and the administration has backed the bankruptcy of Detroit, which is seen as a national model for forcing through pension cuts and other measures.
The surge in corporate profits is one consequence of these policies. According to Bloomberg, US corporations’ after-tax profits have grown by more than 170 percent under Obama, more than any president since World War II. They have reached their highest level relative to the size of the economy since the government began keeping records in 1947. Profits are more than twice as high as their peak during the Reagan administration, which, beginning with the smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike in 1981, initiated a class war against workers.
Since Reagan, the American ruling class has waged an unrelenting campaign, utilizing the services of the trade unions, which abandoned any defense of the working class. Deindustrialization and financialization has been accompanied by the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of entire industries. To the extent that any jobs are created, it is on the basis of poverty level wages.
Labor’s share of the Gross Domestic Product has now fallen to 57 percent, the lowest portion of the country’s output since 1950. Since the recession officially ended in January 2009, wages for auto workers have fallen by 10 percent in real terms, and for manufacturing as a whole they have fallen by 2.4 percent.
Although the global economic crisis resulted in losses or slower profits in Europe, China and the so-called emerging markets, multinational manufacturing firms reaped huge profits in the US. Aircraft manufacturer Boeing saw its profits rise 18 percent to $4.6 billion last year, while Ford saw profits rise 26 percent to $7.2 billion. Caterpillar beat analyst expectations with a 44 percent jump in fourth quarter profits, due primarily to “aggressive cost-cutting,” i.e., mass layoffs and wage cuts, which its CEO promised would accelerate in 2014.
US corporations are holding on to a record $1.5 trillion in cash reserves, according to Moody’s credit rating agency. Rather than investing in new plants or hiring, let alone raising wages and benefits, corporations are chiefly spending this stockpile of cash on dividend payouts to their investors and stock buybacks to drive up share values, like Caterpillar’s $10 billion program.
Talk of a manufacturing “renaissance” is largely a fraud. Only 568,000 manufacturing positions have been added since January 2010, a small fraction of the nearly six million lost between 2000 and 2009, according to a New York Times column published last week by Obama’s former “car czar,” Steven Rattner.
Employers that have moved production to the US have been lured through wage reductions and massive tax cuts, like the $280,000 a job credit given to Volkswagen for its Chattanooga, Tennessee plant. Pointing to the German auto company, Rattner noted that it “moved production from a high-wage country (Germany) to a low-wage country (the United States).”
As Obama boasted in his address, “for the first time in over a decade, business leaders around the world have declared that China is no longer the world’s number one place to invest; America is.” The president added that, “over half of big manufacturers say they’re thinking of in-sourcing jobs from abroad.”
As a model of success, the president pointed to Detroit Manufacturing Systems, a business that hires welfare recipients and the long-term unemployed to produce components for Ford. A Washington Post article noted that the workers, who are members of the United Auto Workers union, are hired “at far lower wages than many had been earning in their previous jobs.”
The Obama administration and the ruling class have counted on the UAW, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and other trade unions, whose executives and their financial advisors see “in-sourcing” as a growth strategy. Manufacturers making some of the largest profits have relied on the treachery of the unions to impose wage-cutting contracts and suppress struggles when they did erupt.
This included the UAW’s collaboration in the restructuring of the auto industry, which reduced wages of new hires to the equivalent, in real terms, of what was earned by workers in 1914, when Henry Ford first established the $5 day. The UAW was rewarded with corporate shares and millions more in dues money from newly hired workers, who, on top of suffering the indignation of poverty wages, are soon to be hit with a 25 percent dues increase.
Most recently at Boeing, the IAM rammed through a contract extension originally defeated by rank-and-file workers that allowed the jet manufacturer to end company paid pensions, won in 1947, and ban strikes for the next decade.
The experience of the Obama administration, which has overseen the greatest explosion of social inequality in US history, while accelerating the attack on democratic rights and war-mongering policies of his Republican predecessor, has provoked widespread disgust and anger. The president’s election-year rhetoric about “equality” and his proposals for token “reforms” is largely falling on deaf ears.
The historic reversal in living standards for the working class in the United States and around the world is producing enormous levels of social anger, which the capitalist parties, the trade unions and their apologists will not be able to contain. It is only a matter of time for these tensions to erupt into massive struggles. When they do, however, they must be guided by a new leadership and political program, based on the international unity of the working class, its political independence from the corporate-backed parties and the fight to replace the capitalist profit system with socialism, that is genuine social equality.
Jerry White




“Wages are too high,” declares billionaire Trump

At Republican presidential debate

“Wages are too high,” declares billionaire Trump

By Patrick Martin
12 November 2015
Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate began with something rare in American political life: an open expression of class policy, in which the billionaire who leads the Republican field declared his opposition to any pay increase for the tens of millions of workers making poverty wages, on the grounds that low pay was necessary to make American capitalism more competitive.
In the first question posed to the field of eight Republican candidates, Donald Trump was asked whether he was sympathetic to demands for an immediate hike in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. He replied, “I can’t be … and the reason I can’t be is that we are a country that is being beaten on every front economically.”
He went on to add that in his view, taxes were “too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it [the minimum wage, now $7.25 an hour] the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard …”
The candidates currently second and third in polls of likely Republican voters gave similar responses. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson claimed, “Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases. It’s particularly a problem in the black community. Only 19.8 percent of black teenagers have a job … and that’s because of those high wages. If you lower those wages, that comes down.”
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida was asked a different question, but insisted on responding on the minimum wage issue. “If I thought that raising the minimum wage was the best way to help people increase their pay, I would be all for it,” he said, “but it isn’t. In the 20th century, it’s a disaster. If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that’s replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.”
These statements, which took up less than 10 minutes, revealed more about the nature of class relations in America than all the debates and campaign speeches, and all the campaign commentaries that have filled up countless hours on broadcast and cable television and endless column inches in the national press.
Wages are “too high,” says the capitalist Trump, and make it more difficult for American companies to compete in the world market. The solution to unemployment is to “lower those wages,” says Dr. Carson, a multi-millionaire Christian fundamentalist now tied with Trump in many polls. If you raise the minimum wage, “it’s a disaster,” says Senator Rubio, who is increasingly viewed as the consensus choice of Wall Street and the Republican Party establishment for the nomination.
None of the other Republican candidates raised any objection to these sentiments, which make nonsense of all their posturing in the remainder of the debate about defending the “middle class,” fighting for “good jobs,” or bemoaning the growth of poverty, food stamp use, small business bankruptcies and other indicators of the deepening social and economic crisis of American capitalism.
The question to Trump was provoked by the nationwide demonstrations Tuesday by fast food workers demanding a $15 an hour wage, which culminated in a rally of several thousand workers outside the Milwaukee theater where the Republican debate was held. The “Fight for 15” campaign has been organized by a section of the trade unions, led by the Service Employees International Union, with the backing of pseudo-left groups like the International Socialist Organization and Socialist Alternative.
These organizations are trying to channel the legitimate anger of the young workers participating in these protests into the dead end of support for the Democratic Party in the 2016 elections. Bernie Sanders addressed one of the Fight for 15 rallies, while Hillary Clinton—who only backs a raise in the minimum wage to $12 an hour—tweeted her support.
The Democratic Party in power, however, in the person of President Barack Obama, has pursued the same basic economic program outlined by Trump, Carson and Rubio. The Obama administration forced through a 50 percent wage cut for new hires in the auto industry, to as little as $14 an hour, as part of its bailout of GM and Chrysler (now FCA) in 2009. This was necessary, the White House declared, in order to make the auto industry competitive with its foreign rivals.
Outright wage-cutting was combined with Obama’s phony health care “reform,” aimed at cutting the cost of benefits for American employers, and the refusal of the administration, with a Democratic Congress in 2009-2010, to raise the minimum wage or index it to inflation. As a result of this inaction, the federal minimum wage has been frozen at $7.25 an hour for more than six years. Considering inflation, low-paid workers have taken a severe wage cut under Obama.
Cutting US wage levels in order to boost the profits of American companies and make them more competitive in the world market is the axis of Obama’s policy of encouraging “in-sourcing” by US corporations. As Obama boasted in his 2014 State of the Union address, “for the first time in over a decade, business leaders around the world have declared that China is no longer the world’s number one place to invest; America is.” A major element of this “success” is the slashing of US production costs to near Chinese levels.
There is a cynical irony in the promotion of the “Fight for 15” slogan by the unions and the Democrats. It is not low-wage workers who will be lifted up to $15 an hour, but those at higher wages, like first-tier workers at GM, Ford and FCA, who are being reduced to that level. $15 an hour is not to be the floor under the living standards of the working class, but the ceiling.
What the Republicans demand in brutally reactionary terms—cut wages, cut benefits, boost profits—the Democrats actually implement, even while disguising the effect of their policies under a cloud of populist rhetoric, with the political assistance of the unions and the pseudo-left. The contradiction between words and actions is so stark that in the 2016 election campaign, the Democrats have had to resort to a self-proclaimed “socialist,” Senator Sanders, to give their pro-Wall Street program a left cover.
The political lesson for the working class is clear. The defense of living standards and decent-paying jobs requires a break with both the parties of big business, the Democrats as much as the Republicans. The working class must build an independent mass political movement of its own, based on a socialist program. Workers must fight for a drastic redistribution of wealth and income: the confiscation of the vast wealth of the super-rich, and the reorganization of economic life to serve the needs of the vast majority of working people, not private profit.


The author also recommends:
Obama’s low-wage “recovery”[31 January 2014]

DISAPPEARING JOBS AS THE DEMOCRAT PARTY CONSPIRES FOR AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY AND NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!

Immigration Policy is Being Used to Pink-Slip American Workers

 By Jon Feere

 TheHill.com, November 11, 2015

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/immigration/259790-immigration-policy-is-being-used-to-pink-slip-american-workers

Excerpt: Immigration policy impacts Americans of all skillsets and education levels. It is often incorrectly assumed that our immigration system only brings in low-skilled laborers who compete with blue collar Americans in an increasingly difficult job market. Many politicians, whose jobs are not threated by foreign labor, often welcome mass immigration; in their minds, high levels of immigration means cheaper landscapers, housekeepers and au pairs. Elites in the halls of Congress and in many of the nation's newsrooms simply don't care about the impact low-skilled immigration has on American workers.

But some are starting to take notice about the impact of our nation's immigration policy on high-skilled Americans who work in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.

 

 

Kraft Heinz and Alcoa among companies cutting hundreds of jobs in upstate New York Financial results for the third quarter from parent company Berkshire Hathaway reported record profits of $9.4 billion up from $4.6 billion last year largely on the back of the Kraft Heinz cuts. On Saturday in a Reuters article, Jeff Mathews of Ram Partners LP hedge fund conveyed mock sympathy for the plight of workers, stating, “Warren Buffett, the billionaire, is getting richer on cost cuts while 2,600 families are getting poorer. It’s a shame.”

By Steve Filips
12 November 2015

Last week Kraft Heinz announced plans to close seven plants nationwide and the layoff of an additional 2,600 workers over the next 12 to 24 months, bringing the total announced layoffs nationwide to more than 5,000. Included in the plants slated for closure is the one in Campbell, New York, a plant with 393 workers.
The Kraft Heinz layoffs amount to 14 percent of the company’s North American factory workforce. In August, the company announced the elimination of 2,500 jobs, including 700 workers at its corporate headquarters in Chicago.
The plants slated to be closed are: two in California, one in Fullerton and the other in San Leandro. Also being closed are plants in St. Marys, Ontario, Canada, Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania and Madison, Wisconsin.
Kraft Heinz is the fifth largest food company in the world and is the product of the merger of the two companies earlier this year valued at $49 billion. The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Heinz company was acquired for $28 billion by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway in 2013. Buffet promptly slashed 7000 jobs.

Financial results for the third quarter from parent company Berkshire Hathaway reported record profits of $9.4 billion up from $4.6 billion last year largely on the back of the Kraft Heinz cuts. On Saturday in a Reuters article, Jeff Mathews of Ram Partners LP hedge fund conveyed mock sympathy for the plight of workers, stating, “Warren Buffett, the billionaire, is getting richer on cost cuts while 2,600 families are getting poorer. It’s a shame.”

Warren Buffett, listed as having a net worth of $72.4 billion, up by $14.5 billion, soaring 20 percent higher from last year, is the third wealthiest person in the world.
The Kraft Heinz merger is one of many mergers this year where “value” investors take advantage of the historically low finance rates provided by the Federal Reserve—purchasing struggling companies and boosting profits through cost savings that center on laying off higher paid workers, often to be replaced by contract or temporary workers.
Kraft has four plants with 1,279 workers scattered throughout upstate New York of which three were slated to be closed. In a joint press release, New York Democrats Governor Andrew Cuomo and US Senator Chuck Schumer, and Kraft Heinz announced the company will be given $25 million of public funds as incentive to remain in the state.
Under terms of the deal Cuomo and Schumer sanctioned the closing of the Campbell, NY plant and the destruction of 393 jobs. The company will receive $20 million up front and another $5 million in five years if they have not closed the other three plants. Kraft Heinz also operates a factory in Lowville with 340 workers that makes cheese and other milk products. The plant in Avon which has 405 workers and the Walton plant with 141 workers will remain open for now.
In an interview that shed some light on the social conditions in the state’s southern tier, the mother of a worker at the Campbell plant told twcnews.com, “My son works there, I’ve had a lot of family members that work there. There’s a lot of local people in the town that work there. It would devastate the town pretty bad I think. There’s not a lot of jobs around.”
The role of the Teamsters union, which represents many of the Kraft Heinz workers, has been largely silent about the threat leveled at workers and their livelihoods by the Buffett-owned company.
Layoffs were also announced Monday at the Alcoa plant in the small town of Massena, New York situated on the US border with Canada. There are two Alcoa aluminum smelting plants named East and West. The company has been producing aluminum in Massena since 1902. The East plant will lay off 487 workers and have some remaining production.
The West plant was previously owned by Reynolds and will be shuttered. Alcoa is blaming the closure on a 30 percent reduction in the price of aluminum claiming the plants are “uncompetitive.” The town was also the home to a General Motors (GM) powertrain engine castings plant that closed in 2009, eliminating 500 jobs when production transferred to the GM Metal Casting Operations plant in Saginaw, Michigan.
On Thursday Governor Cuomo said in a short statement, “We are doing everything possible to identify an alternative scenario that both allows the facility to remain open and protects the taxpayer investments.” Alcoa has been showered with massive public subsidies in return for a commitment that the company keep a minimum number of jobs in the state.
In a statement to the media United Steel Workers Local 420-a (USW) president Bob Smith said, “They’re still making sense of the details of Alcoa’s plans to curtail its smelter in Massena and lay off almost 500 people. The level of solidarity is incredible. Everybody is hanging together I really want to say, from labor’s perspective, we really appreciate the level of dedication we’ve seen from our elected officials. It’s been amazing.”
In reality, the role of the officials has been to shower the company with record-breaking grants and incentives as well as tax abatements. On the other hand, for the affected workers, they are not offering much, save some cold solace and help with their resumés.
In a deal between the state and company just two years ago the New York Power Authority agreed to discount electric rates for Alcoa by 40 percent. In exchange, the company promised that it would keep and expand production at the plant.
The shutdown also hints at the rapid deterioration of global economic conditions as Alcoa has cut 45 percent of its smelting capacity in the last eight years in an effort to maintain high profits as commodity prices have collapsed.
Alcoa has nine other plants in the US with 6100 workers and is cutting jobs in many of them. The USW, which represents these workers, has not announced any plans to defend their jobs.
Chris Felix, one of the Alcoa workers facing layoff, stated in an interview with North Country Public Radio, “All the early retirements happened long ago. The workers left in Massena are mid-career, with families to support, mortgages and car payments to make, kids to put through school.
“You’ve got guys who are in the mid- 40s, -50s. They didn’t have the chance to take the buy-out, or take an early retirement. What’s going to happen to those guys?”
Other companies with recent closures and/or mass layoffs in upstate New York include:
Watertown’s New York Air Brake, which manufactures for the railroad industry and is making record profits, has laid off 15 production workers affiliated with the International Association of Machinists (IAM) as well as salaried employees at the plant. There are 248 hourly workers at the factory. The IAM is not leading any effort to oppose the layoffs.
Coyne Textile, an industrial laundry in business for 86 years based in Syracuse, filed for bankruptcy and was auctioned off to competitors last month. The company had customers for its services in 24 states. Only 90 of a total of 620 workers in several states will be kept on after the sale according to the winning bidders. Workers at the company made just over the minimum wage and were forced to work two and sometimes three jobs to make ends meet.

 

Kraft Heinz and Alcoa among companies cutting hundreds of jobs in upstate New York 

Financial results for the third quarter from parent company Berkshire Hathaway reported record profits of $9.4 billion up from $4.6 billion last year largely on the back of the Kraft Heinz cuts. On Saturday in a Reuters article, Jeff Mathews of Ram Partners LP hedge fund conveyed mock sympathy for the plight of workers, stating, “Warren Buffett, the billionaire, is getting richer on cost cuts while 2,600 families are getting poorer. It’s a shame.”

By Steve Filips
12 November 2015
Last week Kraft Heinz announced plans to close seven plants nationwide and the layoff of an additional 2,600 workers over the next 12 to 24 months, bringing the total announced layoffs nationwide to more than 5,000. Included in the plants slated for closure is the one in Campbell, New York, a plant with 393 workers.
The Kraft Heinz layoffs amount to 14 percent of the company’s North American factory workforce. In August, the company announced the elimination of 2,500 jobs, including 700 workers at its corporate headquarters in Chicago.
The plants slated to be closed are: two in California, one in Fullerton and the other in San Leandro. Also being closed are plants in St. Marys, Ontario, Canada, Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania and Madison, Wisconsin.
Kraft Heinz is the fifth largest food company in the world and is the product of the merger of the two companies earlier this year valued at $49 billion. The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Heinz company was acquired for $28 billion by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway in 2013. Buffet promptly slashed 7000 jobs.

Financial results for the third quarter from parent company Berkshire Hathaway reported record profits of $9.4 billion up from $4.6 billion last year largely on the back of the Kraft Heinz cuts. On Saturday in a Reuters article, Jeff Mathews of Ram Partners LP hedge fund conveyed mock sympathy for the plight of workers, stating, “Warren Buffett, the billionaire, is getting richer on cost cuts while 2,600 families are getting poorer. It’s a shame.”

Warren Buffett, listed as having a net worth of $72.4 billion, up by $14.5 billion, soaring 20 percent higher from last year, is the third wealthiest person in the world.
The Kraft Heinz merger is one of many mergers this year where “value” investors take advantage of the historically low finance rates provided by the Federal Reserve—purchasing struggling companies and boosting profits through cost savings that center on laying off higher paid workers, often to be replaced by contract or temporary workers.
Kraft has four plants with 1,279 workers scattered throughout upstate New York of which three were slated to be closed. In a joint press release, New York Democrats Governor Andrew Cuomo and US Senator Chuck Schumer, and Kraft Heinz announced the company will be given $25 million of public funds as incentive to remain in the state.
Under terms of the deal Cuomo and Schumer sanctioned the closing of the Campbell, NY plant and the destruction of 393 jobs. The company will receive $20 million up front and another $5 million in five years if they have not closed the other three plants. Kraft Heinz also operates a factory in Lowville with 340 workers that makes cheese and other milk products. The plant in Avon which has 405 workers and the Walton plant with 141 workers will remain open for now.
In an interview that shed some light on the social conditions in the state’s southern tier, the mother of a worker at the Campbell plant told twcnews.com, “My son works there, I’ve had a lot of family members that work there. There’s a lot of local people in the town that work there. It would devastate the town pretty bad I think. There’s not a lot of jobs around.”
The role of the Teamsters union, which represents many of the Kraft Heinz workers, has been largely silent about the threat leveled at workers and their livelihoods by the Buffett-owned company.
Layoffs were also announced Monday at the Alcoa plant in the small town of Massena, New York situated on the US border with Canada. There are two Alcoa aluminum smelting plants named East and West. The company has been producing aluminum in Massena since 1902. The East plant will lay off 487 workers and have some remaining production.
The West plant was previously owned by Reynolds and will be shuttered. Alcoa is blaming the closure on a 30 percent reduction in the price of aluminum claiming the plants are “uncompetitive.” The town was also the home to a General Motors (GM) powertrain engine castings plant that closed in 2009, eliminating 500 jobs when production transferred to the GM Metal Casting Operations plant in Saginaw, Michigan.
On Thursday Governor Cuomo said in a short statement, “We are doing everything possible to identify an alternative scenario that both allows the facility to remain open and protects the taxpayer investments.” Alcoa has been showered with massive public subsidies in return for a commitment that the company keep a minimum number of jobs in the state.
In a statement to the media United Steel Workers Local 420-a (USW) president Bob Smith said, “They’re still making sense of the details of Alcoa’s plans to curtail its smelter in Massena and lay off almost 500 people. The level of solidarity is incredible. Everybody is hanging together I really want to say, from labor’s perspective, we really appreciate the level of dedication we’ve seen from our elected officials. It’s been amazing.”
In reality, the role of the officials has been to shower the company with record-breaking grants and incentives as well as tax abatements. On the other hand, for the affected workers, they are not offering much, save some cold solace and help with their resumés.
In a deal between the state and company just two years ago the New York Power Authority agreed to discount electric rates for Alcoa by 40 percent. In exchange, the company promised that it would keep and expand production at the plant.
The shutdown also hints at the rapid deterioration of global economic conditions as Alcoa has cut 45 percent of its smelting capacity in the last eight years in an effort to maintain high profits as commodity prices have collapsed.
Alcoa has nine other plants in the US with 6100 workers and is cutting jobs in many of them. The USW, which represents these workers, has not announced any plans to defend their jobs.
Chris Felix, one of the Alcoa workers facing layoff, stated in an interview with North Country Public Radio, “All the early retirements happened long ago. The workers left in Massena are mid-career, with families to support, mortgages and car payments to make, kids to put through school.
“You’ve got guys who are in the mid- 40s, -50s. They didn’t have the chance to take the buy-out, or take an early retirement. What’s going to happen to those guys?”
Other companies with recent closures and/or mass layoffs in upstate New York include:
Watertown’s New York Air Brake, which manufactures for the railroad industry and is making record profits, has laid off 15 production workers affiliated with the International Association of Machinists (IAM) as well as salaried employees at the plant. There are 248 hourly workers at the factory. The IAM is not leading any effort to oppose the layoffs.
Coyne Textile, an industrial laundry in business for 86 years based in Syracuse, filed for bankruptcy and was auctioned off to competitors last month. The company had customers for its services in 24 states. Only 90 of a total of 620 workers in several states will be kept on after the sale according to the winning bidders. Workers at the company made just over the minimum wage and were forced to work two and sometimes three jobs to make ends meet.

COP CRIMES IN AMERICA - US Supreme Court expands immunity for killer cops

ULTIMATELY IT IS THE OBJECTIVE OF THE SUPREME COURT TO PROTECT THE STATUS QUO, WALL STREET CRIMINALS AND THE ULTIMATE INTERESTS OF THE 1%


US Supreme Court expands immunity for killer cops

US Supreme Court expands immunity for killer cops

12 November 2015
With the death toll from police brutality continuing to mount, the US Supreme Court on Monday issued a decision expanding the authoritarian doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which shields police officers from legal accountability.
When a civil rights case is summarily dismissed by a judge on the grounds of “qualified immunity,” the case is legally terminated. It never goes to trial before a jury and is never decided on its constitutional merits.
In March of 2010, Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Chadrin Mullenix climbed onto an overpass with a rifle and, disobeying a direct order from his supervisor, fired six shots at a vehicle that the police were pursuing. Mullenix was not in any danger, and his supervisor had told him to wait until other officers tried to stop the car using spike strips. Four shots struck Israel Leija, Jr., killing him and causing the car, which was going 85 miles per hour, to crash. After the shooting, Mullenix boasted to his supervisor, “How’s that for proactive?”
The Luna v. Mullenix case was filed by Leija’s family members, who claimed that Mullenix used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights. The district court that originally heard the case, together with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, denied immunity to Mullenix on the grounds that his conduct violated clearly established law. The Supreme Court intervened to uphold the Mullenix’s entitlement to immunity—a decision that will set a precedent for the summary dismissal of civil rights lawsuits against police brutality around the country.
This is the Supreme Court’s response to the ongoing wave of police mayhem and murder. The message is clear: The killings will continue. Do not question the police. If you disobey the police, you forfeit your life.
So far this year, more than 1,000 people have been killed by the police in America. Almost every day, there are new videos posted online showing police shootings, intrusions into homes and cars, asphyxiations, beatings and taserings.
Last week, two police officers in Louisiana opened fire on Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old autistic boy, and his father Chris Few. The boy’s father had his hands up during the shooting and is currently hospitalized with serious injuries. His son succumbed to the police bullets while still buckled into the front seat of the car.
The Supreme Court’s decision reflects the fact that in the face of rising popular anger over police killings, the entire political apparatus—including all of the branches of government—is closing ranks behind the police. This includes the establishment media, which has largely remained silent about Monday’s pro-police Supreme Court decision.
The police operate with almost total impunity, confident that no matter what they do, they will have the backing of the state. Two weeks ago, a South Carolina grand jury refused to return an indictment against the officer who was caught on video killing 19-year-old Zachary Hammond. This follows the exoneration of the police who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.
The Obama administration’s position regarding the surge of police violence was most clearly and simply articulated by FBI director James Comey in a speech on October 23. “May God protect our cops,” Comey declared. He went on to accuse those who film the police of promoting violent crime. Meanwhile, in virtually every police brutality case that has come before the federal courts, the Obama administration has taken the side of the police.
On Monday, the Supreme Court went out of its way to cite approvingly an amicus curiae (friend of court) brief filed by the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO), which defended Mullenix. With this citation, notwithstanding its ostensible role as a neutral arbiter and guarantor of the Constitution, the Supreme Court sent a clear signal as to which side it is on.
During the imposition of de facto martial law in Ferguson last year, NAPO issued statements vociferously defending Michael Brown’s killer, labeling demonstrators as “violent outsiders,” and denouncing “the violent idiots on the street chanting ‘time to kill a cop!’”
“Qualified immunity” is a reactionary doctrine invented by judges in the later part of the 20th century to shield public officials from lawsuits. As a practical matter, this doctrine allows judges to toss out civil rights cases without a jury trial if, in the judge’s opinion, the official misconduct in question was not “plainly incompetent” or a “knowing violation of clearly established law.”
Over recent decades, the doctrine has been stretched to Kafkaesque proportions to shield police officers from accountability. In the landmark case of Tennessee v. Garner (1985), the Supreme Court held that it violates the Constitution to shoot an “unarmed, nondangerous fleeing suspect,” and required an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury before the police could open fire. But the Supreme Court in its decision on Monday dismissed this language as constituting a “high level of generality” that was not “particular” enough to “clearly establish” any particular constitutional rights.
Since cases that are dismissed on the grounds of qualified immunity do not result in decisions on the constitutional issues, this circular pseudo-logic ensures that no rights will ever be “clearly established.” It also ensures that, instead of the democratic procedure of a jury trial, cases involving the police will be decided by judges.
The Supreme Court issued Monday’s decision without full briefing or oral argument, designating it “per curiam,” i.e., in the name of the court, not any specific judges.
Justice Antonin Scalia filed a concurring opinion, displaying his trademark sophistry. According to Scalia, Mullenix did not use “deadly force” within the meaning of the Supreme Court’s prior cases, since he was shooting at a car, not a person. (Four bullets struck Leija, but none of the six shots struck the engine block at which Mullenix was supposedly aiming.)
Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed the sole dissent, noting that this decision “renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow,” and sanctions a “shoot first, think later” approach to policing. However, Sotomayor wrote that she would have used a “balancing” analysis instead, in which a “particular government interest” would need to be “balanced” against the use of deadly force. This “balancing” rhetoric mirrors the Obama administration’s justifications for assassination and domestic spying, according to which national security is balanced against democratic rights.
The Bill of Rights itself—that old, yellow, forgotten piece of paper—does not make itself contingent on the subjective mental states of police officers, “clearly established law,” or the “balancing” of “government interests.”
America confronts a massive social crisis. Decades of endless war and occupations abroad, the degradation of wages and living conditions at home, the enrichment of a tiny layer of financial criminals at the expense of the rest of the society, rampant speculation and corruption at the highest levels—these factors contribute to mounting social tensions and the danger, from the standpoint of the ruling class, of the growth of social opposition. Such opposition can already be seen, in its earliest stages, in the struggle by autoworkers against the sellout contract being imposed by the United Auto Workers union.
Like the tyrant who proposes to solve the problem of hunger by imposing a hefty fine on everyone who starves, the Supreme Court’s decision Monday confirms that the entire social system has nothing to offer by way of a solution to the crisis except more of the same.
The abrogation of democratic rights, torture, military commissions, drone assassinations, unlimited surveillance, the lockdown of entire cities, internment camps, beatings, murder, martial law, war—this is how the ruling class plans to deal with the social crisis. Notwithstanding the epidemic of police violence, the flow of unlimited cash and military hardware to police departments from the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon continues unabated.
The buildup of the police as a militarized occupation force operating outside the law, pumped up and ready to kill, must be seen as a part of preparations by the ruling class for mass repression and dictatorship in response to the growth of working class opposition.
Tom Carter

Los Angeles Police Department shootings doubled in a single year, report shows

Los Angeles Police Department shootings doubled in a single year, report shows

By Dan Conway and Marc Wells
13 November 2015
Describing the trend as “alarming,” the president of the Los Angeles Police Commission reported last Tuesday that Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) shootings have doubled in 2015 with 45 instances, compared to 23 the previous year.
According to board president Matt Johnson, 19 of those instances resulted in fatalities, meaning that LAPD officers kill nearly two persons each month.
Moreover, this figure does not include individuals killed in confrontations with either the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Office or California Highway Patrol, in which case the actual number killed would be far higher. Multiple towns and medium-sized cities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area were also not included as they maintain their own departments separate from the LAPD.
The Los Angeles Police Commission, nominally the civilian leadership of the department, is completely embedded within the LAPD and exists to foster the illusion that a civilian oversight board exists to hold police accountable for misconduct. Their reviews of police killings are typically held in private with officers inevitably cleared of any wrongdoing, although the commission occasionally speaks on such issues openly when public anger over a particular police murder threatens to spiral out of control.
Nonetheless, the figures cited by the commission are quite alarming and reveal a working-class population in the nation’s second largest city that is being regarded as nothing more than target practice by the state.
By contrast, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, there have been only six deaths in the line of duty in California in 2015, including two in the K9 units. None of these, human or otherwise, worked in Los Angeles.
On Tuesday, the commission sought to address the rise in police shootings with a request for an inquiry into the use of force by LAPD in the last 10 years and a review of police body camera usage. It also called for an increase in the use of other allegedly nonlethal equipment, such as Taser and beanbag guns, even though both are responsible for serious injuries and deaths.
While police killings have increased, Los Angeles County has actually seen a steady decline in murder rates since 2001, when 588 murders per 100,000 people were reported. In 2013, that rate was at 251, a decline of 57 percent. The Los Angeles TimesHomicide Report also shows that in the entire County of Los Angeles, 578 homicides were counted in 2014, the lowest number since 2000.
Police killings therefore comprise an increasing percentage of overall murders in Los Angeles County.
The share of police homicides has more than doubled in 15 years, from 3 percent in 2000 to 7 percent this year. The Times report, a searchable crime database, shows that LAPD killings in 2015, with seven weeks remaining in the year, are already higher than in 2014, when officers killed 17 people.
Police in Los Angeles County are responsible for killing 589 people since 2000, or one person a week, according to a September 2014 report. Also, according to an article in the Guardian newspaper earlier this summer, the LAPD had killed more people than any other law enforcement agency in the country in 2015.
Given these numbers, an increase in police-involved shootings is all the more significant as it indicates an escalation in the establishment of police-state methods.
LAPD officers, like their counterparts across the country, act as a law unto themselves, terrorizing entire communities with impunity. With a Supreme Court ruling this week expanding the use of “qualified immunity” to grant officers a reprieve from even the most brazen acts of murder, cops can act with confidence that there will be no legal consequences whatsoever for their actions. (See: US Supreme Court expands immunity for killer cops)
Four days ago, Los Angeles police officers confronted 34-year-old Miguel Cano in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles. Cano, who according to his mother was homeless with a history of alcoholism, had been standing in traffic and erratically running through cars before police were called.
The police confronted Cano, hitting him with at least one round from a “beanbag” gun and stun-gunning him. A beanbag gun is a regular 12-gauge shotgun loaded with shells containing tear-proof bags which themselves are loaded with #9 lead shot. Once fired, the bags travel at 300 feet per second and are designed to induce trauma to internal organs and thus incapacitate a suspect. A Taser is also similarly designed to cause “neuromuscular incapacitation” and delivers a powerful electric current via two barbed prongs shot into a suspect at high velocity.
Both of these “nonlethal” weapons are extraordinarily dangerous and life threatening. A beanbag gun caused the death of a Georgia man last April after a round delivered to his spleen caused irreversible internal bleeding. Tasers, since they were first mass-produced and delivered to police departments around the country, have caused the deaths of thousands. Nonetheless, these two measures were apparently insufficient for dealing with Cano this week, whereupon the two LAPD officers shot him dead.
Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck responded to the shooting, making the highly implausible and oft-repeated police claim that the suspect grabbed for the officer’s gun even after he was hit by the initial impact of the stun gun and beanbag gun. “In fact, the individual was able to confront the officers that had the beanbag shotgun and take the beanbag shotgun from the officer,” Beck said. “The individual then deployed the beanbag shotgun, fired at least one round at our officers. They returned fire, killing the subject.”
Last month, in another high-profile police killing also in the San Fernando Valley region, LAPD officers shot and killed a man who had thrown a beer bottle through the back window of their police cruiser while stopped at a red light. The officers claim they believed a gunshot had caused the broken window and shot at the suspect fearing for their lives. The LAPD claims that the officers were not wearing body cameras at the time of the shooting and that their cruiser did not have a camera either.
The LA Police Commission had approved the use of body cameras last April, although the 7,000 body cameras are not scheduled to be fully deployed until the end of this year. There are no guidelines, however, as to how body camera footage is to be reviewed even if the majority of officers actually wear and enable their cameras while on duty.
In fact, the Police Commission guidelines give officers the right to review images from the cameras themselves before writing reports or giving statements to internal investigators. Moreover, footage will not be publicly released unless it is part of a criminal or court proceeding. Given recent high-profile exonerations of police killers, this effectively means that the public will never see footage from body cameras at all unless, one would assume, a rare case emerges in which police encounter actual violence from a suspect.
In more recent months, the department’s violent actions and brutal killings have been met with revulsion and protests, especially in cases where the victims were unarmed, homeless or mentally challenged.
Last May, Brendon K. Glenn, unarmed and homeless, was killed in Venice, California, by the LAPD, which refused to provide a full account to more than 400 people who attended a “community meeting” showing their anger for the killing.
An unarmed homeless man known as “Africa” was shot and killed on Los Angeles’s Skid Row last March, with a video of the incident viewed by millions of people worldwide. Nine police officers on the scene subdued the frail man with Tasers and shot him multiple times while he was lying prone on the ground. The bystander who video-recorded the shooting also denied the police version in which they once again claimed that the suspect had reached for an officer’s gun.
The last time the Los Angeles Police Commission spoke publicly was in June of this year over the killing of 24-year-old Ezell Ford. Ford, who was mentally challenged, was confronted by two veteran LAPD officers even though the officers had no reason to believe he was engaged in any criminal activity. Police claimed that Ford struggled with them and attempted to grab one of the officer’s guns, whereupon the officers shot him in the back.
The Police Commission found that neither officer was guilty of any wrongdoing, while one of them may have used “inappropriate tactics” in initially confronting the young man. The sole video footage of the incident was confiscated by the LAPD and has not been released to the public.

LA RAZA SUPREMACIST HILLARY CLINTON and her MOVE TO EXPAND THE MEXICAN WELFARE STATE ON OUR BACKS. She calls it the Obama Amnesty.

FROM HER BANKSTER-BACKING, TO HER LONG HISTORY OF ENDLESSLY HISPANDERING TO THE ILLEGALS FOR THEIR VOTES, HILLARY CLINTON IS THE NATURAL SUCCESSOR TO THE GREAT HISPANDERER, BARACK OBAMA.

Hillary Clinton Embraces Obama’s Immigration Policy and Contempt for Congress



 Triangulation Is Dead

By Dan McLaughlin

 RedState.com, November 2, 2015
. . .
In that context, you might think that the old Clinton “triangulation” machine that gave us a “Sister Souljah moment” in 1992 would come up with some way to finesse a full-throated embrace of Obama’s unilateral-executive-amnesty-or-bust approach on immigration. If you recall Hillary’s 2008 campaign, in fact, the very moment it went off the rails was a poorly-executed effort to straddle the question of whether New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was right to issue drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants, which ended with her getting backed into the corner of supporting Spitzer, but while blaming his actions on a lack of bipartisan action in Washington: “Senator Clinton supports governors like Governor Spitzer who believe they need such a measure to deal with the crisis caused by this administration’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform.”

This time around, though, the sky is the limit. At the October 13 debate, Hillary declared that she planned to go even further than Obama:
. . .
http://www.redstate.com/2015/11/02/hillary-clinton-embraces-obamas-immigration-policy-contempt-congress/

Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law

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.


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!


Obama set to defy federal court on amnesty

By Rick Moran


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:
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. 
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. 
Get a load of what the DHS bureaucrats think about illegals working in the U.S.:
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:
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. 
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. 
Get a load of what the DHS bureaucrats think about illegals working in the U.S.:
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
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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 ...

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. 
 
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.


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. 


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/the_causes_of_income_inequality.html#ixzz3qSBDYQVs
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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, 2010


Open 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.
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.
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.