Monday, May 9, 2016

HILLARY CLINTON AGREES TO SERVE AS TRUMP'S VICE PRESIDENT FOR WALL STREET'S INTERESTS - Republican split deepens over Trump nomination

THERE IS VIRTUALLY NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN

HILLARY CLINTON AND DONALD TRUMP. BOTH SERVE

THEIR OWN INTERESTS PRIMARILY. BOTH WILL SERVE

THE SUPER RICH AND WALL STREET ABOVE THE

INTERESTS OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.

HOWEVER, TRUMP SAYS HE WILL PUSH BACK

MEXICO'S LOOTING AND OCCUPATION. HILLARY

CLINTON HAS BEEN ENDORSED BY MEXICO AS BEING

GOOD FOR THE  INTERESTS OF THE NARCOMEX

DRUG CARTELS.

THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS LONG BEEN THE PARTY OF

OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY, NO LEGAL NEED APPLY,

AND AMNESTY TO KEEP THE HORDES COMING.

UNDER BARACK OBAMA THE HORDES HAVE COME BY

SEA, BY LAND, THROUGH TUNNELS.


"Their statements underscore the explosive character of the political crisis building up in the United States, which threatens the break-up of the two-party system through which big business has exercised a political monopoly for more than a century."


"Powerful sections of corporate America reject Trump’s attacks on trade agreements that have been engineered, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, to favor the interests of the biggest US companies and banks."


Republican split deepens over Trump nomination


Republican split deepens over Trump nomination

By Patrick Martin
9 May 2016
Several former leaders of the Republican Party have declared that they will not support the presumptive presidential nominee of the party, billionaire real estate tycoon Donald Trump. Their statements underscore the explosive character of the political crisis building up in the United States, which threatens the break-up of the two-party system through which big business has exercised a political monopoly for more than a century.

Beginning with House Speaker Paul Ryan, who announced Thursday that he was “not ready… at this point” to endorse Trump for the presidency, the list has grown to include both living former Republican presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, several former candidates for the 2016 nomination, and numerous other elected officials.

While Ryan presented his rebuff of Trump as conditional, pending a meeting between the two now set for May 12, the repudiation of the Republican frontrunner by the others was more definitive. A statement issued on behalf of the two former presidents announcing that they would not endorse Trump indicated that neither Bush would have anything to say about the presidential campaign until after the November 8 election.

BLOG: AM I NOT MISTAKEN THAT JEB'S FAMILY HAS STARTED TWO MIDDLE EAST WARS ON BEHALF OF THEIR SAUDI PAYMASTERS AND WAS AMERICA'S FIRST SUPREME COURT APPOINTED PRESIDENT?

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination and the younger brother of George W. Bush, posted a statement Friday on Facebook declaring, “Donald Trump has not demonstrated [the] temperament or strength of character” necessary in a president. He continued: “He has not displayed a respect for the Constitution. And, he is not a consistent conservative. These are all reasons why I cannot support his candidacy.”

Mitt Romney appeared Thursday night at a gala dinner in

Washington DC to benefit the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

When asked if he would run as an independent candidate for

president, he said he was not interested. He then added, “I don’t

intend on supporting either of the major-party candidates at this

point.” He continued: “I am dismayed at where we are now, I wish

we had better choices, and I keep hoping that somehow things will

get better, and I just don’t see an easy answer from where we are.”

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who like Jeb Bush was a candidate for the Republican nomination and signed a pledge last year to support the eventual nominee, said Friday that Trump was unfit to be commander in chief. “I don't think he’s a reliable Republican conservative,” he said. “I don’t believe that Donald Trump has the temperament and judgment to be commander in chief. I think Donald Trump is going to places where very few people have gone and I’m not going with him.”

An even more scathing denunciation came from former US senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, who will be a delegate to the Republican National Convention pledged to Ohio Governor John Kasich. “Unequivocally, I am not supporting Donald Trump,” he told the press. “I think he is a sociopath.”

While saying he would vote for Trump in November, Arizona Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, said he would not attend the July convention in Cleveland. This is the increasingly common choice of those who won’t oppose Trump publicly but don’t want to be associated with his coronation as the nominee.

The executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Ward Baker, told a briefing for lobbyists and donors Thursday that Republican candidates should skip the convention if they felt it was to their advantage in November.

Some of the most right-wing members of the House Republican caucus have declared their opposition to Trump, including Justin Amash of Michigan, who bills himself a libertarian, and Steve King of Iowa, a ferocious anti-immigrant bigot who supported Texas Senator Ted Cruz and is aligned with the most extreme Christian fundamentalists.

While those publicly opposing Trump include some of the most prominent Republican Party leaders, they are in a distinct minority.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have both declared their support for Trump as the presumptive nominee. They were joined by former vice president Dick Cheney, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee Robert Dole, and a slew of Republican governors, including many, like Mike Spence of Indiana and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, who had supported rival candidates for the nomination.

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who dropped out of the presidential race last September and urged his rivals to unite against Trump, said he would support Trump over likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Some of the Trump endorsements came from rivals who once described him in scathing terms. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry called Trump a “barking carnival act” and a “cancer on conservatism” when he was running against the billionaire last year. On Thursday, he endorsed him and indicated he was available to be his running mate.

Former Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal described Trump last fall—before he abandoned his own presidential campaign—as “dangerous” and “a narcissist and egomaniac.” That didn’t stop him from endorsing Trump as well.

Another unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, had called Trump “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag,” adding that “A speck of dirt is way more qualified to be president.” Last month he said he would support Trump if he became the Republican nominee.

There is cynicism and duplicity on both sides of the Republican divide. But there are significant underlying political conflicts, which have nothing to do with characterizations of Trump as a maniac or buffoon.

There is substantial opposition to the billionaire’s muddled views on foreign policy, a mixture of isolationism and extreme militarism, and his promotion of economic nationalism, where the dominant factions on Wall Street and in the military-intelligence apparatus see Democrat Hillary Clinton as a more reliable defender of their interests.

Powerful sections of corporate America reject Trump’s attacks on trade agreements that have been engineered, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, to favor the interests of the biggest US companies and banks.

Trump did not help himself in this quarter with his declaration that Britain would be better off pulling out of the European Union, followed by his suggestion that the US government could pressure creditors to accept less than full payment on the national debt. In both cases, Wall Street is adamantly opposed because of the potentially catastrophic damage to its financial interests.


Amnesty..... it's all about keeping wages DEPRSSED!

UNDER BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA, TWO-THIRDS OF ALL JOBS WENT TO FOREIGN BORN, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL.


Poverty has become more concentrated under Obama

Poverty has become more concentrated under Obama

By Nancy Hanover
2 May 2016
Under the Obama administration, more Americans have found themselves consigned to economic ghettos, living in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent subsist below the poverty level. Millions more now live in “high poverty” districts of 20-40 percent poverty, according to recently released report by the Brookings Institution.

All in all, more than half of the nation’s poor are now concentrated in these high-poverty neighborhoods. This means that on top of the difficult daily struggle to make ends meet, they face a raft of additional crushing barriers because of where they live.

The Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program report, “Concentrated poverty continues to grow post recession,” is authored by Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes and scrutinizes this unprecedented shift in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown.

The report, based on an analysis of US census tracts, shows that concentrations of poverty have grown under the Obama administration in all geography types: large metropolitan areas, small cities and rural areas. In fact, the number of poor people living in concentrated poverty in suburbs grew nearly twice as fast as in cities, putting paid to the myth of affluence or even stability in America’s suburbs.

The growth of social and economic distress within large parts of the US is demonstrated by the statistics. Pockets of high poverty exist in virtually every part of the country, including adjacent to the nation’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Since 2000, according to the report, the total number of poor people living in high-poverty neighborhoods has doubled to 14 million Americans. This is five million more than prior to the Great Recession.

Referring to the “double burden” facing the poor when they live in high-poverty neighborhoods, Kneebone and Holmes say, “Residents of poor neighborhoods face higher crime rates and exhibit poorer physical and mental health outcomes. They tend to go to poor-performing neighborhood schools with higher dropout rates. Their job-seeking networks tend to be weaker and they face higher levels of financial insecurity.”

These effects are clearly discernible once a neighborhood’s poverty rate exceeds 20 percent, the report explains. During the study period, between 2005-09 and 2010-14, the number of such high poverty neighborhoods grew by more than 4,300.

Across many demographics: City and suburb, black and white

Suburbs accounted for one-third of the newly high-poverty neighborhoods, a higher share than cities, rural or small metro areas. The share of poor black and Hispanic suburban residents climbed by 10 percent while poor white residents climbed by eight percent, almost as much.

BLOG: OBAMANOMICS; FUCK THE WORKER TO SERVE THE SUPER RICH

The palpable effects of the auto industry restructuring, with the Obama administration’s stipulation of a 50 percent cut in wages for new autoworkers, is demonstrated in the growth of poverty in the sprawling auto-dominated Detroit region. Out of metro Detroiters living in poverty, 58 percent now reside in suburban districts, according to a survey by Oakland County Lighthouse.

A recent and similar demographic study by the Century Foundation states that the six-county region has the highest concentration of poverty among the top 25 metro areas in the US by population. This represents 32 percent of the poor living in concentrated tracts.

There has been a staggering growth of poor neighborhoods in and around Detroit, Kneebone told the Detroit Free Press, adding that the number “grew almost fivefold between 2000 and 2010-14.” Detroit now has an official poverty rate of 39 percent, the highest in the US among cities with more than 300,000 residents.

“Sadly this report reinforces what we have been seeing year after year in Detroit and across Michigan.” Gilda Jacobs, of the Michigan League for Public Policy told the World Socialist Web Site. “Poverty is too high, and where people—especially kids—live has a direct and significant impact on their economic standing, health and other outcomes.”

From the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt

Detroit, however, is just the most concentrated expression of the national trend. “Among the nation’s largest metro areas, two-thirds (67 percent) saw concentrated poverty grow between 2005-09 and 2010-14,” the Brookings study found. The authors note that some of the “largest upticks included a number of Sun Belt metro areas hit hard by the collapse of the housing market—like Fresno, Bakersfield and Stockton in California and Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona—and older industrial areas in the Midwest and northeast—like Indianapolis, Buffalo, and Syracuse.”
Eight metro areas now show concentrated poverty over 30 percent: Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, Wisconsin (30.1 percent); Memphis, Tennessee (31.1 percent); Bakersfield, California (31.7 percent); Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, Michigan (32 percent); Syracuse, New York (32.4 percent); Toledo, Ohio (34.9 percent); Fresno, California (43.8 percent); and McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas (52.3 percent).

As the WSWS has previously reported, all job growth over the last decade has been “temp” or contingency employment, traditionally the lowest wage levels of any job and paying no benefits. This loss of hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs has impacted communities throughout the US. Concentrated poverty in suburbs has jumped 2.4 points in the wake of the recession, to a record high of 7.1 percent.

What is the “double burden” of concentrated poverty?

In her remarks to the WSWS, Gilda Jacobs elaborated on the double burden of concentrated poverty: “So many detrimental factors come with living in high-poverty neighborhoods. There are no viable jobs, public transportation, childcare, or grocery stores. Crime rates are high, there’s blight and abandoned buildings, and the health risks of lead exposure and asthma. Even Detroit’s public schools are unhealthy and even dangerous.

“This is what Detroit kids and other low-income children are dealing with every day, and what they have to try to overcome in improving their futures. These living and learning conditions are all connected, and harm kids’ development and learning, their academic outcomes and their future job prospects. It is called toxic stress when kids are under constant strain. This study reiterates that so many factors affecting poverty are external and environmental, making them nearly impossible to defeat alone,” she stressed.

A series of studies [including George Galster’s “The Mechanism(s) of Neighborhood Effects Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications” and others] have documented how poor neighborhoods undermine even the most determined individual efforts to escape poverty.

Taken together, these studies demonstrate how the escalating growth of poverty concentration exacts an ever-higher toll on American society, affecting many aspects of life and particularly destroying the potential of the next generation.


OBAMA'S BANKSTER RULED AMERICA - THE LOOTING NEVER ENDS!

*Education. High-poverty neighborhoods exert “downward pressure” on school quality. Data from the Stanford Data Archive has recently shown a staggering effect upon child learning capacities of attending impoverished school districts. Utilizing 215 million state accountability test scores, the study showed that “Children in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty score an average of more than four grade levels below children in the richest districts [emphasis added].”

*Violence. Exposure to violence has reached epidemic proportions for low-income youth, particularly among minorities. Parental stress over neighborhood violence is a substantial factor motivating families to move—when they can—from high-poverty neighborhoods, compounded by fears of negative peer influences upon their children. Youth and adults who have been exposed to violence as witnesses or victims suffer increased stress and documented declines in mental health.

*Toxic exposures. Poor areas are chronically associated with higher concentrations of air-, water- and soil-borne pollutants. Lead poisoning is most often associated with older housing stock.
Researchers have demonstrated that depression, asthma, diabetes and heart ailments are correlated with living in high-poverty neighborhoods. Additionally, individuals in poor neighborhoods often receive inferior health care and reduced government services.

* Other effects of physical decay . The inability to exercise outdoors is a known factor in the rise of obesity, especially among children. High levels of noise pollution produce stress, and prolonged exposure to run-down surroundings can lead to hopelessness.

*The poor pay more. Prices in poor neighborhoods are notoriously higher and the goods of poorer quality than those in better-off areas. Food and health-care “deserts” are common. The costs of home and car insurance are usually substantially higher.

*Lack of social cohesion. Disorder and lack of social cohesion are associated with both crime and mental distress. Children who live without a cohesive neighborhood network are more likely to have behavioral problems and have lower verbal skills. Those in areas of concentrated poverty are typically more isolated within their households and have fewer educated or employed friends and neighbors. Low levels of employment in distressed neighborhoods also destroy the informal networks crucial for workers to find good jobs.
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