When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
OPIOD ADDICTED AMERICA: One in Seven Addicted
The opioid epidemic in
the US: A national health emergency
18 July 2017
The Washington Post recently published an
extraordinary article on policies to address the spiraling drug epidemic in the
United States. The article—“As opioid overdoses exact a higher price,
communities ponder who should be saved”—did not feature calls for emergency
health care or rehabilitation programs, but rather suggestions by some local
officials that the state should just let drug addicts die.
The Post highlighted, among others, the proposal
of Middletown, Ohio Council Member Daniel Picard that emergency responders should
not use the drug naloxone to save overdose victims more than two times. The
newspaper noted that the drug is often “the only thing separating whether an
overdose victim goes to the hospital instead of the morgue,” and draws the
conclusion that it is perfectly reasonable to adopt policies to ensure that
many more go to the latter rather than the former.
That such fascistic
measures—what might be called the “Duterte solution” to the drug epidemic in
the US—are being treated as a rational and legitimate part of the political
debate is an expression of the debased political psychology that dominates in
the American ruling class. As far as the corporate and financial elite is
concerned, if tens of thousands more people die from drug overdoses, this is
not only acceptable, it is a positive good.
Such measures are being advanced amidst a national public health
emergency on a scale not seen since the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. In
2015, a shocking 52,000 people in the United States died from drug overdoses,
including more than 30,000 from opioids alone. This compares to just under
42,000 deaths from AIDS at its peak in 1995. The figures for 2016, when finally
totaled, are expected to show an increase of nearly 20 percent, rising to
nearly 170 people every day of the year.
In the hardest hit
regions, stories of morgues and funeral homes running at maximum capacity are
commonplace. Twice already this year in Montgomery County, Ohio, the coroner’s
office has been so overwhelmed with bodies that it was forced to rent extra
refrigeration units.
Opioid-related deaths
have jumped in states throughout the country, devastating rural areas and big
cities, and affecting all races and ethnicities. In Maryland, the number of
opioid-related deaths has nearly quadrupled since 2010. In Ohio, opioid related
deaths jumped from 296 in 2003 to 2,590 in 2015, a 775 percent increase. In
Florida in 2015, three opioids—heroin, fentanyl and oxycodone—were directly
responsible for the deaths of 3,896 people.
The number of people
directly impacted by the crisis—including family members, friends and
colleagues, medical responders, social workers and many others—is in the
millions. Many addicts have children who are forced into a resource-starved
foster care system, or are left in the hands of family members who cannot
provide for them. A recent study from University of Michigan estimates that one
baby is born addicted to some sort of opiate every hour.
Thousands of workers
who have dedicated their lives to jobs that treat drug addiction experience
second-hand trauma from the hardships that come with combating the epidemic,
with little to no resources. Hospital workers are forced to turn away
withdrawing addicts from the emergency room without care; social workers have
the task of telling children they cannot be reunited with their parents, or
worse, that one or both of their parents have died; rehabilitation clinicians
are expected to “cure” addicts with nothing more than additional drugs and a
12-twelve step program.
The drug epidemic is
a public health crisis of incredible magnitude, and yet nowhere in the
political establishment is there serious discussion on the measures needed to
combat it—or who is responsible.
The underlying assumption in articles like the one in the Post is
that drug abuse is a moral failing, and that those addicted deserve to face the
consequence of their actions. This is a convenient explanation for those who
wish to wash their hands of a problem that threatens their pocketbooks.
The drug epidemic,
however, is not an individual failing but a symptom of a diseased social
system. It is the product of definite actions taken by the ruling class and its
political representatives, Democratic and Republican.
There are of course
the pharmaceutical companies, which have for years have been given a free hand
to aggressively market some of the most addictive opioids, making huge profits
in the process. These drugs were recklessly misbranded as “abuse resistant”
throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, despite overwhelming evidence to the
contrary. Prescriptions for opioids such as Percocet, Oxycontin and Vicodin
skyrocketed from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 259 million in 2012, enough to
supply each American adult with a bottle of pills, and some with two.
The same
pharmaceutical companies continue to profit from the crisis that they helped
foster. One of the reasons that cities face growing costs for using naloxone is
that some companies marketing varieties of the drug have hiked up the price by
as much as 500 percent.
More fundamentally,
the drug epidemic is a symptom of the devastation produced by nearly forty
years of social counterrevolution. Whatever the specific circumstances behind
each individual tragedy, the crisis is the product of the unrelenting attack on
social programs, wages, education and health care, combined with
deindustrialization that has wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs and
produced levels of social inequality not seen since the 1920s.
Obama concluded his
two terms in office declaring that “things have never been better” in the
United States—a proclamation that applied to the ruling elite he served, but
not to the great mass of the population. Now, under the Trump administration,
the political establishment is engaged in a great “debate” over the future of health
care, currently centered on just how much and in what way to destroy Medicaid,
which funds at least eighty percent of drug abuse services.
The outcome of the
new health care bill, whatever its form, will be nothing short of social
murder. In this sense, Picard, the local Ohio official, is merely channeling
the general outlook of the ruling class, for which the reduction in life
expectancy is a basic strategic aim.
A health emergency on
the scale of the drug epidemic requires an emergency response. The Socialist
Equality Party insists that billions of dollars must be allocated to fund
rehabilitation centers, using the most advanced scientific methods and
procedures. The health care system must be equipped with detox centers and
connected to institutions to help with long-term recovery. All social workers
in the field must receive a decent wage and the counseling and support needed.
Children must be given the highest level of care while their parents recover.
Such elementary
measures and more must be connected to the reconstruction of society to ensure
that everyone has the right to a high-paying job, health care, education and
quality housing. Only in this way can the underlying causes of drug addiction
be addressed.
None of these
measures is possible without a frontal attack on wealth of the corporate and
financial elite and its stranglehold on the entire economic and political
system. As tens of thousands die, the ruling class conspires to spend trillions
on war and conjure up new ways to amass ever greater fortunes.
The disease of which
the drug epidemic is a symptom is the capitalist system. It can be cured only
through the mobilization of the entire working class in the fight for
socialism.
Genevieve Leigh
We don’t ask for financial contributions to support this POLITICALLY VERY INCORRECT BLOG, but do appreciate you clicking on the ADSENSE ADS you find at the right and at the bottom of all posts which puts funds in our pockets to keep it going. Thanks for your support.
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Trouble in Trump County, USA
An Indiana community typifies the working-class struggles that shaped the 2016 election.
By rights, Scott County, a rural Indiana community of 24,000, should be flourishing. It’s in a pro-business state. It’s part of the large, successful 1.2 million-person Louisville, Kentucky, metro area that’s been growing total jobs (75,300, or 12.9 percent) and manufacturing positions (19,600, or 31.6 percent) in the last five years. Scott County is an easy half-hour commute from downtown Louisville.
Yet for years, Scott has struggled with severe economic and social challenges. Changes to the economy from automation and globalization eliminated many jobs and sent employers elsewhere. The Great Recession made things worse. The county is also grappling with a major public-health crisis, driven by drugs and HIV. It made national headlines in 2016 after recording 203 new cases of HIV in only about a year and a half. National media—NPR, theWall Street Journal, and theNew York Times—swooped in to cover the story. The HIV outbreak resulted from needle-sharing among drug addicts, particularly to inject the prescription opioid Opana.
Last November, Donald Trump, who stressed economic stagnation and the drug crisis during his campaign, won two-thirds of the vote in Scott—a substantial improvement on Mitt Romney’s 52 percent take in 2012 and even more impressive in a county that often votes Democratic in state and local elections. Thus, Scott makes a good case study for understanding the working-class dynamics that drove Trump to victory—and what prospects these places have for renewal.
Located about 30 miles north of the Ohio River, along I-65 between Indianapolis and Louisville, Scott dates its origins to 1820, when the young state of Indiana created it from portions of five other counties. Southern Scott County includes a section of the original land grant that Virginia gave to George Rogers Clark and his men for their service in capturing what became the Northwest Territory from the British during the Revolutionary War. Lexington, one of the towns originally considered for Indiana’s first capital, became the county seat. The county jail briefly held members of the infamous Reno Gang, perpetrators of the nation’s first train robbery, after the Pinkerton Detective Agency captured them. Throughout the nineteenth century, Scott remained small, with the principal excitement being frequent debates and litigation involving moving the county seat to a more central location. Ultimately, the county seat did move, to land adjacent to Centerville, along the Jeffersonville Railroad. This became Scottsburg, today the county’s largest municipality, with 6,700 people.
Agriculture anchored Scott’s economy. The area’s plentiful produce attracted several canning companies, especially in the northern part of the county, where Austin became a quasi-company town for Morgan Foods, founded there in 1899 and still family-controlled and operating in the city today. Morgan remains a major employer, with workers making private-label soups and other products.
Scott County was never especially prosperous and suffered repeated economic reversals. Agriculture has always been a high-risk affair. In the postwar years, automation and improved efficiency dramatically reduced local farm employment. Farmers had once worried about keeping their children on the farm after they finished school—but by the 1950s, that concern was obsolete, since there were fewer farming jobs for them to come back to. Economic changes affected other areas, too. In the early days of the car, Scott’s economy flourished along the US 31 corridor, but the construction of I-65 in the late 1950s transformed everything. William Graham, a Republican who has served as Scottsburg’s mayor since 1988, worked originally as a civil engineer and spent a decade helping build the interstate system. He says that within five years of I-65’s opening, half the businesses that had lined US 31 through town were gone; within ten years, 90 percent of them had closed. Yet it took about 20 years for the interstate interchange to develop as a commercial location.
The community took another blow in the 1980s, when Public Service Indiana canceled its Marble Hill nuclear power-plant project in adjacent Jefferson County. The move, made in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident, ended construction after $2.5 billion had already been spent—the costliest U.S. nuclear power-plant project ever abandoned. Many Scott County residents had worked on it. Graham believes that as much as a quarter of the community wound up unemployed as a result.
Like many working-class communities, then, Scott County was no stranger to economic hardship—and the Great Recession delivered more of it. The local American Steel plant, which made steel cords for tires, closed. Auto-parts supplier Freudenberg-NOK also shuttered, moving its jobs to Mexico. In 2009, Scott County unemployment soared into double digits and stayed there for four years, peaking at 15.3 percent in 2010.
The county has since rebounded somewhat. Unemployment declined sharply, to 4.8 percent in 2016; jobs are up 16.1 percent in the last five years. But the jobless rate has dropped so substantially partly because Scott’s labor force has declined by more than 800 people, or 7 percent, since peaking in 2006. And Scott County’s per-capita income of $34,400 is only 82.1 percent of the statewide average and 71.6 percent of the national average.
Economic woes are only part of the gloomy picture. Scott County is also reeling from a drugs and HIV crisis, fueled by the increasing availability of hard drugs. As Indiana State Health Commissioner Dr. Jerome Adams puts it, whereas people once self-medicated with moonshine, now they use drugs such as Opana.
Changes in medical-industry practices and government policy played an important role in making such drugs more widely available. Until the 1990s, the prescribing of pain medication had been tightly regulated, but that changed as pain management became a key medical goal. In 1996, the American Pain Society declared pain “the fifth vital sign.” The federal standard hospital-patient satisfaction survey asked patients questions, including: “How well was your pain controlled?” And: “How often did the hospital staff do everything they could to help you with your pain?”
“Only 12.2 percent of the population holds a bachelor’s degree or higher—and that’s up from just 7.3 percent in 2000.”
The result was a major rise in the quantity of opioid pain prescriptions. Indiana is one of only a few states averaging more than one opioid prescription per resident per year. “Before, you wouldn’t give anyone any Vicodin for a dental procedure,” observes Adams. “Now we’re sending them home with 90 Vicodin. The patient takes nine, leaving 81 in the bottle in the medicine cabinet.” As a consequence, he says, “It’s actually harder [for minors] to get alcohol than it is to get pills in the community.”
Another problem is family dysfunction. Previous eras of economic hardship took place against the backdrop of a largely intact social structure and stable homes. Divorce and out-of-wedlock births are now far more widespread. As recently as 1990, only about 20 percent of Scott County births were out of wedlock. By 2002, this figure had doubled to more than 40 percent. The causes and effects of these shifts are subject to debate, but it is indisputable that legal reforms facilitated divorce and changing social mores dramatically reduced the stigma associated with out-of-wedlock births. Americans broadly want divorce and even single motherhood to remain socially acceptable choices—yet these behaviors are associated with poor life outcomes.
Scott County and places like it are dealing with the fallout. Conditions in the county now sometimes resemble stereotypes of the inner city, where parents are unfit or unable to raise their own kids. Graham observes: “One of the biggest changes is grandparents raising grandchildren, where you used to never see that—never.” These social changes occurred nationally but have hit communities like Scott hardest, leaving a sizable segment of the eligible population unemployable, regardless of how many jobs might be available. The problem in many working-class American communities today is as much social as economic.
But even if they stay off drugs and graduate high school, people in these kinds of communities still face employment hurdles. Today’s jobs require increasingly sophisticated skills, but, like many rural communities, Scott County has low rates of college-degree attainment. Only 12.2 percent of the population holds a bachelor’s degree or higher—and that’s up from just 7.3 percent in 2000. Even many blue-collar jobs—from welding to computer-drive manufacturing—now require significant postsecondary-school training. The skill shortage limits access to jobs, both locally and regionally, and poses an obstacle to business recruitment.
Taken together, the employment crisis and the social dysfunction produce a sense of malaise in some places. People almost always wave, smile, and say hello in small-town Indiana; but in Austin, for instance, only one person I saw even acknowledged my presence while I drove around. The rest just shambled about with blank stares. One local assured me that had my wife not been with me in the car, prostitutes would surely have approached me, soliciting for money to buy drugs. Scottsburg looks much better, with a healthy business district centered on its interstate interchange, but it, too, has troubles, such as significant retail-storefront vacancy on its courthouse square.
The difficulties of communities like Scott are all the more striking, considering the region’s economic strengths. Scott is part of the federally defined Louisville metro area. The inclusion of rural areas within metro regions is not unusual. America’s metro areas are defined by commuting patterns, and they include large rural zones. To say that America is a metropolitan nation—86 percent of the country lives in metro areas—doesn’t mean that it all looks like Chicago or New York. Most of the metropolitan population is in suburban and even rural areas, and many rural areas, like Scott, are within easy commuting distance of a city. In Scott’s case, that city is the center of a bustling regional economy that is home to major corporations like Brown-Forman, Humana, and Yum! Foods (parent company of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell). In the last five years, the Louisville metro area added 75,300 jobs—a growth rate of 12.9 percent. Manufacturing grew 31.6 percent, adding 19,600 jobs. Ford maintains a major auto-assembly plant there, and General Electric still manufactures appliances in the city. Louisville is also the site of UPS’s primary global air hub. The shipping firm employs more than 20,000 people and supports a major distribution infrastructure.
The state of Indiana is economically strong, too, enjoying a budget surplus—with savings equivalent to 14 percent of the state’s annual budget—and an AAA credit rating. It has the eighth-best business-tax climate in the nation, according to the Tax Foundation. It’s a right-to-work state that has implemented nearly the full panoply of state-level conservative best practices for boosting business, and it has seen solid results in many places. But smaller, working-class communities without assets like a university have continued to struggle. Even within thriving Indianapolis, working-class neighborhoods and less educated residents have also lagged behind. These results pose a philosophical challenge for conservatives, who have typically assumed that economic prosperity will follow from implementing such business-friendly policies. For Indiana, a favorable tax and regulatory climate may be a virtue, but it hasn’t been sufficient to help everyone.
Other factors have played a role in making places like Scott County especially vulnerable to pathology and stagnation. Scott was always a more hardscrabble place than some surrounding areas. One suggestive way to compare small towns is to look at their infrastructure, especially the existence of sidewalks and the quality of the houses. More historically prosperous small towns often have sidewalks through much of the city. Sidewalks are scarce in Austin; in Scottsburg, they line the courthouse square but are otherwise not prevalent. In many surrounding towns, by contrast, sidewalks stretch throughout much of their historic areas. Nearby Seymour, hometown of John Mellencamp, doesn’t just have sidewalks but also alleys and landscaped medians in some sections. Similarly, Scottsburg and Austin boast fewer grand old Victorian houses than one often finds even in many small towns; instead, small workers’ cottages predominate.
Demographics are another drag on the county. Much of southern Indiana, like the Ohio River Valley in general, was heavily settled by German immigrants. To this day, 24 percent of the people in Clark County, to the immediate south, list their ancestry as German. To the immediate north, in Jackson County, that figure is nearly 29 percent; there’s even a Lutheran high school in Seymour. Scott County, by contrast, is only 15.6 percent German, being more Scotch-Irish-dominated. The area saw a heavy influx of Appalachian migration, with former residents of Hazard, Kentucky, flocking to Austin, in particular, drawn by jobs at Morgan Foods. Scott’s largest listed ethnicity, at 20 percent, is “American”—an appellation commonly used by the Scotch-Irish. Appalachia has long been known for its entrenched poverty and social dysfunction. The Centers for Disease Control recently released a list of counties at high risk for HIV and hepatitis C infections, and Appalachian areas were heavily represented. J. D. Vance’s best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy describes the tragic struggles of Appalachians in the modern world. Thus, communities like Scott County have a smaller reservoir of economic and social capital to recover from the big technological, economic, and social forces acting on them.
Still, for all its drawbacks, Scott County is working hard to improve its circumstances. The first priority was to address the HIV outbreak, and here, the state has played a vital part. The tight-knit Austin community had a long history of believing that it could solve its own problems, but the outbreak was too much to handle on its own. Even in this rural area, it turns out, many people didn’t drive or own a car, making effective treatment a struggle. So the state set up a “one-stop shop” in an Austin community center. The national media focused almost exclusively on the needle-sharing dimension. But the facility also provided HIV testing and treatment, addiction-recovery counseling, health-insurance enrollment, state identification cards, and birth certificates. The result: a dramatic decline in the rate of new infections. The drug crisis isn’t over, but tremendous progress has been made in stopping the spread of HIV.
The one-stop shop was created by then-governor Mike Pence’s executive order. Results suggest that it could be a model for how to deal with disease outbreaks in communities similar to Scott. Adopting it might be politically contentious in red states because it would involve spending more money to open field-office locations rather than relying on regional or countywide service centers; states have preferred service consolidation in rural areas, on efficiency grounds. But that old approach might not work anymore for deeply troubled communities.
Other developments offer hope on the addiction front. Medical and government officials are taking steps to reduce prescription opioid abuse. Last year, the American Medical Association recommended that the “pain is the fifth vital sign” concept be dropped. Washington is planning to eliminate the pain questions from the patient-satisfaction survey form. In March 2017, an FDA panel concluded that the benefits of Opana no longer outweighed the drug’s risks; the FDA is now considering whether to take regulatory action. This is just a start, though. The drug epidemic in America goes beyond Opana or OxyContin—it involves many illegal substances, including meth, fentanyl, and heroin. While reducing the scourge of legal-painkiller abuse is a worthy goal, stopping the flow of drugs like heroin will be much tougher.
Beyond fighting back against drugs and HIV, Scott County has also made a good start on retraining workers to help them find jobs and offering inducements to attract employers. The main effort on both counts is Scottsburg’s new $10 million Mid-America Science Park, financed half from stimulus funds and half from reserves in the local Tax Increment Financing district. Despite its own serious troubles, the county generously delayed the science park’s planned 2012 opening so that it could be used as a temporary high school after a tornado destroyed nearby (Clark County) Henryville’s building. Today the science park hosts training facilities for workers and high school students. IvyTech, Indiana’s community-college system, has opened a campus there.
Some training is employer-specific. For example, Jeffboat in nearby Jeffersonville, America’s largest inland shipbuilder, donated a special welding training machine to help people learn how to perform the extra-thick welds needed on the barges that it constructs. The science park’s goal is to become, in effect, an outsourced training department for employers—albeit one they don’t have to pay for. Mayor Graham tells local companies: “My goal is that if you need any training done, I’ll do it. You won’t have to do it.” This wouldn’t just be for new hires. “It’s also for our incumbent workers,” Graham says. “If they need to get their skills upgraded—and they do—they can come here and take some training.”
In a community that needs jobs, Graham’s can-do attitude is admirable. But it prompts the question: Why can’t companies do their own training, as they did before? The answer, in part, has to do with globalization. Businesses still manufacturing in the U.S. face such stiff competition from foreign firms that they often can’t afford to invest in workforce development. Nor can they always pay their workers much, which helps explain the low personal incomes in Scott County. (It’s notable that Jeffboat is protected from global competition by the notorious Jones Act, which requires domestic water transportation to be done using only American-made boats.) Scottsburg did lose one major employer, Freudenberg-NOK, to Mexico, but Graham is reluctant to blame trade deals like NAFTA. “I’m not sure that any of us here are qualified to say. I question it, but I’m not going to say it’s a bad thing.” Railing against trade may play well politically, but Graham would rather focus on what he can do with the tools available to him.
The outcome, so far, is encouraging. Globalization gave back some of what it took away when the Japanese firm Tokusen bought the shuttered wire plant and reopened it. Electronics firm Samtec merged two regional locations into one facility at the science park that will employ 300—a big jobs number in a community the size of Scott County.
These local business expansions are important because the purpose of Mid-America Science Park isn’t only training local workers for jobs but also attracting employers. Indiana local governments rely heavily on property taxes. The state’s tax-cap system limits single-family-home taxes to 1 percent of property value; commercial property is capped at 3 percent of value. This puts a premium on attracting commercial development. So the science park includes infrastructure targeted at business attraction, including generous meeting space, ultrahigh-quality videoconferencing capabilities, and rooms certified as secure enough for secret military-related teleconferences.
State and local government have had some success in adjusting to globalization and technology-driven disruption, but they’re weak actors in the face of broad economic forces. Only the federal government can hope to shape them fundamentally. Donald Trump was elected in part because he promised to change the status quo on globalization and the economy. The challenge will be reforming the system to help working-class communities without harming the aggregate economy. That’s not likely to be a simple task.
Even favorable federal policies will make little difference if communities like Scott can’t do something to address their crippling social problems—especially family breakdown, which enables all the others. Job openings go unfilled in communities with high proportions of drug addicts and dropouts. If changing economic conditions is hard, reversing negative social trends is even harder. A sense of humility about what can be accomplished is wise.
Scott County has made a good start on retraining workers to help them find jobs while offering inducements to attract employers. (MARK CORNELISON/KRT/NEWSCOM)
Does Scott County have a long-term future? “Give me two to three years,” says Scottsburg’s Graham, on his plans to improve the struggling downtown. One key area of focus in these localities is preserving historic downtown architecture, which even hardened urbanites love. Local leaders in Scott County understand the importance of these unique districts, not only to their community’s identity but also to the long-term viability of attracting and retaining residents. But they have little money to spend on such efforts. Overall, Graham is realistic but hopeful. “Do we have a terrible situation?” he asks, referring to the HIV outbreak. “We certainly do. We’re doing something about it.”
His confidence may seem unwarranted to outsiders, but Scott County does have a track record of coming through crises. It survived agricultural automation, the disruption of the interstate highway, the closure of Marble Hill, and other setbacks. More recently, when businesses threatened to leave over poor Internet quality in the early 2000s, small-town Scottsburg built one of America’s first wireless municipal broadband systems to provide web service after the local providers refused to upgrade the community’s capacity. And Scott County retains its significant geographic advantages.
While Scott and other working-class American communities may never be highly prosperous or glamorous, they might yet pull through this trial, as they have through others in the past. “What makes Scott County unique?” Adams asks. “My honest answer is: absolutely nothing. There are Scott Counties all throughout the country. All of the ingredients exist in many communities.” How Scott and its brethren fare will tell us a lot about America’s fate in the Trump years.
Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
EXCLUSIVE: Cartel Violence Spills into Texas as Gunmen Storm Past U.S. Border Security
PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Coahuila — Two cartel gunmen fleeing from a raging gun battle with Mexican authorities ran through U.S. border security measures twice as they crossed into Texas and back; using their vehicle to ram barriers.
The cartel gunmen were able to cross into Eagle Pass through International Bridge #2 by running the security checkpoints. Shortly after they crossed back through a second bridge that was closed at the time. The gunmen used their vehicle to ram security barriers and later ditched it escape on foot.
The violence began overnight near the rural community of Nava, Coahuila, when authorities received information about two gunmen riding in a late model white Toyota Tundra, information provided to Breitbart Texas by Coahuila law enforcement revealed.
State police officers with a special investigative unit spotted the vehicle along Boulevard Carranza near the intersection with Airport Boulevard in the border city of Piedras Negras. Officers tried to pull over the gunmen but were met with gunfire as they sped off–setting off a high-speed chase.
The gunmen were able to reach the main plaza in Piedras Negras, Plaza de Las Culturas, where they once again engaged law enforcement in a short firefight. As they made their way to the International Bridge #2, gunmen rammed their way through other vehicles and barriers as they used the inbound lanes through Mexican Customs to reach the U.S. side of the bridge.
Coahuila state police officers contacted their counterparts in Texas. Before American authorities were able to apprehend the shooters, they made their way to another international bridge, locally known as Bridge 1. While the crossing was closed at the time, the gunmen were able to ram through the security barriers and make their way back into Mexico.
The Mexican Army, Fuerza Coahuila, and local police officers had been combing the area however, they were able to make their way to a nearby neighborhood called Mundo Nuevo where they abonded the vehicle and fled on foot. Authorities were able to locate the white SUV that had multiple bullet holes and extensive body damage.
During the initial gun battle and chase, two Coahuila police officers from the investigative unit and six officers with Fuerza Coahuila were injured. The six officers with Fuerza Coahuila appear to have been injured in a crash during the high-speed chase. Authorities have not revealed how the two other officers were injured.
Breitbart Texas reached out to CBP for comment and the agency did not respond in any manner.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by Coahuila’s “J.M. Martinez” and Breitbart Texas’ Ildefonso Ortiz.
MEXICO SERVES UP CHEAP HERION IN AMERICA'S OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS! A generation of orphans
The impact of US opioid epidemic on foster care and social services
By Genevieve Leigh 12 July 2017
The epidemic of opioid addiction in the US, which has reached never before seen heights in the past two years, has put an immense strain on the already resource-starved US health care system. Among the most devastating consequences of this crisis has been the thousands of children who lose their parents to addiction every day.These children have flooded the foster care system, and their cases have exhausted social services.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2012, 397,000 U.S. children were in foster care. By 2015, that number had risen 8 percent, to 428,000. There is no concrete data yet for 2016; however, experts predict that the past two years—the height of the opioid epidemic so far—has increased that number dramatically.
A recent study published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that in 14 states the number of foster kids rose by more than a quarter between 2011 and 2015.
States that are experiencing a massive influx of children into protective custody all face similar problems, with varying degrees of severity. None are equipped with the resources to adequately deal with the crisis. Three of the hardest hit states have been Maine, Florida, and Ohio.
Maine
More than 1,800 children were reported to be in foster care across the state of Maine in 2016—a nearly 45 percent increase in foster children since 2011.
Last year, 376 people died from drug overdoses in Maine. This is the highest number ever recorded for the state and marks a 114 percent increase over a period of just four years, coinciding with the rise of the opioid crisis. Moreover, more than 1,000 children were born addicted to drugs in Maine last year, with the majority of the cases involving some form of opioid.
Bette Hoxie, executive director of Adoptive and Foster Families for Maine, a non-profit organization that works to provide support services for adoptive and foster parents, as well as kinship providers, recently spoke to the WSWS about the immense scope of the opioid epidemic.
“We work with about 3,100 families. Of these, 1,600 are utilizing our resources from more intensive services than just basic services. This means that they need things like clothes, they need help working through the system, they need bedding, they need much more active involvement.”
“The homes where these children are going are just not prepared with everything they need to house a child,” Hoxie noted.
“I would say nearly every single one of those cases is due to drug addiction. Of the kinship calls [when children are placed with extended family members instead of with foster families] that we get, at least 85-90 percent have been due to drug addiction, with the majority being opioids.”
Hoxie explained the effect of the spike in opioid use on the child care services: “Up until about 8 or 10 years ago, when children were coming into protective services, they were placing kids with foster care families until they could reunite them with their families or place them in permanent homes.”
“Over the last few years—in a large way, to deal with the sudden influx of such high numbers of children—there is more and more use of family members. There is definitely a strain on the system. We have 1,900 children in care, and we have 1,200 licensed foster homes.” Hoxie expressed concerns that some of these children end up in homes where the caregivers, often grandparents, are on fixed incomes and struggle to provide for the children.
Speaking on the opioid crisis more generally Hoxie added, “The biggest thing we are struggling with here in Maine is recovery options. ... When a family with addiction problems reaches out for help and they hear ‘Well, it will be three months before we can get you into a place,’ these people lose a lot of hope.”
Ohio
The state of Ohio has one of the nation’s highest overdose rates. In 2016, 4,149 deaths from drug overdose were reported, showing a 36 percent jump from the year before. In 2015, an astounding one in nine heroin deaths nationwide occurred in Ohio, a number that has likely jumped even higher since.
Ohio’s foster population has gone up nearly 10 percent, with more than 60 percent of children in the system because of parental drug abuse. The situation in Ohio is unique, not only because the opioid epidemic is so severe, but also because it is possibly the most resource-starved state in terms of child care services. The state ranks 50th for state share of children services total expenditures. In fact, Ohio state expenditures for child services are so low that if the number doubled, it would still remain 50th in the country.
Scott Britton, who works for Public Children Services Association of Ohio, told the WSWS: “The drug epidemic really has caused a crisis across the board. We have 11 percent increase of children in custody and 19 percent increase in retention rate. We have some 2015 data that showed that 28 percent of the parents of kids who were taken from their homes were using some type of opioid. So that means more than one in four and almost one in three. This is not counting kinship care or other ways a child might come in. We suspect that number has only gone up in 2016, considering that back in 2015 we were not seeing near the same volume of opioid use as we had in 2016 and which continues today.”
“It is affecting just about every facet of the foster care system. Some come into our care because they were born with addiction, others because they have experienced severe neglect. They very often come in with a lot of trauma from their experiences, which complicates things. Sometimes placing them with a typical foster family is not what’s best due to the severity of their issues.”
Another major problem, mentioned by every charity group, nonprofit, and social service worker who spoke to our reporters, is the effect the pressure has had on social workers. Britton explained that Ohio is no different: “These workers are emotionally exhausted. They are often the ones who are left with tasks like telling a child that one of their parents, or sometimes both of their parents, have died from overdose, for example.
“Our caseworkers are really committed to reunifying children with their parents. That is our number-one goal. They work really hard to get parents into treatment. Unfortunately, they are seeing less and less of that, which is really tough on their morale. We did a survey in 2016 and found that one out of every four caseworkers left their positions. I suspect they just become exhausted from taking that emotional stress home.”
Florida
The worst manifestation of the opioid epidemic in Florida is in the state’s 12th Judicial Circuit Court, which includes Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. One figure that sheds light on the severity of the situation in this area is the number of doses of Narcan (Naloxone), the drug that reverses the effects of an overdose, being administered. In July 2015, emergency responders in this area administered a record 281 doses of the “miracle drug.” By July 2016, that number had more than doubled to 749. Officials in the area remain unable to stem the epidemic.
Kathryn Shea is the president and CEO of the Florida Center for Early Childhood, which is an early childhood mental health provider. Shea works in the heart of the Florida epidemic.
Shea told the WSWS: “The numbers we are seeing in Sarasota of kids in care we have never seen before. There is no question that the biggest cause is substance abuse, and the primary drug is opioids. Our children have been dramatically impacted, as have our babies. To give you an idea of how severe it is, consider that 90 percent of babies in the NICU at Sarasota Memorial Hospital are there from opioid substances.”
When asked about reports that Florida and other states such as Oregon and Texas have been forced to have children sleep in state buildings because there were no foster homes available, Shea responded, “Yes, that has happened here. Not as often, because they are constantly recruiting foster parents. Instead, here they often have to go over their waiver of five kids per parent.”
Shea also commented on the effect this crisis has had on those who work in the field, “Our turnover rate for social workers is just horrible. It’s very hard to keep cases managers and investigators. A lot of these workers are very young and have just gotten out of college or just have high school degrees and don’t have a lot of life experience to help buffer the intense situations that they have to deal with. Let me put it this way—I have been in this industry 37 years and it is still difficult for me. Often they are traumatized by what they go through on the job. They end up with secondary trauma from what they see and do. Honestly, from all my years in the field, I’ve never seen the situation this bad.”
When asked about what sort of impact the Trump health care plan, which would end Medicaid as an entitlement program, might have on the children affected by the opioid epidemic Shea said it would be a disaster. “Most of our families are on Medicaid. This covers over 90 percent of our kids. The services for them would be dropped. What we are talking about is the difference between life and death for children. I am not saying that lightly. I am very serious. We will be hurting the most vulnerable population. I think it’s an absolute crime.”
Asked to explain what she thought was driving the opioid epidemic Shea told the WSWS: “Well, I think the real root cause of this is poverty. Many of these people were raised in poverty and don’t see a way out of it. Many of them have experienced serious trauma and have never been treated properly because they don’t have the money and they use drugs to self-medicate, and to deal with the pain.”
….. the American Middle-Class at death’s door and knocking ….
Have you notice Democrat Party politicians always keep their fat mouths closed tight on the topic of the Mexican drug cartels operating across America???
"If true, it shows Trump being the ultimate cynic and not having the courage to state his true beliefs to the American public who elected him. That's always been my biggest problem with Trump: his lack of integrity and consistent belief system." ----- ED STRAKER
TRUMP BACK-PEDDLES ON LEGALS AND KEEPS OBAMA’S ILLEGAL AMNESTY OPERATING…. It’s all about keeping wages DEPRESSED!
“He's showing more empathy for illegal aliens than he is for American citizens. Shouldn't it be the concerns of Americans he should be considering first, before the feelings of illegals? These people are taking taxpayer money and American jobs, some committing crimes, and many are not assimilating and speaking English, and Trump wants them to stay?”
Notice how we never hear the phony populist Trump talking about E-VERIFY!
AMERICA: NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!
“The percentage of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force has more than tripled over the last four decades and while the U.S. represents just 5 percent of the world’s population it attracts 20 percent of the world’s immigrants, according to a new report.”
Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone.
Those most impacted are middle class and lower middle class. It is they whose jobs are taken, whose raises are postponed, whose schools are filled with non-English speaking children that absorb precious resources for remedial English, whose public parks are trashed and whose emergency rooms serve as the local clinic for the illegal underground.
Exclusive – Mo Brooks in Senate Ad: Fund President Trump’s Border Wall or Face Government Shutdown
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Alabama, is threatening to shut the government down in the U.S. Senate if his colleagues do not fund President Donald J. Trump’s planned border wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Mo Brooks, one of three major candidates in the race to succeed now Attorney General Jeff Sessions for Sessions’ seat, made the threat in a new ad set to air statewide in Alabama on television soon.
“Hi, I’m Mo Brooks, candidate for the Senate, and I approved this message,” Brooks opens the ad, titled “Build The Wall.” The ad was provided exclusively by Brooks’ campaign to Breitbart News ahead of its public release.
The ad then cuts to President Trump’s speech in mid-2015 at Trump Tower in New York City from the day he launched his campaign for president.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said in that speech, the clip of which is used by Brooks in the ad.
“President Trump promised a wall to keep us safe and to protect American jobs for American workers,” Brooks then says on camera:
But even some establishment Republicans are blocking the way. Elect me to the Senate, and I’ll fight every spending bill that doesn’t fund that wall. And if I have to filibuster on the Senate floor, I’ll even read the King James Bible until the wall is funded. And you know what? Washington could benefit from that. We’re going to build that wall, or you’ll know the name of every Republican who surrenders to the Democrats to break my filibuster. I give you my word, and I don’t give my word lightly.
WATCH THE AD FROM REP. MO BROOKS’ U.S. SENATE CAMPAIGN:
Brooks’ clarion call for border wall funding in the government spending bills coming up comes as many in the GOP establishment are not interested in standing with President Trump in ensuring that a wall is built on the U.S. border with Mexico. What he promises in this ad is a guarantee to fight as hard as a U.S. Senator can for the wall.
The race to succeed Sessions in the U.S. Senate is shaping up to be a very interesting one. Brooks, the pro-Trump candidate, is facing off against both former Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore and the appointed Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL). Strange was not elected to the seat but was appointed under questionable circumstances by now former Gov. Robert Bentley. Bentley has left office under a cloud of ethics questions.
Strange’s team and allies, filled with anti-Trump GOP establishment operatives, have been inaccurately accusing Brooks of being anti-Trump in a series of attacks on the ground in Alabama. Brooks actually supported President Trump during the general election, even donating to the president’s campaign, while Strange refused to publicly back Trump with donations or public comments.
The only evidence Strange’s team has against Brooks is that he was not on board during the primaries — when Strange was also not supportive of the president — so the attacks are ringing hollow throughout the politically-in-tune Alabama. Brooks is also very close with Attorney General Sessions, the former Senator whose seat he is running to fill. Brooks and Sessions repeatedly worked together in the U.S. Congress to advance the interests of America First priorities that later became a focal point of Trump’s campaign. Sessions has not endorsed a candidate in the race as he is the Attorney General.
But Trump allies like nationally syndicated radio hosts Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, Fox News’ Sean Hannity, and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) — the chairman of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus — have all endorsed Brooks in the race.
A highly connected GOP source with inside knowledge of Alabama politics who is closely following this race told Breitbart News that Strange is “like the Jeb Bush of this race. Nobody likes him. And while he’s got all this money and all these connections, nobody likes pro-establishment views. You can’t sell a product that consumers don’t like.” Also, given Strange’s allies and connections in the Washington establishment, there is likely no way he will ever commit to helping President Trump on his core campaign promise of building a wall on the border as much as Brooks has now in this ad.
Brooks was almost taken out by the shooter who opened fire on the GOP congressional baseball game practice, as he was one of many members at the practice. Brooks’ name actually appeared on the shooter’s hit list, though he was not hit in the shooting that has landed House Majority Whip Steve Scalise in the hospital multiple times.
The primary race is on Aug. 15, and the top two vote-getters are expected to head to a runoff sometime in September.
HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Amnesty would add 100 million more illegals and cost Legals trillions!
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the number of elderly persons who are homeless in the US will have doubled by 2050.
Starve the Opioids, Build the Wall
By Kenric Ward
ImmigrationReform.com, July 6, 2017
Mexico is the world’s third largest producer of heroin – an opioid drug — and Mexican heroin now controls over 50 percent of the market share. Additionally, most of the heroin from Colombia and South East Asia comes to the U.S. via Mexican drug cartels.
A border wall would choke that flow.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., points out that the opioid epidemic stems “not only from abuse (of prescription drugs), but from the illicit drug trade.” America, he said, is “consistently a step behind in stopping trafficking of opioids and other illegal drugs.”
Ohio politician proposes letting overdose victims die
The policy of “social murder” behind the US health care debate
By Barry Grey 5 July 2017
At a June 20 meeting of the Middletown, Ohio City Council, Dan Picard, a council member, offered a novel proposal to contain surging costs associated with a worsening epidemic of opioid overdoses in the town. Like cities across the United States, this southwestern Ohio town of some 49,000 people is being ravaged by the explosive spread of drug addiction linked to opioid pain killers. This year it has already recorded nearly 600 overdoses, more than in all of 2016.
Picard, who is not planning to run for reelection, proposed that the City Council adopt a “three strikes” policy, under which those who make use of emergency services two times to deal with an overdose will be denied help the third time. As he told the Washington Post, “When we get a call, the [emergency services] dispatcher will ask who is the person who has overdosed. And if it’s someone who has already been provided services twice, we’ll advise them that we’re not going to provide further services—and we will not send out an ambulance.”
Defending his proposal, Picard said, “I want to send a message to the world that you don’t want to come to Middletown to overdose… We need to put a fear about overdosing in Middletown.”
This call for what amounts to state-sanctioned murder evoked an angry response from the public in Middletown and wherever else people became aware of it. Numerous health care organizations and advocacy groups involved in dealing with the drug abuse epidemic denounced Picard and his proposal.
Alexis Pleus, the founder of Truth Pharm, a nonprofit that seeks to raise awareness of the issues surrounding substance abuse, did not mince words in an open letter to Picard: “To suggest that you withhold emergency medical response to overdose patients is manslaughter at best and premeditated murder at worst.”
Most of the American population, however, never learned of the incident. This is because the establishment media, fixated on its campaign against Russia and saber-rattling against North Korea, China, Iran and Syria, along with the political warfare in Washington between the Trump administration and its ruling class opponents, did not widely report the story.
There are other political reasons for the downplaying of the story by the corporate-controlled media. Picard’s brazen suggestion that drug abuse victims be allowed to die comes uncomfortably close to lifting the lid on a basic policy question underlying the current official debate on health care “reform.”
Behind the proposals in the Republicans’ bills to cut costs and boost profits by gutting Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, and lifting the current requirement that insurance companies cover certain “essential benefits,” lies a deliberate and calculated effort to reduce life expectancy for working people overall and send many of the old, infirm and mentally or socially disabled to an early grave.
The effort, moreover, is bipartisan. The Democrats are pleading for negotiations on a “compromise” bill to “fix” Obamacare, a euphemism for incorporating the demands of the insurance monopolies for even higher premiums, copays and deductibles and fewer restrictions on their ability to gouge the public. Obamacare itself is a mechanism for cutting costs for corporations and the government, weakening the system of employer-provided health insurance and rationing access to health care on a more openly class basis. The Republican plans build on Obamacare to accelerate the health care counterrevolution it initiated.
The corporations, banks and hedge funds that are pushing health care “reform” and the politicians and policy experts who are doing their bidding are well aware that many thousands will die needlessly as a result of the measures being proposed. Medicaid, slated to be cut under the Republican bills by some $800 billion over ten years and terminated as an open-ended entitlement program with guaranteed benefits, provides about 80 percent of funding to treat drug abuse, which overwhelmingly affects working class and poor people.
In 2015, some 1.35 million low-income Americans had an opioid use disorder. As it is, only 25 percent of those people get treated in a year.
Last year some 60,000 people in the US died from drug overdoses, 60 percent of them from opioids. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. There is no starker barometer of the failure of the capitalist system and the descent of broad masses of the population into conditions of desperate social crisis.
Of the 22 million people who will lose medical coverage under the Senate health care bill, Medicaid cuts will account for 15 million of them. Moreover, both the House and Senate bills allow insurance companies to drop coverage of care for mental health and substance abuse, among other basic services.
Can there be any doubt that many will die as a result of these cuts? Lynn Cooper, director of the Drug and Alcohol Division at Pennsylvania’s Rehabilitation and Community Providers Association, told National Public Radio last month: “It is a death epidemic all over the country. The loss of Medicaid expansion will be like the bottom dropping out for thousands of Pennsylvania citizens and their families.”
The impact is so self-evident, and public opposition so pervasive, that government officials are obliged to resort to the most brazen lying when defending their proposals. Typical was the performance of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a notorious and longstanding opponent of basic social program such as Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, in an appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. Of the Republican plan to dismantle Medicaid, he said, “We want to make certain that Medicaid is a program that can survive.”
While claiming to be committed to addressing the opioid epidemic, he declared, “We don’t need to be throwing money” at the crisis.
Ruling class strategists speak more frankly on specialized think tank web sites meant for corporate and state officials and their academic advisers. In 2013, the World Socialist Web Site drew attention to two policy papers published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) on the negative consequences for American imperialism and the national security apparatus of lengthening life spans for ordinary people resulting from advances in medical science and treatment and government health programs.
As the CSIS experts explained, the human and social achievement of better health and longer life for many millions of Americans spells disaster for the American ruling class and the capitalist system. The authors of the studies insisted that action had to be taken to deal with the “crisis,” including increasing the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security to force the “young elderly,” those aged 60-69, to forgo retirement and keep working.
One of the papers, titled “The Budget Crisis and the Civil-Military Challenge to National Security Spending,” was written by Anthony H. Cordesman, a longtime CSIS strategist who acts as a consultant for the US State and Defense departments. Denouncing the siphoning of money away from the military to pay for medical care for the elderly, Cordesman wrote, “The US does not face any foreign threat as serious as its failure to come to grips with… the rise in the cost of entitlement spending.”
Behind such discussion papers are systematic studies and actuarial tables calculating the likely effectiveness in shortening life expectancy for workers—a process that is already underway—of various proposals to “reform” the health care system.
In his immortal 1845 work The Conditionof the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels accurately characterized as “social murder” the horrific conditions imposed on workers by the capitalist class, which “placed hundreds of proletarians in such as position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death…”
The present crisis-ridden and bankrupt state of American and world capitalism is once again bringing to the fore the incompatibility of the profit system and the rule of a financial aristocracy with the satisfaction of human needs such as health and longevity. The health care counterrevolution in the US is a case of “social murder” at the hands of the capitalist class.
AMERICA THE ADDICTED!
How America surrendered to Mexico’s invasion, occupation and looting.
The Mexican drug cartels now control most of America’s southern borders as LA RAZA “The Race” fascist party expands Mexico’s anchor baby welfare state from border to open border.
More significant still, a former Mexican official, Jorge Castañeda, threatened to unleash Mexican cartels onto the U.S. to retaliate for deportations of illegal immigrants and the construction of a border wall.
“When we get a call, the [emergency services] dispatcher will ask
who is the person who has overdosed. And if it’s someone who
has already been provided services twice, we’ll advise them that
we’re not going to provide further services—and we will not send
out an ambulance.”
Picard states openly the widespread sentiment in the American ruling class and among its political flunkeys—that the life of a working class person has a price tag, which is dropping every day.
Ohio councilman proposes “three strike policy” to let opioid overdosers die
By Genevieve Leigh 3 July 2017
A city councilman in Middletown, Ohio, Dan Picard, has proposed a “three strike” policy for people who overdose on opioids, under which those reported to have overdosed on more than two occasions would be denied emergency treatment the third time. He made the proposal at a City Council meeting on June 20.
In what would amount to state-sanctioned murder, emergency responders would not be dispatched and the opioid user would be left to die. As Picard told the Washington Post on Wednesday: “When we get a call, the [emergency services] dispatcher will ask who is the person who has overdosed. And if it’s someone who has already been provided services twice, we’ll advise them that we’re not going to provide further services—and we will not send out an ambulance.”
Like hundreds of cities and towns across the US, Middletown, located in southwestern Ohio, has been wracked by the opioid epidemic. The town, which has a population of 48,791, has already seen nearly 600 overdoses this year, which is more than it saw in all of 2016.
Defending his proposal, Picard told the press, “It’s not a proposal to solve the drug problem. My proposal is in regard to the financial survivability of our city.” He continued, “If we’re spending $2 million this year and $4 million next year and $6 million after that, we’re in trouble. We’re going to have to start laying off. We’re going to have to raise taxes.”
Picard states openly the widespread sentiment in the American ruling class and among its political flunkeys—that the life of a working class person has a price tag, which is dropping every day.
The giant pharmaceutical companies played a central role in creating the opioid epidemic. They made billions of dollars in profits by systematically and knowingly pushing highly addictive opioid medications on the population throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s.
Now the epidemic has become a concern for the ruling class, not out of any compassion for those who suffer, but because it is creating a financial burden for the state. The proposals currently working their way through Congress to drastically reduce the availability of medical care for the working class, particularly by gutting Medicaid, the primary source of funding for the treatment of drug addiction, are calculated to accomplish on a national scale what Picard is proposing for Middletown.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies continue to profit from the crisis. Part of the reason emergency care for those who overdose on opioids is so expensive is that the price of the “miracle drug” Naloxone (trade name Narcan), used to revive users from overdoses, has skyrocketed over the past decade. The popular injectable version of the drug has gone from $0.92 a dose to more than $15 since 2007. An auto-injector version is now up to more than $2,000 a dose.
The pharmaceutical companies’ price-gouging, combined with the increase in demand, has caused revenues from the sale of Naloxone to jump from $21.3 million in 2011 to $81.9 million last year, according to data from the prescription-tracking company IMS Health. It is now costing state and local governments much more money to save lives.
Picard pointed to this in a statement defending his proposal, saying, “I want to send a message to the world that you don’t want to come to Middletown to overdose because someone might not come with Narcan and save your life. We need to put a fear about overdosing in Middletown.” He continued, “John Smith obviously doesn’t care much about his life, but he’s expending a lot of resources and we can’t afford it.”
As with all social problems, the opioid epidemic is treated by the political establishment as the result of the personal failings of individuals. In fact, it, and drug abuse more generally, are the result of the increasingly dire social conditions facing broad masses of the people, under conditions of unprecedented and growing levels of social inequality. These conditions are themselves rooted in the rapacious drive of the pharmaceutical corporations and the corporate-financial elite in general for profit, intensified by the worsening crisis of the capitalist system.
Picard’s homicidal proposal has evoked an angry response from the public. Middletown City Manager Douglas Adkins wrote in a blog post Wednesday about the overwhelming backlash. “We’ve received hate mail, national news coverage and overloaded voice mail and email in-boxes,” he said.
Many health care organizations, recovery centers and advocacy groups have spoken out against Picard’s plan. Truth Pharm, a nonprofit organization that seeks to raise awareness of the issues surrounding substance abuse, released an open letter to Picard denouncing his proposal.
Alexis Pleus, the founder of Truth Pharm, wrote in the letter: “In short, our goal is to save lives, so, needless to say, we were more than appalled by your recent proposition to refuse medical treatment to overdose patients. It pains and infuriates us to see how easily you have turned human lives into dollar signs and an impact on your budget… To suggest that you withhold emergency medical response to overdose patients is manslaughter at best and premeditated murder at worst.”
Pleus spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the issues raised by Picard’s proposal. On the use of Naloxone as a solution, Pleus explained: “At first, Naloxone and Narcan seemed like a pretty fast and cheap solution to save lives. And that was true to a point. It is still a very important tool we have to help people.
“The problem is that they have never dedicated the follow-up... There is no governmental body that has given the proper resources necessary to complement the use of Naloxone. It is not a fix in itself, is not a cure to the epidemic. We set ourselves up for frustration because we keep using this life-saving device but don’t ever get to the root causes of addiction. I think ultimately the fault goes right back to each state government and the federal government as a whole.”
Pleus told reporters she wasn’t surprised that lawmakers would propose a measure not aimed at addressing the epidemic but rather at saving money. “Look at how easy it is to get legislation to pass when there is money to be made,” she said. “But try and get something through that simply helps people--it just won’t happen…this problem does not have a quick cheap fix. But still, all the while, the pharmaceutical companies are profiting, profiting, profiting.”
When asked how President Trump’s new health care plan might affect the opioid problem, Pleus said, “It will be absolutely devastating.” She continued: “At our organization we try and help people find treatment. About 80 percent of those we help have Medicaid. If they repeal it, I cannot even fathom what we will do. The new plan also will not mandate addiction treatment as part of insurance coverage. I can’t imagine turning away eight of ten people and telling them there is nothing we can do.”
The LA RAZA drug cartels haul back $100 BILLION from heroin sales.
More significant still, a former Mexican official, Jorge Castañeda, threatened to unleash Mexican cartels onto the U.S. to retaliate for deportations of illegal immigrants and the construction of a border wall.
CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES!
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: Heroin, Criminals, Anchor baby breeders for 18 years of gringo-paid welfare.
"Public education as a whole came under brutal attack as part of the Obama administration’s effort to shift the burden of the financial crisis onto the backs of the working class."
AMERICA THE ADDICTED: 1 in 7 are addicted
CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES!
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: Heroin, Criminals, Anchor baby breeders for 18 years of gringo-paid welfare.
Washington’s latest foray against sanctuary cities raises the stakes by threatening to withhold federal funding from non-compliant cities and states. One analysis estimates that the sanctuary jurisdictions of New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle could lose a combined $4.448 billion under HR 3003.
But any fiscal hit presupposes: 1) the Senate will pass the House bill and, 2) the law survives inevitable court challenges. With judges blocking President Donald Trump’s earlier effort to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities, does HR 3003 provide enough legal ammunition? Though Congress has clear constitutional authority over appropriation of funds, such facts have not always deterred activist judges.
Unwilling to wait around, Texas enacted Senate Bill 4 to strip sanctuary cities of state law-enforcement funds and hold local officials liable for non-compliance. SB 4 does not recognize localities’ right to flout state law.
Senate Republicans maneuver in effort to pass draconian health care bill
By Kate Randall 11 July 2017
Republican senators returning to Washington from the July 4 holiday recess face internal divisions over legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was unable to bring legislation to the floor that could gain the required 50 votes before the recess.
Protests against the Republican proposals took place Monday in more than a dozen locations in House and Senate office buildings. As of Monday afternoon, police had arrested 80 protesters, 21 in House office buildings and 59 in Senate buildings, and charged them with misdemeanor offenses.
Returning Republican senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Rob Portman of Ohio and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, were greeted by protesters in or around their offices. Some of those outside Cruz’s office lay down on the floor, blocking foot traffic and leading Capitol police to carry them down the hall. Cruz, Flake and Portman also faced protests in their home states over the recess, with 15 protesters arrested in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio.
The Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), the Senate version of the House’s American Health Care Act (AHCA) passed in May, is massively unpopular. A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll shows that only 17 percent of US adults approve of the BCRA, while 55 percent disapprove. (Another 7 percent either haven’t heard enough about it or have no opinion.)
While Republican Senate leaders are seeking to tweak the bill to satisfy ultra-conservatives and “moderates” in their ranks who disagree with the bill, it is clear that any changes they make will not alter the fundamentally reactionary character of the legislation. With 50 votes needed to pass the bill, at least 10 Republican senators are presently opposed and no Democrats are expected to support it.
The Republicans hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate and can afford to lose only two Republican votes. If a floor vote were to end in a 50-50 tie, Vice President Mike Pence would be allowed to cast a tie-breaking vote to pass the bill.
Passage of the bill would mark the end of Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, as a guaranteed social benefit based on need, establishing either a per-capita spending cap or limiting funding, benefits and eligibility by means of block grants to the states. It would also phase out the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare in the 31 states and the District of Columbia that adopted it. The result would be brutal cuts or the outright elimination of health care for tens of millions of families with children, seniors and people with disabilities. Medicaid currently covers over 70 million Americans.
Senator Cruz has authored a “Consumer Freedom Option” amendment to the Senate bill, under which private insurers would be able to vary premiums based on health history or deny coverage outright to people with expensive preexisting conditions. This would be allowed as long as states offered at least one “community-rated” plan, in which premiums would not vary based on health status.
The effect of such a change would be to eliminate ACA protections against discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and requirements that all plans offer a set of “essential” medical services, such as maternity care, prescription drugs, doctor visits, emergency care, substance abuse, mental health and other vital services.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has analyzed other changes to the Senate bill under consideration and their long-term effects, which it says would have “little impact” on the bill’s “five core features.”
Ending the ACA Medicaid expansion: One change under discussion would slow or delay the phase-out of federal funding for Medicaid expansion. KFF says that states’ costs would still increase three- to five-fold in the long run, leading most or all states to end their expansions. A proposal to add $45 billion for treating opioid drug disorders would be offset by opioid-addicted people presently covered by the Medicaid expansion losing access to other mental and physical health care.
Capping and cutting federal Medicaid funding: A proposal to return to the House bill’s slightly less draconian growth rates for per-enrollee funding would still shift large costs to the states, “leading to deep cuts to eligibility, benefits, and provider payments,” according to KFF.
Increasing marketplace premiums and deductibles: Allowing the use of health savings accounts to pay premiums for individual coverage would be mostly a tax break for the rich, as low- and middle-income people have little or no income to set aside for such accounts.
Changes to the ACA’s individual market: The “Cruz amendment,” mentioned above, would sharply raise premiums and deductibles for people with preexisting conditions, making coverage unaffordable for many.
Cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations: One proposal is to not repeal the ACA’s 3.8 percent tax on high-income households, which is presently repealed in both the House and Senate bills. KFF estimates this change would still leave in place tax cuts of $457 billion, almost exclusively benefiting corporations and the rich.
The Senate leadership has sent two versions of the bill with these changes, one with Cruz’s amendment and one without, to the Congressional Budget Office for analysis. The CBO predicted that the initial Senate bill would result in an additional 22 million Americans becoming uninsured over 10 years.
Several Republicans have predicted that the bill will not pass. Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said, “My view is it’s probably going to be dead.” Asked about the bill’s odds on “Fox News Sunday,” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said, “I would probably put that at 50-50.”
Majority Leader McConnell has acknowledged that if the Republicans and President Trump fall short on their pledge to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, they will be forced to negotiate with the Democrats. Any such negotiations would involve discussions on further concessions to the profit demands of the insurance companies.
Minority Leader Charles Schumer and Senate Democrats have continued to campaign against the BRCA and said they will negotiate only if the Republicans give up on repealing the ACA. Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, suggested another scenario, in which Republicans could repeal most of the ACA, forcing Democrats to the table to work on a replacement.
However this plays out, the Democrats have made clear that they are willing to work with the Republicans to “fix” Obamacare. This has nothing to do with making the ACA better—lowering soaring premiums and deductibles, widening the networks of hospitals and providers, further expanding Medicaid and its federal funding, and taxing the wealthy.
The entire framework of the official health care “debate” is reactionary. Obamacare itself is a regressive restructuring of the health care system designed to cut costs for corporations and the government, undermine the system of employer-provided health insurance, and force uninsured workers to purchase health plans from insurance companies with huge premiums and absurdly high deductibles and co-pays. It still leaves some 28 million people completely uninsured.
The basic premise of the Republican plans as well as Obamacare is the capitalist market and the profitability of the gigantic insurance and pharmaceutical firms and hospital chains. The health and well-being of the working population is completely subordinated to the profit drive of the corporate elite.
While the Democrats pose as the defenders of workers and their families who are struggling under the weight of rising health costs and rationed services, they are in full agreement with the Republicans that there is “no money” for health care and other basic social services, and “realistic” sacrifices must be made. This is a brazen lie in a country where 20 individuals have as much wealth as the bottom 175 million people.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the advocate of “Medicare for all,” spent Sunday rallying voters in West Virginia and Kentucky to call on their Republican senators to vote against the bill. He would have people believe that pressuring these reactionary politicians will make any difference in the lives of workers and youth who stand to lose under whichever plan emerges from either the Republicans or some sordid deal between them and the Democrats.
Millions of Americans are outraged by the attack on health care being hatched in Washington, as demonstrated by the plunging poll numbers for both Republican plans and the growing protests. But in taking forward this fight, the working class cannot allow itself to be drawn behind any section of the political establishment and must proceed with its own methods of class struggle.
A socialist solution to the health care crisis requires a break with the Democratic Party—and all those who promote illusions in this big business party—and a fight for the independent mobilization of the working class. Only the expropriation of the health care industry and the establishment of socialized medicine can secure health care as a social right.
HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Amnesty would add 100 million more illegals and cost Legals trillions!
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
"A Mexican illegal alien allegedly raped a girl in Kansas in September after being deported ten times in the past six years alone, according to reports."
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
“What we're seeing is our Congress and national leadership dismantling our laws by not enforcing them. Lawlessness becomes the norm, just like Third World corruption. Illegal aliens now have more rights and privileges than Americans. If you are an illegal alien, you can drive a car without a driver's license or insurance. You may obtain medical care without paying. You may work without paying taxes. Your children enjoy free education at the expense of taxpaying Americans.”
“Part of the problem, Santorum said, has been the arrival of
millions of unskilled immigrants — legal and illegal — in the
United States. "American workers deserve a shot at [good] jobs,"
Santorum said. "Over the last 20 years, we have brought into this
country, legally and illegally, 35 MILLIONmostly unskilled
workers. And the result, over that same period of time, workers'
wages and family incomes have flatlined." SEN. RICK SANTORUM
In the July/August version of the Atlantic, columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”
inart, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”
The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.
Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.” The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama. Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.” Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today. A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.” Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda. This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.” Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.” But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.” It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration. Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other. One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”? A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete. What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity. Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation neednot mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally. Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally. Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work. Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.” In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same? Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today. *Opening photo credits: AFP; Alain Jocard; Alfons Teruel / Eyeem; Bloomberg; Brooks Kraft; Chesnot; David McNew; David Ramos; Drew Angerer; Erik McGregor / Pacific Press / LightRocket; Frederic J. Brown; Gerard Julien; Getty; Hector Vivas / LatinContent; Jonathan Nackstrand; Lars Baron; Mike Roach / Zuffa; Omar Torres; Orlando Sierra; Paul Bradbury; Paul Morigi / WireImage; Pradeep Gaur / Mint; Rodin Eckenroth; Saul Loeb; Spencer Platt; Tasos Katopodis; Thomas Koehler / Photothek; Victor J. Blue; Vitaly Nevar / TASS; Zach Gibson
OPEN BORDERS – HOW THE DEMOCRAT PARTY DESTROYED THE GOP, THE AMERICAN WORKER and then AMERICA!
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA:
A PARTNERSHIP OF MEXICO, THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
“But as American sanctuary cities flouted Federal law and encouraged illegal immigration after 1980, those working in the U.S. started to wire transfer money back to their families in amounts that became so large that by the late 1990s remittances to Mexico were the second largest source of foreign revenues, second only to oil revenues.”
October 18, 2016
Why Hillary and Her Wall Street Donors Don’t Want Trump’s Wall
When GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump first talked about building a “big, beautiful wall” at the southern border of the U.S. he was met with fierce resistance. Given the facts that the southern border is the main route used by drug smugglers and criminal illegal immigrants(all persons who cross the border illegal commit a Federal misdemeanor the first time, a felony the second time) there would not seem to be a good reason to resist lawful regulation of border entry. As usual, the answer may be in who gains from the absence of a Wall, and what they gain. The best way to get the answer is to follow the money.
Right now the transfer of money from persons working in the U.S. to Mexico, called “personal remittances” are a major source of Mexican revenue. The growth of remittance revenue is a recent development. Mexico seized the assets of nearly all foreign oil companies operating in Mexico in 1938. But as American sanctuary cities flouted Federal law and encouraged illegal immigration after 1980, those working in the U.S. started to wire transfer money back to their families in amounts that became so large that by the late 1990s remittances to Mexico were the second largest source of foreign revenues, second only to oil revenues.
According to the World Bank, in 2015 the world’s top remittance corridor was from the United States to Mexico. As much as $25.2 billion dollars was sent back to Mexico from people working in the U.S. Remittances are a great source of revenue for Mexico and are more stable than all other flows such as oil.
BLOG: ADD THE $40 TO $60 BILLION THE NARCOMEX DRUG CARTELS HAUL BACK!
In 1979 the Police Chief of Los Angeles publicly stated that he would not enforce immigration law. Following this announcement, which was the effective beginning of Los Angeles as a sanctuary city, remittances to Mexico from the U.S. grew very rapidly from only $177 million in 1979 to $26.9 billion in 2007, following the growth of those sectors of the economy such as construction where illegal immigrants worked. After the 2007 economic peak there was a drop in 2009 to $22 billion. But in 2015 the amount of remittances climbed back to $26.2 billion, according to the World Bank. Ninety-eight percent of all remittances sent to Mexico come from the U.S.
It is no coincidence that the most rapid growth occurred from 2000 to 2008 when Vincente Fox was the president of Mexico. This is why the most emotional and energetic resistance to the Wall came from Vincente Fox, who used abusive language toward Trump. His statement were cloaked in emotion and anger, a skillfully crafted disguise for the real reason for his concern: money.
One in every eleven persons born in Mexico has gone to the U.S. The National Review reported that in 2014 $1.87 billion was spent on incarcerating illegal immigrant criminals.
Since the political economy of Los Angeles depends so heavily on the Federal and state program money that supports illegal immigration, the Los AngelesTimes still defends Special Order 40 as essential to, paradoxically, law and order. It’s also essential to the economy of Los Angeles but somehow the Times doesn’t mention that fact.
BLOG:
THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS INVADING ILLEGALS ONE BILLION IN WELFARE.
90% OF ALL MURDERS IN LOS ANGELES ARE BY MEXICANS.
THE TAX FREE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN L.A. COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION.
One may ask why the Federal government chooses to spend so much money on the incarceration of criminal aliens by defying the Federal 1996 Immigration Act. But it’s important to keep in mind the benefits the Federal government, particularly the Democrat Party, the party of government sector teacher unions, obtains from illegal immigration. After all, their four biggest campaign contributors, the Service Employees International Union, the National Education Association, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and American Federation of Teachers are four of the top six contributors from 1989 to present. And they give over 99% of their contributors to Democrats. Today sixty five percent of public school students in Los Angeles County are Hispanic. In Chicago 46% are Hispanic.
Democrats, who have dominated almost all large metropolitan areas since FDR, are heavily dependent on illegal immigrants and their children.Should Trump build an effective wall, he would disrupt the flow of illegal immigrants, public school students, teacher union donations and block grant money to all their most important bases of electoral and demographic support. Trump’s wall is the major threat to what they see as their party’s long term goal of maintaining control of state governments as well as the national government.
Multimillionaire Jorge Ramos of Univision has criticized Trump aggressively. While Univision may have no obvious direct financial interest in remittances, their TV network certainly stands to profit from increases in Hispanic viewership, increases that are totally dependent on the growth of the Hispanic populations in cities they serve.
BLOG:
THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS INVADING ILLEGALS ONE BILLION IN WELFARE.
90% OF ALL MURDERS IN LOS ANGELES ARE BY MEXICANS.
THE TAX FREE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN L.A. COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION.
BLOG: CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS FARGO and BANK of ILLEGALS (AMERICA) ARE MAJOR DONORS TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race”.
In short, everything that matters to Hillary and her Democrat Party is existentially threatened by Trump’s wall. And as a personal matter, Hillary’smulti-million dollar speech income from Wall Street contributors is also threatened: the banks make money from the wire transfers. Every time someone in the U.S. wires money to Mexico, the banks, currency exchanges, and other providers of wire transfer services make easy money. And the loss of low paying jobs to teenagers and seniors to illegal immigrants also contributes to the recession. Hillary and her party supporters desperately need illegal immigrants: Hillary is bought and paid for.
We now know that the big Wall Street banks bought her and you are paying for it in many ways. Hillary will not reveal what she has said to big bank contributors, but it is not unlikely that she reassured them that she will allow an open border to exist on the Southern part of the U.S. Recent email leaks have confirmed that she believes in open borders.
And then there’s the humanitarian issue. After all, the rationalization for allowing illegal immigration is that we need people to do “low paid jobs no one else will do.” This is a racist, humiliating characterization of Hispanics from Mexico and other Central American countries. America’s most shameful chapter in its history was its promotion of the institution of slavery, the importation of blacks from Africa to do “low paid jobs no one else will do.” It is hard to understand how anyone with sensitivity toward racial minorities can now bring up another generation of low paid workers. Vincente Fox never discusses this abuse, or the rape trees human smugglers construct as monuments to their criminal rape of young Hispanic women illegally crossing the border from the South.
Those following the money trail would say this follows the pattern perfectly: that Hillary allows illegal immigrants to be exploited by cartels and rapists in order for the banks she protects to collect their remittance transfer money. Somehow these humanitarian topics are avoided. We know that Wall Street investment banks gave tens of millions to support Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. These same banks make easy profits from of illegal immigrant bank transfer fees as well as high interest rate home loans and car loans targeted to Hispanics.
Hillary’s lack of humanitarian concern is accompanied by a silence toward the issue of money.
"Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise forglobalization and open bordersfrequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors."
SOARING POVERTY AND UNEMPLOYMENT UNDER OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS POLICIES.
THE DEPT. of HOMELAND OPEN BORDERS SECURITY SECRET REPORT:
The Borders Are Wide Open. Illegals Jumping it in the Thousands.
Death of the America Middle Class is around the corner. End of the GOP is at hand. A one Party American is near. Mexico will elect all future Presidents.
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
JAMES WALSH - THE HISPANICAZATION of AMERICA
How the Democrat party surrendered America to Mexico:
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
HILLARY’S AMERICA: NOW BANKROLLED BY THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS
IMAGES OF AMERICA UNDER LA RAZA MEX OCCUPATION:
Your neighborhood will be next to fall to LA RAZA!
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
OPEN BORDERS: The Democrat Party’s Weapon of Mass Destruction on the American Worker
"Los Angeles saw all crime rise in 2015: violent crime up 19.9 percent, homicides up 10.2 percent, shooting victims up 12.6 percent, rapes up 8.6 percent, robberies up 12.3 percent, and aggravated assault up 27.5 percent,"Landry said.”
The illegal broke into her place.
Using a claw hammer, he beat her, broke her neck and raped her!
Marilyn Pharis was 64 when she died from her assault.
According to a 2011 report from the Government Accountability Office, there are 70,000 sexual offenses attached to the incarcerated criminal alien population.
A Mexican illegal alien allegedly raped a girl in Kansas in September after being deported ten times in the past six years alone, according to reports.
BUILDING THE MEXICAN CARTELS IN THE AMERICAN BURBS!
MEXIFORNIA (Formerly California) NOW UNDER NARCOMEX CONTROL
Suspected Illegal Alien Marijuana Farmers Held Workers Hostage: ICE
"More than 728,000 illegal immigrants have been shielded from being deported and granted work permits through President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty
program, according to the Migration Policy Institute."
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: Let the Mexicans Destroy America
…. Amnesty will destroy the GOP, white and black middle America, keep wages depressed and build the LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY
Fermin Rivera, 28, allegedly beat a puppy to death while trying to break into a neighborhood home. During the attempted burglary, Rivera had broken into the backyard but was met with barking by a small puppy. Surveillance cameras show Rivera subsequently “cornered the Bichon-Maltese mix, lifted the dog over his head and slammed it down with all his strength on the concrete slab twice.” River is now reportedly “facing felony counts of animal cruelty charges and attempted burglary charges.” Rivera is reportedly on an immigration hold.
LEADING MEMBERS OF THE LA RAZA DEMOCRAT PARTY:
2,000 CALIFORNIANS HAVE BEEN MURDERED BY MEXICANS..... WHO THEN FLED BACK OVER THE OPE BORDER TO AVOID PROSECUTION
http://www.illegalaliencrimereport.com/
CLINTON’S PROMISE OF AMNESTY IN A 100 DAYS!
HILLARY CLINTON AND THE CONSPIRACY WITH THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “THE RACE” TO SURRENDER AMERICA’S BORDERS, DESTROY THE GOP WITH MILLIONS OF MEX VOTERS AND EXPAND THE MEX WELFARE STATE ON AMERICA’S BACKS http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/08/la-raza-supremacist-hillary-clinton.html HILLARY CLINTON: Closet Republican …and Openly a LA RAZA SUPREMACIST agent for Mexico! "The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality, with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an extent not seen since the 1920s."
"He (Trump) is able to get a hearing because millions of people are being driven into economic insecurity and poverty while the rich and the super-rich continue to amass obscene levels of wealth. He is able with some success to divert mass discontent along reactionary nationalist and racialist channels precisely because what passes for the “left” in American politics, anchor by the Democratic Party, has moved ever further to the right, culminating in the Obama administration which has presided over endless war and an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of the economic ladder."
A NATION IN BORDER MELTDOWN:
MILLIONS OF JOBS TO ILLEGALS AND
BILLIONS IN WELFARE
MEXICO WILL DOUBLE AMERICA’S POPULATION
IMMIGRANT SHARE OF ADULTS QUADRUPLED IN 232 COUNTIES
Most Americans (legals) would be appalled to know that from day one the Obomb has funded the MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race” with U.S. tax dollars and this racist party has operated out of the white house under LA RAZA V.P. Cecilia Munoz.
THE CLINTON, OBAMA AND PAUL RYAN CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY.
FOR THE DEMOCRAT PARTY, MEXICO'S INVASION, OCCUPATION AND EVER EXPANDING WELFARE STATE KEEPS WAGES DEPRESSED, BUILD THE DEMS' LA RAZA PARTY BASE, AND DESTROYS THE GOP.
WE ARE SOON TO BE A ONE PARTY NATION WITH OPEN BORDERS FOR THE MEXICAN HORDES AS THEY JUMP OUR JOBS, WELFARE OFFICES AND VOTING BOOTHS WAVING THEIR MEXICAN FLAGS!
BARACK OBAMA , HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND THE LA RAZA
MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS….
There’s more than one way to destroy America’s white middle class!
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
INVADING ILLEGALS = UNREGISTERED DEMS
925k CRIMINAL ILLEGALS NOT DEPORTED
OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS TO DESTROY THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS- MILLIONS OF INVADING CRIMINALS NOT DEPORTED
OPEN BORDERS KEEPS WAGES FOR LEGALS DEPRESSED AND BUILDS THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY PARTY BASE FOR THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HELL BENT ON DESTROYING THE GOP WITH AN ENDLESS INVASION BY MEXICO!
LA RAZA ILLEGAL CARLOS ESPARAZA RAPED A 7 YEAR OLD.
THEN HE WENT OUT AND VOTED DEM FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS!
The sputtering economic recovering under President Obama, the last to follow a major recession, has fallen way short of the average recovery and ranks as the worst since the 1930s Great Depression, according to a new report.
Had the recovery under Obama been the average of the 11 since the Depression, according to the report, family incomes would be $17,000 higher, six million fewer Americans would be in poverty, and there would be six million more jobs.
"These figures present a scathing indictment of the social order that prevails in America, the world’s wealthiest country, whose government proclaims itself to be the globe’s leading democracy. They are just one manifestation of the human toll taken by the vast and all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS TO SERVE THE SUPER RICH: The slow and painful death of America that dominates American society."
“This study follows reports released over the past several months documenting rising mortality rates among US workers due to drug addiction and suicide, high rates of infant mortality, an overall leveling off of life expectancy, and a growing gap between the life expectancy of the bottom rung of income earners compared to those at the top.”
THE CLINTON “JOBS” PLAN ENDORSED BY NARCOMEX – IT’S CALLED AMNESTY!
Clinton, in the guise of a “jobs” and “infrastructure” program, promoted yet another scheme to hand out tax cuts and other incentives for companies to hire workers at poverty-level wages, with the trade unions brought in to keep the workers in line in return for a cut in the spoils.
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
MILLIONS OF AMERICAN JOBS HANDED OVER TO ILLEGALS ALONG WITH BILLIONS IN WELFARE.... AND THE PARTY HAS JUST BEGUN!
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY PLATFORM:
NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!
VIVA LA RAZA FASCISM? THEN VOTE DEM!
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 (UPI) — The total apprehensions by U.S. Border Patrol agents of people trying to illegally cross the border between the United States and Mexico increased in 2016 from last year but is lower than the two years prior.
In 2016, there were 408,870 total apprehensions, a 23 percent increase from 2015 in which there were 331,333 apprehensions, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement. The 2016 numbers, though, represent a 14.7 percent decrease from the 479,371 apprehensions in 2014, and a 1.3 percent decrease from the 414,397 apprehensions in 2013.
“The demographics of illegal migration on our southern border has changed significantly over the last 15 years — far fewer Mexicans and single adults are attempting to cross the border without authorization, but more families and unaccompanied children are fleeing poverty and violence in Central America,” Johnson wrote.
The number of Central Americans apprehended at the southern border outnumbered Mexicans for the first time in 2014, and in 2016 the situation occurred again, Johnson added.
In 2016, there were 59,692 unaccompanied children, 77,674 people who attempted to cross the border as a family, and 271,504 individuals who attempted to cross the border illegally.
Johnson said that though President Barack Obama’s administration has “endeavored to enforce the immigration laws in a fair and humane way … the reality is the system is broken, and badly need of comprehensive immigration reform that only Congress can provide.”
Johnson called on Congress and the United States’ next president, likely to be either Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or Republican nominee Donald Trump, to “make smart investments in border security technology, equipment and other resources.”
“Border security alone cannot overcome the powerful push factors of poverty and violence that exist in Central America. Walls alone cannot prevent illegal migration,” Johnson wrote. “Ultimately, the solution is long-term investment in Central America to address the underlying push factors in the region.”
THE LA RAZA PLAN: California’s final surrender to fly the Mexican flag within 4 years.
"The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot." -- - EXCELSIOR --- national newspaper of Mexico
WITHOUT VOTER APPROVAL, THE LA RAZA-OCCUPIED COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS ILLEGAL MEXICAN MORE THAN A BILLION IN WELFARE FOR BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES…. AMERICA’S NEXT GENERATION OF STAGGERINGLY EXPENSIVE “CHEAP” LABOR
“Taco Runt” is a member of the Mexican Fascist Movement of M.E.Ch.A. and a racist (yes, Mexicans think of themselves as a unique “race”) LA RAZA supremacist.
He is proud of the fact that he FAILED California’s State Bar test more than any other illiterate Mexican on earth and that qualifies him to operate California’s Mexican Welfare State for LA RAZA.
BELOW LINK IS TO THE LA RAZA “THE RACE” MEXICAN FASCIST AND RACIST ANTI-AMERICAN SEPARATIST MOVEMENT M.E.Ch.A.Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan. (WARNING GRAPHIC!)
“As one attorney general, Kamala Harris, steps down to replace Barbara Boxer, another attorney general is secreted out of the glands of selfsame power in the form of pus-spewing Xavier Becerra.”
It didn’t stop Becerra, a prominent Latino rights advocate who has
served in Congress since 1993, from pushing for the dealer’s
release at the request of his father, Horacio. The elder Vignali, a
rich Los Angeles businessman, contributed thousands of dollars
to Becerra’s various campaigns and a favor was in order.
“Through love of having children, we are going to take over.”AUGUSTIN CEBADA, BROWN BERETS, THE LA RAZA FASCIST PARTY
CALIFORNIA UNDER LA RAZA SIEGE:
Mexico’s looting and ethnic cleansing of a once American state.
CA HAS THE HIGHEST TAXES IN THE NATION, THE LARGEST ILLEGAL MEXICAN POPULATION, THE LARGEST MEX WELFARE STATE and HALF THE MURDERS IN CA ARE NOW BY MEXICAN GANGS.
LA RAZA MEXICO’S TRILLION DOLLAR LOOTING OF AMERICA
The staggering cost of all that “cheap” Mexican labor:
“The lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare benefits of illegal immigrant beneficiaries of President Obama’s executive amnesty would be well over a trillion dollars, according to Heritage Foundation expert Robert Rector’s prepared testimony for a House panel obtained in advance by Breitbart News.”
THE STAGGERINGCOST OF AMNESTY: non-enforcement is another form of AMNESTY!
Legals to pay trillions for open borders and Mexico’s looting
Between one-quarter and one-third of the 1.5 million new arrivals in 2014 were illegal aliens, meaning that a conservative estimate is that 1,000 illegal aliens a day are moving to the United States.
ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS ORDERS CALIFORNIA TERMINATED.
MEXICO IMMEDIATELY DENOUNCED THE DECREE AND FIRED SESSIONS.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions: Emergency Intervention Needed in California NOW!
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: poverty, anchor baby breeders for welfare, criminals, unregistered dems and HEROIN!
By Arthur Schaper
Townhall.com
In California, illegals can vote: it’s possible and very likely. California’s automatic motor-voter law all but assures that illegals seeking driver’s licenses will get a ballot along with their license.
Miscreants from any corner of the world can register to vote in California online, too. No vetting, no assurance, no integrity.
Voter fraud in broken inner city hellholes like Detroit and New York City cannot compare with the ballot stuffing throughout the once Golden State.
OPEN BORDERS: The Democrat Party’s Weapon of Mass Destruction on the American Worker
"Los Angeles saw all crime rise in 2015: violent crime up 19.9 percent, homicides up 10.2 percent, shooting victims up 12.6 percent, rapes up 8.6 percent, robberies up 12.3 percent, and aggravated assault up 27.5 percent," Landry said.”
IMAGES of LA RAZA CRIMINALSIN LOS
ANGELES ALONE:
200 MOST WANTED (MURDER) CRIMINALS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES:
“The lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare benefits of illegal immigrant beneficiaries of President Obama’s executive amnesty would be well over a trillion dollars, according to Heritage Foundation expert Robert Rector’s prepared testimony for a House panel obtained in advance by Breitbart News.”
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: poverty, anchor baby breeders for welfare, criminals, unregistered dems and HEROIN!
BILLIONAIRES FOR BORDERLESS AMERICA
….It’s all to keep wages DEPRESSED.
“This nation no longer is a democratic republic...rather it has become a tool of the super-rich members of the above mentioned elite who preselect our presidents based on their cooperation and complicity with the elite’s ultimate goals. Obama has, in their opinion done superbly carrying out the plans well laid out for him by his backers.”
“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually (DATED FIGURES) in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” --- Christian Science Monitor
While the declining job market in the United States may be discouraging some would-be border crossers, a flow of illegal aliens continues unabated, with many entering the United States as drug-smuggling “mules.”
Californiamust stem the flow of illegal immigrants
The state should go after employers who hire them, curb taxpayer-funded benefits, deploy the National Guard to help the feds at the border and penalize 'sanctuary' cities.
“Illegal immigration is another matter entirely. With the state budget in tatters, millions of residents out of work and a state prison system strained by massive overcrowding, California simply cannot continue to ignore the strain that illegal immigration puts on our budget and economy. Illegal aliens cost taxpayers in our state billions of dollars each year.As economist Philip J. Romero concluded in a 2007 study, "illegal immigrants impose a 'tax' on legal California residents in the tens of billions of dollars."
Casting a shadow on economic recovery efforts in the United States is the cost of illegal immigration that consumes U.S. taxpayer dollars for education, healthcare, social welfare benefits, and criminal justice. Illegal aliens (or more politically correct, “undocumented immigrants”) with ties to Mexican drug cartels are contributing to death and destruction on U.S. lands along the southern border.
While the declining job market in the United States may be discouraging some would-be border crossers, a flow of illegal aliens continues unabated, with many entering the United States as drug-smuggling “mules.”
What does the US Department of Justice, the Sinaloa drug cartel, and the spy corporation Stratfor have in common? According to CIA documents leaked by WikiLeaks, they’re all at the center of the new US strategy in the War on Drugs. In 2012, Whiteout Press exposed the shocking alliance in the article, ‘Secret US Alliance with Sinaloa Cartel exposed’.
“According to Immigration and Customers Enforcement data first obtained by the Associated Press this week, about 70 percent of the 40,000 migrant family members arrested at the border since May did not follow up their arrest with a necessary visit to an immigration office.”
The NARCOMEX drug cartels now operate in all major
American cities and haul back to NARCOMEX between $40
THE REAL FACE OF CALIFORNIA UNDER MEXICAN OCCUPATION:
“The California-Mexico border would surely be opened wide, prompting a spike in unfettered immigration by desperately poor people, drug dealers, and gang members to what is already a virtually lawless and out-of-control welfare state.”
Lou Dobbs Tonight
In California, League of United Latin American Citizens has adopted a resolution to declare "California Del Norte" a sanctuary zone for immigrants. The declaration urges the Mexican government to invoke its rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo "to seek third‑nation neutral arbitration of disputes concerning immigration laws and their enforcement." We’ll have the story.
BELOW LINK IS TO THE LA RAZA “THE RACE” MEXICAN FASCIST SEPARATIST MOVEMENT (WARNING! GRAPHIC!)
"The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot." --- EXCELSIOR --- national newspaper of Mexico
BELOW LINK IS TO THE LA RAZA “THE RACE” MEXICAN FASCIST SEPARATIST MOVEMENT (WARNING! GRAPHIC!)
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant Islamists have the goal of destroying the United States.Mexican drug cartels are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually every community across this country.” JUDICIALWATCH
REMITTANCES ….. are only part of Mexico’s
looting… and billions for anchorbaby breeders,
billions for heroin sales and then do the numbers!
Mexicans abroad sent home nearly $2.4 billion in transfers in November, 24.7 percent higher than a year earlier, marking their fastest pace of expansion since March 2006, according to Mexican central bank data on Monday…
ONE OF THE MOST DISTURBING BOOKS OUT THERE ON MEXICO’S INVASION, OCCUPATION AND LOOTING of CALIFORNIA
MILLIONS of JOBS and BILLIONS in WELFARE and they commit most of the MURDERS
SANCTUARY CITIES AND STATES:AMERICA FALLS TO LA RAZA SUPREMACY!
“What we're seeing is our Congress and national leadership dismantling our laws by not enforcing them. Lawlessness becomes the norm, just like Third World corruption. Illegal aliens now have more rights and privileges than Americans. If you are an illegal alien, you can drive a car without a driver's license or insurance. You may obtain medical care without paying. You may work without paying taxes. Your children enjoy free education at the expense of taxpaying Americans.”
“According to the Centers for Immigration Studies, April '11, at least 70% of Mexican illegal alien families receive some type of welfare in the US!!! cis.org”
So when cities across the country declare that they will NOT be sanctuary, guess where ALL the illegals, criminals, gang members fleeing ICE will go???? straight to your welcoming city. So ironically the people fighting for sanctuary city status, may have an unprecedented crime wave to deal with along with the additional expense.
$17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
$12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English.
$22 billion is spent on (AFDC) welfare to illegal aliens each year.
$2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as (SNAP) food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
$3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.Does not include local jails and State Prisons.
2012 illegal aliens sent home $62 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. This is why Mexico is getting involved in our politics.
$200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States.
Center for Immigration Studies. Federation for American Immigration Reform. House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Investigations. Inter-American Development Bank. Violent Crimes Institute. Federation for American Immigration Reform. Immigration Studies Program. Illegal Alien Crime Report. Memorial to victims of Illegal Alien Crime.
REVOLUTION IN MEXICO: Will It Spread Over America’s Open Borders?
“Over the last decade, theMexican ruling class has carried out a ruthless drive to intensify the exploitation of its labor and natural resources, mainly by American banks and corporations.”….sounds like what Wall Street has done to us!
LOS ANGELES: Mexico’s Second Largest City, First Place for Billion Dollar Mexican Welfare, Number 1 for Mexican Murder and Western Gateway For the LA RAZA Mexican Drug Cartels
“Part of the problem, Santorum said, has been the arrival of millions of unskilled immigrants — legal and illegal — in the United States. "American workers deserve a shot at [good] jobs," Santorum said. "Over the last 20 years, we have brought into this country, legally and illegally, 35 MILLIONmostly unskilled workers. And the result, over that same period of time, workers' wages and family incomes have flatlined." SEN. RICK SANTORUM
A study by City.com reveals that the crime rate in Phoenix dropped dramatically after the city dropped its sanctuary city policies.
There are many reason why crime rates decline over a certain period of time. But the study suggests a provacative link between fewer criminal illegal aliens roaming the streets and a falling crime rate.
“When we eliminated our sanctuary policy back in 2008, we saw crime, violent and stolen vehicles fall by 25 percent,” former Phoenix police officer and Executive Director of the Arizona Police Association Levi Bolton told Fox News Channel’s William La Jeunesse in an interview. “We saw a 20-year low crime rate. When we were allowed and had the discretion to contact our federal immigration partners, crime fell drastically.”
Lajeunesse reported data from City-Data.com revealing that from 2008 to 2009, the murder rate in Phoenix dropped by 27 percent. Other crimes fell as well. Auto thefts fell by 36 percent, robberies 23 percent, thefts by 19 percent, burglaries by 14 percent, and assaults by 13 percent, the report states. The rates fell again in 2010, but by smaller numbers. The overall crime index fell by 20 percent the first year after the city’s policy change.
Police chiefs around the country tout that sanctuary cities are safer than cities that actually turn criminal aliens over to immigration officials for removal from the country.
“Police chiefs across the nation believe that enlisting local police to enforce immigration law is a bad idea,” California Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Leon (D) told reporters during a recent press conference “Having [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] pluck criminals out of jail and send them across the border or wherever they came only to come right back endangers our communities.”
The University of California, Riverside, disagrees. A 2016 study by the university revealed that “violent crime is slightly higher in sanctuary cities.” It concluded there is not a “discernible difference in violent crime rates, rape, or property crime” across the 55 cities in their study, La Jeunesse reported.
Finding a direct, causal link between the crime rate and illegal alien criminals is difficult because there are so many factors besides illegals that must be considered, including incarceration rates, declining or increasing population, even the amount of resources devoted to crime prevention.
Having said that, it's hard to escape the conclusion that turning illegals over to the feds has had a positive impact on reducing crime. I suppose it depends on your point of view. If you are disposed to reject any evidence that removing criminal illegal aliens from the community could reduce the number of serious crimes, you can find plenty of ammunition to buttress your point of view.
But to do that, you have to ignore the totality of the evidence. And although statistics from one city could be an outlier, it will be interesting to examine statistics from other cities that have changed their policies.
IS THERE A “SANCTUARY” WHERE LEGALS ARE SAFE FROM MEXICAN MURDERING RAPIST?
LIST of “SANCTUARY COUNTIES” AND THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE STATS
ICE ROUNDS UP THE ILLEGALS
THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE…. Murder, rape, molestation and then vote DEM for more!
"Los Angeles saw all crime rise in 2015: violent crime up 19.9 percent, homicides up 10.2 percent, shooting victims up 12.6 percent, rapes up 8.6 percent, robberies up 12.3 percent, and aggravated assault up 27.5 percent," Landry said.”
Although MS-13 started out in Salvadoran communities in Los Angeles sometime during the 1980’s, lax immigration policies and weak border security helped the gang explode in size as MS-13 originated from illegal immigrants, Breitbart Texas reported.
40% of all Federal Border Crimes are by invading Mexicans!
The impact of US opioid epidemic on foster care and social services
By Genevieve Leigh 12 July 2017
The epidemic of opioid addiction in the US, which has reached never before seen heights in the past two years, has put an immense strain on the already resource-starved US health care system. Among the most devastating consequences of this crisis has been the thousands of children who lose their parents to addiction every day.These children have flooded the foster care system, and their cases have exhausted social services.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2012, 397,000 U.S. children were in foster care. By 2015, that number had risen 8 percent, to 428,000. There is no concrete data yet for 2016; however, experts predict that the past two years—the height of the opioid epidemic so far—has increased that number dramatically.
A recent study published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that in 14 states the number of foster kids rose by more than a quarter between 2011 and 2015.
States that are experiencing a massive influx of children into protective custody all face similar problems, with varying degrees of severity. None are equipped with the resources to adequately deal with the crisis. Three of the hardest hit states have been Maine, Florida, and Ohio.
Maine
More than 1,800 children were reported to be in foster care across the state of Maine in 2016—a nearly 45 percent increase in foster children since 2011.
Last year, 376 people died from drug overdoses in Maine. This is the highest number ever recorded for the state and marks a 114 percent increase over a period of just four years, coinciding with the rise of the opioid crisis. Moreover, more than 1,000 children were born addicted to drugs in Maine last year, with the majority of the cases involving some form of opioid.
Bette Hoxie, executive director of Adoptive and Foster Families for Maine, a non-profit organization that works to provide support services for adoptive and foster parents, as well as kinship providers, recently spoke to the WSWS about the immense scope of the opioid epidemic.
“We work with about 3,100 families. Of these, 1,600 are utilizing our resources from more intensive services than just basic services. This means that they need things like clothes, they need help working through the system, they need bedding, they need much more active involvement.”
“The homes where these children are going are just not prepared with everything they need to house a child,” Hoxie noted.
“I would say nearly every single one of those cases is due to drug addiction. Of the kinship calls [when children are placed with extended family members instead of with foster families] that we get, at least 85-90 percent have been due to drug addiction, with the majority being opioids.”
Hoxie explained the effect of the spike in opioid use on the child care services: “Up until about 8 or 10 years ago, when children were coming into protective services, they were placing kids with foster care families until they could reunite them with their families or place them in permanent homes.”
“Over the last few years—in a large way, to deal with the sudden influx of such high numbers of children—there is more and more use of family members. There is definitely a strain on the system. We have 1,900 children in care, and we have 1,200 licensed foster homes.” Hoxie expressed concerns that some of these children end up in homes where the caregivers, often grandparents, are on fixed incomes and struggle to provide for the children.
Speaking on the opioid crisis more generally Hoxie added, “The biggest thing we are struggling with here in Maine is recovery options. ... When a family with addiction problems reaches out for help and they hear ‘Well, it will be three months before we can get you into a place,’ these people lose a lot of hope.”
Ohio
The state of Ohio has one of the nation’s highest overdose rates. In 2016, 4,149 deaths from drug overdose were reported, showing a 36 percent jump from the year before. In 2015, an astounding one in nine heroin deaths nationwide occurred in Ohio, a number that has likely jumped even higher since.
Ohio’s foster population has gone up nearly 10 percent, with more than 60 percent of children in the system because of parental drug abuse. The situation in Ohio is unique, not only because the opioid epidemic is so severe, but also because it is possibly the most resource-starved state in terms of child care services. The state ranks 50th for state share of children services total expenditures. In fact, Ohio state expenditures for child services are so low that if the number doubled, it would still remain 50th in the country.
Scott Britton, who works for Public Children Services Association of Ohio, told the WSWS: “The drug epidemic really has caused a crisis across the board. We have 11 percent increase of children in custody and 19 percent increase in retention rate. We have some 2015 data that showed that 28 percent of the parents of kids who were taken from their homes were using some type of opioid. So that means more than one in four and almost one in three. This is not counting kinship care or other ways a child might come in. We suspect that number has only gone up in 2016, considering that back in 2015 we were not seeing near the same volume of opioid use as we had in 2016 and which continues today.”
“It is affecting just about every facet of the foster care system. Some come into our care because they were born with addiction, others because they have experienced severe neglect. They very often come in with a lot of trauma from their experiences, which complicates things. Sometimes placing them with a typical foster family is not what’s best due to the severity of their issues.”
Another major problem, mentioned by every charity group, nonprofit, and social service worker who spoke to our reporters, is the effect the pressure has had on social workers. Britton explained that Ohio is no different: “These workers are emotionally exhausted. They are often the ones who are left with tasks like telling a child that one of their parents, or sometimes both of their parents, have died from overdose, for example.
“Our caseworkers are really committed to reunifying children with their parents. That is our number-one goal. They work really hard to get parents into treatment. Unfortunately, they are seeing less and less of that, which is really tough on their morale. We did a survey in 2016 and found that one out of every four caseworkers left their positions. I suspect they just become exhausted from taking that emotional stress home.”
Florida
The worst manifestation of the opioid epidemic in Florida is in the state’s 12th Judicial Circuit Court, which includes Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. One figure that sheds light on the severity of the situation in this area is the number of doses of Narcan (Naloxone), the drug that reverses the effects of an overdose, being administered. In July 2015, emergency responders in this area administered a record 281 doses of the “miracle drug.” By July 2016, that number had more than doubled to 749. Officials in the area remain unable to stem the epidemic.
Kathryn Shea is the president and CEO of the Florida Center for Early Childhood, which is an early childhood mental health provider. Shea works in the heart of the Florida epidemic.
Shea told the WSWS: “The numbers we are seeing in Sarasota of kids in care we have never seen before. There is no question that the biggest cause is substance abuse, and the primary drug is opioids. Our children have been dramatically impacted, as have our babies. To give you an idea of how severe it is, consider that 90 percent of babies in the NICU at Sarasota Memorial Hospital are there from opioid substances.”
When asked about reports that Florida and other states such as Oregon and Texas have been forced to have children sleep in state buildings because there were no foster homes available, Shea responded, “Yes, that has happened here. Not as often, because they are constantly recruiting foster parents. Instead, here they often have to go over their waiver of five kids per parent.”
Shea also commented on the effect this crisis has had on those who work in the field, “Our turnover rate for social workers is just horrible. It’s very hard to keep cases managers and investigators. A lot of these workers are very young and have just gotten out of college or just have high school degrees and don’t have a lot of life experience to help buffer the intense situations that they have to deal with. Let me put it this way—I have been in this industry 37 years and it is still difficult for me. Often they are traumatized by what they go through on the job. They end up with secondary trauma from what they see and do. Honestly, from all my years in the field, I’ve never seen the situation this bad.”
When asked about what sort of impact the Trump health care plan, which would end Medicaid as an entitlement program, might have on the children affected by the opioid epidemic Shea said it would be a disaster. “Most of our families are on Medicaid. This covers over 90 percent of our kids. The services for them would be dropped. What we are talking about is the difference between life and death for children. I am not saying that lightly. I am very serious. We will be hurting the most vulnerable population. I think it’s an absolute crime.”
Asked to explain what she thought was driving the opioid epidemic Shea told the WSWS: “Well, I think the real root cause of this is poverty. Many of these people were raised in poverty and don’t see a way out of it. Many of them have experienced serious trauma and have never been treated properly because they don’t have the money and they use drugs to self-medicate, and to deal with the pain.”
When Donald Trump said he would not pursue legal action against Hillary Clinton after he won the election, the majority of his supporters were not happy. After all, what Hillary, her family. and the
Clinton Foundation actually did, or were accused
of doing through credible evidence, was obviously
criminal.
Fast forward to today and the onslaught of false Russian collusion accusations against President Trump and it is obvious why not going after Hillary was a huge mistake.
After the election there always seems to be, there is a kind of political vacuum period. It is usually called a honeymoon for a newly elected president. Unfortunately, this period of time is mostly controlled by the media.
In most cases this period is filled with relatively positive and generally inquisitive news from the media about a new president’s agenda, who he is putting together his team and figuring out how he plans to implement his policies. There is often positive news during this period about the new first family and how they will perform in their new public role. But in the case of President Trump, it was abundantly clear after a mostly vicious political battle between the Trump and Hillary. that there was only one candidate eligible to be granted a honeymoon period by the liberal news media – Hillary Clinton. And if Donald Trump were to actually win the election, as he did, there be hell to pay. Welcome to Hell President Trump.
There is no way Donald Trump or any of his political advisors couldn’t have seen this coming. And if there was any doubt at all by Trump and his team that they would not get a traditional presidential honeymoon, the hundreds of anti-Trump political rallies (more like violent riots) across America calling for “resistance” to President Trump should have been enough to erase any and all doubts. Not to mention the immediate wall-to-wall negative liberal media coverage that began the day after the election.
Donald Trump’s gut instinct to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton and her family foundation was spot-on. Trump specifically promised America during a debate that he would do this. As a business man who is also well acquainted with
politics, Trump instinctively knew that defeating
Hillary Clinton at the polls would not stop the
attacks by the media, and that he needed to stay on
offense and try to finish off Hillary and the entire
Clinton political machine for good.
But Donald Trump did something he rarely ever does – he went against his gut instinct; blowing his chance to fill the political void with something he knew would eventually benefit his presidency. Trump knew that that something to fill the political void was a legitimate criminal investigation of actual crimes that had been committed by Hillary Clinton.
The liberal media must have been ecstatic when they realized Donald Trump was giving Hillary a total pass on her criminal activity. The liberal media knew they had just been given a golden opportunity to unleash relentless negative attacks on President Trump the likes of which have never before been seen in American history. The liberal media happily gave Donald Trump something for winning the election - a nightmare he will never forget - a nightmare that has yet to end and will continue on for the next four years if the liberal media continues to get their way.
When Trump announced that he would not pursue legal charges against Hillary, the liberal media took that opportunity and quickly filled the post-election political void with a manufactured story of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in hopes of destroying the Trump presidency before it could even get off the ground. That political void is now so full of Russian collusion stories that President Trump’s agenda and accomplishments are virtually unknowable by the average American citizen – unless of course they watch Fox News, follow conservative web media or listen to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk-radio.
So what defense does President Trump, his political team, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative airwaves offer against the Russian Trump collusion story? They tell whoever will listen that Hillary Clinton actually did break the law. Seriously? So now President Trump and his supporters want to prosecute Hillary Clinton after Trump said he wouldn’t pursue legal action against her? Well that train has left the station. The golden
opportunity to take down Hillary and the entire
Clinton machine was passed over by the president
himself. And even if Trump now tries to revisit Hillary’s criminal activities through lawful means, his efforts will be branded as nothing but a political distraction to try and cover up the liberal media driven fake Russian Trump collusion story.
Had President Trump honored his promise and pursued a broad criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton and her family foundation immediately after he was inaugurated the exact opposite could be happening in the media right now. The political void that is now filled with
Russian Trump collusion stories could have been
filled with criminal investigation stories of Hillary
and her family foundation, collusion between the
media and the Hillary campaign against Bernie
Sanders, collusion between Hillary and Russia
regarding the uranium deal and the kick-backs to
the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton personally
and probably much more. Had Donald Trump followed his initial gut instinct and gone after Hillary and her family the tables would have been turned on Democrats and the liberal media and the fake news about any Russian Trump collusion would have been branded by the Trump administration and conservative media as a political distraction by Democrats and the liberal media in an attempt to cover-up investigations into actual crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and her family.
So what can President Trump possibly do to turn the tide against the Democrats and liberal media?
How about instead of using Hillary’s criminal activities as a defense against the fake news Russian Trump collusion narrative the Trump administration actually investigates her? If they are so certain she’s guilty then enforce the damn law! And maybe, just maybe, if President Trump urges AG Sessions to empanel a grand jury and re-open the investigation into Hillary Clinton right now, the facts concerning her criminal activity in the news might be enough to quell the Democrats and liberal media zealot’s agenda and get them to ease up on pushing fake news and begin covering news that matters to the forgotten men and women of this great country.
When Donald Trump said he would not pursue legal action against Hillary Clinton after he won the election, the majority of his supporters were not happy. After all, what Hillary, her family. and the Clinton Foundation actually did, or were accused of doing through credible evidence, was obviously criminal.
Fast forward to today and the onslaught of false Russian collusion accusations against President Trump and it is obvious why not going after Hillary was a huge mistake.
After the election, as there always seems to be, there is a kind of political vacuum period. It is usually called a honeymoon for a newly elected president. Unfortunately, this period of time is mostly controlled by the media.
In most cases this period is filled with relatively positive and generally inquisitive news from the media about a new president’s agenda, who he is putting together his team and figuring out how he plans to implement his policies. There is often positive news during this period about the new first family and how they will perform in their new public role. But in the case of President Trump, it was abundantly clear after a mostly vicious political battle between the Trump and Hillary. that there was only one candidate eligible to be granted a honeymoon period by the liberal news media – Hillary Clinton. And if Donald Trump were to actually win the election, as he did, there be hell to pay. Welcome to Hell President Trump.
There is no way Donald Trump or any of his political advisors couldn’t have seen this coming. And if there was any doubt at all by Trump and his team that they would not get a traditional presidential honeymoon, the hundreds of anti-Trump political rallies (more like violent riots) across America calling for “resistance” to President Trump should have been enough to erase any and all doubts. Not to mention the immediate wall-to-wall negative liberal media coverage that began the day after the election.
ut instinct to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton and her family foundation was spot-on. Trump specifically promised America during a debate that he would do this. As a business man who is also well acquainted with politics, Trump instinctively knew that defeating Hillary Clinton at the polls would not stop the attacks by the media, and that he needed to stay on offense and try to finish off Hillary and the entire Clinton political machine for good.
But Donald Trump did something he rarely ever does – he went against his gut instinct; blowing his chance to fill the political void with something he knew would eventually benefit his presidency. Trump knew that that something to fill the political void was a legitimate criminal investigation of actual crimes that had been committed by Hillary Clinton.
The liberal media must have been ecstatic when they realized Donald Trump was giving Hillary a total pass on her criminal activity. The liberal media knew they had just been given a golden opportunity to unleash relentless negative attacks on President Trump the likes of which have never before been seen in American history. The liberal media happily gave Donald Trump something for winning the election - a nightmare he will never forget - a nightmare that has yet to end and will continue on for the next four years if the liberal media continues to get their way.
When Trump announced that he would not pursue legal charges against Hillary, the liberal media took that opportunity and quickly filled the post-election political void with a manufactured story of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in hopes of destroying the Trump presidency before it could even get off the ground. That political void is now so full of Russian collusion stories that President Trump’s agenda and accomplishments are virtually unknowable by the average American citizen – unless of course they watch Fox News, follow conservative web media or listen to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk-radio.
So what defense does President Trump, his political team, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative airwaves offer against the Russian Trump collusion story? They tell whoever will listen that Hillary Clinton actually did break the law. Seriously? So now President Trump and his supporters want to prosecute Hillary Clinton after Trump said he wouldn’t pursue legal action against her? Well that train has left the station. The golden opportunity to take down Hillary and the entire Clinton machine was passed over by the president himself. And even if Trump now tries to revisit Hillary’s criminal activities through lawful means, his efforts will be branded as nothing but a political distraction to try and cover up the liberal media driven fake Russian Trump collusion story.
Had President Trump honored his promise and pursued a broad criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton and her family foundation immediately after he was inaugurated the exact opposite could be happening in the media right now. The political void that is now filled with Russian Trump collusion stories could have been filled with criminal investigation stories of Hillary and her family foundation, collusion between the media and the Hillary campaign against Bernie Sanders, collusion between Hillary and Russia regarding the uranium deal and the kick-backs to the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton personally and probably much more. Had Donald Trump followed his initial gut instinct and gone after Hillary and her family the tables would have been turned on Democrats and the liberal media and the fake news about any Russian Trump collusion would have been branded by the Trump administration and conservative media as a political distraction by Democrats and the liberal media in an attempt to cover-up investigations into actual crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and her family.
So what can President Trump possibly do to turn the tide against the Democrats and liberal media?
How about instead of using Hillary’s criminal activities as a defense against the fake news Russian Trump collusion narrative the Trump administration actually investigates her? If they are so certain she’s guilty then enforce the damn law! And maybe, just maybe, if President Trump urges AG Sessions to empanel a grand jury and re-open the investigation into Hillary Clinton right now, the facts concerning her criminal activity in the news might be enough to quell the Democrats and liberal media zealot’s agenda and get them to ease up on pushing fake news and begin covering news that matters to the forgotten men and women of this great country.
PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Coahuila — Two cartel gunmen fleeing from a raging gun battle with Mexican authorities ran through U.S. border security measures twice as they crossed into Texas and back; using their vehicle to ram barriers.
The cartel gunmen were able to cross into Eagle Pass through International Bridge #2 by running the security checkpoints. Shortly after they crossed back through a second bridge that was closed at the time. The gunmen used their vehicle to ram security barriers and later ditched it escape on foot.
The violence began overnight near the rural community of Nava, Coahuila, when authorities received information about two gunmen riding in a late model white Toyota Tundra, information provided to Breitbart Texas by Coahuila law enforcement revealed.
State police officers with a special investigative unit spotted the vehicle along Boulevard Carranza near the intersection with Airport Boulevard in the border city of Piedras Negras. Officers tried to pull over the gunmen but were met with gunfire as they sped off–setting off a high-speed chase.
The gunmen were able to reach the main plaza in Piedras Negras, Plaza de Las Culturas, where they once again engaged law enforcement in a short firefight. As they made their way to the International Bridge #2, gunmen rammed their way through other vehicles and barriers as they used the inbound lanes through Mexican Customs to reach the U.S. side of the bridge.
Coahuila state police officers contacted their counterparts in Texas. Before American authorities were able to apprehend the shooters, they made their way to another international bridge, locally known as Bridge 1. While the crossing was closed at the time, the gunmen were able to ram through the security barriers and make their way back into Mexico.
The Mexican Army, Fuerza Coahuila, and local police officers had been combing the area however, they were able to make their way to a nearby neighborhood called Mundo Nuevo where they abonded the vehicle and fled on foot. Authorities were able to locate the white SUV that had multiple bullet holes and extensive body damage.
During the initial gun battle and chase, two Coahuila police officers from the investigative unit and six officers with Fuerza Coahuila were injured. The six officers with Fuerza Coahuila appear to have been injured in a crash during the high-speed chase. Authorities have not revealed how the two other officers were injured.
Breitbart Texas reached out to CBP for comment and the agency did not respond in any manner.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by Coahuila’s “J.M. Martinez” and Breitbart Texas’ Ildefonso Ortiz.
MEXICO SERVES UP CHEAP HERION IN AMERICA'S OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS! A generation of orphans
The impact of US opioid epidemic on foster care and social services
By Genevieve Leigh 12 July 2017
The epidemic of opioid addiction in the US, which has reached never before seen heights in the past two years, has put an immense strain on the already resource-starved US health care system. Among the most devastating consequences of this crisis has been the thousands of children who lose their parents to addiction every day.These children have flooded the foster care system, and their cases have exhausted social services.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2012, 397,000 U.S. children were in foster care. By 2015, that number had risen 8 percent, to 428,000. There is no concrete data yet for 2016; however, experts predict that the past two years—the height of the opioid epidemic so far—has increased that number dramatically.
A recent study published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that in 14 states the number of foster kids rose by more than a quarter between 2011 and 2015.
States that are experiencing a massive influx of children into protective custody all face similar problems, with varying degrees of severity. None are equipped with the resources to adequately deal with the crisis. Three of the hardest hit states have been Maine, Florida, and Ohio.
Maine
More than 1,800 children were reported to be in foster care across the state of Maine in 2016—a nearly 45 percent increase in foster children since 2011.
Last year, 376 people died from drug overdoses in Maine. This is the highest number ever recorded for the state and marks a 114 percent increase over a period of just four years, coinciding with the rise of the opioid crisis. Moreover, more than 1,000 children were born addicted to drugs in Maine last year, with the majority of the cases involving some form of opioid.
Bette Hoxie, executive director of Adoptive and Foster Families for Maine, a non-profit organization that works to provide support services for adoptive and foster parents, as well as kinship providers, recently spoke to the WSWS about the immense scope of the opioid epidemic.
“We work with about 3,100 families. Of these, 1,600 are utilizing our resources from more intensive services than just basic services. This means that they need things like clothes, they need help working through the system, they need bedding, they need much more active involvement.”
“The homes where these children are going are just not prepared with everything they need to house a child,” Hoxie noted.
“I would say nearly every single one of those cases is due to drug addiction. Of the kinship calls [when children are placed with extended family members instead of with foster families] that we get, at least 85-90 percent have been due to drug addiction, with the majority being opioids.”
Hoxie explained the effect of the spike in opioid use on the child care services: “Up until about 8 or 10 years ago, when children were coming into protective services, they were placing kids with foster care families until they could reunite them with their families or place them in permanent homes.”
“Over the last few years—in a large way, to deal with the sudden influx of such high numbers of children—there is more and more use of family members. There is definitely a strain on the system. We have 1,900 children in care, and we have 1,200 licensed foster homes.” Hoxie expressed concerns that some of these children end up in homes where the caregivers, often grandparents, are on fixed incomes and struggle to provide for the children.
Speaking on the opioid crisis more generally Hoxie added, “The biggest thing we are struggling with here in Maine is recovery options. ... When a family with addiction problems reaches out for help and they hear ‘Well, it will be three months before we can get you into a place,’ these people lose a lot of hope.”
Ohio
The state of Ohio has one of the nation’s highest overdose rates. In 2016, 4,149 deaths from drug overdose were reported, showing a 36 percent jump from the year before. In 2015, an astounding one in nine heroin deaths nationwide occurred in Ohio, a number that has likely jumped even higher since.
Ohio’s foster population has gone up nearly 10 percent, with more than 60 percent of children in the system because of parental drug abuse. The situation in Ohio is unique, not only because the opioid epidemic is so severe, but also because it is possibly the most resource-starved state in terms of child care services. The state ranks 50th for state share of children services total expenditures. In fact, Ohio state expenditures for child services are so low that if the number doubled, it would still remain 50th in the country.
Scott Britton, who works for Public Children Services Association of Ohio, told the WSWS: “The drug epidemic really has caused a crisis across the board. We have 11 percent increase of children in custody and 19 percent increase in retention rate. We have some 2015 data that showed that 28 percent of the parents of kids who were taken from their homes were using some type of opioid. So that means more than one in four and almost one in three. This is not counting kinship care or other ways a child might come in. We suspect that number has only gone up in 2016, considering that back in 2015 we were not seeing near the same volume of opioid use as we had in 2016 and which continues today.”
“It is affecting just about every facet of the foster care system. Some come into our care because they were born with addiction, others because they have experienced severe neglect. They very often come in with a lot of trauma from their experiences, which complicates things. Sometimes placing them with a typical foster family is not what’s best due to the severity of their issues.”
Another major problem, mentioned by every charity group, nonprofit, and social service worker who spoke to our reporters, is the effect the pressure has had on social workers. Britton explained that Ohio is no different: “These workers are emotionally exhausted. They are often the ones who are left with tasks like telling a child that one of their parents, or sometimes both of their parents, have died from overdose, for example.
“Our caseworkers are really committed to reunifying children with their parents. That is our number-one goal. They work really hard to get parents into treatment. Unfortunately, they are seeing less and less of that, which is really tough on their morale. We did a survey in 2016 and found that one out of every four caseworkers left their positions. I suspect they just become exhausted from taking that emotional stress home.”
Florida
The worst manifestation of the opioid epidemic in Florida is in the state’s 12th Judicial Circuit Court, which includes Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. One figure that sheds light on the severity of the situation in this area is the number of doses of Narcan (Naloxone), the drug that reverses the effects of an overdose, being administered. In July 2015, emergency responders in this area administered a record 281 doses of the “miracle drug.” By July 2016, that number had more than doubled to 749. Officials in the area remain unable to stem the epidemic.
Kathryn Shea is the president and CEO of the Florida Center for Early Childhood, which is an early childhood mental health provider. Shea works in the heart of the Florida epidemic.
Shea told the WSWS: “The numbers we are seeing in Sarasota of kids in care we have never seen before. There is no question that the biggest cause is substance abuse, and the primary drug is opioids. Our children have been dramatically impacted, as have our babies. To give you an idea of how severe it is, consider that 90 percent of babies in the NICU at Sarasota Memorial Hospital are there from opioid substances.”
When asked about reports that Florida and other states such as Oregon and Texas have been forced to have children sleep in state buildings because there were no foster homes available, Shea responded, “Yes, that has happened here. Not as often, because they are constantly recruiting foster parents. Instead, here they often have to go over their waiver of five kids per parent.”
Shea also commented on the effect this crisis has had on those who work in the field, “Our turnover rate for social workers is just horrible. It’s very hard to keep cases managers and investigators. A lot of these workers are very young and have just gotten out of college or just have high school degrees and don’t have a lot of life experience to help buffer the intense situations that they have to deal with. Let me put it this way—I have been in this industry 37 years and it is still difficult for me. Often they are traumatized by what they go through on the job. They end up with secondary trauma from what they see and do. Honestly, from all my years in the field, I’ve never seen the situation this bad.”
When asked about what sort of impact the Trump health care plan, which would end Medicaid as an entitlement program, might have on the children affected by the opioid epidemic Shea said it would be a disaster. “Most of our families are on Medicaid. This covers over 90 percent of our kids. The services for them would be dropped. What we are talking about is the difference between life and death for children. I am not saying that lightly. I am very serious. We will be hurting the most vulnerable population. I think it’s an absolute crime.”
Asked to explain what she thought was driving the opioid epidemic Shea told the WSWS: “Well, I think the real root cause of this is poverty. Many of these people were raised in poverty and don’t see a way out of it. Many of them have experienced serious trauma and have never been treated properly because they don’t have the money and they use drugs to self-medicate, and to deal with the pain.”
….. the American Middle-Class at death’s door and knocking ….
Have you notice Democrat Party politicians always keep their fat mouths closed tight on the topic of the Mexican drug cartels operating across America???
"If true, it shows Trump being the ultimate cynic and not having the courage to state his true beliefs to the American public who elected him. That's always been my biggest problem with Trump: his lack of integrity and consistent belief system." ----- ED STRAKER
TRUMP BACK-PEDDLES ON LEGALS AND KEEPS OBAMA’S ILLEGAL AMNESTY OPERATING…. It’s all about keeping wages DEPRESSED!
“He's showing more empathy for illegal aliens than he is for American citizens. Shouldn't it be the concerns of Americans he should be considering first, before the feelings of illegals? These people are taking taxpayer money and American jobs, some committing crimes, and many are not assimilating and speaking English, and Trump wants them to stay?”
Notice how we never hear the phony populist Trump talking about E-VERIFY!
AMERICA: NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!
“The percentage of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force has more than tripled over the last four decades and while the U.S. represents just 5 percent of the world’s population it attracts 20 percent of the world’s immigrants, according to a new report.”
Open the floodgates of our welfare state to the uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled masses of the world and in a generation or three America, as we know it, will be gone.
Those most impacted are middle class and lower middle class. It is they whose jobs are taken, whose raises are postponed, whose schools are filled with non-English speaking children that absorb precious resources for remedial English, whose public parks are trashed and whose emergency rooms serve as the local clinic for the illegal underground.
Exclusive – Mo Brooks in Senate Ad: Fund President Trump’s Border Wall or Face Government Shutdown
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Alabama, is threatening to shut the government down in the U.S. Senate if his colleagues do not fund President Donald J. Trump’s planned border wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
Mo Brooks, one of three major candidates in the race to succeed now Attorney General Jeff Sessions for Sessions’ seat, made the threat in a new ad set to air statewide in Alabama on television soon.
“Hi, I’m Mo Brooks, candidate for the Senate, and I approved this message,” Brooks opens the ad, titled “Build The Wall.” The ad was provided exclusively by Brooks’ campaign to Breitbart News ahead of its public release.
The ad then cuts to President Trump’s speech in mid-2015 at Trump Tower in New York City from the day he launched his campaign for president.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said in that speech, the clip of which is used by Brooks in the ad.
“President Trump promised a wall to keep us safe and to protect American jobs for American workers,” Brooks then says on camera:
But even some establishment Republicans are blocking the way. Elect me to the Senate, and I’ll fight every spending bill that doesn’t fund that wall. And if I have to filibuster on the Senate floor, I’ll even read the King James Bible until the wall is funded. And you know what? Washington could benefit from that. We’re going to build that wall, or you’ll know the name of every Republican who surrenders to the Democrats to break my filibuster. I give you my word, and I don’t give my word lightly.
WATCH THE AD FROM REP. MO BROOKS’ U.S. SENATE CAMPAIGN:
Brooks’ clarion call for border wall funding in the government spending bills coming up comes as many in the GOP establishment are not interested in standing with President Trump in ensuring that a wall is built on the U.S. border with Mexico. What he promises in this ad is a guarantee to fight as hard as a U.S. Senator can for the wall.
The race to succeed Sessions in the U.S. Senate is shaping up to be a very interesting one. Brooks, the pro-Trump candidate, is facing off against both former Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore and the appointed Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL). Strange was not elected to the seat but was appointed under questionable circumstances by now former Gov. Robert Bentley. Bentley has left office under a cloud of ethics questions.
Strange’s team and allies, filled with anti-Trump GOP establishment operatives, have been inaccurately accusing Brooks of being anti-Trump in a series of attacks on the ground in Alabama. Brooks actually supported President Trump during the general election, even donating to the president’s campaign, while Strange refused to publicly back Trump with donations or public comments.
The only evidence Strange’s team has against Brooks is that he was not on board during the primaries — when Strange was also not supportive of the president — so the attacks are ringing hollow throughout the politically-in-tune Alabama. Brooks is also very close with Attorney General Sessions, the former Senator whose seat he is running to fill. Brooks and Sessions repeatedly worked together in the U.S. Congress to advance the interests of America First priorities that later became a focal point of Trump’s campaign. Sessions has not endorsed a candidate in the race as he is the Attorney General.
But Trump allies like nationally syndicated radio hosts Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, Fox News’ Sean Hannity, and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) — the chairman of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus — have all endorsed Brooks in the race.
A highly connected GOP source with inside knowledge of Alabama politics who is closely following this race told Breitbart News that Strange is “like the Jeb Bush of this race. Nobody likes him. And while he’s got all this money and all these connections, nobody likes pro-establishment views. You can’t sell a product that consumers don’t like.” Also, given Strange’s allies and connections in the Washington establishment, there is likely no way he will ever commit to helping President Trump on his core campaign promise of building a wall on the border as much as Brooks has now in this ad.
Brooks was almost taken out by the shooter who opened fire on the GOP congressional baseball game practice, as he was one of many members at the practice. Brooks’ name actually appeared on the shooter’s hit list, though he was not hit in the shooting that has landed House Majority Whip Steve Scalise in the hospital multiple times.
The primary race is on Aug. 15, and the top two vote-getters are expected to head to a runoff sometime in September.
HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Amnesty would add 100 million more illegals and cost Legals trillions!
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the number of elderly persons who are homeless in the US will have doubled by 2050.
Starve the Opioids, Build the Wall
By Kenric Ward
ImmigrationReform.com, July 6, 2017
Mexico is the world’s third largest producer of heroin – an opioid drug — and Mexican heroin now controls over 50 percent of the market share. Additionally, most of the heroin from Colombia and South East Asia comes to the U.S. via Mexican drug cartels.
A border wall would choke that flow.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., points out that the opioid epidemic stems “not only from abuse (of prescription drugs), but from the illicit drug trade.” America, he said, is “consistently a step behind in stopping trafficking of opioids and other illegal drugs.”
Ohio politician proposes letting overdose victims die
The policy of “social murder” behind the US health care debate
By Barry Grey 5 July 2017
At a June 20 meeting of the Middletown, Ohio City Council, Dan Picard, a council member, offered a novel proposal to contain surging costs associated with a worsening epidemic of opioid overdoses in the town. Like cities across the United States, this southwestern Ohio town of some 49,000 people is being ravaged by the explosive spread of drug addiction linked to opioid pain killers. This year it has already recorded nearly 600 overdoses, more than in all of 2016.
Picard, who is not planning to run for reelection, proposed that the City Council adopt a “three strikes” policy, under which those who make use of emergency services two times to deal with an overdose will be denied help the third time. As he told the Washington Post, “When we get a call, the [emergency services] dispatcher will ask who is the person who has overdosed. And if it’s someone who has already been provided services twice, we’ll advise them that we’re not going to provide further services—and we will not send out an ambulance.”
Defending his proposal, Picard said, “I want to send a message to the world that you don’t want to come to Middletown to overdose… We need to put a fear about overdosing in Middletown.”
This call for what amounts to state-sanctioned murder evoked an angry response from the public in Middletown and wherever else people became aware of it. Numerous health care organizations and advocacy groups involved in dealing with the drug abuse epidemic denounced Picard and his proposal.
Alexis Pleus, the founder of Truth Pharm, a nonprofit that seeks to raise awareness of the issues surrounding substance abuse, did not mince words in an open letter to Picard: “To suggest that you withhold emergency medical response to overdose patients is manslaughter at best and premeditated murder at worst.”
Most of the American population, however, never learned of the incident. This is because the establishment media, fixated on its campaign against Russia and saber-rattling against North Korea, China, Iran and Syria, along with the political warfare in Washington between the Trump administration and its ruling class opponents, did not widely report the story.
There are other political reasons for the downplaying of the story by the corporate-controlled media. Picard’s brazen suggestion that drug abuse victims be allowed to die comes uncomfortably close to lifting the lid on a basic policy question underlying the current official debate on health care “reform.”
Behind the proposals in the Republicans’ bills to cut costs and boost profits by gutting Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, and lifting the current requirement that insurance companies cover certain “essential benefits,” lies a deliberate and calculated effort to reduce life expectancy for working people overall and send many of the old, infirm and mentally or socially disabled to an early grave.
The effort, moreover, is bipartisan. The Democrats are pleading for negotiations on a “compromise” bill to “fix” Obamacare, a euphemism for incorporating the demands of the insurance monopolies for even higher premiums, copays and deductibles and fewer restrictions on their ability to gouge the public. Obamacare itself is a mechanism for cutting costs for corporations and the government, weakening the system of employer-provided health insurance and rationing access to health care on a more openly class basis. The Republican plans build on Obamacare to accelerate the health care counterrevolution it initiated.
The corporations, banks and hedge funds that are pushing health care “reform” and the politicians and policy experts who are doing their bidding are well aware that many thousands will die needlessly as a result of the measures being proposed. Medicaid, slated to be cut under the Republican bills by some $800 billion over ten years and terminated as an open-ended entitlement program with guaranteed benefits, provides about 80 percent of funding to treat drug abuse, which overwhelmingly affects working class and poor people.
In 2015, some 1.35 million low-income Americans had an opioid use disorder. As it is, only 25 percent of those people get treated in a year.
Last year some 60,000 people in the US died from drug overdoses, 60 percent of them from opioids. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. There is no starker barometer of the failure of the capitalist system and the descent of broad masses of the population into conditions of desperate social crisis.
Of the 22 million people who will lose medical coverage under the Senate health care bill, Medicaid cuts will account for 15 million of them. Moreover, both the House and Senate bills allow insurance companies to drop coverage of care for mental health and substance abuse, among other basic services.
Can there be any doubt that many will die as a result of these cuts? Lynn Cooper, director of the Drug and Alcohol Division at Pennsylvania’s Rehabilitation and Community Providers Association, told National Public Radio last month: “It is a death epidemic all over the country. The loss of Medicaid expansion will be like the bottom dropping out for thousands of Pennsylvania citizens and their families.”
The impact is so self-evident, and public opposition so pervasive, that government officials are obliged to resort to the most brazen lying when defending their proposals. Typical was the performance of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a notorious and longstanding opponent of basic social program such as Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, in an appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. Of the Republican plan to dismantle Medicaid, he said, “We want to make certain that Medicaid is a program that can survive.”
While claiming to be committed to addressing the opioid epidemic, he declared, “We don’t need to be throwing money” at the crisis.
Ruling class strategists speak more frankly on specialized think tank web sites meant for corporate and state officials and their academic advisers. In 2013, the World Socialist Web Site drew attention to two policy papers published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) on the negative consequences for American imperialism and the national security apparatus of lengthening life spans for ordinary people resulting from advances in medical science and treatment and government health programs.
As the CSIS experts explained, the human and social achievement of better health and longer life for many millions of Americans spells disaster for the American ruling class and the capitalist system. The authors of the studies insisted that action had to be taken to deal with the “crisis,” including increasing the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security to force the “young elderly,” those aged 60-69, to forgo retirement and keep working.
One of the papers, titled “The Budget Crisis and the Civil-Military Challenge to National Security Spending,” was written by Anthony H. Cordesman, a longtime CSIS strategist who acts as a consultant for the US State and Defense departments. Denouncing the siphoning of money away from the military to pay for medical care for the elderly, Cordesman wrote, “The US does not face any foreign threat as serious as its failure to come to grips with… the rise in the cost of entitlement spending.”
Behind such discussion papers are systematic studies and actuarial tables calculating the likely effectiveness in shortening life expectancy for workers—a process that is already underway—of various proposals to “reform” the health care system.
In his immortal 1845 work The Conditionof the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels accurately characterized as “social murder” the horrific conditions imposed on workers by the capitalist class, which “placed hundreds of proletarians in such as position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death…”
The present crisis-ridden and bankrupt state of American and world capitalism is once again bringing to the fore the incompatibility of the profit system and the rule of a financial aristocracy with the satisfaction of human needs such as health and longevity. The health care counterrevolution in the US is a case of “social murder” at the hands of the capitalist class.
AMERICA THE ADDICTED!
How America surrendered to Mexico’s invasion, occupation and looting.
The Mexican drug cartels now control most of America’s southern borders as LA RAZA “The Race” fascist party expands Mexico’s anchor baby welfare state from border to open border.
More significant still, a former Mexican official, Jorge Castañeda, threatened to unleash Mexican cartels onto the U.S. to retaliate for deportations of illegal immigrants and the construction of a border wall.
“When we get a call, the [emergency services] dispatcher will ask
who is the person who has overdosed. And if it’s someone who
has already been provided services twice, we’ll advise them that
we’re not going to provide further services—and we will not send
out an ambulance.”
Picard states openly the widespread sentiment in the American ruling class and among its political flunkeys—that the life of a working class person has a price tag, which is dropping every day.
Ohio councilman proposes “three strike policy” to let opioid overdosers die
By Genevieve Leigh 3 July 2017
A city councilman in Middletown, Ohio, Dan Picard, has proposed a “three strike” policy for people who overdose on opioids, under which those reported to have overdosed on more than two occasions would be denied emergency treatment the third time. He made the proposal at a City Council meeting on June 20.
In what would amount to state-sanctioned murder, emergency responders would not be dispatched and the opioid user would be left to die. As Picard told the Washington Post on Wednesday: “When we get a call, the [emergency services] dispatcher will ask who is the person who has overdosed. And if it’s someone who has already been provided services twice, we’ll advise them that we’re not going to provide further services—and we will not send out an ambulance.”
Like hundreds of cities and towns across the US, Middletown, located in southwestern Ohio, has been wracked by the opioid epidemic. The town, which has a population of 48,791, has already seen nearly 600 overdoses this year, which is more than it saw in all of 2016.
Defending his proposal, Picard told the press, “It’s not a proposal to solve the drug problem. My proposal is in regard to the financial survivability of our city.” He continued, “If we’re spending $2 million this year and $4 million next year and $6 million after that, we’re in trouble. We’re going to have to start laying off. We’re going to have to raise taxes.”
Picard states openly the widespread sentiment in the American ruling class and among its political flunkeys—that the life of a working class person has a price tag, which is dropping every day.
The giant pharmaceutical companies played a central role in creating the opioid epidemic. They made billions of dollars in profits by systematically and knowingly pushing highly addictive opioid medications on the population throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s.
Now the epidemic has become a concern for the ruling class, not out of any compassion for those who suffer, but because it is creating a financial burden for the state. The proposals currently working their way through Congress to drastically reduce the availability of medical care for the working class, particularly by gutting Medicaid, the primary source of funding for the treatment of drug addiction, are calculated to accomplish on a national scale what Picard is proposing for Middletown.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies continue to profit from the crisis. Part of the reason emergency care for those who overdose on opioids is so expensive is that the price of the “miracle drug” Naloxone (trade name Narcan), used to revive users from overdoses, has skyrocketed over the past decade. The popular injectable version of the drug has gone from $0.92 a dose to more than $15 since 2007. An auto-injector version is now up to more than $2,000 a dose.
The pharmaceutical companies’ price-gouging, combined with the increase in demand, has caused revenues from the sale of Naloxone to jump from $21.3 million in 2011 to $81.9 million last year, according to data from the prescription-tracking company IMS Health. It is now costing state and local governments much more money to save lives.
Picard pointed to this in a statement defending his proposal, saying, “I want to send a message to the world that you don’t want to come to Middletown to overdose because someone might not come with Narcan and save your life. We need to put a fear about overdosing in Middletown.” He continued, “John Smith obviously doesn’t care much about his life, but he’s expending a lot of resources and we can’t afford it.”
As with all social problems, the opioid epidemic is treated by the political establishment as the result of the personal failings of individuals. In fact, it, and drug abuse more generally, are the result of the increasingly dire social conditions facing broad masses of the people, under conditions of unprecedented and growing levels of social inequality. These conditions are themselves rooted in the rapacious drive of the pharmaceutical corporations and the corporate-financial elite in general for profit, intensified by the worsening crisis of the capitalist system.
Picard’s homicidal proposal has evoked an angry response from the public. Middletown City Manager Douglas Adkins wrote in a blog post Wednesday about the overwhelming backlash. “We’ve received hate mail, national news coverage and overloaded voice mail and email in-boxes,” he said.
Many health care organizations, recovery centers and advocacy groups have spoken out against Picard’s plan. Truth Pharm, a nonprofit organization that seeks to raise awareness of the issues surrounding substance abuse, released an open letter to Picard denouncing his proposal.
Alexis Pleus, the founder of Truth Pharm, wrote in the letter: “In short, our goal is to save lives, so, needless to say, we were more than appalled by your recent proposition to refuse medical treatment to overdose patients. It pains and infuriates us to see how easily you have turned human lives into dollar signs and an impact on your budget… To suggest that you withhold emergency medical response to overdose patients is manslaughter at best and premeditated murder at worst.”
Pleus spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the issues raised by Picard’s proposal. On the use of Naloxone as a solution, Pleus explained: “At first, Naloxone and Narcan seemed like a pretty fast and cheap solution to save lives. And that was true to a point. It is still a very important tool we have to help people.
“The problem is that they have never dedicated the follow-up... There is no governmental body that has given the proper resources necessary to complement the use of Naloxone. It is not a fix in itself, is not a cure to the epidemic. We set ourselves up for frustration because we keep using this life-saving device but don’t ever get to the root causes of addiction. I think ultimately the fault goes right back to each state government and the federal government as a whole.”
Pleus told reporters she wasn’t surprised that lawmakers would propose a measure not aimed at addressing the epidemic but rather at saving money. “Look at how easy it is to get legislation to pass when there is money to be made,” she said. “But try and get something through that simply helps people--it just won’t happen…this problem does not have a quick cheap fix. But still, all the while, the pharmaceutical companies are profiting, profiting, profiting.”
When asked how President Trump’s new health care plan might affect the opioid problem, Pleus said, “It will be absolutely devastating.” She continued: “At our organization we try and help people find treatment. About 80 percent of those we help have Medicaid. If they repeal it, I cannot even fathom what we will do. The new plan also will not mandate addiction treatment as part of insurance coverage. I can’t imagine turning away eight of ten people and telling them there is nothing we can do.”
The LA RAZA drug cartels haul back $100 BILLION from heroin sales.
More significant still, a former Mexican official, Jorge Castañeda, threatened to unleash Mexican cartels onto the U.S. to retaliate for deportations of illegal immigrants and the construction of a border wall.
CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES!
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: Heroin, Criminals, Anchor baby breeders for 18 years of gringo-paid welfare.
"Public education as a whole came under brutal attack as part of the Obama administration’s effort to shift the burden of the financial crisis onto the backs of the working class."
AMERICA THE ADDICTED: 1 in 7 are addicted
CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES!
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: Heroin, Criminals, Anchor baby breeders for 18 years of gringo-paid welfare.
Washington’s latest foray against sanctuary cities raises the stakes by threatening to withhold federal funding from non-compliant cities and states. One analysis estimates that the sanctuary jurisdictions of New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle could lose a combined $4.448 billion under HR 3003.
But any fiscal hit presupposes: 1) the Senate will pass the House bill and, 2) the law survives inevitable court challenges. With judges blocking President Donald Trump’s earlier effort to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities, does HR 3003 provide enough legal ammunition? Though Congress has clear constitutional authority over appropriation of funds, such facts have not always deterred activist judges.
Unwilling to wait around, Texas enacted Senate Bill 4 to strip sanctuary cities of state law-enforcement funds and hold local officials liable for non-compliance. SB 4 does not recognize localities’ right to flout state law.
Senate Republicans maneuver in effort to pass draconian health care bill
By Kate Randall 11 July 2017
Republican senators returning to Washington from the July 4 holiday recess face internal divisions over legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was unable to bring legislation to the floor that could gain the required 50 votes before the recess.
Protests against the Republican proposals took place Monday in more than a dozen locations in House and Senate office buildings. As of Monday afternoon, police had arrested 80 protesters, 21 in House office buildings and 59 in Senate buildings, and charged them with misdemeanor offenses.
Returning Republican senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Rob Portman of Ohio and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, were greeted by protesters in or around their offices. Some of those outside Cruz’s office lay down on the floor, blocking foot traffic and leading Capitol police to carry them down the hall. Cruz, Flake and Portman also faced protests in their home states over the recess, with 15 protesters arrested in Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio.
The Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), the Senate version of the House’s American Health Care Act (AHCA) passed in May, is massively unpopular. A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll shows that only 17 percent of US adults approve of the BCRA, while 55 percent disapprove. (Another 7 percent either haven’t heard enough about it or have no opinion.)
While Republican Senate leaders are seeking to tweak the bill to satisfy ultra-conservatives and “moderates” in their ranks who disagree with the bill, it is clear that any changes they make will not alter the fundamentally reactionary character of the legislation. With 50 votes needed to pass the bill, at least 10 Republican senators are presently opposed and no Democrats are expected to support it.
The Republicans hold a 52-48 majority in the Senate and can afford to lose only two Republican votes. If a floor vote were to end in a 50-50 tie, Vice President Mike Pence would be allowed to cast a tie-breaking vote to pass the bill.
Passage of the bill would mark the end of Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, as a guaranteed social benefit based on need, establishing either a per-capita spending cap or limiting funding, benefits and eligibility by means of block grants to the states. It would also phase out the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare in the 31 states and the District of Columbia that adopted it. The result would be brutal cuts or the outright elimination of health care for tens of millions of families with children, seniors and people with disabilities. Medicaid currently covers over 70 million Americans.
Senator Cruz has authored a “Consumer Freedom Option” amendment to the Senate bill, under which private insurers would be able to vary premiums based on health history or deny coverage outright to people with expensive preexisting conditions. This would be allowed as long as states offered at least one “community-rated” plan, in which premiums would not vary based on health status.
The effect of such a change would be to eliminate ACA protections against discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and requirements that all plans offer a set of “essential” medical services, such as maternity care, prescription drugs, doctor visits, emergency care, substance abuse, mental health and other vital services.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has analyzed other changes to the Senate bill under consideration and their long-term effects, which it says would have “little impact” on the bill’s “five core features.”
Ending the ACA Medicaid expansion: One change under discussion would slow or delay the phase-out of federal funding for Medicaid expansion. KFF says that states’ costs would still increase three- to five-fold in the long run, leading most or all states to end their expansions. A proposal to add $45 billion for treating opioid drug disorders would be offset by opioid-addicted people presently covered by the Medicaid expansion losing access to other mental and physical health care.
Capping and cutting federal Medicaid funding: A proposal to return to the House bill’s slightly less draconian growth rates for per-enrollee funding would still shift large costs to the states, “leading to deep cuts to eligibility, benefits, and provider payments,” according to KFF.
Increasing marketplace premiums and deductibles: Allowing the use of health savings accounts to pay premiums for individual coverage would be mostly a tax break for the rich, as low- and middle-income people have little or no income to set aside for such accounts.
Changes to the ACA’s individual market: The “Cruz amendment,” mentioned above, would sharply raise premiums and deductibles for people with preexisting conditions, making coverage unaffordable for many.
Cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations: One proposal is to not repeal the ACA’s 3.8 percent tax on high-income households, which is presently repealed in both the House and Senate bills. KFF estimates this change would still leave in place tax cuts of $457 billion, almost exclusively benefiting corporations and the rich.
The Senate leadership has sent two versions of the bill with these changes, one with Cruz’s amendment and one without, to the Congressional Budget Office for analysis. The CBO predicted that the initial Senate bill would result in an additional 22 million Americans becoming uninsured over 10 years.
Several Republicans have predicted that the bill will not pass. Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said, “My view is it’s probably going to be dead.” Asked about the bill’s odds on “Fox News Sunday,” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said, “I would probably put that at 50-50.”
Majority Leader McConnell has acknowledged that if the Republicans and President Trump fall short on their pledge to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, they will be forced to negotiate with the Democrats. Any such negotiations would involve discussions on further concessions to the profit demands of the insurance companies.
Minority Leader Charles Schumer and Senate Democrats have continued to campaign against the BRCA and said they will negotiate only if the Republicans give up on repealing the ACA. Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, suggested another scenario, in which Republicans could repeal most of the ACA, forcing Democrats to the table to work on a replacement.
However this plays out, the Democrats have made clear that they are willing to work with the Republicans to “fix” Obamacare. This has nothing to do with making the ACA better—lowering soaring premiums and deductibles, widening the networks of hospitals and providers, further expanding Medicaid and its federal funding, and taxing the wealthy.
The entire framework of the official health care “debate” is reactionary. Obamacare itself is a regressive restructuring of the health care system designed to cut costs for corporations and the government, undermine the system of employer-provided health insurance, and force uninsured workers to purchase health plans from insurance companies with huge premiums and absurdly high deductibles and co-pays. It still leaves some 28 million people completely uninsured.
The basic premise of the Republican plans as well as Obamacare is the capitalist market and the profitability of the gigantic insurance and pharmaceutical firms and hospital chains. The health and well-being of the working population is completely subordinated to the profit drive of the corporate elite.
While the Democrats pose as the defenders of workers and their families who are struggling under the weight of rising health costs and rationed services, they are in full agreement with the Republicans that there is “no money” for health care and other basic social services, and “realistic” sacrifices must be made. This is a brazen lie in a country where 20 individuals have as much wealth as the bottom 175 million people.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the advocate of “Medicare for all,” spent Sunday rallying voters in West Virginia and Kentucky to call on their Republican senators to vote against the bill. He would have people believe that pressuring these reactionary politicians will make any difference in the lives of workers and youth who stand to lose under whichever plan emerges from either the Republicans or some sordid deal between them and the Democrats.
Millions of Americans are outraged by the attack on health care being hatched in Washington, as demonstrated by the plunging poll numbers for both Republican plans and the growing protests. But in taking forward this fight, the working class cannot allow itself to be drawn behind any section of the political establishment and must proceed with its own methods of class struggle.
A socialist solution to the health care crisis requires a break with the Democratic Party—and all those who promote illusions in this big business party—and a fight for the independent mobilization of the working class. Only the expropriation of the health care industry and the establishment of socialized medicine can secure health care as a social right.
HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Amnesty would add 100 million more illegals and cost Legals trillions!
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
"A Mexican illegal alien allegedly raped a girl in Kansas in September after being deported ten times in the past six years alone, according to reports."
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
“What we're seeing is our Congress and national leadership dismantling our laws by not enforcing them. Lawlessness becomes the norm, just like Third World corruption. Illegal aliens now have more rights and privileges than Americans. If you are an illegal alien, you can drive a car without a driver's license or insurance. You may obtain medical care without paying. You may work without paying taxes. Your children enjoy free education at the expense of taxpaying Americans.”
“Part of the problem, Santorum said, has been the arrival of
millions of unskilled immigrants — legal and illegal — in the
United States. "American workers deserve a shot at [good] jobs,"
Santorum said. "Over the last 20 years, we have brought into this
country, legally and illegally, 35 MILLIONmostly unskilled
workers. And the result, over that same period of time, workers'
wages and family incomes have flatlined." SEN. RICK SANTORUM
In the July/August version of the Atlantic, columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”
inart, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Haaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”
The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.
Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.” The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama. Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.” Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today. A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.” Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda. This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.” Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.” But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.” It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration. Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other. One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”? A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete. What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity. Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation neednot mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally. Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally. Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work. Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.” In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same? Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today. *Opening photo credits: AFP; Alain Jocard; Alfons Teruel / Eyeem; Bloomberg; Brooks Kraft; Chesnot; David McNew; David Ramos; Drew Angerer; Erik McGregor / Pacific Press / LightRocket; Frederic J. Brown; Gerard Julien; Getty; Hector Vivas / LatinContent; Jonathan Nackstrand; Lars Baron; Mike Roach / Zuffa; Omar Torres; Orlando Sierra; Paul Bradbury; Paul Morigi / WireImage; Pradeep Gaur / Mint; Rodin Eckenroth; Saul Loeb; Spencer Platt; Tasos Katopodis; Thomas Koehler / Photothek; Victor J. Blue; Vitaly Nevar / TASS; Zach Gibson
OPEN BORDERS – HOW THE DEMOCRAT PARTY DESTROYED THE GOP, THE AMERICAN WORKER and then AMERICA!
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA:
A PARTNERSHIP OF MEXICO, THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
“But as American sanctuary cities flouted Federal law and encouraged illegal immigration after 1980, those working in the U.S. started to wire transfer money back to their families in amounts that became so large that by the late 1990s remittances to Mexico were the second largest source of foreign revenues, second only to oil revenues.”
October 18, 2016
Why Hillary and Her Wall Street Donors Don’t Want Trump’s Wall
When GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump first talked about building a “big, beautiful wall” at the southern border of the U.S. he was met with fierce resistance. Given the facts that the southern border is the main route used by drug smugglers and criminal illegal immigrants(all persons who cross the border illegal commit a Federal misdemeanor the first time, a felony the second time) there would not seem to be a good reason to resist lawful regulation of border entry. As usual, the answer may be in who gains from the absence of a Wall, and what they gain. The best way to get the answer is to follow the money.
Right now the transfer of money from persons working in the U.S. to Mexico, called “personal remittances” are a major source of Mexican revenue. The growth of remittance revenue is a recent development. Mexico seized the assets of nearly all foreign oil companies operating in Mexico in 1938. But as American sanctuary cities flouted Federal law and encouraged illegal immigration after 1980, those working in the U.S. started to wire transfer money back to their families in amounts that became so large that by the late 1990s remittances to Mexico were the second largest source of foreign revenues, second only to oil revenues.
According to the World Bank, in 2015 the world’s top remittance corridor was from the United States to Mexico. As much as $25.2 billion dollars was sent back to Mexico from people working in the U.S. Remittances are a great source of revenue for Mexico and are more stable than all other flows such as oil.
BLOG: ADD THE $40 TO $60 BILLION THE NARCOMEX DRUG CARTELS HAUL BACK!
In 1979 the Police Chief of Los Angeles publicly stated that he would not enforce immigration law. Following this announcement, which was the effective beginning of Los Angeles as a sanctuary city, remittances to Mexico from the U.S. grew very rapidly from only $177 million in 1979 to $26.9 billion in 2007, following the growth of those sectors of the economy such as construction where illegal immigrants worked. After the 2007 economic peak there was a drop in 2009 to $22 billion. But in 2015 the amount of remittances climbed back to $26.2 billion, according to the World Bank. Ninety-eight percent of all remittances sent to Mexico come from the U.S.
It is no coincidence that the most rapid growth occurred from 2000 to 2008 when Vincente Fox was the president of Mexico. This is why the most emotional and energetic resistance to the Wall came from Vincente Fox, who used abusive language toward Trump. His statement were cloaked in emotion and anger, a skillfully crafted disguise for the real reason for his concern: money.
One in every eleven persons born in Mexico has gone to the U.S. The National Review reported that in 2014 $1.87 billion was spent on incarcerating illegal immigrant criminals.
Since the political economy of Los Angeles depends so heavily on the Federal and state program money that supports illegal immigration, the Los AngelesTimes still defends Special Order 40 as essential to, paradoxically, law and order. It’s also essential to the economy of Los Angeles but somehow the Times doesn’t mention that fact.
BLOG:
THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS INVADING ILLEGALS ONE BILLION IN WELFARE.
90% OF ALL MURDERS IN LOS ANGELES ARE BY MEXICANS.
THE TAX FREE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN L.A. COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION.
One may ask why the Federal government chooses to spend so much money on the incarceration of criminal aliens by defying the Federal 1996 Immigration Act. But it’s important to keep in mind the benefits the Federal government, particularly the Democrat Party, the party of government sector teacher unions, obtains from illegal immigration. After all, their four biggest campaign contributors, the Service Employees International Union, the National Education Association, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and American Federation of Teachers are four of the top six contributors from 1989 to present. And they give over 99% of their contributors to Democrats. Today sixty five percent of public school students in Los Angeles County are Hispanic. In Chicago 46% are Hispanic.
Democrats, who have dominated almost all large metropolitan areas since FDR, are heavily dependent on illegal immigrants and their children.Should Trump build an effective wall, he would disrupt the flow of illegal immigrants, public school students, teacher union donations and block grant money to all their most important bases of electoral and demographic support. Trump’s wall is the major threat to what they see as their party’s long term goal of maintaining control of state governments as well as the national government.
Multimillionaire Jorge Ramos of Univision has criticized Trump aggressively. While Univision may have no obvious direct financial interest in remittances, their TV network certainly stands to profit from increases in Hispanic viewership, increases that are totally dependent on the growth of the Hispanic populations in cities they serve.
BLOG:
THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS INVADING ILLEGALS ONE BILLION IN WELFARE.
90% OF ALL MURDERS IN LOS ANGELES ARE BY MEXICANS.
THE TAX FREE UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN L.A. COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION.
BLOG: CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS FARGO and BANK of ILLEGALS (AMERICA) ARE MAJOR DONORS TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race”.
In short, everything that matters to Hillary and her Democrat Party is existentially threatened by Trump’s wall. And as a personal matter, Hillary’smulti-million dollar speech income from Wall Street contributors is also threatened: the banks make money from the wire transfers. Every time someone in the U.S. wires money to Mexico, the banks, currency exchanges, and other providers of wire transfer services make easy money. And the loss of low paying jobs to teenagers and seniors to illegal immigrants also contributes to the recession. Hillary and her party supporters desperately need illegal immigrants: Hillary is bought and paid for.
We now know that the big Wall Street banks bought her and you are paying for it in many ways. Hillary will not reveal what she has said to big bank contributors, but it is not unlikely that she reassured them that she will allow an open border to exist on the Southern part of the U.S. Recent email leaks have confirmed that she believes in open borders.
And then there’s the humanitarian issue. After all, the rationalization for allowing illegal immigration is that we need people to do “low paid jobs no one else will do.” This is a racist, humiliating characterization of Hispanics from Mexico and other Central American countries. America’s most shameful chapter in its history was its promotion of the institution of slavery, the importation of blacks from Africa to do “low paid jobs no one else will do.” It is hard to understand how anyone with sensitivity toward racial minorities can now bring up another generation of low paid workers. Vincente Fox never discusses this abuse, or the rape trees human smugglers construct as monuments to their criminal rape of young Hispanic women illegally crossing the border from the South.
Those following the money trail would say this follows the pattern perfectly: that Hillary allows illegal immigrants to be exploited by cartels and rapists in order for the banks she protects to collect their remittance transfer money. Somehow these humanitarian topics are avoided. We know that Wall Street investment banks gave tens of millions to support Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. These same banks make easy profits from of illegal immigrant bank transfer fees as well as high interest rate home loans and car loans targeted to Hispanics.
Hillary’s lack of humanitarian concern is accompanied by a silence toward the issue of money.
"Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise forglobalization and open bordersfrequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors."
SOARING POVERTY AND UNEMPLOYMENT UNDER OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS POLICIES.
THE DEPT. of HOMELAND OPEN BORDERS SECURITY SECRET REPORT:
The Borders Are Wide Open. Illegals Jumping it in the Thousands.
Death of the America Middle Class is around the corner. End of the GOP is at hand. A one Party American is near. Mexico will elect all future Presidents.
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
JAMES WALSH - THE HISPANICAZATION of AMERICA
How the Democrat party surrendered America to Mexico:
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
HILLARY’S AMERICA: NOW BANKROLLED BY THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS
IMAGES OF AMERICA UNDER LA RAZA MEX OCCUPATION:
Your neighborhood will be next to fall to LA RAZA!
Even though it has gone virtually unreported by corporate media, BreitbartNews has extensively documented the Clintons’ longstanding support for “open borders.” Interestingly, as the LosAngelesTimes observed in 2007, the Clinton’s praise for globalization and open borders frequently comes when they are speaking before a wealthy foreign audiences and donors.
OPEN BORDERS: The Democrat Party’s Weapon of Mass Destruction on the American Worker
"Los Angeles saw all crime rise in 2015: violent crime up 19.9 percent, homicides up 10.2 percent, shooting victims up 12.6 percent, rapes up 8.6 percent, robberies up 12.3 percent, and aggravated assault up 27.5 percent,"Landry said.”
The illegal broke into her place.
Using a claw hammer, he beat her, broke her neck and raped her!
Marilyn Pharis was 64 when she died from her assault.
According to a 2011 report from the Government Accountability Office, there are 70,000 sexual offenses attached to the incarcerated criminal alien population.
A Mexican illegal alien allegedly raped a girl in Kansas in September after being deported ten times in the past six years alone, according to reports.
BUILDING THE MEXICAN CARTELS IN THE AMERICAN BURBS!
MEXIFORNIA (Formerly California) NOW UNDER NARCOMEX CONTROL
Suspected Illegal Alien Marijuana Farmers Held Workers Hostage: ICE
"More than 728,000 illegal immigrants have been shielded from being deported and granted work permits through President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty
program, according to the Migration Policy Institute."
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: Let the Mexicans Destroy America
…. Amnesty will destroy the GOP, white and black middle America, keep wages depressed and build the LA RAZA SUPREMACY DEMOCRAT PARTY
Fermin Rivera, 28, allegedly beat a puppy to death while trying to break into a neighborhood home. During the attempted burglary, Rivera had broken into the backyard but was met with barking by a small puppy. Surveillance cameras show Rivera subsequently “cornered the Bichon-Maltese mix, lifted the dog over his head and slammed it down with all his strength on the concrete slab twice.” River is now reportedly “facing felony counts of animal cruelty charges and attempted burglary charges.” Rivera is reportedly on an immigration hold.
LEADING MEMBERS OF THE LA RAZA DEMOCRAT PARTY:
2,000 CALIFORNIANS HAVE BEEN MURDERED BY MEXICANS..... WHO THEN FLED BACK OVER THE OPE BORDER TO AVOID PROSECUTION
http://www.illegalaliencrimereport.com/
CLINTON’S PROMISE OF AMNESTY IN A 100 DAYS!
HILLARY CLINTON AND THE CONSPIRACY WITH THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “THE RACE” TO SURRENDER AMERICA’S BORDERS, DESTROY THE GOP WITH MILLIONS OF MEX VOTERS AND EXPAND THE MEX WELFARE STATE ON AMERICA’S BACKS http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/08/la-raza-supremacist-hillary-clinton.html HILLARY CLINTON: Closet Republican …and Openly a LA RAZA SUPREMACIST agent for Mexico! "The same period has seen a massive growth of social inequality, with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American society to an extent not seen since the 1920s."
"He (Trump) is able to get a hearing because millions of people are being driven into economic insecurity and poverty while the rich and the super-rich continue to amass obscene levels of wealth. He is able with some success to divert mass discontent along reactionary nationalist and racialist channels precisely because what passes for the “left” in American politics, anchor by the Democratic Party, has moved ever further to the right, culminating in the Obama administration which has presided over endless war and an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of the economic ladder."
A NATION IN BORDER MELTDOWN:
MILLIONS OF JOBS TO ILLEGALS AND
BILLIONS IN WELFARE
MEXICO WILL DOUBLE AMERICA’S POPULATION
IMMIGRANT SHARE OF ADULTS QUADRUPLED IN 232 COUNTIES
Most Americans (legals) would be appalled to know that from day one the Obomb has funded the MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “The Race” with U.S. tax dollars and this racist party has operated out of the white house under LA RAZA V.P. Cecilia Munoz.
THE CLINTON, OBAMA AND PAUL RYAN CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY.
FOR THE DEMOCRAT PARTY, MEXICO'S INVASION, OCCUPATION AND EVER EXPANDING WELFARE STATE KEEPS WAGES DEPRESSED, BUILD THE DEMS' LA RAZA PARTY BASE, AND DESTROYS THE GOP.
WE ARE SOON TO BE A ONE PARTY NATION WITH OPEN BORDERS FOR THE MEXICAN HORDES AS THEY JUMP OUR JOBS, WELFARE OFFICES AND VOTING BOOTHS WAVING THEIR MEXICAN FLAGS!
BARACK OBAMA , HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS AND THE LA RAZA
MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS….
There’s more than one way to destroy America’s white middle class!
HSBC laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their body parts.
INVADING ILLEGALS = UNREGISTERED DEMS
925k CRIMINAL ILLEGALS NOT DEPORTED
OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS TO DESTROY THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS- MILLIONS OF INVADING CRIMINALS NOT DEPORTED
OPEN BORDERS KEEPS WAGES FOR LEGALS DEPRESSED AND BUILDS THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY PARTY BASE FOR THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HELL BENT ON DESTROYING THE GOP WITH AN ENDLESS INVASION BY MEXICO!
LA RAZA ILLEGAL CARLOS ESPARAZA RAPED A 7 YEAR OLD.
THEN HE WENT OUT AND VOTED DEM FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS!
The sputtering economic recovering under President Obama, the last to follow a major recession, has fallen way short of the average recovery and ranks as the worst since the 1930s Great Depression, according to a new report.
Had the recovery under Obama been the average of the 11 since the Depression, according to the report, family incomes would be $17,000 higher, six million fewer Americans would be in poverty, and there would be six million more jobs.
"These figures present a scathing indictment of the social order that prevails in America, the world’s wealthiest country, whose government proclaims itself to be the globe’s leading democracy. They are just one manifestation of the human toll taken by the vast and all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS TO SERVE THE SUPER RICH: The slow and painful death of America that dominates American society."
“This study follows reports released over the past several months documenting rising mortality rates among US workers due to drug addiction and suicide, high rates of infant mortality, an overall leveling off of life expectancy, and a growing gap between the life expectancy of the bottom rung of income earners compared to those at the top.”
THE CLINTON “JOBS” PLAN ENDORSED BY NARCOMEX – IT’S CALLED AMNESTY!
Clinton, in the guise of a “jobs” and “infrastructure” program, promoted yet another scheme to hand out tax cuts and other incentives for companies to hire workers at poverty-level wages, with the trade unions brought in to keep the workers in line in return for a cut in the spoils.
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
MILLIONS OF AMERICAN JOBS HANDED OVER TO ILLEGALS ALONG WITH BILLIONS IN WELFARE.... AND THE PARTY HAS JUST BEGUN!
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY PLATFORM:
NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!
VIVA LA RAZA FASCISM? THEN VOTE DEM!
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 (UPI) — The total apprehensions by U.S. Border Patrol agents of people trying to illegally cross the border between the United States and Mexico increased in 2016 from last year but is lower than the two years prior.
In 2016, there were 408,870 total apprehensions, a 23 percent increase from 2015 in which there were 331,333 apprehensions, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement. The 2016 numbers, though, represent a 14.7 percent decrease from the 479,371 apprehensions in 2014, and a 1.3 percent decrease from the 414,397 apprehensions in 2013.
“The demographics of illegal migration on our southern border has changed significantly over the last 15 years — far fewer Mexicans and single adults are attempting to cross the border without authorization, but more families and unaccompanied children are fleeing poverty and violence in Central America,” Johnson wrote.
The number of Central Americans apprehended at the southern border outnumbered Mexicans for the first time in 2014, and in 2016 the situation occurred again, Johnson added.
In 2016, there were 59,692 unaccompanied children, 77,674 people who attempted to cross the border as a family, and 271,504 individuals who attempted to cross the border illegally.
Johnson said that though President Barack Obama’s administration has “endeavored to enforce the immigration laws in a fair and humane way … the reality is the system is broken, and badly need of comprehensive immigration reform that only Congress can provide.”
Johnson called on Congress and the United States’ next president, likely to be either Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton or Republican nominee Donald Trump, to “make smart investments in border security technology, equipment and other resources.”
“Border security alone cannot overcome the powerful push factors of poverty and violence that exist in Central America. Walls alone cannot prevent illegal migration,” Johnson wrote. “Ultimately, the solution is long-term investment in Central America to address the underlying push factors in the region.”
THE LA RAZA PLAN: California’s final surrender to fly the Mexican flag within 4 years.
"The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot." -- - EXCELSIOR --- national newspaper of Mexico
WITHOUT VOTER APPROVAL, THE LA RAZA-OCCUPIED COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES HANDS ILLEGAL MEXICAN MORE THAN A BILLION IN WELFARE FOR BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES…. AMERICA’S NEXT GENERATION OF STAGGERINGLY EXPENSIVE “CHEAP” LABOR
“Taco Runt” is a member of the Mexican Fascist Movement of M.E.Ch.A. and a racist (yes, Mexicans think of themselves as a unique “race”) LA RAZA supremacist.
He is proud of the fact that he FAILED California’s State Bar test more than any other illiterate Mexican on earth and that qualifies him to operate California’s Mexican Welfare State for LA RAZA.
BELOW LINK IS TO THE LA RAZA “THE RACE” MEXICAN FASCIST AND RACIST ANTI-AMERICAN SEPARATIST MOVEMENT M.E.Ch.A.Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan. (WARNING GRAPHIC!)
“As one attorney general, Kamala Harris, steps down to replace Barbara Boxer, another attorney general is secreted out of the glands of selfsame power in the form of pus-spewing Xavier Becerra.”
It didn’t stop Becerra, a prominent Latino rights advocate who has
served in Congress since 1993, from pushing for the dealer’s
release at the request of his father, Horacio. The elder Vignali, a
rich Los Angeles businessman, contributed thousands of dollars
to Becerra’s various campaigns and a favor was in order.
“Through love of having children, we are going to take over.”AUGUSTIN CEBADA, BROWN BERETS, THE LA RAZA FASCIST PARTY
CALIFORNIA UNDER LA RAZA SIEGE:
Mexico’s looting and ethnic cleansing of a once American state.
CA HAS THE HIGHEST TAXES IN THE NATION, THE LARGEST ILLEGAL MEXICAN POPULATION, THE LARGEST MEX WELFARE STATE and HALF THE MURDERS IN CA ARE NOW BY MEXICAN GANGS.
LA RAZA MEXICO’S TRILLION DOLLAR LOOTING OF AMERICA
The staggering cost of all that “cheap” Mexican labor:
“The lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare benefits of illegal immigrant beneficiaries of President Obama’s executive amnesty would be well over a trillion dollars, according to Heritage Foundation expert Robert Rector’s prepared testimony for a House panel obtained in advance by Breitbart News.”
THE STAGGERINGCOST OF AMNESTY: non-enforcement is another form of AMNESTY!
Legals to pay trillions for open borders and Mexico’s looting
Between one-quarter and one-third of the 1.5 million new arrivals in 2014 were illegal aliens, meaning that a conservative estimate is that 1,000 illegal aliens a day are moving to the United States.
ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS ORDERS CALIFORNIA TERMINATED.
MEXICO IMMEDIATELY DENOUNCED THE DECREE AND FIRED SESSIONS.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions: Emergency Intervention Needed in California NOW!
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: poverty, anchor baby breeders for welfare, criminals, unregistered dems and HEROIN!
By Arthur Schaper
Townhall.com
In California, illegals can vote: it’s possible and very likely. California’s automatic motor-voter law all but assures that illegals seeking driver’s licenses will get a ballot along with their license.
Miscreants from any corner of the world can register to vote in California online, too. No vetting, no assurance, no integrity.
Voter fraud in broken inner city hellholes like Detroit and New York City cannot compare with the ballot stuffing throughout the once Golden State.
OPEN BORDERS: The Democrat Party’s Weapon of Mass Destruction on the American Worker
"Los Angeles saw all crime rise in 2015: violent crime up 19.9 percent, homicides up 10.2 percent, shooting victims up 12.6 percent, rapes up 8.6 percent, robberies up 12.3 percent, and aggravated assault up 27.5 percent," Landry said.”
IMAGES of LA RAZA CRIMINALSIN LOS
ANGELES ALONE:
200 MOST WANTED (MURDER) CRIMINALS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED LOS ANGELES:
“The lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare benefits of illegal immigrant beneficiaries of President Obama’s executive amnesty would be well over a trillion dollars, according to Heritage Foundation expert Robert Rector’s prepared testimony for a House panel obtained in advance by Breitbart News.”
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: poverty, anchor baby breeders for welfare, criminals, unregistered dems and HEROIN!
BILLIONAIRES FOR BORDERLESS AMERICA
….It’s all to keep wages DEPRESSED.
“This nation no longer is a democratic republic...rather it has become a tool of the super-rich members of the above mentioned elite who preselect our presidents based on their cooperation and complicity with the elite’s ultimate goals. Obama has, in their opinion done superbly carrying out the plans well laid out for him by his backers.”
“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually (DATED FIGURES) in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” --- Christian Science Monitor
While the declining job market in the United States may be discouraging some would-be border crossers, a flow of illegal aliens continues unabated, with many entering the United States as drug-smuggling “mules.”
Californiamust stem the flow of illegal immigrants
The state should go after employers who hire them, curb taxpayer-funded benefits, deploy the National Guard to help the feds at the border and penalize 'sanctuary' cities.
“Illegal immigration is another matter entirely. With the state budget in tatters, millions of residents out of work and a state prison system strained by massive overcrowding, California simply cannot continue to ignore the strain that illegal immigration puts on our budget and economy. Illegal aliens cost taxpayers in our state billions of dollars each year.As economist Philip J. Romero concluded in a 2007 study, "illegal immigrants impose a 'tax' on legal California residents in the tens of billions of dollars."
Casting a shadow on economic recovery efforts in the United States is the cost of illegal immigration that consumes U.S. taxpayer dollars for education, healthcare, social welfare benefits, and criminal justice. Illegal aliens (or more politically correct, “undocumented immigrants”) with ties to Mexican drug cartels are contributing to death and destruction on U.S. lands along the southern border.
While the declining job market in the United States may be discouraging some would-be border crossers, a flow of illegal aliens continues unabated, with many entering the United States as drug-smuggling “mules.”
What does the US Department of Justice, the Sinaloa drug cartel, and the spy corporation Stratfor have in common? According to CIA documents leaked by WikiLeaks, they’re all at the center of the new US strategy in the War on Drugs. In 2012, Whiteout Press exposed the shocking alliance in the article, ‘Secret US Alliance with Sinaloa Cartel exposed’.
“According to Immigration and Customers Enforcement data first obtained by the Associated Press this week, about 70 percent of the 40,000 migrant family members arrested at the border since May did not follow up their arrest with a necessary visit to an immigration office.”
The NARCOMEX drug cartels now operate in all major
American cities and haul back to NARCOMEX between $40
THE REAL FACE OF CALIFORNIA UNDER MEXICAN OCCUPATION:
“The California-Mexico border would surely be opened wide, prompting a spike in unfettered immigration by desperately poor people, drug dealers, and gang members to what is already a virtually lawless and out-of-control welfare state.”
Lou Dobbs Tonight
In California, League of United Latin American Citizens has adopted a resolution to declare "California Del Norte" a sanctuary zone for immigrants. The declaration urges the Mexican government to invoke its rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo "to seek third‑nation neutral arbitration of disputes concerning immigration laws and their enforcement." We’ll have the story.
BELOW LINK IS TO THE LA RAZA “THE RACE” MEXICAN FASCIST SEPARATIST MOVEMENT (WARNING! GRAPHIC!)
"The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot." --- EXCELSIOR --- national newspaper of Mexico
BELOW LINK IS TO THE LA RAZA “THE RACE” MEXICAN FASCIST SEPARATIST MOVEMENT (WARNING! GRAPHIC!)
"Republicans should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant Islamists have the goal of destroying the United States.Mexican drug cartels are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually every community across this country.” JUDICIALWATCH
REMITTANCES ….. are only part of Mexico’s
looting… and billions for anchorbaby breeders,
billions for heroin sales and then do the numbers!
Mexicans abroad sent home nearly $2.4 billion in transfers in November, 24.7 percent higher than a year earlier, marking their fastest pace of expansion since March 2006, according to Mexican central bank data on Monday…
ONE OF THE MOST DISTURBING BOOKS OUT THERE ON MEXICO’S INVASION, OCCUPATION AND LOOTING of CALIFORNIA
MILLIONS of JOBS and BILLIONS in WELFARE and they commit most of the MURDERS
SANCTUARY CITIES AND STATES:AMERICA FALLS TO LA RAZA SUPREMACY!
“What we're seeing is our Congress and national leadership dismantling our laws by not enforcing them. Lawlessness becomes the norm, just like Third World corruption. Illegal aliens now have more rights and privileges than Americans. If you are an illegal alien, you can drive a car without a driver's license or insurance. You may obtain medical care without paying. You may work without paying taxes. Your children enjoy free education at the expense of taxpaying Americans.”
“According to the Centers for Immigration Studies, April '11, at least 70% of Mexican illegal alien families receive some type of welfare in the US!!! cis.org”
So when cities across the country declare that they will NOT be sanctuary, guess where ALL the illegals, criminals, gang members fleeing ICE will go???? straight to your welcoming city. So ironically the people fighting for sanctuary city status, may have an unprecedented crime wave to deal with along with the additional expense.
$17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
$12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English.
$22 billion is spent on (AFDC) welfare to illegal aliens each year.
$2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as (SNAP) food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
$3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.Does not include local jails and State Prisons.
2012 illegal aliens sent home $62 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. This is why Mexico is getting involved in our politics.
$200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States.
Center for Immigration Studies. Federation for American Immigration Reform. House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Investigations. Inter-American Development Bank. Violent Crimes Institute. Federation for American Immigration Reform. Immigration Studies Program. Illegal Alien Crime Report. Memorial to victims of Illegal Alien Crime.
REVOLUTION IN MEXICO: Will It Spread Over America’s Open Borders?
“Over the last decade, theMexican ruling class has carried out a ruthless drive to intensify the exploitation of its labor and natural resources, mainly by American banks and corporations.”….sounds like what Wall Street has done to us!
LOS ANGELES: Mexico’s Second Largest City, First Place for Billion Dollar Mexican Welfare, Number 1 for Mexican Murder and Western Gateway For the LA RAZA Mexican Drug Cartels
“Part of the problem, Santorum said, has been the arrival of millions of unskilled immigrants — legal and illegal — in the United States. "American workers deserve a shot at [good] jobs," Santorum said. "Over the last 20 years, we have brought into this country, legally and illegally, 35 MILLIONmostly unskilled workers. And the result, over that same period of time, workers' wages and family incomes have flatlined." SEN. RICK SANTORUM
A study by City.com reveals that the crime rate in Phoenix dropped dramatically after the city dropped its sanctuary city policies.
There are many reason why crime rates decline over a certain period of time. But the study suggests a provacative link between fewer criminal illegal aliens roaming the streets and a falling crime rate.
“When we eliminated our sanctuary policy back in 2008, we saw crime, violent and stolen vehicles fall by 25 percent,” former Phoenix police officer and Executive Director of the Arizona Police Association Levi Bolton told Fox News Channel’s William La Jeunesse in an interview. “We saw a 20-year low crime rate. When we were allowed and had the discretion to contact our federal immigration partners, crime fell drastically.”
Lajeunesse reported data from City-Data.com revealing that from 2008 to 2009, the murder rate in Phoenix dropped by 27 percent. Other crimes fell as well. Auto thefts fell by 36 percent, robberies 23 percent, thefts by 19 percent, burglaries by 14 percent, and assaults by 13 percent, the report states. The rates fell again in 2010, but by smaller numbers. The overall crime index fell by 20 percent the first year after the city’s policy change.
Police chiefs around the country tout that sanctuary cities are safer than cities that actually turn criminal aliens over to immigration officials for removal from the country.
“Police chiefs across the nation believe that enlisting local police to enforce immigration law is a bad idea,” California Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Leon (D) told reporters during a recent press conference “Having [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] pluck criminals out of jail and send them across the border or wherever they came only to come right back endangers our communities.”
The University of California, Riverside, disagrees. A 2016 study by the university revealed that “violent crime is slightly higher in sanctuary cities.” It concluded there is not a “discernible difference in violent crime rates, rape, or property crime” across the 55 cities in their study, La Jeunesse reported.
Finding a direct, causal link between the crime rate and illegal alien criminals is difficult because there are so many factors besides illegals that must be considered, including incarceration rates, declining or increasing population, even the amount of resources devoted to crime prevention.
Having said that, it's hard to escape the conclusion that turning illegals over to the feds has had a positive impact on reducing crime. I suppose it depends on your point of view. If you are disposed to reject any evidence that removing criminal illegal aliens from the community could reduce the number of serious crimes, you can find plenty of ammunition to buttress your point of view.
But to do that, you have to ignore the totality of the evidence. And although statistics from one city could be an outlier, it will be interesting to examine statistics from other cities that have changed their policies.
IS THERE A “SANCTUARY” WHERE LEGALS ARE SAFE FROM MEXICAN MURDERING RAPIST?
LIST of “SANCTUARY COUNTIES” AND THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE STATS
ICE ROUNDS UP THE ILLEGALS
THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE…. Murder, rape, molestation and then vote DEM for more!
"Los Angeles saw all crime rise in 2015: violent crime up 19.9 percent, homicides up 10.2 percent, shooting victims up 12.6 percent, rapes up 8.6 percent, robberies up 12.3 percent, and aggravated assault up 27.5 percent," Landry said.”
Although MS-13 started out in Salvadoran communities in Los Angeles sometime during the 1980’s, lax immigration policies and weak border security helped the gang explode in size as MS-13 originated from illegal immigrants, Breitbart Texas reported.
40% of all Federal Border Crimes are by invading Mexicans!
The impact of US opioid epidemic on foster care and social services
By Genevieve Leigh 12 July 2017
The epidemic of opioid addiction in the US, which has reached never before seen heights in the past two years, has put an immense strain on the already resource-starved US health care system. Among the most devastating consequences of this crisis has been the thousands of children who lose their parents to addiction every day.These children have flooded the foster care system, and their cases have exhausted social services.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2012, 397,000 U.S. children were in foster care. By 2015, that number had risen 8 percent, to 428,000. There is no concrete data yet for 2016; however, experts predict that the past two years—the height of the opioid epidemic so far—has increased that number dramatically.
A recent study published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that in 14 states the number of foster kids rose by more than a quarter between 2011 and 2015.
States that are experiencing a massive influx of children into protective custody all face similar problems, with varying degrees of severity. None are equipped with the resources to adequately deal with the crisis. Three of the hardest hit states have been Maine, Florida, and Ohio.
Maine
More than 1,800 children were reported to be in foster care across the state of Maine in 2016—a nearly 45 percent increase in foster children since 2011.
Last year, 376 people died from drug overdoses in Maine. This is the highest number ever recorded for the state and marks a 114 percent increase over a period of just four years, coinciding with the rise of the opioid crisis. Moreover, more than 1,000 children were born addicted to drugs in Maine last year, with the majority of the cases involving some form of opioid.
Bette Hoxie, executive director of Adoptive and Foster Families for Maine, a non-profit organization that works to provide support services for adoptive and foster parents, as well as kinship providers, recently spoke to the WSWS about the immense scope of the opioid epidemic.
“We work with about 3,100 families. Of these, 1,600 are utilizing our resources from more intensive services than just basic services. This means that they need things like clothes, they need help working through the system, they need bedding, they need much more active involvement.”
“The homes where these children are going are just not prepared with everything they need to house a child,” Hoxie noted.
“I would say nearly every single one of those cases is due to drug addiction. Of the kinship calls [when children are placed with extended family members instead of with foster families] that we get, at least 85-90 percent have been due to drug addiction, with the majority being opioids.”
Hoxie explained the effect of the spike in opioid use on the child care services: “Up until about 8 or 10 years ago, when children were coming into protective services, they were placing kids with foster care families until they could reunite them with their families or place them in permanent homes.”
“Over the last few years—in a large way, to deal with the sudden influx of such high numbers of children—there is more and more use of family members. There is definitely a strain on the system. We have 1,900 children in care, and we have 1,200 licensed foster homes.” Hoxie expressed concerns that some of these children end up in homes where the caregivers, often grandparents, are on fixed incomes and struggle to provide for the children.
Speaking on the opioid crisis more generally Hoxie added, “The biggest thing we are struggling with here in Maine is recovery options. ... When a family with addiction problems reaches out for help and they hear ‘Well, it will be three months before we can get you into a place,’ these people lose a lot of hope.”
Ohio
The state of Ohio has one of the nation’s highest overdose rates. In 2016, 4,149 deaths from drug overdose were reported, showing a 36 percent jump from the year before. In 2015, an astounding one in nine heroin deaths nationwide occurred in Ohio, a number that has likely jumped even higher since.
Ohio’s foster population has gone up nearly 10 percent, with more than 60 percent of children in the system because of parental drug abuse. The situation in Ohio is unique, not only because the opioid epidemic is so severe, but also because it is possibly the most resource-starved state in terms of child care services. The state ranks 50th for state share of children services total expenditures. In fact, Ohio state expenditures for child services are so low that if the number doubled, it would still remain 50th in the country.
Scott Britton, who works for Public Children Services Association of Ohio, told the WSWS: “The drug epidemic really has caused a crisis across the board. We have 11 percent increase of children in custody and 19 percent increase in retention rate. We have some 2015 data that showed that 28 percent of the parents of kids who were taken from their homes were using some type of opioid. So that means more than one in four and almost one in three. This is not counting kinship care or other ways a child might come in. We suspect that number has only gone up in 2016, considering that back in 2015 we were not seeing near the same volume of opioid use as we had in 2016 and which continues today.”
“It is affecting just about every facet of the foster care system. Some come into our care because they were born with addiction, others because they have experienced severe neglect. They very often come in with a lot of trauma from their experiences, which complicates things. Sometimes placing them with a typical foster family is not what’s best due to the severity of their issues.”
Another major problem, mentioned by every charity group, nonprofit, and social service worker who spoke to our reporters, is the effect the pressure has had on social workers. Britton explained that Ohio is no different: “These workers are emotionally exhausted. They are often the ones who are left with tasks like telling a child that one of their parents, or sometimes both of their parents, have died from overdose, for example.
“Our caseworkers are really committed to reunifying children with their parents. That is our number-one goal. They work really hard to get parents into treatment. Unfortunately, they are seeing less and less of that, which is really tough on their morale. We did a survey in 2016 and found that one out of every four caseworkers left their positions. I suspect they just become exhausted from taking that emotional stress home.”
Florida
The worst manifestation of the opioid epidemic in Florida is in the state’s 12th Judicial Circuit Court, which includes Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. One figure that sheds light on the severity of the situation in this area is the number of doses of Narcan (Naloxone), the drug that reverses the effects of an overdose, being administered. In July 2015, emergency responders in this area administered a record 281 doses of the “miracle drug.” By July 2016, that number had more than doubled to 749. Officials in the area remain unable to stem the epidemic.
Kathryn Shea is the president and CEO of the Florida Center for Early Childhood, which is an early childhood mental health provider. Shea works in the heart of the Florida epidemic.
Shea told the WSWS: “The numbers we are seeing in Sarasota of kids in care we have never seen before. There is no question that the biggest cause is substance abuse, and the primary drug is opioids. Our children have been dramatically impacted, as have our babies. To give you an idea of how severe it is, consider that 90 percent of babies in the NICU at Sarasota Memorial Hospital are there from opioid substances.”
When asked about reports that Florida and other states such as Oregon and Texas have been forced to have children sleep in state buildings because there were no foster homes available, Shea responded, “Yes, that has happened here. Not as often, because they are constantly recruiting foster parents. Instead, here they often have to go over their waiver of five kids per parent.”
Shea also commented on the effect this crisis has had on those who work in the field, “Our turnover rate for social workers is just horrible. It’s very hard to keep cases managers and investigators. A lot of these workers are very young and have just gotten out of college or just have high school degrees and don’t have a lot of life experience to help buffer the intense situations that they have to deal with. Let me put it this way—I have been in this industry 37 years and it is still difficult for me. Often they are traumatized by what they go through on the job. They end up with secondary trauma from what they see and do. Honestly, from all my years in the field, I’ve never seen the situation this bad.”
When asked about what sort of impact the Trump health care plan, which would end Medicaid as an entitlement program, might have on the children affected by the opioid epidemic Shea said it would be a disaster. “Most of our families are on Medicaid. This covers over 90 percent of our kids. The services for them would be dropped. What we are talking about is the difference between life and death for children. I am not saying that lightly. I am very serious. We will be hurting the most vulnerable population. I think it’s an absolute crime.”
Asked to explain what she thought was driving the opioid epidemic Shea told the WSWS: “Well, I think the real root cause of this is poverty. Many of these people were raised in poverty and don’t see a way out of it. Many of them have experienced serious trauma and have never been treated properly because they don’t have the money and they use drugs to self-medicate, and to deal with the pain.”
When Donald Trump said he would not pursue legal action against Hillary Clinton after he won the election, the majority of his supporters were not happy. After all, what Hillary, her family. and the
Clinton Foundation actually did, or were accused
of doing through credible evidence, was obviously
criminal.
Fast forward to today and the onslaught of false Russian collusion accusations against President Trump and it is obvious why not going after Hillary was a huge mistake.
After the election there always seems to be, there is a kind of political vacuum period. It is usually called a honeymoon for a newly elected president. Unfortunately, this period of time is mostly controlled by the media.
In most cases this period is filled with relatively positive and generally inquisitive news from the media about a new president’s agenda, who he is putting together his team and figuring out how he plans to implement his policies. There is often positive news during this period about the new first family and how they will perform in their new public role. But in the case of President Trump, it was abundantly clear after a mostly vicious political battle between the Trump and Hillary. that there was only one candidate eligible to be granted a honeymoon period by the liberal news media – Hillary Clinton. And if Donald Trump were to actually win the election, as he did, there be hell to pay. Welcome to Hell President Trump.
There is no way Donald Trump or any of his political advisors couldn’t have seen this coming. And if there was any doubt at all by Trump and his team that they would not get a traditional presidential honeymoon, the hundreds of anti-Trump political rallies (more like violent riots) across America calling for “resistance” to President Trump should have been enough to erase any and all doubts. Not to mention the immediate wall-to-wall negative liberal media coverage that began the day after the election.
Donald Trump’s gut instinct to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton and her family foundation was spot-on. Trump specifically promised America during a debate that he would do this. As a business man who is also well acquainted with
politics, Trump instinctively knew that defeating
Hillary Clinton at the polls would not stop the
attacks by the media, and that he needed to stay on
offense and try to finish off Hillary and the entire
Clinton political machine for good.
But Donald Trump did something he rarely ever does – he went against his gut instinct; blowing his chance to fill the political void with something he knew would eventually benefit his presidency. Trump knew that that something to fill the political void was a legitimate criminal investigation of actual crimes that had been committed by Hillary Clinton.
The liberal media must have been ecstatic when they realized Donald Trump was giving Hillary a total pass on her criminal activity. The liberal media knew they had just been given a golden opportunity to unleash relentless negative attacks on President Trump the likes of which have never before been seen in American history. The liberal media happily gave Donald Trump something for winning the election - a nightmare he will never forget - a nightmare that has yet to end and will continue on for the next four years if the liberal media continues to get their way.
When Trump announced that he would not pursue legal charges against Hillary, the liberal media took that opportunity and quickly filled the post-election political void with a manufactured story of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in hopes of destroying the Trump presidency before it could even get off the ground. That political void is now so full of Russian collusion stories that President Trump’s agenda and accomplishments are virtually unknowable by the average American citizen – unless of course they watch Fox News, follow conservative web media or listen to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk-radio.
So what defense does President Trump, his political team, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative airwaves offer against the Russian Trump collusion story? They tell whoever will listen that Hillary Clinton actually did break the law. Seriously? So now President Trump and his supporters want to prosecute Hillary Clinton after Trump said he wouldn’t pursue legal action against her? Well that train has left the station. The golden
opportunity to take down Hillary and the entire
Clinton machine was passed over by the president
himself. And even if Trump now tries to revisit Hillary’s criminal activities through lawful means, his efforts will be branded as nothing but a political distraction to try and cover up the liberal media driven fake Russian Trump collusion story.
Had President Trump honored his promise and pursued a broad criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton and her family foundation immediately after he was inaugurated the exact opposite could be happening in the media right now. The political void that is now filled with
Russian Trump collusion stories could have been
filled with criminal investigation stories of Hillary
and her family foundation, collusion between the
media and the Hillary campaign against Bernie
Sanders, collusion between Hillary and Russia
regarding the uranium deal and the kick-backs to
the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton personally
and probably much more. Had Donald Trump followed his initial gut instinct and gone after Hillary and her family the tables would have been turned on Democrats and the liberal media and the fake news about any Russian Trump collusion would have been branded by the Trump administration and conservative media as a political distraction by Democrats and the liberal media in an attempt to cover-up investigations into actual crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and her family.
So what can President Trump possibly do to turn the tide against the Democrats and liberal media?
How about instead of using Hillary’s criminal activities as a defense against the fake news Russian Trump collusion narrative the Trump administration actually investigates her? If they are so certain she’s guilty then enforce the damn law! And maybe, just maybe, if President Trump urges AG Sessions to empanel a grand jury and re-open the investigation into Hillary Clinton right now, the facts concerning her criminal activity in the news might be enough to quell the Democrats and liberal media zealot’s agenda and get them to ease up on pushing fake news and begin covering news that matters to the forgotten men and women of this great country.
When Donald Trump said he would not pursue legal action against Hillary Clinton after he won the election, the majority of his supporters were not happy. After all, what Hillary, her family. and the Clinton Foundation actually did, or were accused of doing through credible evidence, was obviously criminal.
Fast forward to today and the onslaught of false Russian collusion accusations against President Trump and it is obvious why not going after Hillary was a huge mistake.
After the election, as there always seems to be, there is a kind of political vacuum period. It is usually called a honeymoon for a newly elected president. Unfortunately, this period of time is mostly controlled by the media.
In most cases this period is filled with relatively positive and generally inquisitive news from the media about a new president’s agenda, who he is putting together his team and figuring out how he plans to implement his policies. There is often positive news during this period about the new first family and how they will perform in their new public role. But in the case of President Trump, it was abundantly clear after a mostly vicious political battle between the Trump and Hillary. that there was only one candidate eligible to be granted a honeymoon period by the liberal news media – Hillary Clinton. And if Donald Trump were to actually win the election, as he did, there be hell to pay. Welcome to Hell President Trump.
There is no way Donald Trump or any of his political advisors couldn’t have seen this coming. And if there was any doubt at all by Trump and his team that they would not get a traditional presidential honeymoon, the hundreds of anti-Trump political rallies (more like violent riots) across America calling for “resistance” to President Trump should have been enough to erase any and all doubts. Not to mention the immediate wall-to-wall negative liberal media coverage that began the day after the election.
ut instinct to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton and her family foundation was spot-on. Trump specifically promised America during a debate that he would do this. As a business man who is also well acquainted with politics, Trump instinctively knew that defeating Hillary Clinton at the polls would not stop the attacks by the media, and that he needed to stay on offense and try to finish off Hillary and the entire Clinton political machine for good.
But Donald Trump did something he rarely ever does – he went against his gut instinct; blowing his chance to fill the political void with something he knew would eventually benefit his presidency. Trump knew that that something to fill the political void was a legitimate criminal investigation of actual crimes that had been committed by Hillary Clinton.
The liberal media must have been ecstatic when they realized Donald Trump was giving Hillary a total pass on her criminal activity. The liberal media knew they had just been given a golden opportunity to unleash relentless negative attacks on President Trump the likes of which have never before been seen in American history. The liberal media happily gave Donald Trump something for winning the election - a nightmare he will never forget - a nightmare that has yet to end and will continue on for the next four years if the liberal media continues to get their way.
When Trump announced that he would not pursue legal charges against Hillary, the liberal media took that opportunity and quickly filled the post-election political void with a manufactured story of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in hopes of destroying the Trump presidency before it could even get off the ground. That political void is now so full of Russian collusion stories that President Trump’s agenda and accomplishments are virtually unknowable by the average American citizen – unless of course they watch Fox News, follow conservative web media or listen to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk-radio.
So what defense does President Trump, his political team, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative airwaves offer against the Russian Trump collusion story? They tell whoever will listen that Hillary Clinton actually did break the law. Seriously? So now President Trump and his supporters want to prosecute Hillary Clinton after Trump said he wouldn’t pursue legal action against her? Well that train has left the station. The golden opportunity to take down Hillary and the entire Clinton machine was passed over by the president himself. And even if Trump now tries to revisit Hillary’s criminal activities through lawful means, his efforts will be branded as nothing but a political distraction to try and cover up the liberal media driven fake Russian Trump collusion story.
Had President Trump honored his promise and pursued a broad criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton and her family foundation immediately after he was inaugurated the exact opposite could be happening in the media right now. The political void that is now filled with Russian Trump collusion stories could have been filled with criminal investigation stories of Hillary and her family foundation, collusion between the media and the Hillary campaign against Bernie Sanders, collusion between Hillary and Russia regarding the uranium deal and the kick-backs to the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton personally and probably much more. Had Donald Trump followed his initial gut instinct and gone after Hillary and her family the tables would have been turned on Democrats and the liberal media and the fake news about any Russian Trump collusion would have been branded by the Trump administration and conservative media as a political distraction by Democrats and the liberal media in an attempt to cover-up investigations into actual crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and her family.
So what can President Trump possibly do to turn the tide against the Democrats and liberal media?
How about instead of using Hillary’s criminal activities as a defense against the fake news Russian Trump collusion narrative the Trump administration actually investigates her? If they are so certain she’s guilty then enforce the damn law! And maybe, just maybe, if President Trump urges AG Sessions to empanel a grand jury and re-open the investigation into Hillary Clinton right now, the facts concerning her criminal activity in the news might be enough to quell the Democrats and liberal media zealot’s agenda and get them to ease up on pushing fake news and begin covering news that matters to the forgotten men and women of this great country.
The impact of US opioid epidemic on foster care and social services
By Genevieve Leigh 12 July 2017
The epidemic of opioid addiction in the US, which has reached never before seen heights in the past two years, has put an immense strain on the already resource-starved US health care system. Among the most devastating consequences of this crisis has been the thousands of children who lose their parents to addiction every day.These children have flooded the foster care system, and their cases have exhausted social services.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2012, 397,000 U.S. children were in foster care. By 2015, that number had risen 8 percent, to 428,000. There is no concrete data yet for 2016; however, experts predict that the past two years—the height of the opioid epidemic so far—has increased that number dramatically.
A recent study published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that in 14 states the number of foster kids rose by more than a quarter between 2011 and 2015.
States that are experiencing a massive influx of children into protective custody all face similar problems, with varying degrees of severity. None are equipped with the resources to adequately deal with the crisis. Three of the hardest hit states have been Maine, Florida, and Ohio.
Maine
More than 1,800 children were reported to be in foster care across the state of Maine in 2016—a nearly 45 percent increase in foster children since 2011.
Last year, 376 people died from drug overdoses in Maine. This is the highest number ever recorded for the state and marks a 114 percent increase over a period of just four years, coinciding with the rise of the opioid crisis. Moreover, more than 1,000 children were born addicted to drugs in Maine last year, with the majority of the cases involving some form of opioid.
Bette Hoxie, executive director of Adoptive and Foster Families for Maine, a non-profit organization that works to provide support services for adoptive and foster parents, as well as kinship providers, recently spoke to the WSWS about the immense scope of the opioid epidemic.
“We work with about 3,100 families. Of these, 1,600 are utilizing our resources from more intensive services than just basic services. This means that they need things like clothes, they need help working through the system, they need bedding, they need much more active involvement.”
“The homes where these children are going are just not prepared with everything they need to house a child,” Hoxie noted.
“I would say nearly every single one of those cases is due to drug addiction. Of the kinship calls [when children are placed with extended family members instead of with foster families] that we get, at least 85-90 percent have been due to drug addiction, with the majority being opioids.”
Hoxie explained the effect of the spike in opioid use on the child care services: “Up until about 8 or 10 years ago, when children were coming into protective services, they were placing kids with foster care families until they could reunite them with their families or place them in permanent homes.”
“Over the last few years—in a large way, to deal with the sudden influx of such high numbers of children—there is more and more use of family members. There is definitely a strain on the system. We have 1,900 children in care, and we have 1,200 licensed foster homes.” Hoxie expressed concerns that some of these children end up in homes where the caregivers, often grandparents, are on fixed incomes and struggle to provide for the children.
Speaking on the opioid crisis more generally Hoxie added, “The biggest thing we are struggling with here in Maine is recovery options. ... When a family with addiction problems reaches out for help and they hear ‘Well, it will be three months before we can get you into a place,’ these people lose a lot of hope.”
Ohio
The state of Ohio has one of the nation’s highest overdose rates. In 2016, 4,149 deaths from drug overdose were reported, showing a 36 percent jump from the year before. In 2015, an astounding one in nine heroin deaths nationwide occurred in Ohio, a number that has likely jumped even higher since.
Ohio’s foster population has gone up nearly 10 percent, with more than 60 percent of children in the system because of parental drug abuse. The situation in Ohio is unique, not only because the opioid epidemic is so severe, but also because it is possibly the most resource-starved state in terms of child care services. The state ranks 50th for state share of children services total expenditures. In fact, Ohio state expenditures for child services are so low that if the number doubled, it would still remain 50th in the country.
Scott Britton, who works for Public Children Services Association of Ohio, told the WSWS: “The drug epidemic really has caused a crisis across the board. We have 11 percent increase of children in custody and 19 percent increase in retention rate. We have some 2015 data that showed that 28 percent of the parents of kids who were taken from their homes were using some type of opioid. So that means more than one in four and almost one in three. This is not counting kinship care or other ways a child might come in. We suspect that number has only gone up in 2016, considering that back in 2015 we were not seeing near the same volume of opioid use as we had in 2016 and which continues today.”
“It is affecting just about every facet of the foster care system. Some come into our care because they were born with addiction, others because they have experienced severe neglect. They very often come in with a lot of trauma from their experiences, which complicates things. Sometimes placing them with a typical foster family is not what’s best due to the severity of their issues.”
Another major problem, mentioned by every charity group, nonprofit, and social service worker who spoke to our reporters, is the effect the pressure has had on social workers. Britton explained that Ohio is no different: “These workers are emotionally exhausted. They are often the ones who are left with tasks like telling a child that one of their parents, or sometimes both of their parents, have died from overdose, for example.
“Our caseworkers are really committed to reunifying children with their parents. That is our number-one goal. They work really hard to get parents into treatment. Unfortunately, they are seeing less and less of that, which is really tough on their morale. We did a survey in 2016 and found that one out of every four caseworkers left their positions. I suspect they just become exhausted from taking that emotional stress home.”
Florida
The worst manifestation of the opioid epidemic in Florida is in the state’s 12th Judicial Circuit Court, which includes Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. One figure that sheds light on the severity of the situation in this area is the number of doses of Narcan (Naloxone), the drug that reverses the effects of an overdose, being administered. In July 2015, emergency responders in this area administered a record 281 doses of the “miracle drug.” By July 2016, that number had more than doubled to 749. Officials in the area remain unable to stem the epidemic.
Kathryn Shea is the president and CEO of the Florida Center for Early Childhood, which is an early childhood mental health provider. Shea works in the heart of the Florida epidemic.
Shea told the WSWS: “The numbers we are seeing in Sarasota of kids in care we have never seen before. There is no question that the biggest cause is substance abuse, and the primary drug is opioids. Our children have been dramatically impacted, as have our babies. To give you an idea of how severe it is, consider that 90 percent of babies in the NICU at Sarasota Memorial Hospital are there from opioid substances.”
When asked about reports that Florida and other states such as Oregon and Texas have been forced to have children sleep in state buildings because there were no foster homes available, Shea responded, “Yes, that has happened here. Not as often, because they are constantly recruiting foster parents. Instead, here they often have to go over their waiver of five kids per parent.”
Shea also commented on the effect this crisis has had on those who work in the field, “Our turnover rate for social workers is just horrible. It’s very hard to keep cases managers and investigators. A lot of these workers are very young and have just gotten out of college or just have high school degrees and don’t have a lot of life experience to help buffer the intense situations that they have to deal with. Let me put it this way—I have been in this industry 37 years and it is still difficult for me. Often they are traumatized by what they go through on the job. They end up with secondary trauma from what they see and do. Honestly, from all my years in the field, I’ve never seen the situation this bad.”
When asked about what sort of impact the Trump health care plan, which would end Medicaid as an entitlement program, might have on the children affected by the opioid epidemic Shea said it would be a disaster. “Most of our families are on Medicaid. This covers over 90 percent of our kids. The services for them would be dropped. What we are talking about is the difference between life and death for children. I am not saying that lightly. I am very serious. We will be hurting the most vulnerable population. I think it’s an absolute crime.”
Asked to explain what she thought was driving the opioid epidemic Shea told the WSWS: “Well, I think the real root cause of this is poverty. Many of these people were raised in poverty and don’t see a way out of it. Many of them have experienced serious trauma and have never been treated properly because they don’t have the money and they use drugs to self-medicate, and to deal with the pain.”
….. the American Middle-Class at death’s door and knocking ….
Have you notice Democrat Party politicians always keep their fat mouths closed tight on the topic of the Mexican drug cartels operating across America???
THE DEATH OF AMERICA: MEXICO SERVES UP THE HEROIN.
“The Republican proposal builds on the core features of Obamacare, designed to boost the profits of the private insurers and slash health care costs for the government and big business.”
HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Amnesty would add 100 million more illegals and cost Legals trillions!
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the number of elderly persons who are homeless in the US will have doubled by 2050.
Starve the Opioids, Build the Wall
By Kenric Ward
ImmigrationReform.com, July 6, 2017 . . . Mexico is the world’s third largest producer of heroin – an opioid drug — and Mexican heroin now controls over 50 percent of the market share. Additionally, most of the heroin from Colombia and South East Asia comes to the U.S. via Mexican drug cartels.
A border wall would choke that flow.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., points out that the opioid epidemic stems “not only from abuse (of prescription drugs), but from the illicit drug trade.” America, he said, is “consistently a step behind in stopping trafficking of opioids and other illegal drugs.”
Ohio politician proposes letting overdose victims die
The policy of “social murder” behind the US health care debate
By Barry Grey 5 July 2017
At a June 20 meeting of the Middletown, Ohio City Council, Dan Picard, a council member, offered a novel proposal to contain surging costs associated with a worsening epidemic of opioid overdoses in the town. Like cities across the United States, this southwestern Ohio town of some 49,000 people is being ravaged by the explosive spread of drug addiction linked to opioid pain killers. This year it has already recorded nearly 600 overdoses, more than in all of 2016.
Picard, who is not planning to run for reelection, proposed that the City Council adopt a “three strikes” policy, under which those who make use of emergency services two times to deal with an overdose will be denied help the third time. As he told the Washington Post, “When we get a call, the [emergency services] dispatcher will ask who is the person who has overdosed. And if it’s someone who has already been provided services twice, we’ll advise them that we’re not going to provide further services—and we will not send out an ambulance.”
Defending his proposal, Picard said, “I want to send a message to the world that you don’t want to come to Middletown to overdose… We need to put a fear about overdosing in Middletown.”
This call for what amounts to state-sanctioned murder evoked an angry response from the public in Middletown and wherever else people became aware of it. Numerous health care organizations and advocacy groups involved in dealing with the drug abuse epidemic denounced Picard and his proposal.
Alexis Pleus, the founder of Truth Pharm, a nonprofit that seeks to raise awareness of the issues surrounding substance abuse, did not mince words in an open letter to Picard: “To suggest that you withhold emergency medical response to overdose patients is manslaughter at best and premeditated murder at worst.”
Most of the American population, however, never learned of the incident. This is because the establishment media, fixated on its campaign against Russia and saber-rattling against North Korea, China, Iran and Syria, along with the political warfare in Washington between the Trump administration and its ruling class opponents, did not widely report the story.
There are other political reasons for the downplaying of the story by the corporate-controlled media. Picard’s brazen suggestion that drug abuse victims be allowed to die comes uncomfortably close to lifting the lid on a basic policy question underlying the current official debate on health care “reform.”
Behind the proposals in the Republicans’ bills to cut costs and boost profits by gutting Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, and lifting the current requirement that insurance companies cover certain “essential benefits,” lies a deliberate and calculated effort to reduce life expectancy for working people overall and send many of the old, infirm and mentally or socially disabled to an early grave.
The effort, moreover, is bipartisan. The Democrats are pleading for negotiations on a “compromise” bill to “fix” Obamacare, a euphemism for incorporating the demands of the insurance monopolies for even higher premiums, copays and deductibles and fewer restrictions on their ability to gouge the public. Obamacare itself is a mechanism for cutting costs for corporations and the government, weakening the system of employer-provided health insurance and rationing access to health care on a more openly class basis. The Republican plans build on Obamacare to accelerate the health care counterrevolution it initiated.
The corporations, banks and hedge funds that are pushing health care “reform” and the politicians and policy experts who are doing their bidding are well aware that many thousands will die needlessly as a result of the measures being proposed. Medicaid, slated to be cut under the Republican bills by some $800 billion over ten years and terminated as an open-ended entitlement program with guaranteed benefits, provides about 80 percent of funding to treat drug abuse, which overwhelmingly affects working class and poor people.
In 2015, some 1.35 million low-income Americans had an opioid use disorder. As it is, only 25 percent of those people get treated in a year.
Last year some 60,000 people in the US died from drug overdoses, 60 percent of them from opioids. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. There is no starker barometer of the failure of the capitalist system and the descent of broad masses of the population into conditions of desperate social crisis.
Of the 22 million people who will lose medical coverage under the Senate health care bill, Medicaid cuts will account for 15 million of them. Moreover, both the House and Senate bills allow insurance companies to drop coverage of care for mental health and substance abuse, among other basic services.
Can there be any doubt that many will die as a result of these cuts? Lynn Cooper, director of the Drug and Alcohol Division at Pennsylvania’s Rehabilitation and Community Providers Association, told National Public Radio last month: “It is a death epidemic all over the country. The loss of Medicaid expansion will be like the bottom dropping out for thousands of Pennsylvania citizens and their families.”
The impact is so self-evident, and public opposition so pervasive, that government officials are obliged to resort to the most brazen lying when defending their proposals. Typical was the performance of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a notorious and longstanding opponent of basic social program such as Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, in an appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. Of the Republican plan to dismantle Medicaid, he said, “We want to make certain that Medicaid is a program that can survive.”
While claiming to be committed to addressing the opioid epidemic, he declared, “We don’t need to be throwing money” at the crisis.
Ruling class strategists speak more frankly on specialized think tank web sites meant for corporate and state officials and their academic advisers. In 2013, the World Socialist Web Site drew attention to two policy papers published by the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) on the negative consequences for American imperialism and the national security apparatus of lengthening life spans for ordinary people resulting from advances in medical science and treatment and government health programs.
As the CSIS experts explained, the human and social achievement of better health and longer life for many millions of Americans spells disaster for the American ruling class and the capitalist system. The authors of the studies insisted that action had to be taken to deal with the “crisis,” including increasing the eligibility age for Medicare and Social Security to force the “young elderly,” those aged 60-69, to forgo retirement and keep working.
One of the papers, titled “The Budget Crisis and the Civil-Military Challenge to National Security Spending,” was written by Anthony H. Cordesman, a longtime CSIS strategist who acts as a consultant for the US State and Defense departments. Denouncing the siphoning of money away from the military to pay for medical care for the elderly, Cordesman wrote, “The US does not face any foreign threat as serious as its failure to come to grips with… the rise in the cost of entitlement spending.”
Behind such discussion papers are systematic studies and actuarial tables calculating the likely effectiveness in shortening life expectancy for workers—a process that is already underway—of various proposals to “reform” the health care system.
In his immortal 1845 work The Conditionof the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels accurately characterized as “social murder” the horrific conditions imposed on workers by the capitalist class, which “placed hundreds of proletarians in such as position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death…”
The present crisis-ridden and bankrupt state of American and world capitalism is once again bringing to the fore the incompatibility of the profit system and the rule of a financial aristocracy with the satisfaction of human needs such as health and longevity. The health care counterrevolution in the US is a case of “social murder” at the hands of the capitalist class.
AMERICA THE ADDICTED!
How America surrendered to Mexico’s invasion, occupation and looting.
The Mexican drug cartels now control most of America’s southern borders as LA RAZA “The Race” fascist party expands Mexico’s anchor baby welfare state from border to open border.
More significant still, a former Mexican official, Jorge Castañeda, threatened to unleash Mexican cartels onto the U.S. to retaliate for deportations of illegal immigrants and the construction of a border wall.
“When we get a call, the [emergency services] dispatcher will ask
who is the person who has overdosed. And if it’s someone who
has already been provided services twice, we’ll advise them that
we’re not going to provide further services—and we will not send
out an ambulance.”
Picard states openly the widespread sentiment in the American ruling class and among its political flunkeys—that the life of a working class person has a price tag, which is dropping every day.
Ohio councilman proposes “three strike policy” to let opioid overdosers die
By Genevieve Leigh 3 July 2017
A city councilman in Middletown, Ohio, Dan Picard, has proposed a “three strike” policy for people who overdose on opioids, under which those reported to have overdosed on more than two occasions would be denied emergency treatment the third time. He made the proposal at a City Council meeting on June 20.
In what would amount to state-sanctioned murder, emergency responders would not be dispatched and the opioid user would be left to die. As Picard told the Washington Post on Wednesday: “When we get a call, the [emergency services] dispatcher will ask who is the person who has overdosed. And if it’s someone who has already been provided services twice, we’ll advise them that we’re not going to provide further services—and we will not send out an ambulance.”
Like hundreds of cities and towns across the US, Middletown, located in southwestern Ohio, has been wracked by the opioid epidemic. The town, which has a population of 48,791, has already seen nearly 600 overdoses this year, which is more than it saw in all of 2016.
Defending his proposal, Picard told the press, “It’s not a proposal to solve the drug problem. My proposal is in regard to the financial survivability of our city.” He continued, “If we’re spending $2 million this year and $4 million next year and $6 million after that, we’re in trouble. We’re going to have to start laying off. We’re going to have to raise taxes.”
Picard states openly the widespread sentiment in the American ruling class and among its political flunkeys—that the life of a working class person has a price tag, which is dropping every day.
The giant pharmaceutical companies played a central role in creating the opioid epidemic. They made billions of dollars in profits by systematically and knowingly pushing highly addictive opioid medications on the population throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s.
Now the epidemic has become a concern for the ruling class, not out of any compassion for those who suffer, but because it is creating a financial burden for the state. The proposals currently working their way through Congress to drastically reduce the availability of medical care for the working class, particularly by gutting Medicaid, the primary source of funding for the treatment of drug addiction, are calculated to accomplish on a national scale what Picard is proposing for Middletown.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies continue to profit from the crisis. Part of the reason emergency care for those who overdose on opioids is so expensive is that the price of the “miracle drug” Naloxone (trade name Narcan), used to revive users from overdoses, has skyrocketed over the past decade. The popular injectable version of the drug has gone from $0.92 a dose to more than $15 since 2007. An auto-injector version is now up to more than $2,000 a dose.
The pharmaceutical companies’ price-gouging, combined with the increase in demand, has caused revenues from the sale of Naloxone to jump from $21.3 million in 2011 to $81.9 million last year, according to data from the prescription-tracking company IMS Health. It is now costing state and local governments much more money to save lives.
Picard pointed to this in a statement defending his proposal, saying, “I want to send a message to the world that you don’t want to come to Middletown to overdose because someone might not come with Narcan and save your life. We need to put a fear about overdosing in Middletown.” He continued, “John Smith obviously doesn’t care much about his life, but he’s expending a lot of resources and we can’t afford it.”
As with all social problems, the opioid epidemic is treated by the political establishment as the result of the personal failings of individuals. In fact, it, and drug abuse more generally, are the result of the increasingly dire social conditions facing broad masses of the people, under conditions of unprecedented and growing levels of social inequality. These conditions are themselves rooted in the rapacious drive of the pharmaceutical corporations and the corporate-financial elite in general for profit, intensified by the worsening crisis of the capitalist system.
Picard’s homicidal proposal has evoked an angry response from the public. Middletown City Manager Douglas Adkins wrote in a blog post Wednesday about the overwhelming backlash. “We’ve received hate mail, national news coverage and overloaded voice mail and email in-boxes,” he said.
Many health care organizations, recovery centers and advocacy groups have spoken out against Picard’s plan. Truth Pharm, a nonprofit organization that seeks to raise awareness of the issues surrounding substance abuse, released an open letter to Picard denouncing his proposal.
Alexis Pleus, the founder of Truth Pharm, wrote in the letter: “In short, our goal is to save lives, so, needless to say, we were more than appalled by your recent proposition to refuse medical treatment to overdose patients. It pains and infuriates us to see how easily you have turned human lives into dollar signs and an impact on your budget… To suggest that you withhold emergency medical response to overdose patients is manslaughter at best and premeditated murder at worst.”
Pleus spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the issues raised by Picard’s proposal. On the use of Naloxone as a solution, Pleus explained: “At first, Naloxone and Narcan seemed like a pretty fast and cheap solution to save lives. And that was true to a point. It is still a very important tool we have to help people.
“The problem is that they have never dedicated the follow-up... There is no governmental body that has given the proper resources necessary to complement the use of Naloxone. It is not a fix in itself, is not a cure to the epidemic. We set ourselves up for frustration because we keep using this life-saving device but don’t ever get to the root causes of addiction. I think ultimately the fault goes right back to each state government and the federal government as a whole.”
Pleus told reporters she wasn’t surprised that lawmakers would propose a measure not aimed at addressing the epidemic but rather at saving money. “Look at how easy it is to get legislation to pass when there is money to be made,” she said. “But try and get something through that simply helps people--it just won’t happen…this problem does not have a quick cheap fix. But still, all the while, the pharmaceutical companies are profiting, profiting, profiting.”
When asked how President Trump’s new health care plan might affect the opioid problem, Pleus said, “It will be absolutely devastating.” She continued: “At our organization we try and help people find treatment. About 80 percent of those we help have Medicaid. If they repeal it, I cannot even fathom what we will do. The new plan also will not mandate addiction treatment as part of insurance coverage. I can’t imagine turning away eight of ten people and telling them there is nothing we can do.”
The LA RAZA drug cartels haul back $100 BILLION from heroin sales.
More significant still, a former Mexican official, Jorge Castañeda, threatened to unleash Mexican cartels onto the U.S. to retaliate for deportations of illegal immigrants and the construction of a border wall.
AMERICA THE ADDICTED: 1 in 7 are addicted
CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES!
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: Heroin, Criminals, Anchor baby breeders for 18 years of gringo-paid welfare.
"Public education as a whole came under brutal attack as part of the Obama administration’s effort to shift the burden of the financial crisis onto the backs of the working class."
AMERICA THE ADDICTED: 1 in 7 are addicted
CAUTION: GRAPHIC IMAGES!
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS TO U.S.: Heroin, Criminals, Anchor baby breeders for 18 years of gringo-paid welfare.
Washington’s latest foray against sanctuary cities raises the stakes by threatening to withhold federal funding from non-compliant cities and states. One analysis estimates that the sanctuary jurisdictions of New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle could lose a combined $4.448 billion under HR 3003.
But any fiscal hit presupposes: 1) the Senate will pass the House bill and, 2) the law survives inevitable court challenges. With judges blocking President Donald Trump’s earlier effort to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities, does HR 3003 provide enough legal ammunition? Though Congress has clear constitutional authority over appropriation of funds, such facts have not always deterred activist judges.
Unwilling to wait around, Texas enacted Senate Bill 4 to strip sanctuary cities of state law-enforcement funds and hold local officials liable for non-compliance. SB 4 does not recognize localities’ right to flout state law.
'Largest medical fraud takedown in American history': More than 400 doctors, nurses and pharmacists are arrested for heathcare and opioid scams worth $1.3bn in false billing
US attorneys announce they will prosecute over 400 in medical fraud case
Attorney General Jeff Sessions calls the action the 'largest medical fraud takedown in American history'
More than 52,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2015
Nearly 300 health care providers are being suspended or banned from participating in federal health care programs
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that federal prosecutors have charged more than 400 people in taking part in medical fraud and opioid scams that totaled $1.3 billion in fraudulent billing.
Sessions said that 412 individuals will be prosecuted by his office in what he called the 'largest health care fraud takedown operation in American history' during a press conference in Washington.
Sessions noted that the case involves doctors, nurses and pharmacists that 'have chosen to violate their oaths and put greed ahead of their patients.'
Video playing bottom right...
Loaded: 0%
Progress: 0%
0:04
Pause
Unmute
Current Time0:04
/
Duration Time1:30
Fullscreen
ExpandClose
Among those charged are six Michigan doctors accused of a scheme to prescribe unnecessary opioids. A Florida rehab facility is alleged to have recruited addicts with gift cards and visits to strip clubs, leading to $58 million in false treatments and tests.
Officials said those charged in the schemes include more than 120 people involved in illegally prescribing and distributing narcotic painkillers.
Such prescription opioids are behind the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in US history.
More than 52,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2015 - a record - and experts believe the numbers have continued to rise.
'In some cases, we had addicts packed into standing-room-only waiting rooms waiting for these prescriptions,' acting FBI director Andrew McCabe said. 'They are a death sentence, plain and simple.'
+1
More than 52,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2015 (stock photo of prescription painkillers)
Nearly 300 health care providers are being suspended or banned from participating in federal health care programs, Sessions said.
'They seem oblivious to the disastrous consequences of their greed. Their actions not only enrich themselves, often at the expense of taxpayers, but also feed addictions and cause addictions to start,' Sessions said.
Health care fraud sweeps like Thursday's happen each year across the country, but law enforcement officials continue to grapple over the best way to fight the problem.
The people charged were illegally billing Medicare, Medicaid and the health insurance program that serves members of the armed forces, retired service members and their families, the Justice Department said.
The allegations include claims that those charged billed the programs for unnecessary drugs that were never purchased or given to the patients.
EXCLUSIVE: Cartel Violence Spills into Texas as Gunmen Storm Past U.S. Border Security
PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Coahuila — Two cartel gunmen fleeing from a raging gun battle with Mexican authorities ran through U.S. border security measures twice as they crossed into Texas and back; using their vehicle to ram barriers.
The cartel gunmen were able to cross into Eagle Pass through International Bridge #2 by running the security checkpoints. Shortly after they crossed back through a second bridge that was closed at the time. The gunmen used their vehicle to ram security barriers and later ditched it escape on foot.
The violence began overnight near the rural community of Nava, Coahuila, when authorities received information about two gunmen riding in a late model white Toyota Tundra, information provided to Breitbart Texas by Coahuila law enforcement revealed.
State police officers with a special investigative unit spotted the vehicle along Boulevard Carranza near the intersection with Airport Boulevard in the border city of Piedras Negras. Officers tried to pull over the gunmen but were met with gunfire as they sped off–setting off a high-speed chase.
The gunmen were able to reach the main plaza in Piedras Negras, Plaza de Las Culturas, where they once again engaged law enforcement in a short firefight. As they made their way to the International Bridge #2, gunmen rammed their way through other vehicles and barriers as they used the inbound lanes through Mexican Customs to reach the U.S. side of the bridge.
Coahuila state police officers contacted their counterparts in Texas. Before American authorities were able to apprehend the shooters, they made their way to another international bridge, locally known as Bridge 1. While the crossing was closed at the time, the gunmen were able to ram through the security barriers and make their way back into Mexico.
The Mexican Army, Fuerza Coahuila, and local police officers had been combing the area however, they were able to make their way to a nearby neighborhood called Mundo Nuevo where they abonded the vehicle and fled on foot. Authorities were able to locate the white SUV that had multiple bullet holes and extensive body damage.
During the initial gun battle and chase, two Coahuila police officers from the investigative unit and six officers with Fuerza Coahuila were injured. The six officers with Fuerza Coahuila appear to have been injured in a crash during the high-speed chase. Authorities have not revealed how the two other officers were injured.
Breitbart Texas reached out to CBP for comment and the agency did not respond in any manner.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by Coahuila’s “J.M. Martinez” and Breitbart Texas’ Ildefonso Ortiz.
No comments:
Post a Comment