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!!!
Monday, December 18, 2017
DOES WALL STREET STEAL MORE FROM AMERICA THAN CHINA? Protecting intellectual property in America is harder than ever
Protecting intellectual property in America is harder than ever
BY SCOTT MOSKOWITZ, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 12/07/17 08:20 AM EST 22
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
Ever feel like you’ve come up with a million-dollar idea that could make people’s lives easier or more productive? Unfortunately, American inventors are discovering that developing the next great idea here is not worth the trouble, and they are either giving up or looking abroad to places like China for protection.
Innovative new ideas have always fueled America’s dynamic economy. For courageous individuals willing to go out on a limb with their invention, our strong patent system has always provided the safety net — until now.
Over the last few years, a series of ill-conceived laws, harmful policies and bad court decisions have decimated the framework established by the Constitution to protect inventions. The purposeful demolition of America’s patent system, once the envy of the world, has left small players unable to protect their work.
The playing field has tilted increasingly against individuals, small businesses and universities with good ideas. Large corporations are finding it easier to steal intellectual property than to pay for it.In much the same way people download digital content without paying and with no fear of retribution, large corporations brazenly infringe on inventors’ patents.
This carefully orchestrated campaign to weaken the patent system did not happen overnight, but it has effectively rendered small inventors defenseless against big players with deep pockets.
The deceptively titled America Invents Act that Congress passed in 2011 established the Patent Trial and Review Board (PTAB), which can invalidate patents upheld by federal courts using a lower standard of evidence. Because the PTAB has nullified 80 percent of the patent claims it has reviewed, it has the well-earned nickname of “Patent Death Squad.”
Some companies are making the unorthodox decision to move their patents to Native American tribes to protect them. But more patent holders are fleeing the U.S., in a desperate search for foreign jurisdictions — such as Europe, or even China — that will better protect their ideas against theft. Where the research and the inventions go, employers and people follow.
Innovators are having to look abroad, because they cannot even seek injunctions against those infringing on their patents in the U.S. as they pursue expensive and lengthy procedures to defend their intellectual property. The U.S. Chamber’s 2017 report on global their intellectual property shows that the U.S. patent system has fallen in recent years, from first place to 10th place worldwide — equivalent to Hungary.
In a perverse twist, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office now plans to raise fees because the compromised system has killed so many patents and dissuaded so many inventors, the agency’s funding model is at risk.
Some inventors even staged a patent-burning this summer in front of the Patent and Trademark Office to demonstrate that their patents are no longer worth the paper they are printed on. Recently, the momentum has started to shift.
The nominee to be the next director of the Patent and Trademark Office, Andrei Iancu, has the professional background to recognize the current system’s failures and can curtail some of its abuses. The Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments in the Oil States case, which examines the constitutionality of whether an administrative body like the PTAB can remove a patent holder’s property rights.
And Congress has finally noticed that the law needs to be fixed. Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ala.) introduced the bipartisan STRONGER Patents Act this year that aims to repair some of the damage caused by the America Invents Act, and to make it more difficult for infringers to unravel patent protections.
But we need to act soon, or American competitiveness will continue to suffer.
Scott Moskowitz is the policy board chairman of US Inventor, a nonprofit group representing American inventors and innovators. He is also the founder and managing director of Blue Spike LLC.
CHINA SHOCK: Study Shows Chinese Imports Caused ‘Deaths’ of American Factories
The flood of Chinese imports into the U.S. does not just cost jobs. It shuts down factories and businesses altogether, with devastating consequences for the communities where they are located.
After years of denial, it is now widely known that the opening of the U.S. market to Chinese imports was devastating, inflicting deep and lasting damage to many areas in the U.S. Regions most exposed to competition from China not only lost manufacturing jobs, they saw overall employment decline and never recovered. Areas with higher exposure have also been shown to have more people relying on food stamps and disability payments, more people addicted to opioids, lower rates of marriage, higher rates of political polarization, and higher rates of incarceration.
New research suggests that one of the main reasons the damage has been so deep and lasting is that the jobs lost from Chinese imports were not just from companies downsizing or becoming more efficient but from closing manufacturing plants altogether. The paper by four economists — Brian Asquith of the National Bureau of Economic Research and University of California at Irvine’s Sajana Goswami, David Neumark, and Antonio Rodriguez-Lopez — finds that the so-called “China shock” operated mainly through “deaths of establishments.”
This makes the job losses from the China shock fundamentally different from other adverse shocks, such as recessions, that can hit the U.S. labor market. In those situations, job losses are primarily from contractions of the number of people employed at a plant, rather than the outright closing of a plant.
“From a local-labor markets point of view, regional economies are likely to suffer more from deaths than from contractions (which tend to be one-off events or cyclical) because closed establishments can more permanently reduce local employment,” the authors write.
The economists say that many of the workers thrown out of
work because of “establishment deaths” are later
“reabsorbed” into the “nontradeable” sector, mainly through
the births of new establishments. What is not explored in the
paper is that many of these nontradeable sector jobs,
however, a likely to be lower-paying service sector jobs.
TRICKLE UP ECONOMICS
"Additionally, the report found that concentration of wealth in the
hands of the top one percent has risen sharply, particularly in the
US, Russia and China. In the US, the wealth share monopolized by
the top one percent rose from 22 percent in 1980 to 39 percent; in
China it doubled from 15 percent to 30 percent; and in Russia it
went from 22 percent to 43 percent."
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a TRILLION DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to
the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
*
EVEN BEFORE HE TOOK OFFICE, BARACK OBAMA HAD SUCKED IN MORE BRIBES FROM CRIMINAL BANKSTERS THAN ANY OTHER PRESIDENT IN HISTORY!
Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors
are employees of financial industry giants -Goldman Sachs
($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207)
and Citigroup ($358,054).
World’s richest one percent capture twice as much income growth as the bottom half
By Niles Niemuth 15 December 2017
The inaugural World Inequality Report published on Thursday by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, Facundo Alvaredo and Lucas Chancel documents the rise in global income and wealth inequality since 1980.
The report covers up to 2016, leaving out the last year, in which the stock market has soared on the expectation that the US will enact massive tax cuts, providing yet another windfall for the rich.
The report found that between 1980 and 2016 the world’s richest one percent captured twice the income growth as the bottom half of the world’s population, contributing to a significant rise in global inequality.
The data shows that the world’s top 0.1 percent alone captured as much growth as the bottom half, and the top 0.001 percent, just 76,000 people worldwide, received 4 percent of global income growth. Meanwhile those in the 50th to 99th percentiles worldwide, which the report refers to as the “squeezed bottom 90 percent in the US and Western Europe,” encompassing the working class in the world’s advanced economies, experienced anemic growth rates.
The report is based on tax data and other financial information collected for the World Wealth and Income Database by more than 100 researchers in 70 countries. It shows that income inequality has either risen or remained stable in every country.
Additionally, the report found that concentration of wealth in the hands of the top one percent has risen sharply, particularly in the US, Russia and China. In the US, the wealth share monopolized by the top one percent rose from 22 percent in 1980 to 39 percent; in China it doubled from 15 percent to 30 percent; and in Russia it went from 22 percent to 43 percent.
In terms of income, the top ten percent captured 37 percent of national income in Europe, 41 percent in China, 47 percent in the United States-Canada, 54 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, 55 percent in Brazil and India, and 61 percent in the Middle East.
Notably, Russia, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, had the lowest level of inequality in 1980, with the top ten percent accounting for 20 percent of income. There was a sharp spike in inequality following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91, with half of all national income going to the top ten percent in less than five years. Russia has now reached parity with the United States, returning to levels of inequality that prevailed a century ago under the rule of the tsar.
The report also shows that there has been a significant divergence in inequality levels between the United States and Europe since 1980, when the top one percent claimed 10 percent of income in both regions. As of 2016, the top one percent in Europe claimed 12 percent of income, while in the United States its share had doubled to 20 percent.
The top one percent and the bottom half of the American population have essentially flipped positions. While the bottom 50 percent received 20 percent of national income in 1980, that figure declined steadily to just 13 percent by 2016. Conversely, the top one percent steadily increased their claim on national income, from 10 percent to 20 percent in less than two generations.
Average annual income for the bottom half of the US population, adjusted for inflation, has remained at $16,500 for the last 40 years, while the top one percent have seen their average income triple from $430,000 to $1.3 million.
The report’s authors note in an op-ed published in the Guardian that the United States is an outlier among the advanced economies, with a surge in income and wealth inequality over the last four decades that has developed into a “second Gilded Age.”
The authors attribute the dramatic difference between the US and Europe to a “perfect storm of radical policy changes” in the US. They argue that the growth of inequality in the US has been exacerbated by a number of factors, including a tax system that has become less progressive over time, a federal minimum wage that has not kept up with inflation, shrinking unions, deregulation of the finance industry and increasingly unequal access to higher education. They warn that the Republican tax cuts will “turbocharge” the further rise of inequality.
Despite its explosive content, the latest report on inequality was buried by the media, relegated to a small headline in the Business Day section of the New York Times and posted well down the Guardian’s front page in the world news section. The vast and ever-growing level of social inequality around the world is not what the ruling classes in the US, Europe and elsewhere want to talk about.
Social inequality in the United States is being ignored and covered up by the political system. The Democrats are entirely focused on issues of sex and the anti-Russia campaign, even as the Republicans are pushing to finalize tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy by the end of the year.
However, under the surface of official life, class conflict is growing. The World Inequality Report reveals that the contradictions of the capitalist system find expression in every country.
In concluding their report, the authors refer to policy decisions that could be adopted to reverse the growth of social inequality, promoting the illusion that a fair distribution of resources can be achieved under capitalism through various liberal reform measures and appeals to capitalist governments to enact progressive tax measures.
There is, however, no “reform” faction in the ruling class. The growth of inequality in the US has been carried out under both Democrats and Republicans, aided and abetted by the trade unions. In Europe, the ruling elite is moving rapidly to catch up to the United States through the implementation of labor “reform” measures, the destruction of social programs and the redistribution of wealth to the rich.
The response of the ruling class to growing social opposition is not reform, but repression. A movement against inequality requires the building of a socialist movement of the international working class on the basis of a socialist program to appropriate the wealth of the corporate and financial oligarchy, transform the banks and giant corporations into democratically controlled public utilities, and reorganize economic life on the basis of social need.
Portland billionaire attacks city’s homeless
By Hector Cordon 14 December 2017
With last month’s publication in the opinion section of The Oregonian of an anti-homeless rant by Columbia Sportswear president and CEO Tim Boyle, an effort has begun to shift the response to city's the homeless crisis to a more open policy of criminalization.
Days after Boyle's op-ed was posted, Portland's Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, who has been barred by multiple court decisions from using sit-lie laws which ban sitting or lying on sidewalks or in other public spaces, side stepped the issue by implementing an eight-block “pedestrian use zone,” restricting the use of sidewalks to pedestrians and mobility devices only.
The mayor's bureaucratic maneuver effectively accomplished the aim of sit-lie laws: excluding the homeless from an area. This fact was emphasized by Wheeler’s assigning implementation of the measure to the Portland Police Bureau rather than the Transportation Department. The eight-block zone manages to encompass Boyle’s Columbia Sportswear downtown flagship store.
While Wheeler has issued statements and tweets insisting that “homelessness is not a crime” and “it’s irresponsible to conflate homelessness and crime.” However, the duplicitous content of these progressive-sounding phrases was revealed by an article in the Guardian, which noted that Boyle wrote his op-ed at Wheeler's urging. “[I]n Boyle’s telling, [Wheeler] is hoping to gain momentum to get more police on the streets.” Wheeler’s office Tuesday demanded a “correction” of this statement by the Guardian, denying any such request to Boyle.
However, in an interview with Oregon Public Radio on December 6, Boyle asserted that Wheeler had asked his help in promoting the view that “we need more police on the street in Portland.” He went on to say that he volunteered to “help him do that.” Boyle’s op-ed piece makes clear his solution to homelessness is to criminalize the victims.
He wrote, “Wheeler has put forward a proposal to the Portland City Council to add 80 police officers. Frankly, based on our employees’ experiences, we would suggest even more support for the Portland police, but Wheeler’s proposal is an important step and something that deserves prompt support.”
Boyle, with a net worth of nearly $2 billion, was a significant donor to Wheeler’s election campaign. He took the opportunity provided by the intransigently right-wing Oregonian to, indeed, conflate homelessness with crime, at one point describing thefts from employees’ cars as “our laptop donation program.”
Since then, he has attempted to deny that his opinion piece—in which he threatened to move his Sorel business out of the city—was anti-homeless. However, his reference to “individuals camping in our doorway” cannot be interpreted as anything but hostility to homeless people. Boyle’s specific and immediate call for deploying increased numbers of police against the homeless on Portland’s streets contrasts sharply with the vague and completely vacuous “liberal solution” he offered in a follow-up article in the Oregonian. “We cannot solve all problems, and we will likely never address all the needs related to homelessness, but as Oregonians we can make meaningful progress if our leaders (business, government, non-profits and others) have the will to do so,” he wrote.
The latest “point in time” count of homelessness—conducted nationally every two years—shows that Portland’s homeless population has increased by 10 percent from the 2015 count. Notorious for carrying out the count in January, when most homeless seek whatever accommodations can be had in order to avoid freezing in the winter weather, the count nonetheless shows a shocking number of 4,177 homeless.
In the midst of skyrocketing housing costs, alongside stagnant and low-wage jobs, both Section 8 and Public Housing lists are shown as closed on the Home Forward web site. In cold bureaucratic language, it informs those unfortunate enough to be ill-housed or homeless that “Home Forward (HF) is not accepting Public Housing waiting list applications at this time. This waiting list was last open for specific properties for three days in June 2016. There is no notice of when this waiting list will reopen.” The same canned message was repeated for Section 8 housing.
The City Council’s answer to homelessness is to implement market-based principles—normally an approach associated with the Republican right. According to Portland’s Homeless Challenge magazine, “‘We can’t just put people in housing,’ says Commissioner Saltzman. ‘It wouldn’t be sustainable. We have more of a balanced approach.’ The best solution, Saltzman believes, is getting real-estate developers to set aside units for low-income people.” A “balanced approach” that harmonizes well with the lack of regulation over rent increases and evictions. Oregon law prohibits the imposition of rent controls.
A report by the Oregon Employment Department illustrates the growth of social polarization, alongside homelessness. “The fastest growing sectors, over the last ten years in the Portland region, are low wage jobs ($21,000 for the average hospitality position) and the high wage jobs ($133,000 for the average high tech manufacturing position), growing at 18 percent and 13 percent respectively.” The author, Christian Kaylor, added, “It’s a classic tale of economic divide. And that divide is growing.”
According to Forbes, there is one other billionaire in Oregon in addition to Boyle, Phil Knight of Nike. His worth is $28.2 billion. The cost to fully resolve Portland’s homeless crisis over the next 20 years is estimated at $500 million per year, or one third of the combined wealth of these two individuals. Meanwhile, the combined wealth of the three richest billionaires, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Warren Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway) exceeds that of the bottom half of the US population.
Currently, the city is encouraging the homeless to find shelter as nighttime temperatures plummet to below freezing levels, in order to avoid the nation- and worldwide scandal that plagued Portland at the beginning of the year. In the first ten days of 2017, four homeless people and one newborn froze to death as the Democratic Party-dominated City Council failed to anticipate and make plans for the readily predictable disaster.
POST ON YOUR FACEBOOK AND EMAIL THIS LINK TO YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY.
"Today, each of the top 5 billionaires owns as much as
750 million people, more than the total population of Latin
America and double the population of the US."....AND THEY
ALL WANT AMNESTY, OPEN BORDERS, NO E-VERIFY
AND NON-ENFORCEMENT TO KEEP WAGES
DEPRESSED!
Portland billionaire attacks city’s homeless
By Hector Cordon 14 December 2017
With last month’s publication in the opinion section of The Oregonian of an anti-homeless rant by Columbia Sportswear president and CEO Tim Boyle, an effort has begun to shift the response to city's the homeless crisis to a more open policy of criminalization.
Days after Boyle's op-ed was posted, Portland's Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, who has been barred by multiple court decisions from using sit-lie laws which ban sitting or lying on sidewalks or in other public spaces, side stepped the issue by implementing an eight-block “pedestrian use zone,” restricting the use of sidewalks to pedestrians and mobility devices only.
The mayor's bureaucratic maneuver effectively accomplished the aim of sit-lie laws: excluding the homeless from an area. This fact was emphasized by Wheeler’s assigning implementation of the measure to the Portland Police Bureau rather than the Transportation Department. The eight-block zone manages to encompass Boyle’s Columbia Sportswear downtown flagship store.
While Wheeler has issued statements and tweets insisting that “homelessness is not a crime” and “it’s irresponsible to conflate homelessness and crime.” However, the duplicitous content of these progressive-sounding phrases was revealed by an article in the Guardian, which noted that Boyle wrote his op-ed at Wheeler's urging. “[I]n Boyle’s telling, [Wheeler] is hoping to gain momentum to get more police on the streets.” Wheeler’s office Tuesday demanded a “correction” of this statement by the Guardian, denying any such request to Boyle.
However, in an interview with Oregon Public Radio on December 6, Boyle asserted that Wheeler had asked his help in promoting the view that “we need more police on the street in Portland.” He went on to say that he volunteered to “help him do that.” Boyle’s op-ed piece makes clear his solution to homelessness is to criminalize the victims.
He wrote, “Wheeler has put forward a proposal to the Portland City Council to add 80 police officers. Frankly, based on our employees’ experiences, we would suggest even more support for the Portland police, but Wheeler’s proposal is an important step and something that deserves prompt support.”
Boyle, with a net worth of nearly $2 billion, was a significant donor to Wheeler’s election campaign. He took the opportunity provided by the intransigently right-wing Oregonian to, indeed, conflate homelessness with crime, at one point describing thefts from employees’ cars as “our laptop donation program.”
Since then, he has attempted to deny that his opinion piece—in which he threatened to move his Sorel business out of the city—was anti-homeless. However, his reference to “individuals camping in our doorway” cannot be interpreted as anything but hostility to homeless people. Boyle’s specific and immediate call for deploying increased numbers of police against the homeless on Portland’s streets contrasts sharply with the vague and completely vacuous “liberal solution” he offered in a follow-up article in the Oregonian. “We cannot solve all problems, and we will likely never address all the needs related to homelessness, but as Oregonians we can make meaningful progress if our leaders (business, government, non-profits and others) have the will to do so,” he wrote.
The latest “point in time” count of homelessness—conducted nationally every two years—shows that Portland’s homeless population has increased by 10 percent from the 2015 count. Notorious for carrying out the count in January, when most homeless seek whatever accommodations can be had in order to avoid freezing in the winter weather, the count nonetheless shows a shocking number of 4,177 homeless.
In the midst of skyrocketing housing costs, alongside stagnant and low-wage jobs, both Section 8 and Public Housing lists are shown as closed on the Home Forward web site. In cold bureaucratic language, it informs those unfortunate enough to be ill-housed or homeless that “Home Forward (HF) is not accepting Public Housing waiting list applications at this time. This waiting list was last open for specific properties for three days in June 2016. There is no notice of when this waiting list will reopen.” The same canned message was repeated for Section 8 housing.
The City Council’s answer to homelessness is to implement market-based principles—normally an approach associated with the Republican right. According to Portland’s Homeless Challenge magazine, “‘We can’t just put people in housing,’ says Commissioner Saltzman. ‘It wouldn’t be sustainable. We have more of a balanced approach.’ The best solution, Saltzman believes, is getting real-estate developers to set aside units for low-income people.” A “balanced approach” that harmonizes well with the lack of regulation over rent increases and evictions. Oregon law prohibits the imposition of rent controls.
A report by the Oregon Employment Department illustrates the growth of social polarization, alongside homelessness. “The fastest growing sectors, over the last ten years in the Portland region, are low wage jobs ($21,000 for the average hospitality position) and the high wage jobs ($133,000 for the average high tech manufacturing position), growing at 18 percent and 13 percent respectively.” The author, Christian Kaylor, added, “It’s a classic tale of economic divide. And that divide is growing.”
According to Forbes, there is one other billionaire in Oregon in addition to Boyle, Phil Knight of Nike. His worth is $28.2 billion. The cost to fully resolve Portland’s homeless crisis over the next 20 years is estimated at $500 million per year, or one third of the combined wealth of these two individuals. Meanwhile, the combined wealth of the three richest billionaires, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Warren Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway) exceeds that of the bottom half of the US population.
Currently, the city is encouraging the homeless to find shelter as nighttime temperatures plummet to below freezing levels, in order to avoid the nation- and worldwide scandal that plagued Portland at the beginning of the year. In the first ten days of 2017, four homeless people and one newborn froze to death as the Democratic Party-dominated City Council failed to anticipate and make plans for the readily predictable disaster.
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