Saturday, December 30, 2017

ELDERLY AND DEAD! SWAMP KEEPER TWITTER TRUMPER ROLLS BACK FINES AGAINST NURSING HOMES AS VIOLATIONS MOUNT

Trump administration rolls back fines against nursing homes as violations mount

By Kate Randall
30 December 2017
The Trump administration is drastically cutting back fines against nursing home owners that have been cited for violations against elderly patients. The move, reported by the New York Times over the Christmas holiday weekend, comes as serious violations such as neglect and mistreatment against nursing home residents continue to rise unabated.
Donald Trump is responding to a direct request from the nursing home industry that the Medicare health insurance program’s penalty protocols be changed. “It is critical that we have relief,” wrote Mark Parkinson, president of the American Health Care Association, in a letter to then president-elect Trump in a letter in December 2016.
In keeping with the administration’s slashing of rules and regulations which impinge on the profiteering of big business, under new rules Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) regulators are now being discouraged from giving nursing homes fines if a violation—even for the most serious cases of mistreatment—was a “one-time mistake,” according to the Times.
Since 2013, nearly 6,500 nursing homes, or four of every 10, have been cited at least once for a serious violation, according to federal records. According to Kaiser Health News (KHN), basic steps to prevent infections—such as washing hands, isolation of contagious patients and keeping sick nurses and aides away from residents—are routinely ignored in nursing homes across the US.
A KHN analysis of four years of federal inspection records showed that while 74 percent of nursing homes have been cited for failing to properly control infections, disciplinary action such as substantial fines are rare. Even before the Trump administration began quashing penalties over the course of 2017, only 1 in 75 homes found in violation has received a high-level citation.
CMS officials have made the blatantly false claim that the changes in penalizing nursing home owners are being made in patients’ interests. “Rather than spending quality time with their patients, the providers are spending time complying with regulations that get in the way of caring for their patients and doesn’t increase the quality of care they provide,” Dr. Kate Goodrich, director of clinical standards and quality at CMS, told the Times.
According to federal records examined by KHN, infections cause a quarter of the medical injuries Medicare beneficiaries experience in nursing homes. By one government estimate, a staggering 380,000 deaths a year may be the result of health care-associated infections in facilities for the elderly.
It is under these scandalous conditions that nursing homes are being given less than a slap on the wrist for serious violations endangering patients’ lives. The spread of antibiotic-resistant germs such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) have become a major public health issue, but CMS claims that fines for most infection-control violations are not warranted because they do not pose a certain danger to patients.
According to the Times, CMS insists that if an inspector observed a nurse not washing his or her hands while caring for a resident, a lower-level citation was justified “unless there was an actual negative resident outcome, or there was likelihood of a serious resident outcome.” How such a causal relationship between infection-control lapses and “negative” or “serious” resident outcome is to be determined is not explained.
A July memo from CMS discouraged directors of state agencies from issuing daily fines to nursing homes for violations that began before an inspection, advising a one-time fine be issued instead. This one change means that many nursing homes would be protected from accruing fines above the maximum per-instance fine of $20,965, even for mistakes in care that could potentially result in infections and death.
The low wages, poor training and overwork of nursing home staff play a direct role in endangering patient safety. According to inspection records examined by KHN, nurses and aides are often not familiar with basic safety protocols, such as wearing protective clothing when coming into contact with a contagious patient. In a rush to care for a burdensome patient load, basic precautions such as hand washing are often not taken.
Staff who are not paid for sick days are under pressure to come to work sick, further jeopardizing patient health, leading to avoidable accidents and falls, mistreatment, infections, neglect and bedsores. KHN reports on the case of Georgina Morris, a resident of Astoria Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Sylmar, California in October 2015.
While at Astoria, Morris, 86, became infected with a virulent strain of Clostridium difficile, or C-diff, and was severely dehydrated. Her son James Morris noticed that “workers were coming in and out without washing their hands.” He insisted that she be sent to the hospital, where she was admitted for 10 days.
She has had other flare-ups of the infection requiring rehospitalization, as well as a fecal transplant, in which doctors transplant stool from a healthy patient into her intestines to introduce bacteria that counter the C-diff bacteria.
State inspectors waited for 18 months before investigating her case. Although inspectors found that Astoria workers had not cleaned their hands while treating Georgina Morris, “they could not definitively determine whether she contracted the infection there or before she arrived,” according to KHN.
Although it was the second year in a row that inspectors cited Astoria for substandard inspection control that could potentially harm residents, neither citation resulted in a financial penalty. As more and more seniors require long-term care, government changes to regulations governing nursing homes are part of a deliberate bipartisan policy that threatens the lives of elderly patients while enriching the owners of for-profit facilities.

WHEN HAVE YOU EVEN ONCE HEARD THE ADVOCATES FOR AMNESTY, DACA SURRENDER, AND OPEN BORDERS ADDRESS THE STAGGERING HOMELESSNESS IN AMERICA???


How the homeless in Los Angeles spent Christmas





A dashcam video of downtown Los Angeles on Christmas day reveals a stunning sight: hundreds of tents and lean-tos on the sidewalks that serve as shelter for the homeless.
The scene is reminiscent of a third-world country. 
The Daily Mail reported on the video:
The three-minute clip was originally published on Instagram by [L.A.] street artist Plastic Jesus[,] then on LiveLeak by Nick Stern in the 'Citizen Journalism' video category.
It had ... been live for [only] 10 hours when it was viewed nearly 40,000 times.
In one frame of the viral footage, a man can be seen pushing a wheelchair in the middle of the road.
Another wheelchair-bound man reclines listlessly on a street corner while women file their thin-looking children through the crowds.
Makeshift canopies – often simply sheets erected on poles – are packed in tightly beside one another in endless rows.
The rising cost of rent and housing in California is also forcing middle[-]class residents into alternative accommodation.
Workers end up living in their cars by the roadside[,] and hundreds of people – including nurses and chefs – sleep in parking lots in affluent areas like Santa Barbara.
For example, nursing assistant Marva Ericson has been sleeping in her Kia for the past three months.
She showers at her local YMCA[,] then gets dressed in her hospital scrubs for work.
The problem is so widespread that a Safe Parking Program was introduced in the area 12 years ago.
It allows clients to stay overnight in the parking lots of churches, not-for-profits[,] and government offices.
In Santa Barbara alone, there are 23 parking lots currently used for the program.

BLOG: LOS ANGELES' OWN FIGURES ON HOMELESSNESS PUTS THE NUMBERS AT 60,000 AND GROWING WEEKLY.


With more than 20,000 homeless people in Los Angeles, the question of what the city has been doing to create more good jobs and affordable housing needs to be asked.  The answer is precious little.  In fact, the homeless problem has been getting worse across the entire state, including San Francisco, where the city keeps spending more and more money only to see things get worse.
The city spent $275 million on homelessness and supportive housing in the fiscal year that ends Friday, up from $241 million the year before.  Starting Saturday, that annual spending is projected to hit an eye-popping $305 million.
Public Works cleanup crews were busier than ever, picking up more than 679 tons of trash from homeless tent camps since June 1, 2016[] and collecting more than 100,000 used syringes from the camps in that time span.
But, despite all the money and effort, reality on the streets hasn't improved. In many ways, homelessness in San Francisco is as bad as ever.
Just-released numbers from January's homeless count, conducted every two years as a requirement to receive federal funds, show a very slight decrease. The drop is attributed to fewer families and youths among the homeless, while the number of single adults living on the street – the most visible – has risen.
Cities are rapidly becoming the domain of the very rich and the very poor.  Even those people working at decent jobs can't afford to live in the city in which they are employed.  Rent control, stupid zoning policies, corruption, and fierce opposition to building any kind of housing have driven the working and middle classes out of urban areas.  Along with them has gone the tax base that supports city services.  So the cities keep raising taxes on businesses and the upper middle class, eventually driving them out of town, too.  It is the "blue model" of Democratic governance, and there has rarely been better evidence of its failure.
Rather than create conditions where affordable housing and good jobs can exist, they sweep the homeless problem under the rug, hiding the true extent of the effect of their rancid policies 
The video is an eye-opener.

Cold wave proves lethal for US homeless, poor

By Patrick Martin
29 December 2017
A record cold wave extending from the Upper Midwest through the Great Lakes and into New England contributed to numerous deaths across the United States Christmas week. Homeless people and the elderly were particularly at risk, but the greater stress imposed by severe weather has yet again laid bare the social crisis affecting all sections of the working class.
Deaths due to hypothermia (exposure to extreme cold) were reported in Chicago; Cincinnati, Ohio; Rapid City, South Dakota; and Ogden, Utah over the Christmas holiday period.
The victim in Chicago was a 62-year-old man, whose name has not been released, found unresponsive in his car the day after Christmas. His was the fourth death in Chicago attributed to exposure since the current cold season began in late October. The other victims were all men suffering from multiple health problems aggravated by alcoholism.
The man found dead Tuesday at a bus stop in downtown Cincinnati, 55-year-old Kenneth Martin, was homeless. In Rapid City, Alan Jack, aged 69, was found dead outdoors early Christmas morning. The 79-year-old woman, Verna Marriott, found dead the morning of December 23 in Ogden was suffering from dementia and had wandered from the home she shared with her daughter’s family in the middle of the night.
An even greater death toll comes from the rising number of house fires, frequently triggered by space heaters or other precarious methods of keeping warm in severe weather. These fires for the most part represent the intersection of the cold wave with the bad housing conditions endured by impoverished layers of the working class.
Tweleve people died Thursday night, including a one-year-old child, as the result of a fire which ripped through an apartment building in the Bronx, New York City's poorest borough. While a cause of the fire has yet to be officially determined, initial reports indicate that the fire was caused by a space heater. The fire comes less than two weeks after a house fire in Brooklyn killed a mother and her three children.
Two fires in eastern Iowa over the weekend killed nine people, including four children, bringing the total number of fire deaths in 2017 in Iowa to 51, the highest level in more than a decade.
Four members of one family died in a house fire early Christmas Day in Blue Grass, just west of Davenport. One of the four residents escaped but later died in the hospital. The other three died inside their home.
A second fire in a Davenport mobile home December 21 killed a mother and her four children. The mobile home had no working smoke detectors and, because it was owner-occupied, was not subject to fire department inspection.
Kelsey Clain, 23, and two of her children, Jayden Smead, five, and Carson Smead, two, died at the scene. Isabella Smead, nine months, died in hospital December 24, and Skylar Smead, four, died similarly on Tuesday, December 26.
In the neighboring state of Minnesota, a house fire Tuesday in Hibbing killed four people, including two grandparents, Steven and Patricia Gillitzer, and two grandsons, Todd Gillitzer, nine, and Anteus Adams, three. A third grandson, Jonathan Gillitzer, eight, was rescued by his grandfather and survived, but Steven, a retired firefighter, died trying to save other members of his family.
Firefighters from five departments fought the blaze in temperatures of around 20 below zero Fahrenheit, with wind chills as low as 35 below. The house had smoke detectors which were sounding when firefighters arrived at the scene. There were two other fire deaths in Minnesota since Christmas Day, bringing the total for the year to 63, the most since 2002.
Two children were killed in a house fire in East Franklin, Pennsylvania, northeast of Pittsburgh, on Thursday morning, December 28. The 13-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy were caught by a fast-moving fire, but five other residents—the children’s mother, her boyfriend, and three siblings escaped by jumping out second-floor windows. The day before, a 16-year-old boy was killed in a house fire in nearby South Bend, Pennsylvania.
Cold weather stretching into the southern portion of the Plains states created treacherous driving conditions. Four women—two teenagers, a 20-year-old and a 47-year-old—died Tuesday in a car crash near Abilene, Kansas caused by icy roads. The car hit a guardrail on a bridge and went over, landing 25 feet below on its roof, according to the state highway patrol.
The cold shattered records throughout the affected area, home to half the population of the United States. International Falls, Minnesota, proverbially the coldest spot in the continental US, set a record low of minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit Wednesday morning, four degrees below the 1924 record. Detroit tied its previous record of minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit the same day.
The National Weather Service issued extreme-cold advisories for New England, the Northeast, the Midwest and parts of the West. The forecast for New Year’s Eve in New York City was a wind chill in negative numbers, some 40 degrees colder than normal. City officials said that emergency shelter space was being opened for thousands of homeless people who might otherwise be on the streets this week.
As the cold wave set in, city after city across the United States has reported record annual death tolls among the homeless. Memorial services were held in several hundred cities on December 21—the shortest day and longest night of the year—to mark these tragic events.
The cities involved include many that might not be thought of as centers of homelessness and premature death—Charlotte, North Carolina, with 28 deaths, triple the previous high; Nashville, Tennessee, with 118 deaths; Denver, Colorado, with 232 deaths.
These grim totals were dwarfed by the figure from Los Angeles, a staggering 805 deaths among the homeless, up from 719 in 2016. The city is the center of US homelessness, and particularly of those living on the streets rather than in shelters or doubled-up with relatives and friends.
By one estimate, documented in a three-minute clip posted on Instagram on Christmas Day, there are 20,000 people living on the streets in downtown LA’s Skid Row alone. The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty visited this area as part of his recent tour of high-poverty areas in the United States, and cited it as part of his report, which concluded that for many millions of people, “The American Dream is the American Illusion.”



Washington, D.C. (December 28, 2017) - An analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies of newly released Census Bureau data shows that 1.03 million immigrants (legal and illegal) settled in the United States in the first six months of 2016.  Based on prior patterns, a total of 1.8 million immigrants likely came in all of 2016.  The data comes from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and shows a dramatic rebound in the number of new immigrants settling in the country, since bottoming out in 2011, when new arrivals fell after the Great Recession.  Newly arrived immigrants include new green card holders (permanent residents), long-term term “temporary” visitors (e.g. guest workers and foreign students), new asylum seekers, as well as new illegal immigrants.

As Steven Camarota, the Center’s Director of Research and co-author of the report observes, “These dramatic increases are truly extraordinary. Our generous legal immigration system allows in a huge number of immigrants and then permits them to sponsor their relatives creating a multiplier effect. This chain migration has contributed to nearly 14 million immigrants settling here between 2006 to 2016.  The numbers have profound implications for American schools, taxpayers, workers as well as our culture and national security.  Yet the whole system is allowed to run largely on autopilot with few asking whether any of this makes sense for our country.”

View the entire analysis at: https://cis.org/Report/18-Million-Immigrants-Likely-Arrived-2016-Matching-Highest-Level-US-History 
  • More than one million new immigrants (legal and illegal) settled in the country in the first six months of 2016.  This represents a 13 percent increase over the same period in 2015, a 24 percent increase over 2014, and a 53 percent increase over the first half of 2011.    

  • Based on past patterns, it seems almost certain that when data becomes available for all of 2016 it will show 1.8 million new immigrants arrived in 2016, matching 1999 —the highest level of new immigration in a single year in American history.

  • The 1.8 million immigrants who likely came in 2016 and the 1.6 million who came in 2015 are a continuation of a dramatic rebound in immigration since 2011.    In 2014, 1.5 million came, in 2013 1.3 million arrived, in 2012 it was 1.2 million and in 2011 1.1 million new immigrants settled in the country.

  • Regions showing the most dramatic increase in new arrivals between 2011 and 2015 are Central America (up 132 percent), South America (up 114 percent), the Caribbean (up 64 percent), and the Middle East and South Asia both up 52 percent.  South Asia includes Indian, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

  • Mexico remains the top sending country, with 190,000 immigrants (legal and illegal) settling in the United States in 2015, and 216,000 likely coming in all of 2016.  While the number of new arrivals from Mexico has roughly doubled since 2011, the number coming remains well below the annual level more than decade ago.

  • The dramatic increase in new immigrants settling in the United States in recent years is primarily driven by the nation’s generous legal immigration system, both long-term temporary visa holders (e.g. guest workers and foreign students) and new permanent residents (green cards).

  • There is also evidence that the arrival of new illegal immigrants may have also rebounded in the last few years.  The number of new less-educated younger immigrants arriving each year from Latin American roughly doubled between 2011 and 2016.  However, the level remains well below what it was before the recession.

  • The decision to admit large numbers of unaccompanied minors at the southern border, along with the adults traveling with them, likely accounts for some of the increase in new illegal immigration, particularly from Central America.

Adios, California           
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. 
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.

Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. 
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." 
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. 
And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.


JUDICIAL WATCH

The true cost of all that “cheap” Mexican labor is staggering!

Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion a Year




PEW
MAP OF MUSLIM OCCUPATION OF EUROPE

MAP OF MEXICAN OCCUPATION of U.S.




HOMELESS CRISIS IN LOS ANGELES, MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST

 

CITY, WORSENS BY THE DAY….        Approximates the great depression

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/homeless-crisis-in-mexicos-second.html

 

 

93% of the murders in Los Angeles are by Mexicans


 

HOMELESS AMERICA’S HOUSING CRISIS as 40 million illegals have climbed U.S. open borders.

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/homeless-in-america-hundreds-of.html

 

EVERY AMERICAN (Legal) only one paycheck and two illegals away from living in their cars.

 




No decline in Michigan poverty since the Great Recession


By Debra Watson
28 December 2017

Despite a drastic fall in the official unemployment rate for the state the same percentage of Michigan households are living below the poverty line today as did after the onset of the Great Recession in December of 2007.

According to new income and poverty statistics from the US Census Bureau released in early December, Michigan’s poverty rate was 16.3 percent at the end of 2016, the same annual rate calculated as an average for the five-years from January 2008 through December 2012. The current rate is not much lower than the peak annual poverty rate of 16.9 percent reported for the five-year period of 2010-14.

Unemployment has been below five percent in the state since the end of 2015, down from a post-recession peak of 14.5 percent in 2009. However, this month Michigan unemployment ticked up slightly, to 4.5 percent.

The proliferation of low-paying temporary and part-time jobs in the auto industry, a process enshrined in the sellout contract imposed by the UAW in 2015, has been a key factor in the general decline in living standards in Michigan. According to data recently reported by the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget wages in manufacturing jobs in the state are down by $2.00 an hour, from a high of $22.73 before the crash.

Behind the apparent contradiction between declining unemployment rates and the ongoing high official poverty level is the massive and increasing income and wealth inequality in the US. As Karl Marx established over a century ago, poverty at one pole of society is complemented by obscene levels of wealth at the other. The three top American plutocrats, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffet and the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, now own more wealth than the bottom half of the US population, 160 million people.

Like Trump’s glorification of the ever-rising bubble in the stock market, Obama pointed to job growth when characterizing his administration as “the best time to be alive.” Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder and the Democratic Mayor of Detroit Mike Duggan have incessantly boasted of the declining unemployment and job creation as signals of a recovering economy.
Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal recently touted that Michigan had “increased sharply” its “capital investment and hiring.” The paper praised policies that repealed personal-property taxes for manufacturers and right-to-work legislation, policies taken from the Republican playbook and implemented in the state.
The latest Census figures demonstrate that poverty remains a chronic condition in Michigan despite this supposed resurgence in the state’s economy. Even so, the official poverty rate grossly underestimates the depth of economic want.
In the US the official poverty level is not measured as a percentage of median income, as it is in many other developed countries, but on a far narrower measure related to food costs. Poverty for a family of three is pegged at a derisory $20,000 a year, far below sixty percent of Michigan’s current median household income of about $52,400 and drastically below the amount needed to support a family.
Sustained high rates of poverty over nearly a decade have had devastating personal implications. A family’s meagre resources can dwindle as successive years’ income deficits are never offset with rising income. They have had an equally devastating societal impact.
The five-year Census Bureau American Community Series (ACS) rolling averages from the December report supplement annual poverty and income statistics released by the Census’ Current Population Series in September. The greater sample sizes in the five-year averages allow for more accuracy and sufficient data to communities with smaller populations.
There are smaller communities in the state where there are indications poverty has increased dramatically. The large increases in poverty in these small communities indicate how a relatively small economic disruption can have a huge effect on living standards for a village or town.
For example, some villages in the Upper Peninsula with populations in the hundreds saw double digit increases. In Baldwin, which is located toward the middle of the state’s lower peninsula, poverty increased from a third of its one thousand plus residents in poverty in 2008-2012 to well over half now.
The December ACS release shows that in the five-year look-back from the end of 2016, there was an increase in poverty in half of Michigan’s communities of all sizes over the average recorded in the five years that followed the onset of the recession. Communities located throughout the state saw such increases.
Flint and other cities such as Jackson, Lansing, Detroit, Muskegon, Bay City and Ann Arbor showed small increases in their poverty rate. Other cities with comparable population sizes had poverty rates that declined, albeit slightly, including Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and Saginaw.
Detroit, Michigan’s largest city, recorded a shockingly high official poverty rate of a 39.4 percent using the five-year ACS average. The city’s poverty rate was one percentage point higher than the 38.1 percent average for the years 2008 through 2012.
Whole cities with substantially sized populations like Detroit and Flint have average poverty rates that are more than twice the state poverty rate. The high rates in some cities reach the level of poverty concentration that is utilized by social scientists to identify neighborhoods endemic to urban areas where pervasive poverty seriously debilitates families and social structure.
Inequality is driving communities to be divided by income like never before in recent history. The growth in concentrated poverty nationwide was noted in a Brookings Institution report last year. According to the report, between 2005-09 and 2010-14 the number of such high poverty neighborhoods in the US, where more than forty percent of households are below the official poverty line, grew by more than 4,300.
By the end of 2016 Detroit, along with Cleveland, had a poverty rate a full ten percentage points higher than the city with the third highest poverty rate in the country, Philadelphia. Detroit Democratic Mayor Mike Duggan’s recent re-election campaign relied on the narrative of an ongoing “Detroit comeback” based on highly concentrated downtown real estate investment.
Detroit’s poverty statistics present a window into the effect of exploding growth in temporary and part-time jobs and parallel wage stagnation and how it has affected workers struggling in the lowest-paying jobs.
Thirty-six percent of Detroit residents now work for less than $15,000 a year. Twenty-five percent of residents do not have access to a car. Industrial jobs have hemorrhaged out of the city over the nine years since the recession. Suburban jobs require serious time and expense to reach as the mass transit system in the area is barely functional.
Two of the cities in Michigan where poverty rates were even higher than Detroit’s are actually enclaves of Detroit and would cause a higher rate and higher increase in the poverty rate for the Detroit inner-city area if their data was included. Hamtramck, a small enclave of Detroit has a poverty rate of 49.7 percent, up from 44.6 percent in the years immediately after the recession started. The other municipal enclave, Highland Park, has a poverty rate of 51.1 percent, up from 46.7 percent in the earlier years.


A Tale of Two Op-Eds
By Jason Richwine
The Corner at National Review Online, December 21, 2017
. . .
How about restricting low-skill immigration to encourage recruitment of Americans? No, Furman says, because — well, actually, he does not mention immigration at all, not even to dismiss its importance. Omitting the i-word in discussions of labor-force dropout is an unfortunate habit on both the left and the right. Amy Wax and I wrote our Inquirer op-ed (based on a much longer essay in American Affairs) to show that employers turned to immigrants as the native work ethic declined. As evidence, we point both to the much higher labor-force participation of low-skill immigrants compared to low-skill natives, as well as to the near-universal preference expressed by employers for immigrant labor. Restricting the flow of foreign workers would generate a major incentive for business owners, politicians, and opinion leaders to reintegrate American men into the labor force. It is, in our opinion, a crucial part of any reform strategy.
. . .
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/454859/male-labor-force-participation-immigration

Study Shows E-Verify's Effectiveness
By Preston Huennekens
CIS Immigration Blog, December 8, 2017

Their study indicates that E-Verify is one of the most important enforcement tools available to states that wish to reduce their illegal alien populations. Research shows that most illegal migration is for economic reasons, and that the adoption of E-Verify and other worksite enforcement measures effectively blocks illegal aliens from procuring employment, thereby preventing many from settling down in the United States. Faced with mandatory E-Verify, the study shows that many aliens either returned to their home countries or traveled to other states that did not have employment verification regulations.
. . .
https://cis.org/Huennekens/Study-Shows-EVerifys-Effectiveness



Whom Does Congress Work For?
By John Miano
CIS Immigration Blog, December 12, 2017
. . .
When Disney replaced 350 Americans with foreign workers, forcing them to train their replacements, did we see any Florida members of Congress threaten to shut down the government unless it was stopped?

When Southern California Edison and the University of California replaced Americans with foreign workers, did any California members of Congress threaten to shut down the government unless it was stopped?

When Toys "R" Us replaced Americans with foreign workers, did any New Jersey members of Congress threaten to shut down the government unless it was stopped?

When Cargill and Best Buy replaced Americans with foreign workers, did any Minnesota members of Congress threaten to shut down the government unless it was stopped?

No.

Yet when illegal aliens working under the DACA program are threatened with losing their jobs, members of Congress spring into action:
. . .
https://cis.org/Miano/Whom-Does-Congress-Work

AMERICA'S CRIMINAL BANKSTERS LOOTED MORE THAN A TRILLION DOLLARS OF AMERICA'S REAL ESTATE WITH THEIR TOXIC MORTGAGES AND WERE REWARDED WITH NO-STRINGS BAILOUTS AND NO (REAL) REGULATION.... THEY'RE STILL LOOTING AMERICA!


"It would inevitably be met with massive and overwhelming 

opposition on the part of the financial oligarchy, which 

controls all levers of the state power, and has at its disposal 

not only the courts and politicians, but, even more decisively, 

the police and the army."

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).

Socialism and the problem of the super-rich

28 December 2017
Nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx, citing the early 19th century French economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi, observed that “the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.”
Never has this been so true as today, as day after day, week after week, reports are published showing the massive social wealth piled up by the financial oligarchy at the expense of the working class.
The latest of these is the Bloomberg Billionaires 

Index published on Friday, which showed that the 

fortunes of the world’s wealthiest 500 billionaires 

rose 23 percent over the past year, making them $1 

trillion richer than at the end of 2016. The combined 

wealth of this group reached $5.3 trillion. The gain 

of $1 trillion was four times last year’s increase.
Bloomberg found that the world’s richest 500 people as a group added an average of $2.7 billion to their fortunes every day in 2017. This means that, on average, each of these individuals added $5,400,000 every day, or $225,000 every hour—roughly equivalent to the combined income of five working-class households in the US over the course of a year.
The rapid expansion of the wealth of the financial oligarchy accompanies growing indicators of social misery at the other pole of society, exemplified in the report this month by the Centers for Disease Control that life expectancy in the US fell for the second year in a row.
Wealth concentration on the scale reflected in these reports has immense social implications. It is impossible to seriously address a single social issue without confronting the problem of economic inequality. The colossal diversion of resources into private wealth accumulation by the financial oligarchy effectively starves society of the resources it needs to deal with the most basic problems.
The United Nations estimates that it would cost $30 billion a year to eradicate world hunger, a small fraction of the wealth monopolized by the world’s billionaires. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos alone added $34.2 billion to his fortune in 2017.
America’s 159 billionaires added $315 billion to their fortunes last year, giving them a collective net worth of $2 trillion. This is double the $1 trillion spent by the US government in 2015 on health care ($980 billion), education ($70 billion) and housing ($63 billion) combined.
The funneling of these vast sums into the bank accounts of the super-rich, combined with the nearly $1 trillion set aside every year to fund the military machine that protects the oligarchy’s financial interests around the world, leaves virtually nothing to address the crumbling social and physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, rail, mass transit) of the United States.
The tax bill just passed by the Trump administration will fuel a further growth of social inequality in the US and around the world beyond what are already the highest levels since the Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century.
The economic life of the planet is determined by the drive of the ruling elite for ever greater self-enrichment. The policies of all capitalist governments and parties, whether right-wing or nominally “left,” are driven by this requirement. The unprecedented rise in the stock market has been engineered by the world’s central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, to enable the capitalist class to recoup its losses and increase its share of wealth and income in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The Fed, first under Bush and then under Obama, led the way in organizing bank bailouts and the infusion of trillions into the financial markets by means of ultra-low interest rates and “quantitative easing” money-printing operations.
To provide a certain context, the total of $5.3 trillion in assets controlled by the richest 500 people is greater than the combined GDPs of the UK and France. The $2 trillion owned by US billionaires is almost twice the GDP of Mexico, a country of 128 million people. It is also more than double the combined GDPs of Argentina, Chile and Peru.
Bezos’ gain for the year is itself only slightly less than the combined GDPs of Jamaica ($14 billion), Niger ($7.5 billion) and Zimbabwe ($16 billion), with a combined population of 40 million.
The financial elite has definite social interests, which it enforces through the wholesale buying of political parties and politicians, making democracy under capitalism nothing but a hollow shell.
What would happen in response to any serious effort to reform this state of affairs, to pursue a modest reallocation of social resources, within the framework of the capitalist system, to ensure that all people received the basic rudiments of nutrition, health care, and education?
It would inevitably be met with massive and overwhelming opposition on the part of the financial oligarchy, which controls all levers of the state power, and has at its disposal not only the courts and politicians, but, even more decisively, the police and the army.
When social reform is impossible, social revolution becomes inevitable. There is no way to avoid the conclusion that it is necessary to expropriate the wealth of the financial oligarchy.
These resources are derived from the social labor of the working class, which produces all the wealth of society. The working class is the only social force that can and must carry out this historic task. The only answer to the growth of poverty and immiseration for the masses alongside ever more obscene levels of wealth for a tiny minority is socialism, based on common ownership and democratic control of the productive forces and the rational, planned international coordination of economic life.
Barry Grey

MICHAEL BARONE:
The Lawlessness of the Obama Administration: A never-ending story

THE OBAMA YEARS: A LEGACY OF SCANDAL AND DECEPTION














Joe Biden’s bizarre disconnect regarding his scandal-ridden former boss.




           
On December 13, former vice president, Joe Biden, appeared on CBS with the hosts of “This Morning” where he peddled his new book and showered his former boss with praise. During the course of the interview, he was asked about his relationship with Obama and responded with the following; “I’ve served with eight presidents and I’ve gotten to know four of them very well. I’ve never met any president that has more character, more integrity, and more backbone than this guy does.” Then he went completely off the rails when he absurdly added; “And eight years, not a hint — not a hint — of a scandal.
What was perhaps even more outrageous than the statement itself was the fact that none of This Morning’shosts challenged the veracity of that statement and allowed it to pass without a scintilla of scrutiny, exposing yet again an extreme bias existing within elements of the establishment media. In fact, the Obama administration was among the most corrupt and scandal-ridden in recent memory. Biden’s comment merits further examination so let’s buckle up and take a stroll down memory lane.
Solyndra Scandal – The Obama administration provided this failing solar company with a $535 million stimulus-funded loan, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Taxpayer money kept pouring in despite the fact that the Office of Management and Budget warned that Solyndra was not a profitable or viable company. But it gets worse. The family foundation of billionaire George Kaiser, an Obama fundraiser, was one of Solyndra's main investors. Can you say quid pro quo? 
Veterans Affairs Scandal - Over 40 veterans needlessly died while waiting to be seen by doctors at a Phoenix VA facility. Another 1,700 veterans were forced to wait for months before being seen by medical personnel. An audit of the VA confirmed that VA officials systematically altered records and appointment schedules in a deliberate and methodical VA scheme to manipulate data to meet fabricated goals.
Operation Chokepoint Scandal – The Obama DOJ utilized the power of big government to pressure banks to cease doing business with industries with which the administration had ideological differences. Gun manufacturers and gun stores were prime targets even though they had not violated any laws. Eventually, the FDIC admitted to misconduct, bowed to pressure and significantly curtailed the discriminatory regulations after affected businesses threatened legal action. 
Gibson Guitar Scandal – Armed federal agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., seizing guitars, electronic files and other inventory including wood that was purchased in India and Madagascar. The DOJ alleged that Gibson’s had violated an obscure law known as the Lacey Act which made it a crime to violate the environmental laws of another country. Gibson produced an affidavit from government officials in Madagascar stating that Gibson had violated none of that nation’s laws. Gibson also alleged that the DOJ was misinterpreting Indian law. Gibson’s CEO was a major donor to the GOP but his competitors, who purchased the same materials and were not GOP donors, were untouched by Obama’s DOJ. As part of a settlement to drop criminal charges, Gibson was required to pay a $250,000 fine and was required to donate $50,000 to an environmental group. Gibson was eventually able to retrieve its inventory from the clutches of the DOJ.
Fast & Furious Scandal – A scheme concocted by the Obama administration that went horribly wrong. The administration lost track of some 1,400 guns that made their way into the stream of criminal enterprises including those of the Mexican drug cartels. Two of the guns were found at the scene of the shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Attorney General Eric Holder was cited for contempt of Congress for failing to turn over documents relating to the scandal. It was the first time Congress had taken such an action against a sitting Cabinet official. Seventeen Democrats joined Republicans in voting in favor of the criminal contempt resolution.
DOJ-James Rosen Scandal – FOX News journalist, James Rosen became the target of Obama’s DOJ in yet another example of extreme government overreaching. Believing that Rosen was responsible for a leak concerning a policy decision on North Korea, AG Eric Holder sought a subpoena for Rosen’s emails claiming that Rosen had broken the law “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” The government’s affidavit also accused Rosen of possibly violating the Espionage Act. It appeared that the DOJ was acting like the East German Stasi in chasing fictitious enemies of the state. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, Holder was roundly criticized from all sides of the political spectrum and Holder himself was later forced to acknowledge that he regretted the episode.
Gruber-Obamacare Scandal – To establish Obamacare’s validity, Obama hired economist and academic Jonathan Gruber to give the plan his seal of approval. Gruber was later caught on video and audio making several disparaging remarks about Americans, stating that Obamacare’s passage rested on the “stupidity of the American voter.” Democrats later tried to distance themselves from him and tried to minimize his role in formulating Obamacare but there was no debating that he was one of Obamacare’s chief architects and was paid nearly $400,000 for his services. Gruber confirmed what most of us already knew; that Obamacare passed as a result of a concerted effort by the administration to deceive the American people.
Skolkovo Scandal – While serving as secretary of state, Clinton oversaw a program meant to “reset” relations with Moscow and improve ties. The program centered around the Russian city of Skolkovo near Moscow with the stated aim of “identifying areas of cooperation and pursuing joint projects and actions that strengthen strategic stability, international security, economic well-being, and the development of ties between the American and Russian people.” The program transformed Skolkovo into a technology hub akin to a Silicon Valley. Sensitive American technology was transferred to the Russians, substantially enhancing their military and cyber capabilities. The US Army and the FBI concluded that Russia had exploited the program for military applications. The FBI warned American technology companies doing business in Skolkovo that the Skolkovo project was a means by which the Russians would acquire dual use technologies and apply them for military ends. According to investigative author Peter Schweizer, Russian and American companies and individuals involved in the Skolkovo fiasco “had major financial ties to the Clintons.” Moreover, during the Russian reset period, those entities provided the Clintons with “tens of millions of dollars” in the form of “contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties.”
Benghazi Scandal - U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed during an attack on the American consulate office. The Obama administration initially denied that the attack was terror related and instead peddled the now false and discredited narrative that it was triggered by a reaction to an anti-Muslim film. However, emails later confirmed that administration officials were well aware that it was a well-orchestrated, premeditated attack planned by Islamist terrorists and had nothing to do with an internet film. In addition, a congressional committee found that the delay in deploying military assets to the theater, which it attributed to needless bureaucratic bungling, almost certainly cost those men their lives.
IRS Exemption Scandal – IRS officials, taking their cues from the White House delayed, ignored or rejected nonprofit status applications from groups deemed to be right-wing or pro-Israel. Eventually, Former IRS senior executive Lois Lerner, one of the key actors in the scandal was held to be in contempt of Congress, though Holder’s DOJ refused to prosecute. 
Iran Ransom Scandal – In deal to secure the release of four Americans held hostage by Iran, the Obama administration gave the Iranian government $1.7 billion in unmarked, untraceable cash, stacked in pallets. The money promptly went to finance Iran’s terrorist activities. Attorney General Loretta Lynch was required to sign off on the ransom deal but no paper bearing her signature was ever produced despite congressional calls compelling her to do so.
Bergdahl-Guantanamo Scandal – Obama released 5 hardened Taliban terrorists for convicted deserter Bowe Bergdahl. The release of the terrorists was in violation of the National Defense Authorization Act. Obama was required to provide Congress with 30-days’ notice prior to releasing the Guantanamo detainees but he only provided notice on the actual day of the exchange. Consequently, the chief counsel for the Government Accountability Office determined that the Pentagon had illegally spent the money used to facilitate the prisoner exchange. In addition, like Benghazi, the administration tried to spin the story and portrayed Bergdahl as a soldier who “served with honor and distinction.” Lastly, at least 3 of the 5 detainees released for Bergdahl have reverted to their terrorist habits placing America and its allies at risk.
Dossier Scandal – Elements within the FBI and DOJ who were hostile to Trump and friendly to Clinton obtained a salacious and unverified dossier on Trump which was compiled by a British foreign agent from Russian sources. In addition to being unverified, unreliable and based exclusively on Russian sources, the dossier amounted to opposition research because it was obtained by agents and operatives working directly and indirectly for the Clinton campaign. Despite this knowledge, the FBI dressed up the dossier to appear as if it was a legitimate intelligence document and then used it to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on American citizens.
Clinton Email Server Scandal – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used an unsecured bathroom server to send and receive classified information. It is a virtual certainty that many of Clinton’s emails were compromised by foreign, hostile governments. Over 33,000 emails belonging to the State Department were deleted and some of Clinton’s state department emails ended up on a registered sex offender’s laptop. Clinton was criminally exonerated by the FBI and Loretta Lynch’s DOJ blindly accepted the FBI’s findings and recommendations without conducting an examination of its own. FBI agent Peter Strzok, who maintained a visceral hatred toward Trump and was deeply involved in the email investigation, later changed the wording of a memo exonerating Clinton to “extremely careless” from “grossly negligent.” The change was significant because the latter language tracked the wording of the criminal statute. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was also involved in investigating Clinton, failed to disclose that his wife had accepted $500,000 for her state senate campaign from long-time Clinton ally, Terry McAuliffe.
Uranium 1 Scandal – While serving as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton signed off on a deal that allowed Russia to acquire 20 percent of America’s uranium mining capacity. While other members of the Obama cabinet were also required to sign off for approval of the deal, Clinton was the only cabinet figure to obtain direct pecuniary benefit, to the tune of millions of dollars, from entities with vested interests in seeing the acquisition completed. She never disclosed this conflict of interest when giving her authorization. Once in Russian hands, some of the uranium, the foundational material for nuclear bombs, was exported abroad.  
Loretta Lynch-Bill Clinton Tarmac Scandal – While Hillary Clinton was being criminally investigated by the FBI, Loretta Lynch, the nation’s top law enforcement official met with Bill Clinton for 30 minutes at a Phoenix tarmac where she says they discussed “grandchildren” and “golf.” Later, it was revealed that she instructed FBI Director James Comey to refer to the investigation as a “matter” rather than an investigation, tracking the Clinton campaign’s talking points. Finally, Comey testified in a closed session before the Intelligence Committee, that he confronted Lynch with a sensitive document in which it was suggested that Lynch was going to use her authority and power of her office to thwart prosecution of Clinton irrespective of the FBI’s findings. Lynch reportedly stared at the document and then “looked up with a steely silence that lasted for some time, then asked him if he had any other business with her and if not that he should leave her office.”
Project Cassandra Scandal – In an effort to curry favor with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Obama administration delayed, obstructed and ultimately shut down a DEA initiative aimed at thwarting Hezbollah arms trafficking, drug trafficking and money laundering schemes. As a result, Hezbollah continued to import drugs into the United States, continued to supply anti-American insurgents with deadly Explosively Formed Projectiles and continued to engage in massive money laundering schemes.
The level of corruption and scandal witnessed during Obama’s tenure rivals, and perhaps even surpasses that of the Nixon years. The administration’s legacy leaves a long and wide trail of lies, deception and government overreaching. Biden’s comment on This Morning would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad. Lastly, whether one opposes or favors Trump, all can acknowledge that but for Trump’s victory, many of these scandals would have never come to light because the Clinton administration would have happily swept all the filth under the rug.
BARACK OBAMA:
THE PSYCHOPATH WHO WOULD BE DICTATOR FUNDED BY HIS
CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS AND REELECTED FOR A THIRD TERM BY
MEXICO
MICHAEL BARONE:
The Lawlessness of the Obama Administration: A never-ending story

JAMES WALSH

THE OBAMA 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
  
The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”

 SOARING POVERTY AND DRUG ADDICTION UNDER OBAMA
"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 filthy rich

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.


“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.”

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. 


DEBUNKING LIES ABOUT IMMIGRATION AND “FAMILY REUNIFICATION”





Time to put the interests of American families first.

       
4
It has taken decades of concerted efforts by the immigration anarchists to get America to the dangerous point where it is today.  
Currently America has a population of unknown millions of illegal aliens who entered the United States covertly and without vetting by running our borders. Their presence in the United States and their very identities are unknown and unknowable.
We also have millions of illegal aliens who violated the terms of their lawful admissions into the United States and have gone “missing in America.” 
Incredibly so-called “Sanctuary Cities” and “Sanctuary States” 

harbor and shield these illegal aliens from detection by the 

Department of Homeland Security and its component immigration 

law enforcement agencies, even as mayors of those cities demand 

to be given federal funds to combat crime and protect their 

residents against international terrorists they may be harboring.
Securing our nation’s borders and enforcing our immigration laws from within the interior of the United States has nothing to do with racism, bigotry or xenophobia, the lie most often spewed by immigration anarchists, but has everything to do with national security, public safety and public health.
Our immigration laws have nothing to do with race, religion or ethnicity.  A review of Title 8 U.S. Code § 1182 will quickly lay waste to the notion that our immigration laws are about racism or bigotry.  That section of law enumerates the grounds of inadmissibility of aliens without considering their race, religion or ethnicity.
Among the categories of such aliens to be excluded are those who have dangerous communicable diseases, are seriously mentally ill, are criminals, fugitives, spies, terrorists or have been previously deported from the United States and have not been granted authorization since deportation to reenter the United States.  That section of law also protects American workers from unfair foreign competition.
The primary goal of all five branches of the U.S. military is to keep America’s enemies as far from our shores as possible. However, in this era of terrorism and asymmetrical warfare, terrorists don’t engage in conventional warfare against our military, but seek to enter the United States by whatever means that they can, to carry out deadly terrorist attacks against our civilian population. 
During World War II Nazi saboteurs came to America on German U-boats and used other covert means to infiltrate the U.S. to spy and commit acts of sabotage.  Today, the terrorists most often enter the United States through ports of entry.
However, all means of entering the United States, both legal means and illegal means, can and have provided terrorists and transnational criminals and fugitives with access to the United States.
As I have frequently noted, the United States has fifty “border states.”  Any state that lies along America’s northern or southern borders are border states as are those states that have access to America’s 95,000 miles of coastline.  Finally, any state that has an international airport is also a border state.
Therefore the mission of immigration law enforcement is to back up the military by making the borders of the United States our first and last line of defense against America’s foes and those foreign nationals who would pose a threat to the safety and well-being of America and Americans.
On September 11, 2001 just nineteen terrorists inflicted more casualties on the United States than did the entire Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the death toll from the attacks of 9/11 continues to climb.  
On December 14, 2017 the New York Post reported that a 9/11 first responder killed himself after a battle with lung disease.  That “first responder” was Douglas Greenwood, the NYPD Captain who led the first responders who dug through the mountain of rubble at “Ground Zero” that came to be known as “the pile” searching at first for survivors and then for human remains. His disease not unlike so many others, was attributed to exposure to the toxins released with the World Trade Center complex was destroyed by two hijacked airliners on 9/11.
Today much has been made about chain migration and the underlying principle of “family reunification.”  The idea is that if an alien is granted lawful immigrant status and subsequently becomes a United States citizen, he/she may then petition the U.S. government to have their brothers and sisters become resident aliens along with all of their spouses and minor children.
The incredible lie is that it is unfair for aliens to legally immigrate to the United States and thus be separated from their families. The Obama administration went even beyond the provisions of the immigration laws and mandated that so-called illegal alien “unaccompanied minors” be permitted to enter the United States to be “reunified” with their illegal alien family members who were already living illegally in the United States.
Under current immigration laws, aliens who become lawful immigrants are able to bring their nuclear families with them as immigrants.  This means that their spouses and minor children are also granted Alien Registration Cards (Green Cards).  This makes perfect sense.
However, when lawful immigrants become United States citizens, they are then entitled to petition to have their parents and all of their brothers and sisters admitted as lawful immigrants in their own rights.  Furthermore, their siblings are also entitled, as immigrants, to have all of their spouses and minor children granted green cards as well.
Because of this, one newly-minted U.S. citizen can ultimately provide lawful immigrant status to dozens of extended family members.
Under this visa program, the impact that such massive numbers of immigrants will have on job prospects for America workers is not taken into account.  Simply by virtue of a familial 
relationships, the United States admits large numbers of aliens who may compete unfairly with American workers.
Flooding American schools with non-English speaking children creates a hardship for school districts and the students who attend those beleaguered schools.
In December 2007 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published an important report, “The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments” that found that it costs between 20 percent and 40 percent extra to educate students who lack English language proficiency. 
We need to take a moment to consider how insane the notion of providing green cards to extended family members of naturalized citizens truly is given how this impacts America and Americans.
To shed light on the absurdity of the false narrative created by the open borders/immigration anarchists that it is reasonable to provide green cards to extended family members to reunite families in the United States, we ought to consider that is not uncommon in America for children to grow up and voluntarily take jobs across the United States and even, outside the United States. 
Those children are free to return home for holidays and to attend family functions.  Similarly, members of their families may opt to travel to visit with them in their new homes across the United States.
This is comparable to the alien who makes the willful decision to immigrate to America.  These immigrants and naturalized citizens are certainly free to travel back to their home countries to spend time with their families whenever they wish.
Additionally --  and this is the part of the immigration issue that is never discussed -- there are two forms of visas that can be granted to aliens: immigrant visas and nonimmigrant visas.
Each year the United States provides approximately one million aliens with lawful immigrant status.  Immigrant visas immediately place the alien on the pathway to citizenship.  However, each year tens of millions of nonimmigrant (temporary) foreign visitors are admitted into the United States as tourists, foreign students and authorized temporary workers.
Family members of naturalized citizens are free to travel to the United States, presuming that they have no criminal histories, or other such factors in their backgrounds, as nonimmigrant visitors.
They can be granted tourist visas or, if they are citizens of one of the 38 Visa Waiver Countries, don’t require visas to spend up to 90 days in the United States to visit with their family members who have become naturalized citizens.
As tourists they may not work in the United States, but they certainly can spend time with their family members here.
Back when I was an Immigration Inspector at the beginning of my career with the INS it was not uncommon form many foreign visitors to travel to the United States on tourist visas to visit for a temporary period with their family members who had immigrated to the United States.
Today the news media and advocates for open border and immigration anarchy refuse to discuss this aspect of the lawful immigration program because it provides a “solution” to a problem that really does not exist.
Current immigration laws are not incompatible with the compassion of our nation.  
Nonimmigrant visas can enable families to be reunited in a way that does not undermine the lives and livelihoods of Americans and the sovereignty and security of our nation.  However, this runs contrary to the immigration anarchists who are often improperly referred to as being “pro-immigrant” by the compliant globalist media. 

THIS IS REALITY OF AMERICA UNDER MEXICAN OCCUPATION.... WE CAN'T END THE HOUSING, HOMELESSNESS, JOBS OR DRUG CRISIS UNTIL WE PUSH MEXICO OUT OF OUR BORDERS AND PRO-AMNESTY POLS OUT OF OFFICE!

The people of Poughkeepsie: Searing portraits of life in New York where one in five are below the poverty line and drugs and sex work run rampant

  • Photographer Caleb Stein captured images part of ongoing project in Poughkeepsie, New York 
  • 'Down by the Hudson' showcases how 19 per cent of the 30,267 resident live below the poverty line
  • He said: 'Recent years have brought a great deal of economic hardship to this lively, character-filled place'
  • Images are part of his interactions with residents along a three-mile strip of Main Street in the city
Striking new images show how some residents living in Poughkeepsie, north of New York City are living below the poverty line as drugs and sex work run rampant in the small city.
Photographer Caleb Stein captured the images as part of an ongoing project titled 'Down by the Hudson'. The captivating photos showcase how 19 per cent of the 30,267 residents struggle to make ends meet.
As a result, many of those who are impoverished live on the streets or turn to prostitution to earn cash, he claims.
'Recent years have brought a great deal of economic hardship to this lively, character-filled place,' Stein, a british-born photographer, told Petapixel. 'Some people attribute this to the downsizing of IBM’s local headquarters. Others say that fault lies with the Poughkeepsie Galleria Mall, or the additions to the highway system, both of which have de-emphasized the role of Main Street.' 
The images are part of his interactions with residents along a three-mile strip of Main Street in the city and is a record of his walks. Stein, who is originally from London, currently lives in the Poughkeepsie area after graduating from Vassar College in 2017.  
Striking new images show how some residents living just outside of New York City in Poughkeepsie are living below the poverty line as drugs and sex work run rampant in the city. Pictured above is a man named Artie showing off his 'smoked out' chest tattoo
Striking new images show how some residents living just outside of New York City in Poughkeepsie are living below the poverty line as drugs and sex work run rampant in the city. Pictured above is a man named Artie showing off his 'smoked out' chest tattoo
Photographer Caleb Stein captured the images as part of an ongoing project titled 'Down by the Hudson'. Pictured above is a woman named Karen with a cat on Main Street
Photographer Caleb Stein captured the images as part of an ongoing project titled 'Down by the Hudson'. Pictured above is a woman named Karen with a cat on Main Street
The captivating photos showcase how 19 per cent of the 30,267 residents struggle to make ends meet. As a result, many of those who are impoverished live on the streets or turn to prostitution to earn cash, Stein said. Pictured above is Nikki on Cherry Street in the city
The captivating photos showcase how 19 per cent of the 30,267 residents struggle to make ends meet. As a result, many of those who are impoverished live on the streets or turn to prostitution to earn cash, Stein said. Pictured above is Nikki on Cherry Street in the city
Nikki came from a home where her mother was a drug addict and she hasn't seen her family in years, including her daughter. Prostitution and drug addiction have become a vicious cycle for her, Stein said
Nikki came from a home where her mother was a drug addict and she hasn't seen her family in years, including her daughter. Prostitution and drug addiction have become a vicious cycle for her, Stein said
The images in the series are part of his interactions with residents along a three-mile strip of Main Street in the city and is a record of his walks. Pictured above is Nikki looking into Jose's eye
The images in the series are part of his interactions with residents along a three-mile strip of Main Street in the city and is a record of his walks. Pictured above is Nikki looking into Jose's eye
Stein, who is originally from London, currently lives in the Poughkeepsie area after graduating from Vassar College in 2017. Pictured above are a group of residents playing basketball near Market Street 
Stein, who is originally from London, currently lives in the Poughkeepsie area after graduating from Vassar College in 2017. Pictured above are a group of residents playing basketball near Market Street 
Stein captured this image showing Virginia relaxing in Malcolm X Park in the city. He claims she has been addicted to heroin for decades and that her entire family has died of overdoses 
Stein captured this image showing Virginia relaxing in Malcolm X Park in the city. He claims she has been addicted to heroin for decades and that her entire family has died of overdoses 
Kaleb is pictured above enjoying a slice of pizza near the White Bridge watering hole in Poughkeepsie
Kaleb is pictured above enjoying a slice of pizza near the White Bridge watering hole in Poughkeepsie
Residents Danny and Michael are pictured smoking cigars at Joe Netherworld's Satanist 'Winter Frolic' Party on Clinton Street in Poughkeepsie
Residents Danny and Michael are pictured smoking cigars at Joe Netherworld's Satanist 'Winter Frolic' Party on Clinton Street in Poughkeepsie
Poughkeepsie resident Rebecca is pictured above walking down Main Street in the city with her dog, Ruby
Poughkeepsie resident Rebecca is pictured above walking down Main Street in the city with her dog, Ruby
A young teen is pictured above before going to prom on Raymond Avenue in Poughkeepsie 
A young teen is pictured above before going to prom on Raymond Avenue in Poughkeepsie 
Thomas is pictured above holding a basketball and a bag while on Main Street in Poughkeepsie
Thomas is pictured above holding a basketball and a bag while on Main Street in Poughkeepsie
A painting inside of a window on Main Street is pictured above in Poughkeepsie
A painting inside of a window on Main Street is pictured above in Poughkeepsie
Discarded items and trash are pictured around a tree on Rose Street in Poughkeepsie
Discarded items and trash are pictured around a tree on Rose Street in Poughkeepsie



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5202815/Searing-images-poverty-upstate-New-York.html#ixzz52g4I2BBj 

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