Thursday, January 24, 2019

THE ILLEGALS' CONTEMPT FOR OUR BORDERS, LAWS, COURTS, FLAG AND CULTURE... By invitation of the Democrat Party

Texas Finds 95,000 Non-US Citizens Registered To Vote -- 58,000 Have Actually Voted In Recent Elections

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/timothymeads/2019/01/25/texas-finds-95000-nonus-citizen-registered-to-vote-58000-have-actually-voted-in-recent-elections-n2540285

 


On Friday January 25, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that 95,000 individuals registered to vote in the Lone Star State have been identified as "Non-US Citizens," meaning they are illegally registered to vote. Further evidence brought forth by Texas Secretary of State David Whitely confirms that 58,000 of these individuals have broken the law and voted in "one or more" recent elections.
“Every single instance of illegal voting threatens democracy in our state and deprives individual Texans of their voice," AG Paxton said in a statement. "My Election Fraud Unit stands ready to investigate and prosecute crimes against the democratic process when needed."





Immigration Failure: No-Show Rates in U.S. Immigration Courts

Washington, D.C. (January 24, 2019) – Ahead of several key Senate votes on border security and illegal immigration policy, a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies highlights the persistent failure of aliens to show up to immigration court--a serious challenge for the country's immigration enforcement efforts.

U.S. immigration courts recently released their numbers to Congress for fiscal year 2017, and hoped-for improvements are largely absent. Rather, problems that have defined the courts since their beginning persist.

Among the highlights:
  • 43 percent of all aliens free pending trial failed to appear for court in 2017.
  • Since 1996, 37 percent of all aliens free before trial disappeared from court.
  • Aliens abscond from court more often today than they did before 9/11.
  • Deportation orders for failing to appear in court exceed deportation orders from cases that were tried by 306 percent.
  • 46 percent of all unaccompanied children disappeared from U.S. immigration courts from 2013 through 2017.
  • 49 percent of unaccompanied children failed to appear in U.S. immigration courts in 2017.
View the full report: https://www.cis.org/Report/Immigration-Courts-Aliens-Disappear-Trial

Mark Metcalf, a former immigration judge in Miami, Fla., and the author of the report, said, "The challenges facing America's immigration courts are significant, as highlighted by the rising number of no-shows. This is an issue which would cause  serious redress in any other court system, and which ought to be tackled in any legislative immigration solution. It is not immigration that has failed America, but the American government that has often failed immigration."


About 40% of H-1B Jobs Give Employers a Tidy $40,000/Year Discount



By David North on January 18, 2019

A recently released report on the H-1B program (for skilled nonimmigrant workers) indicates that in at least 40 percent of the jobs the employer gets a full-time (alien) worker for a $40,000 a year discount from actual prevailing wages.
No wonder many employers use this program and shoulder aside citizen and green-card workers! My sense is that between half a million and a full million resident college grads have lost decent jobs to alien workers as a result of H-1B.
The comprehensive and damning report, "Reforming US' High-Skilled Guestworker Program", is by one of America's leading experts on the H-1B program, Professor Ron Hira of Howard University, and Bharath Gopalaswamy, director of the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center. It was published by the Atlantic Council, a distinguished Washington think tank whose chairman is Jon Huntsman Jr., the former GOP governor of Utah, and currently our ambassador to Russia.
The 14-page document carefully describes the complex inner workings of the H-1B program and its impact on U.S. workers. The best of many such articles I have read on the subject over the years, it highlights these points:
·         Most H-1B employers do not have to make any effort to recruit U.S. workers before they are eligible to use the program;
·         Most of the H-1 B workers have, at best, average credentials and most are doing run-of-the mill work;
·         The program design itself is deeply flawed, and it is important to address that issue rather than overemphasizing the behavior of certain "bad actors" within the program; and
·         The program needs an assertive, well-designed enforcement program rather than just responding to individual complaints.
Perhaps the strongest part of the article is its analysis of the weak, complex, and (to many) the easy-to-misunderstand wage regulations set by the U.S. Department of Labor. In a context of actual wages paid in the industry in question, the Department sets four wage levels for H-1B hiring purposes:
Wage Level
Wage Percentile
1
17th
2
33rd
3
Median (i.e., 50th)
4
66th
The employer then chooses which level to pay the specific alien worker. Level One is for entry workers, while Level Four is for supervisors, with gradations in between.
Were the system to be fair to both aliens and competing U.S. workers, the pay choices of the employers would be about 25 percent in each of the levels. This does not happen.
Instead, in 2017 employers used wage Level One for 41 percent of the jobs, and Level Two for 37 percent, leaving only 12 percent of the jobs at the average wage or above. It is in wage Level One that employers are getting the $40,000 a year discount mentioned earlier. The discount for wage Level Two is about $20,000 a year.
Hira comes to these comparisons (on page 10 of his article) by quoting the Labor Department’s own statistics (from the Office of Foreign Labor Certification) which show, for 2017, that the Level One wage for computer systems analysts in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara MSA was $76,918, while the mean wage in the same occupation was $116,522 per year, a difference of $39,604 per year.
Employers and their lobbyists talk about the program as being designed to bring America the "best and the brightest" of the foreign workers, and then pay 88 percent of these workers at substandard wages.
This article is a must-read for anyone worried about the fact that our immigration system is tilted so heavily in favor of employers.










Grassroots Immigration Group: Amnesty Is Worse than No Wall


Amnesty Trump
AFP/Getty Image
  409
5:54

President Donald Trump should not offer a combined “DACA-Dreamer” amnesty to win “one-tenth of a border fence,” says William Gheen, founder of the grassroots Americans for Legal Immigration PAC group.

“Every single amnesty bill we’ve seen for 15 years has been filled with all sorts of restrictions and enforcement promises designed to garner votes in Congress and give lawmakers things to cover their asses with angry constituents,” Gheen told Breitbart News. He continued:
Each time we have found language in the bill that

allows all enforcement to be skipped or ignored

or they will just pass it and ignore the

enforcement restrictions like the ’86 Amnesty. It

is completely offensive and wrong that the U.S.

Senate is even considering anything like Dreamer

or DACA Amnesty considering the way the nation

voted in 2016 to try to go in a different direction.
Breitbart TV

The statement was made after Trump announced his support for a deal in which he would get $5.7 billion for border wall funding in exchange for endorsing three-year work permit amnesties for one million people in the DACA and Temporary Protected Status programs. The exchange is supported by business groups who are clamoring for more imported workers to help suppress wage raises before the 2020 election.
Gheen said Trump’s deputies are planning to offer more giveaways to Democrats and business-first Republicans in exchange for a “DACA-Dreamer amnesty.”
Trump “is only hearing from CEOs,” said Rosemary Jenks, policy director at the Numbers USA group, which favors reduced migration. Trump should not give up on his wage-raising “Hire American” policy, especially for white-collar professionals threated by the H-1B program, she said, adding:
The people he campaigned with, the [H-1B-] displaced workers, are just distraught. If he helps wages and job opportunities grow for Americans, he will turn out voters in 2020. If he helps put in place more policies that harm American workers and wages, he will not turn out voters.
In a press statement, ALIPAC said:
ALIPAC calls on Amnesty Trump to end his “Trump Wall Pretense” now that it is clear he’s using the issue to promote border destroying Amnesty for illegal immigrants.
While originally supportive of a massive new wall on the southern border, ALIPAC is dropping support for Trump’s wall efforts because he is only building fencing and he is only seeking a small fraction of funding needed for border structures in exchange for Amnesty for illegal immigrants which will render any borders and defenses moot.
From this point forward, ALIPAC will refer to the President as Amnesty Trump and to his deceptive bait and switch promises of a border wall as “Trump’s Wall Pretense” now that President Trump is using the wall issue to advance DACA and Immigration Reform Amnesty for illegals.
ALIPAC also feels that Trump’s chances of reelection in 2020 are now very low because Trump will never be able to rally and mobilize millions of American voters, like those at ALIPAC, who responded to his campaign promises about border security and illegal immigration.
Gheen’s ALIPAC does not have an office in Washington D.C., but it played major roles in defeating the 2006 and 2007 would-be amnesties, and the 2010 push to amnesty the large population of “Dreamer” young illegals. In 2014, the group also helped to kill off the 2013 “Gang of Eight” cheap labor amnesty by helping ensure the primary defeat of GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor.









We need Trump supporters to understand that DACA & "immigration reform" are both Amnesty for illegal aliens.






Other pro-American advocates are growing concerned about the pro-amnesty push among officials in Trump’s White House. Breitbart News reported:
Co-host of the “Red Pilled America” podcast Patrick Courrielche told Breitbart News that while amnesty would be a boon to DACA illegal aliens, it would hurt the very Americans who supported Trump.
“Trump promised us no amnesty,” Courrielche said. “Passing DACA amnesty knowing the devastating results of Reagan’s amnesty on American workers and families would be an unforgivable betrayal. I’d prefer no wall deal if it includes legalizing DACA.”
A DACA amnesty would put more U.S.-born children of illegal aliens — commonly known as “anchor babies” — on federal welfare, as Breitbart News reported, while American taxpayers would be left with a $26 billion bill.
Mickey Kaus is also urging Trump to preserve his wage-raising “Hire American” policy by trading non-immigration policies to win the wall:

Another potential avenue for shutdown-ending compromise: How about 'We stop screwing around with Obamacare' for Wall (instead of trading the wall for an amnesty that will encourage a surge across the border before the wall is built)?

Surely Obamacare is something Dems care about





Another thing Trump could maybe offer the Dems in exchange for the wall: Legislation ending debt-ceiling shutdowns.

Would be an organically relevant way to end this one.

He doesn't have to offer DACA. There are other things Dems want.




Ann Coulter is the strongest advocate for a wall, and she argues that Trump should anti – offer to swap support some Democratic priorities, such as “a higher federal minimum wage, an infrastructure bill, a solar panel bill.”


Gheen’s opposition to the pending amnesty-for-wall trade was ridiculed by Todd Schulte, the D.C. director of a pro-migration advocacy group funded by Silicon Valley investors:


Schulte’s investors want more H-1B visa workers to cut their payroll costs, and they want more immigrant customers for their new companies. The group’s investors include Mark Zuckerberg, the multi-billionaire founder of Facebook.
The establishment’s economic policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.
That annual flood of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as visa workers and illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees and especially wages for the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.
The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor U.S. Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland.



GOP/Dems Consider DACA Amnesty-for-Wall Deal Backed by Billionaire Donors



DACA Amnesty for the WallGetty Images
 3 Jan 2019832
4:10

A handful of Republican and Democrat lawmakers are continuing to tout a plan that gives amnesty to nearly a million illegal aliens in exchange for some amount of funding for President Trump’s proposed border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), as well as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Democrats such as Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) and Debbie Dingell (D-MI) have signaled that they are at least open to granting amnesty to at least 800,000 illegal aliens who are enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program if it meant receiving a fifth of wall funding.
In an interview with Yahoo NewsMeadows said he has had multiple conversations with Graham about a DACA amnesty-for-wall funding deal:
Compromise and finding common ground are not void from the conversations that he and I have had, as well as some of the conversations I’ve had with some of my Democratic colleagues,” Meadows said. [Emphasis added]
Though the Freedom Caucus has previously opposed extending protections from deportation for the children of undocumented immigrants, Meadows suggested he would be open to a deal to preserve such concessions in exchange for wall funding. [Emphasis added]
Graham has touted an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens for months as part of a deal on funding at least a portion of Trump’s proposed wall.
Coincidentally, the DACA amnesty deal is supported by the billionaire donor class that delivers campaign funds every election cycle to Republicans and Democrats who support the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration policy of importing about 1.5 million mostly low-skilled foreign workers every year to compete against America’s working and middle class.
As Breitbart News most recently reported, the billionaire Koch brothers and their network of organizations have made passing an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens their goal for the new year.
Similarly, billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s cheap labor lobbying group FWD.us is asking Republicans, Democrats, and the Trump administration to reach a deal whereby DACA illegal aliens are allowed to permanently remain in the U.S.
The organization, founded and funded by Silicon Valley’s tech plutocrats, has been demanding an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens since at least 2017.
View image on Twitter
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So here is what @FWDus would like to see happen with the incoming Congress, this harmful shutdown and urgently needed immigration policy changes...

 

 

Billionaires Demand Fast-Track Green Cards for 400,000 Visa Workers



 7 Dec 2018384
6:49



Internet billionaire Marc Benioff is urging the GOP Congress and President Donald Trump to fast-track 400,000 foreign visa-workers — plus 400,000 family members — to green cards, the U.S. job market, and the ballot box.

“This is good for our economy,” Benioff said in a Tuesday tweet that was applauded by Silicon Valley lobbyists. “We need to grow our workers to grow our economy.” 
Benioff’s comment is a tautology: Expanding the population by importing more than 800,000 people would obviously grow the nation’s economy, retail sales, government taxes, company profits, and Wall Street stock options. 
But Benioff’s cheap-labor importation plan would also shrink the income and careers sought by millions of American college graduates, many of whom will vote in 2020 for or against Trump. 

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I strongly support HR392 eliminating the per country visa cap. This bill must happen. The high skill visa provision has overwhelming bi-partisan support because this is good for our economy. We need to grow our workers to grow our economy. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/392 



The planned giveaway is in a pending House bill, dubbed H.R. 392. It is also hidden in the House version of the 2019 funding package for the Department of Homeland Security. If Trump accepts that funding package, he will help companies import more cheap visa-workers from India and China an inflict more economic and career damage to the nation’s professional-status workforce of at least 55 million American college-graduates.
The nation’s workforce now includes roughly 1.5 million foreign college-graduate contract-workers who are imported via the H-1B, L-1, OPT, O-1, J-1, and other visa programs. These outsourcing workers are not immigrants, but instead, they are contract workers hired for one to six years, at lower wages, to take jobs that would otherwise go to American graduates.

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1684392160/Neil-Avatar_normal.jpg


GOP Reps. are still pushing Rep. Yoder's middle-class outsourcing bill to put 600K Indian visa-workers & families on fast-track to US jobs/voting. It would help CEOs import more Indians for US college-grad jobs - w/o any benefit for US workers or even GOP. http://bit.ly/2QzuoDJ 


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DHS Opposes GOP's Stealth Bill to Outsource College Graduate Jobs



This massive level of middle-class outsourcing has suppressed the wage growth needed by many American graduates to repay their college debts, get married, buy homes, and raise children. For example, the salaries for 21 million “professional and business services” employees rose by just roughly one percent after inflation from the second quarter of 2017 to the second quarter of 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their after-inflation pay was flat from 2o15 to 2016.
The Americans’ salary loss, however, would be a gain for the CEOs who see their profits rise and their stock options spike as middle-class salaries decline. 
The MyVisaJobs.com site shows that Benioff’s company asked for 1,063 H-1B visa workers in 2018, up from 880 in 2017. The site also shows job titles and work locations. 
https://media.breitbart.com/media/2018/12/Screen-Shot-2018-12-07-at-1.00.06-PM.png
Benioff also sought 1,071 green cards for his contract workers in from 2016 to 2018. 
The company’s stock price has doubled since Trump’s election, but Benioff and most of his employees have strongly supported Democrats, including Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. For example, only 5.2 percent of employee donations to candidates went to GOP candidates in 2018. 
Now Benioff and his fellow executives as asking Trump to raise their stock portfolios by fast-tracking green cards to roughly 400,000 foreign contract-workers — plus 400,000 family members — who sidelined hundreds of thousands of American college graduates. 
Benioff’s support for the visa workers was echoed by Todd Schulte, who is the director of a pro-migration lobbying group. The Democratic-aligned group, FWD.us, was formed and funded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and numerous other CEOs and investors who prefer to import visa-workers instead of hiring Americans.

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This from @Benioff is really important. A really important fix to our immigration system that would help so many people stuck in the green card backlog because of discriminatory country caps.




Without irony, Schulte’s website declares that “We believe that when every person has the opportunity to achieve their full potential, our families, communities, and economy thrive.” 
Amazon is also urging Trump to approve the green-card giveaway. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, also runs the Washington Post and supported Clinton.

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Amazon applauds @KevinYoder on the passage of his amendment to the @DHSgov appropriations bill, H.R. 392, that would remove the per-country limit on green cards. This is an important step towards green card reform, and Amazonians thank you for your leadership on this issue.



In 2018, Amazon asked the government for almost 6,000 H-1B visa workers and almost 5,000 green cards. Facebook asked for almost 2,400 H-1B workers and 1,400 green cards. Those outsourcing requests add up to 15,000 white-collar jobs sought by U.S. graduates. 
Business lobbyists are trying to minimize publicity about their demand for a green-card giveaway and they are pressing GOP leaders behind closed doors to keep the giveaway in the 2019 DHS budget. 
But opposition is rising as Americans graduates have begun organizing to block the giveaway. For example, Protect US Workers helped defeat Rep. Kevin Yoder who used his authority as an appropriations chairman to insert the giveaway into the DHS budget. 

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NEW COLUMN IS POSTED! PUSSY (HATS) WHIPPED - http://www.anncoulter.com 
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Enjoyed helping send @RepKevinYoder packing.

Yep, I helped fund these billboards and voted straight RED in FL. Yoder's love for foreign guestworker/Replacemnts sent him packing. No American should ever have to train their Foreign Replacements@NeilMunroDC @bseeker @Dawnnewyorker pic.twitter.com/WOnwxr3seY


View image on Twitter


The American graduates are also using federal data to show U.S. legislators how many Americans’ middle-class jobs are being outsourced in their districts to the foreign workers. 

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I clean homes for a living. These kind of policies undercuts my job because of cheap labor. The dems try to make excuses for their policies against American workers. They don’t care about Americans, they just care about non citizens. They need to be voted out on 2020.
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Yep, been there, trained my foreign Replacements in '02. Awful experience. Went public with it, told Congress. The worst part was the disregard we got from our 2 Dem senators


7


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The managing director of Thiel Capital, Eric Weinstein, tweeted to Benioff to highlight his report which shows that the federal officials created the H-1B visa program to lower salaries paid to American technology experts:

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/183983583/weinstein200-1_normal.jpg


You know why we developed the H-1B visa Marc? It was to weaken American workers’ bargaining positions so much that they would be *forced* to mitigate their wage demands at your bargaining table. It’s a wage tampering program.





The mass outsourcing also adding pressure to the lives of many American technology workers, many of whom have already lost jobs to cheaper contract-workers. An informal survey of tech workers shows that almost four-in-ten say they are depressed.
One of the leading advocates for the green-card giveaway is Leon Fresco, an immigration lawyer who helped Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer pass the disastrous 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty through the Senate. The bill was so unpopular that the GOP gained nine Senate seats in 2014, preventing Schumer from becoming Senate Majority Leader.
On December 6, Fresco suggested there is only a small chance that the giveaway will get into the final DHS bill:



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ANGRY. RUN. CHAMPION. 🏆@gmfb@KingHenry_2 99 YARDS TO THE HOUSE!



Many Indian contract workers are lobbying to help pass the green-card bill:

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Thank you @Benioff for your leadership on ensuring fairness by the removal of national origin discrimination on Employment Based Green Cards #HR392 #S281




In the United States, the establishment’s economic policy of using migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees offer.
The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in the coastal states.



The stakes are high. Once the treaty is ratified, it will be exponentially harder to roll back internet censorship. Unless you want the tech giants’ right to censor to persist for another 20 years (that’s how long NAFTA lasted), now is the time to make your voice heard.



The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people, it floods the market with foreign laborspikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate priceswidens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

But not everything is great for all Californians, with Breitbart News reporting that Silicon Valley has the highest income inequality in the nation and the U.S. News & World Report naming California as the worst state for “quality of life,” due to the high cost of living.



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.”


In the July/August version of the Atlantic, columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration.”


“The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero.”


Peter Beinart, a frequent contributor to the New York TimesNew York Review of BooksHaaretz, and former editor of the New Republic, blames immigration for deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed “costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.”

llustration by Lincoln Agnew*


The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.

Listen to the audio version of this article:Download the Audm app for your iPhone to listen to more titles.In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”

Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?

There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the numbers have leveled off.

But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised a decade ago remain relevant today.What’s Wrong With the Democrats?A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection, immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria. Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”
Progressive commentators routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France; Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t. According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance, Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that “natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete. And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against each other.
One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions. Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the “wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report, immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute wealth. People tend to  be less generous when large segments of society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this. His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review, Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants. Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it. In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which has been heralded for identifying the forces that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

Europe Must Resist Third-World Migration


Bill Gates has recently commended Germany for allocating 0.7% of GDP for payments to fight poverty in less developed developing countries (LDDCs).  With his infinite browser wisdom, he asserts that the developed world, especially Europe, must increase these contributions or face a flood of migration from the LDDCs that will overwhelm the continent.  We all understand that by "overwhelm," he is referring to crime, housing, health care, education, and cultural viability of European identities.  In short, the Europe we know will be crushed.  Gates's vocabulary includes terms like "unfolding tragedy," "migratory pressure," and "development aid payments."  He is fixated on drama ("tragedy"), demography, and the tired category of development that has become a cliché in use for the last 72 years since the end of WWII.  These terms out of the business and administrative glossary fail to capture the depth and danger of the situation Gates is referring to.
Gates thinks the migration can be stopped by an even greater effort to rehab (read: buy off) the LDDCs  under the decades-old rubric of development.  Again, according to the guilt-ridden, weakened leftist mindset, it's so sad to see those sub-Saharans and Arabs living in great poverty and under-development that we need to throw more money at the problem, and thereby save ourselves.  So Gates is not really changing his tune.  He's not worried about obliterating European identities or economies.  Rather, he is still singing the old liberal-left song.  Throw money at vast social problems, and your peace and stability will be assured.  
Building up the LDDC economies is not a new idea.  This has been the clichéd response since the end of WWII when the U.N., the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank were founded.  Going back to the 1960s, Walter Rostow, one of Harvard's eminent economists, projected his theory of the "take-off stage."  With economic development support through the three above-named institutions, the poorest countries would be subsidized and finally move to the take-off stage, where they could generate sufficient surplus capital to manage and grow their own assets and begin to develop viable economic projects and infrastructure without "development funds" and without the currency undergirding of the IMF.
These take-off stages never materialized.
Nevertheless, the United Nations has intensified its commitment to saving the LDDCs from self-destruction.  The latest round of this utopian vision is the formulation by the United Nations of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the developing world.  For the purposes of this article, it is worth noting that their goal of the elimination or radical reduction of poverty acknowledges that despite the efforts of the United Nations for 72 years, there are 867 million people in the world living in poverty defined as income of less than $1.25 a day.
The implementation of programs in support of the U.N.'s SDGs involves providing the people in the least developed countries with welfare in every area of their lives.  It is projected as a global welfare system that will make the welfare systems of the U.S. or even Europe look like child's play.  Housing, food, health, employment, childbearing, childrearing, education, gender equality, etc. are areas for dedicated U.N. action.  Multiple sectors of third-world economies will be upheld by a vast global welfare bureaucracy.  Do you think we as taxpaying Americans (45% do not pay any tax) are burdened now?  Wait and see what is moving to the front burner!  Obviously, Bill Gates, former boy wonder, and now the richest man in the world, sees a speedup of the SDG implementation as essential for stemming the tide of migration.  But instead of talking about an explosion of economic support and world governance beyond anything ever dreamed of on planet Earth, he hides the horrific reality behind abstractions like "increasing the percentage contributions of national GDP by developed countries."
He says nothing about confronting the "small matters" of governmental corruption, governmental waste, and tribal conflict in the LDDCs.  Inter-tribal warfare is a norm in sub-Saharan Africa.  We give money despite the fact that genocide and civil wars in many countries is the norm.  Likewise in the Middle East.  We see Muslim against Muslim as well as Muslim against infidels for 1,400 years.  All they know is the fight for power.
Instead of increasing the amounts of "developmental assistance," there should be increased resistance to terrible third-world governance and to migration.  This resistance must be multi-pronged.  There must be pushback against the U.N.'s SDG Programs, there must be pushback against the corrupt World Bank and IMF, and there must be pushback against migration from Africa and the Middle East.
Europe is experiencing an invasion.  Powerful segments of political leadership in North America are attempting to open the doors to invasion.  What should be done?  There should be a lessening of welfare payments to refugees and migrants to Europe, Canada, and the USA as a disincentive to leave the home countries, and as an incentive for refugees and migrants to leave these wealthy areas and go back to their native lands.  Additionally, some boats will have to be turned away since the occupants do not have papers.  Extreme vetting of refugees from war-torn sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern countries must be instituted.
A massive campaign of literature should be dropped on those countries with high migration telling them that there are no facilities for them in their goal countries, and they will be turned back.  Matchbooks should be dropped by the millions (this matchbook technique has been used on other occasions, notably when they were searching worldwide for Ramzi Yousef, the bomber of the World Trade Center in the early 1990s) announcing that the immigration venues have been closed.  Get this message to the people.  The matchbooks could be in French, English, Arabic, and Swahili.   
Let us learn from history.  Migration of Germanic tribes was the undoing of the Roman Empire.  The Romans could not stem the tide.  Various strategies were undertaken, but they failed in the end.  The Vandals, Franks, Saxons, Angles, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths just kept coming.  Eventually, the migrants, called "barbarians" by the Romans, were brought into the military to help support the Roman defense against border crossing, but the Germanics who were in the Roman army coalesced and fought against that selfsame army...and won!  Embracing a threat, even a supposed controlled embrace, leads to an undesirable endgame.  Rome was sacked and destroyed in the 5th century.
We are facing a threat of this magnitude, whether Bill "The Genius" Gates realizes it or not.  His genius in business may not translate into wisdom or a grasp of historical realities.

"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."
BANKSTERS AND BILLIONAIRES PREPARE FOR THE WORST.
REVOLUTION IS IN LOOMING AND WILL MARCH RIGHT DOWN WALL STREET FIRST.

"A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would participate in a “large-scale uprising.” Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, “Banks and money rule the world.”

*
"The ruling class was particularly terrified by the teachers’ walkouts earlier this year because the biggest strikes were organized by rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the pro-corporate organizations that have suppressed the class struggle for decades."
*“The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”
*
"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."
*"A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."

As global elites gather at Davos

Oxfam: 26 billionaires control as much wealth as poorest half of humanity

22 January 2019
As members of the world’s financial elite gather today in Davos, Switzerland, for the opening of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, a new report by the UK-based charity Oxfam International has highlighted the vast accumulation of wealth at the heights of society, and the accelerating growth of social inequality.
The report showed that last year, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $900 billion, or 12 percent, while 3.8 billion people—half the world’s population—saw their wealth decline by 11 percent.
Last year, the billionaires increased their wealth by $2.5 billion every day, while a millionaire moved into their ranks every two days.
In the decade since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, governments and financial authorities have imposed its full impact on the backs of the world working class, in the form of stagnant and lower wages and austerity programs that have gutted health and other social services, to name just some of its effects. Meanwhile, wealth has become ever more concentrated. Last year, just 26 people controlled as much wealth as the 3.8 billion people who comprise half the world’s population, compared to 43 people the year before.
Oxfam noted that just 1 percent of the $112 billion fortune accumulated by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, was equivalent to the entire health budget for Ethiopia, a nation of 105 million people.
The Oxfam report found that the top tax rate for the rich in the developed countries plunged from 62 percent in 1970 to 38 percent by 2013, and pointed to the tax cut introduced by US president Trump at the end of 2017, benefiting the wealthy and corporations.
In developing countries, the top personal tax rate is just 28 percent. In the UK and Brazil, the report found that the bottom 10 percent of the population paid a higher proportion of their income in tax than the top 10 percent.
Tax avoidance is rife. The report revealed that the super-rich were hiding $7.6 trillion from tax authorities, while corporations were holding large amounts of money offshore, depriving developing countries of $170 billion per year in revenue.
As a result, only 4 percent of all tax revenue came from the taxation of wealth.
The report noted that “the rate of poverty reduction has halved since 2013, and that “Extreme poverty is actually increasing in sub-Saharan Africa.”
It added that between 1980 and 2016, the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population received only 12 cents in every dollar of global income growth, while the top 1 percent captured 27 cents of every dollar.
A decade ago, the ruling elite’s annual meeting in Davos took place in the wake of the most severe economic and financial crisis, caused by the massive fraud and criminality of the world’s largest financial institutions.
But rather than being sent to jail, the “malefactors of great wealth” were bailed out. Over the next decade, they were provided with trillions of dollars of ultra-cheap money, enabling them to continue their wealth accumulation at an exponential rate.
According to a new report by Bloomberg, the wealth of the 12 richest Davos attendees soared by a combined $175 billion, as the overall wealth of the world’s billionaires grew, in the same period, from $3.4 trillion to $8.9 trillion.
The Bloomberg report highlights the details of this extraordinary growth:
  • Mark Zuckerberg increased his wealth from $3 billion a decade ago to $55.6 billion, a rise of 1853 percent.
  • Stephen Schwarzman, the head of the hedge fund Blackstone, has seen the assets of his firm rise from $95 billion at the end of 2008 to $457 billion, while his personal wealth has shot up from $2.1 billion to $10.1 billion, an increase of 486 percent.
  • The media baron Rupert Murdoch has increased his wealth from $3.2 billion to $15.1 billion, a rise of 472 percent, while Jamie Dimon, the head of JP Morgan, has enjoyed a 276 percent wealth increase, from $0.4 billion to $1.1 billion.
And the list goes on.
The strength, however, of the economic data produced by Oxfam, forms a stark contrast to its prescriptions for dealing with such extreme levels of social inequality. These centre on the development of what it calls a “human economy,” built on different principles from what it calls a “growth economy.”
The “human economy” would provide health care, education and gender equality, and create the best conditions for shared wealth. It could be financed by raising taxes on the world’s wealthiest individuals and corporations, given that just a 0.5 percent increase in taxes on the richest individuals would raise enough money to educate the 262 million children, who currently don’t receive an education, and provide health care that would save 3.3 million people from preventable deaths.
Oxfam, however, has been making such proposals for the past eight years, issuing warnings and calling for a policy switch. But to no avail. Every year the situation worsens, as Oxfam itself acknowledges, and at an accelerating rate.
The scourge of social inequality cannot be ended through futile appeals, made to the very powers that preside over the current system, to change course. They are no more capable of that, than the ancien regime in France, prior to the revolution of 1789, or the czarist autocracy in Russia, before 1917.
The only road to a genuine “human economy” is through the working class taking political power in the socialist revolution, thus ending the dictatorship of private profit and the financial markets. Only in this way can the vast resources created by the working class be utilised to meet the social needs of all.
This is the perspective that must now be advanced in the social and class struggles that are erupting around the world—from auto parts strikes in Mexico, the teachers’ strike in Los Angeles, to the huge struggles of the Indian working class. It requires the building of the world party of socialist revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International, in every country, to provide the necessary leadership.










1,500 Private Jets Descend on Davos Carrying Globalist Elite for Climate Talks



A man passes the Dassault Falcon 2000EX business jet before the start of the 2017 Asian Business Aviation Conference and Exhibition (ABACE) at Shanghai's Hongqiao Airport on April 10, 2017. ABACE will be held at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport from April 11 to 13. / AFP PHOTO / Johannes EISELE (Photo …
JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty
4:30

At least 1,500 private jets are expected to descend on Davos and nearby airports in Switzerland this week as the international financial and political elite gathers to talk about global climate challenges.

That would be up from the more than 1,300 aircraft movements seen at last year’s forum, despite climate change registering as the top risk factor identified for the global economy in a survey of World Economic Forum (WEF) movers and shakers last week.
Sir David Attenborough, a lead speaker this year, has already stated that climate is the issue of our time.
The veteran broadcaster, 92, used his acceptance speech to tell business leaders and governments to come up with “practical solutions”.
Speaking at the beginning of the forum on Monday, the Blue Planet and Dynasties narrator told the crowd he is “quite literally from another age” and warned of “man-made disaster of global scale” that lies ahead.
Industry group Air Charter Service calculated the private jet flights over the week, as delegates fly in to hear the likes of Mr. Attenborough speak at an event boasting a basic entry ticket price of U.S.$60,000 – per person.
Davos is a small town in the Swiss Alps, around 92 miles south-east of Zurich.
Andy Christie, Private Jets Director at ACS, told the Guardian how the numbers are determined:
Davos doesn’t have its own airfield and, whilst we have several clients who fly into the town by helicopter, the four main airfields that private jet users attending the forum use are Zürich, Dübendorf, St. Gallen-Altenrhein and St. Moritz.
Working with WingX, we looked at private jet activity at those airports over the six days of each WEF week since 2013 – from one day before the event to one day after. Last year was the busiest year for private jets so far, showing an 11% increase on 2017, with more than 1,300 aircraft movements. If we see a similar increase this year, we could be looking at almost 1,500 aircraft movements over the six days.
Countries with the most arrivals and departures over the past five years at Davos areGermany, France, the UK, U.S., Russia, and UAE, respectively.
Demand for private jets far outstrips other events that also loom large on the private aviation calendar, such as the Super Bowl or Champions’ League final, according to Mr. Christie.
“We have had bookings from as far as our operations in Hong Kong, India and the US ?- no other event has the same global appeal,” he said in a statement
And the trend is towards even more expensive, larger private jets such as the Gulfstream GV and Bombardier’s Global Express.
“This is at least in part due to some of the long distances travelled, but also possibly due to business rivals not wanting to be seen to be outdone by one another,” Mr. Christie said.
Around 3,000 participants are expected for the 2019 edition of the WEF. They represent the worlds of business, government, international aid, academia, arts and culture, and the media, although U.S. President Donald Trump will not be among them.


Among the list of topics to be covered this week is the WEF’s Global Risk Report for 2019 which reveals environmental crises, such as failures to tackle climate change, “are among the likeliest and highest-impact risk that the world faces over the next decade.”
How much does it cost to participate?
The WEF website reveals annual membership (required if you want to buy a ticket to Davos) is upwards of U.S.$60,000, depending on the institution or company’s “level of engagement”.
At the top are the 100 “strategic partner” companies – including Accenture, Barclays, Deloitte, KPMG and Unilever – who pay around U.S.$600,000 for annual membership, which entitles them to buy an access-all-sessions pass for themselves and five colleagues, including special privileges. But they still have to purchase actual tickets to the event.
AFP contributed to this report


GENERAL MOTORS DUMPS THOUSANDS OF WORKERS AND CLOSES PLANTS   -  Stockholders celebrate!


"It identifies socialism with proposals for mild social reform such as “Medicare for all,” raised and increasingly abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of “economic freedom,” i.e., the unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all social reforms, business regulations, tax increases or anything else that impinges on the oligarchy’s self-enrichment."






“The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documentsa sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.”



"The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process."

"A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself."

*
Every Legal is one paycheck and One Hundred Illegals away from homelessness….  a rape, murder or molestation!
NANCY PELOSI’S VISION OF AMERICA: 49 MORE MEXIFORNIAS AND A 50 STATE EXPANDED ANCHOR BABY WELFARE STATE

But not everything is great for all Californians, with Breitbart 

 

News reporting that Silicon Valley has the highest income 

 

inequality in the nation and the U.S. News &

 

World Report naming California as the worst state for “quality of 

 

life,” due to the high cost of living.


THE INVITED INVADING HORDES: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!

"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."


"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."

THE WALL STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY
SERVING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS

THE CRONY CLASS:

Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.

  
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”

  

THE DEATH of CALIFORNIA:

CALIFORNIA UNDER MEX-OCCUPATION: POVERTY, GANG CRIME, STAGGERING LA RAZA WEFLARE STATE on LEGALS’ BACKS

SHOCKING REPORT OF POVERTY, CRIME AND LA RAZA SUPREMACY

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-passes-uk-to-become-worlds.html





Inequality, class and life expectancy in America


A study by Brookings Institution economists released Friday documents a sharp increase in life span divergences between the rich and the poor in America. The report, based on an analysis of Census Bureau and Social Security Administration data, concludes that for men born in 1950, the gap in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of wage earners and the bottom 10 percent is more than double the gap for their counterparts born in 1920.

For those born in 1920, there was a six-year differential between rich and poor. For those born in 1950, that difference had reached 14 years. For women, the gap grew from 4.7 years to 13 years, almost tripling.

Overall, life expectancy for the bottom 10 percent improved by just 3 percent for men born in 1950 over those born in 1920. For the top 10 percent, it soared by about 28 percent.

Life expectancy for the bottom 10 percent of male wage earners born in 1950 rose by less than one year compared to that for male workers born 40 years earlier—to 73.6 from 72.9. But for the top 10 percent, life expectancy leapt to 87.2 from 79.1.

The United States ranks among the worst so-called rich countries when it comes to life expectancy. But its low ranking is entirely due to the poor health and high mortality of low-income Americans. According to the Social Security Administration, life expectancy for the wealthiest US men at age 60 was just below the rates for Iceland and Japan, two countries with the highest levels. Americans in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, on the other hand, ranked just above Poland and the Czech Republic.

Life-expectancy is the most basic indicator of social well-being. The minimal increase for low-income workers and the widening disparity between the poor and the rich is a stark commentary on the immense growth of social inequality and class polarization in the United States. It underscores the fact that socioeconomic class is the fundamental category of social life under capitalism—one that conditions every aspect of life, including its length.

The Brookings Institution findings shed further light on the catastrophic decline in the social position of the American working class. They follow recent reports showing a sharp rise in death rates for both young and middle-aged white workers, primarily due to drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide. Other recent reports have shown a dramatic decline in life expectancy for poorer middle-aged Americans and a reversal of decades of declining infant mortality.

It is no mystery what is behind this vast social retrogression. It is the product of the decay of American capitalism and a four-decade-long offensive by the ruling elite against the working class. From Reagan to the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans alike have overseen a corporate-government assault on the jobs, wages, pensions and health benefits of working people.
The ruling elite has dismantled the bulk of the country’s industrial infrastructure, destroying decent-paying jobs by the millions, and turned to the most parasitic and criminal forms of financial speculation as the main source of its profit and private wealth. Untold trillions have been squandered to finance perpetual war and the maniacal self-enrichment of the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent.
The basic infrastructure of the country has been starved of funds and left to rot, to the point where uncounted millions of people are being poisoned with lead and other toxins from corroded water systems. Flint, Michigan is just the tip of the iceberg.

Under Obama, this social counterrevolution has been intensified. The financial meltdown of 2008 has been utilized by the same forces that precipitated the crash to carry through a reordering of social relations aimed at reversing every social gain won by the working class in the course of a century of struggle. A central target of the attack is health care for working people.

Obamacare is the spearhead of a worked-out strategy to reduce the quantity and quality of health care available to workers and reorganize the health care system directly on a class basis. Corporate and government costs are to be slashed by gutting employer-paid health care, forcing workers individually to buy expensive, bare-bones plans from the insurance monopolies, and rationing drugs, tests and medical procedures to make them inaccessible to workers.

The rise in mortality for workers and the widening of the life span gap between rich and poor are not simply the outcome of impersonal economic forces. In corporate boardrooms, think tanks and state agencies, the ruling class is working to lower working class life expectancy. In late 2013, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank with the closest ties to the Pentagon and the CIA, published two 
policy papers decrying the “waste” of money on health care for the elderly. The clear message was that ordinary people were living much too long and diverting resources needed by the military to wage war around the world.

The social and economic chasm in America finds a political expression in the vast disconnect between the entire political establishment and the masses of working people. Neither party nor any of their presidential candidates, the self-described “socialist” Bernie Sanders included, can seriously address the real state of social conditions or offer a serious program to address the crisis.

In his final State of the Union Address last month, Obama presented an absurd picture of a resurgent economy. “The United States of America, right now,” he declared, “has the strongest, most durable economy in the world… Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.”
In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Sanders are seeking to outdo one another in seizing the mantle of the Obama administration and praising its supposed social and economic achievements.

They cannot address the real conditions facing the masses of working people because they defend the capitalist system, which is the source of the social disaster. The remedy must be based on an understanding of the disease. It is the building of an independent socialist and revolutionary movement uniting the entire working class, in the US and around the world.

Tech Billionaires urge fast-track green cards for 400,000 contract visa-workers - and many more later. Just guessing here, but maybe most Americans prefer fewer visa workers for biz & higher salaries for their families? http://bit.ly/2UpS5NT 

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