Sunday, December 8, 2019

CALIFORNIA: GREATEST NUMBER OF ILLEGALS, GREATEST NUMBER OF PEOPLE LIVING IN POVERTY, GREATEST HOUSING CRISIS, GREATEST HOMELESS CRISIS AND HIGHEST TAXES IN AMERICA


Every American (Legal) is one paycheck and one thousand illegals away from being homeless!

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO SOME GRAPHIC IMAGES AND VIDEOS OF WHAT IT IS NOW LIKE LIVING IN MEX-OCCUPIED CALIFORNIA WHERE HALF THE 30 MILLION POPULATION ARE ILLEGALS OR THE ANCHOR BABY PROGENY OF ILLEGALS.

"When we hear stories about the homelessness in California and elsewhere, why don't we hear how illegal aliens contribute to the problem?  They take jobs and affordable housing, yet instead of discouraging illegal aliens from breaking the law, politicians encourage them to come by lavishing free stuff on them with confiscated dollars from this and future generations."  JACK HELLNER



HOUSE POOR:
How price hikes hurt the most vulnerable

An exclusive analysis shows the Bay Area’s poorest ZIP codes endured the largest percentage increases in rents and mortgages. Residents say there’s nowhere to go.

By Julia Prodis Sulek and Kaitlyn Bartley
PART 2 OF 3

PUBLISHED: DECEMBER 8, 2019

AFFORDING the meager apartment he shares above a pool hall on International Boulevard already was a scramble for Ricardo Lopez. But when the landlord announced last summer that she was nearly doubling the rent, the 60-year-old janitor began a soul-crushing journey: scouting out the squalid homeless encampments proliferating around the city, looking for one he could bear to live in.
Over 2 million Americans don’t have access to 

indoor plumbing or water, report finds

A new report titled “Closing the Water Access Gap in the United States: A National Action Plan,” published last month by two non-profit groups, DigDeep and U.S. Water Alliance, estimates that over 2 million Americans in 2019 do not have access to running water. The report drew its conclusions based on survey data from the American Community Survey and the US Census Bureau in addition to research conducted by Michigan State University.
Unlike other modern capitalist countries, the American federal government does not keep detailed records on lack of water access. The authors note that “datasets in the United States are incomplete, and official data collection efforts undercount vulnerable populations like communities of color and lower-income people.”
The authors also note that the available census data doesn’t provide a complete picture of the problem; while the survey asks if a household has running water or indoor plumbing, which includes a toilet, tap and shower, the survey doesn’t ask if the water service is affordable or safe to consume. As seen in cities throughout the United States, including FlintNewarkBaltimore and Milwaukee, it is patently clear that the water flowing through corroding lead pipes and into the homes and schools of millions of Americans is not safe to drink.
In order to compensate for the limitations provided by the survey data, researchers for the report gathered qualitative data including interviews with residents in six specific regions within the US that “face water and sanitation access challenge.” These regions include the Central Valley in California, the Navajo Nation which covers parts of northeastern Arizona, southeastern Utah, and northwestern New Mexico, Texas colonias near El Paso, rural southern communities in Mississippi and Alabama, McDowell County, West Virginia and finally, the US territory of Puerto Rico.
Residents in most rural communities are forced to build septic systems and dig wells in order to survive. The costs associated with the maintenance and repair of these private systems in order to ensure cleanliness and reliability are too high for many. Often wells have to be redug if they are contaminated with toxic runoff from nearby farms. Residents who have tried to speak out regarding water issues face reprisals from corporations, including service shutoffs, eviction, or immigrations raids.
In the Texas colonias residents are forced to make use of unmonitored private wells. Hector and Juana, who live in a colonia called Laura E. Mundy, told researchers that they drank their well water for 20 years before they were both diagnosed with H. pylori, a water-borne infection that can cause cancer. With no other choice they are forced to still use well water to shower and clean, but Hector is “very, very afraid” that the well may run dry as nearby farms compete for groundwater.
Several of the colonias are located less than a mile from working service lines, but residents are told by government officials that there is “no money” to extend the lines and provide service. Many moved to the area originally on the promise from developers that once the community grew, roads would be paved and the lines would be extended, but this never came to fruition.
In McDowell County, previously clear streams now run black with runoff from fracking and mining operations. In addition to dirty water contaminated from years of extraction companies violating what pitiful regulations were put in place, local municipalities are unable to afford the equipment needed to repair old run-down coal camp water systems. These private systems were constructed by the coal companies to serve their workers and were abandoned when the companies left.
While these areas are in acute crisis, the report notes that every state in the US has entire communities, not isolated individuals, without access to plumbing. Generally, those living in urban areas which invested in and built public sanitation projects in the early 20th century are still able to access running water. Over 5 percent of residents in Alaska are unable to access any public water works; in New Mexico it is 1.6 percent and just under 1 percent of the population in Arizona and Maine.
Given the survey results and their own research, the authors concluded that over 2 million Americans “live without basic access to safe drinking water and sanitation.” Within that group, 1.4 million people in the continental US and 250,000 Puerto Ricans “lack access to indoor plumbing.” The authors estimate an additional 553,000 homeless people within the US also do not have access to indoor plumbing.
As the authors note in the report, these numbers are vast under-representations of the true scale of the social crime perpetrated by the ruling class on the most exploited sections of the population.
“Water access issues disproportionately affect lower-income people, people of color, undocumented immigrants, and people who do not speak English, … all groups that are considered Hard to Count (HTC) populations and are underrepresented in the census,” the report notes.
In a shocking testament to capitalism's inability to guarantee the basic rights of the working class, six states, Delaware, Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota and the US territory of Puerto Rico saw increases in the number of people within them that lacked access to water between 2000 and 2014.
In addition to losing access the report estimates that over 44 million Americans, over an eighth of the population, are currently being served by water systems that had recorded Safe Drinking Water Act violations. Private wells, which many rural and underserved communities are forced to rely on for water, are extremely susceptible to contamination. The United States Geological Survey found contaminants, including arsenic, uranium, nitrates, and E. coli in 23 percent of the wells tested for the report.
While overall the report’s authors found a slight decline in the population without complete plumbing access from 1.6 million in 2000 to a slightly lower 1.4 million in 2014, very nearly within the margin of error, even this “decline” is much less than in previous decades. Between 1950 and 1970 the percentage of the US population that didn’t have access to running water decreased from 27 percent to 5.9 percent.
The authors correctly point out that this decrease was due to robust public investment in public water systems. “In 1977, 63 percent of total capital spending for water and wastewater systems came from federal agencies; today that number is less than nine percent.” It is clear from the report that billions of dollars are needed to either rebuild or construct new pipes and sanitation systems to combat this growing health crisis.
In order to guarantee access to clean water and sanitation services for every human being on the planet, the immense resources monopolized by the top 1 percent—every race, ethnicity, gender and nationality—must be put under the democratic control of the international working class, the class that creates all of society’s wealth. This is not, however, the solution the authors of the report put forward.
Instead, drawing from the Democratic Party-aligned “Advisory Council” which had a hand in creating the report, including Derrick Johnson, President and Chief Executive Officer, NAACP and Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the report recommends further privatization of public services, promoting “collaborative collaboration” to “bring market expertise to the water access challenge.”
This also explains the report’s elevation of race as the primary factor in determining water access. In the “Five Major Findings from the National Analysis,” the authors determine that race is the strongest predictor of water and sanitation access. While it is true that there are racial disparities, the report notes that Native Americans, due to living on remote rural reservations, are “19 times more likely than white households to lack indoor plumbing,” these disparities are not rooted in skin pigmentation, but class.
Poverty and social inequality, which the report attempts to downplay, are the key obstacles to clean water. Despite the shortcomings of the authors’ conclusions, the report is valuable in highlighting the severity of the water crisis in America and the urgent necessity on the part of workers, students and youth to fight for a socialist solution that addresses the water access needs of the world’s population.


The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.

The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier this year.

Trump administration food stamp cuts spell hunger and destitution for millions

The Trump Administration announced Wednesday a rule change that will deprive nearly 700,000 people of benefits from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, increasing hunger for countless families.
SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program, currently provides vital federal assistance to over 36 million people.
Beginning in April 2020, the rule will make it much harder for adults, aged 18 to 49, who are without dependents to obtain benefits. It will make it more difficult for states to waive a requirement that these individuals work at least 20 hours a week or lose their benefits by allowing only those states with an official unemployment rate of 6 percent or above to apply for waivers. Currently, some regions with jobless rates as low as 2.5 percent are included in the waived areas.
A supermarket displays stickers indicating they accept food stamps in West New York, N.J. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
The print and broadcast media have largely ignored the move, which will lead untold thousands of households to go hungry. Congressional Democrats have remained virtually silent, focused on their impeachment proceedings against Trump centering on claims that his policies are insufficiently aggressive against Russia.
That is because, in attacking the living conditions of masses of people, Trump is carrying out a bipartisan policy supported by both parties of big business. In 2014, President Obama signed legislation into law that cut $8.7 billion in food stamp benefits over the next decade, causing 850,000 households to lose an average of $90 a month.
According to a study from earlier this year when the change was first proposed, it will affect the poorest and most vulnerable: 97 percent of SNAP participants affected live in poverty; 88 percent have household incomes at or below 50 percent of the poverty level, or less than $600 a month.
The work rule change is tied to two other proposals—one capping deductions for utility allowances and another that would lead to nearly 1 million students losing access to reduced-cost or free lunches. Taken together, the Urban Institute estimates that these three proposals would cut 3.6 million people from SNAP benefits. In the words of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, these measures—which will literally snatch food from the mouths of children, the destitute and the most vulnerable in society—will “restore the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population, while also respecting the taxpayers who fund the program.”
In reality, Perdue’s dystopian vision has nothing to do with restoring the “dignity of work” and everything to do with plunging millions of Americans further into poverty while increasing the wealth of the already super-wealthy who have been the beneficiaries of Trump’s tax cuts and attacks on social programs. Forbes places Perdue’s current net worth at $5 million, a minor player compared to Education Secretary Betsy Devos, whose net worth is $2 billion, the highest in Trump’s cabinet.
The secretary of agriculture and former Georgia governor built a fortune in agribusiness and real estate. Shortly after joining Trump’s cabinet, he transferred control of investments worth at least $8 million to his adult children. It is a cruel irony that the Trump official leading the assault on food stamps made his fortune profiting from agribusiness, while suicides among financially ruined Midwest family farmers are surging.
The three changes to SNAP rules would reduce the food stamp rolls by at least 15 percent in 13 states, according to an estimate by the Urban Institute. The third of these changes would hit the District of Columbia (24 percent) and Nevada (22 percent). Total benefits would fall by at least 15 percent in nine states.
In California alone, an estimated 200,000 people could lose benefits as a result of the restrictions on waivers to work requirements.
Americans living in cold-weather states like Vermont, New York and South Dakota will bear the biggest brunt from the rule reducing the amount people can deduct for utility costs. Mostly rural Vermont would lose almost 22 percent of its food stamp aid, while New York, South Dakota and Maine would lose about 11 percent each. The US Department of Agriculture estimates the utility cost overhaul will reduce food stamp spending by about $4.5 billion over five years.
Almost 7 in 10 Vermonters would see a cut in SNAP benefits, with the typical benefit reduced by almost 40 percent, dropping from an already paltry $215 a month to about $133, according to Hunger Free Vermont. Ellen Vollinger, legal director at the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, said the utility cost proposal will force people to “choose whether to eat or heat.”
It is a myth that any of these measures will help people find jobs. Hunger advocates have emphasized that many of those who will be affected are impoverished, live in rural areas and often face mental health issues and disabilities. “The policy targets very poor people struggling to work—some of whom are homeless or living with health conditions,” Stacey Dean, food assistance policy vice president at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told NBC News. “Taking away basic food assistance from these individuals will only increase hardship and hunger, while doing nothing to help them find steady full-time work.”
But as the Trump administration touts a rise in the GDP as an indicator of the country’s economic health, renewed signs of social crisis in America portend an increase—not a lessening—of suffering and despair, which will only be exacerbated by cuts to food assistance.
The US has experienced a decline in life expectancy for the third straight year. More disturbingly, growing numbers of people are dying relatively young, between the ages of 25 and 64, an age group that intersects with those targeted by the rule changes to SNAP.
These are people who in a healthy society would be in the prime of their working lives. Instead, rising numbers of people are dying from “diseases of despair:” suicide, alcohol and drug overdose. Midlife mortality rates have also increased as a result of at least 35 other causes, including diseases and conditions such as diabetes, autoimmune disorders, obesity and high blood pressure.
After a decline in the uninsured rate due to the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that those without health insurance obtain coverage from a private insurer, the uninsured rate is now rising again. The numbers of those who are underinsured and burdened by high out-of-pocket costs are growing, leading to increasing numbers of people filing for personal bankruptcy.
A new report by two non-profit groups reveals the staggering statistic that over 2 million Americans in 2019 do not have access to indoor plumbing or running water. New statistics also show that the Flint water crisis is not an isolated incident, and that the water supply in countless cities and towns across the country are contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.

The defense of the basic human right to adequate nutrition, water and health care cannot be entrusted to either big business party. The Trump administration’s assault on SNAP benefits poses the necessity of the working class adopting its own independent defense of these social rights through the organization of a revolutionary leadership that fights for the socialist organization of society on the basis of human need, not profit.



Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans


The wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.

For the first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds.
The analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23 percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot via the New York Times)
The analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt writes:
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate taxAnd they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]
The report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.
“The same consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in the Senate.
That increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times the rate of other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

 

 

Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018

(Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the first to incorporate the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many economists to be skewed in favor of the wealthy.
But the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties, has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level, while the reading was lower in 36 states.

The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier this year. 

Trump proposal denies free school meals to half a million children

The Trump administration has provided a new analysis of how proposed changes to eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, will impact children who participate in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. By the White House’s own admission, these changes mean that about a half-million children would become ineligible for free school meals.
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has described the changes as a tightening up of “loopholes” in the SNAP system. But those affected by the changes are not corporate crooks or billionaires, but hundreds of thousands of children who stand to lose access to free meals. For many American children, free school breakfasts and lunches make up the bulk of their nutritional intake, and they stand to suffer permanent physical and psychological damage as a result of the cuts.
Children receive a free lunch at the Phoenix Day Central Park Youth Program in downtown Phoenix. (AP Photo Matt York)
The sheer vindictiveness of the proposed rule change is shown by the minimal savings that would result—about $90 million a year beginning in fiscal year 2021, or a mere 0.012 percent of the estimated $74 billion annual SNAP budget. Put another way, the savings would amount to two-thousandths of a percent of the $4.4 trillion federal budget. But while this $90 million might appear as small change to the oligarchs running and supporting the government, it will be directly felt as hunger in the bellies of America’s poorest children.
SNAP provided benefits to roughly 40 million Americans in 2018 and is the largest nutrition program of the 15 administered by the federal Food and Nutrition Service. Along with programs such as the Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children and school breakfast and lunch programs, SNAP has been a major factor in making a dent in the hunger of working-class families. But despite these programs’ successes, the Trump administration is seeking to claw them back, with the ultimate aim of doing away with them altogether.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the food stamp and school meal programs, says that the new analysis presented last week is a more precise estimate of the impact of rule changes in SNAP the USDA first announced in July. The main component of the rule change is an end to “broad-based categorical eligibility” for the food stamp program. Food stamps are cut off for households whose incomes exceed 130 percent of the federal poverty line, or $33,475 per year for a family of four, calculated after exemptions for certain expenses.
Under “broad-based categorical eligibility,” which is currently used by over 40 states, households can be eligible for food stamps based on their receiving assistance from other anti-poverty programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Under this rule, which has been in effect for about 20 years, states are allowed to raise income eligibility and asset limits to promote SNAP eligibility. This prevents many households from falling over the “benefit cliff,” which happens when a small increase in income results in a complete cutoff of benefits, leaving a family worse off than before the rise in income.
According to the USDA, the rule change on broad-based eligibility would throw more than 680,000 households with children off SNAP. About 80 percent of these households have school-age children, amounting to about 982,000 children. Of those, 55 percent, or about 540,000, would no longer be eligible for free school meals, although most would be eligible for reduced-price meals. About 40,000 would be required to pay the full meal rate.
However, this does not paint the full picture. Households thrown off SNAP would be required to apply separately for access to free or reduced-price school meals. The USDA admits that its cost estimates “do not account for potential state and local administrative costs incurred due to collecting and processing household applications … and also do not account for any increased responsibility placed on the households to complete and submit a school meals application.”
While the Trump administration claims that the proposed changes to SNAP eligibility are aimed at closing up “loopholes” and stopping people from claiming benefits they’re not entitled to, the reality is that there is no evidence that broad-based eligibility has allowed significant numbers of people to supposedly “game the system.” A 2012 Government Accountability Office investigation found that only 473,000 recipients, or just 2.6 percent of beneficiaries, received benefits they would not have received without the broad-based eligibility offered by many states.
There is consistent evidence that SNAP contributes to a decrease in food insecurity, a condition defined by the USDA as limited or uncertain access to adequate food. By one estimate, SNAP benefits reduce the likelihood of food insecurity by about 30 percent and the likelihood of being very food insecure by 20 percent. Census data has shown that SNAP also plays a critical role in reducing poverty, with about 3.6 million Americans, including 1.5 million children, being lifted out of poverty in 2016 as a result of the program.
The EconoFact Network reports that SNAP has improved birth outcomes and infant health. When an expectant mother has access to SNAP during pregnancy, particularly in the third trimester, it decreases the likelihood that her baby will be born with low birth weight. There is also evidence that the benefits of nutrition support can persist well into adulthood when access to SNAP is provided before birth and during early childhood. This can have a long-term impact on an individual’s earnings, health and life expectancy. Conversely, food insecurity in childhood correlates with greater risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease later in life.
The proposed threat to school lunches for half a million children has elicited little response from Democrats in Congress, who are obsessively focused on the Trump impeachment inquiry. Critical issues such as the health and nutrition of school children are of little consequence to the Democratic Party, which instead gives voice to those sections of the military intelligence apparatus that sees Trump’s actions, particularly his sudden pullout from Syria, as endangering the global interests of American imperialism.
The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier this year. At $94.6 million, the cost of one of the US Air Force’s newest and most technologically advanced fighter jets, the F-35A, would cover the $90 annual savings from depriving half a million US schoolchildren of free meals.

The Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier this year. 


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