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May 14th, 2014

5/14/2014

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IF OBAMA ISN'T MAKING EXECUTIVE DECISIONS TO BUILD STRUCTURES TO END SOCIAL SECURITY----myRA, MEDICARE AND MEDICAID----THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT-----HE IS BUILDING THE STRUCTURES FOR IMMIGRATION NEEDED TO MOVE TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT FORWARD.......THE HIGH-SKILLED GREEN CARD POLICY AND GENERAL LIFTING OF IMMIGRATION NUMBERS EACH YEAR.

WE LOVE IMMIGRANTS BUT NOT POLICY THAT SEEKS TO LEAVE ALL WORKERS  EXPLOITED AND IMPOVERISHED.

Do you hear your labor unions shouting and fighting this? 


As republicans pretend to fight this high-skilled immigration reform policy now fast-tracked by Obama remember again-----the immigration policy that allows high-skilled immigrants only is a republican policy so it is not the democratic party moving these bad policies forward----it is neo-liberals and republicans.



As we see below, NPR's favorite 'good billionaire' Bill Gates is now being exposed as really, really bad.  When he isn't off pushing the Trans Pacific Trade Pact that seeks to end public health and health care subsidy so his PHARMA can maximize profits----ending public education so his education tech industries and selling of computers for online lessons can maximize profits---and while at it let's garner a majority share of militarized food with the Monsanto/Blackwater corporate merger. 
WHAT A GUY.

He just keeps on taking and killing democratic societies all for market share.  Below you see he and his tech buddies are now building an immigration policy that kills not only US workers, but Hispanic workers already in the US and even the foreign grads indentured to jobs that exploit them.

Obama just used Executive privilege yet again to move immigration reform to only high-skilled immigrants and their spouses.  So, he is single-handedly putting into place the structures for Trans Pacific Trade Pact while your neo-liberal incumbents are silent. 
Remember, TPP allows global corporations to bring people from developing nations to work in the US under the conditions of that third world nation....say India or China.  This is especially true for low-wage immigrant workers but it affects high-skilled workers as well.  The path to citizenship never comes for 99% as buying your citizenship is now the policy and the cost is prohibitive.

These are not democratic policies----they are neo-liberal and neo-con policies meant only to maximize profit at the expense of further impoverishing workers.


Remember as well each time the President uses Executive privilege.....we move away from having a legislative branch.  Clinton started using this once rarely used executive practice, Bush increased the use, and now Obama is moving the most controversial polices through this practice.  If your pol is not shouting loudly about how bad this is for US democracy no matter what party does it----they are not working for you and me.

THOSE HISPANICS WHO THINK NEO-LIBERALS ARE WORKING FOR THEM----THINK AGAIN.  ALL MARYLAND POLS ARE NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS.

The foreign grads falling into these high-skill jobs become indentured into often the most menial of jobs.
__________________
STEM labor shortages?: Microsoft report distorts reality ...www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages... 
__________________
We had a glut of nursing staff last decade as college students were told nursing would always be a strong field for hiring.  Then, neo-liberals and neo-cons starting bringing immigrant labor over to the US to take those health care jobs.  Now we have high unemployment for nursing and professional health positions.

The American people and especially progressive labor and justice love immigrants and work to protect their rights as workers just as all workers.  Immigrants already in the US must see that flooding the labor market now while unemployment is at 36% and hirer for Hispanic workers already in the US-----that this kind of immigration policy means to hurt all workers.


So, when we hear the mantra of STEM in K-12 and we see a steady stream of health care and tech industry layoffs and grads with no jobs-----we are not getting accurate data. 

This article does a good job showing that media is deliberately misinforming the American people and research data is being skewed by corporate universities and a corporate run government.


Columnist Diane Ravitch: Why Are So Many STEM Graduates Unemployed?

By Wired Academic on July 24, 2012


By Diane Ravitch, Guest Columnist

How many times have we heard the President, the Secretary of Education, and leaders of corporate America tell us that we must produce more scientists? That there are thousands of jobs unfilled because we don’t have qualified college graduates to fill them? That our future depends on pumping billions into STEM education?

I always believe them. Science, engineering, technology and mathematics are fields critical for the future.

But why then, according to an article in the Washington Post, are well-educated scientists unable to find jobs?

Three years ago, USA Today reported  high unemployment among scientists and engineers.

Some experts in science say there is no shortage of scientists, but there is a shortage of good jobs for scientists.

Some say that the pool of qualified graduates in science and engineering is “several times larger” than the pool of jobs available for them. And here is a shocker: The quality of STEM education has NOT declined:

Despite this nearly universal support for upgrading science and math education, our review of the data leads us to conclude that, while the educational pipeline would benefit from improvements, it is not as dysfunctional as believed. Today’s American high school students actually test as well or better than students two decades ago. Further, today’s students take more science and math classes, and a large number of students with strong science and math backgrounds graduate from U.S. high schools and start college in S&E fields of study. 

Why don’t our leaders tell us the truth? Why don’t they tell us that many of our highly trained young people will not find good jobs in research labs or universities or anywhere else?

I have said before on this blog that the economy is changing in ways that no one understands, least of all me.

Over the past century, whenever reformers told the schools to prepare students for this career or that vocation, the policymakers and school leaders were woefully inadequate at predicting which jobs would be available ten years later. When the automobile was first invented, there were still plenty of students taking courses to prepare them to be blacksmiths. The same story could be repeated over the years. We are not good at prognosticating.

My own predilection is to believe that all young people should get a full and rounded general education, which will teach them to think and evaluate new information. I prefer an education that includes the usual range of disciplines, not because of tradition but because each of them is valuable for our lives.

We don’t know what the future will bring, but we all need to learn the skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. We don’t know what jobs will be available in ten or twenty years, but we all need to study history, so that we possess knowledge of our society and others; we need an understanding of science so we know how the world works; we need to be involved in the arts, because it is an expression of the human spirit and enables us to think deeply about ourselves and our world. I could make the same claims for other disciplines. The claim must be based on enduring needs, not the needs of the job market, because the only certainty is that the  job market will be different in the future.

Ravitch is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University. This post first appeared on DianeRavitch.net

________________________________________
This is a long article but a good one.  You see Mikulski's office is targeted as Johns Hopkins is the worst for exploiting foreign green card professionals.  I have a friend here in Baltimore working at Hopkins from India left with the mind-numbing tasks of repetitive lab tests garnering only a grad assistant wage and after years in this position------no hope in site for citizenship or a better job.  Hopkins is of course now a corporation so is using this Indian immigrant purely to maximize profit.  Meanwhile------unemployment across America and in Maryland is 36% and as you see US STEM grads are the largest group.

Remember, this immigration reform was never about giving justice to Hispanic workers already in the US.....neo-liberals are trying to create a third world system of deeply impoverished professional workers-----even doctors, lawyers, and Indian Chiefs are impoverished in the third world.  There is more to these policies.  When heading for the third world status those in power always surround themselves with administrative professional that are not citizens----they have no rights as US citizens and are kept in an indentured state with fear of deportation to maintain loyalty as conditions worsen in the US.  This is why you always see an exodus of immigrant workers fleeing a collapsing dictatorship. 

AUTOCRATIC SOCIETIES NEED LOTS OF PEOPLE WORKING KEY JOBS HAVING NO RIGHTS AS CITIZENS.


Meanwhile, the Hispanic workers fighting for REAL immigration reform are left with no hope for the pathway to citizenship or enforcement of labor laws to their benefit-----because abuse of labor is the goal of neo-liberals and republicans.

AS LONG AS WE HAVE NEO-LIBERALS AND NOT PROGRESSIVE LABOR AND JUSTICE RUNNING IN DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES!  STOP ALLOWING A NEO-LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL PARTY CHOOSE YOUR CANDIDATES----LET'S REBUILD THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!



'But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them'.


12:00 AM - May 1, 2013

It doesn’t add up A science writer questions the conventional wisdom of US-born STEM workers

By Beryl Lieff Benderly  Columbia Journalism Review


Homegrown President Obama, seen here visiting at technical college in North Carolina, supports bringing more foreign STEM workers to the US, despite high unemployment among US workers. (Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Images)

In late February, Christine Miller and Sona Shah went to the Capitol Hill office of Miller’s senator, Barbara Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat, to talk about immigration reform and the job market for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workers. Miller, an American-born MIT grad with a PhD in biochemistry, had 20 years of research experience when Johns Hopkins University laid her off in 2009 because of funding cuts. Shah, an Indian-born US citizen with degrees in physics and engineering, had been laid off earlier by a computer company that was simultaneously hiring foreign workers on temporary visas. Proposals to increase admission of foreign stem workers to the US, Miller and Shah told Erin Neill, a member of Mikulski’s staff, would worsen the already glutted stem labor market.

According to Miller, Neill told them this is not the argument “she normally encounters on this issue.” The conventional wisdom is that tech companies and universities can’t find enough homegrown scientists to hire, so they need to import them from China and India. Neill suggested to Miller and Shah that “we would have more impact if we represented a large, organized group.”


Miller and Shah are, in fact, part of a large group. Figures from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform.


The two main STEM-related proposals currently part of that debate in Congress would increase the number of temporary high-skill worker visas (also called guestworker visas), and give green cards to every foreign graduate of an American college with a master’s or PhD in a STEM field. Media coverage of these proposals has generally hewed, uncritically, to the unfounded notion that America isn’t producing enough native talent in the science and engineering fields to satisfy the demands of businesses and universities—and that foreign-born workers tend to be more entrepreneurial and innovative than their American-born counterparts. Allowing more stem immigrants, the story goes, is key to adding jobs to the beleaguered US economy.

It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.

High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. Politicians, advocates, and articles and op-eds published by media outlets—including The New York Times, Forbes, CNN, Slate, and others—invoke such foreign-born entrepreneurs as Google’s Sergey Brin or Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, as if arrival from abroad (Brin and Yang came to the US as children) explains the success of the companies they founded . . . with partners who are US natives. Journalists endorse studies that trumpet the job-creating skills of these entrepreneurs from abroad, while ignoring the weaknesses that other scholars find in the research.

Meanwhile, The National Science Board’s biennial book, Science and Engineering Indicators, consistently finds that the US produces several times the number of STEM graduates than can get jobs in their fields. Recent reports from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, and the American Chemical Society warn that overproduction of STEM PhDs is damaging America’s ability to recruit native-born talent, and advise universities to limit the number of doctorates they produce, especially in the severely glutted life sciences. In June 2012, for instance, the American Chemical Society’s annual survey found record unemployment among its members, with only 38 percent of new PhDs, 50 percent of new master’s graduates, and 33 percent of new bachelor’s graduates in fulltime jobs.
Overall, STEM unemployment in the US is more than twice its pre-recession level, according to congressional testimony by Ron Hira, a science-labor-force expert at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

And yet, a bill introduced in Congress last year that would have heeded the NIH recommendation by limiting visas for biomedical scientists was attacked in a Forbes article that suggested it could delay progress on the search for a cure for cancer by keeping out able researchers.

* * * Foreign-born scientists and engineers have, of course, contributed significantly to American society as innovators and entrepreneurs—and the nation’s immigration policy certainly needs repair. But many leading STEM-labor-force experts agree that the great majority of stem workers entering the country contribute less to innovative breakthroughs or job growth for Americans than to the bottom lines of the companies and universities that hire them.


Temporary visas allow employers to pay skilled workers below-market wages, and these visas are valid only for specific jobs. Workers are unable to take another job, making them akin to indentured servants. Universities also use temporary visas to recruit international graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, mainly from China, to do the gruntwork for professors’ grants. “When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.

Research by Hira, Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, Richard Freeman of Harvard, and numerous others has shown how temporary visas have allowed employers to flood STEM labor markets and hold down the cost of tech workers and scientists doing grant-supported university research. Wages in the IT industry rose rapidly throughout the 1990s, but have been essentially flat or declining in the past decade, which coincides with the rising number of guestworkers on temporary visas.

In his new book, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Peter Cappelli, a human-resources specialist at the Wharton School, concludes that companies’ reported hiring difficulties don’t arise from a shortage of qualified workers, but from rigid recruitment practices that use narrow categories and definitions and don’t take advantage of the applicants’ full range of abilities. Companies so routinely evade protections in the visa system designed to prevent displacement of American citizens that immigration lawyers have produced videos about how it is done. For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.

The temporary-visa system also facilitates the offshoring of STEM work, particularly in the IT field, to low-wage countries. Outsourcing companies use the temporary visas to bring workers to the US to learn the jobs that the client company is planning to move to temp workers’ home country. The 10 firms with the largest number of H-1B visas, the most common visa for high-skill workers, are all in the business of shipping work overseas, and former Indian commerce minister Kamil Nath famously labeled the H-1B “the outsourcing visa.”


These practices have helped to reduce incomes and career prospects in STEM fields drastically enough to produce what UC Davis’s Norman Matloff calls “an internal brain drain” of talented Americans to other, more promising career opportunities such as Wall Street, healthcare, or patent law.


The proposal before Congress to automatically grant green cards to all STEM students with graduate degrees—regardless of field, origin, or quality—would exacerbate the problem of already overcrowded markets,
according to new research by Hal Salzman of Rutgers University, Daniel Keuhn of American University, and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University. It also would benefit universities facing tough financial times by dramatically increasing the allure of American graduate schools, and thus the income potential to universities. And, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said at a 2011 hearing,
it would “further erode the opportunities of American students. Universities would in essence become visa mills.”

Academic departments generally determine how many graduate students they admit, or postdocs they hire, based on the teaching and research workforce they need, not on the career opportunities awaiting young scientists. Unlike companies, universities have access to unlimited temporary-worker visas. This allows universities to hire skilled lab workers and pay them very low, “trainee” wages. Postdocs are an especially good deal for professors running labs because they don’t require tuition, which must be paid out of the professors’ grants, notes Paula Stephan, a labor economist at Georgia State University, in her book How Economics Shapes Science.

* * * Immigrants constitute the nation’s “only shot at getting a growing economy,” because they “start more jobs than natives,” declared New York Times columnist David Brooks on Meet the Press in February. “Every additional 100 foreign-born workers in science and technology fields is associated with 262 additional jobs for US natives,” he had written in the Times, adding that “a quarter of new high-tech companies with more than $1 million in sales were also founded by the foreign-born.”

These claims, cited by Brooks and many others, arise from a body of research that has been the subject of scholarly dispute—though you’d never know it from the media coverage of this issue. The overwhelming majority of coverage presents the conclusions reached in studies like the one conducted by Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, who publishes widely in popular media and speaks frequently on immigration issues. About a quarter of the 2,054 engineering and technology companies that responded to Wadhwa’s telephone survey said they had a “key founder”—defined as a chief technology officer or a CEO—who was foreign-born. Extrapolating from that figure, the study credits immigrant-founded companies with employing 450,000 people nationally in 2005.

But a nationwide survey by political scientist David Hart and economist Zoltan Acs of George Mason University reached a different conclusion.
In a 2011 piece in Economic Development Quarterly, Hart and Acs note that between 40 and 75 percent of new jobs are created by no more than 10 percent of new businesses—the so-called high-impact firms that have rapidly expanding sales and employment. In their survey of high-impact technology firms, only 16 percent had at least one foreign-born founder, and immigrants constituted about 13 percent of total founders—a figure close to the immigrant share of the general population. But the more fundamental problem with Wadhwa’s study, Hart and Acs suggest, is that it does not report the total number of founders at a given company, making conclusions about immigrants’ overall contribution impossible to quantify.

Evaluating the issues of statistics and sample selection that divide the academic researchers is beyond the purview of most general media, but informing readers that reputable researchers reached different conclusions is not. Though real, the immigrant role in high-tech entrepreneurship could be considerably less dramatic than many writers claim. Research on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in 1999 by AnnaLee Saxenian, for example, found that 36 percent of high-tech companies owned by Chinese immigrants were doing nothing more groundbreaking than putting together computers for sale from components.

* * * As Erin Neill, of Senator Mikulski’s staff, pointed out, no one in the immigration debate speaks effectively for US-born STEM workers. The IT world’s libertarian ethos, the relative poverty among young scientists and their unemployed and underemployed peers, and a fear of antagonizing present or potential employers all hamper efforts to organize these workers
. National scientific associations and advocacy groups sponsored by industry and universities, meanwhile, represent the interests of those who benefit from the system—tenured faculty, university administrators, and company executives, including those at companies whose donations support scholarly conferences and other association activities. These organizations and their lobbyists frame their policy arguments with feel-good abstractions about the inherent value of science and research and innovation, suggesting they are a panacea for America’s economic ills.

Which brings us to the story of Xianmin Shane Zhang, a software engineer in Minnesota. According to his LinkedIn page, Zhang earned his BS in engineering in his native China, one MS in physics at Southern Illinois University, and another in computer science at the University of Houston. His profile next lists a series of IT jobs at US companies. In 2005, 43-year-old Zhang was one of a group of workers over 40 who sued their former employer, Best Buy, for age discrimination, when the company laid them off after outsourcing their jobs. The suit ended in an undisclosed settlement.

After being laid off by Best Buy, Zhang eventually fulfilled the rosy forecast of those advocating increased STEM-worker immigration by becoming an entrepreneur, though hardly following the innovation and jobs-for-Americans script. His Z&Z Information Services in St. Paul helps US companies outsource their IT and programming needs to China. “Giving green cards to foreign students can lead to offshoring as well,” notes Norman Matloff, who uncovered this tale. That’s because young scientists and engineers from abroad get older, and wind up facing the same age discrimination and glutted market as their native-born colleagues. Why isn’t that reported, too?


______________________________________
Below you see Pritzker-----Hyatt heiress as Obama's Commerce Secretary.  She is of course the face of impoverishment and workplace abuse of many immigrant workers coming through her hotel chain.

This Senate Immigration bill was never about a pathway to citizenship or even Hispanic immigrants....it was always about a market-based immigration policy that seeks only to lower US global corporation's labor costs using immigrant labor mostly from Asian nations and mostly at the high-skilled level.  So, the millions of Hispanic immigrants who are always made the face of these immigration reforms are being relegated to the same underserved and underfunded schools as US children having little opportunity to access the higher education paths needed to land anything other than poverty jobs.

The foreign graduates that are allowed to stay are trapped in an indentured state with low wages never truly advancing from the most menial of jobs in the high-skilled areas.  At the article above made clear------there are fewer than 20% of foreign grads that go on to building viable corporations that contribute to the US economy.

The other side of this is that these foreign grads now allowed to work in US corporations are hired to work on overseas expansions of global corporations giving little value to the US economy------and in fact contributing to the stagnation of the economy by displacing thousands of US citizens graduating with STEM degrees. 

OBAMA AND NEO-LIBERALS ARE DELIBERATELY CREATING THE CONDITIONS TO KEEP UNEMPLOYMENT HIGH FOR US WORKERS AND GRADUATES LEFT WITH TONS OF STUDENT LOAN DEBT AND WITH A WALL STREET STUDENT LOAN COLLECTION PROCESS-----STUDENTS ARE NOT ONLY UNEMPLOYED----THEY ARE PREY TO WALL STREET FEES, FINES, AND HARASSMENT.


Obama to ease rules for foreign high-skilled workers

Alan Gomez, USA TODAY
5:48 p.m. EDT May 6, 2014(Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)


The Obama administration wants to let nearly 100,000 spouses of foreigners working in high-tech fields to work here as well in a move critics say is harmful to nearly 10 million jobless Americans.

The administration also hopes to ease the process for foreign professors and researchers who are trying to extend their stays in America.

The proposed changes, announced Tuesday by Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, come as high-tech companies and university officials continue pressing Congress and the Obama administration to ease restrictions that they say make it difficult to import highly skilled foreign workers.

Groups like FWD.us, created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech organizations are lobbying Congress for expanded visa programs they use to hire foreign workers.

Mayorkas said the proposed rule changes keep America competitive as more countries offer incentives to attract the workers.

"The proposed rules announced today provide important support to U.S. businesses while also supporting economic growth here in the U.S.," he said. "This enhances our country's competitiveness to attract skilled workers from other countries."

But critics accuse the pro-visa groups of wanting cheap labor, and say Obama should be helping U.S. citizens get jobs rather than making it easier for foreigners to expand their employment opportunities in the United States.

"The U.S. already provides businesses with 700,000 temporary guest workers every year to compete against unemployed Americans, in addition to the annual flow of 1 million permanent legal immigrants," said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who has opposed efforts to import more foreign workers.

"The administration's unilateral decision to increase that number will hurt already-struggling American workers."

The proposed changes will be published in the Federal Register this week and then be open to 60 days of public comment before the administration can implement them.

The first proposed change affects holders of H-1B visas, which are granted to foreigners trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Current rules allow their spouses to move to the U.S. with them, but restricts them from working.

The new rule would allow the spouses of those H-1B holders who are in the process of applying for a green card to find work.

Mayorkas estimated that 97,000 people could benefit from that rule change in the first year, and 30,000 each year after.

The second proposed change focuses on a series of visa holders who come from Chile, Singapore, Australia and the Northern Mariana Islands. Current rules allow workers from those countries who have at least a bachelor's degree in a specialized field to extend their stay, but they must produce certain evidence of the success they've had. The proposed change would extend the time those workers could stay in the U.S. and allow them to use new forms of evidence to win their stay in the U.S.

Microsoft vice president of government affairs Fred Humphries said they remain committed to getting a broader immigration fix through Congress. But in the mean time, he said the two "thoughtful, commonsense changes" would help them recruit abroad.

"These changes will improve American competitiveness for the best talent in the world," Humphries said.

Critics say the changes are not being implemented for economic reasons.


"The administration's political motivation in announcing this change now is to throw a bone to the tech firms to keep them in the (comprehensive immigration reform) camp and not try to cut a separate deal with Republicans," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower levels of immigration.

Mayorkas and Pritzker said the changes will help U.S. business and universities retain the workers they need, but they stressed that Congress needs to find a broader immigration solution to address all the deficiencies in the system.

"As the president said in his State of the Union Address, we are committed to achieving a lasting solution," Pritzker said. "Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle can make this happen."


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March 19th, 2014

3/19/2014

0 Comments

 
AS I SPEAK ABOUT EDUCATION REFORM THAT HAS MANY FOREIGN LANGUAGES TAUGHT IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS....REMEMBER, BEING FORCED TO EMIGRATE OVERSEAS FOR WORK IS NOT PROGRESSIVE POLICY AND THIS IS FOR WHAT EDUCATION REFORMERS ARE PLACING THIS EMPHASIS ON FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.  It sounds progressive, but the goals for US citizens are regressive.

IF YOUR POLITICIANS ARE NOT SHOUTING AND EDUCATING YOU AS TO WHAT TRANS PACIFIC TRADE PACT (TPP) AND NEO-LIBERALISM HAVE AS A GOAL---THEY ARE NEO-LIBERALS.


Regarding corporate BBC/NPR/APM report on the state of Ireland:

From Wall Street's view Ireland was a success in the scheme of sucking all public wealth from a nation and then having the public pay to replace all the money off-shored by the looters.  I liked as well the emphasis on the fact that Ireland's young people are now EMIGRANTS......as a result.  Ireland's elected pols subjected its citizens to the worst of austerity and indeed took most public wealth in the country as is happening in the US today.  Remember, Iceland nationalized its banks and made the looters pay and is far better off than any nation that did not do that.  DO YOU EVER HEAR OF ICELAND'S SUCCESS?

I would like to look at this one case that mirrors all nation's efforts to address the massive looting by corporations of national Treasuries and public wealth.  Are Irish really playing to TROIKA or have their voices been silenced?

Another important piece from this report was the push of youth towards emigration.  That is indeed the plan for neo-liberals------empire-building means citizens are exported to overseas jobs to live as ex-pats after all.  So, when Maryland and the Federal education reformers say we need lots of foreign language in elementary schools-----they are not being progressive-----they are preparing our children for becoming ex-pats-----emigrants.

RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU WANT YOUR CHILD'S FUTURE TO HOLD ONLY AN OPTION OF WORKING OVERSEAS?  NO ONE.  EVEN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL GRADS DO NOT WANT THIS.  Raise you hand if you want a strong public education system that prepares people to work in a domestic economy fueled with US families as consumers?  EVERYONE.  See the disconnect?


NEO-LIBERALS ARE PREPARING TO MAKE OUR CHILDREN TOOLS OF EMPIRE BUILDING BY SENDING THEM OVERSEAS AND LIVING AS EX-PATS JUST AS BBC DESCRIBED IS HAPPENING IN IRELAND.

Who will be staying in the US?  With Trans Pacific Trade Pact (TPP) citizens who will live as Chinese citizens did while US corporations used China for offshore factory work.



The Bank Guarantee That Bankrupted Ireland


Posted on Nov 2, 2013 kevin dooley (CC BY 2.0)
By Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

This piece first appeared at Web of Debt.

The Irish have a long history of being tyrannized, exploited, and oppressed—from the forced conversion to Christianity in the Dark Ages, to slave trading of the natives in the 15th and 16th centuries, to the mid-nineteenth century “potato famine” that was really a holocaust. The British got Ireland’s food exports, while at least one million Irish died from starvation and related diseases, and another million or more emigrated.

Today, Ireland is under a different sort of tyranny, one imposed by the banks and the troika—the EU, ECB and IMF. The oppressors have demanded austerity and more austerity, forcing the public to pick up the tab for bills incurred by profligate private bankers.

The official unemployment rate is 13.5%—up from 5% in 2006—and this figure does not take into account the mass emigration of Ireland’s young people in search of better opportunities abroad. Job loss and a flood of foreclosures are leading to suicides. A raft of new taxes and charges has been sold as necessary to reduce the deficit, but they are simply a backdoor bailout of the banks.

At first, the Irish accepted the media explanation: these draconian measures were necessary to “balance the budget” and were in their best interests. But after five years of belt-tightening in which unemployment and living conditions have not improved, the people are slowly waking up. They are realizing that their assets are being grabbed simply to pay for the mistakes of the financial sector.

Five years of austerity has not restored confidence in Ireland’s banks. In fact the banks themselves are packing up and leaving. On October 31st, RTE.ie reported that Danske Bank Ireland was closing its personal and business banking, only days after ACCBank announced it was handing back its banking license; and Ulster Bank’s future in Ireland remains unclear.  The field is ripe for some publicly-owned banks. Banks that have a mandate to serve the people, return the profits to the people, and refrain from speculating. Banks guaranteed by the state because they are the state, without resort to bailouts or bail-ins. Banks that aren’t going anywhere, because they are locally owned by the people themselves.

The Bank Guarantee That Bankrupted Ireland

Ireland was the first European country to watch its entire banking system fail.  Unlike the Icelanders, who refused to bail out their bankrupt banks, in September 2008 the Irish government gave a blanket guarantee to all Irish banks, covering all their loans, deposits, bonds and other liabilities.

At the time, no one was aware of the huge scale of the banks’ liabilities, or just how far the Irish property market would fall.

Within two years, the state bank guarantee had bankrupted Ireland.  The international money markets would no longer lend to the Irish government.

Before the bailout, the Irish budget was in surplus. By 2011, its deficit was 32% of the country’s GDP, the highest by far in the Eurozone. At that rate, bank losses would take every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years.

“This debt would probably be manageable,” wrote Morgan Kelly, Professor of Economics at University College Dublin, “had the Irish government not casually committed itself to absorb all the gambling losses of its banking system.”

To avoid collapse, the government had to sign up for an €85 billion bailout from the EU-IMF and enter a four year program of economic austerity, monitored every three months by an EU/IMF team sent to Dublin.

Public assets have also been put on the auction block. Assets currently under consideration include parts of Ireland’s power and gas companies and its 25% stake in the airline Aer Lingus.

At one time, Ireland could have followed the lead of Iceland and refused to bail out its bondholders or to bow to the demands for austerity. But that was before the Irish government used ECB money to pay off the foreign bondholders of Irish banks. Now its debt is to the troika, and the troika are tightening the screws.  In September 2013, they demanded another 3.1 billion euro reduction in spending.

Some ministers, however, are resisting such cuts, which they say are politically undeliverable.

In The Irish Times on October 31, 2013, a former IMF official warned that the austerity imposed on Ireland is self-defeating. Ashoka Mody, former IMF chief of mission to Ireland, said it had become “orthodoxy that the only way to establish market credibility” was to pursue austerity policies. But five years of crisis and two recent years of no growth needed “deep thinking” on whether this was the right course of action. He said there was “not one single historical instance” where austerity policies have led to an exit from a heavy debt burden.

Austerity has not fixed Ireland’s debt problems. Belying the rosy picture painted by the media, in September 2013 Antonio Garcia Pascual, chief euro-zone economist at Barclays Investment Bank, warned that Ireland may soon need a second bailout.

___________________________________________


Ireland was suckered into this neo-liberal policy of making a state or country home to business by giving them everything they want.  In the US Texas leads in this policy and neo-liberal states like Maryland are following.  What happens when you allow this race to the bottom in attracting jobs is what happened in Ireland.  Citizens are taken on whatever ride neo-liberals want always to the detriment of labor and justice.

This is why we need to take back the democratic party-----the people's party from the neo-liberals and move back towards economic policy that allows our country stability and first world quality of life.  It is not too late as neo-liberals try to tell us.  WE SIMPLY NEED TO SHAKE THE NEO-LIBERAL BUGS FROM THE RUG!

In this article I like the DUMP THE EURO because right now the monetary capture of the TROIKA makes European unity a lose-lose situation for individual nations and their citizens.




John T. Harvey John T. Harvey Contributor
Leadership 7/08/2013   Forbes

Ireland: No More Austerity (and Dump the Euro)


Today, my wife and I are traveling to Ireland to visit the town where my grandfather grew up (and maybe have a beer or two–if we survive my driving!). The economy there presents a sad case study for the austerity programs being forced on economies around the world. Just days ago, it was reported that Ireland appears to be in recession once again (Ireland falls back into recession). How can this be given the rapid growth of the Celtic Tiger just a few years ago? Actually, this comes as no surprise to many economists because the so-called solutions being implemented are a function of the very same principles that caused the collapse in the first place. Unless a significant about-turn is executed, stagnation, emigration, and unemployment will continue for years to come.

That culprit is the philosophy of neoliberalism. It argues, among other things, that unregulated financial markets efficiently price assets, higher profits are good for everyone as they lead to increased employment and wages (the so-called trickle down effect), and governments represent a net drag on economic activity. Neoliberalism has been a powerful force driving world economic policy since the 1980s and as such laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are experiencing today. Ireland was not immune to these influences and, as a consequence, policy makers lowered corporate tax rates, made transfer pricing rules business-friendly, and adopted a largely hands-off approach to financial regulation (even when improprieties emerged). Dropping the punt in favor of the euro was also seen as a sign of economic responsibility because it linked Irish policy to that of the fiscally-prudent Germans.

What resulted was the emergence of Ireland-as-tax-haven. Yes, foreign firms were attracted and the impact was not entirely negative, but they tended to repatriate a substantial portion of their profits so that this money was available neither as a component of domestic income nor as part of the tax base. This, along with low euro interest rates that were more appropriate to the German than Irish economy, created an environment in which borrowing was easy and it appeared that no investment could fail. An asset bubble–something that neoliberalism says cannot happen in a free market since assets are priced efficiently–naturally followed. As is well known, that bubble burst in 2008.

But then, rather than decide that the earlier policies had failed, bets were doubled. In keeping with the neoliberal assumption that businesses were the key to prosperity, it was they, not the citizens, that the Irish government protected. In addition, Ireland continued to cede control of monetary policy by remaining on the euro. But most egregious of all was following the neoliberal advice of reining in “wasteful” government spending via austerity.

There is little more difficult to understand than the widespread fetish for balanced government budgets. Anyone who believes that lowering public spending will help an economy expand is woefully ignorant of both elementary accounting principles and basic economic theory. With respect to the former, by definition, a public sector deficit must equate to a private sector surplus. If you reduce one, you reduce the other. That cutting government spending means cutting private sector income is an inescapable fact (see for example Why you should love government deficits).

Furthermore, the key problem in modern economies is the inability of the private sector to consistently generate sufficient demand to hire all those willing to work. Consider this. Why did the Great Depression strike America? Was there a mass wave of laziness in the United States? Did Americans forget how to produce all the goods and services people had been consuming during the Roaring 20s? Of course not. The problem was insufficiency of demand, which is why once US government deficits grew, standards of living were able to not only recover, but reach new heights. Nor was the period thereafter one of economic collapse as the weight of government debt suffocated American firms and consumers. The fact is, the private sector needs government spending to supplement demand. The latter creates jobs and income when the former cannot.

And so it comes as little surprise that Ireland’s austerity policies have generated nothing more than…austerity. Unemployment stands at nearly 14%, an obscene level given that it was closer to 4% a mere six years ago. It’s not as if the goods and services that Irish men and women purchased back in 2007 are no longer producible. There is zero reason that the same standard of living could not be enjoyed today. The austerity policies are a monumental injustice and a crime against every Irish man, woman, and child affected by the contraction that has followed.

Recovery will only come when the Irish government rejects the neoliberal worldview and takes steps to directly employ the unemployed. This will require, at least at the outset, larger government deficits. This also means that Ireland MUST leave the euro so that fiscal policy is no longer tied to the wishes of the European Central Bank and hedge fund managers. Nations with their own currencies are never forced to borrow abroad to finance their own government’s spending (for more on how deficits actually work see The big danger in cutting the deficit). But so long as Ireland uses the euro, it will be dependent on the acquiescence of foreigners for both monetary and fiscal policy. And for far too long Ireland has been run for someone other than the Irish.

Now is the time to abandon austerity, increase spending, and leave the euro. The other path has already been tried.


__________________________________

Please go to this site and view the slide show that accompanies the article.  All of Europe's nation's are seeing their public sector dismantled as this was the goal of the massive corporate frauds sucking all wealth from nation's Treasuries.....and it is why neo-liberals here in America deliberately ignore the massive fraud and work to dismantle the public sector.

Public health and public education are the next global market say neo-liberals so give it up!  THIS IS WHY WE ARE SEEING PUBLIC HEALTH DISMANTLED BY THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT.

THE PIIGS NATIONS IN EUROPE ARE SEEING THE LEVEL OF AUSTERITY THAT WILL COME TO THE US WITH THE NEXT ECONOMIC COLLAPSE ---LATER THIS YEAR.  Stability until after these primary/general elections.  This is why these 2014/2016 elections are so important for labor and justice.




Ireland austerity: Hospitals to send some patients home on weekends


Friday Aug 31, 2012 6:17 AM

By NBC News staff

Hospitals in Ireland will send some patients home at weekends after the country’s public health services announced a new round of deep cuts, according to a media report Friday.

Cash-strapped hospitals will have to shut some wards on weekends as part of an effort to cut $44 million in spending on staff and overtime by the end of 2012, according to the Irish Independent.
Slideshow: Austerity in Ireland

Adam Patterson / Panos for nbcnews.com

Irish voters share their views on austerity and the economy as they prepare to vote in a referendum on the European Union's new fiscal treaty.

Launch slideshow

 

'The country is on its knees': Ireland grapples with economic collapse

The cuts were announced Thursday by senior staff at the Health Service Executive.

The health service is facing cuts of $163 million across the service, reports said. Overall, the country's health system is running a $315 million deficit, according to the Irish Times.

Officials said the staff shortages that the cuts would cause meant that more hospitals would have to operate "five-day" wards, according to the Independent.

That meant that patients assessed as "clinically suitable" would be sent home for weekends but would return to hospitals on Mondays.

Ghost towns tell the story of Ireland's faded dream

"Every effort has been made to target areas that do not impact on direct patient or client services," the newspaper quoted Laverne McGuinness of the Health Service Executive as saying.

The disability organization Inclusion Ireland condemned the cuts.

_______________________________________

Guess who is profiting from the dismantling of the Spanish public sector and wealth.  The same people creating the massive frauds.  Guess who else?  US public and private pension funds.  Yes, labor and justice is having their pensions used to squeeze all the public wealth from these social democracies.  Know what is next?  These same US pensions will be left to prop this sovereign debt as the next crash comes and the looters are covered by these credit default swaps (CDS).  Same thing as happened with the subprime mortgage fraud and economic crash.

NEO-LIBERALS ARE SETTING THE STAGE TO DO THE SAME THING TO CITIZENS IN EUROPE AND US AS WAS DONE IN 2008.  IS YOUR POLITICIAN SHOUTING THIS LOUDLY AND STRONGLY?

Of course you do not hear that the Spanish people as with the Irish, Italian, Portuguese, and Greek citizens are protesting en masse and vow to obtain justice from these fleecings.




 Portugal Default Swaps Signaling Gain From Pain: Euro Credit



By Abigail Moses and Maria Tadeo Aug 16, 2012 4:25 AM ET


Portugal’s fiscal reforms are giving investors the greatest confidence in its debt in more than a year, even as its economy struggles under the weight of austerity.

Credit-default swaps on Portugal dropped as low as 725 basis points today, from 1,515 in January and 1,237 in May. The contracts have fallen by the most of any government this year and by more than every nation except Ireland in the past month.

The implied probability of Portugal defaulting on its debt has declined to 46 percent from 73 percent as optimism that spending cuts and tax increases will get finances back on track outweighs a shrinking economy and rising unemployment. The government is trying to fulfill the terms of a 78 billion-euro ($122 million) bailout and return to bond markets next year.

“It’s the poster child of success for the European programs,” said Arif Husain, the London-based director of European fixed-income at AllianceBernstein Ltd., which oversees $407 billion and holds Portuguese bonds. “The reforms, unless something goes crazily, strangely wrong, will always lead to a short term contraction but put it on a better foot going forward.”

Investors are both buying bonds and paring bearish bets, with credit-default swaps protecting the smallest amount of Portuguese debt since at least 2009, when Bloomberg started collecting data from the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. A total of 4,153 swaps contracts covering a net $4.5 billion of bonds were outstanding as of Aug. 10, down from $9.6 billion in January 2010.
Record Yields

The Portuguese 10-year yield was at 9.88 percent at 9:07 a.m. in London, down from a euro-era record of 18.29 percent on Jan. 31, while the rate on similar-maturity Spanish debt was 6.68 percent. German 10-year bunds yield 1.55 percent and Irish nine-year bonds pay 6.06 percent.

Portugal’s gross domestic product shrank for a seventh quarter in the three months through June, falling 1.2 percent from the previous period, while unemployment rose to a euro-era record of 15 percent.

The nation, which has 173 billion euros of debt outstanding, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, is seeking to narrow its budget deficit to 4.5 percent of GDP this year and 3 percent in 2013. It sold stakes in state-owned companies including utility EDP-Energias de Portugal SA and power-grid operator REN-Redes Energeticas Nacionais SA to bolster public finances.
Troika Demands

Reforms are being demanded by the so-called troika of international creditors -- the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

“Portugal has been successful in meeting the targets required by the troika, the privatization program has been quickly implemented and the country is responding to austerity,”
said Joaquim Gomes, a fund manager of Dunas Capital Gestao de Activos in Lisbon. “I’m confident that Portugal will make a successful return to the bond market in 2013.”

Gomes said he’s now buying Portugal’s 30-year bonds, after buying five-year notes starting last year. The nation’s five- year notes yield 8.38 percent, while the rate on the longer- dated securities is 8.89 percent.

In the first seven months of 2012, Portuguese debt returned 28 percent, the most of 26 markets tracked by indexes compiled by Bloomberg and the European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies. German bunds rose 4.1 percent and Spanish debt fell 5.1 percent.
Irish Risk

As austerity in Portugal wins plaudits from credit investors, Irish debt risk is also falling as the government reforms its economy. The nation sold bonds last month for the first time since it sought a 67.5 billion-euro international rescue in November 2010.


Swaps on Ireland dropped as low as 449.5 basis points today, the lowest in almost two years, from a peak of 1,181 last July.

“A lot of people are extrapolating Portuguese yields toward where Ireland has gone,” Husain said.

The troika will arrive in Lisbon on Aug. 28 for its fifth review mission ensuring that the conditions attached to the bailout program remain on track.

Risks remain and a return to the bond market next year may be “premature,” according to Gilles Moec, co-chief European economist at Deutsche Bank AG in London. But the government is doing “more than enough to justify continued support from the EU,” he wrote in an Aug. 10 note to investors.
Crisis Contagion

Contagion from the crisis in neighboring Spain is one of the biggest threats to Portugal’s recovery, according to Christian Schulz, an economist at Berenberg Bank in London. The Spanish government is considering requesting aid, European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn signaled in a Bloomberg Television interview this week.

“As long as Spain is in trouble, returning to the markets for Portugal will be difficult,” Schulz said. “One big advantage for Portugal is politically stability, the country has a stable government and the success of the adjustment program acts as glue.”

Portugal’s President Anibal Cavaco Silva last week called on the ECB to buy its debt to help the government return to markets. The central bank said this month it may intervene in tandem with Europe’s bailout funds if troubled nations commit to improving their economies and fiscal positions.

“The Portuguese government has exceeded expectations,” said Schulz. “The real test for the Portuguese economy will be whether or not it can return to the market in 2013 at a sustainable level.”


________________________________________

We need to see the youth in America get ahead of this next economic crash that will leave America worse than Europe in the assault of the banks on Western nations.  If you do not see that EMIGRATION is the employment future US global corporations have for US citizens.....YOU NEED TO SEE IT COMING!



Young Europeans Against Austerity Launch "Troika Party" to Run in 2014

Wed, 12/4/2013 - by Steve Rushton  Occupy.com

 

Neoliberalism erodes democracy and people’s sovereignty: this is the defiant message from the pan-European Troika Party, an irony-steeped political party that has announced its run for the European Union parliamentary elections in May 2014. The party's slogans include, “Vote for us and you will never have to vote again!” and “Democracy is not competitive!”

Set to formally launch in January 2014, the Troika Party aims to become a rallying point across the continent against the current economic direction forced by austerity policies. “The campaign is a tool to raise awareness and dismantle the current neoliberal narrative, unpacking Troika’s role in European decision making,” one of the Troika Party’s organizers, Emma Avilés, told Occupy.com.

From Madrid, Avilés works on collective projects within the 15M movement, formerly dubbed by the media as the Indignados. “There is not a focus on who to vote [for] or not voting," she added. "We aim at people rethinking the concept of democracy.”

The party takes its name from the trio alliance – the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – which has determined the bailout and austerity packages imposed on southern European countries in recent years, widely seen as devastating those nations' social programs in favor of rescuing the banks that gambled away and indebted their economies.

Due to the bailouts, Greece is regarded to be suffering the worst humanitarian disaster in peacetime Europe. Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland are all suffering severely, too. The bailouts encapsulate northern Europe’s reaction to the financial crisis – a demand for belt-tightening austerity measures that include public service cuts, workers' rights reductions and slashed wages – all of which are deepening already entrenched economic inequality. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies reports that austerity has caused Europe’s worst humanitarian crisis in 60 years.

As strategy goes, the Troika Party looks to build on the "Can’t pay, won’t pay" slogan which calls into legitimacy the dominant narrative of the international debt crisis: that countries are expected to pay back to the financial industry the debts that banks and corrupt, irresponsible governments were responsible for incurring. The Troika Party points out that the countries cannot afford to pay off these debts, even if they were legitimate.

“There is a big difference between understanding the crisis as something inevitable and our fault, then accepting austerity measures, the loss of rights and the undermining of democracy,” continued Avilés. “On the other hand, we want people to read it in a different light: the crisis as a 'scam' with specific actors that move the strings and benefit from it.”

The current, neoliberal economic structure is widely blamed as the key factor behind the Eurozone debt crisis –a contention forwarded inan academic paper by economists at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, which addresses how the Eurozone’s financial architecture is “protecting the interests of financial capital” and “facilitating the dominance of Germany at the expense of the Eurozone.”

In the fallout of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that spread to Europe, the scholars say investors saw Greece as an easy target and suggest the European Central Bank should have stopped “speculators playing destabilizing games.” Furthermore, the paper catalogues the ways austerity is causing poverty and recession in Europe's peripheral countries – meaning the debts are even less likely to be repaid.

"Short-selling," they contend, is one mechanism that deepened Greece’s troubles greatly. In times of crisis, speculators can short-sell financial assets and deepen a crisis by fueling panic and financial hysteria. This is done simply by borrowing assets, immediately selling them for a high price, then buying back those assets at a lower price. Looking at Greece’s crisis, now in its fifth year, the Financial Timesreports it was not only hedge funds that were responsible, but banks, insurance and pension companies which profited greatly as Greece’s debts escalated.

The Greek Credit Default Market is a key example. It was in the interests of the holders of these financial assets for Greece to default, as a default meant they got paid out. This credit default market’s value rose sharply in the run-up to Greece’s default. Worse still, from the perspective of the ensuing humanitarian catastrophe in Greece, the impacts of the credit default market created more panic sharpening the crisis.

A dominant power creates consent by shaping what people think of as “common sense,” according to the political philosopher Antonio Gramsci. In turn, Gramsci suggested that hierarchies can be challenged by undermining their myths. The notion of redefining common sense is core to the Troika Party’s platform. Alongside providing a hub for analysis, the party aims to challenge the messages that underpin neoliberalism itself.

“All around Europe we are hammered with tailored messages that are becoming mantras we unconsciously repeat, hiding the real truth about the direction Europe is taking and its consequences,” suggested Avilés. “Instead, we want to point at how Europe is walking towards a non-democratic model where finance and economic power have more say that citizens.”

The campaign aims to push serious economic and political messages in a fun and engaging way. “It will use satire, sarcasm and humor to dismantle the neoliberal narrative, backed up with visual tools and 'everyday language' to explain to Europeans what is really happening behind the curtains,” she said.

“This type of campaigning will play a key role in bringing political messages to sectors of the population that are not yet politicized, contributing to the multi-level European struggle against the 'E.U. crisis regime'.”

The Troika Party says it wants to challenge the stereotype that southern Europeans caused the crisis because they are lazy and that the southern countries spent too much on public services. The inspiration for the pan-European party came from Spain, where a version of it has already been active. It was later put forward at a convergence of members from different social and political movements who met in Amsterdam in October.

“Everyone is invited” is another slogan for the campaign, which seeks to create events, actions, reports and media that can be shared online. Party organizers purposefully left lots of space for campaigns and platforms to be tailored to each country.

The potential breadth of targets reach beyond the bailouts and austerity; the group highlights examples like the upcoming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, and the Competitiveness Pact which could be included as points of opposition in the platform.

“On a global level there are movements fighting against austerity measures, illegitimate debt, questionable bailouts, privatizations, loss of labor, civil and human rights or attacks on natural resources, which this campaign might reach out to,” Avilés added. "We need to recover the true spirit of citizens as political actors."

- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/young-europeans-against-austerity-launch-troika-party-run-2014#sthash.pA6rnaae.dpuf
0 Comments

June 20th, 2013

6/20/2013

0 Comments

 
I can't write much today as I have meetings all day but I wanted to get out the importance of labor and unions along with communities supporting them in returning this country to first world status.  We are seeing citizens completely ignored and policy that is killing people....regulations disappearing and dismantled that have protected families and communities.

DO NOT ALLOW THIRD WAY CORPORATE NEO-LIBERALS TEAR DOWN OUR NEW DEAL AND WAR ON POVERTY PROGRAMS AND HAND ALL CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT TO CORPORATIONS.....



Philadelphia Parents, Lunchroom Staff Begin Fast for Safe Schools

Posted by Kyle Schafer on June 17, 2013 Fasters encamp on steps of Governor’s Philadelphia office; call for Commonwealth and City act.  Unite Here

A group of Philadelphia public school parents and lunchroom staff today launched a fast for safe schools. The elimination of more than 1,200 student safety staff from schools across the district, including those on the federal “persistently dangerous” schools list, places Philadelphia’s students in danger. The group has encamped on the steps of Governor Tom Cobertt’s Philadelphia office, where the fast will continue without food or juice until the Commonwealth and City act to prioritize school safety.

“I care about my daughter and grandson,” said faster Earlene Bly, mother of a 9th grade student and grandmother of a soon-to-be 1st grader in PSD. “I am making this sacrifice to make sure they have safe schools.  I am fasting to show my family and the city how serious this situation really is.”

SUPPORT THE FAST, SEND AN EMAIL TO GOVERNOR CORBETT!

The School District of Philadelphia announced the layoff of over 3,700 employees on June 7th. Student safety staff make up the largest group slated to be cut. Employed in school hallways and lunchrooms across the district, they are often the first workers to defuse tensions, maintain order and deescalate conflicts between students.

In the next two weeks, the Pennsylvania state legislature and Philadelphia City Council will decide whether to supplement school funding, which could allow student safety staff and other school employees to return in the Fall.

“I am fasting for the children,” said faster Patricia Norris, a food service worker at Cayuga Elementary.  “When the children won’t go to the principal, when they won’t go to their teacher, they go to the student safety staff.  They give them love and knowledge.  Without them, school would be a disaster waiting to happen.”

“They want us to succeed, because we are the future,” said Shakur Miller, 17, a Junior at Mastbaum High School. “I support the fast because our student safety staff talk to us, which is something we need to be safe and to succeed.”

- See more at: http://www.realfoodrealjobs.org/2013/06/phillyfastlaunch/#sthash.mGmHd8qB.dpuf
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What we are seeing in both of these articles from Philadelphia are simple examples of what are happening in cities all across America, especially in Baltimore. Large chunks of the cities are being bought and handed to these Wall Street investment firms and then allowed to sit until the area is blighted all the while filled with dangerous housing and and lost services.  SOUND FAMILIAR?  YOU CAN BET BALTIMORE IS IN THE SAME SHAPE!

Met this guy across from Philly City Hall. Think his name is Greg. Said he's outraged the only person being prosecuted by the city is the African American worker who was operating the equipment. Says he's going to be in front of the courthouse with his sign on Wednesday, June 26 at 9am, when Sean Benschop appears before a judge. Benschop was just following orders as a worker. The Contractor Griffin Campbell was clearly unqualified to do this type of demolition. Government officials reluctant to regulate business and enforce safety standards must be considered as a contributing factor. But the the wealthy property owners are ultimately responsible for the disaster: STB Investments Corps. The properties being demolished next to the crushed building were owned by STB, whose officers are Richard Basciano, Scott Wexler, Frank Cresci Jr. and Anthony Trumbetta, based in New York City at 300 W. 43rd St.

Who wants to join Greg and me on June 26th?



Philly: Inspector said collapse 'wasn't my fault


By MARYCLAIRE DALE Associated PressPosted:   06/14/2013 03:26:31 PM MDT

PHILADELPHIA—A building inspector who had visited a demolition site before a brick wall collapsed onto an adjacent thrift store, killing six people, left a cellphone video message before his apparent suicide this week saying the collapse "wasn't my fault," the mayor's spokesman said. However, inspector Ronald Wagenhoffer also said he wished he'd been more diligent, spokesman Mark McDonald told The Associated Press on Friday.

Wagenhoffer inspected the downtown site before and after demolition work began in February and visited an attached, related job site on May 14 following a complaint.

A four-story brick wall collapsed at the site June 5, burying 19 people inside a one-story Salvation Army thrift shop next door. Besides the six people who died, 13 were injured.

Wagenhoffer, a veteran inspector, was found dead in his truck Wednesday night, hours after finishing his last shift. Police said they believe he shot himself in the chest.

According to McDonald, Wagenhoffer first secured his cellphone on the dashboard and made two brief videos, each 20 to 30 seconds long. The first was for his wife and young son, McDonald said, and the second described his thoughts on the collapse.

"He says that he can't sleep," said McDonald, who said he viewed both videos Friday afternoon. "He says that he was devastated by the deaths and injuries at the scene."

McDonald said Wagenhoffer then says briefly on the videos he "wished that he'd been; more diligent." "He wished that he'd gotten out of a truck at some point in time," he said, "but it's not connected to any particular event. There's no mention of May 14. And he never says that he never inspected the site."

McDonald said Wagenhoffer used the words: "It wasn't my fault."

The demolition site included three attached storefront buildings, all owned by Richard Basciano, once dubbed the pornography king of Times Square.

Records from the Department of Licenses and Inspections state that Wagenhoffer visited the site on May 14 over a complaint that the contractor's permit wasn't visible.

However, a resident has said his complaint alleged far more serious problems about the safety of the demolition work underway. And another person took a video on June 2, a Sunday, that shows workers using equipment to pull down the facade and bricks spilling down on the sidewalk, which remained open and has a staircase to an underground transit stop.

Demolition subcontractor Sean Benschop, accused of being impaired by marijuana and painkillers while operating heavy equipment just before the collapse, has been charged with six counts of involuntary manslaughter. He also had his right hand in a cast, but his lawyer has said he was fit to work.

Demolition contractor Griffin Campbell also was onsite, and Basciano was believed to be there. Basciano's lawyer has declined to comment. Campbell's lawyer has said Benschop was supposed to be taking the wall down by hand, to protect the Salvation Army store.

Wagenhoffer started working for the city as a carpenter in 1997 and worked his way up to his post as an inspector, earning just over $60,000 a year, city records show. He was nominated for a top safety award in the Department of Licenses and Inspections in 2011.

His family did not immediately return a message seeking comment Friday.


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We are glad for the energizing but what we are seeing are unions backing different candidates.  This same thing happened in Los Angeles and all they had running were Third Way corporate democrats......

GET LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES IN THESE PRIMARY RACES AND NOT THE SAME FACES!


Energized by Bloomberg's Exit, Labor Chiefs Try to Sway Race:
[Metropolitan Desk]HernÁNdez, Javier C. New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) [New York, N.Y] 19 June 2013: A.1. Turn on hit highlighting for speaking browsersAbstract (summary)Translate Abstract

Unions across the city, after years of low morale and stalled contract negotiations, are roaring back to life this election season, excited by the prospect of installing a friend of labor in City Hall when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg leaves office at the end of the year. Public officials across the country, including Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent, have cast doubt on their motives, and pushed back against demands from municipal workers for retroactive raises and more generous health benefits.

After more than a decade of sitting out the fiercest race in town, leaders of the United Federation of Teachers are plotting a comeback.

They have so much polling data that they can pinpoint the views of Puerto Ricans and Chinese immigrants alike. They can tailor messages based on brands of toilet paper voters buy. Normally busy handling complaints from teachers, they are now scouring financial records and questioning candidates about $4,000 restaurant bills.

And on Wednesday, the union will throw its sophisticated political machine behind a candidate for mayor of New York City.

Unions across the city, after years of low morale and stalled contract negotiations, are roaring back to life this election season, excited by the prospect of installing a friend of labor in City Hall when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg leaves office at the end of the year.

Some groups, like the teachers' union, are expected to spend several million dollars on the race. Several labor leaders are weighing advertising blitzes aimed at the broader public. Political organizers are training callers, social media activists and door-to-door canvassers.

"Politics in the city are shifting," Michael Mulgrew, president of the teachers' union, said. "It's not a pipe dream. We're going to be a force."

Labor leaders face several challenges as they seek to reassert themselves as political heavyweights in a city that has not elected a Democrat for mayor since 1989. In a crowded field, they are split over whom to endorse, causing concern that they might cancel one another out.

At a time of declining union membership and lingering economic turmoil, the strength of organized labor is unclear. Public officials across the country, including Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent, have cast doubt on their motives, and pushed back against demands from municipal workers for retroactive raises and more generous health benefits. And a new pro-business group in New York is preparing to spend millions on City Council races.

Still, political experts say there is potential for organized labor to sway the mayoral election. Analysts expect only modest turnout -- around 650,000 voters, or about one-fifth of registered Democrats -- in the Democratic primary in September. A runoff election is widely expected, raising the stakes.

Each of the city's large unions can be valuable to different candidates. Unions representing lower-paid service workers might be able to deliver black and Latino voters for candidates who will rely more heavily on them, like William C. Thompson Jr., a former comptroller, and Bill de Blasio, the public advocate. The teachers' union, whose membership is more middle-class, says it has a database of 171,000 teachers, retirees and their relatives.

"Unions know their membership and can motivate them," said Edward F. Ott, a lecturer at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York. "The impact may be reduced and spread across a lot of candidates, but they'll definitely have an impact."

Exactly how much the unions will spend in the mayoral race depends on several factors, including whether they face competition from other unions or from political action groups seeking to dampen the influence of organized labor.

"It could be the wild, wild West," said Neal Kwatra, a Democratic strategist whose clients include unions, "or it could be business as usual."

The teachers' union endorsement is considered a prize because of its politically engaged work force, a treasury of at least $2.5 million and a team that has refined its political operations after years of bitter feuds with Mr. Bloomberg.

The seven leading Democratic candidates for mayor are mostly in line with the union's ideology, backing its calls to reduce testing and offer more support to failing schools. In recent days, some have stepped up their efforts to court the union's leaders.

Mr. Thompson, a former president of the city's Board of Education, recently announced a plan to give each teacher a $200 budget for classroom supplies. On Tuesday, he picked up the support of the principals' union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators.

Mr. de Blasio, another leading candidate for the teachers' union's endorsement, stood with Mr. Mulgrew last week to denounce high-stakes testing.

The union last made an endorsement for mayor in 2001, when it selected Mark Green, a Democrat, over Mr. Bloomberg, then a Republican. It did not enter the contests in 2005 and 2009, wary of Mr. Bloomberg's vast financial resources. Some union officials regretted the decision to skip the 2009 race, after Mr. Thompson, then the Democratic nominee, came within striking distance of Mr. Bloomberg, who spent more than $100 million of his fortune on that race alone.

When Mr. Mulgrew became the union's president in 2009, he set out to modernize its political operations. In the past, he said, candidates were chosen based on personal relationships. Now union officials look to polls and focus groups, tossing around terms like "burn rates" and "propensity models."

The union has become adroit in scrutinizing public spending records to gauge which candidates are more efficient stewards of campaign money. It can examine, for instance, how much a candidate earns at a fund-raiser relative to how much he or she spends on catering, entertainment and facilities.

With a trove of data on the table, conversations between the candidates and Mr. Mulgrew have turned into cross-examinations. He has set benchmarks for each of them, asking them to prove they could build support among crucial demographic groups, like Hispanic voters in Upper Manhattan.

"It's all about a path to victory," he said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Mulgrew will recommend a candidate to union delegates, who are expected to approve the choice that day. He is said to be focusing on two candidates -- Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Thompson -- though he has also expressed admiration for Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker. He faces pressure from Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, the city's largest union, which has lobbied him to create a broad labor coalition by following its lead and endorsing Mr. de Blasio. Another influential union, District Council 37, has endorsed John C. Liu, the city comptroller.

A central part of the union's strategy for this election is to use tools more common in national campaigns. It has put together a database of its members, and bought access to information like the purchasing history of people who use chain-store rewards cards. For example, the union might focus calls and mailings on people who buy top-shelf brands of toilet paper or other products, which typically suggest that a person has a higher income and is more likely to vote. It could also use the information to tailor advertisements to certain groups of voters, like placing a container of Cherry Garcia in an ad directed at people who buy Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

This year, public sector unions are bolstering their political operations after several years of failed negotiations. More than 282,000 unionized workers are without a contract, representing 95 percent of the city's work force. Workers are seeking as much as $7.8 billion in retroactive raises for the time they have been without a contract. Mr. Bloomberg has said the city does not have the money.

In response, union leaders representing those workers are letting the clock tick as they build political support. Several unions joined together to produce a $200,000 advertising campaign recently. A radio ad said in part: "The people who keep this city running: hard-working, middle-class New Yorkers. They count. They vote."

Harry Nespoli, leader of a committee of unions representing municipal workers, said they wanted a mayor who would work with unions to find savings in the city budget to pay for wage increases.

"We don't expect the new mayor to give away the store," he said. "We expect the new mayor to recognize the fact that we are the city and that we should have negotiations in good faith."

Even if the city's labor leaders do not coalesce around one candidate, Mr. Nespoli said, they are united in their frustration with Mr. Bloomberg, who on Monday compared the endorsement of the teachers' union to the "kiss of death."

Union officials now have their own retort. They have taken to repeating three numbers, 12-31-13, a reference to the mayor's final day in office.


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WHILE THEY PRETEND THE DOMESTIC ECONOMY IS STAGNANT THEY ARE EXPANDING OVERSEAS LIKE CRAZY AND IT IS ALL CAUSED BY PUBLIC POLICY WRITTEN AND ENFORCED BY THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRATS!


The US is struggling economically because we have had tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud moved offshore out of our economy and that is enough to stall any economic growth.  We have waited for 4 years for the Justice Department to bring back these tens of trillions but we are dealing with suspended Rule of Law in America..that's right, a former first world allowing it Treasury be looted!

Add to that the Fed policy that gives away free money to corporations so they can make billions playing the market rather than actually working/hiring and you have stagnation.  Public policy could not have been implemented to stagnate the economy more!  The objective is to simply hold the domestic economy captive to high unemployment and low wages for the long term as corporations use all that money from the Fed on expanding globally as this article says.  Now, if you are going to keep American workers poor to maximize profits then they cannot be the consumers needed to grow the economy..we all know that.  It is the policy of impoverishing workers and feeding free money to corporations allowing them to expand globally that is creating the mess we have in America today.  It is all policy and it is now being dealt out by Third Way corporate democrats.  Thought it would go away went you voted democrat?  Not with these neo-liberals..



RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE NEXT ELECTIONS!


Retailers expanding globally turn to developing markets


Lorraine Mirabella 7:30 a.m. EDT, June 17, 2013

Retailers plagued by slow sales might want to seek customers outside the U.S. -- places, for instance, such as Brazil, Chile and Uruguay.

Those countries top a 2013 ranking of developing countries for retail investment by consultant A.T. Kearney.

"South America is blossoming," the report says, thanks to increased consumer confidence amid a strong and growing middle class, controlled inflation, sustained economic growth and continued economic and political stability.

Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Yves Saint Laurent, Emporio Armani and Calvin Klein opened or have plans to open stores in Uruguay. Gap opened its first store in Uruguay in December, the report says.

The global retail development index, published each year since 2002, ranks the top 30 developing countries based on 25 macroeconomic and retail-specific variables. The study found that while developed markets have weak or stagnant growth potential, opportunities lie in developing markets.

Turkey, the sixth-ranked country, is luring international retailers with a growing economy and favorable consumer demographics. Apple is opening its first store in Istanbul this year.

In Mexico, which rose by seven rankings to land at 21st, Payless ShoeSource will open 41 stores though a Mexican franchiser in the next three years. Apparel chain H&M has opened its first Mexico City store.

And sub-Saharan Africa continues to build momentum, with Botswana and Namibia in the rankings.

Because five of the 12 most populous countries will be in Africa by 2100, "there is no doubt that this continent is a dramatic retail opportunity for those that can navigate the business and political risks," the report says.

For luxury retailers, some up-and-coming hubs are on the horizon. Small-population countries with wealth and a focus on consumers were ranked highly, among them Uruguay; ranked third, Mongolia, seventh; Georgia, eighth, and Armenia, 10th.

The index also found examples of global retailers reversing course after aggressive expansions, including in China, where "many are scaling back plans for new stores and choosing sites more carefully," the report says.

Meanwhile, in Latin America and Central Asia, more retailers are opening in smaller countries before deciding whether to enter larger markets.

lorraine.mirabella@baltsun.com


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June 04th, 2013

6/4/2013

0 Comments

 
Sorry I missed you Monday......was marching for Bradley Manning!

Regarding the protests for Bradley Manning:

Manning is a low-level military serviceman who was assigned to one of the worst duties a person could have....watching the US military commit human rights violations, break international law, and kill innocent civilians over and again with disregard to 'collateral' damage.  It is interesting to see the repulsion of these same politicians to what citizens under attack by America see as 'collateral damage' at the marathon in Boston.  Shocked when it happens here.....apathetic when it happens abroad.

Manning is a man of conscious and that is a bad character trait for someone assigned to witness the most horrible of crimes.  We are hearing other young college graduates needing a job and assigned to drone warfare coming forward who are equally disgusted by the actions of its government.  So this man of conscious no doubt agonized offer how he could reconcile his responsibilities as a human being with what his military leaders were demanding he do and ultimately he saw Wikileaks and allowing the world visual proof of the kinds of leaders that have hold of America today.  Bradley Manning is a whistleblower of crimes against humanity and not a criminal as he is painted by his government and the press. THE WORLD LOVES HIM FOR IT....MANY AMERICANS AS WELL!  He did this knowing the penalties would be harsh and that is what a HERO does.....places his life before the needs of the greater good.

We had marches and vigils this past week at Ft Meade as his trial is preparing to start.  Saturday we had hundreds of people from all across the country ascend on this military base and passionate speakers for political and social justice.  Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers whistleblower) spoke of the Manning as a voice for a nation that has taken the wrong path and which is seeing all civil liberties and democratic institutions under attack.  The young lady who was one of three captured and imprisoned in Iran for a few years simply for political leverage spoke, shouting out that Manning was a hero of conscious and his message of authoritarianism in foreign and domestic affairs was clear.  She highlighted that America was now leading the world in imprisonment, abuse of detainees, and what was most relevant to her own experience the experience of long term isolation.  When a nation works against the interests of its own people the leadership fears collaboration and organizing and hence the isolation.  She pointed to Manning's long period in isolation with the military giving the reason of a worry for Manning's thoughts of suicide.  She then pointed out that if they were worried about suicide, long-term isolation is known to double the occurrence.....other speakers included former military testifying to the loss of morale and loss of respect for serving their country when forced to witness and perform what they all knew to be illegal, immoral, and dangerous for America in the ill feelings all of this military dishonor sows all around the world.  THIS RALLY WAS INSPIRING AND IT SHOWED THAT AMERICANS FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE ARE ORGANIZING TO FIGHT THE CAPTURE OF THE US GOVERNMENT BY CORPORATE PUPPETS.

Again, there were no US media on site for this major rally on Saturday, but I did see a good report from WBFF Fox on another rally later in the week.  There was plenty of media at the event though.....from all over the world.  They even welcomed me to share my views which never happens here!  They knew of course that Maryland is ground zero for all this behavior!

Third Way corporate democrats are neo-liberals and colonizers and they are just as aggressive in foreign policy in meeting the goals of globalism as republicans.....MORE SO.  The one good thing about the open disregard towards the public on how criminal and corrupt they have become is that more and more people are seeing the truth no matter the media capture.  As we see in Turkey's large protests....the citizens are saying they are sick and tired of their leaders taking them out of the political process and they will fight the authoritarian turn taking place in Turkey.  Well, Turkey is taking that turn because the world's leader in freedom and democracy has taken that turn.  NO JUSTICE.....NO PEACE.

BRADLEY MANNING IS A HERO AND WE WILL NOT STOP FIGHTING FOR HIS FREEDOM.



Update 6/2/13:
Nearly two thousand rally for Bradley Manning at Ft. Meade

By the Bradley Manning Support Network. June 2, 2013.

Supporters marched on Ft. Meade for PFC Bradley Manning (Photo: Nathan Fuller)

Nearly two thousand supporters of US Army PFC Bradley Manning rallied and marched on Fort Meade, Maryland, this afternoon for the young whistle-blower.

Under a sweltering sun, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, former political prisoner-turned-human rights advocate Sarah Shourd, LGBT activist and US Army LT Dan Choi, and retired US Army Col. Ann Wright addressed supporters at the Llewellyn Gate, nearest the military courtroom. 

The demonstration, which lasted several hours, comes two days before Manning’s trial is set to begin at Ft. Meade, on June 3, and three years after his arrest. The government is charging Manning with indirectly “aiding the enemy” for releasing hundreds of thousands of war logs, diplomatic cables, and military videos to the transparency website WikiLeaks.

PFC Manning has said that he hoped the releases would “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.” 

A dozen chartered buses brought supporters from across the northeast, including three buses from New York City. Military veterans and activists traveled from around North America—some arriving from as far as Michigan, Montreal, and Mexico City.

“People came from great distances to stand with a true American hero,” said Jeff Paterson, director of the Bradley Manning Support Network. “From Bradley’s demeanor in court, it’s clear he takes strength from the outpouring of support.” 

Today’s rally was held with the assistance of many national organizations, including Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, CODEPINK Women for Peace, World Can’t Wait, and Courage to Resist. 

In addition to today’s event, the Bradley Manning Support Fund is also responsible for 100% of PFC Manning’s legal fees. Twenty thousand supporters have contributed over $1.25 million dollars in defense of PFC Manning and towards associated public education efforts, since his arrest in Iraq in May 2010.



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Regarding the Supreme Court decision that DNA can be taken from someone not charged with a crime:

Don't you just hate with a person who is Attorney General of a state known for its ranking at the bottom for fraud, corruption, and lack of transparency speaks out for the need to bank DNA in pursuit of criminals?  We all see the problem with this.....the people committing the most crime in the state are not being picked up by police so we will not have the DNA of the most notorious criminals.....corporate executives.  This is why every American has lost faith in not only the Justice Department but the courts as well.  Who was it that allowed these postage stamp settlements go through the courts in tact?  Who was it that is allowing every one of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution fall under attack?  THE COURTS.  So, if the branches of government assigned to serve and protect are corrupted.....people have little regard for what it says.  There is a reason that 17% of Americans support/trust Congress.  So a Supreme Court ruling that takes yet another right from the citizens only stirs more people to action.

There was outrage a few years ago when it was found that millions of rape kits in police departments were never processed supposedly to save money.  We now feel a need to finance these police department activities because indeed, people who are charged with crime may be guilty of another.  When a country decides it will collect personal information, especially as private as DNA without warrant or charge, it is tyranny just as Anthony Scalia very eloquently described....who would have thought progressives would need Libertarians and conservatives like Scalia to fight for civil liberties against Third Way corporate democrats. Whether Obama or in Maryland's case.....AG Doug Gansler.....many of the police departments allowing this collection of DNA happen are Third Way corporate democrats.

Why are we seeing all this interest in DNA databases?  We have had DNA as a tool for decades.  If the media would give Americans the goal of these policies then people would know that what looks good for one issue is bad overall.  The goal is a national DNA/identity database complete with facial images, fingerprints, and DNA.  The reason can only be one......an authoritarian takeover of life in America.  There is no other explanation for the proliferation of the ways citizens in America have been assaulted as regards their personal information.  Europe is appalled and fighting it because they have living memory of Fascism......and US citizens are now paying attention.  So, the Immigration Bill has immigrants giving fingerprints/DNA.....the regressive gun control policies had people fingerprinted and in some cases giving DNA.....health care reform is placing patients health information on line and it is already being sold and categorized.....having access to DNA.  You may not know it yet but there is a push to take and file DNA samples of children when they enter school.  IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT AN AUTHORITARIAN GROUP OF POLITICAL LEADERS OBSESSED WITH SURVEILLANCE WANT A NATIONAL DNA BASE.

We are already hearing of techniques to identify people who are thought to have genes for violence and crime.  We hear of the desire to track children in school according to genetic predisposition to certain skills.  We hear that health care insurance will not use genetic predisposition to disease against you.....PROMISE.  Same for employment, that would be discriminatory if we had the same labor laws we have today, BUT THEN THERE IS THE INTERNATIONAL TRADE AGREEMENTS THESE POLS EXPECT TO REPLACE THESE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS!

This is for what these DNA laws will be used.  So, we sell the public on that never ending bogeyman.....and they will follow us into a police state say these pols.  I am pretty sure that most people have more a fear of their government and police then they do of someone stealing their IPHONE.



Expanded DNA Collection By The Federal Government Leahy Concerned With Proposed DNA Database Rule Proposed Measure Could Compromise Civil Liberties, Judiciary Chairman Says

April 25, 2008

WASHINGTON (Friday, April 25, 2008) – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is urging policy makers on Capitol Hill to scrutinize a proposed Federal rule that will sanction the collection of DNA from all citizens arrested for Federal crimes.  Under the proposal, the personal, genetic information of arrested or detained individuals would be included in the nation’s leading DNA database known as CODIS.

In a statement Thursday, Leahy pointed to serious civil liberties violations that could arise if the proposed rule were enacted.  Much like finger printing now, the DNA collected would then be added to a national DNA indexing system for later access by other law enforcement agencies.  Of specific concern, the new rule would allow Federal law enforcement agencies to enter biological information into the growing CODIS database, even information from individuals ultimately found innocent and freed.  The policy could make it more difficult for innocent people to have their DNA removed from government databases.

“DNA testing, like any powerful tool, must be used carefully,” said Leahy.  “If abused, it can infringe on the privacy and civil liberties of Americans while doing little to prevent crime.  I am concerned that the policy just announced may do exactly that.”

The notice of the proposed rule was published in the Federal Register on April 18. 

The text of Leahy’s statement follows.

# # # # #

Statement Of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.),

Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee,

On Expanded DNA Collection By The Federal Government

April 24, 2008

I was concerned to learn from the newspapers last week that the Federal government is getting ready to publish a rule sanctioning the collection of DNA samples from all citizens arrested for Federal crimes and from many people detained as illegal immigrants.  These samples may be even be kept permanently as part of the government’s DNA database even if a person is ultimately exonerated. 

I have long supported the analysis of DNA evidence to catch the guilty and exonerate the innocent.  In 2000, I introduced the Innocence Protection Act, which included the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Grant program for defendants.  This program, where appropriate, gave defendants access to the post-conviction DNA testing necessary to prove their innocence in those cases where the system got it grievously wrong.  As a former prosecutor, I was acutely aware that DNA testing could help prevent both the conviction of innocent defendants, and the criminal justice nightmare of the real wrongdoer remaining undiscovered and possibly at large. 

In 2004, Congress passed the Innocence Protection Act as an important part of the Justice for All Act.  Congress recognized the need for important changes in criminal justice forensics despite resistance from the current administration.  The Justice for All Act authorized several other important programs to encourage the use of DNA evidence which I strongly supported, notably including the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant program to eliminate the nationwide backlog of rape kits and other evidence awaiting DNA testing in crime labs around the country.  That important program has helped law enforcement to find the perpetrators of terrible crimes throughout the country and to ease the ordeal that crime victims go through.

But DNA testing, like any powerful tool – and particularly any powerful tool in the hands of the government – must be used carefully.  If abused, it can infringe on the privacy and civil liberties of Americans while doing little to prevent crime.  I am concerned that the policy just announced may do exactly that. 

When Sen. Kyl proposed the legislation that formed the basis for this policy, I said that it raised serious privacy concerns.  Right now, a person’s DNA can be collected immediately upon arrest, and it can be used immediately to search the DNA indexes for a possible “hit.”  But it cannot be added to the Federal index unless and until the person has been formally charged with a crime.  This new policy allows DNA to be entered for those who have arrested, but not charged.

This change adds little or no value for law enforcement, while intruding on the privacy rights of people who are, in our system, presumed innocent.  It creates an incentive for pretextual arrests, and will likely have a disproportionate impact on minorities and the poor.  This policy may also make it harder for innocent people to have their DNA expunged from government databases.

Since I first spoke out against this provision in 2005, we have only seen more examples of abuses of power by this administration, including the Justice Department’s improper firing of prosecutors for political reasons and the FBI’s abuse of national security letter power given in the PATRIOT Act.  In this light, the added power to collect and keep DNA information from potentially innocent people gives even more cause for concern.

I will study the proposed rules and policy carefully and the Judiciary Committee will perform careful oversight of its implementation.  We must ensure that DNA evidence is used aggressively and efficiently to make us safer, but also that it is used in a careful and appropriate way that secures our rights and increases our confidence in our justice system. 



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I want to emphasize two things in these International Trade deals......what the Federal government is doing in these trade deals is taking and rewriting the US Constitution as fits this new world order.  It takes all the rights of citizens out of the equation and places all policy-making in corporate hands.  I like this article but take exception to the reporter suggesting that this is unilateral with Obama at the lead.....we all know this is a decade long process involving all of Congress.  The second issue is that we have heard nothing of this and it is the largest event in the history of America.  Think who you listen to as pundits (MSNBC----REALLY?)....and ask why they haven't been shouting about this for a decade....if I knew, they knew!!!!!


Obama's Covert Trade Deal:
[Op-Ed]Wallach, Lori; Beachy, Ben. New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) [New York, N.Y] 03 June 2013:

[...]the agreement must eventually face a Congressional vote, which means that one day it will become public. Because Mr. Obama wants the agreement to be given fast-track treatment on Capitol Hill.

WASHINGTON -- THE Obama administration has often stated its commitment to open government. So why is it keeping such tight wraps on the contents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the most significant international commercial agreement since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995?

The agreement, under negotiation since 2008, would set new rules for everything from food safety and financial markets to medicine prices and Internet freedom. It would include at least 12 of the countries bordering the Pacific and be open for more to join. President Obama has said he wants to sign it by October.

Although Congress has exclusive constitutional authority to set the terms of trade, so far the executive branch has managed to resist repeated requests by members of Congress to see the text of the draft agreement and has denied requests from members to attend negotiations as observers -- reversing past practice.

While the agreement could rewrite broad sections of nontrade policies affecting Americans' daily lives, the administration also has rejected demands by outside groups that the nearly complete text be publicly released. Even the George W. Bush administration, hardly a paragon of transparency, published online the draft text of the last similarly sweeping agreement, called the Free Trade Area of the Americas, in 2001.

There is one exception to this wall of secrecy: a group of some 600 trade "advisers," dominated by representatives of big businesses, who enjoy privileged access to draft texts and negotiators.

This covert approach is a major problem because the agreement is more than just a trade deal. Only 5 of its 29 chapters cover traditional trade matters, like tariffs or quotas. The others impose parameters on nontrade policies. Existing and future American laws must be altered to conform with these terms, or trade sanctions can be imposed against American exports.

Remember the debate in January 2012 over the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have imposed harsh penalties for even the most minor and inadvertent infraction of a company's copyright? The ensuing uproar derailed the proposal. But now, the very corporations behind SOPA are at it again, hoping to reincarnate its terms within the Trans-Pacific Partnership's sweeping proposed copyright provisions.

From another leak, we know the pact would also take aim at policies to control the cost of medicine. Pharmaceutical companies, which are among those enjoying access to negotiators as "advisers," have long lobbied against government efforts to keep the cost of medicines down. Under the agreement, these companies could challenge such measures by claiming that they undermined their new rights granted by the deal.

And yet another leak revealed that the deal would include even more expansive incentives to relocate domestic manufacturing offshore than were included in Nafta -- a deal that drained millions of manufacturing jobs from the American economy.

The agreement would also be a boon for Wall Street and its campaign to water down regulations put in place after the 2008 financial crisis. Among other things, it would practically forbid bans on risky financial products, including the toxic derivatives that helped cause the crisis in the first place.

Of course, the agreement must eventually face a Congressional vote, which means that one day it will become public.

So why keep it a secret? Because Mr. Obama wants the agreement to be given fast-track treatment on Capitol Hill. Under this extraordinary and rarely used procedure, he could sign the agreement before Congress voted on it. And Congress's post-facto vote would be under rules limiting debate, banning all amendments and forcing a quick vote.

Ron Kirk, until recently Mr. Obama's top trade official, was remarkably candid about why he opposed making the text public: doing so, he suggested to Reuters, would raise such opposition that it could make the deal impossible to sign.

Michael Froman, nominated to be Mr. Kirk's replacement, will most likely become the public face of the administration's very private negotiations and the apparent calculation that underlies them. As someone whose professional experience has been during the Internet era, he must know that such extreme secrecy is bound to backfire.

Whatever one thinks about "free trade," the secrecy of the Trans-Pacific Partnership process represents a huge assault on the principles and practice of democratic governance. That is untenable in the age of transparency, especially coming from an administration that is otherwise so quick to trumpet its commitment to open government.

AuthorAffiliation LORI WALLACH and BEN BEACHY Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, where Ben Beachy is the research director.



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March 12th, 2013

3/12/2013

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THE IDEA IS THIS:  NOW THAT WE HAVE ALL OF THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, WE ARE DESIGNING A SOCIETY THAT ALLOWS THE MASSES TO LIVE WITHOUT ANY MONEY.....THIS IS WHAT ZEITGEIST TZM MEANS.


I want to emphasize that there are good people and advocates in all of these organizations I highlight.  What I am pointing towards is the heads of these organizations who are installed to move the group towards the policy of the 1%....locally that is Hopkins.  CASA does fine things for Hispanic families no doubt but the Dream Act and in-state tuition for college would be an after-thought to protecting low-wage workers from abuse that shatters and in cases kills people from impoverishment.  Also, Third Way corporate democrats are pushing Dream Act not only for Hispanics but as part of the New Economy......bringing immigrants from around the world to work at both the low and high end of the income scale.  The 1% needed to have this Dream Act to make recruitment more attractive.  Hispanics can benefit but it was not done as a policy for Hispanics already here.  CASA was used to promote this policy that most families won't be able to access because of the level of impoverishment.

I wanted to point towards the next round of private non-profits that are emerging.  These are organizations promoting the global world strategy.  ONE EARTH, ONE WORLD.  That is what happens when global corporations look towards empire and not national assets.  So rather than working to make a strong nation we look at how to make global societies interconnected.  Remember, the wealth inequity that we have in America is mirrored around the world and in most cases the despots at the top of that inequity are graduates of US elite universities.  This plutocracy is very small as regards world population but they are now organizing society towards individual global acquisitions.  Do you know the Gates Foundation and their global initiative on disease in developing countries?  Sounds very noble.  I was living in Seattle and at a shareholder meeting a few decades ago when Microsoft shareholders fought the idea of spending billions of profits on this health adventure rather than sinking it back into the company.  Gates cooled the dissent by saying that US workers would not go to Africa or Southeast Asia to work if disease was running rampant.  This whole disease effort was groundwork for building global markets and sending workers to far reaches of the world.  Remember the British Empire and British people sent to India and Africa in colonial empire-building?  That is what your Third Way corporate democrat is working towards.  Say goodbye to your grandchild if they are successful!

The global organization I referred to above is Zeitgeist TZM.  If you listen to the talk you will hear them bad-mouthing the world's elite.....but they represent the world's elite.  The idea of sustainability is a good one for all but if you look they are arranging for an economy where most people have no money.....as is true with wealth inequity.  They are envisioning less consumption which is not bad meaning less ownership.  Say good-bye to the ownership society.  See why subprime mortgages targeted the working/middle-class.  Home/property-ownership for the masses is not achievable when wages continue to fall to subsistence.  We listened to a SharedTool Library, the IndyReader,  Baltimore BNotes a grassroots currency based on exchanging an alternate money system throughout small businesses who agree to participate, and Baltimore Time Bank.  This movement is being designed and developed at the top by the 1% as a way to segue the majority of the population into what will become a money-less society for the masses as the money will be at the top.  These 1% are using the students who simply want to work and earn a living to implement this societal change.  DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT SIMPLY RETURNING TO WEALTH EQUITY AND A MIDDLE-CLASS AS CONSUMERS IS WHAT EVERYONE WANTS TO DO.  AS AN EGALITARIAN SOCIETY WOULD WE THEN WANT TO BECOME MORE SUSTAINABLE IN CONTROLLING CONSUMPTION?  OF COURSE WE WOULD.  DO WE WANT TO LIVE IMPOVERISHED AND BE FORCED TO DO IT?  NO, WE DO NOT.

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!!!!!

RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!!!


We all know our college grads are sitting totally unemployed because the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and your Third Way corporate democrat are deliberately starving the economy and creating the unemployment that forces people into the position of entering into these Zeitgeist Movement initiatives.  I have yet to see any of these young people excited by these grassroots societal changes.....they are being forced into it as a way to support themselves.  If you look at Baltimore as ground zero for this movement as Hopkins is behind it here in Maryland you see Parks and People sharing gardening equipment, below you see a Tool library meant for sharing, and the IndyReader which serves as an alternative news journal.....greatly needed.  All of this suggests people need to be ready for not affording all of these items.  So we have Gifting private non-profits where corporations and the rich decide to what they want to invest....let's say the Tool Library for $25,000.  They business model is that for the development years of this business it seeks to have you and me donate our tools to share with others.  The tool Library then charges a membership fee and small rental charge and you have access to all kinds of tools.  Does this sound like Zip Car and Rent-a-Center?  That's right.  Building a business inventory on donated equipment that grows to be large enough to go private and the investor giving the $25,000 is then paid from what will now be a for-profit business.  The IndyReader is taking the Huffington Post model of gathering a bunch of writers who work for free to put their words in print.....not bad....but the model will make those starting this project the ones who get the profits when it grows to be large enough to be a business and go private.....just as Huffington Post did when taken private.

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!!  THEY ARE ALLOWING THIS IMPOVERISHMENT TO HAPPEN!!!!


I'll use this week to speak about this movement.  Again, the people are good people being forced into a societal model they may not have chosen if they could get work in the fields from which they graduated.  They can't because of the economy created by Third Way politicians which INCLUDE ALL MARYLAND POLITICIANS.

The Maryland Chapter of The Zeitgeist Movement
will be presenting the new documentary, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. The screening will take place at The Patterson Theater in Baltimore, MD on Sunday, January 16th at 4PM. Doors open at 3PM, so please arrive early. After the screening, we will host a question and answer session with the audience. Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, by director Peter Joseph, is a feature length documentary work which will present a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society. This subject matter will transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical "life ground" attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a "Resource-Based Economy".



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YOU SEE ABOVE THE ZEITGEIST MANTRA OF MOVING FORWARD AND THE NAME OF THE PRIVATE NON-PROFIT BELOW MOVING MARYLAND FORWARD.....IT IS ALSO O'MALLEY'S SLOGAN.  THEY ARE ALL LINKED TO THE 'NEW ECONOMY' WHERE A FEW HAVE ALL THE MONEY AND THE 99% HAVE NO MONEY.

 DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KEEP SUPPORTING AND VOTING FOR THE VERY POLITICIANS MOVING THESE POLICIES TO REPLACE A EGALITARIAN MIDDLE-CLASS SOCIETY?  CENTRALIZING ALL ADVOCACY IN A CORPORATE STATE  HAVING ONE OF THE WORST CASES OF WEALTH INEQUITY AND QUASI-GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES IN THE COUNTRY?  REALLY?

VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE AND RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE!!!


Moving Maryland Forward Network

The Moving Maryland Forward Network (MMFN) is part of a bold vision to energize the strength of progressive advocates by connecting new online audiences in Maryland to the long and successful history of Maryland’s advocacy Leaders. MMFN is an initiative designed to transform advocacy campaigns in Maryland by building an advocacy network of Leaders who are capable of moving social and policy change more efficiently and effectively. The project is managed by Netcentric Campaigns and funded by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.

The top advocacy Leaders in Maryland are “networked” in a traditional sense. These key players know each other. Many organizations already work in specific coalitions or coordinated campaigns. MMFN is not designed to compete with those ways of working together. MMFN aims to layer in a robust and supportive network structure to complement the traditional and offline work of many good groups working in Maryland.  

MMFN aims to ensure traditional organizing is not disconnected from online discussion, online debates and power of online mobilizations. MMFN is designed to engage more people and improve the online and mobile organizing strategies of Maryland’s best advocates.  

 We need your help to spread the word today, so please take any of the following actions that you can;



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The Zeitgeist Movement Official Blog

Become the change you want to see in the world

Home TZM interviews Federico Pistono at TZM Interviews Submitted by TZM global, Published on Fri, 01/25/2013 - 20:32 TZM Interviews is a new form of dialog that brings proactive, visionary and inspiring people into this conversation about how the scientific method for social concern applies to global sustainability and how to effectively change the world. This month our guest is Federico Pistono, former coordinator of the Italian Chapter for The Zeitgeist Movement, author, blogger, activist and more...

Mark Boyle at TZM Interviews Submitted by TZM global, Published on Tue, 12/11/2012 - 19:23 Mark Boyle, AKA The Moneyless Man, (born 8 May 1979) is a writer and activist best known for founding the online Freeconomy Community, and for living without money since November 2008. Boyle writes regularly for the Freeconomy Blog and British newspaper The Guardian. His first book, The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, was published in 2010. He recently published ‘The Moneyless Manifesto’ where he does not only demystify money and the system that binds us to it, he also explains how liberating, easy and enjoyable it is to live with less of it.

Nikola Danaylov at TZM Interviews Submitted by TZM global, Published on Fri, 11/02/2012 - 15:56 TZM Interviews is a new form of dialog that brings proactive, visionary and inspiring people into this conversation about cutting edge technology applied to global sustainability and how to effectively change the world.
Jason Silva at TZM Interviews Submitted by TZM global, Published on Fri, 10/05/2012 - 18:37 TZM Interviews is a new form of dialog that brings proactive, visionary and inspiring people into this conversation about cutting edge technology applied to global sustainability and how effectively change the world. This month our guest is Jason Silva, he has been described as "part Timothy Leary, part Ray Kurzweil, and part Neo from The Matrix".
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IT IS ABSURD TO THINK THAT THIS MOVEMENT CAME ABOUT AS THE BANKS WERE LOADING THE ECONOMY WITH BAD DEBT TO IMPLODE THE WESTERN WORLD UNDER THE GUISE OF 'AVOIDING A MONETIZED CULTURE'.  REALLY FOLKS.  THE HANDS OF THE 1% ARE AS OBVIOUS AS IT IS BECAUSE THOSE AT THE TOP NOW ARE ABSOLUTE IDIOTS!!!!!

THIS IS CLINTON AND BUSH AND REVOLVES AROUND THE WORK OF THIRD WAY......IT IS WHY THE REPUBLICANS CALL OBAMA AND HIS POLICIES 'SOCIALIST'.  IT ISN'T A SOCIETY BUILD FOR THE COMMON GOOD.....IT IS A SOCIETY BUILT BECAUSE ALL OF THE MONEY HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM THE NATION AND EVERYONE NEEDS TO FIND OTHER WAYS TO LIVE!!!!


Zeitgeist Cult Implodes

Posted on | April 25, 2011 |

Zeitgeist, the conspiracy-theory movie that influenced Tucson mass-murder suspect Jared Loughner, also inspired its own cult movement.

Zeitgeist director Peter Joseph Merola became an advocate of The Venus Project, a utopian scheme for a “resource-based economy” proposed by Jacque Fresco, a Florida-based futurist. The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) described itself as the “activist arm of The Venus Project” (TVP).

Now, three months after the Tucson shootings, a dispute between Merola and Fresco has apparently produced an irreparable schism between TZM and TVP. According to statements made by Merola and by Fresco’s partner Roxeanne Meadows, it appears that the schism developed because Fresco wanted to make a major feature film based on his plans for The Venus Project. Merola viewed Fresco’s film project as impractical and yet, despite Merola’s objections, Fresco began soliciting contributions to produce the film.

Here is an audio excerpt from an hour-long meeting/conference-call. You’ll hear Meadows ramble on for about two minutes before Merola jumps in and starts cussing her a blue streak, describing as “ridiculous” Fresco’s idea for a $20 million movie:

It’s rather ironic that Merola, a critic of the “monetary-based economy,” fell out with his partners over money. And because his utopian partners were impractical. (Imagine that!)

Anyway, I thought you’d want to know what became of this cult inspired by the movie with which the Tucson shooter was reportedly obsessed. As one longtime critic of the cult asked, “Is this how it ends for our friends who were going to remake human civilization in Jacque Fresco’s image?”




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February 08th, 2013

2/8/2013

0 Comments

 
This globalist philosophy is steeped in the Ayn Rand wealth credo that we all found out after the financial collapse had Alan Greenspan as a devoted follower.  So, as Reagan started this handing over of all that is America to the few by appointing Alan Greenspan to the Federal Reserve we watched Bill Clinton renew his term and we watch Obama send in his surrogate in Ben Bernanke.  All of this means that all of policy in Washington is now driven by furthering the empire building now that the wealth has been transferred to the top.  IMMIGRATION AND EMIGRATION HAS ONLY TO DO WITH HOW HUMAN CAPITAL AS WE ARE NOW CALLED BEST PRODUCES CORPORATE PROFIT.....IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FAIR AND JUSTICE PUBLIC POLICY!

You can look at the devil in the details folks!!!

WE WANT A CLEARLY DEFINED GRANTING OF CITIZENSHIP!!!!

We know that the pathway to citizenship will simply institutionalize the abuses and exploitation and many of these Hispanic families have paid their dues.....they do not need to go to the end of the line.  The crime in all of this comes from the business owner who knowingly hires these workers.
Below you'll see that immigration problems are not cured by Visa or Green Card.  When people are brought to the country to work with one business they are in a double-bond in that they have no other hiring options and feel trapped.  These businesses are not always the good will ambassador these corporate pols want to make people believe.  THERE IS GREAT EXPLOITATION BY VISA/GREEN CARD AS WELL.  The abuse is also not well-reported as most immigrants do not complain or move around to avoid bad apples.  The point is this:  we do not want what we know to be a bad situation to be a solution......
the solution is citizenship!!!

DO NOT BELIEVE THIS PATHWAY TO CITIZENSHIP....SHOUT OUT FOR IMMEDIATE CITIZENSHIP FOR THOSE MEETING CRITERIA.

Latino Workers in South Face Rampant AbuseKey Finding: 41% of Respondents Say They Have Experienced Wage Theft

They come for the work.

They harvest onions in Georgia and pack tomatoes in Florida. They pour concrete in Charlotte and clean hotel rooms in New Orleans. In cities and small towns throughout the South, they wash dishes, mow lawns and slaughter chickens.

They do the hardest, most hazardous work for the least pay, fueling our economy and making products cheaper for all of us.

Yet when it comes to the workplace, Latino immigrants in the South take their chances.

With the influx of Latino labor in the South, what has emerged is a shadow economy where employers are keenly aware that immigrants — including those who are working here legally — are often ill-equipped to stand up for their rights.

The result is rampant wage theft, intimidation and unsafe working conditions. Government regulation does little to protect them.

For undocumented workers, the situation is particularly oppressive. Theoretically, they have the same legal protections in the workplace as documented workers. Yet unscrupulous employers use their immigration status against them, threatening to have them deported if they object to wage theft or working conditions.

This dire situation facing Latino immigrants is reflected in the survey responses:

 

  • Forty-one percent of those surveyed had experienced wage theft where they were not paid for work performed. In New Orleans, an astonishing 80 percent reported wage theft.

  • Most people surveyed (about 80 percent) had no idea how to contact government enforcement agencies such as the Department of Labor. Many respondents did not know such agencies even exist.

  • Overall, 32 percent of Latinos surveyed reported on-the-job injuries. Among those injured on the job, only 37 percent reported that they received appropriate treatment. The remainder of the Latinos who said they suffered on-the-job injuries reported that they were not paid for their lost wages, they did not receive medical care and/or they were fired because they were injured.
The danger immigrants face when they stand up for their rights was powerfully illustrated when an immigrant advocate in New Orleans told SPLC researchers what happened when one Latino worker attempted to collect wages from a contractor.

"The contractor raised his shirt and showed he had a gun — and that was enough," said Eva San Martin, an advocate working in New Orleans. "He didn't have to say any more. The worker left."

Beltran, a day laborer in Louisiana, said he carpeted 10 apartments and was never paid the $3,000 he was owed for the work. It wasn't the first time he had been cheated.

"This happens to everyone," he said. "The humiliation begins there. I know in this country you can defend your rights, but people are afraid of the police."

The SPLC survey found Latino immigrants were employed in a variety of labor-intensive fields. Construction was the leading industry employing them, with 17 percent of respondents, followed by factory work (11 percent), cleaning (10 percent) and restaurant work (9 percent).

Widespread Abuse in Wake of Katrina
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 created the ideal conditions for immigrant abuse as the cleanup and rebuilding effort drew thousands of migrant workers looking for employment. In the wake of the storm, the Crescent City quickly became home to a labor force eager to work but highly vulnerable to exploitation.

A look at a few of the cases that have resulted in legal action provides a glimpse into the conditions many of these workers endured. They also are a reminder of the immigrants who are not so fortunate to find legal help and the countless instances of abuse that go unreported every day.

Latino immigrants were among the hundreds of workers restoring schools in New Orleans following Katrina. Despite their hard labor, many discovered they were frequently shortchanged on payday.

"When we weren't paid, we didn't even have money for food," said Sergio de Leon, who cleaned toxic mud and mold from St. Bernard Parish schools. "These companies are robbing us of our money after we worked so hard."

The SPLC filed a lawsuit against LVI Environmental Services of New Orleans, Inc., and its subcontractor, D&L Environmental, Inc. on behalf of these workers. The case has since been settled.

Latino immigrants also worked to restore key public services in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, including Tulane Hospital and Tulane University. They often worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, to remove mold, mud and toxic contamination from the flooded buildings.

Workers employed by subcontractors of Belfor USA Group Inc. discovered they were not being paid the overtime wages they had earned. After the SPLC filed a lawsuit against Belfor on behalf of the workers, the company launched an internal investigation that found certain subcontractors had not appropriately paid overtime wages to their employees.

Belfor reached a settlement agreement in 2006 to ensure that hundreds of workers would receive the pay they earned.

Another group of immigrant workers were drawn to New Orleans to repair an apartment complex. They were promised a wage of at least $500 a week and an apartment at the Audubon Pointe apartment complex they were repairing. They arrived to discover they would be living in storm-damaged apartments and cheated out of wages. Their employer allegedly responded to complaints of nonpayment with threats of eviction and deportation.

"They said that we did not have rights in this country and that we had to shut up and continue working if we did not want problems," said Reyes Aguilar-Garcia, an Audubon Pointe worker, in an affidavit that's part of a lawsuit the SPLC filed against his employer.

Their apartments had holes in the walls or no finished walls, broken windows, smelly carpets and cockroaches. One worker shared a two-bedroom apartment with seven other workers. Despite these conditions, the fear of homelessness kept many workers from leaving.

"Without any money, Audubon Pointe was the only place we had to sleep, and we could not survive if we were to lose this housing, as bad as it was," Aguilar-Garcia said.

A federal lawsuit was filed in March 2008 on behalf of these workers by the SPLC, the Pro Bono Project and the National Employment Law Project. It alleges the employers violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Victims of Trafficking Protection Act. The case has since been settled and an agreement reached to pay the workers' wages.

Guestworkers Face Systematic Abuse
Having few opportunities in Peru, Humberto Jimenez jumped at the opportunity to earn money for his child's college education — even though it meant mortgaging his house.

A major hotel chain in New Orleans was looking for workers to fill jobs left empty after Hurricane Katrina. Labor recruiters promised 40 hours of work each week and plenty of overtime. Jimenez mortgaged his house in Peru to pay $4,000 in fees to a recruiter who helped him secure the job.

But the promises were not true. Many of the workers hired by the hotel chain found themselves working 25 hours a week or less. Jimenez couldn't make ends meet on what he earned — much less pay back the money he borrowed.

"Four thousand dollars is a lot of money in Peru," Jimenez said. "I came here to make enough money to see my child through college. If I had known the truth I would never have come."

Jimenez, who was in the country legally as a guestworker, could not get a second job or quit the job to find other work. That's because workers with H-2 guestworker visas for low-skill, seasonal jobs are bound to the employers who hire them under the program and cannot legally look for other work. They are often forced deeply into debt because of exorbitant fees charged by the recruiters who bring them to the United States. Accepting abuse and earning what little money is available is often seen as better than returning home with crushing debt and no earnings.

The SPLC documented widespread abuse in the H-2A and H-2B programs in its 2007 report, Close to Slavery. The report describes rampant wage violations, recruitment abuses, seizure of identity documents and squalid living conditions.

Under these conditions, it shouldn't be surprising to hear Latinos recounting stories of desperation, such as the one Berta of Oak Park, Ga., told for this report.

Berta was driving home from work one night when she saw two Latino men on the road looking for a ride. They were guestworkers who had escaped from their jobs. Their employer had threatened to fire them if they left the job site, an action that would cost them their visas and result in deportation.

The men risked an escape only because they weren't making enough money to live. The cold calculation for them was that it was better to become an undocumented immigrant than to work legally under their employer.

"Even though we don't have papers, [undocumented immigrants] are sometimes a little freer because we don't have to ask permission from the boss to be able to leave," Berta said. "In some ways, it's like [guestworkers] are prisoners, because they cannot leave and look for other work. They are here like slaves."



South's Weak Labor Laws Key to Abuse
It is not surprising that workplace abuse flourishes in the South. The South has the weakest labor protections of any region in the United States. Every Southern state, for example, is a "right to work" state, making it harder for workers to unionize and collectively improve wages and working conditions.

Further, these Southern states do not have strong enforcement mechanisms to help workers assert their rights. While many states have vigorous state Departments of Labor, that simply is not the case for most states in the South. The result is that, given the failure of the federal government to protect them, workers in the South are largely without recourse when their rights are violated.

In examining one major industry that relies heavily on Latino migrant labor — agriculture — it is easy to understand why conditions for agricultural workers in the Southeast are considered the worst in the nation. State laws to protect farmworkers from abuse are appallingly weak, or nonexistent.

For example, farmworkers are not covered by workers' compensation laws in many of the Southern states.1 That means when farmworkers are injured on the job — and many are, given that it is one of the most dangerous occupations in the U.S. — they are routinely denied any benefits at all. And there is little or nothing they can do about it.

In addition, many state wage and hour laws, if they exist at all, exempt agricultural workers from their protection. In some states, farmworker children are even exempt from the state's compulsory education laws.2 And many state health and safety laws exclude farmworkers.3

These antiquated laws are vestiges of slavery. The farmworker population in the Southeast has always been composed principally of racial or ethnic minorities and has suffered shocking prejudice and oppression as a result. As one North Carolina grower summed up the situation: "The North won the War on paper but we confederates actually won because we kept our slaves. First we had sharecroppers, then tenant farmers and now we have Mexicans."4

The treatment in the fields described by one Latina is a sad confirmation of this attitude. Hilda, who has worked in the United States for eight years, described working in the fields of Georgia, where plants are covered in pesticides or even sprayed with pesticides as the workers harvest.

"There is no protection," Hilda said in an interview for this report. "A simple shirt, a bandana, no protection for the mouth or the nose — nothing. …When we ask for protection, they say there is none."

In the spring of 2008, the author interviewed numerous migrant tomato workers in Immokalee, Fla., and found them desperately poor, fearful of retaliation and lacking in the benefits most workers take for granted. These workers earned as little as 40 to 45 cents for each 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they picked — or about $25 per ton.

The workers faced regular exposure to pesticides in the fields and chronic violations of wage and hour laws. As one worker said: "If you say something, they fire you."5

Farmworkers who try to stand up for their rights often find themselves frustrated by multiple layers of subcontractors and middlemen — an arrangement that seems designed to insulate corporations at the top from accountability for the mistreatment of workers. The same phenomenon was seen repeatedly in New Orleans with contractors working to clean up the city after Hurricane Katrina.

In southeast Georgia between 2003 and 2006, hundreds of Latinos — both foreign guestworkers and U.S.-based migrant laborers — toiled in onion fields controlled by Fresh Del Monte Produce (Southeast), Inc. a subsidiary of the food giant Fresh Del Monte Produce. They lived in Del Monte labor camps. They used Del Monte equipment. They were supervised by Del Monte employees.

The workers claim they were consistently cheated out of their pay. They contend hourly rates were sometimes wrong and that pay stubs frequently showed fewer hours than they actually worked. But the company claimed it wasn't responsible for shortchanging the workers — that it was the responsibility of an "independent" labor contractor. The SPLC brought suit against Del Monte and won a ruling that the labor contractor and the workers were really employees of the Del Monte subsidiary and that the company was indeed responsible for any wage abuses that could be proven.6

The federal ruling was an important milestone for workers, but the fact remains that most Latino farmworkers in the South have little or no access to legal representation.

Many low-income individuals across the U.S. rely upon legal services offices when they have legal problems. Unfortunately, many immigrants simply cannot do that. Federally funded legal services offices are prohibited from representing undocumented immigrants and many legal immigrants, as well.

Because there are few private lawyers or other nonprofits in the South willing to take cases on behalf of low-income immigrants, many people whose rights have been violated are left with no recourse whatsoever.

Suffering in Silence
Even if an immigrant is fairly paid by an employer, there's still the worry of how the employer will respond to an on-the-job injury or illness.

Miguel, a Latino in Georgia, described the ordeal his brother faced after he began having trouble with his back on the job. The supervisor told Miguel's brother there was nothing he could do since the Guatemalan was undocumented. Eventually, his supervisor agreed to take him to the hospital — on one condition. He had to tell hospital officials that the company found him on the side of the road, drunk and run over by a car.

It was a story that would completely disassociate the man from the company that had employed him for nearly two years.

In New Orleans, an advocate recounted the story of a Latino whose thumb was severed on the job. The worker was taken to the home of his employer's brother where he waited for four hours until he was taken to the hospital.

A Latina in Nashville described how she cut herself while cleaning a restaurant. Although she had seen managers take non-Latinos to the hospital, she was told they wouldn't take her. Even after receiving medical treatment, her employer refused to pay any of the cost. The injury has left her with limited mobility in her hand.

In 2004, an Associated Press investigation found that Mexican workers were about 80 percent more likely to die on the job than native-born workers. That figure translates to one Mexican worker a day dying on the job from accidental deaths; workers as young as 15 were "impaled, shredded in machinery, [and] buried alive."7

In the South, the rate of deaths for Mexican workers was 1 in 6,200 workers — more than double the national average for Mexican workers, the AP study found. The deadliest states were Georgia, Florida and North Carolina. The total deaths jumped from 27 in 1996 to 94 in 2002 — a more than three-fold increase.

Every day, the SPLC receives calls from workers who are not paid for work performed, illegally fired, or injured on the job and fired. Quite often, if the SPLC is unable to provide representation, there is no other legal recourse available. As a final resort, they are referred to the U.S. Department of Labor, even though it is highly unlikely they will ever see their lost wages.8

Berta, the Latina in Georgia, said the impact of workplace abuse, like being chronically exposed to pesticides, isn't fully realized while they still live in the United States. And the cost is not borne by the U.S. companies that employ them — or by the consumers who enjoy the products or services they produce.

"What happens is when we feel sick, we go back to our homeland, and that's where we die," Berta said. "The consequences are not seen here, they leave and they are seen in Mexico."

1. Employers in the following Southern states are not required to provide workers' compensation to their agricultural employees under most circumstances: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

2. Under Alabama Statute § 16-28-6(4), children who are legally employed under the state child labor code are not obligated to attend school. Because Alabama's child labor law (Ala. Stat. § 25-8-1) exempts agriculture, children employed in agriculture are not required to attend school in the state. In South Carolina, children as young as 12 can work legally in agriculture and can be exempted from attending school if they have finished the 8th grade (S.C. Code § 59-65-30(c)).

3. See, e.g., Ala. Code § 25-1-1; Ark. Code Ann. § 11-2-101; O.C.G.A. (Georgia) §§ 34-2-2, 34-2-10; La. R.S. § 23.13.

4. Charles D. Thompson Jr. and Melinda F. Wiggins, The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor and Advocacy, University of Texas Press, 2002, p. 250.

5. See e.g., Testimony of Mary Bauer, Southern Poverty Law Center, before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, U.S. Senate, April 15, 2008, available at www.splcenter.org (detailing the abuses of migrant tomato workers and recommended remedies).

6. Luna v. Del Monte Fresh Produce (Southeast), Inc., 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21636 (N.D. Ga. Mar. 18, 2008)

7. Justin Pritchard, "AP Investigation: Mexican Worker Deaths Rise Sharply Even as Overall U.S. Job Safety Improves," The Associated Press, March 13, 2004.

8. See e.g. Testimony of the Southern Poverty Law Center before the Domestic Policy Subcommittee, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives, June 26, 2007, available at www.splcenter.org (detailing the failure of the U.S. Department of Labor to deal with massive wage theft in post-Katrina New Orleans)

Photo by Kevork Djansezian/AP Images

Photo by Lowell Handler

Photo by Sarah Reynolds

_____________________________________________________
Don't think the status of green card or visa worker adds any protection.  We all know that when a worker is in a country only at the invite by a business-owner, that person feels bound to that business no matter the working conditions and those conditions are often bad.  This happens mostly at the lower pay scale but is true for the top earners as well.

What seems like opportunity quickly becomes capture as these green care workers watch as they follow a different track than others.  WE WANT THESE WORKERS ALLOWED CITIZENSHIP WITHOUT THE BURDEN OF BUYING INTO IT. 
_
Report: Workers, visa system exploited by employers By Elise Foley
Friday, November 05, 2010 at 3:04 pm

Via the Kansas City Star, a government report released this week found that foreign workers are at times abused and exploited under the H-2B visa program, which allows companies to hire foreign workers for temporary jobs they can’t fill with Americans. The Government Accountability Office found that some employers cheat the system to avoid hiring American workers and then subject foreign workers to bad conditions and unfair wages.

The Government Accountability Office went undercover to investigate how 18 recruiters would respond to questions about how to hire foreign workers, who can be less expensive than native-born workers. Three of them took the bait, recommending the fictional landscape employer dissuade Americans from applying by scheduling job interviews before 7 a.m., requiring drug tests and making applicants “run around the shop carrying a 50-pound bag to determine [if] they were fit for the work.”

For the foreign workers who eventually get jobs under H-2B visas, the GAO found employers sometimes underpay or charge visa workers excessive fees for visa processing, housing or transportation. More than half of the cases reviewed by government investigators involved fees that drastically reduced paychecks for workers, sometimes to as low as $48 in a two-week period.

Labor rights groups say that foreign-born workers are often exploited by employers who rely on their lack of connections or access to resources in the United States. This can be even worse for undocumented workers, who rights groups say suffer frequent wage theft and other workplace abuses because they fear being turned over to immigration authorities.Workers on H-2B visas are in the country legally, but at times it’s through employers who are cheating the system by skipping over qualified American applicants.

For more on workplace exploitation, it’s worth re-reading the Star’s series on trafficking from last year. After the series ended in December, Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said she would begin more work on ending human trafficking, including a campaign launched in July to improve trafficking assistance and awareness programs.

The Labor Department, which also handles the issue, has added investigators to its Wage and Hour Division to audit seasonal H-2B visa workers. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has argued for fair wages for all workers — even undocumented ones — and appeared in advertising this summer telling workers “every worker in America has the right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.”




Ayn Rand: Queen of the Universe Thursday, 07 February 2013 15:22 By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Op-Ed

Thirty years after her death, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness and billionaire empowerment rules the world. It’s a remarkable achievement for an ideology that was pushed to the fringes for most of her life, and ridiculed on national television in a notorious interview with Mike Wallace.

But, it’s happened. And today, the United States and other independent governments around the world are crumbling while Ayn Rand’s billionaires are taking over.

With each new so-called Free Trade agreement – especially the very secretive Trans Pacific Partnership, which has less to do with trade and more to do with a new law of global governance for transnational corporations – Ayn Rand’s reviled “state” (or what we would call our democracy, the United States of America) is losing its power to billionaires and transnational corporations.

Ayn Rand hated governments and democracy. She considered them systems of mob rule. She grew up in Russia, and as a child watched the Bolsheviks confiscate her father’s pharmacy during the Russian Revolution. Likely suffering from PTSD from that incident, Ayn Rand devoted her future writings to evil government, including the "evil" of its functions like taxation, regulation, and providing social services to the poor and sick.

She divided the world into makers and takers (or what she called “looters”).

On one side are the billionaires and the industrialists. People like Dagny Taggert, a railroad tycoon, and Hank Rearden, a steel magnate. Both were fictional characters in her book Atlas Shrugged, but both have real-world counterparts in the form of the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, and Sheldon Adelson. According to Rand, they are the “Atlases” holding up the world.

So, in Atlas Shrugged, when the billionaires, tired of paying taxes and complying with government regulation, go on strike, Ayn Rand writes that the American economy promptly collapsed.

On the other side are the “looters,” or everyone else who isn’t as rich or privileged, or who believed in a democratic government to provide basic services, empower labor unions, and regulate the economy. They are the leeches on society according to Rand (and according to Mitt Romney with his 47% comments). And, as she told Mike Wallace in in 1959, they do not even “deserve love.”

To our Founding Fathers, looking out for the general welfare of the population was an explicit role of the government, one of its most important and the reason this nation was created when we separated from Britian.

But to Ayn Rand, a government that taxed billionaires to help pay for healthcare and education for impoverished children was not just unwise economically, it was also immoral.

Nature abhors a vacuum – both in the wild and in politics.  So, when people, organized in the form of a government, are removed from power, then money organized in the form of corporations and billionaires moves into the vacuum to take power – which is exactly what’s happening today, worldwide.

In the thirty years after her death, the United States crept closer and closer to Ayn Rand’s utopia. Reagan dramatically slashed taxes on the rich and went after labor unions. Clinton deregulated financial markets for the rich, ended welfare as we know it, and committed our nation to one globalist corporate free trade agreement after another.

And, under Bush and Obama, we’ve seen the rapid privatization of our commons, the further erosion of social safety nets, and more losses of national sovereignty with more so-called free trade agreements.

In Europe, we’re seeing sovereign governments neutered by Conservative technocrats. According to Ayn Rand, the rich can never be asked to sacrifice. So instead, it’s working people across the Eurozone who have to pay for the bad investments that the banksters made in the run-up to the global financial collapse.

As we saw in Greece in 2011 with the deposing of Prime Minister George Papandreou, and all across the state of Michigan over the last few years with financial managers laws, when democratic governments are unwilling to do the bidding of the rich, they're immediately replaced by corporate lackeys who will.

The Taggerts and the Reardens are holding the reins of government today.

Which explains why Corporate America paid an average tax rate of just 12% in 2011 – the lowest rate in 40 years. It explains why 400 billionaires in America now own more wealth than 150 million other Americans combined. And it explains why fewer impoverished Americans are getting less federal assistance than at any time in the last half-century.

Ayn Rand envisioned a world without governments – a world where the super-rich are free to do as they wish.

We tried that during the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th Century – before Ayn Rand was alive. If she'd watched the ruthlessness of the Robber Barons like she did the Bolsheviks, she may have reached different conclusions.

She may have realized that American Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower were right when they made sure that wealth was more evenly distributed and the Billionaire Class was held in check.

Or she may have come to understand that corporations and billionaires owe their wealth to the state and not the other way around. Without favorable patent and copyright laws, a court system, an educated workforce, and an infrastructure to move goods about the country, then no one would be able to get rich in America.  We'd be like the Libertarian paradise of Somalia.

As Harry Moser, the founder of the Reshoring Initiative,argued in The Economist, “Corporations are not created by the shareholders or the management. Rather they are created by the state. They are granted important privileges by the state (limited liability, eternal life, etc). They are granted these privileges because the state expects them to do something beneficial for the society that makes the grant. They may well provide benefits to other societies, but their main purpose is to provide benefits to the societies (not to the shareholders, not to management, but to the societies) that create them.”

Sadly, this understanding of how democratic republics work - and why - has been lost this generation.

And Ayn Rand’s disciples are making sure the next generation never finds it again.

Idaho State Senator John Goedde, who chairs that state Senate’s Education Committee, introduced a bill this week that would require all students to read Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” before they can graduate. Goedde explained that the book made his son a Republican and that it “certainly gives one a sense of personal responsibility.”

Between stupidity like this, and the re-birth of Ayn Rand through corporate-funded think tanks and Hollywood movies, the Billionaire Class wants to make sure the next generation buys into a toxic ideology that’s quite literally destroying the world as we know it.

They don’t want the 21st Century to be “America’s Century.” They want it to be the “Billionaire’s Century.” And if they succeed, then the middle class in America - and through most of the developed world - will go extinct.
_________________________________________________
This globalist philosophy is steeped in the Ayn Rand wealth credo that we all found out after the financial collapse had Alan Greenspan as a devoted follower. So, as Reagan started this handing over of all that is America to the few by appointing Alan Greenspan to the Federal Reserve we watched Bill Clinton renew his term and we watch Obama send in his surrogate in Ben Bernanke. All of this means that all of policy in Washington is now driven by furthering the empire building now that the wealth has been transferred to the top. IMMIGRATION AND EMIGRATION HAS ONLY TO DO WITH HOW HUMAN CAPITAL AS WE ARE NOW CALLED BEST PRODUCES CORPORATE PROFIT.....IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FAIR AND JUSTICE PUBLIC POLICY!

You can look at the devil in the details folks!!!

Ayn Rand: Queen of the Universe Thursday, 07 February 2013 15:22 By Thom Hartmann and Sam Sacks, The Daily Take | Op-Ed

Thirty years after her death, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness and billionaire empowerment rules the world. It’s a remarkable achievement for an ideology that was pushed to the fringes for most of her life, and ridiculed on national television in a notorious interview with Mike Wallace.

But, it’s happened. And today, the United States and other independent governments around the world are crumbling while Ayn Rand’s billionaires are taking over.

With each new so-called Free Trade agreement – especially the very secretive Trans Pacific Partnership, which has less to do with trade and more to do with a new law of global governance for transnational corporations – Ayn Rand’s reviled “state” (or what we would call our democracy, the United States of America) is losing its power to billionaires and transnational corporations.

Ayn Rand hated governments and democracy. She considered them systems of mob rule. She grew up in Russia, and as a child watched the Bolsheviks confiscate her father’s pharmacy during the Russian Revolution. Likely suffering from PTSD from that incident, Ayn Rand devoted her future writings to evil government, including the "evil" of its functions like taxation, regulation, and providing social services to the poor and sick.

She divided the world into makers and takers (or what she called “looters”).

On one side are the billionaires and the industrialists. People like Dagny Taggert, a railroad tycoon, and Hank Rearden, a steel magnate. Both were fictional characters in her book Atlas Shrugged, but both have real-world counterparts in the form of the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, and Sheldon Adelson. According to Rand, they are the “Atlases” holding up the world.

So, in Atlas Shrugged, when the billionaires, tired of paying taxes and complying with government regulation, go on strike, Ayn Rand writes that the American economy promptly collapsed.

On the other side are the “looters,” or everyone else who isn’t as rich or privileged, or who believed in a democratic government to provide basic services, empower labor unions, and regulate the economy. They are the leeches on society according to Rand (and according to Mitt Romney with his 47% comments). And, as she told Mike Wallace in in 1959, they do not even “deserve love.”

To our Founding Fathers, looking out for the general welfare of the population was an explicit role of the government, one of its most important and the reason this nation was created when we separated from Britian.

But to Ayn Rand, a government that taxed billionaires to help pay for healthcare and education for impoverished children was not just unwise economically, it was also immoral.

Nature abhors a vacuum – both in the wild and in politics.  So, when people, organized in the form of a government, are removed from power, then money organized in the form of corporations and billionaires moves into the vacuum to take power – which is exactly what’s happening today, worldwide.

In the thirty years after her death, the United States crept closer and closer to Ayn Rand’s utopia. Reagan dramatically slashed taxes on the rich and went after labor unions. Clinton deregulated financial markets for the rich, ended welfare as we know it, and committed our nation to one globalist corporate free trade agreement after another.

And, under Bush and Obama, we’ve seen the rapid privatization of our commons, the further erosion of social safety nets, and more losses of national sovereignty with more so-called free trade agreements.

In Europe, we’re seeing sovereign governments neutered by Conservative technocrats. According to Ayn Rand, the rich can never be asked to sacrifice. So instead, it’s working people across the Eurozone who have to pay for the bad investments that the banksters made in the run-up to the global financial collapse.

As we saw in Greece in 2011 with the deposing of Prime Minister George Papandreou, and all across the state of Michigan over the last few years with financial managers laws, when democratic governments are unwilling to do the bidding of the rich, they're immediately replaced by corporate lackeys who will.

The Taggerts and the Reardens are holding the reins of government today.

Which explains why Corporate America paid an average tax rate of just 12% in 2011 – the lowest rate in 40 years. It explains why 400 billionaires in America now own more wealth than 150 million other Americans combined. And it explains why fewer impoverished Americans are getting less federal assistance than at any time in the last half-century.

Ayn Rand envisioned a world without governments – a world where the super-rich are free to do as they wish.

We tried that during the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th Century – before Ayn Rand was alive. If she'd watched the ruthlessness of the Robber Barons like she did the Bolsheviks, she may have reached different conclusions.

She may have realized that American Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower were right when they made sure that wealth was more evenly distributed and the Billionaire Class was held in check.

Or she may have come to understand that corporations and billionaires owe their wealth to the state and not the other way around. Without favorable patent and copyright laws, a court system, an educated workforce, and an infrastructure to move goods about the country, then no one would be able to get rich in America.  We'd be like the Libertarian paradise of Somalia.

As Harry Moser, the founder of the Reshoring Initiative,argued in The Economist, “Corporations are not created by the shareholders or the management. Rather they are created by the state. They are granted important privileges by the state (limited liability, eternal life, etc). They are granted these privileges because the state expects them to do something beneficial for the society that makes the grant. They may well provide benefits to other societies, but their main purpose is to provide benefits to the societies (not to the shareholders, not to management, but to the societies) that create them.”

Sadly, this understanding of how democratic republics work - and why - has been lost this generation.

And Ayn Rand’s disciples are making sure the next generation never finds it again.

Idaho State Senator John Goedde, who chairs that state Senate’s Education Committee, introduced a bill this week that would require all students to read Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” before they can graduate. Goedde explained that the book made his son a Republican and that it “certainly gives one a sense of personal responsibility.”

Between stupidity like this, and the re-birth of Ayn Rand through corporate-funded think tanks and Hollywood movies, the Billionaire Class wants to make sure the next generation buys into a toxic ideology that’s quite literally destroying the world as we know it.

They don’t want the 21st Century to be “America’s Century.” They want it to be the “Billionaire’s Century.” And if they succeed, then the middle class in America - and through most of the developed world - will go extinct.


0 Comments

February 07th, 2013

2/7/2013

0 Comments

 
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that what is being proposed in this immigration legislation hurts the American citizens as well as those immigrants it pretends to help.  It moves America further towards the third world autocracies that thrive on 'guest workers' as those in the middle-east do now.  We look at France and Germany's guest worker programs of these past few decades and we see a policy that failed to integrate and now is creating an explosive social situation because after all these programs are only meant to exploit people.

So, the American people must shout out against this globalization plan by the Brookings Institute and Third Way corporate pols that is only meant to move the US closer to a third world colonial empire-building structure.  There is nothing democratic about it and it is not the future we want for our children and grandchildren.

To reverse this trend we simply need to reinstate Rule of Law, rebuild these white collar criminal agencies across America and hold corporations accountable to domestic and international law.  That will downsize them and return them to the status of good corporate citizen.  It is not hard to do.....JUST VOTE YOUR THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRAT OUT OF OFFICE AND RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES!!!

American workers can see these immigration policies do not bode well for their future but we need immigrants here in America and wanting to come to America to understand they are lying to you as to their intent.  Just as has been the case in countries all around the world using guest workers the only intent is to exploit labor.  WE CAN HAVE A FAIR IMMIGRATION POLICY THAT GIVES IMMEDIATE CITIZENSHIP TO HISPANICS WITH A TRACK RECORD OF WORKING AND LIVING IN AMERICA.  THAT WILL BE THE ONLY POLICY THAT WILL BE JUST......ANY OTHER WILL LEAD NOWHERE GOOD FOR ANY OF US!!!  DO NOT BE FOOLED OVER COMPROMISE LEGISLATION WITH THE REPUBLICANS.....THIRD WAY DEMOCRATS KNOW WHAT A COMPROMISE WILL BRING.

THINK TO YOURSELF.......WOULD A POLITICIAN WHO INVITES YOU TO MARYLAND AND BALTIMORE AND THEN TURNS HIS/HER HEAD WHILE ALL KINDS OF WORKPLACE EXPLOITATION OCCURS REALLY BE WORKING IN YOUR BEST INTEREST?  OF COURSE NOT.....THEY HAVE TRICKS UP THEIR COLLECTIVE SLEEVES.

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 A lesson in immigration: Guest worker experiments transformed Europe
Boston Globe ^ | April 19, 2006 | Colin Nickerson
Posted on Saturday, May 13, 2006 12:10:56 PM by Ooh-Ah

BERLIN -- Germany needed workers. Turks needed work.

So starting in 1961, the country invited Turkish ''guest workers" to come do the dirty jobs that Germans didn't want. ...

Nobody grasped that the country -- and the continent, because neighboring nations soon undertook similar experiments -- was on the brink of a transformation whose effects are still reverberating across Europe. ...

In Germany, guest workers -- mostly poorly educated young men who were issued special visas allowing them entry for one or two years to take unskilled jobs -- helped the nation to become the third-richest in the world. The fabulous post-war prosperity of ... West European countries was also boosted by immigrant labor, mainly from Turkey and North Africa.

... recently, as economic growth has slowed, swelling numbers of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa -- many of them arriving without any visas, or overstaying their visas and melting into the ethnic suburbs -- are being blamed for social stresses from urban blight to chaotic schools. ...

For decades, there were no efforts to integrate the newcomers. They were entitled to social benefits, but not citizenship. Their children could attend schools, but little effort was made to give them language skills. Far from a melting pot, Europe in the post-World War II era became the realm of ''parallel societies," in which native and immigrant populations occupied the same countries but shared little common ground.

Now, the presence of millions of largely unassimilated newcomers, coupled with terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, has triggered furious debates in Europe over national identity and the future of immigration. ...

''The parents took jobs that Germans didn't want -- and most of that first generation did all right," ... ''But the young people don't even get the bad jobs. ...


(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
________________________________________________


Asian guest workers would become `second-class citizens'
  • by: Ewin Hannan
  • From: The Australian
  • April 01, 2010 5:39AM

UNIONS have vowed to oppose a proposal by Colin Barnett to bring in Asian guest workers to the Pilbara on two year contracts to help meet labour demand.

The WA Premier touted the idea last week, saying workers from Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia could be targeted.

But the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union said it was very concerned about the potential creation of a fly-in fly-out workforce from Asian countries.

The union's national secretary, John Sutton, said the proposal had parallels with the guest worker schemes in the Middle East where Asian workers were flown into Dubai.

"Those workers go to the Middle East under fixed contracts to satisfy the building boom over there," he said.

"They end up living in almost what you would term slave-like conditions and they get treated abysmally.


"It's a two-tier workforce. You have got the palatial lifestyle of the first class citizens and then you have got the slave camps hidden out of view. I don't think too many Australians like that kind of model.


"If we move towards this sort of guest workforce en masse that Barnett is floating, it would not take long before these workers became an enclave of second class citizens."


Mr Barnett has cited the limited guest worker program operating in Queensland for Pacific Islanders to work in the agricultural industry as a good model.

He said he had raised with Kevin Rudd, "an equivalent program in perhaps Broome with hospitality industry workers and maybe the Pilbara".

"They would work under Australian conditions and earn Australian salaries and in terms of their own countries, it would probably set them up for life," he said.

Mr Sutton stressed that unions believed permanent migration, as well as local companies taking on additional apprentices and trainees, was the best way to address labour shortages.



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LET'S BE CLEAR, THE TARGETING OF THIS SUBPRIME LOAN FRAUD ON MINORITY COMMUNITIES WAS DELIBERATE.  IT WAS MEANT TO NOT ONLY DEFRAUD THE GOVERNMENT BY TARGETING POPULATIONS THAT WOULD USE FEDERAL HOUSING LOAN BENEFITS BUT IT WAS MEANT TO BANKRUPT PEOPLE OF COLOR CREATING A SPIRAL OF INDEBTEDNESS FROM WHICH THEY WOULD NOT ESCAPE.

THE SOLUTION TO THIS MASSIVE FRAUD WOULD HAVE BEEN TO MAKE ALL OF THE VICTIMS WITH LEGITIMATE CLAIMS OF FRAUD WHOLE AGAIN AS REGARDS CREDIT HISTORIES AND HOME OWNERSHIP.....MOVING THE COSTS OF THE FRAUD BACK TO THE BANKS WHO WERE THE CRIMINALS.....THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN.

MORE IMPORTANTLY AS REGARDS IMMIGRATION REFORM....THIS SUBPRIME LOAN FRAUD AND THE CRASH THAT LEFT PEOPLE WITH NO JOBS ALSO MARRED MANY INNOCENT AND GOOD PEOPLE'S RECORDS AND WILL AFFECT THEIR ABILITY TO MEET THESE NEW CITIZENSHIP GOALS.....AND THIS IS DELIBERATE!  REMEMBER, IT IS THIRD WAY OBAMA AND THE JUSTICE SYSTEM THAT FAILED TO GIVE JUSTICE TO PEOPLE IN THIS SUBPRIME LOAN SCAM AND IT WILL AFFECT FUTURE CITIZENSHIP WITH THE POLICIES BEING PUT FORWARD.

Loss of homes by Latino homeowners signals an erosion of equality in the nation

Posted date: June 26, 2012 | LatinaLista —

As June, otherwise known as National Homeownership Month, draws to an end so does the American Dream for many Americans, especially Latino and black home owners. RealtyTrac reports that banks took back 54,844 properties last month, up 7 percent from April. This is a discouraging sign in an economy where Latino homeowners have already lost 60 percent of their wealth since the onset of the housing collapse in 2008.



It’s even more troubling when it’s realized that more than half of all foreclosed home owners are white, but black and latino home owners are much, much more likely to be foreclosed on.

In a CHCI white paper written by 2011–12 CHCI Housing Graduate Fellow, Janel Gomez, the loss of home ownership for Latinos has translated into a sad reality — “more than one million Latino families have either lost or will soon lose their home.”

Gomez concurs with what was initially blamed as the widespread home loss among families of color — agreeing to sign the dotted line on risky lending practices by mortgage companies. Yet, it’s not the only thing to blame for devastating so many Latino families.

In 2005, Latinos derived nearly two-thirds of their net worth from home equity. However, because many Latinos live in places where housing prices increased the most prior to the housing crisis — and have fallen the most since — the housing bust had a greater impact on Latino household wealth than any other group. The steep decline in housing prices has many Latino homeowners underwater on their home mortgages. According to a Pew Hispanic Center survey, 28% of Latino homeowners say they owe more on their home than what they could sell it for — double the share (14%) of homeowners in the general population who say the same.

The disproportionate impact on Latino homeowners has resulted in Latinos being the largest group to have lost their homes, dropping homeownership from 51 percent to 47 percent. This disparity is also widening the gap between white homeowners and Latino homeowners.

Though there have been some encouraging predictions about Latinos and homeownership — Movoto.com reports that between now and 2020, Latinos will account for 50 percent of new buyers — unfortunately, it’s not helping distressed Latino homeowners now or the thousands of potential buyers who can’t qualify for today’s stringent home loans.

Clearly, more intervention programs need to be created to allow homeowners to stay in their homes and create home ownership opportunities. The loss of a home is now known to be so psychologically damaging to both the adults and the children that as long as families can pay something there’s no reason why banks can’t or shouldn’t work with these families.

Because of seeing homes as properties and not as dwellings for families, banks have been on the receiving end of the new movement Occupy Homes, a group that fights on behalf of foreclosed homeowners. But no amount of fighting is effective unless solutions are drafted and implemented to help people in danger of losing their homes and the American Dream of homeownership is preserved for those who want it and are willing to pay for it.

As it is, over fifty percent of housing experts believe that in five years the U.S. homeownership will be at or below 65 percent, while one in five economists see the rate falling as low as 63 percent, the lowest on record since 1965.

Home ownership signifies much more than a family’s wealth, especially among Latino homeowners. A home is a sign of a family’s investment in their local community. It serves as the one constant and stabilizing foundation for families who inevitably experience change and growth over time. It serves as a sanctuary from the outside world and it’s the one place where people can enjoy being who they are without fear of criticism, ridicule or scrutiny.

Owning a home is also a major step in creating equality in a society where equality is eroding at the expense of the middle class/communities of color.

The time to do something about it is now — before too many resign themselves to the fallacy that home ownership is only for the wealthy and not for those who supply the wealth and are the engine that keeps the economy moving.
___________________________________________________


0 Comments

February 06th, 2013

2/6/2013

0 Comments

 
I want to talk the next few days about the two biggest issues before us as both issues show the same modus operandus that is Third Way corporate policy.  Immigration and Gun Control.  These are two issues that most democrats would support and we do as well.  So, how would a corporate politician move those progressive issues to the political right as a win for wealth and corporations?  It is being sold as bipartisan because these policies have something both sides want but since both sides are wealth and corporations.....you can bet the people will be the big losers.

The AFL-CIO was right to speak out in support of immigration policy that gives citizenship to those immigrants already here and established.  So we thank them for shouting out for a great progressive and labor call.  The Black pastors and NAACP are right to support gun control as it is the black community that is devastated by gun violence.  So we thank justice organizations who shout out for reasonable gun control policy.  THE PROBLEM IN BOTH CASES IS IN THE DETAILS OF BOTH ISSUES MAKING THESE POLICIES ULTIMATELY BAD FOR THE VERY PEOPLE IT APPEARS TO HELP.

For immigration reform the key is 'path to citizenship' and 'contained borders'.  Because Obama does not go with outright citizenship he is telling us that this policy will not meet the goals we have for it.  Just as he said in his campaign in 2008 that he would make Medicare strong and now we see the hundreds of billions of dollars cut and co-pays and deductibles making access impossible for many seniors.....of course Medicare Trusts will be fortified if no one can access care for goodness sake but is that what we wanted?  Of course not.....they played with words and could care less.
That is what is happening with immigration and gun control....they are playing with words.

The goal for the 1% regarding immigration reform is creating an entire class of green card workers at both the top of the income ladder and at the bottom squeezing ordinary citizens into career choices they would never choose.  If you look at any third world autocracy the 1% who have money are surrounded by an administrator-class of maybe another 5% and then everyone else is in poverty.  If you look at who is filling all of the government positions at the Federal, State, and even local levels you will see elite school grads...Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins for example.  These are all people who support the policies of the 1% and we know how that is going for the 95%....wealth inequity and massive crime and corruption.  So, if you allow the elite of the world attending these elite schools to stay in the US with green cards you have ever more people with the same policy goals taking all the top jobs.  Not to mention they would work more cheaply than the professional-class we have now.....lowering wages at the top.

We already know what immigrants with/without green cards do to the lower income wages......bringing them often below standard minimum wage to third world poverty.  Will registering with the government with fingerprinting and national IDs allow more money to these immigrants at the lower end?  NO.  What is that path to citizenship now?  The only immigrants being considered now are those paying hundreds of thousands and/or millions of dollars for citizenship requirements.  The lottery that has always been in place is not used now.  That will not change any time soon.  The immigrants at the top of the income ladder will buy their citizenship and the ones at the bottom will continue to be exploited.....which is what the 1% want.

IMMIGRATION REFORM IS ALL ABOUT WHAT IS GOOD FOR THE 1% AND WE ALL KNOW THAT IS NEVER GOOD FOR YOU AND ME!!! 


Emigration

From Wikipedia,

. The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown, depicting emigrants leaving England Emigration is the act of permanently leaving one's country or region to settle in another. It is the same as immigration but from the perspective of the country of origin. Human movement in general is termed migration. There are many reasons why people might choose to emigrate. Better economic opportunity is a "pull" factor, as is a quest for a better climate. Fears of poverty or of religious or political discrimination are "push" factors.

Emigration had a profound influence on the world in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, when millions of people left Europe; they usually headed to the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Australia.

The term "emigrate" usually suggests voluntary movement. However Involuntary migration refers to groups that are forced by their enemies to leave through population transfer or ethnic cleansing.


Let's be clear...we have an entire generation of recent college grads unemployed, joining the military, or working at McDonalds. These are young people who can rise to the challenge of these jobs the media insist have no qualified people to fill. We also have the next round of graduates in the pipeline for these STEM jobs. What happens when the Best of the Best in the World take all of the best positions? Our children and grandchildren are sent overseas to work as ex-pats. THAT IS WHAT THIS BEST OF THE BEST IMMIGRATION POLICY DOES!!! WE ARE IN CRISIS AS REGARDS HIRING AND WE DO NOT NEED THIS POLICY NOW.....IT IS ABOUT PEOPLE NOT PROFIT!!!


Wait Time for U.S. Employment Green Card Infographic

by Bill Rapp from the report:
Becoming a Magnet for Global Talent

www.thirdway.org/publications/390
From 1900 to 2000, the U.S. became home to 47.2 million legal immigrants—far more than any other country. During the same period, the U.S. economy grew by nearly 25-fold, we won two World Wars and a Cold War, and our middle class became the envy of the world. Immigrants—whether it was Albert Einstein and Andrew Carnegie or millions of factory workers, farm workers, cooks, and construction workers—were a huge part of America’s 20th century success story.

Today, we are an increasingly service, knowledge, and innovation led economy. Even our manufacturing jobs require a great deal more skill because we do not make socks anymore—we make finely tuned, high-end products. To maintain our global dominance and strengthen our economy today, U.S. immigration policy must not only maintain its current levels of legal immigration, but it must also be restructured to attract foreign-born intellectual capital to facilitate innovation and job creation. In this report, we argue that immigration reform must be a central component of long-term U.S. economic growth.
_________________________________________________
THIS POLL IS DRIVEN BY PRIVATE NON- PROFITS THAT ARE PART OF THE NGO WHO ADVOCATE FOR THESE ISSUES.  SO, CASA DE MARYLAND FOR EXAMPLE WILL BE OUT PUSHING THIS BILL NOT EXPLAINING ALL OF HOW THIS ISSUE HURTS MANY IN THE HISPANIC COMMUNITY NOT TO MENTION ALL OF US.  FOR THE REST OF THE JUSTICE PEOPLE IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.......A BLIND WILLINGNESS TO SUPPORT OBAMA ISSUES!!!



Poll Finds a Boost for Obama on Handling Immigration

By Greg Holyk | ABC OTUS News –

Public approval of Barack Obama's handling of immigration has jumped to a career high in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, buttressed by majority support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and, much more broadly, endorsement of stricter border control.

While the president lacks majority approval on the issue overall, slightly more Americans now approve than disapprove of his approach, by 49 vs. 43 percent. Obama was underwater on the issue - just 38 percent approved, while 52 percent disapproved - as recently as last July.

See PDF with full results, charts and tables here.

In terms of specific policies, an overwhelming 83 percent support stricter border control, including 64 percent who are "strongly" supportive; only 15 percent are opposed. Fewer, 55 percent, also favor a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, with 41 percent opposed.

GROUPS - There are vast differences among groups, underscoring the president's advantage on the issue among nonwhites generally and Hispanics in particular, and the Republican Party's challenges in finding support within the party for an immigration policy that can boost its support among Hispanics.

Specifically, 67 percent of Hispanics and 71 percent of nonwhites overall approve of Obama's handling of immigration, compared with 38 percent of whites. And a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is supported by 82 percent of Hispanics and 71 percent of all nonwhites, as well as by nearly seven in 10 Democrats and just over half of independents. It's supported by fewer than half of whites, 47 percent; Republicans, 42 percent; and by just 37 percent of adults who describe themselves as very conservative politically.

Obama lost whites by percentage 20 points in the November election, but won nonwhites by 61 points, including Hispanics by 44 points, en route to re-election.

Making the president's gains on the issue, "strong" approval and strong disapproval of his handling of immigration are essentially even - 27 vs. 28 percent in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates. In previous ABC/Post polls, Obama's strongly negative ratings on immigration far outweighed his strongly positive ones.

OBAMA - Obama's approval rating on immigration is 11 percentage points higher than it was seven months ago; disapproval, down by 9 points. His approval score now numerically beats his previous best, three months after he took office, albeit by a single point.

He's gained 13 points since July on the issue among Democrats and independents alike, further strengthening his position within his own party and moving from majority disapproval among independents to an even split. A vast majority of Republicans continues to disapprove.

Along the ideological spectrum, approval of the president on this issue has moved less on the extremes and more in the middle, gaining 11 points among moderates and 20 points among those who say they're "somewhat" conservative.

The president's also improved disproportionately among people in the lower- to middle-income bracket (+22 points), and Northeasterners and Midwesterners (+20 and +18 points, respectively) and those who haven't graduated from college (+15 points).

Shifts in strong approval generally reflect those on approval overall.

POLICY DIVISIONS - While strengthening the country's borders is popular with broad majorities across all groups and in all regions, a path to citizenship is considerably more divisive.

Support for stricter border control includes three-quarters of Democrats and liberals, more than eight in 10 moderates, conservatives and political independents, and a whopping 92 percent of Republicans. Securing the borders is also supported by 87 percent of whites, three-quarters of nonwhites, and bottoms out at a still-high 69 percent among Hispanics.

As noted, views on a path to citizenship are more linked to political preferences. Beyond party affiliation, 73 percent of liberals favor a path to citizenship; that declines to 53 percent of moderates, half of "somewhat" conservatives and fewer than four in 10 strong conservatives.

Notably, support for a path to citizenship reaches majorities across regions, 53 to 59 percent.

METHODOLOGY - This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by landline and cell phone Jan. 30-Feb. 3, 2013, among a random national sample of 1,038 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points. The survey was produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates of New York, N.Y., with sampling, data collection and tabulation by SSRS/Social Science Research Solutions of Media, Pa.
___________________________________________________
Remember, the US is having this stagnant jobless period because

1)  globalization has placed all focus on overseas expansion leaving domestic growth unnecessary.  If markets were not global our economy would be fine and jobs aplenty.

2)  financial policies like no Rule of Law regarding corporate crime and 0% interest and free money from the Fed make our domestic economy unhealthy and unproductive as no one trusts US companies ...... here or abroad.

YOUR THIRD WAY CORPORATE POL IS CREATING THE VERY POLICY THAT MAKES YOU LOOK ELSEWHERE FOR WORK.....THINK ALLOWING THE BEST OF THE BEST FOREIGN GRADS WILL HELP THAT?  NO!  LOOK BELOW TO SEE WHAT THIS INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION DOES TO INDIVIDUAL WAGES AND JOB SECURITY!!!

Where the Jobs Are
May 12, 2010 8:00 PM EDT

Amid the ongoing recession, American freelancers are finding more and more work abroad.

When Donavon Brutus got laid off from his animation job in June 2009, he knew the amount of freelance work near his home in Tampa, Fla., could not sustain him. But rather than spend months looking for a full-time, salaried position in a state with a 12.2 percent unemployment rate, Brutus went online and started working for oDesk, one of a growing number of Web sites that connect contract workers to temporary projects. Now Brutus earns an average of $16 per hour designing logos, 3-D graphics, and CD covers for companies as far away as China, Australia, and India. “The only issue has been the time difference,” he says. “But that’s only been a problem with one client in India, who wanted me to wake up at 3 a.m.”

As the U.S. economy sputters its way back to health, American freelancers increasingly are finding themselves working for companies overseas in what’s becoming a type of reverse outsourcing. Executives at Sologig, Elance, oDesk, and People Per Hour say they’re seeing more corporations and small businesses from the U.K., Australia, China, Pakistan, and India turn to the U.S. freelance market. oDesk has seen its share of international companies that hire U.S. workers jump from 1,429 in February 2009 to 4,285 in February 2010, while the earnings of U.S. Elance freelancers rose 45 percent this year, compared with freelancers in India whose earnings rose 35 percent.

Overseas companies are looking for technical or creative help in writing, editing, marketing, information technology, and engineering, say executives from these online sites, and they want to hire people with strong English-language skills. The recession has given them an opening to hire more skilled workers at a lower cost. “These sites set up competition between people in all countries to do the same work,” says David Autor, a professor of economics at MIT. “They’re paying a premium to hire American workers, but in the current labor market, it may seem like a good deal.”

Though these sites allow workers to tap into the global economy, the entry comes at a high price: mainly, low wages, no benefits, and little economic security. The average oDesk employee makes $17.60 per hour, while the average Elance worker makes an even lower rate of $12.50 per hour. People Per Hour, which caters to high-skill freelancers, says its jobs pay $30 per hour on average and that’s pre-tax with no health insurance, sick leave, vacation, or retirement benefits. In addition to the arguably low pay, oDesk, Rent-A-Coder, and Elance closely monitor workers’ productivity through the use of Web cams, key strokes, time sheets, or streaming screen shots. Elance CEO Fabio Rosati argues the company is not Big Brother; its freelancers can opt out of the streaming shots of their computers, but doing so means they lose any guarantee of payment if a company disputes their work.

Like it or not, lower pay and 24/7 demands are now the reality for U.S. contract workers. Fifty-seven-year-old Richard Kelley is a former advertising executive who used to spend his days in a corner office on Madison Avenue. Now, he works odd hours and weekends to juggle freelance assignments and Skype conference calls with clients in London, France, Australia, or California. Kelley is grateful that People Per Hour’s online assignments helped him survive the downturn in the New York City advertising market. Though he earns about 75 percent of his former salary, he says he enjoys not “being owned” by any particular company and having time to pursue other projects such as writing a children’s book. He’s resigned to the idea that his future may be uncertain. “One just has to roll with the punches a little bit. It’s not the same world anymore,” he says.

In today’s poor economic climate, online sites often become a salvation for the unemployed or underemployed. “For the person in Flint, Mich., you’re bringing the global jobs to a local market where there are no jobs,” says Gary Swart, oDesk’s CEO. “It gives people control over their careers.” It also enables people to make cash while they look for other jobs, and it means that people do not need to relocate for work. “It’s not a race to the bottom because employers understand that if a person works for next to nothing, the value of their skills is really low,” Autor says. “But it does indicate a level of how deep the recession is.”

The main problem with the growth of these online sites is that they inevitably transform workers into “mini-multinationals,” as the CEO of Elance calls them. The mini-multinationals shoulder all of the fees associated with the online freelance Web sites: from paying for a subscription to access the job postings to watching the sites take a commission on each job. It’s like being a global corporation and looking after the taxes, operations, and finance—without any of the American tradition of a workers’ safety net.
________________________________________________

THINK TO YOURSELF......WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF OBAMA HAD COME INTO OFFICE IN 2008 AND IMMEDIATELY WENT TO WORK MOVING TENS OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN CORPORATE FRAUD BACK TO GOVERNMENT AND INDIVIDUALS AS RULE OF LAW DEMANDS?  THE ANSWER IS THESE NOW GLOBAL CORPORATIONS FAT WITH FRAUD WOULD HAVE BEEN DOWNSIZED TO THE REGIONAL ENTITIES WE NEED THEM TO BE IN ORDER TO RETURN THE COUNTRY TO A DEMOCRACY.  NATIONALIZED BANKS WOULD HAVE BEEN REFORMED.  WE CAN STILL DO THAT AS THESE CRIMES HAVE YET TO ADDRESSED.

MAKE NO MISTAKE.....OBAMA WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS SELLING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE OUT IN THIS PUSH TOWARDS EMPIRE!!!!

WE DEMAND THAT JUSTICE REBUILD OUR DOMESTIC MARKETS!!!!


Many U.S. companies are hiring ... overseas One reason why U.S. unemployment remains as high as it is

Heribert Proepper  /  AP An engine technician works on a vessel engine at the Caterpillar company in Friedrichsort near Kiel, northern Germany.

By PALLAVI GOGOI updated 12/28/2010 6:15:56 PM ET

Corporate profits are up. Stock prices are up. So why isn't anyone hiring?

Actually, many American companies are — just maybe not in your town. They're hiring overseas, where sales are surging and the pipeline of orders is fat.

More than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS is also hiring at a faster clip overseas. For both companies, sales in international markets are growing at least twice as fast as domestically.

The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8 percent last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4 percent of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown.

But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute's senior international economist.

"There's a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy," says Scott.

American jobs have been moving overseas for more than two decades. In recent years, though, those jobs have become more sophisticated — think semiconductors and software, not toys and clothes.

  And now many of the products being made overseas aren't coming back to the United States. Demand has grown dramatically this year in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil.

Meanwhile, consumer demand in the U.S. has been subdued. Despite a strong holiday shopping season, Americans are still spending 18 percent less than before the recession on furniture, and 10 percent less on electronics, according to MasterCard's SpendingPulse.

"Companies will go where there are fast-growing markets and big profits," says Jeffrey Sachs, globalization expert and economist at Columbia University. "What's changed is that companies today are getting top talent in emerging economies, and the U.S. has to really watch out."

With the future looking brighter overseas, companies are building there, too. Caterpillar, maker of the signature yellow bulldozers and tractors, has invested in three new plants in China in just the last two months to design and manufacture equipment. The decision is based on demand: Asia-Pacific sales soared 38 percent in the first nine months of the year, compared with 16 percent in the U.S. Caterpillar stock is up 64 percent this year.

"There is a shift in economic power that's going on and will continue. China just became the world's second-largest economy," says David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's, who notes that half of the revenue for companies in the S&P 500 in the last couple of years has come from outside the U.S.

Take the example of DuPont, which wowed the world in 1938 with nylon stockings. Known as one of the most innovative American companies of the 20th century, DuPont now sells less than a third of its products in the U.S. In the first nine months of this year, sales to the Asia-Pacific region grew 50 percent, triple the U.S. rate. Its stock is up 48 percent this year.

DuPont's work force reflects the shift in its growth: In a presentation on emerging markets, the company said its number of employees in the U.S. shrank by 9 percent between January 2005 and October 2009. In the same period, its work force grew 54 percent in the Asia-Pacific countries.

"We are a global player out to succeed in any geography where we participate in," says Thomas M. Connelly, chief innovation officer at DuPont. "We want our resources close to where our customers are, to tailor products to their needs."


While most of DuPont's research labs are still stateside, Connelly says he's impressed with the company's overseas talent. The company opened a large research facility in Hyderabad, India, in 2008.

A key factor behind this runaway international growth is the rise of the middle class in these emerging countries. By 2015, for the first time, the number of consumers in Asia's middle class will equal those in Europe and North America combined.

"All of the growth over the next 10 years is happening in Asia," says Homi Kharas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and formerly the World Bank's chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific.

Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent often points out that a billion consumers will enter the middle class during the coming decade, mostly in Africa, China and India. He is aggressively targeting those markets. Of Coke's 93,000 global employees, less than 13 percent were in the U.S. in 2009, down from 19 percent five years ago.


The company would not say how many new U.S. hires it has made in 2010. But its latest new investments are overseas, including $240 million for three bottling plants in Inner Mongolia as part of a three-year, $2 billion investment in China. The three plants will create 2,000 new jobs in the area. In September, Coca-Cola pledged $1 billion to the Philippines over five years.

The strategy isn't restricted to just the largest American companies. Entrepreneurs, whether in technology, retail or in manufacturing, today hire globally from the start.

Consider Vast.com, which powers the search engines of sites like Yahoo Travel and Aol Autos. The company was founded in 2005 with employees based in San Francisco and Serbia.

Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria worries that the trend could be dangerous. In an article in the November issue of the Harvard Business Review, he says that if U.S. businesses keep prospering while Americans are struggling, business leaders will lose legitimacy in society. He exhorted business leaders to find a way to link growth with job creation at home.

Other economists, like Columbia University's Sachs, say multinational corporations have no choice, especially now that the quality of the global work force has improved. Sachs points out that the U.S. is falling in most global rankings for higher education while others are rising.

"We are not fulfilling the educational needs of our young people," says Sachs. "In a globalized world, there are serious consequences to that."




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October 17th, 2012

10/17/2012

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I WILL END MY LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE AND HEAD TO EDUCATION TOMORROW.  IF YOU GO TO THE 1600-1700 BLOCK OF MASSACHUSETTS AVE NW, WASHINGTON DC, YOU WILL SEE NOTHING BUT JOHNS HOPKINS AND THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION.  IF YOU NOTICE, WHEN MEDIA LOOKS FOR POLICY TALK THEY USE BROOKINGS AS THE 'DEMOCRATIC VIEW.  THERE IS NO FISCAL PROGRESSIVE POLICY ALLOWED! 


The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a division of Johns Hopkins University based in Washington, D.C., is one of the world's leading graduate schools devoted to the study of international affairs, economics, diplomacy, and policy research and education.[1]

The SAIS main campus is located on Massachusetts Avenue's Embassy Row, just off Dupont Circle and across from the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and next to the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute

ALL OF THESE INSTITUTIONS ARE FREE-MARKET GLOBALIZATION POLICY GROUPS.  THEY HAVE FORMULATED THE POLICIES THAT CREATED THIRD WAY POLITICS AND CREATED THE MESS WE HAVE TODAY.  THEY WORK FOR/ARE THE 1%.  THEIR MISSION IS GLOBAL EXPANSION OF US (THEIR) INTERESTS.  THEY ARE THE REASON THE US IS NO LONGER APART OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT.  LET'S LOOK AT HOW THE WORLD MAY SEE THIS MISSION: 

1)  DECLARING THAT THE US WANTS TO RECRUIT THE 'BEST OF THE BEST' IN THE WORLD OR ' WE AIM TO TAKE ALL YOUR FUTURE BUSINESS/COMMUNITY LEADERS'.

2)  WORKING TO BRING GRATEFUL IMMIGRANTS TO LABOR AS HEALTH CARE AND EDUCATION WORKERS RATHER THAN SERVE IN THAT CAPACITY IN THEIR HOME COUNTRIES.  WE DO IT BECAUSE OF THE CHEAP LABOR.....WE WOULDN'T WANT TO RAISE WAGES SO OUR OWN PEOPLE WILL DO THE WORK.

3)  BUYING ALL THE LAND GLOBALLY ASSOCIATED WITH FUTURE COMMODITIES SO AS TO CONTROL THE MARKET/SUPPLY......FOOD, WATER, FUEL, RAW MATERIALS....WHY ARE WE EXPORTING ALL THIS?  PROFIT

4)  VIOLATE ALL INTERNATIONAL LAWS REGARDING SOVEREIGNTY AND BUSINESS LAW BY DRONE SURVEILLANCE/KILLINGS AND MASSIVE FINANCIAL FRAUD SUCKING WORLD'S MONEY TO THE RICH.

NOW, ALL OF THIS POLICY BENEFITS THE 1%.....NOT YOU AND I.  WHAT IT DOES FOR YOU AND I IS PLACES US AT THREAT OF ATTACK AND A FUTURE OF WARS AND CONFLICT.  ADD TO THAT THE FACT THAT GLOBALIZATION WILL STALL AND CREATE A GREATER ECONOMIC COLLAPSE THEN 2008 TO OUR DETRIMENT AND THE 1% BENEFIT,  AND YOU HAVE VERY DANGEROUS, IDIOTIC, SOCIOPATHIC POLICY MAKING.

THIS IS THE JOB OF THE INSTITUTIONS LISTED ABOVE!

REMEMBER, ALL WE NEED TO DO IS GO BACK TO A STRONG DOMESTIC ECONOMY FUELED BY INCOME EQUITY AND A STRONG MIDDLE-CLASS AND SAFETY NET THAT MAKES CONSUMERS OF DOMESTIC WORKERS, GIVING CORPORATIONS MILLIONS AND NOT BILLIONS IN PROFITS...... AND WE WOULD NOT BE AT THIS POINT.  WE DO NOT NEED TO BE THE SUPERPOWER THAT EVERYONE HATES.  WE WERE ADMIRED FOR DECADES AS THE FORCE FOR GOOD.  THAT IS NO LONGER THE CASE!
VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!!


EACH REGION OF THE COUNTRY HAS ITS OWN INSTITUTIONS WORKING THIS ELITE TRANSITION.
I'M GOING TO PICK ON JOHNS HOPKINS BECAUSE THEY ARE THE 1% IN MY HOME STATE OF MARYLAND AND ARE DEEPLY INVOLVED IN ALL THE ISSUES I SPEAK AGAINST.  THE STUDENTS COMING THROUGH ARE NOT BAD, THEY ARE FOLLOWING A COURSE THEY SEE ATTRACTIVE.  HOPKINS IS  BEHIND GROWING US  IMMIGRANT WORKFORCE....BEHIND HOMELAND SECURITY'S GROWTH TO 'SECRET POLICE' STATUS.....BEHIND GLOBAL MOVEMENT AND PROTECTION OF WEALTH.....BEHIND ELITE SCHOOLS FILLING ALL PUBLIC/ORGANIZATIONAL POSITIONS.  LOCALLY, IN BALTIMORE, THEY HAVE USURPED ALL PUBLIC FUNCTIONS.  THEY DO IT FOR CONTROL AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH STRENGTHENED DEMOCRACY.

BELOW YOU SEE HOPKINS IS TIGHT WITH THE POLICY-MAKERS WE LOVE TO HATE......THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND TIMOTHY GEITHNER BEING THE PINNACLE OF THE CRIMINAL ELEMENTS IN THIS MASSIVE MORTGAGE FRAUD AND THE SOURCE FOR GUIDING THE FINANCIAL SECTOR THROUGH THEIR OWN CRIMINAL DEEDS WITH A PROFIT AND NO CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.  IT IS A FACT THAT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE NO LONGER HAVE FAITH IN THEIR GOVERNMENT LARGELY BECAUSE OF THE ACTS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE, GREENSPAN AND BERNANKE, AND TIMOTHY GEITHNER AS WELL AS ERIC HOLDER AND THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT.  THEY ARE INFAMOUS.

AS COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER (IT'S LIKE HAVING GAMBLING MAGNET, CORDISH ON YOUR LACROSSE MUSEUM) GEITHNER PAINTS A PICTURE OF PATRIOTISM OF A  PROCESS WE ALL KNOW TO HAVE BEEN PLANNED AND MANUFACTURED FROM THE START.  INTERESTINGLY HE SPEAKS OF OBAMA'S OPPORTUNITY TO NATIONALIZE THE BANKS WHICH WOULD HAVE PLACED THE COUNTRY ON A TRAJECTORY BEST FOR THE 95%.....RATHER HE CHOSE THE 1%.



"Immigration in a Changing Labor Market: Prospects and Policy Responses"" Hosted By: Western Hemisphere Studies Time: 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM Location: Room 410, The Nitze Building (main building) Summary: Adriana Kugler, chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, will discuss this topic. Note: This event is open to the SAIS community only, and the speaker's comments will be off the record For more information and to RSVP, contact jmcgeoch@jhu.edu.   THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO HEAR THAT YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN WILL BECOME MIGRANT WORKERS IF YOU STICK WITH THEM!



"Federal Reserve Bank of New York Presentation" Hosted By: Office of Career Services Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM Location: Room 417, The Nitze Building (main building) Summary: Representatives from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will discuss the organization and available opportunities for students. Note: This event is open to SAIS faculty, staff and students only. For more information and to register, visit SAISWorks.
THE REVOLVING DOOR STARTS HERE!




Remarks by Secretary Tim Geithner at the Commencement Ceremony for the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
5/24/2012


I came to SAIS in September 1983, right out of college.  I was eager, impatient to learn the craft of governing, and there was, and there is still, no better place to do that. 

...............

It was a tough few months at the beginning.  I remember in those early weeks receiving from a friend a copy of the Teddy Roosevelt quote about “the man in the arena.”  You may know the quote.  It starts like this.  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by sweat and blood…”  

I thought that was a thoughtful gesture from this friend, and then, well, about 10 more people sent me the same quote, and I thought, well…this can’t be good—they must really be worried about me.

I was not overly concerned by the loud chorus of critics. I didn’t have the luxury of time to think about them.  And I had an advantage they did not have.  I knew then that we had a good plan for fighting the financial crisis. 

There are many people who understand that now, but there were not many who believed it at the time.

In confronting the financial crisis, we were fighting two battles—one to save the economy from collapse, and one to convince the American people that we were doing the right thing, the fair and the just thing.  We won the first of these battles, and we are still fighting the second.    At the height of the crisis, President Obama made a difficult and courageous choice.  He decided not to alter economic strategy to fit  the demands for a more simple and compelling popular narrative—that we nationalize the banks, for example, or let them all burn. 

He did not let politics get in the way of doing the right thing, and that made all the difference. 

So, graduates of the class of 2012—you already know you have to be prepared to take the risk and heat. 

You chose the harder path in graduate school.  You chose to learn about power and conflict among nations; about incentives and human behavior; about why nations fail and prosper; about hubris and achievement.  This is the study of how to think and how to choose and how to lead.

You chose a place where you could learn the craft of how to advance a cause, a cause larger than yourself.

You chose SAIS because you understand, to complete Teddy Roosevelt’s words, that “the credit belongs to the man in the arena…who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause.” 

I look forward to seeing you in the arena, and I wish you the very best.


THE THIRD WAY CORPORATE DEMOCRATS LOVE TO SPEAK OF TEDDY ROOSEVELT AS THEIR HERO......TEDDY FOUGHT FOR THE UNIONS AND WORKER'S RIGHTS AND HE FOUGHT TO BREAK UP THE 'TRUSTS'....CORPORATE LARGESSE AND FOUGHT FOR REGULATING CORPORATIONS......ALL THINGS THAT THIRD WAY DEMOCRATS HAVE UNDERMINED.  HE WAS A PROGRESSIVE IN THE REAL SENSE.....FISCALLY.  THIRD WAY DEMOCRATS ARE POSERS.


GEORGE W BUSH AND OBAMA ARE GUILTY OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMES.....THAT IS WHY THE US IS NOT APART OF THIS INTERNATIONAL BODY.  DOES THAT SOUND LIKE GOOD POLICY FOR A DEMOCRACY?  IT IS POLICY THAT CAME FROM THESE THINK TANKS!


International Criminal Court From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
State parties As of July 2012

121 states[8] are states parties to the Statute of the Court, including all of South America, nearly all of Europe and roughly half the countries in Africa.[9] A further 32 countries,[8] including Russia, have signed but not ratified the Rome Statute;[9] one of them, Côte d'Ivoire, has accepted the Court's jurisdiction.[10] The law of treaties obliges these states to refrain from “acts which would defeat the object and purpose” of the treaty until they declare they do not intend to become a party to the treaty.[11] Three of these states—Israel, Sudan and the United States—have informed the UN Secretary General that they no longer intend to become states parties and, as such, have no legal obligations arising from their former representatives' signature of the Statute.[9][12] 41 United Nations member states[8] have neither signed nor ratified or acceded to the Rome Statute; some of them, including China and India, are critical of the Court.[13][14] The Palestinian National Authority, which neither is nor represents a United Nations member state, has formally accepted the jurisdiction of the Court.[15] On 3 April 2012, the ICC Prosecutor declared himself unable to determine that Palestine is a "state" for the purposes of the Rome Statute.[16]


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June 13th, 2012

6/13/2012

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I WROTE A FEW YEARS AGO ABOUT ATTENDING A SYMPOSIUM ON THE FUTURE OF POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPARTMENTS IN ELITE UNIVERSITIES AND WAS STARTLED TO HEAR THAT THESE DRIVERS OF AMERICAN POLICY HAD DECIDED THAT THERE WOULD BE NO NEED FOR CLASSES IN NATIONAL POLITICS AS ALL POLITICS WOULD BE INTERNATIONAL NOW.  THEY ALSO MADE CLEAR THAT SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL LAW WOULD TAKE A BACK SEAT TO CORPORATE INTERESTS AND THIS IS FACT WHAT WE ARE SEEING PLAY OUT WITH FRACKING, THE GULF OIL SPILL, AND THE MIDWEST PIPELINE.  WE ARE ONLY NOW SEEING THIS 'END OF POLITICS IN AMERICA' SURFACING PUBLICALLY IN CALIFORNIA'S NEW ELECTION REFORM EFFORT THAT ALLOWS THE TWO MAJORITY VOTE-GETTERS IN PRIMARIES TO ADVANCE TO THE ELECTION RATHER THAN THE WINNERS OF EACH POLITICAL PARTY.  WE ARE TOLD THIS IS TO BREAK GRIDLOCK IN CONGRESS BY SENDING 'CENTRISTS' TO LEGISLATURES, BUT WHAT IT DOES IT MAKE IT HARDER FOR PROGRESSIVES AND INDEPENDENTS TO WIN.  IF YOU HAVE A DEMOCRATIC STATE LIKE CALIFORNIA AND THE TWO TOP VOTE-GETTERS ARE DEMOCRATS, THEN THEY ARE GOING TO HAVE TO MOVE TO THE RIGHT TO COMPETE FOR REPUBLICAN VOTES TO WIN.  WE KNOW ALL CENTRISTS ARE CORPORATE....WE KNOW ALL REPUBLICANS ARE CORPORATE.......SO THIS IS A PLOY TO NEUTRALIZE LABOR'S AND ENVIRONMENTALIST'S ATTEMPTS TO WIN ELECTIONS.  THIS 'CENTRIST' APPROACH IS BASICALLY A ONE PARTY POLITICAL SYSTEM......THE END OF POLITICS IN AMERICA......WHICH IS WHAT THESE ELITE POLITICAL SCIENTISTS WERE SAYING.  THIS IMMIGRATION PIECE IS APART OF THIS 'END OF POLITICS IN AMERICA'.

THE 1% DO NOT SEE STATES OR CITIZENS, THEY SEE DEVELOPMENT ZONES AND HUMAN CAPITAL, AS DO NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS (NGO'S).  THESE ULTRA-RICH ARE THINKING IN TERMS OF DYNASTIES, NOT NATIONAL CORPORATE INTERESTS.  THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE SEEING HAPPENING IN BALTIMORE AND MARYLAND......HOME OF ALL THINGS SECURITY/MILITARY.  SO WHEN I SAY THAT THESE PEOPLE WILL HAVE US TALKING IN TONGUES, I MEAN THAT THE PLAN IS NOT ONLY TO BRING IMMIGRANTS IN TO TAKE AMERICAN JOBS......HAVING NO CITIZENSHIP RITES.................BUT TO SEND US CITIZENS ABROAD TO WORK GLOBALLY......TAKING THEIR CITIZENSHIP RITES WITH THEM. 

THIS IS A DELIBERATELY PLANNED MIGRATION OF POPULATIONS SURROUNDING LABOR AND IT CENTERS ON DEVELOPING A SOCIETY LIKE THE THIRD WORLD NATIONS HAVING A SMALL PROFESSIONAL-CLASS WHO SERVICE THE TOP, A LARGE POPULATION OF IMMIGRANTS WHO FILL ORDINARY JOBS AT SWEAT-SHOP WAGES, AND A LARGE POPULATION OF PROFESSIONAL EMIGRANTS WHO WORK ABROAD, TAKING THEIR CITIZENSHIP VOICE WITH THEM.  THIS WILL EFFECTIVELY END ANY REAL DEMOCRATIC PROCESS IN AMERICA.  THIS IS A THIRTY YEAR PLAN COMING TO THE LAST HALF OF IMPLEMENTATION........  THAT IS THE PLAN........IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE WHAT HAPPENS!

VOTE YOUR ELECTED OFFICIAL OUT!!!!!!!


Population transfer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Population transfer is the movement of a large group of people from one region to another by state policy or international authority, most frequently on the basis of ethnicity or religion. Banishment or exile is a similar process, but is forcibly applied to individuals and groups.

Often the affected population is transferred by force to a distant region, perhaps not suited to their way of life, causing them substantial harm. In addition, the loss of all immovable property and, when rushed, the loss of substantial amounts of movable property, is implied.

Population exchange is the transfer of two populations in opposite directions at about the same time. Such exchanges have taken place several times in the 20th century, such as during the partition of India and Pakistan and between post-Ottoman Turkey and Greece.


Issues arising from population transfer

According to political scientist Norman Finkelsteintransfer was considered as an acceptable solution to the problems of ethnic conflict, up until around World War II and even a little afterward, in certain cases. Transfer was considered a drastic but "often necessary" means to end an ethnic conflict or ethnic civil war.[1] The feasibility of population transfer was hugely increased by the creation of railroad networks from the mid-19th century.

Population transfer differs more than simply technically from individually motivated migration, though at times of war, the act of fleeing from danger or famine often blurs the differences. If a state can preserve the fiction that migrations are the result of innumerable "personal" decisions, then the state may be able to justify its stand that it has not been culpably involved. Jews who had actually signed over properties in Germany and Austria during Nazism found it nearly impossible to be reimbursed after World War II.

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Emigration

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Emigration is the act of leaving one's country or region to settle in another. It is the same as immigration but from the perspective of the country of origin. Human movement in general is termed migration. There are many reasons why people might choose to emigrate. Some are for reasons of religious, political or economic freedom or escape. Others have personal reasons such as marriage. Some people living in rich nations with cold climates choose to move to warmer climates when they retire.

Emigration had a profound influence on the world in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, when millions of poor families left Europe for the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, the rest of Latin America, Australia and New Zealand.

Even though definitions may be vague and vary somewhat, emigration/immigration should not be confused with the phenomenon of involuntary migration, such as instances of population transfer or ethnic cleansing.


THIS IS THE 1% SOLUTION TO GROWING DISCORD AS A ONCE PROSPEROUS MIDDLE-CLASS IS PUSHED TO POVERTY.....SEND THEM PACKING TO THE GLOBAL COLONIES!!! 

WE SIMPLY NEED TO REVERSE INCOME INEQUITY BY MAKING BANKS WRITE-OFF BAD AND FRAUDULENT LOANS, BREAK-DOWN THE BANKS WITH GLASS-STEAGALL, PROGRESSIVE TAX REFORM, AND REINSTITUTE RULE OF LAW AND WE WILL HAVE OUR NATION BACK.  YOUR POLITICIAN ISN'T DOING THAT!
______________________________________

The Last of England (painting)  Artist Ford Madox Brown Year 1855 Type Oil-on-panel Dimensions 82.5 cm × 75 cm (32 in × 29 in) Location Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery,
Birmingham, EnglandThe Last of England is an 1855 oil-on-panel painting by Ford Madox Brown depicting two emigrants leaving England to start a new life abroad.

 Brown began the painting in 1852 inspired by the departure of his close friend, the Pre-Raphaelitesculptor, Thomas Woolner, who had left for Australia in July of that year. Emigration from England was at a peak, with over 350,000 people leaving that year. Brown, who at the time considered himself "very hard up and a little mad", was himself thinking of moving to India with his new family.
_____________________________________________
CALIFORNIA AND WASHINGTON STATE ARE THE WEST COAST HOMES OF THE 1%.  THEY ARE TESTING THE WATERS FOR THIS ONE PARTY END OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IN AMERICA.  WE MUST UNDERSTAND THIS PROCESS AS A WHOLE SO WE CAN ALL FIGHT POLICIES THE THIRD WAY DEMOCRATS ARE IMPLEMENTING IN THAT DIRECTION.


STEPHEN FRANK'S POLITICAL NEWS AND VIEWS
California’s elusive quest for “moderate candidates” and other reform follies

by Stephen Frank on 06/10/2012 ·

We were told that if we got rid of “partisanship” in primaries—nominated the best two people running, our society would be better.  Of course to do this, Arnold and the Democrats had to eliminate the Green Party, AIP, Libertarian and Peace & Freedom parties as well.

To create a new form of California Democracy—totalitarianism.  Government deciding, not the voters in November who they want representing them.

“That’s important: California’s constitution requires a two-thirds vote of both legislative chambers to pass a tax hike. Thanks to favorable redistricting, Democrats will probably win a two-thirds majority in the state senate this fall. They will fall just short of that mark in the Assembly, but with a little Republican support, domineering Democrats could enact long-dreamed-of increases in tax rates. So if your definition of “centrism” involves higher taxes, the early signs are promising.”

Arnold and the Democrats understand that democracy is messy—so do away with it.  Higher taxes will bring fewer taxpayers—the productive will continue to leave the State.  Totalitarianism flourishes in a Third World climate—that is the climate change Arnold has brought to California.

Top-Two Blues

California’s elusive quest for “moderate candidates” and other reform follies

John Pitney, City Journal, 6/8/12

On June 5, California held a new kind of primary election, which proponents hoped would lead to a new kind of politics. Alas, the new politics seems to resemble the old. For decades, the state ran a closed-primary system, with registered members of each party picking their nominees for the general election. (Independent, or “no party preference,” voters could not take part in these primaries.) A 1996 ballot measure changed the system to a “blanket” format, with all candidates on the same ballot. Voters could cast their ballots for any candidate; the top vote-getter from each party would advance to the general election.

In 2000, the Supreme Court struck down the blanket primary on the grounds that voters hostile to a party’s positions could hijack its nominations. In response, the state legislature established a modified version of the closed primary: each party would have the option of letting independents vote on its nominations. Critics argued that under the new system, each party’s base voters would effectively become the electoral gatekeepers. Sure enough, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats spurned moderate candidates, leaving the state with a polarized political class. And this polarization, the critics concluded, fostered policy gridlock.

Then came Proposition 14, a ballot measure to change the primary process for congressional, statewide, and legislative races. As with the blanket primary, all candidates would be on the same ballot. But instead of resulting in one nominee per party, this system would send the top-two vote getters to the general election, regardless of party. In a heavily Democratic district, for instance, the primary could put two Democrats on the November ballot. The proposal passed with 54 percent of the vote on June 8, 2010 (but its terms dictated that the top-two primary wouldn’t go into effect until 2012).

Though former state senator Abel Maldonado, a Republican, was nominally the idea’s sponsor, the real impetus for the measure came from then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office. As Vito Corleone would say, it was Schwarzenegger all along. His idea was to make primary candidates compete not just for partisan base voters, but also for independents and opposition-party voters. Thus, he reasoned, the system would nudge politicians to the Schwarzeneggerian center.

So how did it work out? In at least a few state assembly races, the top finishers included Republicans who hadn’t signed an oath against raising taxes. That’s important: California’s constitution requires a two-thirds vote of both legislative chambers to pass a tax hike. Thanks to favorable redistricting, Democrats will probably win a two-thirds majority in the state senate this fall. They will fall just short of that mark in the Assembly, but with a little Republican support, domineering Democrats could enact long-dreamed-of increases in tax rates. So if your definition of “centrism” involves higher taxes, the early signs are promising.

Under a broader definition, centrism could be elusive. On the Democratic side, some mildly pro-business candidates will compete in November’s general election. If and when they arrive in Sacramento, however, they will probably vote in line with the dominant liberals. Party discipline is all too real in the Capitol. Lawmakers who stray from the leadership’s wishes face sanctions ranging from loss of committee chairmanships to cuts in staff budgets. They may even end up in “the Dog House,” the unofficial name for the tiniest office in the building.

The power of party leadership will only grow in the years ahead. Voters on Tuesday approved a change in the term-limits law, allowing lawmakers to spend up to 12 years in one chamber or the other. Under the system in place since the early 1990s, they could serve only six years in the assembly and eight in the senate, resulting in constant turnover in leadership positions. Now, leaders can hold their posts much longer, giving them greater leverage over junior members.

Proponents of the “top-two” primary claimed that it would diminish the clout of interest groups, but in fact special interests figure only to get stronger. Candidates must now compete in primaries involving all registered voters, not just members of their own party. Bigger electorates result in costlier campaigns, which in turn require candidates to ask special interests for even more money. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, by far the biggest donor to state campaigns is the California Teachers Association.

Some buyer’s remorse might be setting in. The Santa Cruz Sentinel, which endorsed Proposition 14 two years ago, now laments that third-party and independent candidates will be missing from most fall races. In about one-fifth of the elections for Congress and the legislature, voters will have no choice between parties: two Republicans or two Democrats will be on the ballot, and write-ins won’t count. Nevertheless, this system will be around for a while. In 2008, the Supreme Court upheld a similar process in Washington State. Californians should have ample opportunity to contemplate yet another “reform” that failed to work as advertised.

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    Cindy Walsh is a lifelong political activist and academic living in Baltimore, Maryland.

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