Saturday, August 28, 2010

OLIVER NORTH - Under Seige

OUR OPEN & UNDEFENDED BORDERS
THE OBAMA “HOMELAND SECURITY = PATHWAY to CITIZENSHIP” LA RAZA PLAN

"Our deputies are outnumbered and outgunned. We're up against drug runners carrying AK-47s," the Soviet-era weapon used by al-Qaida terrorists and Taliban insurgents fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

After one of his deputies was wounded by an AK-47-toting border crosser, Babeu requested funding to purchase AR-15 rifles for his department. The county turned him down for lack of funds. He told us, "My deputies shouldn't have to buy their own weapons to protect themselves and the public." A group of concerned citizens is soliciting donations to buy the rifles for them.


Oliver North

Under Siege
TUCSON, Ariz. -- "We're under siege," said rancher Ed Ashurst as he pointed to where he had tracked the killer of his friend and neighbor to the U.S.-Mexico border. "Five years ago, we didn't even bother to lock our doors. Now my wife and I carry firearms everywhere we go."
John Ladd is a fifth-generation cattle rancher in southern Cochise County, Ariz. The southern boundary of his family property is a 10-mile stretch of steel fence erected by the U.S. government. On the other side of the fence: Mexico. He told us, "Mexican drug cartels are running this part of America."
The poet Robert Frost posited that "good fences make good neighbors." From what our Fox News' "War Stories" team documented this week, that's not the case here in southern Arizona, where "the fence" on the U.S.-Mexico border remains unfinished. According to many levelheaded, beleaguered Americans here, the fence is little more than a "speed bump" for drug couriers, killers, human smugglers and lesser criminals flooding into our country.
Wednesday night, just hours after Barack and Michelle Obama and their doting supporters dined on Martha's Vineyard, our team, accompanied by members of the Cochise County sheriff's Border Interdiction Unit, walked up a quiet hilltop a few hundred yards north of the "fence." There we watched through night-vision devices as a group of individuals approached the Mexican side of the steel barrier, timing their movement with the passing of U.S. Border Patrol vehicles.
By the time we departed for another location two hours after dawn, the "jumpers" -- all wearing backpacks -- had yet to make it into the U.S. Heartened by what we had seen, I said to one of the deputies, "It looks as if the fence worked."
"Yeah," said one of our guides and well-armed protectors, "but they have spotters who saw us leave. They will try again. Maybe we'll get 'em, maybe not. But there are a lot more of them than there are of us. And they are better-armed than we are because the cartels have bigger budgets."
The numbers verify the claim. Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman -- a multibillionaire who heads the Sinaloa cartel just across Arizona's border -- commands an army of more than 11,000 "shooters" equipped with heavy machine guns, other automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and armored vehicles. That's more than twice as many "troops" available to the U.S. Border Patrol, Arizona Department of Public Safety, Indian Affairs police and county sheriffs on Arizona's border.
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu -- more than 90 miles north of the border -- explained the consequences: "Our deputies are outnumbered and outgunned. We're up against drug runners carrying AK-47s," the Soviet-era weapon used by al-Qaida terrorists and Taliban insurgents fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
After one of his deputies was wounded by an AK-47-toting border crosser, Babeu requested funding to purchase AR-15 rifles for his department. The county turned him down for lack of funds. He told us, "My deputies shouldn't have to buy their own weapons to protect themselves and the public." A group of concerned citizens is soliciting donations to buy the rifles for them.
Larry Dever is the sheriff of Cochise County. At 6,000 square miles, it is larger than Connecticut. His jurisdiction is home to Tombstone, scene of the legendary 1881 shootout at the OK Corral. It also shares an 82-mile border with Mexico. Last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 550,000 people were arrested trying to enter the U.S. illegally. Nearly half of them crossed the border in the "Tucson sector," which includes Cochise County. Yet Dever has fewer than 90 sworn deputies.
After Cochise County rancher Bob Krantz was murdered by an illegal border jumper March 27, the Obama administration promised to deploy 1,200 National Guard troops to "assist the U.S Border Patrol on the Mexican border." Arizona will get fewer than 550 of them -- when they finally arrive. Not one cent of the $600 million appropriated by Congress this month for "border security" will go to any of the border states or sheriffs. The money all goes to federal agencies.
Instead of new weapons, reinforcements and help protecting our southern border, Arizona's sheriffs and Gov. Jan Brewer received something entirely different from the Obama administration: a federal lawsuit. Last month, a federal judge in Phoenix decided Arizona could not enforce certain provisions of a state law -- SB 1070 -- which allowed Arizona law enforcement officers to ascertain the citizenship of individuals stopped for legal infractions. Arizona filed its appeal in the case this week, while we were on the border.
That's not all that happened this week in what one of our hosts called "the northern edge of the new war zone." A mass grave containing the remains of more than 70 murdered men, women and children from Central America and South America was found in northeastern Mexico, less than 90 miles from the U.S. border. That brings the civilian murder toll in Mexico to more than 28,000 since 2006 -- higher than Afghanistan. And last night, two were killed and three were wounded in a drug-related gunfight here in Tucson.
Meanwhile the president -- who insinuated himself in a local police matter in Cambridge, Mass., and a zoning matter for a mosque in Manhattan -- has been too busy to send condolences to Sue Krantz, the widow of an American murdered by a foreign criminal on U.S. soil.

INVESTORS.com - OBAMA'S NON-ENFORCEMENT = DECLARATION BORDERS ARE OPEN!

INVESTORS.com

Enforcement On ICE

Posted 08/27/2010


Politics: If there's one agency that's been made useless by its leaders, it's Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If, under a new policy, being here illegally is no longer reason enough for deportation, why does it still exist?
The Obama administration has effectively declared open borders to millions of would-be illegal immigrants — not through legislation, but with a sneaky policy move.
On Aug. 20, its man at ICE, John Morton, wrote a memo stating that being in the U.S. illegally is no longer sufficient reason to send someone home. An illegal immigrant now has to be a security threat or else commit a crime — and a violent one at that. To everyone else, ICE turns the blind eye.
Director Morton says it's a matter of priorities. But make no mistake: This is amnesty by another name.
Adding insult to injury, ICE will empty its costly, just-built detention centers of 17,000 existing deportation cases as long as an illegal can show that he or she has applied to become legal.
This, says the New York Times, will "pare huge case backlogs." And to ICE bureaucrats, it's proof they're doing their jobs.
In fact, it's an astonishing abrogation of duty. The policy turns ICE into a $6 billion border-jitney service for the subset of illegals who were picked up by other law enforcement agencies, convicted of violent crime and have served their time, and whose jailers didn't forget to put them on an "immigration hold" list.
Any others can make themselves at home.
That goes for the Mexican Zeta cartel members who are busy recruiting assassins in barrooms around Phoenix, as Fox News reported Friday.
Nothing violent about recruiting, you know — and that goes for illegal immigrants who've illegally voted in U.S. elections.
In the latter case, Fox reported that ICE itself helpfully sent a form letter to an illegal who admitted doing that, coaching him to take his name off the voter rolls first so his application could go through smoothly. ICE didn't mind that the man had admitted to committing a felony. The bureaucrats just wanted to issue him his U.S. citizenship so they could clear the backlog.
It also goes for the Mexican cartel members who may be buying off city governments like that of Cudahy, Calif., which is under FBI investigation. It also goes for illegal immigrants who invade rural properties at night in Arizona, terrifying ranchers.
Not surprisingly, there's no one angrier about this mission-nullification than ICE agents themselves. Last June their union issued a letter expressing a membership consensus of "no confidence" in Morton and Assistant Director Phyllis Coven.
They have "abandoned the agency's core mission of enforcing United States immigration laws and providing for public safety, and have instead directed their attention to campaigning for programs and policies related to amnesty," the agents declared.
By extension, no one's happier than the Mexican cartels that have muscled into the immigrant-smuggling business, making about a third of their income from fees charged for such assistance.
Morgan's no-deport policy is just the enticement they need to bring in new business that will fatten up the fee income they use to make war on the Mexican state.
Last Monday's discovery of a massacre of 72 would-be illegals in Tamaulipas, Mexico, on their way to Los Angeles makes clear what lies ahead. Human smuggling is an evil ICE should not encourage.
The cartels are monopolies that make $500,000 or so per human "load" into the U.S., but they also press many illegals into becoming foot soldiers. Some are forced into sex slavery, and others — as the sole survivor of the Tamaulipas massacre claimed — are ordered to become cartel assassins in the U.S. — or else.
The fact that the U.S. no longer enforces immigration laws for anyone except those with violent criminal or terrorist convictions will draw would-be immigrants into this racket like a magnet.
At a time when U.S. diplomats' families have been ordered to evacuate the consulate in Mexico's second-biggest city, Monterrey — as happened Friday — any encouragement of illegal immigration works at cross purposes to the real national security mission of defeating cartels.
ICE leaders talk smugly about "priorities," but they've effectively abandoned their agency's core law-enforcement mission and become servants of the immigration lobby. ICE should be allowed to do the job it's tasked with. Failing that, it should be disbanded.

MURDER! Hey, he's a Mexican!

Man Sentenced For Killing Drinking Buddy Who Criticized his Singing Ability
KTLA News

12:56 AM PDT, August 27, 2010

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- A man convicted of stabbing a drinking buddy to death for complained about his singing has been sentenced to 16 years to life in prison.

Fifty-eight-year-old Julian Sermano was sentenced Friday on charges of second-degree murder and assault.

Prosecutors says Sermano and two acquaintances were drinking and singing at a San Juan Capistrano park in 2007 when 39-year-old Blas Gutierrez criticized Sermano and boasted he was a better singer.

Prosecutors say the pair began to argue.

A co-defendant, 34-year-old Maurico Molina of San Juan Capistrano, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the case last year and was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Molina, who at first tried to break up the argument, ended up taking out a knife and stabbing Gutierrez, prosecutors said.

Sermano also pulled out his knife and repeatedly stabbed Gutierrez, who later died in a hospital.

Why Wall St. & Mexico Love Obama - WE ARE THEIR WELFARE CHECK!

“The US corporate and financial elite generally favors the approach of both the Fed and the Obama administration, which is to seek to avert a return to negative growth, while utilizing the jobs crisis to permanently restructure class relations in the US, to the detriment of the working class.”
WALL ST. and MEXICO LOVE THE OBAMA THEY BOUGHT. HIS WELFARE FOR CORPORATE AMERICAN AND ILLEGALS IS GREATER THAN ALL 8 YEARS OF BUSH, OR HILLARY BILLARY!

WSW.org… get on their non-corporate owned news!

US slashes estimate of second-quarter economic growth
By Barry Grey
28 August 2010
The Commerce Department on Friday sharply cut its estimate of US economic growth in the second quarter of 2010. The department revised downward its initial estimate, issued July 30, of a 2.4 percent increase in the gross domestic product (GDP) to the even more anemic figure of 1.6 percent.
A 2.4 percent growth rate would already represent a sharp slowdown from previous quarters. US GDP rose 5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 3.7 percent in the first quarter of this year. A growth rate of 1.6 percent is below the minimum pace of 2.0-2.5 percent which economists consider necessary to prevent a further rise in unemployment.
The reduced figure was widely anticipated following a battery of economic indicators reflecting a sharp contraction in economic growth. Many economists are now predicting that the US economy will grow by less than 2 percent for the remainder of 2010, and some are warning of a “double-dip” fall into negative growth. Economists at Goldman Sachs this week placed the chances of a double-dip recession at 25-30 percent.
Despite these grim economic realities, and the resulting social disaster for tens of millions of Americans, the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve Board continue to talk about an economic “recovery,” while conceding that its pace is less than anticipated. This terminology is used to justify a calculated policy of keeping unemployment high in order to pressure workers into accepting wage cuts and speedup, and to carry through a permanent increase in the exploitation of American workers toward the levels of workers in China and other so-called “emerging economies.”
In a column published Friday, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman referred to a speech to be delivered that day by Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and remarked, “But we can safely predict what he and other officials will say about where we are now: that the economy is continuing to recover, albeit more slowly than they would like. Unfortunately, that’s not true: this isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters.”
He continued: “The important question is whether growth is fast enough to bring down sky-high unemployment. We need about 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment from rising, and much faster growth to bring it significantly down. Yet growth is currently running somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, with a good chance that it will slow even further in the months ahead.”
Krugman, a liberal Democrat and Obama supporter, points to the real state of the economy while obscuring the class interests that are served by high unemployment and the roots of the jobs crisis in the systemic crisis of the capitalist system.
In its report, the Commerce Department attributed the slowdown in growth mainly to a “sharp acceleration in imports and sharp deceleration in private inventory investment.” Commerce focused particularly on the trade deficit, which soared by 16 percent in June to nearly $50 billion, the highest level in 19 months. The report said the trade gap subtracted nearly 3.4 percentage points from second quarter growth, the biggest hit from a trade imbalance since 1947.
The GDP report culminated a week of economic data confirming that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression is continuing and, if anything, deepening. Reports issued Tuesday and Wednesday on existing home sales and new home sales in July reflected a housing market that is in free-fall. Existing home sales plummeted a record 27.2 percent from June to hit their lowest levels since 1995. New home sales fell 12 percent from the prior month and were down 32.4 percent from July of 2009 to their lowest levels since records began in 1963.
On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported that orders for durable goods rose from June to July by a mere 0.3 percent. Economists had forecast a 3.0 percent rise. Core orders, excluding transportation items, fell 3.8 percent, the biggest decline since January 2009. Orders for machinery fell 15 percent and those for computers and electronics also fell by 2.4 percent.
On Thursday, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City released its manufacturing index, showing a fall from 14 in July to zero in August. The report’s employment index fell into negative territory and the bank said expectations for the next six months had weakened. This followed a report last week by the Philadelphia Fed showing a similar decline in manufacturing in the Mid-Atlantic region.
Until the past few months, manufacturing had been a relative bright spot in the US economy. But as Michelle Girard, an economist at RBS Economics Research, told the Financial Times, “These figures will no doubt fuel concern that the manufacturing sector is losing momentum quickly.”
On Thursday, the Labor Department released its weekly survey on claims for unemployment benefits. While the report showed the first decline in initial jobless claims in a month, the total, 473,000, remained far above the 400,000 level indicative of an economy that is generating jobs at a sufficient rate to keep pace with the growth in the labor force. The four-week average of claims, moreover, rose to the highest level since last November. And the number of people who have used up their traditional benefits and are now collecting emergency or extended benefits jumped by 302,000 to 5.84 million—a measure of a long-term jobless rate that is breaking all records since the 1930s.
This was the context in which Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke delivered his much anticipated speech Friday at the Kansas City Fed’s annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Attending the event are central bankers and finance ministers from around the world, top officials from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Wall Street economists, academics, and most members of the Federal Reserve’s policy-making Federal Open Market Committee.
There was much speculation that in light of the worsening economic situation, Bernanke would announce new stimulative measures beyond the modest steps announced by the Fed at its last policy meeting on August 10. At that meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee said the US central bank would use cash from maturing mortgage-backed securities that it holds to purchase long-term Treasury notes, instead of paying down the bank’s much expanded balance sheet.
That largely symbolic move was designed to reassure the markets that the Fed would continue to pump cheap credit into the system while doing nothing substantial to promote serious job-creation.
In his Friday speech, Bernanke largely repeated the policy adopted and the rhetoric employed previously. He insisted that the economic “recovery” was continuing, while admitting that it was proceeding more slowly than the Fed had forecast. He reiterated that the central bank stood ready to take new measures, including a more expansive purchase of Treasuries, should it conclude that the economy was slipping back into negative growth, but he made clear that there were no immediate plans to change course.
“I expect the economy to continue to expand in the second half of this year, albeit at a relatively modest pace,” he declared, and added that despite the weak second quarter “the preconditions for a pickup in growth in 2011 appear to remain in place.”
These reassurances were well received on Wall Street. All of the major US stock indexes closed sharply higher, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining 164 points. The US corporate and financial elite generally favors the approach of both the Fed and the Obama administration, which is to seek to avert a return to negative growth, while utilizing the jobs crisis to permanently restructure class relations in the US, to the detriment of the working class.
As one commentator pointed out Friday on the CNBC business cable channel, US corporations made higher profits in the second quarter than in any previous quarter in history.