UNDER OBAMA IT IS SOARING POVERTY FOR AMERICANS BUT STILL
SOARING PROFITS FOR HIS BANKSTER DONORS!
THERE ARE MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS IN OUR JOBS AND BILLIONS IN
WELFARE HANDED OVER TO ILLEGALS SO THEY KEEP COMING AND KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE POLITICIANS’ PAYMASTERS!
Poverty vs. Democracy in America
By Daniel Weeks
Eric Thayer/Reuters
Richard says he is done being a criminal—but the law isn't
done with him. Ever since he completed his four-year prison sentence for armed
robbery, the 28-year-old from Montgomery, Alabama, has been struggling to get
back on his feet. He admits to making mistakes—"I dropped out of school,
fell into the street life … did things I shouldn't do"—but now that he has
served his time, he's asking for a second chance.
He says he can't understand why Alabama has a lifetime
ban on people with felony convictions getting food stamps or public
assistance, or why people like him don't have rights when it comes to housing
or getting hired. Although his skills as an electrician are in high demand, he
has so far been unable to find a job or a home on account of his record. But
the biggest insult of all, he says, is his lack of civil rights in the land of
Martin Luther King. Together with around four million other former felons
nationwide—most of them impoverished—Richard is legally barred from going to
the polls. "Some people don't believe in second chances," he says.
"No way my voice can be heard."
Andy and Maria were criminals of a different kind: They
picked the wrong country of birth and decided to pick again when they grew up.
Having spent the better part of their combined 177 years waiting to attain the
holy grail of U.S. citizenship, the elderly couple from Mexico take pride in
their legal status after a lifetime of unlawful labor in the fields and
factories of Texas and California. Pooling their $700 a month in Social
Security is enough to pay the mortgage on the 400-square-foot trailer they call
home in one of the unincorporated colonias outside El Paso, Texas—but
only just. In spite of their hard-won citizenship, Andy says that voting and
getting heard is a stretch. "The politicians only come here when they're
looking for votes—don't care about the little people," he says. Last
election, for example, they waited outside in line for over three hours before
casting a ballot because the state neglected to properly staff their polling
place. "I guess they didn't think any of us would vote," Maria says.
Still, she maintains that waiting in line is a small price to pay when a third
to half of their neighbors—and 22 million non-citizens nationwide—are prevented
from going to the polls.
"People that got the money, they put their people in place.
Ain't got no representation in Congress!"
Malik never broke any laws. He did not make the mistake of
being born abroad. In fact, the former social worker now on disability was born
and raised in the heart of the nation's capital. That's where he went wrong, as
far as citizenship is concerned: Malik and some 630,000 Americans living in
Washington, D.C.—along with over 4 million taxpaying U.S. citizens in Puerto
Rico and the other island territories—lack voting representation in Congress.
For most of their history, they even lacked the right to vote in presidential
elections or, for Washingtonians, to choose their city leaders. According to
Malik, it doesn't help that D.C. and Puerto Rico top the poverty charts, a fact
with which he has become personally acquainted since losing his job and moving
into an overcrowded shelter not far from the U.S. Capitol. He views poverty as
both personal and political: "People that got the money, they put their
people in place," he says. "Ain't got no representation in Congress!"
These four American citizens are imperfect, like you and I,
but that's not all. They are members of an impoverished underclass—50 million strong—whose
ranks
have swelled since the Great Recession to the highest rate and number
below the poverty line in nearly 50 years. Nearly half of them—20.5
million people, including each of the people mentioned above—are living in
deep poverty on less than $12,000 per year for a family of four, the highest
rate since record-keeping began in 1975. Add to that the hundred million citizens
who are struggling to stay a few paychecks above the poverty line, and fully half the U.S. population
is either poor or "near poor," according to the Census Bureau.
Economically speaking, their poverty entails a lack of
decent-paying jobs and government supports to sustain a healthy life. With half of American jobs
paying less than $33,000 per year and a quarter paying poverty-line wages of
$22,000 or less, even as financial markets soar, people in the bottom fifth of
the income distribution now command the smallest
share of income—3.3 percent—since the government started tracking income
breakdowns in the 1960s. Middle-wage jobs lost during the Great Recession are
largely being replaced
by low-wage jobs—when they are replaced at all—contributing to an 11
percent decline in real income for poor families since 1979. For the 27
million adults who are unemployed or underemployed and the 48
million people in working poor families who rely on some form of public
support, means-tested government programs excluding Medicaid have remained
essentially flat for the past 20 years, at around
$1,000 per capita per year. Only unemployment insurance and food stamps
have seen a marked increase in recent years, although both are currently
under assault
in Congress.
Socially speaking, poor people occupy a space apart from
mainstream. For the nearly one in four children
who are impoverished, hunger and homelessness, absent and incarcerated parents,
violence, and substance abuse are regular facts of life. These and other
"toxic stressors" contribute to high-school
dropout rates of around 50 percent and college-graduation
rates of less than 10 percent for people in poverty—five times worse than
upper-income youth. Without a high-school diploma, poor children are four times
more likely than their college-educated peers to be unemployed and 10 to 20
times more likely to end up behind bars. Regardless of high-school completion
and criminal status, close
to half of all people raised in persistent poverty remain poor at the age
of 35, transmitting the same status to their kids, while less than four
percent join the upper-middle class. Even their health is affected: Prior
to implementation of the Affordable Care Act, around four in 10 Americans in
poverty or who lack a high-school diploma also do not have health
insurance—four times the rate among non-poor people—and one
third of all deaths are estimated to result from poverty and low-education.
Half a century after civil rights, nearly 10 million
voting-age citizens are denied the right to vote or voting representation in
Congress.
But poverty in the United States is not just an economic or
social concern. As this series will explore, the poverty that Andy and Maria,
Richard and Malik, and tens of millions of "second-class citizens"
nationwide, experience is also political. It is embedded in the structure of
American society and maintained by an unequal distribution of political power.
The statistics are straightforward enough: Half a century after civil rights,
nearly 10 million voting-age citizens are denied the right to vote or voting
representation in Congress; 16 million immigrants of voting age have no formal
stake in the political process; and tens of millions more law-abiding citizens
are informally excluded from voting and other forms of participation.
Meanwhile, the politicians on whom they rely do not rely on them: A tiny
fraction of wealthy Americans lobbies the federal government while fewer than
one percent provides the lion's share of campaign funds.
In the articles that follow, I take up the question of
political voice in America through the stories of low-income people themselves.
The voices belong to an assortment of citizens and would-be citizens I
interviewed during a research tour by Greyhound bus in fall 2012 and spring
2013, backed by the Edmond J. Safra
Center for Ethics at Harvard University. In an attempt to better understand
the conditions of life my interviewees described, I lived on a poverty-line
budget of $16 per day throughout my six-week tour, excluding Greyhound fare.
The tour took me some 10,000 miles through 30 states and countless cities and
towns across the continental United States and back—hardly adequate to develop
a rich understanding of a given person or place, but appropriate to the task of
surveying the broader scene of poverty and political voice in America. While
the individuals featured in this series cannot possibly speak for the dozens of
people I interviewed and hundreds of other people with whom I spoke, I've tried
to provide a fair representation of the views and concerns expressed throughout
my travels.
Mine is not an original exploration, nor is it a definitive
account of poverty in the United States. Fifty years ago, Michael Harrington
revolutionized the way Americans saw poverty in The
Other America—at least for a generation. He did so by showing his
audience that even in the post-war boom of the 1950s and ‘60s, poverty was
real. The problem then, Harrington argued, was not so much that poor people
were rejected or forgotten: "What is much worse, they are not seen."
Harrington's nuanced portrayals of an American underclass in forgotten byways
of rural Appalachia and isolated urban slums brought the "invisible"
poor into the light of day. His writings are partly credited with launching the
War on Poverty, announced by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his State
of the Union Address 50 years ago this week. Many courageous journalists
and social critics have followed in his footsteps since.
In many ways, my job is not as hard as Harrington's. In an
age of social media and TV exposés, "the poor" are not as invisible
today as they were in the 1960s. But being visible is not the same thing as
being heard. By a host of relevant measures beyond their control, people with
limited incomes have lost their place at the table of American democracy. Poor
people walk the streets of our nation's capital. They sleep on benches on
Capitol Hill and outside the White House gates in Lafayette Square. In every
state and community in the land, they clear the trash, pick the
crops, man the gates, clean the offices, mind the children, tend
the aged, and deliver the goods that keep America going. They are ubiquitous,
they are indispensable, and they are largely silent.
When Johnson called on Congress to join him in launching a
War on Poverty in 1964, he boldly asserted, "Today, for the first time in
our history, we have the power to strike away the barriers to full
participation in our society. Having the power, we have the duty." His
campaign promised to "strike at the causes, not just the consequence"
of poverty in America. While the War on Poverty is credited with helping millions
of Americans move out of poverty, the work of extending equal opportunity and
full participation to all people in our society is far from complete. If
America intends to continue that struggle, it will have to contend with a
fundamental cause of persistent poverty today: the unintended silence of
millions of impoverished people in the sphere that matters most,
politics.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/poverty-vs-democracy-in-america/282809/
Obama’s fraudulent defense of the unemployed
Obama’s fraudulent defense of the unemployed
By Andre Damon
6 January 2013
As Congress reassembles following the holiday break, the White House and the Democratic Party are seeking to perpetrate a political fraud on the American people. Having overseen the Christmas expiration of extended jobless benefits for 1.3 million long-term unemployed people, the White House is now presenting its call for Congress to restore the benefits for a paltry three months as a crusade against inequality.
“Just a few days after Christmas, more than one million of our fellow Americans lost a vital economic lifeline—the temporary insurance that helps folks make ends meet while they look for a job,” President Obama said in his weekly address Saturday. Blaming Republicans for letting the benefits expire, he declared, “So when Congress comes back to work this week, their first order of business should be making this right."
The claim that blame for the expiration of federal jobless benefits rests entirely, or even primarily, with the Republicans is a shameless lie. Notwithstanding Republican opposition to the benefits program, the failure to extend it past its December 28 deadline is, in the first instance, the result of a calculated policy carried out by the White House and congressional Democrats. By agreeing to a budget deal last month that excluded an extension of the benefits, the Democrats ensured that the program would lapse before the new year.
DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM 2/3s OF ALL
JOBS WENT TO IMMIGRANTS, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL. FEDERAL WORKPLACE ENFORCEMENT
of LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT of ILLEGALS PLUMMETED 70% DURING
HISPANDERING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM… and are expected to be nonexistent during his
second.
Obama and Justice Sotomayor (A LA RAZA PARTY MEMBER) Vow to Illegals to SABOTAGE E-verify!
VIVA LA RAZA SUPREMACY?
EMPLOYERS SAY NO TO HIRING AMERICANS… THE COST OF OBAMACARE IS
CHEAPER WHEN THEY HIRE MORE ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS!
more at this link – post on your Facebook and email broadcast
AMNESTY….LA
RAZA IS PRINTING OUT FRAUD I.D.s BY THE MILLIONS.
"They hauled them down to the border," Sakuma said.
"Three days later, they were standing in our office, but they had a
different name and a different Social Security number."
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/04/here-come-la-raza-hordes-for-our-jobs.html
THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
JOE LEGAL vs JOSE ILLEGAL... who comes out best?
"We could cut
unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal
workers," said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the
Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. "President Obama is on the wrong side of the
American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help
citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than
fail to enforce immigration laws." REP. LAMAR SMITH
WOMEN IN JOBS… not in America! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!!!
357,000
FEWER WOMEN HELD JOBS in OCT.
FEMALE
PARTICIPATION RATE HITS NEW LOW AS JOBS ALL GO TO MEXICAN ILLEGALS.
AMNESTY….
IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED… legals still get the tax bills for LA
RAZA’S welfare state and crime tidal wave in our open borders!
HERITAGE FOUNDATION: OBAMA’S AMNESTY
WOULD
ADD 100 MORE ILLEGALS AND COST AMERICANS
(Legals) BILLIONS AND BILLIONS
NEXT TO DRUGS,
MEXICO’S BIGGEST EXPORTS IS POVERTY, CRIMINALS and ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS = 18
YEARS OF GRINGO-PAID WELFARE!
The danger, as Washington
Post economics
columnist Robert Samuelson argues, is that of
“importing
poverty” in the form of a new
underclass—a permanent group of working
poor… AMNESTY IS ONLY ABOUT
KEEPING WAGES FOR LEGALS DEPRESSED!
Heritage: Amnestied Illegals Will
Get $9.4T in Benefits; Increase Debt $6.3T'
what is the REAL cost of all that “CHEAP” Mexican labor? Add
it up and then factor in the MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE and the fact that the
MEXICAN now operate in 2,500 American
cities!
more at this link – post on your Facebook and email broadcast