Hundreds of millions in cuts on the horizon in Louisiana
Hundreds of millions in cuts on the horizon in Louisiana
By Tom Hall
15 March 2016
A special session of the Louisiana legislature ended last Wednesday with the passage at the last minute of a budget plan increasing the state’s sales tax and adopting other measures aimed at raising revenue to address the the deepest budget crises in the state’s history.
However, approximately $30 million remains in the deficit for the current year and $700 million for next year, out of the $2.9 billion hole announced by Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards. Education and health care services are reportedly funded for four months, with another special session to deal with the remaining deficit will likely be convened in June.
The budget bills were pushed through the legislature with such haste, with only 97 seconds remaining before the legally-mandated end of the session, that the exact extent of the remaining deficit is not yet clear even to state officials.
What the agreement does do, however, is raise revenue—largely through regressive taxation, such as a 1 percent increase in the state sales tax—to keep critical state services on life support and under pressure to cut more and more from their expenses. The future of many of these services remains up in the air, facing direct budget cuts when the legislature meets again.
Education and health care, two of the few areas of spending not protected from cuts by the state’s constitution, have faced years of budget slashing that have left many services barely functional.
Public universities throughout the state have been bracing for the worst. Nicholls State University announced contingency plans to close early for the summer if they did not receive sufficient funding, and administrators at Louisiana State University’s flagship campus in Baton Rouge openly questioned (for the second year in a row) whether their university would even be able to open for the fall.
While no universities have yet been forced to close, the educational futures of tens of thousands of students will be left in limbo as the remaining cuts, many of which will fall on the state’s educational programs, are hashed out over the summer, after graduation for high school seniors.
A major state-run scholarship program, the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students (TOPS), faces a possible 80 percent cut in funding for the next academic year in the fall, resulting in tens of thousands of in-state students losing access to the program. TOPS payments were temporarily suspended last month by Edwards before being restored a week later at only 80 percent of their previous level.
Louisiana’s publicly-funded hospital network (which was turned over to private operators under the previous governor, Republican Bobby Jindal) faced such deep cuts even under the so-called “best case scenario” during the special session that private operators threatened to simply walk away from their contracts with the state rather than attempt to deal with the impact of the cuts. The University Medical Center in downtown New Orleans, which opened only last year as a replacement for the pre-Katrina Charity Hospital, faced $44 million in cuts.
Even access to the constitutional right to an attorney has been threatened by the budget crisis, as the state’s Public Defenders Offices struggle to contend with the new cuts. Plaquemines Parish, a suburban parish in the metropolitan New Orleans area, was forced to close its Public Defenders Office and furlough its two staff attorneys indefinitely after state lawmakers voted to cut $472,000 from the state Public Defender Board’s budget. A meagre $30,000 in “emergency funding” was later provided to keep the office open through March. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with a total prison population of almost 40,000 out of a total state population of 4.6 million, or roughly 1 in 75 adults.
The special session largely mirrored the kabuki theater on display at the federal level over the past several years, in which the intransigence of right-wing Republicans had been utilized to legitimize historic cuts as a “compromise” solution. Even the framework provided for addressing the budget crisis by the state’s constitution stacks the deck in favor of the right-wing, with a two-thirds majority required in each house to raise taxes or repeal existing tax exemptions.
However, the deep divisions and infighting among Republicans was arguably a more salient feature in Louisiana, as elements from the “Tea Party” and other legislators opposed to any tax hikes whatsoever threatened to derail even a “compromise” solution. A group of roughly 20 legislators in the 104-member House of Representatives torpedoed several bills and held up negotiations until the last minute. Senate President John Alario, a Republican and the longest-tenured member of the Senate, tearfully denounced the House of Representatives as the session expired for referring eight bills to the Senate with only fifteen minutes to spare.
A major factor in the budget crisis is the impact of the ongoing slump in oil prices as well as widespread and deepening poverty and unemployment more than seven years after the 2008 financial crisis. However, no small role has been played by former Governor Jindal, whose massive tax cuts and corporate tax breaks effectively bankrupted the state, a fact which Jindal sought to conceal in the last years of his administration by draining “rainy day funds” and selling off state assets to balance the budget. Jindal sought to burnish his appeal among the Republican right-wing, appealing to elements from the Tea Party and religious fundamentalists throughout his two terms (ultimately unsuccessfully, as his abortive presidential campaign has made clear).
Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers are now denouncing Jindal’s fiscal policies, months after Jindal was term-limited out of office. However, all of them enthusiastically supported his legislative agenda for years. Democratic Governor Edwards, newly elected after a November election in which he and his Republican opponent David Vitter took turns scapegoating Syrian refugees, effectively made Jindal’s tax policy a central plank of his campaign when he pledged not to raise taxes.
.............. what would have happened to this once great nation if instead of handing billions in welfare to criminal banksters, and millions of our jobs to illegals.... we handed free education to America's youth.
but then we wouldn't need to import boatloads of educated people to take our tech jobs!!!
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: TRANSFERRING THE NATION'S WEALTH TO THE 1%, JOBS AND WELFARE TO ILLEGALS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND BUILD THE DEM PARTY BASE WITH MEX FLAG WAVERS
“My greatest worry is working all my life, constantly chasing debt and never being to own a house or have children,” writes a millennial named “Gemma” in a section of the series entitled “#Itsnotjustyou: Millenials share their secret fears.” Continuing, she states: “The cost of renting privately is rising, the cost of travelling is rising, the cost of living is rising and yet the salaries don’t reflect this rise. … I am worried that capitalism is pushing this and creating a greater wealth inequality gap. It seems unsustainable and to be driving people apart—a recent example is the demonization of our own NHS service and the junior doctors.”
Study: Worsening conditions for young people throughout the developed world
Study: Worsening conditions for young people throughout the developed world
By Nick Barrickman
15 March 2016
Incomes for young people born between 1980 and 1994 have hit unprecedented low levels in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, according to a recent investigative series conducted by the UK’s Guardian publication titled “Millenials: The Trials of Generation Y.” The study draws on income statistics from eight of the world’s 15 most advanced economies, including the US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, France, Italy, Spain and Germany to paint a picture of dimming social prospects for young people throughout the developed world.
The Guardian cites as contributing factors “a combination of debt, joblessness, globalization, demographics and rising house prices” which “have grave implications for everything from social cohesion to family formation.” Whereas during the 1970s and 1980s people in their 20s averaged more than the national income, the study found that young couples and families in five of the eight countries listed made 20 percent less than the rest of the population today.
“It is likely to be the first time in industrialized history, save for periods of war or natural disaster, that the incomes of young adults have fallen so far when compared with the rest of society,” the British newspaper states.
In the US and Italy, incomes were lower in actual figures than they were a generation ago, with Americans averaging a yearly salary of $27,757 in 2010 compared to $29,638 in 1979. The study notes that young US workers currently make less than those in retirement. In France, households headed by individuals under the age of 50 made less disposable income than recent retirees. In Italy, an 80-year-old pensioner possesses more income than someone under the age of 35.
In many cases, the 2008 financial collapse simply accelerated trends that were already underway. Housing prices in Great Britain and Australia are among the most expensive in the developed world. The average price for a home in Sydney, Australia, is $1 million in Australian dollars, more than 12 times the median household income in the city. The average home loan for first-time buyers in New South Wales is A$424,000. This figure has increased by 43 percent in the past four years alone.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, housing prices have increased more sharply and for a longer period in the past 20 years than at any time since 1880. The Guardian notes that housing costs in the UK and Australia have been increasing at a “neck and neck” pace ahead of the average household income. “We’re heading for a world where rates of home ownership among young people are below 50 percent for the first time,” states Alan Milburn of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, adding that the UK is heading toward becoming “a society that is permanently divided.” Income for those in their late 20s in the UK remain below levels seen in 2004-2005.
A recent survey by British polling firm Ipsos Mori found that 54 percent of those questioned thought the next generation was or would be worse off than the previous. “It’s the highest we’ve measured—it’s completely flipped around from April 2003,” stated Bobby Duffy, managing director of Ipsos Mori’s Social Research Institute of the findings.
In addition, more than a quarter of individuals in this age group live with their parents. An average woman in this age group today waits 7.1 years longer to become married than in 1981; and the average age of childbirth for young families is nearly four years later than those in 1974.
“My greatest worry is working all my life, constantly chasing debt and never being to own a house or have children,” writes a millennial named “Gemma” in a section of the series entitled “#Itsnotjustyou: Millenials share their secret fears.” Continuing, she states: “The cost of renting privately is rising, the cost of travelling is rising, the cost of living is rising and yet the salaries don’t reflect this rise. … I am worried that capitalism is pushing this and creating a greater wealth inequality gap. It seems unsustainable and to be driving people apart—a recent example is the demonization of our own NHS service and the junior doctors.” Many others share similar nightmares.
The study comes amid other findings revealing similar declines in living standards for youth in the developed world. A 2013 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report found nearly 30 million youth in the developed capitalist countries without a job or an education, the basic requirements for functioning in society.
The circumstances faced by young people throughout the world speak to a systemic breakdown of the social order in both the so-called developing and advanced countries, which has been compounded by war and militarism, consecutive attacks on living standards and cuts to social programs, which invariably hit the youngest and most vulnerable the hardest. Though not covered by the study, European nations such as Greece have been reduced to conditions unseen in the developed world, with youth unemployment at over 60 percent due to attacks on living standards demanded by the European Union and enforced by consecutive governments, both right and “left,” under Syriza.
The authors of the Guardian investigation, in an effort to divert rising anger away from the social system responsible for the poverty, destruction of living standards and attendant social misery, single out the relatively-better off living conditions of retirees in order to make a case for attacking pensions and other benefits accruing to the older generation. The publication quotes a recently published interview with Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank (ECB), who states “in many countries the labor market is set up to protect older ‘insiders’—people with permanent, high-paid contracts and shielded by strong labor laws. … The side-effect is that young people are stuck with lower-paid, temporary contracts and get fired first in crisis times.”
Rather than receiving expanded employment, pay and access to better living conditions, it is proposed that the young and the old fight over the rapidly diminishing resources made available by bourgeois public officials and the wealthy. While Draghi advocates attacking the pay and benefits of older workers, the ECB head has funneled billions into the hands of European banking institutions; recently upping the monthly total of cash infusions to €80 billion from €60 billion previously and adding to the wealth of the financial elite.
The fate of retirement benefits and wages under the profit-system is pointed to when the newspaper notes “pensioners’ incomes are likely to rise for at least the next decade, after which future generations will be unlikely to benefit [due to] a drop in home ownership, weaker private sector pension schemes and the expectation that state pensions will be less generous in the future.”
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS: SERVE THE RICH, WALL STREET CRONIES AND LA RAZA, THE MEX FASCIST PARTY of AMERICA....
Then hand what is left of the American middle class the tax bills for bailouts and Mexico's crime wave in our open borders and LA RAZA "The Race" welfare state on our backs!
"The Clinton family charities have outsourced many U.S. white-collar jobs to foreign college graduates instead of hiring American college graduates."
March 11, 2016
Oops! Clinton Foundation outsourced tech jobs to H-1B visa holders
By Thomas Lifson
The Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which does “wonderful work” (if you ask Hillary), also has sought to hire a lot of foreign tech workers brought to the country under the H-1B visa program to fill jobs Americans supposedly can’t be found to perform. Breitbart reports:
The Clinton family charities have outsourced many U.S. white-collar jobs to foreign college graduates instead of hiring American college graduates.
The outsourcing started in 2004 and it continues to this year. When asked if the foundation is still hiring foreign white-collar workers via the controversial H-1B visa program, Vena Cooper, one of the foundation’s personnel officers, responded “We do.”
The foundations declined to answer questions from Breitbart News, but available data shows they sought to hire up to 130 foreign graduates. That’s roughly half the number of 250 jobs outsourced by Disney last October, which has reignited political criticism of the middle-class outsourcing program.
The 130 foreign graduates sought by the Clinton’s foundations were and are not immigrants. Instead, they’re temporary “guest” workers who fill outsourced professional jobs for up to six years.
The Clintons’ foreign graduates have been hired via the H-1B visa program that also is used by Disney and U.S. corporations and universities to employ a population of roughly 650,000 young and cheap foreign professionals in business, design, healthcare, software, science, education, p.r. and media and pharmaceutical jobs. After their six years in the United States, most H-1Bs return
home with the work-experience and connections that help them compete against U.S. professionals in the global marketplace.
The young foreign H-1B professionals are also used to push down average salaries earned by experienced and older American professionals. In turn, those salary cuts boost profit margins and company values on Wall Street.
Hey, those private jets and 5-star luxury hotels favored by the traveling Clintons don’t come cheap, so they’ve got to pinch pennies wherever they can. And besides, a lot of their money comes from foreign sources, so
they’re just returning it to some of the home countries.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/oops_clinton_foundation_outsourced_tech_jobs_to_h1b_visa_holders.html#ixzz42cTZSzX3
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US employment report: Payrolls rise, wages fall
By Barry Grey
5 March 2016
President Barack Obama seized on the February employment report, released Friday morning by the Labor Department, to tout the supposed “success” of his economic policies and paint a picture of a thriving US economy. The report, which showed a larger-than-predicted growth in private nonfarm payrolls of 242,000 jobs, confirmed that the US economy was “the envy of the world,” Obama told reporters at a White House appearance.
“The fact of the matter is that the plans that we have put in place to grow the economy have worked,” he boasted.” He derided “an alternative reality out there from some of the political folks that America is down in the dumps.” He countered, “America is pretty darn great right now.”
He did not attempt to explain why the “alternative reality,” which his labor secretary, Thomas Perez, attributed to “fear-mongers and fact-deniers,” is believed by tens of millions of Americans, whose anger over economic injustice is dramatically reflected in the current election campaign.
One does not have to look too closely at the Labor Department’s report, however, to get an idea of what is fueling the social indignation of working people in the eighth and final year of the Obama administration. Behind the top-line number for new jobs and the quasi-fictional official unemployment rate of only 4.9 percent, ongoing trends with disastrous consequences for the working class are evident. They account for two other important indices in the report: a decline in average earnings from the previous month of 3 cents, or 0.1 percent, to $25.35, bringing the increase for the year down to just 2.2 percent, and a fall in the average private-sector workweek of 0.2 hours to 34.4 hours, a two-year low.
These two figures arise from the fact that the vast bulk of new jobs created in February were low-wage and a huge percentage were part-time. The low-paying service sector—retail, bars and restaurants, health care—accounted for 245,000 jobs. The reality of recession in basic production was reflected in a 16,000 decline in manufacturing and the loss of another 19,000 mining jobs, bringing to 171,000 the total decline in mining since September 2014. The only better-paying industrial sector that saw an increase was construction, which recorded a gain of 19,000.
Another figure highlights the hollow and socially regressive character of Obama’s so-called “recovery.” The financial cable network CNBC pointed out that according to the Labor Department’s household survey, which is the basis for the unemployment rate figure (the figure on payroll growth is derived from a separate survey of business establishments), full-time jobs increased in February by only 65,000, while part-time positions increased by 489,000. This means that a mere 11.7 percent of new jobs in February were full-time!
These statistics point to the fact that the American ruling class, through its instrument, the Obama administration, has utilized the financial crash of 2008, for which it was responsible, to fundamentally reorganize the US economy, transforming it into a low-wage system. The millions of decent-paying jobs that were destroyed have been largely replaced by poverty-wage, part-time and temporary jobs.
The median household income has fallen sharply. Pensions and health benefits have been gutted, schools closed by the thousands, teachers and other public workers laid off by the millions. At the other end, the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets, driving up the stock market and bringing the concentration of wealth at the very top to unprecedented levels. This is what Obama lauds as “success.”
Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain mired in long-term unemployment. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as without work for 27 weeks or more, was essentially unchanged at 2.2 million in February. This number has not shifted significantly since last June. The long-term jobless accounted last month for 27.7 percent of the unemployed, a far higher percentage than in any previous period categorized as an economic recovery.
A broader measure of unemployment that includes people working part-time but wanting full-time work and those too discouraged to seek employment registered 9.7 percent last month, nearly double the official jobless rate. There are, in addition, millions of people who have dropped out of the labor market and are not even counted in government employment reports.
While the employment-to-population ratio edged up to 59.8 percent and the labor force participation rate rose slightly to 62.9 percent, both measures remain extraordinarily low by historical standards.
The impact of soaring social inequality and falling living standards for broad sections of the population is reflected in a growing crisis in the retail sector. This week, sporting goods chain The Sports Authority filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announced it was closing at least 140 of its 463 stores and laying off 3,400 of its 13,000 employees. This follows recent announcements by Walmart, Sears/Kmart and Macy’s of hundreds of store closures and thousands of layoffs.
Hillary Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the champion of the little guy. It has always been a risible claim, but if any of her supporters (including at the Post) are actually paying attention to the scoundrel, this latest gambit ought to disabuse them of the notion.
March 7, 2016
The last refuge of the scoundrel Hillary
By Jonathan F. Keiler
Samuel Johnson’s aphorism that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel doesn’t apply to Hillary Clinton in her email scandal, because nobody – not even her die-hard supporters – would believe her if she said that she set up the private email server in the interests of the United States. Rather, the last refuge of this scoundrel is to blame everybody else she dealt with at the State Department, in the process impugning not only her own close aides, but career diplomats and other nonpolitical professionals who deserve better.
This strategy is reflected in the campaign’s current mantra that “everybody,” including former secretaries Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, at one time or another sent emails that were later determined to be classified. A recent Washington Post analysis of Hillary’s released classified emails demonstrates that she directly sent at least 104 to various aides and officials, and that they too, including the current secretary of state, John Kerry, occasionally sent out emails through nonsecure servers that were later deemed classified. However, what the analysis also shows is that these government officials, when they did use unsecured servers, at least used government accounts, which provide a measure of security, not a private home-brewed server like Mrs. Clinton’s.
The Post’s news editors must be popping a lot of Thorazine, because their coverage of Clinton is increasingly schizophrenic. As longtime readers of the paper know, the news operation is considerably more left-leaning than the editorial side (which occasionally takes a more centrist view). News stories are routinely slanted to present the most favorable liberal perspective and mock or demean opposing outlooks. This tendency is apparent in the Clinton case as well. The Post has broken some important stories in the email scandal, like the recent revelation that the Justice Department granted former Clinton I.T. aide Bryan Pagliano immunity. And the Post’s most heroic figures, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, have separately suggested that the Clinton scandal is the real thing. But since Hillary is the Post’s gal, they seeded the Pagliano report with expert liberal analysis that suggested that the immunity deal is either nothing to get excited about (a weird way to promote a scoop) or actually a good thing for Clinton, while omitting contrary interpretations.
The Post’s analysis of her emails follows the same pattern. On the one hand, the news that Clinton herself personally authored over 100 classified items cuts against her chosen narrative that she got a lot of emails and that she can hardly have been expected to actually read and analyze them all for security issues as she received them or passed them on. On the other hand, the article goes out of its way to suggest that this was an endemic problem at State. And strangely again, the explanation is rather contradictory. We are told that the sending and receipt of classified information was the result of poor security procedures that preceded Clinton’s arrival. But we are also told (in line with claims made by Clinton and her campaign) that there is a culture of “over-classification” in the government. So which is it? Were officials at State too lax about security procedures or too anal? If nothing else, one thing this controversy demonstrates is that the Clinton State Department was pretty much a mess.
But besides the country itself, which is now enduring yet more Clintonian malfeasance in the midst of a critical election, are many individuals that Clinton is cold-bloodily demeaning in an attempt to exonerate herself with the “everybody did it” canard. This rests on the weak premise that other government officials – aides, ambassadors, career officials – occasionally misidentified information as innocuous or insufficiently sensitive to merit security classification. There is little doubt this happened, and continues to happen, as government employees do their best to protect sensitive information but not bog the government down in layers of unnecessary security protocol. But none of the officials identified in the Post analysis did this deliberately by establishing a private home-brewed email system to avoid State Department classification procedures entirely – and this no less, by the head of the State Department itself.
The Post article anonymously quotes one poor soul (identified as a former senior official) whose good name has now been impugned as a careless operator: “I resent the fact that we are in this situation – and we’re in this situation because of Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private email server.”
Hillary Clinton repeatedly claims that she is the champion of the little guy. It has always been a risible claim, but if any of her supporters (including at the Post) are actually paying attention to the scoundrel, this latest gambit ought to disabuse them of the notion.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/the_last_refuge_of_the_scoundrel_hillary.html#ixzz42F4IlYvd
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The Hillary Clinton emails: A record of imperialist crimes
visit judicial watch org for more on hillary's crimes and corruption
ALL HILLARY CLINTON DID AS SECRETARY of STATE, ARGUABLY ALL SHE DOES PERIOD, IS SUCK UP TO MUSLIM DICTATORS, OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS AND CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRE CRONYIES OF BILLARY.... SO SHE AND BILLARY CAN SUCK IN THOSE BIG BRIBES TO THEIR PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION!
OTHER THAN THE TENS OF MILLIONS IN BRIBES SHE SUCKED UP AS SEC. OF STATE, HER TENURE WAS AN UTTER DISASTERS AS WOULD BE ANOTHER WALL STREET BACKED CLINTON ADMINISTRATION!
The Hillary Clinton emails: A record of imperialist crimes
The Hillary Clinton emails: A record of imperialist crimes
By Tom Hall
7 March 2016
Last Monday, the US State Department published the last batch of declassified emails from a private, unsecured server used by Democratic
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state. This latest release draws to a close a year-long review by US intelligence agencies of 52,000 pages of Clinton emails, ostensibly motivated by concerns over possible leaks of classified material.
To date, more than 30,000 emails dating from Clinton’s four-year tenure as secretary of state have been released to the public. Clinton played a central role in the prosecution of aggressive wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Libya as well as the carrying out of drone assassinations and other
illegal actions in a number of additional countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Yet in its extensive reporting of the email scandal, the American media has virtually ignored the actual content of these emails, which contain a wealth of information about the day-to-day functioning of the Clinton State Department.
A review of even a small sampling of the emails, which are available on the State Department’s web site, reveals the reason why: the emails are a damning indictment of the criminal activities of not only Hillary Clinton herself, but the entire imperialist state apparatus, with the corporate-controlled media in tow. The emails could easily serve as evidence in future war crimes trials of Clinton and other top US officials.
One particularly revealing email from 2010, cited by the Interceptn web site but not picked up by the national media, recounts the experiences of former ambassador Joseph Wilson (whose CIA agent wife
Valerie Plame was outed by the Bush administration in retaliation for his criticisms of the war in Iraq) during a recent trip to Iraq in his capacity as an executive for a US engineering firm. The Obama
administration, elected by exploiting mass anti-war sentiment, continued the US occupation of Iraq for three years during Obama’s first term in office, when Clinton was secretary of state, prolonging a conflict that claimed more than 1 million lives. Since then, US troops have returned to Iraq, ostensibly to fight ISIS, as part of the US war for regime-change in neighboring Syria.
Wilson’s email begins: “My trip to Baghdad (September 6-11) has left me slack jawed. I have
struggled to find the correct historical analogy to describe a vibrant,historically important Middle Eastern city being slowly bled to death.Berlin and Dresden in World War II were devastated, but they and their populations were not subjected to seven years of occupation.”
Describing the rampant racism and sadism among US occupation troops, Wilson writes, “Shirts with mushroom clouds [for sale at a gift shop on a US military base at the Baghdad airport] conveyed the Baghdad weather as 32,000 degrees and partly cloudy. Others referred to Arabs as camel
jockeys and those were the least offensive… The service people don’t see themselves there to bring peace, light, joy or even democracy to Iraq. They are there to kill the ‘camel jockeys.’”
Hundreds more emails deal with the US-led proxy war in Libya, in which Clinton played a
leading role. As a recent series of articles in the New York Times confirmed, Clinton was the leading advocate in the White House for the clandestine arming of “rebel” militias comprised largely of Islamic fundamentalists, which comprised the main fighting force against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.
One email from February 2011, written by a veteran diplomat before the launching of the US-NATO war that ended with the murder of Gaddafi, lays out proposals for the construction of a future “post-Gaddafi” political order in Libya. The memo recommends the use of the United Nations to lend political legitimacy to the imperialist carve-up of the country.
“A UN ‘hat’ for multinational/international assistance efforts could be effective,” the author states bluntly. However, the extensive involvement of Italy, whose participation in the war marked a return to the scene of its bloody colonial occupation, should, the author recommends, be “kept relatively low-profile.” Another email chain discusses how to disburse the tens of billions of dollars of frozen Libyan assets stolen by the imperialist powers during the regime-change operation.
Many other emails concern the organization and coordination of the Obama administration's drone assassination program, which has killed thousands in Afghanistan and Pakistan alone. “Twenty-two of the emails on Mrs. Clinton’s server have now been classified as ‘top secret’ at the demand
of the CIA because they discuss the program to hunt and kill terrorist suspects using drone strikes, as well as other intelligence operations and sources,” the New York Times noted two weeks ago, prior to
the latest release. “The emails [also] contain direct and indirect references to secret programs,” the newspaper added obliquely.
One such secret program was the bribing of high-ranking officials in the Afghan government by the CIA. “[The US embassy in Afghanistan's] line has been and will be the standard approach--that we refrain from comment on stories discussing intelligence matters,” one embassy official
writes in a 2010 email, in response to an impending New York Times story revealing that Muhammad Zia Salehi, head of the Afghan National Security Council, was on the CIA payroll. Later reports by the Times revealed that former President Hamid Karzai for years received shopping bags full of cash from the CIA on a regular basis.
Dozens of emails document the collusion between the corporate-controlled media and the State Department in containing the fallout from the release of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks. In one
2010 exchange, Washington Post writer Craig Whitlock reaches out to the State Department to request “a mechanism to receive [the] State [Department's] input” before running a series of articles based on cables revealing the existence of a secret US drone base in the Seychelles Islands, off the coast of Somalia.
The exchange demonstrates that the major newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, provided the State Department with advance printed copies of every cable about which they planned to write, along with drafts to the White House, to be redacted or censored at their discretion. In a conversation between Whitlock’s State Department handlers, they note approvingly
that the practice “was extremely helpful in preparing our redaction requests, as well as anticipating what damage control we’d need to do in diplomatic channels.” Another email describes an editorial by the Washington Post calling for the prosecution of Wikileaks editor Julian Assange and
Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning as “helpful,” adding, “We’ll try and get pickup in [the] international media.”
Clinton also received hundreds of emails via her private server from Sidney Blumenthal, a
former advisor in the Bill Clinton administration, who served as the head of Hillary’s 2008 presidential campaign. Blumenthal, then an employee of the Clinton Family Foundation, functioned as a de facto back channel intelligence gatherer and advisor for Clinton, despite not
officially being a member of her staff. It was Blumenthal’s 2015 testimony to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, the Republican-controlled body set up for the purpose of torpedoing the
likely presidential run of Clinton, which revealed the existence of Clinton’s private email server.
Blumenthal sent Clinton a wide array of intelligence reports from foreign countries targeted by US
imperialism. In one email, he passes on concerns that Islamist militias in Libya might retaliate against the assassination of Osama bin Laden,using weapons obtained from the United States. In another, he recounts the furtive dealings between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military to smother the Egyptian revolution, writing that the two will “continue to work together secretly in an effort to establish a stable government” and create “a secure environment throughout the country” for
investment.
In another email, Blumenthal advises Clinton on how to orchestrate the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the assassination of bin Laden in a cross-border raid into Pakistan by US Special Forces. As a report by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later made clear, the official version of bin Laden’s death was a collection of lies from start to finish.
“Show [the pictures of bin Laden’s body] to members of Congress in a special secure room,
something like when members were permitted to view Abu Ghraib pictures,” Blumenthal writes. “Each of them will emerge speaking to the national and local press on what they have seen… Having members of Congress testify to the reality of the photos will suppress any potential ‘Deather’ movement, that the administration has either fabricated the event or suppressed some aspect of it.”
What the ultimate out come of the Clinton email scandal will be is not yet clear. An FBI criminal
investigation into the emails is ongoing, with signs that the case might be headed to a grand jury. On Wednesday, a former employee of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, Bryan Pagliano, who set up the private email server in Clinton’s home, was granted immunity by federal investigators as part of the investigation.
TIME TO END MEXICO'S LOOTING?
"As alarming as those numbers are, it's gotten a whole lot worse. It's the reason why in both 2013 and 2015 I introduced legislation, the "Remittance Status Verification Act," to fix this. I call this the "Wire Act" for short."
"My bill would require a fee on remittances for customers who wire money to another country but cannot prove that they are in the United States legally. The fee would be used to enhance border security. Basically, we would be able to dramatically improve border security while making illegal immigrants pay for it."
"We also have evidence that many of those illegals who are remitting money are more likely to be illegal immigrant households receiving Social Security, health care benefits, unemployment insurance and/or stimulus money. Is it really fair for those individuals to live off our tax dollars but send untaxed, under-the-table money abroad?"
ON TOP OF THESE FIGURES ADD THE TENS OF BILLIONS HANDED TO INVADING MEXICANS IN THE FORM OF WELFARE.
ON THE STATE LEVEL ALONE, MEXIFORNIA HANDS LA RAZA $30 BILLION IN SOCIAL SERVICES.
THE COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES CHIPS IN ANOTHER BILLION FOR THE LA RAZA ANCHOR BABY BREEDING FOR GRINGO WELFARE PROGRAM.
NOW..... HOW MUCH DOES THE MEX DRUG CARTELS HAUL BACK? SOME ESTIMATES PUT THE NUMBER AT $40 - $60 BILLION!
BLOG: IT IS ESTIMATED THAT THE COUNTY OF LOS
ANGELES HAS A MEXICAN TAX-FREE UNDERGROUND
ECONOMY CALCULATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2
BILLION PER YEAR!
There are the billions of taxpayer dollars used to subsidize illegal immigrants' health care and education. There's the revenue we lose out on when illegal immigrants don't pay income taxes. And there's a less recognized pot of billions — the billions of dollars of earnings that illegal immigrants wire out of the United States with no tax or penalty.
more here:
We need to crack down on illegal immigrants wiring money out of the U.S.: We need to crack down on illegal immigrants wiring money out of the U.S.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/why_is_everything_amnesty.html
February 26, 2016
Why is everything amnesty?
By Silvio Canto, Jr.
Senator Cruz and Rubio will argue a lot about amnesty in the next few days. I guess that standing against amnesty has become the new flag that every GOP candidate wants to carry.
Yet who is actually calling for amnesty? Or something like what President Reagan did in 1986?
Have they changed the definition of the word amnesty? According to the dictionary, amnesty is "the act of an authority (as a government) by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals."
Who is pardoning any group or letting people stay here without consequences?
The GOP should be for an immigration solution that enforces the law against employers and protects the border. At the same time, what is wrong with offering some of those here a chance to stay here? It would go like this:
BLOG: THAT JOB THAT "ALREADY EXISTS" BELONGS TO AN UNEMPLOYED LEGAL!
1) The illegal immigrant would be given a chance to apply for a work visa supported by an employer's letter that a job actually exists.
BLOG: LET US REVIEW OBAMA'S SABOTAGE OF OUR LAWS AND PROMISE OF NON-ENFORCEMENT!
2) He or she would undergo a full criminal background check including fingerprints. We will also check with the home country to verify that the applicant is not married here and back home.
BLOG: LET US REVIEW OBAMA'S SABOTAGE OF OUR LAWS AND PROMISE OF NON-ENFORCEMENT!
3) The applicant will pay a fine for violating the law and or not filing tax returns.
BLOG: MEXICANS ARE A CRIME TIDAL WAVE AND OBAMA LETS THEM LOSE ON US WEEKLY!
4) He or she will be under a period of probation where the person could be deported in case of any violation of law.
5) No path to citizenship or green card will be available to this person.
BLOG: UNDER OBAMA AND HISPANDERING HOLDER, THE DEMS HAVE SABOTAGED E-VERIFY NATIONWIDE. AMNESTY IS ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED AND BUYING THE ILLEGALS' VOTES WITH OUR JOBS AND BILLIONS IN WELFARE!
6) Employers will be harshly punished, including jail time, for hiring someone without papers.
How is that amnesty? Who is getting off free for violating the law?
BLOG: "HUMAN ENFORCEMENT" HALF THE MURDERS IN LA RAZA-OCCUPIED MEXIFORNIA ARE BY MEXICANS! THERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 2,000 CALIFORNIANS MURDERED BY MEXICANS WHO FLED BACK OVER THE BOARD TO AVOID PROSECUTION. WE WILL NOT HEAR FROM THE PRO-AMNESTY GROUPS ABOUT THE VIOLENCE OF THE OCCUPYING MEXICANS!
We have been arguing about immigration for too long. It's time to fix the problem rather than just shout at each other. As Newt Gingrich said in 2012:
And I'm prepared to take the heat for saying, let's be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.
So let's stop shouting about immigration, settle the issue, and move to other topics, like ISIS and the U.S. economy.
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
Gang of Eight? What Gang of Eight?
By Mark Krikorian
The Corner at National Review Online, February 16, 2016
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431394/rubios-immigration-excuses?target=author&tid=982
Marco Rubio’s excuse du jour for his central role in passing the monstrous Gang of Eight amnesty/immigration-surge bill is the most shameless yet: “Rubio: Gang of 8 Bill Never Intended to Become Law“. Coulda fooled me!
The Hill wryly noted “This represents a sharp departure for Rubio.”
I’ll say. In his final speech on the Senate floor before voting on S.744, Rubio concluded, “Here in America, generations of unfulfilled dreams will finally come to pass. And that’s why I support this reform.” Not sure how much clearer you can get.
Rubio’s latest excuse would have fooled Har