Posts

About 80% of Americans will Experience Poverty; Whites Especially Pessimistic About Future

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APFour out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend….

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor”…

Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites – defined as those lacking a college degree – remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.

Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Criticizes Keystone Pipeline, Takes Action to Reduce Production from Fracking

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: CorbisBarack Obama expresses reservations about Keystone XL pipeline project

By Suzanne Goldenberg. Barack Obama has given the strongest indication to date that he holds reservations about the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, saying the project would not create many jobs and could raise gasoline prices.

In an interview with the New York Times, the president disputed a main justification for the pipeline – its economic benefits – and reaffirmed he would reject the project if it expanded carbon pollution.

The comments were seen by campaigners as evidence that Obama, in the wake of last month’s landmark climate change speech, was leaning towards rejecting the project.

Obama has been under growing pressure from campaigners, party donors, and Democrats in Congress to reject the pipeline, which would expand production from Canada’s tar sands.

He adopted some of their arguments in his comments on Saturday, knocking down pipeline supporters’ claims of a big jobs boost, saying Keystone would register little more than a “blip” on the employment rolls. Read more from this story HERE.

________________________________________________________

GOP lawmaker warns Interior’s fracking rule could lead to cascade of new regs

By Ben Geman. A House Republican [Rep. Bill Flores (Texas)] seeking to thwart the Interior Department’s (DOI) regulation of fracking, the controversial oil-and-gas development method, said he’s trying to prevent what he believes will become a cascade of rules from multiple federal agencies…

“What concerns me about the DOI’s proposal is that it is the nose under the tent, if they can get in and say OK, we are only going to regulate where there states have no regulations or we feel like the regulations are not strong enough, then eventually you get a national standard over an area that they really don’t have the expertise to deal with and more importantly they don’t have the federal statutory authority to do it, and again, the states do a great job,” he said in the interview broadcast Sunday.

…Flores, a former oil-and-gas industry executive, said the Obama administration is “determined to try to regulate hydraulic fracturing” through multiple federal agencies. Read more from this story HERE.

States Say “No” to Ludicrous Federal Rule That Employers Can’t Check into New Hires’ Criminal Backgrounds

/9 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APAttorneys general across the country are fighting back against new Obama administration guidelines on businesses using criminal background checks for job applicants and two federal lawsuits that followed, calling both “a quintessential example of gross federal overreach.”

The nine attorneys general sent the letter Wednesday to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which in April 2012 voted in favor of the new guidelines that warn such checks can discriminate against African-Americans because they being are arrested at a disproportionate rate compared to the rest of the U.S. population.

Fifteen months after issuing the guidelines — which included the recommendation that businesses eliminate such policies — the commission filed lawsuits against discount retailer Dollar General and a BMW facility in South Carolina for alleged civil rights violations.

“We believe that these lawsuits and your application of the law, as articulated through your enforcement guidance, are misguided and a quintessential example of gross federal overreach,” the attorneys general wrote in a nine-page letter to EEOC Chairman Jacqueline Berrien and the agency’s four commissioners.

The June 11 suits allege Dollar General violated the civil rights of two applicants. In the one case, the applicant alleged she was denied employment even though a felony conviction was incorrectly attributed to her.

Read more from this story HERE.

Two Americans Added to Food Stamp Rolls for Every Job Created

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: WonderlaneWhite House Press Secretary Jay Carney said yesterday that the Obama administration has pulled the nation from the depths of the “Great Recession” with the creation of 7.2 million private sector jobs.

“And what is absolutely true is that we have come a long way since the depths of the Great Recession. We’ve created over 7.2 million private sector jobs,” Carney told reporters at a press briefing.

Here’s what Mr. Carney didn’t say:

Since February of 2009, the first full month of Obama’s presidency, 9.5 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force. Nearly 90 million Americans are not working today!

Read more from this story HERE.

Root Cause of America’s Economic Decline: The Loss of the Protestant Work Ethic

/4 Comments/in , /by

The causes of America’s current economic malaise are many, and some are harder to address than others. The misguided fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies of our profligate and dysfunctional government head the list. Those can be turned around.

But a problem much more difficult to turn back is the rotting of our moral fabric—the decay of the Protestant work ethic—engendered by decades of New Deals, Great Societies and one attempt after another to Spread the Wealth Around. In its stead, we now have a culture of entitlement and dependency that threatens to accelerate our slide into permanent decline.

The alarming statistics can be seen in the accompanying graph. The first is the breadwinner index—the percent of the U.S. male population that is gainfully employed. Only a few points of this decline can be ascribed to the aging of the population. The graph for males 18 to 52 has much the same slope.

The second shows the number of out-of-wedlock births, the rate of which surpassed 40 percent of all births as of 2008. Add to this the new-normal 50 percent divorce rate and we have a country in which the majority of our children are being raised outside of the economic unit once known as the nuclear family.

The third shows per capita inflation-adjusted total government spending, including federal, state, and municipal government expenditures as best as they can be estimated. The extent to which the huge spike in government spending per person over the past 60 years is the cause or the effect of the first two trends is open to debate. But the relationship is clear. When traditional family breadwinners stop carrying their load, the burden falls upon the remaining workers, an increasing number of whom are single mothers struggling to make ends meet.

Read more from this story HERE.

Black American Leadership Alliance Marches With Thousands in DC for Jobs and Against Amnesty

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APBy Matthew Boyle. Thousands of grassroots activists from all around the country descended on Washington, D.C., on Monday for the Black American Leadership Alliance (BALA) March For Jobs, a movement against amnesty aimed at defeating the Senate “Gang of Eight” immigration bill.

The activists convened at Freedom Plaza early and several speakers rose up against amnesty there before they marched from the downtown landmark near the White House up Pennsylvania Avenue onto Capitol Hill. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) spoke at Freedom Plaza and then led the march through the capital to Congress.

“We have a great country,” King said at Freedom Plaza. “Our Founding Fathers framed it for us. Their job was harder than ours is. They had to identify the pillars of American exceptionalism. We just have to defend them.”

“The rule of law,” King continued. “You can’t be a great nation without the rule of law. And you can’t have amnesty and still have the rule of law. All Democrats and Independents in the Senate believe there ought to be amnesty. Some Republicans think that also.” Read more from this story HERE.

_____________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: APRev. Peterson: working class black Americans don’t want immigration bill

By Tony Lee. Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, who founded the South Central Los Angeles Tea Party, emphasized on Monday that working class black Americans and those at the bottom of the economic ladder oppose the Senate’s immigration bill, contrary to what politicians and those who represent them in Congress may claim.

“Politicians want amnesty,” Peterson said on Breitbart News’ exclusive broadcast of the D.C. March for Jobs rally. “People don’t.” Read more from this story HERE.

Economic Recovery? Not Hardly

/4 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Getty ImagesIn recent months, Americans have heard reports out of Washington and in the media that the economy is looking up—that recovery from the Great Recession is gathering steam. If only it were true. The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period.

The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government’s Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are “jobs.” No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.

That’s just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can’t get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.

The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines.

At this stage of an expansion you would expect the number of part-time jobs to be declining, as companies would be doing more full-time hiring. Not this time. In the long misery of this post-recession period, we have an extraordinary situation: Americans by the millions are in part-time work because there are no other employment opportunities as businesses increase their reliance on independent contractors and part-time, temporary and seasonal employees.

Read more from this story HERE.

Ted Cruz: Immigration Will Increase US Joblessness

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Graeme JenningsSen. Ted Cruz, a leading voice in the national debate over immigration, on Monday appeared before a group that supports curbing both illegal and legal immigration and urged his fellow Republicans in the House to reject immigration reforms approved earlier by the Senate.

Cruz, the son of a legal immigrant from Cuba, has not publicly called for limits on legal immigration and made he no mention of such restrictions in his address to the DC March for Jobs outside the Capitol. But March organizers — including the Black American Leadership Alliance and Tea Party groups — do support curbing legal immigration, saying it could take jobs away from “millions of American citizens.” Cruz also claimed the Senate immigration reform would cost Americans’ jobs but without specific reference to legal immigrants.

“If this bill is passed, it will increase unemployment,” Cruz, R-Texas, said. “If this bill is passed it will increase African American unemployment. If this bill is passed it will increase youth unemployment. If this bill is passed it will increase Hispanic unemployment.”

House leaders insist they have no intention of taking up the Senate bill, which provides a pathway to citizenship. And many House Republicans, like Cruz, cite a similar approach taken in 1986 that allowed undocumented workers to be legalized but lacked the border security measures needed to prevent millions of other illegal immigration from crossing a porous border.

“We might have been foolish enough to fall for this once in 1986,” Cruz said, “but we’re not foolish enough to fall for it again.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Experts: Both Parties Selling Out American Workers with Amnesty Bill

/5 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: WND“Self-preservation has always been regarded as the first law of nature…Those who favor unrestricted immigration care nothing for the people. They are simply desirous of flooding the country with unskilled as well as skilled labor of other lands for the purpose of breaking down American standards.” – Samuel Gompers, founder, American Federation of Labor

The Gang of Eight’s Immigration Reform bill was celebrated by groups as diverse as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, LaRaza, Karl Rove and the new leadership of the AFL-CIO. Some observers say this is an example of real political compromise. Others say this is insider political corruption at its worst.

Sen. Ted Cruz says the alliance is not only suspicious, but “egregious” if the goal is actually economic or humanitarian. He says that buried deep in SB 744 is verbiage that allows the IRS to place a $5,000 fee on any employer who hires a legal African-American, Hispanic, union member, or other legal, disadvantaged applicant:

“I filed an amendment that would have corrected one of the most egregious aspects of the Gang of Eight bill as it intersects with Obamacare legislation, namely a penalty imposed on U.S. employers for hiring U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents. This bill says if an employer hires a citizen or a legal immigrant, the IRS can impose a $5,000 penalty on that employer. But if the employer instead hires someone with RPI [provisional] status [for illegal aliens], that penalty will go away. That is utterly and completely indefensible.

“Nobody in this body wants to see African-American unemployment go up. Nobody wants to see Hispanic unemployment go up, youth unemployment go up, union household unemployment go up, legal immigrant unemployment go up. Yet every one of those will happen if this Gang of Eight bill passes without fixing this problem. If that happens, all 100 members of the U.S. Senate will be accountable to our constituents for explaining why we voted to put a federal penalty on hiring U.S. citizens and hiring legal immigrants. I hope this body will choose to pass my amendment and fix this grave defect in the Gang of Eight legislation,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

54 Months: Record Stretch of 7.5%+ Unemployment Continues

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APSince January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate.

Today, BLS reported that the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate for June was 7.6 percent, the same it was in May.

In December 2008, the month after Obama was first elected and the month before he was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.3 percent. In January 2009, it climbed to 7.8 percent. In February, the month Obama signed what the Congressional Budget Office would later determine was an $830 billion economic stimulus law, the unemployment rate climbed to 8.3 percent.

In the Obama era, the unemployment rate peaked at 10.0 percent in October 2010. It did not dip below 9 percent until October 2011, when it hit 8.9 percent. From August to September 2012, it dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent—the first time during Obama’s tenure it went under 8 percent.

Read more from this story HERE.