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Recent Articles in National Politics
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Misguided U.S. economic policies drive many Mexicans to come here
by Manuel Pérez-Rocha
President Barack Obama did the right thing by supporting comprehensive immigration reform that would place millions of undocumented workers on the path to citizenship.
Obama even went a step further, suing the state of Arizona for its unconstitutional and racially profiling immigration law. That law would punish and divide families, many of whose members have worked years for this country.
However, the U.S. immigration debate tends to ignore a fundamental question: Why do so many people migrate here from Mexico and other countries in Central America? The answer is that they need to look for jobs because there aren’t enough jobs at home. Several years of the wrong economic policies have destroyed millions of jobs, both in the countryside and in cities. These economic policies tend to concentrate wealth. They’re based on what’s often called the “Washington consensus” because they’re designed and dictated from institutions based in the U.S. capital…
Here’s some free advice: Never buy shares in a goldmine from a guy operating out of a house trailer.
Likewise, never buy a story from the Pentagon about an incredible discovery of gold in Afghanistan.
From out of nowhere, a recent news report excitedly tells us that a Pentagon taskforce has discovered an astonishing trillion dollars’ worth of untapped mineral deposits in that war-ravaged, impoverished country. Gold! Copper! Iron! And more! “An economic boon is seen,” declares a newspaper headline.
“There is stunning potential here,” exclaimed General David Petraeus, the top commander of America’s war operations in Afghanistan.
Hmmm... not so fast, Slick. Isn’t it at least curious that this “discovery” comes when the war is going so badly for us and both the public and Congress are questioning why we’re there? Suddenly, the Pentagon gives us a trillion reasons to keep spending American lives and tax dollars: There’s money…
Pretty much everyone (outside of the nutty “he’s the Antichrist” coalition) thinks President Barack Obama did the right thing in firing his Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Unfortunately, he did it for the wrong reasons.
McChrystal got fired for shooting his mouth off about his disdain for our president, his civilian staff, and our allies within earshot of a Rolling Stone reporter. (Generals and high officials get so used to kid-glove treatment from the mainstream press that they’re often shocked when a real reporter shows up and actually reports.) Obama had to get rid of the guy lest he, Obama, be labeled a wimp and lose his already slippery standing with the military and our allies.
He immediately won points, however, for naming Gen. David Petraeus as McChrystal’s successor.
This, Obama assured us, would mean a seamless continuation of the strategy we’ve been following in Afghanistan.
You know times are…
“What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford a hamburger?” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
asked in 1968. Today, many of us who fought for lunch-counter rights have children and grandchildren who can’t afford a restaurant meal.
It’s not just people of color who are paying the price. All communities, including whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and others in Rust Belt states, the northeast corridor, and “new economy” Sun Belt states are losing jobs, homes, and businesses. It’s a nightmarish destruction of wealth.
For communities that were already in economic freefall before this recession, it’s a catastrophe.
Unless we take action soon, generations of progress may get reversed.
African-American unemployment is 16.5 percent (versus 9 percent for whites). Look at any indicator of economic well-being--jobs, income, poverty, health care--and it’s clear that African Americans are still falling behind.
Manufacturing’s demise in the United States…
Now that the dust has settled from this year’s tax-filing scramble, here are a few facts to keep in mind as Congress moves closer to debating the expiring Bush tax cuts. By the end of 2010, those cuts, which began to take effect in 2001, will have cost our nation $2.5 trillion dollars.
To put that enormous loss of revenue into perspective, consider this: It’s twice as much as the combined cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it’s two-and-a-half times the cost of the recently passed health-care plan.
Nearly half of those costly Bush tax cuts went to the top 5 percent of households. But instead of the promised trickle-down growth, we got stagnant wages for middle-class Americans while many wealthy households grew even wealthier. Over the last decade, a record federal budget surplus--before the Bush tax cuts--has turned into a massive federal deficit.
I recently spoke…
