Part Three – Immigration Jail in Texas Inexcusable

Immigration Jail in Texas is not us…. At least it never used to be America.  More on that immigration jail in Texas (actually more than one) are seen further below, causing anguish for desperate families & reflecting very poorly on the United States: Cartoon-Separating-families.  At the very bottom is a song that encapsulates cruelty, especially the leader responsible for the moral degradation.  But first as always in these part 3 sections, we start with comments & articles giving us accurate insights into the real economy.

 

The economy by many measures is chugging along fine.  The problem is the way much of the working class don’t have access to good jobs that can pay a livable wage.  There are numerous reasons for that, including inadequacies in our educational & training systems.  A basic fundamental flaw is within the overall compensation structure itself, as the evolution of our capitalistic system has resulted in capital being compensated substantially more than labor, while corporate management & shareholders have gained significant leverage/power over their employees.  It won’t be easy to upset the apple cart as wealthy donors have tremendous influence over governing leadership in our increasingly pay-to-play crony capitalist system, but it will ultimately take a total restructuring of the standard order of things to finally restore the middle class & American Dream throughout all sectors in our society.  It matters little if unemployment keeps going down as GDP goes up, the economic system is flawed at its core without shared economic growth where all have access to opportunity.

 

Seriously, I’m all for a president who’ll shake up DC & rattle the elite establishment, swinging the pendulum away from favoring the big moneyed interests & bringing it back to the people.  But we can’t trust a clueless jackass to do it.  When we follow a leader devoid of values & ethics, it tears away at a nation’s principles & moral fiber.  As for the articles from the newsfeeds, even labor shortages haven’t enticed businesses to want to break the habit of refusing to pay higher wages.  While there are signs of higher business investments which could produce more widespread growth over time, it still won’t solve the basic structural issues.  See signs of wages actually falling from excerpts in for-the-biggest-group-of-american-workers-wages-arent-just-flat-theyre-falling:

The average hourly wage paid to a key group of American workers has fallen from last year when accounting for inflation, as an economy that appears strong by several measures continues to fail to create bigger paychecks, the federal government said Tuesday. For workers in “production and nonsupervisory” positions, the value of the average paycheck has declined in the past year. For those workers, average “real wages” — a measure of pay that takes inflation into account — fell from $22.62 in May 2017 to $22.59 in May 2018, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said. This pool of workers includes those in manufacturing and construction jobs, as well as all “nonsupervisory” workers in service industries such health care or fast food. The group accounts for about four-fifths of the privately employed workers in America, according to BLS. Without adjusting for inflation, these “nonsupervisory” workers saw their average hourly earnings jump 2.8 percent from last year. But that was not enough to keep pace with the 2.9 percent increase in inflation, which economists attributed to rising gas prices.

 

“This is very likely because of the spike in oil prices eating into inflation-adjusted earnings,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist and strategist at Decision Economics. “We pay for energy-related costs out of our wages, out of our compensation. And it’s making a real impact.” The fall in those wages has alarmed some economists, who say paychecks should be getting fatter at a time when unemployment is low and businesses are hiring. “This is odd and remarkable,” said Steven Kyle, an economist at Cornell University. “You would not normally see this kind of thing unless there were some kind of external shock, like a bad hurricane season, but we haven’t had that.” The falling wages promise to exacerbate historic levels of U.S. inequality. Within the labor force, it means workers who were already making less are falling further behind. And if private laborers as a whole are seeing their earnings flatten while the economy as a whole grows at an annual rate of more than 2 percent, that means the gains are going almost exclusively to people already at the top of the economic ladder, economists say.

 

“The extra growth we are seeing in the economy is going somewhere: to capital owners and people at the top of the income distribution,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department, noting workers’ share of corporate income remained relatively low as of January. “And what we’ve seen is in recent period a much higher share of total income earned going to owners of capital.”

But why is wage growth so tepid? This problem is not new: Slow wage growth bedeviled the Obama administration, as well. Economists broadly disagree about the cause of persistently weak wage growth, offering a variety of possible explanations. Ernie Tedeschi, a former treasury official under President Barack Obama, said the unemployment rate may create a misleadingly positive impression of the health of the jobs market, given how many Americans dropped out of the labor force during the Great Recession.

More on the topic of workers can’t catch a break, with governing leadership being no help, are seen here in posts from Why-many-Americans-aren’t-benefiting-from-robust-US-economy:

Trump boasted of a $4000 raise for workers.  What happened to it?  See these excerpts from Where-s-that-4-000-Raise-the-GOP-Promised-Workers:

When Republicans in Congress passed a big, fat tax break bill in December, they insisted it meant American workers would be singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” all the way to the bank. The payoff from the tax cut would be raises totaling $4000 to $9000, the President’s Council of Economic Advisors assured workers. But something bad happened to workers on their way to the repository. They never got that money. In fact, their real wages declined because of higher inflation. At the same time, the amount workers had to pay in interest on loans for cars and credit cards increased. So now, workers across America are wondering, “Where’s that raise?” It’s nowhere to be found.

 

The U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics reported this week that wages for production and nonsupervisory workers decreased by 0.1% from May 2017 to May 2018 when inflation is factored in.  The compensation for all workers together, including supervisors, rose an underwhelming 0.1 percent from April 2018 to May 2018. That’s not what Congressional Republicans promised workers. They said corporations, which got the biggest, fattest tax cuts of all, would use that extra money to increase wages. Some workers got one-time bonuses and an even smaller number received raises. But not many. The group, Americans for Tax Fairness, estimates it’s 4.3% of all U.S. workers. Most of the money went to stock buybacks, which enrich corporate executives and wealthy stock holders because they have the effect of raising stock values. Corporations set an all-time record for buybacks in the first quarter of this year. They bought $178 billion of their own shares, up by more than 42 percent from the first quarter in 2017.

I’m very confident we could fix Social Security shortfalls if we only had the will.  There’s an array of simple steps we could take to make it solvent for the long run, so I wish America’s political leaders would simply ask me.  Of course, as common sense as my suggestions would be, we’d still need to explain & sell it to the American people.  It’s tough for Americans to give up any personal gains for the good of an overall shared purpose.  As for Medicare, there’s no chance.  There’s just no feasible way to fund it all, based on rising costs, demographics, advanced treatments & technologies (a good thing but very expensive), & escalating future unfunded mandates: medicare-is-running-out-of-money.

 

In the Trump/GOP relentless attempts to destroy Obamacare, even without a suitable replacement, it looks like those with preexisting conditions are in the crosshairs, as seen in these warnings here from gop-to-americans-with-health-problems-drop-dead:

Polls suggest that the public considers health care the most important issue in the midterm elections. This immediately raises the question: Do voters understand what’s at stake? In particular, do they realize that if Republicans hold Congress, they will strip away protections for the 52 million Americans — more than a quarter of nonelderly adults — who have pre-existing conditions that, before passage of the Affordable Care Act, could have led insurers to deny them coverage? It’s a clear signal of Republican priorities: G.O.P. to Americans with health problems: Drop dead.

 

So demands that the A.C.A. be scrapped always meant taking away coverage from the people who need it most; Obamacare opponents just hoped people wouldn’t notice that fact. And the truth is that they mostly got away with it until last year, when Republicans had to offer specific health care legislation. At that point the game was up. It immediately became clear that every Republican alternative to Obamacare would, in fact, hang Americans with pre-existing conditions out to dry. And the public backlash against that revelation is basically the reason the G.O.P.’s repeal effort failed. But it only failed narrowly. And if Republicans still hold Congress next year, anyone who has a history of medical problems and doesn’t get health insurance from his or her employer will lose coverage.

For years after the great recession I downplayed the threat of inflation due to a sputtering economy, stagnant wages, plus low consumer demand & confidence.  In fact, there were legit concerns of deflationary effects on our economy.  But no more.  Besides factors like the tax cuts having a hand in higher deficits & interest rates, we’re seeing an unrelated factor that has nothing to do with the tax cuts but is nonetheless very significant.  With most of the products we buy moved by truck, freight costs are spiking due to a serious driver shortage, higher gas prices & a far-too-restrictive regulation on drivers’ hours (wasn’t Trump suppose to eliminate strangling regulations?).  Those inflationary pressures from higher trucking costs are explained in these excerpts from beware-the-long-lost-threat-of-inflation:

So at the risk of being wrong again — an occupational hazard for all opinion columnists — allow me to ring a faint alarm on inflation once again. This time, I’m spurred by a recent conversation with a veteran of America’s freight-hauling industry, a bellwether sector given the number of lives it directly affects. For a variety of reasons, trucking prices have gone through the roof over the past year, with no end to the upward trend in sight. The problem starts with a shortage of drivers. Interstate truckers have a long history as the ill-treated workhorses of the U.S. economy — underpaid, disrespected, pressured to put in long hours and battling loneliness far from home. With unemployment down to unusually low levels, blue-collar workers have plenty of alternatives to this life. According to a report last year for the American Trucking Associations, U.S. freight companies were short by about 50,000 drivers last year. Given that the median age of private-company drivers is 52 and that young Americans are shunning the field, the shortage could more than triple by 2026. Widespread adoption of self-driving trucks is too remote to offset the problem. This explains the sign-on bonuses that major freight haulers are offering to new drivers. The going rate, according to one industry insider, has climbed tenfold over the past couple of years, from $1,500 to as much as $15,000, collectible after six months on the road. The chance to collect two bonuses per year is fueling rampant driver turnover: as high as 95% annually at major fleets.

 

Important safety advances are adding to the labor shortage, most notably the new requirement that rigs be equipped with an electronic logging device, or ELD. Designed to tame the problem of overtired drivers skirting federal requirements for adequate rest, the tamper-proof ELDs record precisely the number of hours each driver has been on the road in a given day. My new friend from the freight industry estimates that more than 800,000 noncompliant trucks were pulled from circulation when ELD enforcement began on April 1. These trends, along with rising fuel costs and strong consumer demand for shipped goods, are driving the price of freight sky high — up from last year by about four times the rate of inflation, and the worst may be yet to come. Demand for truck space is growing while supply is shrinking. Given that 70% of America’s freight moves by highway, this runaway cost engine is felt in all corners of the economy. At a time when high stock prices reflect expectations of growing corporate earnings, one manufacturer after another has reported that freight costs are weighing noticeably on profits. The story repeats itself across the iconic brands of America’s grocery stores: Coca-Cola, Hershey, General Mills, Tyson, Procter & Gamble. You name it. The heat from this inflationary fire is singeing farmers, food processors, manufacturers, big-box stores, restaurants, and e-commerce giants such as Walmart and Amazon (whose founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, also owns The Post).

Over the past couple months, more than 2000 children have been kidnapped away from their families at the border courtesy of the U.S. Government.  The realities are so heartless, along with terrible optics now that the story is dominating the headlines & become a major political liability for the administration, I’ve got to believe sanity will finally soon prevail & our leaders are about to agree on a solution to solve this inhumane Trump policy, even if they pass just a short-term fix.  But Trump only caters to his base, so who knows?  A few GOP leaders plus every living first lady have called out these atrocities, including the current first lady.  Our liar-in-chief has lied to us yet again by blaming these kidnappings on Dems, one of thousands of blatant lies he’s told us while president.  Trump enforcing this hideous knee-jerk policy is beneath who we are as a nation, where the only real solution is to stem the core problems of brutal violence in countries like Honduras, since these families are fleeing for their lives.  Some of these parents are being deported while their kids are still in detention, with no plans how they can ever be reunited.  It could result in permanent separations!  These excerpts come from i-dont-recognize-this-country-anymore:

Zero tolerance means that people caught crossing the border are treated as criminals, charged accordingly and incarcerated pending trial and sentencing. As one would expect, children don’t go to jail with their parents. Thus, the children are separated and housed in secure, makeshift shelters, including a converted former Walmart in Brownsville, Tex. Appalling.

 

Maybe some hardcore Trump supporters, who elected him president on a promise to get tough on immigration, can swallow this collateral cruelty as a necessary unpleasantness. But I can’t imagine that many of them are parents. As a mother, my heart breaks at the thought of a frightened and confused child being taken away from his or her parents and stashed like an orphaned animal in what amounts to a holding pen.

 

To be blunt, I don’t recognize this country anymore. This “solution” to stanching the human exodus from Latin America across our border takes a toll not only on those arrested and detained but also on our own humanity. To insist that traumatizing children is the way to deal with the problem is a failure of imagination. To not anticipate the consequences of children being detained under a zero-tolerance policy that imprisons their parents is a failure of leadership.

Now we’ve just got reports even babies were stolen from their moms!  They try to couch the horrors by calling these baby/toddler imprisonments “tender age” shelters.  It’s as though Trump’s mindset has been given over to pure evil, with his servants following his lead!  They’re traumatizing these kids & their families!  Where’s the humanity?  Who could do this?: happening-crying-children-fill-tender-age-shelters. Justify won the Triple Crown, but there’s no way to justify the reality of an immigration jail in Texas.  Some other solution must be found to keep families together, somehow, someway.  Also hear the powerfully impactful song at the bottom as we consider the inhumanities Trump has wrought on our nation, lately this spiteful internment of innocent children being one of a whole string of despicable incidences.  Congress is proposing solutions that would eliminate any immigration jail in Texas, but Trump has so far been a stubborn fool.  His speech before a small business group today doubled down on the cruelty.  This may be the headline story until they find a fix, or until another crazy thing occurs, so below is but a small sampling of the multitudes of articles lately.  And reading an account of suffering doesn’t resonate like videos or audios, so hear this one:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/06/18/has-trump-finally-gone-too-far/?utm_term=.f659b7149600

 

The GOP no longer deserves our votes, so we may not be Dem supporters, but the fever swamp that is now the GOP must be broken.  Here is posted the conclusion to democrats-and-voters-must-halt-trumps-threat-to-our-democracy:

By defeating Republican candidates in the coming midterms, voters can help save our threatened democracy and civil life. Democrats in Congress could then counter the Trump administration’s threat by promoting legislation that upholds our democratic principles and blocking that which does not. They could investigate corruption and illegal practices, and display more oversight over the administration’s actions. And from positions of leadership, they could speak out publicly against the subversion of our democracy and let their Republican colleagues know that if they do not do so as well, they might be targeted in the next election.

Other important articles are here exposing the toxic GOP that has lost its soul:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/opinion/trump-base-midterms-moderate-republicans.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Trump still has his loyal base with an obsessive mania over him, but most people have grown tired of his act, as we see in excerpts from trump-job-approval-down-in-heartland-states-he-won-in-2016:

Morning Consult is back with its latest state-by-state job approval numbers for the president, and without investing too much in any one number in any one state, the trends are interesting in terms of what might happen in November — or in November 2020. The president’s ratings among registered voters are underwater (more negative than positive) in the very heartland states he flipped from a past heritage of Democratic voting in 2016: Wisconsin (-12), Michigan (-9), Iowa (-7), Ohio (-4), and Pennsylvania (-4). In the short term, that matters because all these states other than Iowa have Senate races in November, and there are a total of 12 highly competitive House races among them (according to the Cook Political Report). There are some other Trump ’16 states where his high standing has eroded significantly, including six that are holding Senate races this year: Arizona (+2), Montana (+3), Florida (+5), Missouri (+5), Texas (+5), North Dakota (+6), and Indiana (+8). There are other 2018 Senate battlegrounds, however, where POTUS is still very popular, such as Tennessee (+20), Mississippi (+23), and West Virginia (+27).

Our President continues to defile us with despicable dialogue & heartless policies.  The latest outrage is kidnapping terrified children at the border & keeping them separated from their parents.  Please do watch this song of powerful emotion, since America is crying out with this message to our president….

 

Well in case you failed to notice,
In case you failed to see,
This is my heart bleeding before you,
This is me down on my knees

 

And these foolish games are tearing me apart,
And your thoughtless words are breaking my heart
You’re breaking my heart

 

Excuse me, guess I’ve mistaken you for somebody else,
Somebody who gave a damn,
Somebody more like myself

 

And these foolish games are tearing me,
Your tearing me, your tearing me apart
And your thoughtless words are breaking my heart
You’re breaking my heart.