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    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    Southern Poverty Law Center re-launches anti-immigration law hotline

    Southern Poverty Law Center re-launches anti-immigration law hotline


    Wednesday, June 06, 2012, 12:23 PM



    The Birmingham News


    MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- The Southern Poverty Law Center re-launched a hotline today for people to report problems they have experienced as a result of Alabama's immigration law.

    The hotline has been operating since September, when parts of the original immigration law went into effect. But the SPLC said in a statement that spurred it to remind people they can call the hotline at 800-982-1620 either to report problems or get information about changes lawmakers made to the law in the recent legislative session.

    "State lawmakers have callously refused to address the humanitarian crisis created by Alabama's anti-immigrant law," Mary Bauer, legal director for the SPLC said in the statement. "As we continue our fight against this unconstitutional law, we want to know first-hand the suffering it is inflicting on people across the state."

    One of the changes recently made to the law is a requirement for the Department of Homeland Security to post a quarterly report of suspected undocumented immigrants who have appeared in court for any reason and the outcome of their cases.

    "This latest change in the law is nothing more than an attempt to bully and intimidate people, and serves only to encourage vigilantism," Bauer said in today's statement.

    Gardendale Republican Sen. Scott Beason, who sponsored the revision bill, has said the public database is needed to show how the law is being enforced.

    Opponents of the law said last week that they plan a new legal challenge and a public education campaign targeting potential customers of the state's tourism and auto industries, in an effort to persuade lawmakers to repeal the law.

    According to the SPLC statement, the hotline since September has received more than 5,800 calls that included stories of problems people said were created by the law.

    The DOJ launched and paid for the Hotline in September - who is footing the bill for this?

    Southern Poverty Law Center re-launches anti-immigration law hotline | al.com
    Last edited by working4change; 06-07-2012 at 08:57 AM.
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    Senior Member HAPPY2BME's Avatar
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    RELATED SPLC TREASON AND TRICKERY ..

    Opponents plan legal, economic challenge to immigration law

    Published: Thursday, May 31, 2012, 2:43
    Kim Chandler -- Montgomery Bureau By Kim Chandler -- Montgomery Bureau

    MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- Opponents of Alabama's stringent immigration law said their next phase of attack will include a new legal challenge and a "public education" campaign targeting the state's tourism and auto industries.

    Wade Henderson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said that, since efforts to appeal to lawmakers have been met with indifference, groups are attempting to up the ante in their effort to get the law repealed or greatly modified.

    "Our message to the Legislature is simple. If we can't appeal to your humanity, we then will appeal to your pocketbooks," Henderson said in a conference call with reporters.

    Participants in the call included representatives from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the United Auto Workers. Lawmakers this month approved revisions to the state's immigration law instead of repealing it as opponents wanted.

    Henderson said there will be "targeted advertising" to discourage tourists and groups from choosing Alabama for their vacations and conferences

    "Alabama is not a state at this time that is worthy ... of your contributions and support," Henderson said.

    Henderson said the actions are not a boycott against the state.

    "However, we strongly believe only through a gradual escalation of pressure on key economic sectors of Alabama can we achieve the policy changes our coalition and most Alabama citizens would support," Henderson said.

    Cindy Estrada, a national vice president for the United Auto Workers, said they will display banners and leaflets outside 70 Hyundai dealerships around the country "to let Hyundai's customers know that they did not stand against HB 56 or HB658 and by its silence it endorses a law that hurts its large and loyal Latino customer base."

    Estrada said the group will not be picketing the dealerships. However, Estrada said the slogans that will be displayed on banners outside dealerships include, "Stand Up Against Hate."

    Estrada said they hope to convince Hyundai and other businesses to join them in calling for the law's repeal.

    Mary Bauer, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said she anticipates a legal challenge against one of the new provisions of the state's immigration law. Lawmakers added a provision this year that requires the Department of Homeland Security to post a quarterly report of suspected undocumented immigrants who have appeared in court for any reason and the outcome of their cases.

    "That provision is nothing more than an attempt to bully and intimidate people and it will encourage vigilantism," Bauer said.

    Bauer has called the provision a "Scarlet Letter" list.

    Gov. Robert Bentley signed the immigration revisions into law this month. A Bentley spokeswoman called the groups' efforts "misguided.

    "Alabama's immigration law seeks to ensure that those who live and work in the state do so legally. There is nothing unkind or unjust about that. It is misguided for anyone to advocate boycotting Alabama simply because the state has taken action to ensure that federal immigration laws are upheld. Some people want us to turn a blind eye to the issue of illegal immigration. We will not do so," Bentley Press Secretary Jennifer Ardis said.



    Opponents plan legal, economic challenge to immigration law | al.com
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    working4change
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    First article added to the Homepage
    http://www.alipac.us/content/souther...w-hotline-594/

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    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    This entire "operation: by the Union and the SPLC is not surprising. Alabama is a right to work state and the UAW can't get a foot in the door. The SPL is, the SPLC. JMO


    Some background on the Unions an illegal immigration and the SPLC.

    Excerpt, full article at link.
    Unions and Mass Immigration - Behind Organized Labor’s Support

    By Carl F. Horowitz
    Volume 17, Number 3 (Spring 2007)
    The alliance between unions and ethnic radicals, on the other hand, is a product of ideological compatibility. Each is an indispensable bloc within the Democratic Party, and has been instrumental in that party’s sharp turn to the Left over the last dozen years or more. Each sees mass Third World immigration as a vehicle to promote progressive, anti-business policies. In the process, the unions are underwriting this country’s decomposition. For the ethnic advocacy groups, such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), are aggressive in filing lawsuits and organizing marches to promote immigration and linguistic separatism, especially where the endgame is inducing employer commitments to greater ethnic “diversity.” Such organizations are going beyond progressive politics; they want semi-autonomous ethnic mini-nations on U.S. soil.


    Unions have come to believe that Hispanic and other Third World immigrants can be organized into a coalition of “people of color,” so much the better to press legitimate workplace grievances. And they regularly put this conviction on the line. In August 2003, for example, the AFL-CIO issued a statement “In Support of Immigration Reform.” Its dozens of signers included unions such as the Teamsters and the Operating Engineers, plus a farrago of nonprofit organizations such as MALDEF, the Mexico Solidarity Network, the Hispanic Farmers Association of El Paso, the Tennessee Immigrant Rights Coalition, and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. The statement supported “a fair and realistic process to provide an adjustment of status for undocumented workers,” and opposed “the expansion of existing temporary non-immigrant worker programs or the creation of any such new programs at this time.” That’s an odd way to define “reform.”

    The Social Contract - Unions and Mass Immigration - Behind Organized Labor’s Support
    This is a 20 page PDF file from the National Legal and Policy Center released May 7, 2007 and worth the time it takes to read:
    Why Unions Promote Mass Immigration:
    Behind Organized Labor's Interest-Group Alliances

    Carl F. Horowitz

    INTRODUCTION
    It was solidarity time inside the great hall along Chicago's Navy Pier last July. The AFL-CIO was holding its 50th-anniversary convention. And the right of illegal immigrants to remain in
    the U.S. was a top priority. At points throughout the proceedings, federation leaders such as AFL-CIO President John
    Sweeney, and marquee guest speakers including Rev. Jesse Jackson and Sen. Ted Kennedy, peppered their presentations
    with appeals to Congress to legalize the immigration status of millions of "undocumented" workers—in other words, to create an amnesty.

    Apparently disregarded was the fact that Congress nearly 20 years earlier had created such a program, and that the result was more of the very conditions the law was intended to eliminate.

    Yet speaker after speaker, cheered on by hundreds of delegates, delivered the writ. The survival of the labor
    movement depends on legalizing, and organizing, illegal migrant workers.


    We need them and they need us. Let us bring them out from the shadows of the underground economy and into the sunshine of full acceptance as fellow Americans. Let us never forget that
    a cabal of exploitative employers and right-wing Republicans are conspiring to stand in the way of this happy outcome.

    So ran the script.

    Read the Rest of the PDF AT:
    http://nlpc.org/sites/default/files/...%205:24:06.pdf

    Then there is the SPLC and this report with links to sources
    This report is the opinion of the author.
    “Hate Crimes” Peddling at the Southern Poverty Law Center

    Posted 13/07/2010

    by sfcmac


    The race-baiting and exploitation on the part of the slimy lawyers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, rivals that of the NAACP. They make a living from manufacturing (white) “hate groups”, extorting money from organizations and people with lawsuits, and peddling “hate crimes” as a profit-making enterprise.


    A background on Morris Dees, the SPLC’s prominent lawyer:
    In 1975 Dees was arrested and removed from court for attempting to suborn perjury (by means of a bribe) on behalf of the defendant in a North Carolina murder trial. Though the felony charge against Dees was subsequently dropped, the presiding judge refused to re-admit him to the case; that refusal was upheld on appeal.


    ……Dees is known to be the architect of one of SPLC’s most effective—and most controversial—tactics: exaggerating the prevalence and capabilities of racist and extremist rightwing groups operating in the United States in order to frighten supporters into donating money to SPLC.


    Many critics charge that this fundraising revenue, instead of bankrolling SPLC’s civil rights work, is funneled disproportionately into the coffers of SPLC officers like Dees. Several studies conducted in the 1990s indicated that the Dees and other top SPLC figures earned significantly higher salaries than the leaders of most non-profit organizations.


    Because SPLC perennially disburses twice as much on fundraising as it does on legal services (while skimming off substantial amounts of revenue for its own endowment), Dees’ income has provoked accusations of fraud. Stephen Bright, a director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a leftwing Atlanta-based group that opposes the death penalty, put it bluntly in a 1996 letter to Dees, in which he denounced the latter as a “a fraud and a conman,” and upbraided Dees because “you spend so much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself shamelessly.”


    Similarly, leftwing journalist Alexander Cockburn accused Dees of raising funds “by frightening elderly liberals that the heirs of Adolf Hitler are about to march down Main Street.”


    The accusations against Dees have also come from some of the people closest to him. As Dees’ onetime business partner Millard Fuller once said: “Morris and I … shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich.”


    In 1986, SPLC’s entire legal staff quit in an act of defiance against Dees for his pursuit of lucrative, high-profile cases against the KKK, in preference to working to secure civil liberties for the poor. Speaking to reporters, SPLC attorney Gloria Browne candidly admitted that the Center’s programs were devised to cash in on “black pain and white guilt.”
    Morris Dees - Discover the Networks
    More: http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/MorrisDeesFactSheet.pdf



    The SPLC “Poverty Palace” Headquarters has over $170,240,129 in net assets.

    More about the modus operandi of the SPLC:
    The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has one key message: The nation is boiling over with hatred and intolerance. Decades after the civil rights movement forever changed America and despite the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the imposition of affirmative action, American race relations are always worse today than in the days of Jim Crow, according to SPLC.


    “Hate in America is a dreadful, daily constant. The dragging death of a black man in Jasper, Tex.; the crucifixion of a gay man in Laramie, Wyo.; and post-9/11 hate crimes against hundreds of Arab-Americans, Muslim Americans and Sikhs are not ‘isolated incidents.’ They are eruptions of a nation’s intolerance.” That’s the message posted at Tolerance.org, a center website for its special project, “Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Response Guide.”


    “Somewhere in America … EVERY HOUR someone commits a hate crime. EVERY DAY at least eight blacks, four gays or lesbians, two Jews, two whites and one Latino become hate crimes victims. EVERY WEEK a cross is burned,” according to the guide [emphasis in original]. If the center’s math is correct, 8,760 “hate crimes” are committed in the U.S. every year and 52 crosses are burned. But that’s not exactly a tidal wave of bigotry in an ethnically diverse nation of 300 million people.


    The SPLC understands the importance of language. It fights what it labels “hate,” “intolerance” and “discrimination,” but it defines those terms very differently than most Americans would. To the center, you practice “hate” whenever you fail to genuflect with politically correct reverence before every human difference.



    In the SPLC’s world, armies of the night are forever on the march. Cross-burnings, lynchings and rampant racial discrimination are omnipresent. Those who question the SPLC’s approach to race are blacklisted as contemptible bigots.


    The center lumps all sorts of groups on America’s political right together, labeling them enemies of the Republic. Conservative, libertarian, anti-tax, immigration reductionist and other groups are all viewed as legitimate targets for vilification.



    SPLC has an enormous endowment of more than $152 million, according to its 2005 annual report. Its IRS Form 990 for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2005, shows that the center took in gross receipts of $49.8 million that year, $29.7 million of which consisted of contributions and grants.


    According to its balance sheet, by Oct. 31, 2005, its total assets had ballooned from $173.2 million at the beginning of the fiscal year, to $189.4 million by year’s end. SPLC’s endowment is so large that it reported endowment income of nearly $3.5 million, including interest income of $728,356.


    Although SPLC bills itself as a civil rights law firm, it devotes only a fraction of its resources to actual legal work. Of the $28.9 million in expenses it declared for the year ended Oct. 31, 2005, only $4.5 million went to “providing legal services for victims of civil rights injustice and hate crimes,” and $837,907 for “specific assistance to individuals” in the form of “litigation services,” according to its Form 990. Roughly half of its expenditures, $14.7 million, were devoted to “educating the general public, public officials, teachers, students and law enforcement agencies and officers with respect to issues of hate and intolerance and promoting tolerance of differences through the schools.”


    In the same period, SPLC paid attorney Morris Dees $297,559 in salary and pension-plan contributions.

    On the list of nonprofit “employees who earned more than their organization’s chief executive,” (part of the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual survey of top nonprofit executive salaries, published September 2, Dees ranked 48th in the nation.

    SPLC President Richard Cohen took home $274,838, but center co-founder Joseph L. Levin received only $171,904 for his efforts as general counsel.


    SPLC is based in Montgomery, Ala., site of the famous bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement and made a national icon of Rosa Parks, the woman who courageously refused to move to the back of the bus. The center’s fortress-style headquarters seems intended to shield employees from the hordes of neo-Nazis, skinheads and militia groups the center wants people to believe wish to do it harm.


    The co-founders of SPLC were Julian Bond and Morris Dees. (NOTE: This is an error. The co-founders of SPLC were Morris Dees and Joe Levin; Julian Bond was the first President of the organization.) Bond is the founding president. Since 1998, he has been chairman of the NAACP but remains active with the center and currently serves on its board of directors. A highly visible public figure, he is well acquainted with its smear tactics, having compared conservatives and the Bush Administration to Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime.


    Bond has smeared black conservatives with relish, deriding them for joining what he calls “a right-wing conspiracy” aimed at eliminating affirmative action, abridging voting rights and reforming public education. In 2002, he told an NAACP convention that black conservatives were participants in “an interlocking network of funders, groups and activists…. They are the money, the motivation and the movement behind vouchers, the legal assault on affirmative action and other remedies for discrimination, attempts to reapportion us out of office and attacks on equity everywhere.” These conservatives are “black hustlers and hucksters … [who], like ventriloquists’ dummies, speak in their puppet master’s voice,” he said. Bond called anti-racial quota campaigner Ward Connerly a “fraud” and a “con man.”


    In February of this year, at Fayetteville State University in Arkansas, Bond warned that Republicans’ “idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side,” the Fayetteville Observer reported. When his comments provoked a firestorm of criticism, Bond lied, denying he likened the GOP to the Nazi Party.

    He accused “right-wing blogs” of mischaracterizing his statement: “I didn’t say these things I’m alleged to have said. There is no one in the audience who can say I said them.” How wrong he was: The Observer posted a 45-minute recording of Bond’s speech online. In the same speech, Bond implied that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were token black appointees in the Bush Administration, which was using them as “human shields against any criticism of their record on civil rights.”


    ……Dees is admired by left-wing and not-so-left-wing lawyers from coast to coast. A prestigious legal award has been named after him, and on November 16, the high-powered law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP & Affiliates and the University of Alabama School of Law awarded the first annual “Morris Dees Justice Award” to U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice of the Eastern District of Texas. The award will be given annually to “a lawyer who has devoted his or her career to serving the public interest and pursuing justice and whose work has brought about positive change in the community, state or nation.” One of the rulings for which Judge Justice is honored would puzzle many strict constructionist legal scholars and limited-government supporters.

    Justice’s ruling in a 1982 case, Plyler v. Doe, opened the doors for children of illegal aliens to attend public schools through grade 12 at public expense.

    Dees is a consummate salesman and a champion fundraiser. “I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church. Spending Sundays sitting on those hard benches, listening to the preacher pitch salvation … why it was like getting a Ph.D. in selling,” he said.

    Dees was finance director for Democrat George McGovern’s failed 1972 presidential bid and for other Democratic candidates. He raised more than $24 million from 600,000 small donors, marking the first time a presidential campaign was financed with small gifts by mail, according to Dees’s official biography on SPLC’s website.


    Years before co-founding the SPLC, Dees launched a successful direct-mail sales company specializing in book publishing. However, he experienced an epiphany in 1967 and decided to take his life in a new direction and “speak out for my black friends who were still ‘disenfranchised’ even after the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Dees wrote in his autobiographical A Season for Justice. “Little had changed in the South. Whites held the power and had no intention of voluntarily sharing it.”


    Dees’s former legal associate, Millard Farmer, describes the crusading lawyer as “the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” adding, “though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.” Former associates say Dees is obsessed with making money.


    ……The SPLC seems to have steered clear of scandal in recent years, but it received plenty of bad press in the mid-1990s. In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser published a series of investigative articles alleging improprieties, including financial mismanagement and institutionalized racism. Black former employees of the center complained that white supervisors ran it “like a plantation.” The series was a nominated finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, but Dees orchestrated a lobbying campaign to stop publication and prevent it from being considered by the Pulitzer board.


    Jim Tharpe, then managing editor of the Advertiser, described his SPLC-related adventures at a Nieman Foundation for Journalism panel discussion held at Harvard University in May 1999. According to Tharpe, SPLC deployed what is typically considered a corporate public relations weapon to prevent the investigation. It threatened what has come in recent years to be known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP action. Such suits are calculated to intimidate and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense unless they withdraw their criticism.


    ……Tharpe’s team also uncovered what he called “questionable fundraising tactics.” The SPLC handled the case of Michael Donald, a young black man who was brutally murdered in Mobile by Klansmen in 1981. After the perpetrators were convicted, the center filed suit against the KKK organization to which they belonged and secured a $7-million judgment, Tharpe explained.


    “The problem was the people who killed this kid didn’t have any money. What they really got out of it was a $51,000 building that went to the mother of Michael Donald. What the center got and what we reported was they raised $9 million in two years using the Donald case, including a mailing with the body of Michael Donald as part of it. The top center officials, I think the top three, got $350,000 in salaries during that time, and Morris got a movie out of it, a TV movie of the week.”
    Southern Poverty Law Center Pushes Twisted Definition of ‘Hate’ - Conservative News, Views & Books
    “Hate” as defined by the SPLC doesn’t include the New Black Panthers, La Raza, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farakhan, CAIR, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Jamaat ul Fuqra, or any one of a number of violent, radical, extremist, black, hispanic, and muslim groups operating within the United States.


    The SPLC is a criminal enterprise. It uses threats, intimidation, and extortion-based lawsuits as a money-making racket. Morris Dees, Mark Potok, Larry Keller and David Holthouse, are not averse to using smear tactics, taking advantage of victims’ families, leveling false accusations, and labeling black conservatives with pejorative racial terms.


    The RICO Act fits them perfectly.


    More Via The Dustin Inman Society


    Lump of Coal - The Dustin Inman Society - Secure American Borders - Enforce American laws
    “Hate Crimes” Peddling at the Southern Poverty Law Center « The Foxhole

    UAW Specifically.

    Recent Efforts to Overload the American System:
    By DiscoverTheNetworks
    January 2010



    • Irresponsible lending practices by financial institutions: The year 1977 saw the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a federal law that -- for purposes of "racial equity" -- outlawed redlining and required banks to extend credit to undercapitalized, high-risk borrowers in low-income, mostly-minority areas. The Act also established extensive government oversight to monitor how well banks were complying with its mandates. Among the chief promoters of the CRA was Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, along with community organizations like ACORN and the Greenlining Institute. Such individuals and groups consistently sought to stifle efforts by regulators, Congress, and the White House to place some oversight over the risky lending practices.

      Any bank wishing to expand or to merge with another was required to first demonstrate that it had complied with all CRA requirements. Final approval for bank expansions or mergers could be held up or derailed entirely by complaints -- however frivolous or unfounded -- where community groups like ACORN or the Greenlining Institute accused a bank of having violated the CRA.

      In response, terrified bank executives routinely agreed to appoint ACORN or the Greenlining Institute as their official "advisors" on CRA compliance, thereby giving the groups carte blanche to channel loans to their own hand-picked recipients.

      The New York Post explains what happened next:
      "As ACORN ran its campaigns against local banks, it quickly hit a roadblock. Banks would tell ACORN they could afford to reduce their credit standards by only a little -- since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage giants, refused to buy up those risky loans for sale on the 'secondary market.'

      "That is, the CRA wasn't enough. Unless Fannie and Freddie were willing to relax their credit standards as well, local banks would never make home loans to customers with bad credit histories or with too little money for a down-payment.

      "So ACORN's Democratic friends in Congress moved to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to dispense with normal credit standards. Throughout the early '90s, they imposed ever-increasing subprime-lending quotas on Fannie and Freddie….

      "ACORN's intimidation tactics, and its alliance with Democrats in Congress, triumphed. Despite their 1994 takeover of Congress, Republicans' attempts to pare back the CRA were stymied….

      "ACORN had come to Congress not only to protect the CRA from GOP [Republican] reforms but also to expand the reach of quota-based lending to Fannie, Freddie and beyond….

      "[In June 1995] the Clinton administration announced a comprehensive strategy to push homeownership in America to new heights -- regardless of the compromise in credit standards that the task would require. Fannie and Freddie were assigned massive subprime lending quotas, which would rise to about half of their total business by the end of the decade."
      This strengthening of the CRA's loan mandates, coupled with the authority that ACORN and other community organizations were given to intervene at yearly bank reviews, placed the activist groups in a position of great influence. Banks, eager to receive good reports from these groups (in order to avoid having their merger plans blocked or their lending practices challenged by the Justice Department), funneled immense sums of money to them. But the proliferation of risky loans to underqualified borrowers eventually caused Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to suffer financial collapse in 2008. Many U.S. banks likewise folded.

      This economic crisis led to the implementation of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which Congress passed hurriedly into law in October 2008. TARP authorized the Treasury Secretary to purchase $700 billion worth of "troubled assets" from any financial institutions -- banks, savings associations, credit unions, security brokers or dealers, or insurance companies -- that were in deep fiscal trouble.


    • The $787 billion Stimulus Package: In February 2009 the Democrat-led Congress, pressured by President Obama, rushed to pass a monumental $787 billion economic-stimulus bill that was 1,071 pages long, and which few, if any, legislators had read before voting on it. Obama stressed the urgency of passing this bill at the earliest possible moment, so as to forestall further harm to the U.S. economy. After the bill was passed by Congress on February 13, it sat on the President's desk for three days before it was signed, as the Obamas were away on a family holiday. Heritage Foundation economist/sociologist Thomas Sowell noted that the administration's chief priority was to "act before the economy begins to recover on its own."

      One of the stimulus bill's most significant provisions was its repeal of the essentials of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the welfare-reform legislation passed by the Republican Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1996, which reduced the welfare rolls by two-thirds.

      A Heritage Foundation report stated that 32 percent of the stimulus bill -- or an average of $6,700 in "new means-tested welfare spending" for every poor person in the U.S. -- was earmarked for such programs as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families; Medicaid; food stamps; the Women, Infants, and Children food program; public housing; Section 8 housing; the Community Development Block Grant; the Social Services Block Grant; Head Start; and the Earned Income Tax Credit. Said the report:

      "But this welfare spending is only the tip of the iceberg.... Once the hidden welfare spending in the bill is counted, the total 10-year fiscal burden (added to the national debt) will [be] $1.34 trillion. This amounts to $17,400 for each household paying income tax in the U.S."

      Another major example of increased welfare spending in the stimulus bill was Obama's "Make Work Pay" refundable tax credit. According to the Heritage Foundation:

      "This credit represents a fundamental shift in welfare policy. At a cost of around $23 billion per year, this credit will provide up to [$400] in cash to low income adults who pay no income taxes. For the first time, the government will give significant cash to able-bodied adults without dependent children. Since most of these individuals have little apparent need for assistance, the new credit represents 'spreading the wealth' for its own sake. The lack of connection between this credit and 'economic stimulus' is evident in the fact that the first payments under the program will not be made until April 2010."

      In their 2009 book, Catastrophe, political analysts Dick Morris and Eileen McGann provide some keen insights into the monumental significance of President Obama's $400 refundable tax credit:

      "Under the guise of a stimulus package to bring the economy out of recession, the Obama administration is reworking the fundamental politics of our country, passing out checks like heroin to create a constituency addicted to public handouts, and concentrating the tax burden of paying for it all on a smaller and smaller number of Americans. A larger percentage of the American population is paying no income taxes at all and few other levies, making them unlikely to complain when taxes are raised on those who do. At the same time, they're getting checks from Washington as part of a concerted effort to build a constituency that supports big government and big handouts....

      "[W]hen Obama's tax program is fully implemented, a majority of Americans will be exempt from paying any federal income taxes. And, instead of a tax bill, most of them will get checks from Washington every year.

      "Under the guise of cutting taxes and 'making work pay,' Obama is effectively putting a majority of Americans on welfare....

      "Obama has taken the refundable tax credit one step further, giving everyone who earns less than $190,000 a tax credit of $400 (or $800 for couples). And if they don't pay enough in taxes to use up the $400 credit, they will receive a check for the balance. If they pay no taxes at all, they will receive a $400 check in the mail....

      "Obama's refundable tax credit is a permanent part of the tax code, an entitlement we'll have to honor year after year....

      "The political ramifications of this policy will be enormous. Tax eaters will strongly outnumber tax payers, and those who are paying for our government will have little or no voice in what the government does." (Catastrophe, pp. 47-51)

      The stimulus bill also called for a near doubling of federal spending on public education. In addition, analysts noted that a significant amount of the stimulus bill's disbursements would be used to pay illegal aliens working on construction projects funded by the legislation.

      During the 10 months following the passage of the Stimulus Package, more than 4 million additional Americans became unemployed. Yet the Obama administration stated that it had "created or saved" more than 640,000 jobs.
    • The 2009 effort by President Obama and Congressional Democrats to pass a $1.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion overhaul of the American healthcare system, a move that would vastly expand the role of government in that system: Despite the bill's great unpopularity (as indicated by a host of opinion polls) with the American people, its proponents proposed the expansion of both Medicare and Medicaid, programs whose combined unfunded liabilities already totaled more than $100 trillion.Regardless of cost or popular opinion, the objective of the legislation was to make as many people as possible dependent on government assistance.
    • The 2009 effort by President Obama and Congressional Democrats to pass Cap-and-Trade environmental legislation whose effects on the American economy would be catastrophic.
    • The (unsuccessful) 2009 effort by President Obama to make the U.S. a signatory to an international climate bill mandating massive transfers of wealth from industrialized Western Nations (most prominently the United States) to Third World countries:At that time, the U.S. already had a national debt of $12 trillion and was facing a second straight year of $1.4 trillion in annual deficits. There were also more Americans receiving unemployment benefits than at any time since 1983, plus an all-time record number of people for whom government assistance was their sole source of income.
    • The monetization of America's debt: The Federal Reserve's response to America's mounting national debt has been to print ever-greater quantities of money, a strategy that has led to hyper-inflation and the devaluation of currency every time it has been tried in world history.
    • Unions and pension plans: The United Auto Workers (UAW) union is a good illustration of how unions and pension plans are helping to criplle the American economy. Over the years, the UAW has negotiated an ever increasing number of benefits and perks -- including healthcare coverage and retirement benefits -- for its members. By 2009, General Motors was spending more money on union benefits than on the planning and development of automobiles. The Los Angeles Times reports that GM -- in order to fund healthcare, pensions, and empoyee post-retirement benefits -- adds approximately $2,000 to the cost of each UAW-built car it produces. This arrangement prevents the American auto industry from being competitive with car manufacturers based in other countries.

      But in 2009, the U.S. government enacted an Automotive Bailout that committed nearly $85 billion to help keep this unsustainable system afloat awhile longer, and preventing GM and Chrysler from declaring bankruptcy. In effect, this move nationalized the UAW's pensions, funding them with taxpayer money. The UAW, it should be noted, is a major financial contributor to the Democratic Party.

      In January 2009 Orin Kramer, chairman of the New Jersey Pension Fund stated that U.S. public pensions, as a whole, were facing a deficit of some $2 trillion.
      http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/A...cansystem.html
    These groups and their affiliations need to be more "transparent".
    Last edited by Newmexican; 06-07-2012 at 09:49 AM.
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