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Mexico passes bill to try soldiers in civilian courts

[Author]By the El Reportero[/Author]

Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies has approved changes to the military code of justice, unanimously passing a bill that requires soldiers implicated in crimes against civilians to be tried in civilian courts.

The bill, passed unanimously by the Senate last week, is part of steps taken by Mexico to comply with a 2009 Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling.

Once President Enrique Peña Nieto signs the bill into law, cases involving alleged crimes by soldiers against civilians will no longer be under military jurisdiction.

These changes are “reforms that guarantee human rights and comply with new international criteria regarding military jurisdiction,” lawmaker Ricardo Mejia, deputy coordinator of the center-left Citizens’ Movement party, said.

Military police will conduct investigations under the direction of civilian prosecutors and be required to offer assistance to victims and protection to witnesses.

They also will be tasked with arresting military suspects and immediately turning them over to civilian prosecutors.

In cases of alleged crimes against military discipline, the military police officers will be authorized to conduct personal inspections of the detainee and collect items in his or her possession. Armed forces members who have committed crimes against civilians may be held in pretrial detention in military lockups when military authorities deem it necessary to protect their rights.

In such cases, military authorities will cooperate with the civilian courts to ensure the accused appears before the judicial authorities when summoned. Mexico’s Supreme Court limited military jurisdiction in July 2011, but that ruling did not set a binding legal precedent in the country’s justice system.

Half of Mexican minors impoverished

Even as the Day of Mexican Children is being celebrated, more than half of those 40 million children are living in poverty.

Further more, 4.7 million of them are living in extreme poverty, reports the La Jornada daily newspaper.

In Mexico’s indigenous communities, the situation is particularly alarming, due to eight of 10 children under age 17 living in poverty, while one in three is experiencing extreme poverty.

The daily reported these figures coming from a summary prepared jointly by the United Nations Fund for Children and the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy. The fact that poverty is more pronounced among children than in the whole of society is significant.

La Jornada adds that the data contained in the document Poverty and Social Rights of Children and Adolescents in Mexico 2010-2012, highlights the consequences of the economic policies imposed in the country three decades ago.

Under the official economic policies implemented by country’s neoliberal governments, poverty and inequality have increased.

17 facts to show to anyone who believes that the U.S. economy is just fine

[Author]by Michael Snyder
Analysis Economic Collapse[/Author]

No, the economy is most definitely not “recovering”. Despite what you may hear from the politicians and from the mainstream media, the truth is that the U.S. economy is in far worse shape than it was prior to the last recession.

In fact, we are still pretty much where we were at when the last recession finally ended. When the financial crisis of 2008 struck, it took us down to a much lower level economically. Thankfully, things have at least stabilized at this much lower level. For example, the percentage of working age Americans that are employed has stayed remarkably flat for the past four years. We should be grateful that things have not continued to get even worse. It is almost as if someone has hit the “pause button” on the U.S. economy. But things are definitely not getting better, and there are a whole host of signs that this bubble of false stability will soon come to an end and that our economic decline will accelerate once again. The following are 17 facts to show to anyone that believes that the U.S. economy is just fine…

#1 The homeownership rate in the United States has dropped to the lowest level in 19 years.

#2 Consumer spending for durable goods has dropped by 3.23 percent since November. This is a clear sign that an economic slowdown is ahead.

#3 Major retailers are closing stores at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

#4 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of all families in the United States do not have a single member that is employed. That means that one out of every five families in the entire country is completely unemployed.

#5 There are 1.3 million fewer jobs in the U.S. economy than when the last recession began in December 2007. Meanwhile, our population has continued to grow steadily since that time.

#6 According to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, the quality of the jobs that have been “created” since the end of the last recession does not match the quality of the jobs lost during the last recession…

• Lower-wage industries constituted 22 percent of recession losses, but 44 percent of recovery growth.

• Mid-wage industries constituted 37 percent of recession losses, but only 26 percent of recovery growth.

• Higher-wage industries constituted 41 percent of recession losses, and 30 percent of recovery growth.

#7 After adjusting for inflation, men who work full-time in America todaymake less money than men who worked full-time in America 40 years ago.

#8 It is hard to believe, but 62 percent of all Americans make $20 or less an hour at this point.

#9 Nine of the top ten occupations in the U.S. pay an average wage of less than $35,000 a year.

#10 The middle class in Canada now makes more money than the middle class in the United States does.

#11 According to one recent study, 40 percent of all Americans could not come up with $2000 right now even if there was a major emergency.

#12 Less than one out of every four Americans has enough money put away to cover six months of expenses if there was a job loss or major emergency.

#13 An astounding 56 percent of all Americans have subprime credit in 2014.

#14 As I wrote about the other day, there are now 49 million Americans that are dealing with food insecurity.

#15 Ten years ago, the number of women in the U.S. that had jobs outnumbered the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have jobs.

#16 69 percent of the federal budget is spent either on entitlements or on welfare programs.

#17 The number of Americans receiving benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector
by more than 60 million.

Taken individually, those numbers are quite remarkable. Taken collectively, they are absolutely breathtaking. Yes, things have been improving for the wealthy for the last several years. The stock market has soared to new record highs and real estate prices in the Hamptons have sky rocketed to unprecedented heights.

But that is not the real economy. In the real economy, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence. The quality of our jobs is declining and prices just keep rising. This reality was reflected quite well in a comment that one of my readers left on one of my recent articles…

It is getting worse each passing month. The food bank I help out, has barely squeaked by the last 3 months. Donors are having to pull back, to take care of their own families. Wages down, prices up, simple math tells you we can not hold out much longer. Things are going up so fast, you have to adopt a new way of thinking. Example I just had to put new tires on my truck. Normally I would have tried to get by to next winter. But with the way prices are moving, I decide to get them while I could still afford them. It is the same way with food.

I see nothing that will stop the upward trend for quite a while. So if you have a little money, and the space, buy it while you can afford it. And never forget, there will be some people worse off than you. Help them if you can.

And the false stock bubble that the wealthy are enjoying right now will not last that much longer. It is an artificial bubble that has been pumped up by unprecedented money printing by the Federal Reserve, and like all bubbles that the Fed creates, it will eventually burst.

None of the long-term trends that are systematically destroying our economy have been addressed, and none of our major economic problems have been fixed. In fact, as I showed in this recent article, we are actually in far worse shape than we were just prior to the last major financial crisis. Let us hope that this current bubble of false stability lasts for as long as possible. That is what I am hoping for.

But let us not be deceived into thinking that it is permanent. It will soon burst, and then the real pain will begin.

Hispanic college enrollment up, but not by enough

[Author]
by Irene Flórez
New America Media[/Author]

Recent data show that nationwide Hispanic/Latino and Chicano college admissions are on the rise, with Hispanic figures now outpacing white enrollment at some schools. But Hispanic education experts say the numbers are not high enough.
Patricia Gandara, research professor and co-director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, and and commissioner with the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics calls the numbers “disastrous.”

“We can’t sustain an economy this way,” she said, noting that only 11 percent of Hispanic adults in California have a bachelor’s degree. “Very soon half of the graduating class [in California] will be of Hispanic origin. If they are only getting degrees at a rate of 11 percent, we are heading in the wrong direction. It is disastrous for the community and disastrous for the state.”

The Rise

Latinos continue to gain more degrees year after year. As of 2012, there were 2.4 million Hispanic 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in college, representing 19 percent of all college students, compared to 12 percent in 2008. From 2001 to 2011, the number of Hispanics with a bachelor’s degree rose from 11.1 percent to 14.1 percent.

But, the rise isn’t limited to Hispanic students. In the last twenty years, Whites, Blacks, Asians/Pacific Islanders and Hispanics have all seen improvements in bachelor degree attainment rates. Nationwide, up to 60 percent of Asians/Pacific Islanders obtain at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 40 percent for Whites, 23 percent for Blacks and 15 percent for Hispanics.

Another area of concern is the fact that in states like California and Texas, completion rates for first-time, full-time Latino freshman – 15 percent and 17 percent, respectively – continue to lag behind other groups.

Moving Forward

According to Excelencia in Education, a non-profit focusing on Latinos in higher education, for the United States to regain the top global ranking for college degree attainment, Latinos will need to earn 5.5 million more degrees by 2020.

That would go a long way toward boosting the nation’s economic and political vitality, according to one study by the Washington-based think tank Center for American Progress.

The study, which outlines the benefits enjoyed by those with at least a bachelor’s degree, shows college graduates earn more, access more opportunities, show greater rates of civic engagement and have a higher quality of life overall. The authors note that in 2006 the average annual income for a college graduate was $56,897 compared to $30,072 for a high school graduate. And that gap continues to widen for those with masters degrees versus those who hold only a bachelors.

Hans Johnson, co-director of research for the Public Policy Institute of California and author of Closing the Gap: Meeting California’s Need for College Graduates, says that California still has a long way to go. The state needs many more college graduates before it can meet labor market demands.

“When we look at Latino attainment levels we see strong progress in the first generation but that progress still leaves US-born Latinos far short of other groups in terms of college completion,” he said.

In California, Hispanics surpass white enrollment

California is home to a third of the nation’s Hispanic population. As of March of this year, California Latinos now represent 39 percent of the state population, making them the single largest ethnic group in the state.

And for the first time, the state’s premier public institution of higher education, The University of California, announced in April that it had accepted more Hispanic/Chicano students than white students. (This number was an aggregate of all Hispanic, Latino and Chicano students.) Last year Latinos made up 27.6 percent of those admitted for the freshman class. This year, Latinos made up 28.8 percent of the 61,120 Californians admitted for this fall’s freshman class across the UC system’s nine undergraduate campuses. In total, nearly one thousand more Hispanic and Chicano students were admitted this year compared to last year.

Next year, the University of California will have even more data available about Hispanic admissions, thanks to the addition this year of more ethnic designations to their freshman application.

As of 2014, UC’s application has 69 categories including Caribbean, Cuban American, Latin American Latino, Mexican American Chicano, Puerto Rican, Other Black and Other White Caucasian.

As California goes, so goes the nation

Still, experts say that the latest increase in Hispanic admissions at the University of California isn’t a surprise, and that it’s more a reflection of changing demographics already underway.

“Increasing numbers of students admitted to UC is good news but it’s also what you’d expect given the demography [and] high school graduation rates in the state,” said Johnson, of the Public Policy Institute of California. According to Excelencia in Education, in California, Hispanic students make up over half of the K-12 population; in Texas it’s just under half. In Florida, 22 percent of children in K-12 are Hispanic. Nationally, Latino youth represent 22 percent of the K-12 public school population.

The numbers say it all

Mark Hugo López, Director of Hispanic Research at PEW Research says that Hispanic college admission gains are a reflection of trends. There are more college-age Latinos and the share of Latinos finishing high school and choosing to go to college is also growing.

“These changes are more amplified when you look at young people,” he said. “Nationwide Hispanics make up 17 percent of the population, but among 18- 29 year olds they make up 21 percent of the population.” Given those numbers, Gandara says more change needs to happen to make Hispanic enrollment a more accurate reflection of the growth of the population.

Is Obama really the ‘deporter in chief?’ depends on whom you ask

[Author]by Angilee Shah[/Author]

For Prerna Lal, how depor tation data is parsed and explained is personal. She was once an undocumented immigran t herself, and for her, the deportation statistics represent people’s lives.
“There’s political motivations behind the numbers game,” says Lal. “We can cut the numbers either way, but the fact remains that the actual number of deportations is 2 million. These are people who are hard-working members of our community — mothers, brothers, members of our family.”

Lal is a member of the newly formed Not1More Blue Ribbon Commission, a project to represent the interests of people affected by deportation and detention. And for the record, she says President Barack Obama is the “deporter-in-chief,” a label immigration activists have applied to him recently.

During the Obama administration, there have been an estimated 2 million deportations, about 400,000 each year from 2009 to 2012. The New York Times, using a Freedom of Information Act request, obtained data that shows that about two-thirds of these cases involved people with minor or no criminal records.

Compare this to data from 1975 through 1996, when the average number of deportations per year was about 30,000, according to Department of Homeland Security data. As new laws were passed that increased the range of deportable offenses, the number of deportations increased to more than 250,000 per year from 1997 through 2012.

Allison Brownell Tirres, an immigration law scholar and historian at DePaul University, says the huge increase is largely the result of laws passed in 1996, well before Obama took office. These laws significantly expanded the range of deportable offenses, to include misdemeanors such as marijuana possession or writing a bad check, while restricting judges’ discretion.

“We’ve tied the hands of judges in terms of being able to provide deportation relief. You could have someone who’s been here 30 years, has good moral character and once would have been granted deportation relief and a path to legalization. Now we don’t have those legal mechanisms any more,” Tirres says.

The two laws, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), were part of a “law and order” agenda, says Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration. At the time, she says, the immigration system was perceived as full of loopholes, “a lawyer’s playground.”

“The Clinton administration objected to many elements of the law, but at the end of the day the president signed the law because the administration was committed broadly to strengthening immigration enforcement,” says Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a nonpartisan center in Washington, DC. “This is a system that is performing as it was designed to perform going back almost 20 years, with support across the aisle.”

Deportations again increased after the 9/11 attacks, when the focus on border security “went into overdrive” because it became part of the national security response, “even though the hijackers came legally into the country,” says Meissner. Huge amounts of money were poured into enforcing immigration laws, creating both infrastructure and technology that enables the deportation rates we see today. Funding for immigration enforcement increased from $1.2 billion in 1990 to $17.7 billion in 2013, which Meissner explains in an essay she co-authored for MPI.

Because the increase in deportation rates has such deep roots, Meissner says the “deporter-in-chief” label is not fair to Obama, but “it does convey a sense of the deep disappointment and dismay. There is enormous pain out there.”

Tanya Golash-Boza, a sociologist at the University of California, Merced, and author of Immigration Nation, disagrees. She says Obama could have done more to change the Department of Homeland Security when he took office.

“The Department of Homeland Security’s mission under Janet Napolitano [then secretary of DHS] was immigration enforcement,” she says, but it did not need to be. While it is an exaggeration to say that 2 million deportations equals 2 million people deported or 2 million families separated, Golash- Boza says the scale of deportations has earned Obama the “deporter-in-chief” moniker. While the nickname obscures the causes driving the deportation spike, there are ways the Obama administration could help to curb deportations in the short-term, says Tirres. The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the administration discretion about how to prosecute. For example, the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program gives the Department of Homeland Security the ability to prioritize what laws they enforce.

“This is not unlike the discretion that criminal prosecutors have,” Tirres says. “They’re able to decide whether they’re going to bring charges at all, without much constitutional or court scrutiny.”

Ninety-six law professors, including Tirres, signed a letter to the president in May 2012 [pdf] that outlined three ways that he can curb deportations using executive authority.

Tirres adds a fourth: The Obama administration could make sure that the Department of Homeland Security is complying with the “Morton memo,” a 2011 directive to exercise discretion about which cases of undocumented immigration to pursue.

According to the memo, longtime US residents, the elderly or sick, for example, “should prompt particular care and consideration.”

From Lal’s perspective, Obama should be using every bit of his executive authority, up to offering pardons. She moved to the US with her parents from the Fiji Islands before the 2000 military coup. Her parents, sponsored by her grandmother, a US citizen, waited in the backlog and got green cards 10 years later. By that time, Lal had turned 24 and “aged out” of gaining citizenship via her parents. When children turn 21 they can no longer be part of their families’ bids for citzenship and must restart the petitioning process. Lal’s case was just resolved this month, after she had spent three years in deportation hearings.

“There’s potential here to provide relief for our families,” she says.

Magic realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s homage in Mexico

The line of people was endless, Mexico’’s Palace of Fine Arts was besieged by thousands of admirers who, instead of bidding farewell to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, carried flowers to express their gratitude.

Many arrived early in the morning and stayed outside the building waiting for their time to pay tribute to him, although they knew that the ashes of the one-of-a-kind author will not arrive until the afternoon.

Inside were his ashes and all those who wanted to say goodbye to him, to lay a flower, to thank him for the food with which he nourished endless dreams, to say their favorite phrase in a book read so many times.

However, in reality, he was outside: in the deep and thirsty eyes of an elderly woman who was lost in the paths of Macondo in the crowd, in the melodies from the guitar with which a group of young people filled the wait with music, in the afflicted face of a child who asked his father why he had died.

The tribute was not limited to the walls of the building, it was not necessary to look for him only there, Gabo was in the voices of people, in the rhythm of vallenatos played by a band that was accompanying the march to the vestibule of the building, in some tears that rolled down, discreetly, as if they were bidding farewell to a very beloved relative.

When the funeral cortege arrived and Gabo’s ashes were placed in the middle of the vestibule at the Palace of Fine Arts, the hall burst in applauses, because friends, relatives and guests joined for a minute to honor the Nobel Award winner, journalist, script writer and narrator.

Outside, the crowed also applauded here and there, when someone read a fragment, another one shouted “Long live Gabo”, when that boy took flowers from a too formal bouquet, pulled the petals off and launched them to the wind.

The world celebrates Spanish Language Day

Miguel Cervantes de SaavedraMiguel Cervantes de Saavedra

In tribute to the writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, deceased on April 23, 1816, each year is celebrated in this date the Day of Spanish Language.

Known as El Manco del Lepanto, Cervantes left among their works the novel The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha, monumental text that contributed to the enhancement of world literature and Spanish language.

Described as the first modern novel, this has been the most translated and edited book in history, only by the Bible.

Initiative of writer Vicente Clavel, this date was first celebrated in Valencia in 1926 and then the holiday began to be celebrated throughout Spain for later in 1964, being adopted by all Spanish-Speaking countries.

However, this celebration today comes when the world says goodbye to another great writer of Spanish language, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, who recently died in Mexico City.

Author of extraordinary  texts, included in Gabo’s work there is a play that many consider another Don Quixote, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1982.

It would be worth to devote then this Spanish Language Day to García Márquez, for his contributions to journalism, literature, and even cinema, one of his passions.

Ancient Cave in Spain Could Hold Origins of the Study of Astronomy

A cave located on Spain’s Canary Islands, in what was probably the aboriginal region of Artevigua, could reveal an unsuspected knowledge of astronomy by the ancient islanders since it marks equinoxes and solstices, while inside it the light recreates images related to fertility.

The cave was used as a temple and, besides its astronomical function, the light creates in its interior a mythological account of fertility, the likes of which exist nowhere else in the world,” archaeologist Julio Cuenca, who has investigated the area since the 1990s, said.

 

Sánchez Cerén faces resurgence of violence in El Salvador

Salvador Sánchez CerénSalvador Sánchez Cerén
Of the many challenges which El Salvador’s Salvador Sánchez Cerén will face when he takes office on June 1, there is none so pressing as that posed by an escalation in violent crime and extortion associated with the country’s mara gangs.

Homicides are on the increase and in recent weeks gangs have carried out a series of brazen attacks on police, prompting one former head of the national police (PNC) to warn that El Salvador is at risk of becoming a “failed State”.

Just as there are marked differences between politicians about how to deal with the maras – more repression or more emphasis on prevention and reinsertion – two separate peace plans have emerged in the last week: one tabled by the current justice and public security minister, Ricardo Perdomo; and one by nine different churches, including the original two mediators of the March 2012 gang truce. Reported by Latin News.

Alarming food dependency on imports in Mexico

Mexico’’s food dependency on imports reaches alarming levels today due to rural depopulation, insufficient national production and the concentration of the market in big corporations, said the Chamber of Deputies.

A Federal Superior Auditors (ASF) report released last February showed an increase in poverty in rural settings and a scarce generation of employment.

According to the document, there is a divorce between agriculture and industry, bad quality and low levels of fertility of the land due to erosion and soil degradation, lack of technology, infrastructure and credits.

The text added that the incidence of drug trafficking in crop patterns, as well as the escalation of violence and insecurity, extreme poverty, low educational levels and the lack of public services add to the serious situation in the country, La Jornada journal reports today. The text said the importation of basic foodstuffs reaches 45 percent, above the 25 percent recommended by FAO.

The ASF warns about how the increase in food prices has intensified food poverty, since the population whose income is below the well-being line rose from six million people in 2010 to seven million in 2012.

Latin American films have greater presence at Tribeca Film Festival

Alonso RuizpalaciosAlonso Ruizpalacios
The current edition of the Tribeca Film Festival intends to visualize better the Latin American scene, with movies from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, organizers said today.

According to Genna Terranova, one the festival organizers, last year there were not so many Latin American films and now we are trying to include many more. There is a lot of variety, many countries and many voices, she said.

Besides about 80 movies, the festival includes short films and documentaries that will be playing until May 27th.

The festival was created in 2002 as an initiative of producer Jane Rosenthal and actor Robert de Niro to revitalize the homonymous neighborhood after the 9/11 events.

The Mexican film ‘’Güeros’’, by Mexican filmmaker

Alonso Ruizpalacios, stands out among the 160 movies that will be played here at the Tribeca Festival 2014.

The film, which is the only Mexican movie included in the festival, will compete in the category World Narrative.This is Alonso Ruizpalacios’ feature debut, in which three young men, searching for a folk-rock legend rumored to be an idol of Bob Dylan, journey across Mexico City during a student strike at a university in the 90s.

Feature films, short films and documentaries participate in the festival, founded in New York City as an important film center and to contribute to the long-term recovery of Lower Manhattan.

by the El Reportero’s wire services

The middle class in Canada is doing better than the middle class in the United States

For most of Canada’s existence, it has been regarded as the weak neighbor to the north by most Americans. Well, that has changed dramatically over the past decade or so. Back in the year 2000, middle class Canadians were earning much less than middle class Americans, but since then there has been a dramatic shift.

At this point, middle class Canadians are actually earning more than middle class Americans are. The Canadian economy has been booming thanks to a rapidly growing oil industry, and meanwhile the U.S. middle class has been steadily shrinking. If current trends continue, a whole bunch of other countries are going to start passing us too. The era of the “great U.S. middle class” is rapidly coming to a bitter end.

In recent years, I have been up to Canada frequently, and I am always amazed at how much nicer things are up there. The stores and streets are cleaner, the people are more polite and it seems like almost everyone that wants to work has a job.

But despite knowing all this, I was still surprised when the New York Times reported this week that middle class incomes in Canada have now surpassed middle class incomes in the United States…

After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

And things are particularly dire for those in the U.S. on the low end of the scale…

The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.

Even while our politicians and the media continue to proclaim that everything is “just fine”, the U.S. middle class continues to slide toward oblivion.

The biggest reason for this is the lack of middle class jobs. Millions of good jobs have been shipped overseas, and millions of other good jobs have been replaced by technology.

The value of our labor is declining with each passing day, and this has forced millions upon millions of very qualified Americans to take whatever they can get. As NBC News recently noted, this is a big reason why the temp industry has been booming…

For Americans who can’t find jobs, the booming demand for temp workers has been a path out of unemployment, but now many fear it’s a dead-end route.

With full-time work hard to find, these workers have built temping into a de facto career, minus vacation, sick days or insurance. The assignments might be temporary — a few months here, a year there — but labor economists warn that companies’ growing hunger for a workforce they can switch on and off could do permanent damage to these workers’ career trajectories and retirement plans.

“It seems to be the new norm in the working world,” said Kelly Sibla, 54. The computer systems engineer has been looking for a full-time job for four years now, but the Amherst, Ohio, resident said she has to take whatever she can find.

It has been estimated that one out of every ten jobs is now filled by a temp agency. I have worked for temp agencies myself in the past. Big companies like the idea of having “disposable workers”, and this is a trend that is likely to only grow in the years ahead.

But temp jobs and part-time jobs don’t pay as well as normal jobs. And those kinds of jobs generally cannot support middle class families.

At this point, nine out of the top ten occupations in the United States pay an average wage of less than $35,000 a year.

That is absolutely stunning.

These days most families are barely scraping by, and they don’t have much extra money to go shopping with.

This is a big reason for the “retail apocalypse” that we are now witnessing. This week we learned that retail stores in the United States are closing at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But you won’t hear much about that on the mainstream news.

You can find lots of “space available” signs and empty buildings in formerly middle class neighborhoods all over the country. For example, one of my readers recently shot the following YouTube video in Scottsdale, Arizona. As you can see, empty commercial buildings are all over the place…

As the middle class shrinks, more families are being forced to take in family members that can’t find decent work. I have written previously about the huge rise in the number of young adults that are moving back in with their parents. But this is not just happening to young people. As the Los Angeles Times recently detailed, the number of Americans 50 and older that are moving in with their parents has absolutely soared in recent years…

For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents’ homes swelled 67.6 percent to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.

The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who crunched the data.

“The numbers are pretty amazing,” Wallace said. “It’s an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They’re mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They’ve got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden you see this huge push back into their parents’ homes.”

The U.S. economy is slowly but steadily falling apart, and more people fall out of the middle class every single day.

A recent Gallup survey found that 14 percent of all Americans would experience “significant financial hardship” within one week of a job loss.

An additional 29 percent of all Americans would experience “significant financial hardship” within one month of a job loss.

That means that 43 percent of the entire country is living right on the edge.

It is no wonder why only about 30 percent of all Americans believe that we are moving in the right direction as a nation.

Most people know deep down that something is seriously wrong. But most people can’t explain exactly what that is or how to fix it.

Meanwhile, the politicians and the media keep telling us that if we just keep doing the same old things that everything will work out okay somehow. The blind are leading the blind, and we are rapidly marching toward disaster.

by Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse Analysis

Colombia: Moving towards a change in the politics against drug trafficking?

Colombia is a cocaine producing country. Seventy percent of the cocaine produced is exported to the United States. We are concerned about the cocaine production and the role the Colombian guerrillas and the paramilitary have in the business, and what strategies the government is employing to face it. In this interview with Daniel Mejía Londoño, the director of the Center of Studies on Security and Drugs at the University of the Andes of Bogota.
Professor Mejía Londoño, what strategy is the government of Juan Manuel Santos employing to fight drug trafficking?

The position of the government is generally prohibitionist, although recently it has been open to an international debate on the possibility that the state should fulfill a regulatory r ole, more than to continue efforts to shut down production. In spite of the fact that it is the country that might and should lead the debate in Latin America concerning the politics of drugs, it has not taken this role so far, hoping to follow the exam sple of of Guatemala, which is a small country that has no influence at the regional level.

Why are peasants deciding to produce cocaine instead of food?

It is more profitable to produce cocaine than to produce food. Also, the peasants do not have to process it or take it to the market to sell it. The buyers come as close as the edge of their farms to collect the crops, so it is much easier. In some cases pressure is directly applied by the armed illegal groups giving the peasants the difficult choice of either cultivating cocaine or leaving the area.

What role does the paramilitary and the guerrillas have in drug trafficking?

Up to the mid 1990’s, the Farc (Armed Force Revolutionists of Colombia) was linked to the drug trafficking through receiving a tax that is called “gramaje”. That is to say, the guerrillas were receiving from the drug trafficker a payment for every kilo of cocaine produced in the territory under his control. With the fall of the communism, the guerrilla organizations lost international financing and, making use of the gap of power created by the dismantling of the cartels of Medellin and of Cali, entered the Business by controlling zones of farms and laboratories. The Farc and, more recently, the Eln (Army of National Liberation) are involved only in the first stages of the production, that is to say the farming of the coca leaf and its transformation in paste, in some zones they go so far as to producing cocaine, and have established strategic alliances with drug traffickers to smuggle it out of the country. On the other hand, the paramilitary and the Bacrim (Criminal Bands) are linked directly to the drug trafficking, and they themselves take the cocaine out of the country.

One of the methods used to try to stop the farming of cocaine is the spraying of the crops with glifosato (a herbicide). What consequences does it have?

The spraying of this chemical has been very harmful in terms of health and the environment, in addition to being ineffective in terms of reduction of these types of crops. In a review of a database of all the medical visits of Colombians to the health system between 2003 and 2008, there are 54 million incidents. We have compared this with the database of the sprayings, performing an economectric analysis. We believe that in the spray zones there is a much higher incidence of dermatologic problems and a major increase in miscarriages. There are other studies that have revealed negative effects on the environment and a degradation of the confidence that the people living in the municipalities of the fumigations have in the institutions of the state.

These problems do not appear in the cases in which the illicit farmings are eradicated manually. What do you think about this alternative?

Manual eradication has a high cost. Many people doing the manual eradication have died from land mines protecting the farming áreas, which were planted by the Farc or the paramilitary. Even if this was an efficient strategy, I do not think it is worth the sacrifices of so many Colombian lives just so that less cocaine is sent to the USA and to Europe. It is not just our problem, but they are transferring the whole cost to the producing countries – every country has to pay their share of the costs.

What is your proposal to fight to the drug trafficking?

To focus on the demand within the politics of prevention and treatment, it is necessary to treat the problem of the drugs as a problem of public health. The current prohibitionist method is not working. One of the points in the agenda of the dialogues of peace that are ongoing between the Colombian government and the Farc is the problem of drug trafficking.

Do you believe that the decision that will go on the negotiation table will be the ability to change the politics of Santos’s government into the topic of the struggle against drug trafficking?

Yes, it can be that the peace agreements lead to a change in the politics of struggle agains drug trafficking, but this should not be the reason.

Are we going to change it just because the Farc asks for it, after they spent 50 years murdering people, and not because there are more than 15 years of investigations that they say that it is a failure?

by Orsetta Bellani

Colombia: Nationwide Agrarian Submit considers new farmers’ strike

Some 4,000 people from all corners of Colombia participated in the National Agrarian Summit, Peasant, Ethnic and from the People that took place in 15-17 March 2014 in the capital Bogotá. The event consisted of two days of panels and discussions on the issues that most affect the Colombian population, especially those living in the countryside, and concluded on March 17 with a march of about 30 thousand people who went through to the central Bogotá Plaza Bolívar.

César Jerez, national coordinator of Anzorc (Rural Reserve Areas National Association) told El Reportero that, “The National Land Summit represents a process that comes after the August 2013 agricultural strikes. We met with the idea of bringing together peasants, indigenous sectors, people of African descent and people of Colombia, to build a single list of demands, we propose a single negotiating table with the government for the entire country, to support the peace process between the government and the Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and finally set, if the government does not fulfill the agreements they make on the negotiating table, a route of peasant mobilization for the whole country.”

In August 2013, farmers from the better part of the country – backed by students, truck drivers, health workers and led by organizations such as Bureau of Dialogue and Agreement (MIA), the Congress of the People’s Patriotic March, the Coordinator Nacional Agraria (CNA) and the Process of Black Communities – paralyzed the country for three weeks, criticizing the high cost of inputs, the problems of access to land and infrastructural constraints that make it difficult to market their products. During the protests, farmers put a lot of emphasis on the necessity of repealing the resolution 970 of ICA (Colombian Agricultural Institute), which stipulates an obligation to plant certified inbred and transgenic seeds produced by transnational corporations. They also highlighted the problems associated with competition derived from free trade agreements (FTAs).

“The Colombian peasants suffer a structural neglect, exacerbated by the imposition of free trade agreements (FTAs). Actually, it´s not even about free trade agreements, since the signatory governments, such as the U.S., subsidize their agriculture while the Colombia does not. Therefore, the agricultural products imported from the United States can be sold at a cheaper price than Colombian products, a fact that is a disadvantage for local farmers, to the point that some agricultural sectors have gone bankrupt”, explains ASCAMCAT (Association Campesina del Catatumbo)’s Leonardo Rojas Diaz.

In fact, in May 2013 – one year after the entry into force of the FTA with the United States – according to the magazine Portfolio, Colombian imports grew by 50 per cent, mainly in food items. By analyzing the data on coffee exports, the country’s top product, the quality and pride of the Colombian population, we found that in the same period it went down by 31 per cent, while its imports reached 59.1 per cent.

The 2013 peasant mobilizations were harshly repressed and clashes between peasants and the Mobile squadron Riot (riot police) killed 19 people, while 600 were injured. “After the strike they installed negotiating tables with the government of Juan Manuel Santos,” Elisabeth Pavon, a spokeswoman for the farmers in the Catatumbo region in the MIA (Table of Dialogue and Agreement), tells El Reportero. “There is a national negotiating table that gathers delegates from each department and there are tables of local negotiations, one for each department. The results have been very partial, perhaps our table was the one that advanced the most.”

Apart from evidencing the difficulties in the negotiations and the Santos government’s non compliance, Colombian farmers criticize its proposed accession to the Agrarian Covenant, an agreement with Colombian agriculture unions that resulted of a consultation process that began on September 12, 2013. According to grassroots organizations, unions represent agribusiness and the oligarchy, whose interests are opposed to those of peasants, and roundly rejected the government´s proposal.

During the National Agricultural Summit, peasant, indigenous and Afro-descendant organizations from across the country announced that if the government remains deaf to their requests during the first week of May, the date of a new agrarian strike will be set. This is a very dangerous situation for Juan Manuel Santos, considering that he will seek re-election in the May 25 presidential elections.

 

by Orsetta Bellani

Next Salvadorian government for more jobs and productivity

by the El Reportero’s wire services

Salvador Sánchez CerénSalvador Sánchez Cerén

The next government of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) will seek to generate more jobs, so it is urgent to strengthen the country’’s development, said today President-elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren.

In an interview with a local TV channel, Sánchez Ceren explained that to achieve this goal it is necessary to respect the rights of workers and improve their wages, stimulate the industrial sector through the creation of an institutional framework and stimulate investment.

In this regard, he recalled that the present government of Mauricio Funes and the FMLN were able to increase revenues to the extent that they were improving employment conditions.

For the new mandate, there are opportunities for the economic boom of the country because they inherit more than US$ 800 million for the administration of Funes, he said.

Many international companies are interested in investing in the country, much in energy and, in this context, Sanchez Ceren said they will seek mechanisms for El Salvador to be part of Petrocaribe. He also denied that ALBA-Petróleos El Salvador exerts some kind of influence on the nation as one of the questions suggested. We know that understanding will be difficult on some issues, but we must put before the interests of the country, for that reason he insisted on dialogue  and national agreements.

Unasur arrives in Caracas to the perfect narrative

The Venezuelan military high command emitted an unusually long (780-word) communiqué in response to the arrest of three generals accused by President Nicolás Maduro of plotting a coup d’état, in which it congratulated itself on its “coherent” conduct in the face of “the situation denominated a soft coup” taking place in Venezuela since 12 February. If that were not politicised enough, the statement went on to declare that the “monolithic” Bolivarian national armed forces (FANB) is no longer the “elitist and removed from-the-everyday” institution of yore, and that thanks to its “supreme and eternal commander”, Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), its fundamental priority now is to achieve “the wellbeing of all Venezuelans”, and to be “at the forefront of the country’s development”.

Russia interested in Nicaragua’s inter-oceanic canal

A delegation from the Russian State Duma in Nicaragua has expressed Russia’’s interest in participating in the construction of an intercondiciones oceanic canal in Nicaragua.

Laureano Ortega, a delegate from the Investment Promotion Agency of the Government of Nicaragua, said on television that he had held meetings with the parliamentarians and that they were well informed and very interested in the project.

Logically, consultations about how Russian companies might participate in the project have taken place, Ortega said, adding that Nicaragua’s image overseas is quite positive.

Earlier this year, the Sandinista government and the HKND Group, the canal’s concessionaire company, informed that the works for this mega project will start in the last quarter of 2014.

Along with the inter-oceanic waterway, two deep-water ports, a pipeline, new airports and a railroad will also be built.

Russian parliamentarians also held meetings with Foreign Minister Samuel Santos and representatives from the Ministry of Industry, Development and Trade, in which they expressed their interest in strengthening cooperative ties with Nicaragua.

The Russian State Duma delegation arrived in Nicaragua on Tuesday for a two-day visit.

(Prensa Latina and Latin News contributed to this news report).

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