In 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, I moved from a small town in the Midwest to San Clemente, California. The main artery leading from the sleepy coastal town to the inland community of Irvine, where I worked, was Interstate-5, a freeway best described as a six or seven-lane parking lot on a bad day. To escape the worst part of the traffic jam, I often exited the freeway at Sand Canyon Road and turned northwest onto Irvine Blvd, which provided a quicker, more scenic route to work. The natural beauty, which included several miles of strawberry fields bordered on three sides by towering eucalyptus trees, provided my Zen moment of the day.
But one day, some years after beginning the commute, I turned onto Sand Canyon Road and discovered that many of the stately trees had been cut down, and bulldozers had uprooted the strawberry fields. Within weeks, a foundation had been laid for a large shopping center, and by early 2010; the remnants of the strawberry tracts had given way to rows of upscale homes and condos.
Large-scale construction projects of this nature are common in Southern California; in fact, due to gentrification, Hollywood as it exists today, barely resembles the Tinseltown where I worked as a musician in the 1970s. And while I’m saddened by the loss of popular Hollywood landmarks, the transformation of the Sand Canyon farmland in Irvine represents a political and financial trend even more alarming because it has resulted in the loss of American assets to foreign investors.
As Florida Congressman, Alan Grayson, recently wrote in a newsletter:
"Listen, we are in a deep, deep hole, thanks to fake trade. Thanks to fake trade, right now, 1/7th of all assets in this country—every business, every plot of land, every car—1/7th of all assets in this country are now owned by foreigners. And ultimately, if we keep going the way we’re going, they all will be.”
Not only has income inequality mushroomed to unsustainable levels under Obama, so has asset inequality. Because the president failed to protect homeowners during the early stages of the great recession, and because he refused to hold Wall Street traders and bankers accountable for their crimes, millions of Americans have lost their homes and properties through shady foreclosure proceedings. The homes – many that had been passed down through generations – were flipped to wealthy foreign investors who then resold or leased them at usury prices to the very same Americans who had lost their homes. And even though, many of these pieces of property were purchased at rock bottom prices, in L.A., we now face a severe shortage of affordable housing.
Housing and Property Acquisitions
From Bloomberg:
March 14 (Bloomberg) -- Connie Wang paid about $960,000 last June for a new four-bedroom, four-bath house in a sprawling swath of Southern California that’s home to Disneyland and Pimco. Now she may buy a second as an investment.On any given day in L.A., the mad scramble to reshape our national assets into businesses and housing complexes that meet the financial needs of foreign corporations can be seen on almost every corner. Construction projects are cropping up ―block-by-block—in Hollywood at an alarming rate, eliminating some of our most treasured landmarks.“You know why Orange County is doing better?” said Wang, a native of Taiwan who splits her time between Shenzhen in southern China, where she oversees a toy-manufacturing business, and Irvine, California, where she raised her three children. “It’s because all my neighbors are from China and Taiwan, and they all bought their homes in cash.”
Demand for newly built houses is rising in Irvine and surrounding cities, an affluent region south of Los Angeles whose employers include Walt Disney Co., fund manager Pacific Investment Management Co. and technology companies Broadcom Corp. and Western Digital Corp. Orange County home sales are being driven up by Asian-born buyers who are lured by lower prices following the housing collapse…
Here are a few examples:
Historic Villa Carlotta is sold -- L.A. TimesAnd who is CGI?The Villa Carlotta, a landmark luxury Hollywood apartment house built in the early days of the motion picture industry, has been purchased by CGI, a Los Angeles investment firm that has stated they intend to renovate the property.
From their website:
· CGI is one of Asia’s leading investment & corporate restructuring companies with extensive global client relationship and financial capabilities.
· CGI INC. always minimize the risk in development business by reasonable, stable management and will take ourselves to the top position as a real estate developer based on the best planning and technology in Asia Market.
Chinese developer buys site near Staples Center, plans to build condos LA TimesThe property purchased by Shanghai-based Shenglong Group is located at the southwest corner of Grand Avenue and 12th Street. Mark Tarczynski of Colliers International, who represented the sellers, said a 1930s warehouse on the site would be razed to make room.Another developer from China has entered the downtown Los Angeles real estate market with the $26-million purchase of property near Staples Center where it intends to build condominiums.
"A lot of foreign money, especially Chinese money, coming downtown has been focused on condos," said Andrew Tashjian of CBRE Group Inc.
According to Eddie Kim, staff writer for Down Town News:
"There is a big difference… between the current boom and the one that peaked around 2006. Whereas the first wave of housing was powered by local developers often on a piecemeal basis, today the residential and mixed-use projects (and sometimes mega-projects) increasingly come from deep-pocketed institutional investors. What’s more, many of those pouring money into Downtown hail from Asia."
To illustrate his claim, Kim cited recent projects:
· Company: Hanjin International - South Korea Key Project: Wilshire Grand replacement, a $1 billion, 73-story tower at Seventh and Figueroa streets that will be the tallest building west of the Mississippi River when completed. It will have 400,000 square feet of office space and 900 hotel rooms.
· Company: Greenland Group Shanghai, China Key Project: Metropolis, a $1 billion, 6.33-acre mixed-use development adjacent to L.A. Live at Francisco and Eighth streets. The first phase, which broke ground last month, will create a 19-story hotel and a 38-floor residential tower.
· Company: Oceanwide Real Estate Group Beijing, China Key Project: Figueroa Central, a 4.6-acre mixed-use development that will rise on two current parking lots east of Staples Center. It has been entitled for 45- and 33-story residential and hotel towers.
· Company: Onni Group Vancouver, Canada Key Project: A $100 million, 32-story apartment tower at 888 S. Olive St. It will offer 303 one-, two- and three-bedroom units. Scheduled to open in the first quarter of 2015.
· Company: Overseas United Enterprises, Limited Singapore Key Project: U.S Bank Tower, which was purchased from MPG Office Trust last year for $367.5 million.
· Company: Vancouver-based Onni Group has broken ground or submitted plans for more than 1,000 units throughout Downtown, all in mid- and high-rise structures.
· Company: Carmel Partners is deep into construction on a low-rise 700-apartment building with a Whole Foods market at Eighth Street and Grand Avenue, and the San Francisco-based developer recently revealed plans for a 27-story, 363-unit tower nearby at Eighth and Olive streets.
eddie@downtownnews.com http://www.ladowntownnews.com/....
From Forbes magazine:
Chinese To Spend Billions On American Real Estate Forbes, 7 2013And consider this paragraph written by Julie Makinen of the L.A. Times:News of new Chinese real estate deals are popping up every quarter. Similar moves happened with the Japanese back in the 1980s. Now it’s China’s turn. And by most estimates, they are snatching up high end real estate in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, in particular. In California, China is the third largest foreign buyer of real estate, following Mexico and people from the Philippines, according to Realtor.org. *
By comparison, and across the 50 states, the Chinese buy more U.S. homes than Indians, Mexicans or the British. While Mexicans are big in California and all across the south, China still ranks within the top five foreign nationalities buying real estate in 44 states. China, for instance, is ahead of Mexican buyers throughout the more costly Northeast. They already are the number one foreign buyer group in states like West Virginia and Massachusetts. They are number two in New York, Maine, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, Wyoming and Hawaii. *
Right now, Chinese investors see the U.S. as a bargain following the worst foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression. In fact, some cities and towns across the country are cheaper than properties in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Home prices in the U.S., coupled with economic uncertainties and tight regulations designed to curb a housing bubble in China, are driving record Chinese investments in the U.S. residential and commercial real estate markets, according to the Asia Society, a multinational think tank with offices throughout the U.S. and Asia Pacific.
"In January, [Lauri] Lustig-Bower [CBRE Group Inc.] said, she’ll be hosting investors from Hong Kong who are looking to make investments for already constructed sites in the $25-million to $50 million range. And she is in the process of working out a purchase agreement with a Chinese investor for a “high-profile” development site in West L.A."
But we’re not the only nation that has been plundered by investment predators since the 2007 financial collapse. During a 2012 interview with the Guardian, author Fred Pearce explained his latest book, The Land Grabbers:
What inspired you to write The Land Grabbers?While Asian efforts to acquire prime real estate in LA are booming, it’s hard to imagine a Congressional act more cowardly, corrupt, and egregious than the recent backdoor deal slipped into the National Defense Authorization Act, absconding 2,400 acres of sacred Native American land from the Apaches. The property was then ceded to Rio Tinto, an Australian mining company:Over the last few years, I became aware of this hidden revolution taking place around the world: the buying up of vast swaths of land by foreign entities from beneath its occupiers. Soaring grain prices in 2007/2008 led to countries such as Saudi Arabia and South Korea worrying about their national food security and buying up overseas land. Then speculators and investors started piling in on the back of that. The net result is that poor farmers and cattle herders across the world are being thrown off their land. Land grabbing is having more of an impact on the lives of poor people than climate change. No one has put together the global picture of land grabbing so I wanted to take a closer look.
Who's doing the grabbing?
A vast and colourful[sic] cast of characters: Gulf sheikhdoms, jumpy governments worried about food security, Chinese state corporations, Wall Street and City speculators, Russian oligarchs, Gaddafi's henchmen among many. Also some big conservation funds. Most likely your pension fund has a slice of the action too.
Congress Raids Ancestral Native American Lands With Defense Bill Michael McAuliffFrom Salon:When Terry Rambler, the chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, woke up Wednesday in Washington, D.C., it was to learn that Congress was deciding to give away a large part of his ancestral homeland to a foreign mining company.
Rambler came to the nation’s capital for the White House Tribal Nations Conference, an event described in a press announcement as an opportunity to engage the president, cabinet officials and the White House Council on Native American Affairs “on key issues facing tribes including respecting tribal sovereignty and upholding treaty and trust responsibilities,” among other things.
Rambler felt things got off to an unfortunate, if familiar, start when he learned that the House and Senate Armed Services Committee had decided to use the lame-duck session of Congress and the National Defense Authorization Act to give 2,400 acres of the Tonto National Forest in Arizona to a subsidiary of the Australian-English mining giant Rio Tinto.
Report: Wall Street is taking over American farms -- Lindsay AbramsBut farmland isn’t the prime reason many investors swallowed up family domains; it was to gain access to the water associated with the land that drove their ambitions.In the short-term, California’s farmers have this historic drought to worry about. But there’s a larger threat looming for farmland across the U.S.: Wall Street.
A new report from the Oakland Institute projects that over the next two decades, 400 million of acres of farmland could change hands from the families that have held it for generations to institutional investors – places like hedge funds, private equity, pension funds and university endowments – with a combined $10 billion in capital. Their enthusiasm for agriculture, the report claims, “borders on speculative mania.”
From Newsweek:
The Race To Buy Up The World’s Water– Newsweek, By Jeneen InterlandiAnd from a 2013 article written by Fred Pearce, and published by New Scientist magazine:Sitka, Alaska, is home to one of the world’s most spectacular lakes. Nestled into a U-shaped valley of dense forests and majestic peaks, and fed by snowpack and glaciers, the reservoir, named Blue Lake for its deep blue hues, holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it requires no treatment. The city’s tiny population—fewer than 10,000 people spread across 5,000 square miles—makes this an embarrassment of riches. Every year, as countries around the world struggle to meet the water needs of their citizens, 6.2 billion gallons of Sitka’s reserves go unused. That could soon change. In a few months, if all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil—and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai.
Usually this is called land-grabbing, but it is as much about water. In a world of drying rivers and plummeting water tables – and where a quarter of farm production is limited by water shortages – water is valuable stuff.But American property isn’t the only asset being forfeited to foreign buyers; in California, local access to institutions of higher learning has been severely restricted by the sudden influx of international students, primarily the Chinese.As Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup, has argued: "Water will become eventually the single most important commodity asset class, dwarfing oil, copper, agricultural commodities and precious metals." -- New Scientist | 4 March 2013 by Fred Pearce - Magazine issue 2906
Academics
Northridge State University is a 353-acre public university nestled in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. In terms of enrollment, it is the third largest university in California, with UCLA claiming the prize for first place. The long list of noted alumna includes Paula Abdul, Richard Dreyfuss, Jenna Elfman, Teri Garr, Eva Longoria, Eva Mendes, Phil Hartman, Helen Hunt, Cheech Marin, Alyson Hannigan and Debra Winger.
In 1977, the school boasted an enrollment of 28,000 students, with each enrollee paying an affordable $95 in tuition. Last year, enrollment was bursting at the seams, with 40,000 plus students paying the standard California tuition rate of $12,192. This year, the school received 58,000 applications for fall enrollment, and like all Cal State universities, it is struggling to cope with the sudden influx of out-of-area transfer students.
According to the LA Times:
The [California] system received more than 790,000 applications for fall 2015, a number greater than the population of North Dakota.During the great recession, California universities lost billions of dollars in educational funding, drastically reducing enrollment numbers.The ramifications systemwide are far-reaching.
In 2013, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reported:
As states prepare their budgets for the coming year, they face the challenge of reinvesting in public higher education systems after years of damaging cuts — the product of both the economic downturn and states’ reluctance to raise additional revenues.And who benefited from those budget cuts?In two states — Arizona and California — published tuition at four-year schools is up more than 70 percent, while other states’ universities and many two-year colleges have held tuition increases closer to the rate of inflation. Major increases in federal student aid and tax credits, on average, have fallen well short of covering these increases.
These sharp increases in tuition have accelerated longer-term trends of reducing college affordability and shifting costs from states to students. The College Board reports that the price of attending a four-year public college or university, even after accounting for increased federal financial aid and tax subsidies, has grown significantly faster than the growth in median income over the last 20 years.[4]
"To make up for the shortfall, the Cal State system opened its doors to out of state applicants, which resulted in out-of-state and international students seizing 21% of the university slots."
According to the San Jose Mercury News, 700 additional slots were added to the UC system in 2013, which included a 273 percent increase in out-of-state and international students. Only 12 percent of those spots went to California students; the international students grabbed 57 percent, while students from other states grabbed the remaining 31 percent.
As more California high school seniors fight for spaces at popular UC campuses, the universities have flung open their doors to students from other states and countries, more than tripling the ranks of out-of-state freshmen in the past five years.Here is an excerpt from the petition posted at MoveOn.org:Freshmen from outside the Golden State now make up almost 30 percent of their class at UC Berkeley and UCLA, up from just over 10 percent four years earlier, a new analysis by this newspaper shows.
The shift feels like a betrayal to some families coping with -- or fearing -- rejection by the distinguished university system, which was built by and for Californians but now is turning them away in record numbers.
"It feels like we're being sold out, or the kids are being sold out," said Rohini Ashok, a San Jose mother who started an online petition last week to draw attention to what she considers a crisis after reading a story in this newspaper about UC's historic low acceptance rates for in-state students. The petition, "UC for Californians," gathered 2,330 [now 5,018] signatures in its first week.
University of California is now "selling" its admission process to the highest bidder. Qualified high school students are being rejected in favor of out-of-state and foreign candidates, while a portion of the budget is paid by the state government and our tax dollars.The LA Times:
An estimated 25,000 qualified high school graduates have been turned away from Cal State campuses in recent years, many of them turning to community colleges, private universities and out-of-state institutions, said Eric Forbes, Cal State's assistant vice chancellor for student academic services.In 2014, Asian students accounted for the largest number of students enrolled at UCLA. They edged out White Non-Hispanic students 30% to 29.8%, while Black Non-Hispanic enrollment dropped to an alarming 4.2%.Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) said in a statement that California students are being offered “a back seat” compared to those from outside the state.“
At the 34,000-student Santa Monica campus, the situation has been so dire; college regents proposed a two-tier system be implemented to make-up for funding shortfalls.
“Our classes are inundated with students begging to be enrolled after they’re full,” [Santa Monica College President, Chui L.] Tsang said. “We’ve had people from the community asking us if we can open up more courses. The alternative is that students can wait and try their luck next semester or go outside to a more expensive private or for-profit college.”
Santa Monica College to offer two-tier course pricing By Carla Rivera, Los Angeles TimesWhile President Obama’s proposal to cover the costs of enrolling in a community college is a step in the right direction, there is little reason to believe the program will ever be enacted. States will have to pay 25% of the program’s costs, and one only need look at the incredible funding shortfalls in California to realize the money is just not there.“Many students said they view the board’s action as a move toward privatizing programs while relieving the state of its responsibility to adequately fund public higher education.
“It’s creating a two-tiered system of wealthier students who can afford classes and struggling working-class and low-income students competing for the scraps of what’s left; it’s definitely a move in the wrong direction,” said student government President Harrison Wills.”
And during a time when millions of American families are struggling to pay the costs of their children’s education, Asians have exploited the weakness in our educational system to restrict local students from gaining access to an affordable education.
China complains SAT may impose American values on its best students -- LA TimesOnce again, the LA Times:Thanks to a booming economy, hundreds of thousands of Chinese families have opted to send their children to study in the United States (and other Western countries) to avoid China’s highly competitive, sometimes grueling, college entrance exams. Others look to a Western education because they regard China’s system as stagnant and uninspiring.
According to figures from the Institute of International Education, the number of Chinese students studying in U.S. universities has grown by 20% annually for more than six years, and in 2010 China overtook India as the country that sends the largest number of foreign students to the U.S. Though the majority are graduate students, more and more Chinese students are enrolled in undergraduate programs, and some mainland students are now even seeking out high school educations stateside.
Asian families flock to the San Gabriel Valley's school districts because they have some of the highest Academic Performance Index scores in the state. But with hundreds of top-performing students at each high school, focusing on a small set of elite institutions, it's easy to get lost in the crowd.Public PensionsOf the school's 4,000 students, nearly 3,000 are of Asian descent, and like Yue are willing to do whatever it takes to gain entrance to a prestigious university. They will study until they can't remember how to have fun and stuff their schedules with extracurriculars. But there's an important part of their college applications that they can't improve as easily as an SAT score: their ethnicity.
… anxiety over racial admissions rates is peaking as cash-crunched public universities increasingly favor high-paying out-of-state and foreign students at the expense of local applicants of every ethnicity.
President Obama’s decision to bailout big banks while exposing vulnerable Americans to the predatory practices of his Wall Street cronies has resulted in one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the bottom to the top in our nation’s history.
One of the more egregious examples of this big money theft began when Rhode Island State Treasurer, Gina Raimondo – a former Wall Street insider -- raided public pensions at the behest of Wall Street CEOs.
Matt Taibbi:
This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.So, the criminals who caused the financial collapse not only escaped prosecution thanks to our Justice Department, they’ve also seized assets, sold taxpayer funded higher education spots to International students, and they have raided public pension funds – shouldn’t that be enough?Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.
Unfortunately, the corporate coup d’etat isn’t finished. The president is now asking Congress to grant him authority to strip away the average America’s ability to protect what little assets remain and place them at the mercy of predatory corporate attorneys. Even foreign governments will have the authority to seek monetary judgments against U.S. citizens outside the accountability and authority of our own judicial system.
Free Trade Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders:
U.S. sovereignty will be undermined by giving corporations the right to challenge our laws before international tribunals.Recent rulings handed down by the corporately owned U.S. Supreme Court have taught us that once the door has been opened to corrupt laws -- as was clearly evidenced by the Citizen’s United ruling -- the unfair judgments they create are almost always impossible to rescind. And under the terms of the TPP, if a foreign corporation seizes your land through eminent domain, and if that corporation’s nation is a signatory to the TPP, then no U.S. law or law making body will have the power to protect your property.The TPP creates a special dispute resolution process that allows corporations to challenge any domestic laws that could adversely impact their “expected future profits.”
These challenges would be heard before UN and World Bank tribunals which could require taxpayer compensation to corporations.
This process undermines our sovereignty and subverts democratically passed laws including those dealing with labor, health, and the environment.
In 1996, we learned how easy that process could be invoked by a corporation when Chapter 11 disputes were adjudicated under the terms of NAFTA. Consider this judgment handed down against a small community in Mexico:
Metalclad vs. Mexico, Toxic Waste and NAFTA— Gerard GreenfieldIn a 2001 Guardian article, Naomi Klein described the Metalclad decision this way: The Metalclad case is a vivid illustration of what critics mean when they allege that free-trade deals amount to a "bill of rights for multinational corporations". Metalclad has successfully played the victim, oppressed by what Nafta calls "intervention" and what used to be called "democracy".LAST AUGUST 25 the NAFTA Tribunal for the case of Metalclad Corp vs. Mexico ruled in favor of Metalclad, ordering the Mexican government to pay US$16.7 million in compensation. It is the first ruling in an investor-to-state lawsuit under NAFTA.
In October 1996, Metalclad Corporation, a U.S. waste-disposal company, accused the Mexican government of violating NAFTA's Chapter 11 when the state of San Luis Potos refused it permission to reopen a waste disposal facility.
The state governor ordered the site closed down after a geological audit showed the facility would contaminate the local water supply. The governor then declared the site part of a 600,000-acre ecological zone. Metalclad claimed that this constituted an act of expropriation and sought US$90 million in compensation.
If you haven’t watched John Oliver’s recent segment on big tobacco and free trade, then take the time; it's worth it. The show contains some great examples of how unfair these tribunal judgments can be to the victims, and it proves that free trade agreements grant corporations legal rights that supercede the sovereignty of signatory nations :
TransCanada Uses Eminent Domain To Finish Nebraska Land Acquisition TransCanada, the company seeking to build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, said Tuesday it has filed papers in Nebraska seeking to acquire the final 12 percent of easements from holdout landowners along the pipeline path.The Texas Observer:The company is seeking to use eminent domain to compel reluctant property owners to sell easements for the use of their land.
In Texas, property rights are sacred. It’s encoded into our ethos—in this state, your ranch is your kingdom. If you catch strangers inside your fenceline, by golly, you can shoot them. No one can infringe on your land.Consider how ruthless and cruel free trade rulings can be as revealed by a Feb. 2014 article posted by Forbes magazine:Unless it happens to be a pipeline company. Then pipeline operators can do pretty much what they want. Even, it turns out, if that pipeline company is Canadian.
TransCanada has used eminent domain on another part of the pipeline route (NYTimes).History has taught us that U.S. free trade agreements never achieve the objectives espoused by their proponents. Prior to NAFTA’s passage, Bill Clinton boasted the pact would create 200,000 new American jobs within the first two years, but in reality, the free trade agreement eliminated 820,000 to 1,000,000 U.S. jobs--enough positions to employ the entire adult population of Dallas, Texas.In a 2012 ruling, Texas Judge Bill Harris of Lamar County upheld TransCanada’s takeover by eminent domain of a strip of land across Julia Trigg Crawford’s pasture in Paris, Texas to build part of its Keystone XL pipeline. The ruling was delivered in a 15-word text message sent from the Judge’s iPhone, demonstrating the seriousness with which the Judge handled such a constitutionally-charged case.
To quote Joe Biden: “This is a big f&*king deal.”
But when journalists discuss NAFTA’s damage on the U.S. workforce, they rarely mention the damage it inflicted on the indigenous people of Mexico.
When NAFTA was passed two decades ago, its boosters promised it would bring “First World” status for the Mexican people. Instead, it prompted a great migration north. Rufino Domínguez, the former coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, who now heads the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants, estimates that there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the U.S., 300,000 in California alone.Many of the undocumented “dreamers” hiding in the U.S. today came to this country because of NAFTA. The trail of suffering left in its wake is still exacting a heavy toll on innocent victims.In Oaxaca, some towns have become depopulated, or are now made up of only communities of the very old and very young, where most working-age people have left to work in the north. Economic crises provoked by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other economic reforms are now uprooting and displacing these Mexicans in the country’s most remote areas, where people still speak languages (such as Mixteco, Zapoteco and Triqui) that were old when Columbus arrived from Spain.2 “There are no jobs, and NAFTA forced the price of corn so low that it’s not economically possible to plant a crop anymore,” Dominguez says. “We come to the U.S. to work because we can’t get a price for our product at home. There’s no alternative.”
But the pain doesn’t end there.
Obama’s free trade agreement with South Korea may have been a boon for his campaign donors, but because of the huge trade deficit it created, thousands of American workers lost their jobs.
From the Teamsters Union:
KORUS was hailed by supporters two years ago as a job-maker that would create as many as 70,000 much-needed U.S. jobs. But the report shows instead that it has led to the loss [of] more than 46,600 American jobs. Teamsters General President, Jim Hoffa, said the new insight shows why agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has been shrouded in secrecy, should be scrutinized.And I can’t emphasize this enough: If the TPP is enacted; Barrack Obama and the neo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party will own it, and the job losses it incurs will have a negative impact on the Democratic brand. It is one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation in our nation’s history. And even if Republicans support it – and many of them say they won’t – they can still use the bill’s unpopularity to hang a millstone around the neck of every Democratic candidate we field for years to come.
America for Sale
Shortly after taking office, President Obama said this:
"In the end, all of us are paying a price for this home mortgage crisis [Except for his campaign donors, the people who caused the crisis]. And all of us will pay an even steeper price if we allow this crisis to continue to deepen — a crisis which is unraveling homeownership, the middle class and the American dream itself. But if we act boldly and swiftly to arrest this downward spiral, then every American will benefit."
Unfortunately, for millions of Americans, the president’s message was nothing more than empty rhetoric, and the human cost exacted by his policies -- in terms of suffering and displacement -- has been staggering.
Suicides Related to Foreclosure and Eviction Doubled During the Housing Crisis -- by Kriston CappsIn 2013, more people between the ages of 25 and 74 died by their own hands than died in automobile crashes.
In 2010, just as the U.S. was beginning to climb out of the global financial crisis, suicide was the second-leading cause of death for adults aged 25 to 34 in the U.S., and the fourth-leading cause of death for adults aged 35 to 54. With the Great Recession behind us, public health officials are now trying to measure the toll of the housing crisis in terms of lost life and psychological distress.
A new study released this month in the American Journal of Public Health offers one answer to this complex question. The report finds that suicides spurred by severe housing stress—evictions and foreclosures—doubled between 2005 and 2010.