Great Depression of 2016

[The Yakima Kid]

"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."

Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766​

And now we have an entire generation of illegal immigrants who have come here expecting free school breakfast, free school lunch, free education in the language of their choice, food stamps, medical care, and rent subsidies. The fastest growing category of public assistance is "child only" - where the parents are not US citizens and are therefore ineligible.

I listened to an idiot down the block who attempted to extort us in a protection racket explain how we owed "reparations" to his "race" because "this should be Mexico"- and failing that we could pay "taxes" to his gang. This is the same crew that at one point when the police were canvassing because of a particularly brutal mugging which left a victim crawling onto a neighbor's porch, stood on the sidewalk watching, and when we answered the door and talked with the police, they then came down - while the police were still on our street - and told us "we don't like it when you talk to the police." Later that week one of our cars, and a car belonging to the people who had brought the victim in from their porch and called police and an ambulance, were rammed in the middle of the night.

Please don't ask me to subsidize anymore. I know that before I die, the US will be just another Third World Latin American country, and it makes me grateful that I am an old lady.

 

[hemet dennis]

And the stupidest comment for a congressperson this week goes to,

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/07/161...-dont-right-know-everything-going-government/

 

[cupman]

And now we have an entire generation of illegal immigrants who have come here expecting free school breakfast, free school lunch, free education in the language of their choice, food stamps, medical care, and rent subsidies. The fastest growing category of public assistance is "child only" - where the parents are not US citizens and are therefore ineligible.

I listened to an idiot down the block who attempted to extort us in a protection racket explain how we owed "reparations" to his "race" because "this should be Mexico"- and failing that we could pay "taxes" to his gang. This is the same crew that at one point when the police were canvassing because of a particularly brutal mugging which left a victim crawling onto a neighbor's porch, stood on the sidewalk watching, and when we answered the door and talked with the police, they then came down - while the police were still on our street - and told us "we don't like it when you talk to the police." Later that week one of our cars, and a car belonging to the people who had brought the victim in from their porch and called police and an ambulance, were rammed in the middle of the night.

Please don't ask me to subsidize anymore. I know that before I die, the US will be just another Third World Latin American country, and it makes me grateful that I am an old lady.

Did any of that really happen or did you just have one too many last night?

 

[cassie]

Did any of that really happen or did you just have one too many last night?

X2. BTW, the illegal immigrants I have known, and I have known a few, were very hard working. When I lived in California I would hire illegal Mexicans to do odd jobs around my farm whenever I could find them . Why? Because they gave me an honest day's work for a day's pay. I paid them fairly too. I couldn't find any US citizens to do the same. I tried. Some of those folks were the ones screaming the loudest because the illegals were "taking their jobs". Jobs, like putting up fences in the hot sun, they wouldn't take on a bet.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

Did any of that really happen or did you just have one too many last night?

Yes, it definitely happened. We lost several good neighbors who turned their houses into rentals or wound up selling them to investors because they were terrified by all of the MS-13 graffiti that wound up painted on every fence, house walls, cars, sidewalks, streets, curbs, and even on the police trailer that carries the device that broadcasts what speed people are driving on the street. We found people had been paying off the gangsters, which we considered stupid, because the demands only go up and up and up. We refused the initial expected $100 per week. Meanwhile, we noticed neighbors "adopting" large, aggressive dogs - one guy found gang graffiti all over the fence on his corner lot, kept finding the fence between his yard and the local school kicked out, and his tool shed broken into, so he wound up with both a pit bull AND a Rottweiler. He also moved his toolshed so the solid back was against the fence, which prevented further kickouts of the panels.

The police trailer incident was actually funny. I had been assured by the local police that we had no gang problem, despite the mugging and the gang graffiti, a stabbing or two and a drive by shooting in town, and the discarded needles, used condoms, and beer bottles dumped right behind our fence in the adjacent elementary school playground. We kept pointing out how the gangster house had a line of cars pulling through for drive by drug service and that the curb in front of their house was busier than an Inn-N-Out at dinner time on Saturday. I had my identity stolen after repeatedly finding people trying to steal our mail, and I had reported this to the US Postal Service police, and the local police. At the time I was busy trying to exterminate lines of credit someone had opened in my name, and trying to stop an auto loan that someone had applied for in my name in Florida, clear across the continent. Nope, all we had were gang wannabes putting up for gangs that allegedly weren't in our town, and the identity theft was probably a high school prank or something. The only officer who seemed interested was the one in charge of street crimes, and he managed to have a parole search done on the gang house which resulted in the guy who appeared to be the honcho being sent back to prison for a grand total of two weeks because drugs were found in the house. No one could explain why he hadn't been deported as he was not a US citizen. Believe me, we asked.

We were once again told we only had "gang wannabes" who robbed the local corner bodega and murdered the butcher. The police were not amused when they came to pick up their equipment and it was festooned with gang graffiti. They actually asked us if we had seen anything, and given their great helpfulness when the cars were rammed I made it clear to the gangsters down the street who were watching that we knew nothing. No way was I going to cooperate with a police department that refused to acknowledge we actually had a problem. I prefer to not have either my property or my body or my friends and families properties and bodies injured or destroyed.

Finally the SWAT team had to be called into our town's allegedly "premiere" neighborhood, complete with our silly Armored Personnel Carrier because a car belonging to a wanted murderer was in the driveway of a rental house over there. It turned out the murderer had already decamped to the Central Valley after committing his murder over in EPA or somewhere.

After a couple of very dramatic shootings on the city streets, one that apparently involved someone shooting a moving car, finally we wound up with the DEA, ICE, and the FBI doing a round up. We also had a rather dramatic murder of a transgender teen, a couple of fatal stabbings of high school students, and some other drama. For awhile, our little town went from never being in the news to appearing as often as EPA and Oakland. After the roundup, our town has been very peaceful since then, and the almost daily burglaries have settled down a bit, although there was the dramatic case where someone broke into a house while everyone was at Christmas Eve services and stole all of the presents.. This in a town of under 50,000 people.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

X2. BTW, the illegal immigrants I have known, and I have known a few, were very hard working. When I lived in California I would hire illegal Mexicans to do odd jobs around my farm whenever I could find them . Why? Because they gave me an honest day's work for a day's pay. I paid them fairly too. I couldn't find any US citizens to do the same. I tried. Some of those folks were the ones screaming the loudest because the illegals were "taking their jobs". Jobs, like putting up fences in the hot sun, they wouldn't take on a bet.

Why don't you drop by and offer a few jobs to the MS-13 and the Surenos here in the Bay Area? We have plenty of them, and I am sure that you would find them eager to work in the hot sun for low wages instead of dealing drugs, extorting, and stealing in the city..

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and everyone I knew did farm work in the summer - from planting, picking, hoeing, fence raising, and irrigating - depending on age. That and the canneries were where elementary, Junior High, High School, and College students picked up money for expenses, entertainment, cars, and tuition.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

The new owners of our corner bodega took to carrying firearms in heir store for awhile. The old owners who were very nice people sold the store and moved to Texas. Some people complained when the new owners armed themselves; I didn't. The Afghani lady who owned an adjacent dollar type store sold up and quit after that because she was afraid to be in her store.

The butcher was a very nice man who made the mistake of interrupting what appeared to be an intended rape by the robbers. He was shot gunned to death. He had come here legally from Mexico, and all of us who shopped at the store contributed to help send his body to his home town in Mexico for burial. He left a small child.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

"No member — House or Senate, Democrat or Republican — should support any bill with respect to the border crisis that does not include language explicitly prohibiting the administration from taking such action," Sessions added. "Congress must foreclose any possibility of these unlawful executive actions before congressional funding is granted. This is an essential precondition."

The work permit issue is a particular hot button among Republicans, as the nation grapples with a 6.3 percent unemployment rate — 10.7 percent for African Americans — and reports that nearly all of the job growth since 2000 went immigrants, both legal and illegal.

Of the nearly six million more people working in the United States since 2000, 5.7 million of them are immigrants, according to the study by the Center for Immigration Studies.

In other words, the number of new jobs obtained by native-born Americans fell slightly during the period, from 114.8 million to 114.7 million.

During the period, immigrants have obtained jobs across the full employment spectrum: construction, food service, retailing, office support, management, computers, and healthcare.

"Immigrants have made gains across the labor market in lower-, middle-, and higher-skilled jobs," Steven Camarota, the center's research director, told The Washington Times.

Republicans and those opposing immigration reform argue that granting more work permits to illegals would drive native-born joblessness even further, contrary to business leaders and reform advocates who argue that more immigrants would ease labor shortages in a variety of fields.

"During a time of low wages, high unemployment, and surging welfare rolls, the Senate bill doubled the existing and expansive rate of legal immigrant and guest-worker admissions into the U.S.," Sessions charged in a recent opinion piece for The National Review.

He was referring to the bipartisan Gang of Eight comprehensive reform legislation passed by the Senate in June 2013. Sessions is a senior member of the Senate Budget and Judiciary committees.

"If mass immigration is so good for the economy, why then — during this long sustained period of record immigration into the U.S. — are incomes falling and a record number of Americans not working?" he asked.

 

[cassie]

Why don't you drop by and offer a few jobs to the MS-13 and the Surenos here in the Bay Area? We have plenty of them, and I am sure that you would find them eager to work in the hot sun for low wages instead of dealing drugs, extorting, and stealing in the city..

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and everyone I knew did farm work in the summer - from planting, picking, hoeing, fence raising, and irrigating - depending on age. That and the canneries were where elementary, Junior High, High School, and College students picked up money for expenses, entertainment, cars, and tuition.

One, I no longer farm, and two, I no longer live in California. I'm in Missouri and I can't even find a high school kid willing to weed my flower garden. BTW, I paid my illegal farm workers in California more than minimum wage. I didn't cheat them like a lot of people did.

Your mention of farm work in the Pacific Northwest brought back memories. Back in the Dark Ages when I was growing up in Oregon, and later in Idaho, I would catch a bus in the morning that took me and the other juvenile conscripts out to the fields and brought us back in the late afternoon. After a summer spent picking strawberries any job is easy. Before the Santa Clara Valley got overrun with houses and became Silicon Valley, a lot of kids spent their summers cutting apricots and picking fruit. Nowadays that would be considered unacceptable child labor.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

One, I no longer farm, and two, I no longer live in California. I'm in Missouri and I can't even find a high school kid willing to weed my flower garden. BTW, I paid my illegal farm workers in California more than minimum wage. I didn't cheat them like a lot of people did.

Your mention of farm work in the Pacific Northwest brought back memories. Back in the Dark Ages when I was growing up in Oregon, and later in Idaho, I would catch a bus in the morning that took me and the other juvenile conscripts out to the fields and brought us back in the late afternoon. After a summer spent picking strawberries any job is easy. Before the Santa Clara Valley got overrun with houses and became Silicon Valley, a lot of kids spent their summers cutting apricots and picking fruit. Nowadays that would be considered unacceptable child labor.

OK. Strawberry buses, cane berry picking (raspberries, blackberries, Marion berries, and even blue berries.) Pole and bush beans. Cutting hops and picking apples in the Yakima Valley. Working in the canneries, the ones with the Diamond Blue Lake logo, from the Santiam cooperative, which I think is now gone as the farms grew a big crop of ticky tacky. Later I worked at the Seabrook freezer in Albany. I hated hoeing.

If you want an illegal alien, go to Home Depot. They hang out at the edge of the parking lot, or even right by the doors. There are plenty of them in Missouri.

In any event, I don't think that the Surenos or MS-13 are interested in farm work, anymore than the Mafia or the Purple Gang wanted to work on farms during Prohibition. If you want to know what it is like, one of the ways they proclaim their hatred and contempt for the Nortenos, who tend to have been born here and have had some farmworkers in their ancestry, is to refer to them as "fruit pickers" and other agricultural terms, in both English and Spanish, and they consider these terms of derision. To them, campesino is an extreme term of contempt.