Replies to post #167069 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Satire becomes reality with Romney 'self-deportation' answer

The Rachel Maddow Show [video]
February 1, 2012

Lalo Alcaraz, satirist, cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Pocho.com, and coiner of “self-deportation,” talks with Rachel Maddow about watching his parody of right-wing anti-immigrant politics become reality through Mitt Romney.

© 2012 msnbc.com

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/the-rachel-maddow-show/46230207

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@MexicanMitt
Mexican Mitt Romney

I AM THE JUAN PERCENT

2 Feb via TweetDeck

https://twitter.com/#!/MexicanMitt/status/165177077258137601 [(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70822307 and preceding (and any future following), and for that matter http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71727772 and preceding (and any future following)]


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Do-It-Yourself Deportation


Chris Silas Neal

By ANTONIO ALARCÓN
Published: February 1, 2012

ONE of my happiest childhood memories is of my parents at my First Communion. But that’s because most of my memories from that time are of their being absent. They weren’t there for my elementary school graduation, or for parent-teacher conferences.

From the time I was just a baby in Mexico, I lived with my grandparents while my parents traveled to other Mexican states to find work. I was 6 in 2000 when they left for the United States. And it took five years before they had steady jobs and were able to send for me. We’ve been together in this country ever since, working to build a life. Now I am 17 and a senior in high school in New York City. But my parents have left again, this time to return to Mexico.

Last week, when asked in a debate what America should do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants living here, Mitt Romney said he favored “self-deportation.” He presented the strategy as a kinder alternative to just arresting people. Instead, he said, immigrants will “decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here.”

But really this goes along with a larger movement in states like Arizona and Alabama [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/opinion/04mon1.html ] to pass very tough laws against immigrants in an attempt to make their lives so unbearable that they have no choice but to leave. People have called for denying work, education and even medical treatment to immigrants without documentation; many immigrants have grown afraid of even going to the store or to church.

The United States is supposed to be a great country that welcomes all kinds of people. Does Mr. Romney really think that this should be America’s solution for immigration reform?

You could say that my parents have self-deported, and that it was partly a result of their working conditions. It’s not that they couldn’t find work, but that they couldn’t find decent work. My dad collected scrap metal from all over the city, gathering copper and steel from construction sites, garbage dumps and old houses. He earned $90 a day, but there was only enough work for him to do it once or twice a week. My mom worked at a laundromat six days a week, from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m., for $70 a day.

But the main reason they had to leave was personal. I have a brother, 16, a year younger than me, still living in Mexico. He was too little to cross the border with me when I came to the United States, and as the government has cracked down on immigration in the years since, the crossing has become more expensive and much more dangerous. And there was no hope of his getting a green card, as none of us have one either. So he stayed with my grandparents, but last year my grandmother died and two weeks ago my grandfather also died. My parents were confronted with a dilemma: Leave one child alone in New York City, or leave the other alone in Mexico. They decided they had to go back to Mexico.

Now once again I am missing my parents. I know it was very difficult for them to leave me here, worrying about how I will survive because I’m studying instead of earning money working. I’m living with my uncles, but it is hard for my mother to know that I’m coming home to a table with no dinner on it, where there had been dinner before. And it’s hard for me not having my parents to talk to, not being able to ask for advice that as a teenager you need. Now that they are in Mexico, I wonder who will be at my graduation, my volleyball games or my birthday? With whom will I share my joy or my sad moments?

I know a girl named Guadalupe, whose parents have also decided to return to Mexico, because they can’t find work here and rent in New York City is very expensive. She is very smart and wants to be the first in her family to attend college, and she wants to study psychology. But even though she has lived here for years and finished high school with a 90 percent average, she, like me, does not have immigration papers, and so does not qualify for financial aid and can’t get a scholarship.

People like Guadalupe and me are staying in this country because we have faith that America will live up to its promise as a fair and just country. We hope that there will be comprehensive immigration reform, with a path to citizenship for people who have spent years living and working here. When reform happens, our families may be able to come back, and if not, at least we will be able to visit them without the risk of never being able to return to our lives here. We hope that the Dream Act — which would let undocumented immigrants who came here as children go to college and become citizens and which has stalled in Congress — will pass so that we can get an education and show that even though we are immigrants we can succeed in this country.

If, instead, the political climate gets more and more anti-immigrant, eventually some immigrants will give up hope for America and return to their home countries, like my parents did. But I don’t think this is something that our presidential candidates should encourage or be proud of.

Immigrants have made this country great. We are not looking for a free ride, but instead we are willing to work as hard as we can to show that we deserve to be here and to be treated like first-class citizens. Deportation, and “self-deportation,” will result only in dividing families and driving them into the shadows. In America, teenagers shouldn’t have to go through what I’m going through.

Antonio Alarcón is a high school student and a member of Make the Road New York [ http://www.maketheroad.org/ ], an immigrant advocacy group. This essay was translated by Natalia Aristizabal-Betancur from the Spanish.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/opinion/do-it-yourself-deportation.html


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Dying Dad Jesus Navarro Denied Kidney Transplant Over Immigration Status, but Supporters Try to Help

By ASHLEY JENNINGS
ABC News
Feb. 2, 2012

Support is pouring in for a California man who was denied a kidney transplant because of his immigration status.

Jesus Navarro, an immigrant from Mexico, was on an organ donor list for six years before he received word from UC San Francisco's transplant center that he was next in line.

The day of his final consultation, doctors discovered Navarro was an illegal alien and called off surgery.

The 35-year-old's wife stepped in and offered her own kidney. She was a match, but doctors still refused to operate.

Now, city councilmen, advocacy groups and labor union leaders across the state are reaching out.

"It's really troublesome that we've gotten to a point in this country where you allow a person to die because of his so-called legal status," said Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, who also is the vice president of Glass, Molders International Union.

Councilman De La Fuente said his attorneys are working with Kaiser Permanente, Navarro's insurance company, to get him back on the operating table before it's too late.

"He has a willing donor," De La Fuente said. "He has private health care. This is ridiculous."

After an immigration audit, Navarro lost his job at Pacific Steel in Berkeley, Calif., on Jan. 3. He had been working there for 14 years. For now, his daily dialysis treatment is covered by private insurance, which runs out in February.

"There's absolutely no reason for UCSF to deny the transplant based on the argument he won't have the means of providing after care," De La Fuente said. "Even when his insurance runs out, he's covered by the union for 18 months."

But that's exactly the argument UCSF is making.

Though UCSF refused to comment specifically on Navarro's case, a spokeswoman, Karin Rush-Monroe, explained the hospital's policy.

"It's not just, 'OK, we've got an organ,' but they have to be able to maintain it," she said.

"There's a whole host of factors that go into a review for a transplant, including immigration status," Rush-Monroe said. "Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandate that transplant patients be thoroughly evaluated for financial ability to sustain a transplanted organ long term, primarily because following surgery, patients must take costly immunosuppressive drugs for the rest of their lives."

To some immigration reform advocates, the key issue is not whether a U.S. organ recipient has adequate insurance, its whether or not they're in the United States legally. They ask: Why burden the U.S. health care system with the problems of other nations' citizens?

"It should be the responsibility of the home country to provide the other services," said Ira Mehlam, the national media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "The priority ought to be on people who are legal citizens of this country.

"Anybody who is in a life-threatening situation, you have to provide the care, but in a situation like this where there is an opportunity for someone to leave the country and get care -- they need to do so," Mehlam said.

Donald Kagan, who received a kidney transplant from UCSF last year, says someone in Navarro's position wouldn't obtain the quality medical care he needs in Mexico.

He also noted that organ donations involve two people -- and it just so happens that Kagan's donor was an illegal immigrant.

"A person ... had absolutely nothing and was willing to give his kidney to me," said Kagan, the co-owner of a Berkeley technology firm. "What they're saying is that only people who have money should get transplants, and it shouldn't be that way."

Kagan's wife and two children are from Nicaragua. He said if he were Nicaraguan, he'd be dead right now.

"I'm lucky enough to be alive," he said. "Neither myself nor my brother who received a transplant, neither of us would be here if it weren't for those donors."

Kagan said he was never asked whether he was a legal citizen.

Navarro's case has shed light on a debate involving health care and immigration status.

Some medical officials say having to choose between saving a life and adhering to policies when it comes to undocumented immigrants puts them in a difficult role.

Two brothers were denied kidney transplants last year at Bellevue Hospital in New York because they couldn't pay for the surgery.

For now, Navarro continues his dialysis treatment, cleansing his blood of deadly toxins each day.

He's hopeful he can get surgery soon -- for his 3-year-old daughter's sake if for nothing else.

"We are thankful for all of the support. It means a lot," Navarro said.

Copyright © 2012 ABC News Internet Ventures. Yahoo! - ABC News Network

http://abcnews.go.com/US/dying-dad-jesus-navarro-denied-kidney-transplant-immigration/story?id=15494070 [with comments]

[StephanieVanbryce]

SNIP__The Dodd-Frank financial-­reform act, much maligned, has already begun to change the shape of the financial system—even before a number of its major provisions are proposed to go into full effect this coming July. Banks are working hard to interpret Dodd-Frank’s provisions in a way most favorable to them—and repealing Dodd-Frank is a key piece of Mitt Romney’s campaign platform.

[StephanieVanbryce]

MUST READ!__The End of Wall Street As They Knew It

After surprisingly successful financial reform, public vilification, and politics that
have turned against them, the Masters of the Universe are masters no longer.



By Gabriel Sherman Published Feb 5, 2012

On Wall Street, bonus season is a sacred ritual. It is the annual rite where net worth and self-worth get elegantly reduced to a single number. During the 25-year boom that abruptly ended in 2008, the only principle that really mattered come bonus time was how you ranked against the guys to your right and left. The system was governed by a kind of atavistic justice: You eat what you kill. From the outside, the seven- and eight-figure payouts that star bankers earned could seem obscene, immoral even. But on the inside, the outlandish compensation reflected a strict, almost moral logic. “Wall Street is a meritocracy, for the most part,” as a senior Citigroup executive put it to me recently. “If someone has a bonus, it’s because they created value for their institution.” The sanctity of the bonus was built on the idea that Wall Street pay was simply the natural order of capitalism.

And so, among the many dislocations Wall Street has suffered since 2008, none may have been more destabilizing than the headlines that flashed across Bloomberg terminals on the afternoon of January 17, when news leaked that Morgan Stanley would cap cash bonuses at just $125,000. A week later, Bank of America announced that it would be cutting the cash portion of its bonuses by 75 percent, giving the rest in stock. All across Wall Street, compensation is crashing. Goldman Sachs, coming off a lackluster fourth quarter, slashed compensation by 21 percent.

Banks have always had occasional bad years, but the sense on Wall Street is that this bad year is different. Over the past several weeks, I have had wide-ranging conversations with more than two dozen senior Wall Street executives, traders, bankers, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity investors. And what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.

The crash four years ago was shocking enough to the financial class. But what is happening on Wall Street now is even more terrifying. No doubt the economy itself—the crisis in Europe, the effects of the tsunami in Japan, America’s sputtering recovery—has played a large part in the financial industry’s struggles. But even the most stubborn economies improve eventually. The bigger issues are structural. The Dodd-Frank financial-­reform act, much maligned, has already begun to change the shape of the financial system—even before a number of its major provisions are proposed to go into full effect this coming July. Banks are working hard to interpret Dodd-Frank’s provisions in a way most favorable to them—and repealing Dodd-Frank is a key piece of Mitt Romney’s campaign platform.

To comply with the looming regulations, banks have begun stripping themselves of the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading. In the wake of the crash, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding companies to tap the “discount window,” the Fed’s pipeline of cheap funds that gave the banks an emergency source of liquidity. That move seemed smart then, but the stricter standards required of banks have now left them boxed in.

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

Of course, described a little less colorfully, reducing the risk in the system at a cost of a certain amount of the banks’ profits was precisely what the government was striving for. All this has meant that Wall Street’s traders have found themselves on the wrong end of the market—a predicament that many of them have never seen before. Before the crash, when compensation slid, the banks risked seeing their top talent run for the doors to rival firms or hedge funds. Now, with a glut of hedge funds and an industrywide belt-tightening, bank chiefs are calling their star traders’ bluffs. “If you’re really unhappy, just leave,” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman bluntly told Bloomberg TV a few days after his bank announced its meager bonus numbers.

For New York’s bankers and traders, the new math suddenly reordered their assumptions about their place in a post-crash city. “After tax, that’s like, what, $75,000?” an investment banker at a rival firm said as he contemplated Morgan Stanley’s decision. He ran the numbers, modeling the implications. “I’m not married and I take the subway and I watch what I spend very carefully. But my girlfriend likes to eat good food. It all adds up really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill.” “If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”



On Wall Street, the misery index is as high as it’s been since brokers were on window ledges back in 1929. But sentiments like that, accompanied by a full orchestra of the world’s tiniest violins, are only part of the conversation in Wall Street offices and trading desks. Along with the complaint is something that might be called soul-searching—which is, in itself, a surprising development. Since the crash, and especially since the occupation of Zuccotti Park last September (which does appear to have rattled a lot of nerves), there has been a growing recognition on Wall Street that the system that had provided those million-dollar bonuses was built on a highly unstable foundation. Disagreeable as it may be, goes this thinking, bankers have to go back to first principles, assess their value in the economy, and take their part in its rebuilding. No one on Wall Street liked to be scapegoated either by the Obama administration or by the Occupiers. But many acknowledge that the bubble­-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism—and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said. Paul Volcker, whose eponymous rule is at the core of the changes, echoes an idea that more bankers than you’d think would agree with. “Finance became a self-justification,” he told me recently. “They made a lot of money trading with each other with doubtful public benefit.”

The questions of how to fix Wall Street–style capitalism—from taxes to regulation—are being intensely argued and will undergird much of the economic debate during this presidential election. And many on Wall Street are still making the argument that the consequences of hobbling Wall Street could be severe. “These are sweeping secular changes taking place that won’t just impact the guys who won’t get their bonuses this year,” Bove told me. “We’ve made a decision as a nation to shrink the growth of the financial system under the theory that it won’t impact the growth of the nation’s economy.”

And yet, the complaining has settled to a low murmur. Even as bonuses have withered, Wall Street as a political issue is gaining force. Bankers are aware that populism has a foothold, even in the Republican Party, and that these forces are liable to accelerate the process already taking place. “There’s a real sense the world is changing,” says a private-­equity executive with deep ties to the GOP. “People are becoming aware there’s real anger out there. It’s not just some kids camping out in some park. The Romney attacks caught everyone by surprise. We have prepared for this to come from the Democrats in the fall, but not now. You could run an entire campaign if you’re Barack Obama with ads using nothing but Republicans saying things about finance that you’d never hear two months ago. It’s an amazing thing.”

A few hours before Barack Obama delivered the State of the Union address, ­JP­Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sat in a cream-colored chair in his 48th-floor office, talking about the changed reality on Wall Street. “Certain products are gone forever,” Dimon told me. “Fancy derivatives are mostly gone. Prop trading is gone. There’s less leverage everywhere. Mortgages are back to old-fashioned conservative mortgages—which is a good thing.”

Reducing risk may be a good thing for the economy, but it has been dismal for the banks. All across Wall Street, financial institutions are suffering their worst results in years. JPMorgan reported last month that fourth-quarter profits were down by $1.1 billion. Goldman Sachs reported profits fell by 56 percent, Bank of America saw its profits drop by 38 percent, and Morgan Stanley reported a 26 percent drop.

As we talked, Dimon tried to put the best face on the results. Compared to some of his peers, he has deftly navigated the new landscape, holding JPMorgan’s stock price level. With 260,000 employees and thousands of Chase branches, Dimon’s company, unlike that of his rivals at Goldman, has a real, physical business to fall back on. “Companies big and small will still need underwriting, credit, capital management, and advice. McKinsey did a report that showed that the credit needs of multinationals are going to double in the next ten years,” he said. “The net worth of the world is going to double in the next decade. Institutional funding will double in the next ten years. We’re a store, you can buy bonds, FX, advice—we provide great products at a great price. That store is not going to go away. If you’re a big, smart investor and we can give you the best price and the best service, you’ll still be coming here, just like Wal-Mart and Costco.”



Wall Street as Wal-Mart? A few years ago, the Masters of the Universe never could have imagined their industry being compared to big-box retailing. And yet, the model that had fueled bank profits has finally broken, as markets sputtered and new regulation kicked in. “Compensation is never really going to come back,” a Wall Street headhunter told me. “That is something entirely new.”

What is even more startling about this reversal is that few thought the much-vilified Dodd-Frank act would have much effect at all. From the moment it was proposed in 2009, the bill was tarred from all sides. Critics from the left, who wanted a return of Glass-­Steagall, which had kept investments banks and commercial banks separate until it was repealed during the Clinton years, howled that Dodd-Frank wouldn’t go far enough to break up the too-big-to-fail banks. “Dodd-Frank was an attempt to preserve the status quo,” Harvard economist Ken Rogoff told me. The too-big-to-fail banks, for their part, argued that the 2,300-page bill would create an overly complex morass of overlapping regulators that risked killing their ability to compete against foreign rivals. “We joke that Dodd-Frank was designed to deal with too-big-to-fail but it became too-big-to-read,” said the Citigroup executive.

By the time the bill passed, in July 2010, the legislation hadn’t found many new friends. Banks were especially upset by the inclusion of the Volcker Rule, which banned proprietary trading and virtually all hedge-fund investing by banks. Banks also complained about an amendment that slashed lucrative debit-card fees. They capitulated mainly because the alternative—breaking them up—was worse.

Part of the perception that the financial crisis changed nothing is that, in the immediate wake of the crash, the banks, buoyed by bailout dollars, whipsawed back to profitability. Goldman earned a record profit of $13.4 billion in 2009, as markets roared back from their post-Lehman lows. This dead-cat bounce was central to the formation of Occupy Wall Street and the neopopulist political currents that first erupted when the Treasury Department appointed Ken Feinberg to regulate bonuses for several TARP recipients. “The statute creating my authority was populist retribution,” Feinberg told me recently. “The feeling was, if you’re going to bail everyone out with the taxpayers, it has to come with a price.”

And yet, from the moment Dodd-Frank passed, the banks’ financial results have tended to slide downward, in significant part because of measures taken in anticipation of its future effect. Since July 2010, Bank of America nosed down 42 percent, Morgan Stanley fell 25 percent, Goldman fell 21 percent, and Citigroup fell 16—in a period when the Dow rose 25 percent. Partly, this is a function of the economic headwinds. But the bill’s major provisions—forcing banks to reduce leverage, imposing a ban on proprietary trading, making derivatives markets more transparent, and ending abusive debit-card practices—have taken a pickax to the Wall Street business model even though the act won’t be completely in effect till the ­Volcker Rule kicks in this July (other aspects of the bill took force in December; capital requirements and many other elements of the bill will be phased in gradually between now and 2016). “If you landed on Earth from Mars and looked at the banks, you’d see that these are institutions that need to build up capital and that they’re becoming ­lower-margin businesses,” a senior banker told me. “So that means it will be hard, nearly impossible, to sustain their size and compensation structure.” In the past year, the financial industry has laid off some 200,000 workers.

Nobody on either side would say that Dodd-Frank perfectly accomplished its aims. But while critics lament that no bank executives have gone to jail and have argued for a law that would have effectively blown up the banking system, Dodd-Frank is imposing a painful form of punishment. “Since 2008, what the financial community has done is kick the can down the road,” the senior banker added. “?‘Let’s just buy us one more quarter and hope it gets better.’ Well, we’re now seeing cracks in that ability to continue operating with the structures that had been built up.”

To understand how radically Wall Street is changing, you have to first understand how modern Wall Street made its money. In the quaint old days, Wall Street tended to earn its profits rather boringly by loaning money, advising mergers, and supervising bond issues and IPOs. The leveraging of the American economy—and the supercharging of the financial industry—began in earnest in the early eighties. And banks have profited from a successive series of financial bubbles, each bigger and more violent than the one preceding it. “Wall Street did a really good job convincing people it was really complicated and they were the only ones who could do it and it justified paying them millions of dollars,” a former Lehman trader explained. Credit was the engine that powered the explosion in bank profits. From junk bonds in the eighties to the emerging-markets crisis in the nineties to the subprime mania of the aughts, Wall Street developed new ways to produce, package, and sell debt to willing investors. The alphabet soup of complex vehicles that defined the 2008 crash—CLO, CDO, CDS—had all been developed to sell more credit. “If you look at the past 25 years, the world economy was going through a process of leveraging,” a senior Citigroup executive said. “Debt has grown faster than economic growth. The banking industry was at the epicenter of facilitating the growth of credit creation. It drove every business.”

NEST Page Four >>>>>
GO HERE - http://nymag.com/news/features/wall-street-2012-2/index3.html

It's VERY hard for me to read ANY article that is SEVEN pages long..NOT this ONE!...I had NO IDEA how EFFECTIVE DODD FRANK is .. no idea at all ...! ..It's a WHOLE new Wall STREET out there .. and I was PLEASED to hear about it ! .. .PLEASE go read the rest ... ;)