Corruption, Racial Discrimination as Construction Gangs Steal Millions in Texas

By Greg Groogan

Published September 21, 2011

| MyFoxHouston.com

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Corrupt Mexican Construction Gangs Steal Millions in Texas: MyFoxHOUSTON.com

These days, it's just something you rarely, if ever, see: African-Americans laboring within the largely Hispanic construction crews working the Gulf Coast's heavy industrial projects.

Ricardo Charles says he knows exactly why and after 33 years in the building trade, he's blowing the whistle.

Black and White

Charles says those who run organized, largely Hispanic crews almost never hire willing African-American laborers.

"Oh no, blacks they are out of the question. Blacks are out of the question. Nobody wants a black person in there," Charles insisted, a Mexican-American man.

The practice of rejecting black labor is deeply entrenched discrimination which extends to white workers as well, Charles says.

These men and women are effectively cut off from decent-paying construction jobs by secretive Mexican labor gangs.

"They are afraid that white people are not going to put up with their unethical acts," Charles explained.

The Mordida

He's talking about bribes. They call it "Mordida" in Mexico, the bite.

"This is actually just like in Mexico. It's not how much you know, it's who you know," Charles said.

For years, on nearly every major industrial construction site in Texas, workers have been quietly forced to pay the leaders of Mexican labor gangs hundreds of dollars up front just to obtain a job.

With each weekly pay-check, the kick backs from workers to gang leaders continue.

"It's not only how much you pay to go in. You pay anything from $50 to $70 a week while you are in the project," Charles insisted.

Anyone who objects to paying the price is quickly isolated and almost as rapidly cut loose from the job without cause.

"They have these groups that are going to harass you, they want to insult you, degrade you. They want to make it very, very hard on you. They want to make false accusations about you: that you don't know how to do the job, you don't know how to talk to them, but they are all in the same conspiracy. It is a gang, like organized crime," Charles said.

Bed of Rotten Money

Over dozens of years and hundreds of sites across Texas, including the giant petrochemical complex in Port Arthur, he says Mexican construction cliques have muscled honest workers out of millions of dollars.

Money that's made gang bosses rich.

"Everybody knows. Yes, many people know that you have to belong to a clique in order to work. Mexicans exploiting Mexicans and contractors looking the other way," he said.

There's nothing casual about his allegations. Everything he's witnessed:

-- The "pay for play"
-- The graft
-- The enforced silence
-- And the corrupt complicity of contractors

It's all recorded in "Mexican Cliques in Construction", the book he paid thousands of his own hard-earned dollars to publish.

He has also brought his allegations and evidence to the FBI.

"Many people are victims. Many of my friends who are honest are victims," he insisted. "We are applying a system that didn't work in Mexico for hundreds years and actually it's working here in Houston, Texas."

Copies of "Mexican Cliques in Construction" can be obtained by contac

Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/09/21/corrupt-mexican-construction-gangs-steal-millions-in-texas/#ixzz1YuFsSnwU

Corrupt Mexican Construction Gangs Steal Millions in Texas: MyFoxHOUSTON.com

Original article
(Posted on September 22, 2011)

THE NEXT BIG BUBBLE: STUDENT LOANS AND THE COLLEGE MYTH

THE LIGHT IN THE TUNNEL IS A TRAIN!

KIDS & MONEY

Unpaid student loan debt looms as national crisis

By STEVE ROSEN

The Kansas City Star

The next financial bubble? Add student loan debt to the watch list.

The concerns are growing. So is the rhetoric to do something about the problem.

According to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Education, default rates on federal loans are now at their highest level since 1997. More than 320,000 borrowers fell behind on payments for the period that ended Sept. 30, 2010, the government reported this month. That translated into $2.4 billion in loans in default.
And unless the economy starts showing a stronger pulse, the debt situation is likely to get worse.
The department’s report prompted a proposed resolution in the U.S. House that calls for forgiving student loan debt for all college grads, including those who are throwing every spare nickel every month into paying off loans like clockwork.
The thinking: Forgiving the debt would free up more money for people, especially low- and middle-income borrowers, to spend and stimulate the economy.
As stated in the proposal: “Instead of saddling entire generations with debt from which there is no escape, let’s empower the American people to grow this economy on their own!”

Don’t expect this political sideshow to get very far. True, wiping debt off the family ledger would put more money back in your pocket, and it could even encourage more spending that will move the needle. But it wouldn’t make for sound economic policy, and it might hurt the banks that hold student loans, as well as the federal government, which guarantees them.
Still, mounting student loan debt is very tough to cope with. Borrowers can be financially handcuffed to loan payments for years to come. For those with default checkmarks on their credit reports, the outlook can be particularly bleak.
No doubt, borrowers are feeling strained. They’ve fallen behind on their payments because they’re unemployed or earning little. For many, there’s simply too much debt and too little income.
But in some cases, grads have also managed their finances poorly.
Although 8.8 percent of borrowers overall defaulted on federal student loans as of last September, compared with 7 percent the previous year, the default rate actually peaked at 20 percent in 1990.
Digging deeper into the numbers, the highest default rates came from students at for-profit colleges and universities. These borrowers defaulted at a rate of 15 percent in their first two years of repayment through September 2010. That was up from 11.6 percent the previous year.
This was more than twice the default rate for students who attended public colleges and universities and about three times as high as the rate among students at private schools.
The total amount of student loan debt now exceeds what’s owed on credit cards.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see this scenario continue to spiral downward as jobs and salaries for new graduates become harder to come by.
For many students, loans are the only option for being able to attend college. Luckily, the federal government provides several options for paying the money back. Borrowers need to understand their choices, then figure out the best way to make the loan payments manageable.
Otherwise, the best way to deal with the federal loan program is to try to avoid it as much as possible. Some suggestions:
•Readjust your mindset. Many parents and students think highly selective schools with outrageous prices mean status, identity and guaranteed employment after graduation. The reality: There are many good schools that may offer what you’re looking for at affordable prices.
•Go with the free money. Looking for merit-based aid, which doesn’t require repayment and rewards students with good grades and test scores? Then apply to schools that offer generous scholarship packages.
•Tap Grandma. If the grandparents want to help out with tuition and can afford to do so, take advantage of their generosity.
•Graduate early. Earn college credit through advanced placement classes in high school. Also, test out of entry-level classes in college.

Perry’s Texas jobs boom mainly helped immigrants, study says

 

By Zachary Roth

Senior National Affairs Reporter

| The Lookout – Sep 22, 2011

Gov. Rick Perry. AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

Rick Perry has made his record of job creation as governor of Texas the centerpiece of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. But a new study is drawing attention to a side of the Lone Star State's recent jobs boom that Perry might not be so quick to tout.
At the heart of Perry's pitch to voters has been Texas's jobs performance since the start of the Great Recession, which began in late 2007. During that time, the state has added around 300,000 jobs, while the United States as a whole has lost more than 7 million.
The governor's critics have pointed out that much of the job growth is the result of simple population growth--both through immigration and through native-born Americans relocating to Texas from other states. Perry has said that only shows that his low-tax, light-regulation policies are making Texas an attractive place to live and work.
But a new study by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group that advocates for lower immigration rates, could be more difficult for Perry to dismiss. It finds that by far the prime beneficiaries of the boom have been immigrants--both legal and illegal--from other countries.
The key stat? From the middle of 2007, shortly before the recession began, until the middle of this year, Texas added 279,000 jobs. Of those, 225,00 or 81 percent, went to immigrants who arrived in the United States in 2007 or later.
Other important numbers from the study, which is based on Census Bureau data:
• Around half of the newly-arrived immigrants were illegal. So around 40 percent of Texas's job growth benefited illegal immigrants, and around 40 percent benefited legal immigrants.
• New jobs went overwhelmingly to immigrants even though native-born Americans accounted for 69 percent of the growth in Texas's working-age population.
• The percentage of working-age natives who held a job fell from 71 percent to 67 percent during the 2007-2011 period. That's a similar decline to the employment situation in the United States overall during that period.
• 93 percent of the newly-arrived immigrants who took a job in Texas during that time were not American citizens. So more than three quarters of the state's job growth benefited non-citizens.
What does all this mean?
For one thing, it means that if you think about the population of Texas as it was four years ago, it's fared just about as well--or as badly, we should say--as the rest of the country. As David Frum, a former speechwriter in the Bush White House who lately has been critical of the Republican Party, puts it, "There was no Texas miracle, from the point of view of the people who constituted the population of Texas back in 2007."
It also suggests that Perry's relatively liberal approach on immigration has been a crucial piece of his apparent success on jobs. Frum writes,  "A permissive immigration [policy] is the indispensable prerequisite to the no-soup-for-you economy over which Perry presided."
As a result the study could provide fodder for Perry's rivals for the Republican nomination, who may use it both to argue that Perry's record on jobs is less impressive than it sounds, and to attack his permissive approach to immigration from the right.
The study is hardly the only piece of evidence that could undercut Perry's claims of success as a job creator. As The Lookout reported last month, other government figures show that most of the new jobs created in Texas in the last two years are in government, the low-wage service sector, or the energy sector, which has benefited from rising oil prices. And as the New York Times notes today, Texas's unemployment rate--which is calculated differently from the total number of jobs created--has spiked lately from 7.7 percent in June 2009 to 8.5 percent today, even as the national rate has edged downward.

Only 55 percent of young Americans have jobs, lowest since WWII.

(because all of the illegals have taken the jobs that used to be occupied by young American Citizens) 

 

By Zachary Roth

Senior National Affairs Reporter

By Zachary Roth | The Lookout – Thu, Sep 22, 2011

A young person walking in an alley in west Detroit. AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

Unemployment among young adults is at its highest point since World War II, new data show. And it's having a disconcerting impact on the trajectory of their careers and lives.

"We have a monster jobs problem, and young people are the biggest losers," Andrew Sum, an economist with the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University told the Associated Press.

Just 55.3 percent of people between 16 and 29 were employed in 2010 on average, the according to new figures released by the Census Bureau. That represents an enormous drop from 67.3 percent in 2000. Among teens the figure was less than 30 percent.

The result? Young people are delaying taking the steps that traditionally represent movement into adult life: moving to a new place, getting married, and buying a new home. Just 4.4 percent of 18- to 34-year olds moved across state lines -- again, the lowest level since World War Two (though such moves have been declining since long before the recent downturn, it's worth noting). Roughly 5.9 million Americans between 25 and 34 lived with their parents. That's up by 25 percent since before the recession began in late 2007. (Men are nearly twice as likely as women to move back in with Mom and Dad.) The marriage rate for those between 25 and 34 fell to 44.2 percent, also a new low. And home ownership declined for the fourth straight year.

"Many young adults are essentially postponing adulthood and all of the family responsibilities and extra costs that go along with it," Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau told the AP. If that continues, it would make the U.S. more like Europe, where youth unemployment is far higher and many people continue to live with their parents into their 30s.

In addition, studies have shown that when people experience unemployment at a young age, it depresses their likely earning power over the course of their entire career. "These people will be scarred, and they will be called the 'lost generation' - in that their careers would not be the same way if we had avoided this economic disaster," Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard, said.

Reaction to Ron Paul shows some Americans are exceptionally stupid

Published: Sunday, September 18, 2011, 2:00 AM     Updated: Monday, September 19, 2011, 12:07 PM

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger The Star-Ledger

AP File Photo Ron Paul: He irritates more idiots in fewer words than any American politican ever.

Among my least favorite clichés is that one about “speaking truth to power.” It’s easy to speak truth to powerful people. There aren’t many of them and they don’t care what you say.
What really takes nerve is to speak truth to knuckleheads. There are tens of millions of them. And they get to vote.
That is the charm of Ron Paul. I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that no politician in recent history has irritated so many knuckleheads in so few words.
The high point had to be last week at that tea party debate in Florida. A questioner asked whether the candidates favor cutting defense spending to balance the budget. Given the fact that every candidate opposes tax hikes, the only intelligent response had to be, “Of course.”
But when the Texas congressman said exactly that, he set off a sort of knucklehead revolt. Paul started with an assertion that the armed forces should be used solely for defensive purposes. Many Republicans would agree with that. But Paul felt a need to needle the knuckleheads:
“The purpose of al Qaeda was to attack us, invite us over there, where they can target us and they have been doing it,” said Paul. “They have more attacks against us and the American interests per month than occurred in all the years before 9/11, but we’re there occupying their land.”
After Paul went on to ask how we’d feel if we were invaded by China, the No. 1 knucklehead in the race, Rick Santorum, got a chance to reply. He’d been standing there with his jaw open like a flounder and he rose to the bait like it was a chunk of fresh squid.

“We stand for American exceptionalism,” (Note: This term was coined by a communist; see here.) ) the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania proclaimed. “We stand for freedom and opportunity for everyone around the world.”
This got the predictable round of applause from the knuckleheads. But Paul went right back at them: “As long as this country follows that idea, we’re going to be under a lot of danger,” he said. He proceeded to point out the harsh reality that armed occupation leads to armed resistance.
All of this earned Paul a hearty round of boos, but it’s the accepted view among those who understand terrorism. The statistics Paul cited come from Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has studied suicide terrorism extensively. Pape notes that before 9/11, only about 10 percent of suicide attacks were aimed at Americans. Now, it’s more than 90 percent.
Perhaps the leading American expert on suicide terrorism is Bob Baer, a former CIA agent who spent most of the ’80s and ’90s running around the Mideast. When I called Baer to ask his opinion of Paul’s parallel to a foreign invasion of the United States, he brought up the 1984 movie “Red Dawn.”
In it, a small town in Colorado is invaded by Russian paratroopers. The local high school kids get guns and take to the hills.
“We don’t want to be occupied,” said Baer, who’s from Colorado. “The movie was about high school kids essentially committing suicide.”
In making the documentary “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber,” Baer interviewed several would-be suicide bombers who had been captured before killing themselves, as well as the relatives of many successful suicide bombers.
“There was a guy whose cousin blew herself up in a restaurant,” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Because they’re killing us, we have to blow ourselves up. We don’t have F-16s and tanks, so we have to use suicide belts.’”
The ultimate irony here, Baer said, is that Islamic radicals may not be needing those suicide belts much longer. Thanks to the insistence by the neoconservatives — which is the polite way of saying “knucklehead” — that everyone should be freed from dictatorial rule, Islamic fundamentalists are now in a position to control much of the Mideast.
Once freed from the horrible Hosni Mubarak, Baer noted, the Egyptians promptly sacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo. If the dictatorship in Syria falls, he said, Israel will be surrounded on all sides by angry Muslims. All of them will have the freedom and opportunity Santorum and his fellow neocons wanted them to have.
“We really do have to wake up,” Baer said. “We do not have the money to play out our fantasies.”

Fall Equinox. Merry Mabon. Autumn. Second Harvest. Freyas Blot

AUTUMN EQUINOX IS HERE!

Say Goodbye to Summer! Our journey towards Winter has begun.

FALLFEAST
Autumn Equinox near September 21stFallfest of is another joyous festival in the Asatru holy calendar, and falls on the Autumn Equinox, and is the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere: the moment when the sun appears to cross the celestial equator, heading southward; the equinox occurs around September 22 - 24, varying slightly each year according to the 400-year cycle of leap years in the Gregorian Calendar. Fallfest represents the second harvest of the season.
Bonfires, feasting and dancing played a large part in the festivities. Even into Christian times, villagers cast the bones of the slaughtered cattle upon the flames, cattle having a prominent place in the pre-Christian Germanic world. (Though folk etymology derives the English word "bonfire" from these "bone fires,") With the bonfire ablaze, the villagers extinguished all other fires. Each family then solemnly lit their hearth from the common flame, thus bonding the families of the village together.
Materially speaking it marked the beginning of the gathering of food for the long winter months ahead, bringing people and their livestock in to their winter quarters. To be alone and missing at this dangerous time was to expose yourself and your spirit to the perils of imminent winter. In present times the importance of this part of the festival has diminished for most people. From the point of view of an agricultural people, for whom a bad season meant facing a long winter of famine in which many would not survive to the spring, it was paramount.
At the equinox, the sun rises directly in the east and sets directly in the west. In the northern hemisphere, before the autumnal equinox, the sun rises and sets more and more to the north, and afterwards, it rises and sets more and more to the south.
In ancient times, our European ancestors celebrated their Harvest Feast, where they have found many reasons to be thankful and to celebrate. Our people have done this for as long as we can trace our history. Although what our people have felt thankful for has certainly changed over the many years, remember you sit down this year with your family, you're participating in an ancient tradition. And it's a great time to figure out what you're thankful for.

* 9/23 (5:04 a.m. EDT): C--Marks the beginning of Autumn and point of equal daylight and darkness; celebrates the bounty of Mother Earth with feasting and aiding those in need.

Harvest (around September 23) - At the Autumn Equinox, we give praise and thanks to the group of Germanic deities known as the Vanir, whose specialties are fertility, plenty, and pleasure. The best known Vanir are the twins Frey and Freya, but there are others.

Bass Pro sued for racial discrimination in hiring

HOUSTON, Texas -  The federal government has sued national outdoor retail chain Bass Pro Outdoor World alleging racial discrimination in its hiring practices dating back to 2005.
The Equal Opportunity Commission, a federal agency charged with enforcing anti-discrimination laws in employment, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Houston on Wednesday.
The lawsuit alleges that qualified African-Americans and Hispanics were routinely denied positions at Bass Pro stores and managers of stores in Houston, Louisiana and other locations made derogatory racial comments acknowledging the practice.
The commission also alleges that Bass Pro destroyed documents related to applications and internal discrimination complaints and retaliated against those who spoke up.
A spokesman for Springfield, Mo.-based Bass Pro Shops said the company had not yet reviewed the lawsuit.

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/article_dd058cf6-e478-11e0-858b-001a4bcf6878.html#ixzz1Yk7uHluE