Bloomberg: Send All Illegal Immigrants To Detroit

The neo-liberal plan for Detroit and other financially-strapped cities is becoming clear.

With Detroit in financial straits, a corporate manager has been put in charge of the school system to close down half the public schools in the city and replace them with for-profit charters, tear up the union contracts with teachers, fire every teacher in the city (and only hire back the ones willing to take steep pay cuts) and raise class sizes to 60 in traditional public schools, but not charters.

Gee, that sounds like a fantastic plan guaranteed to, well, guaranteed to make money for the corporate education reform movement that will run the charters.

But it certainly doesn't sound like it's going to improve the Detroit schools system, improve the lives of the children there or help bring population back to a city that has lost a quarter of it in the last ten years.

In fact, it sounds like the people who haven't fled Detroit already may decide they can do better than this and run screaming from the city.

Perhaps that will happen, but neo-liberal dictator of NYC Michael Bloomberg has a solution:

Mayor Bloomberg has a fix for the nation's immigration debate: Send 'em to Detroit.

"If I were the federal government," Bloomberg told David Gregory on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday morning. "Assuming you could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together, you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit and live there for five or ten years."

Detroit has suffered a devastating population loss in recent decades, losing 25% of its citizens since the last census.

Meanwhile, immigrants are clamoring to enter the United States.

Bloomberg says he can fix both at once.

The immigrants would arrive in Detroit, "start businesses, take jobs whatever," Bloomberg said. "You would populate Detroit over night because half the world wants to come here ... You can use something like immigration policy - at no cost to the federal government - to fix a lot of the problems that we have."

Wow - now all these corporate takeovers of bankrupt municipalities in states like Michigan really comes into focus - the corporate overlords who own the country plan on using them as dumping grounds for cheap labor - the illegal immigrant kind.

Hey, that's one way to bring back factories and manufacturing to Detroit and STILL keep labor and production costs dirt cheap for multi-national corporations like Apple and Microsoft who usually prefer places like Sri Lanka and China to pursue their slave labor needs.

Add hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to Detroit, bring back the 12 hour/7 day work week and start manufacturing again.

Wow - what a fantastically evil plan.

No wonder Bloomberg is articulating it.

But you know, I say why not dispense with the whole "freedom" thing entirely and just call the illegal immigrants Bloomberg wants to use for cheap labor in bankrupt cities like Detroit the correct term for what they'll be - "slaves."

And why not change the "democracy" moniker we still anachronistically use to describe the United States to "feudal system instead?

That's where we've been heading anyway, and now Bloomberg has revealed the next step in the feudalization process.

How ironic will it be when American jobs start getting outsourced to American cities that contain special "illegal immigrant" entrepreneurial zones where illegal immigrants, afraid of deportation, will work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, churning out ipads, xboxes and whatever other corporate crap our overlords decide to manufacture there?

CROSS-POSTED AT THE DAILY KOS

Study: Illegal Immigrants Paid $11.2 Billion In Taxes, General Electric Paid $0

But illegal immigrants are the freeloaders, right?

I bet most of you didn't know undocumented immigrants contributed more - much more - to the national treasury last year than General Electric. Surprised? Yet it's true.

While GE - which earned a whopping $14 billion last year - is reported to have paid nothing, nada, zero in taxes (GE denies it), the undocumented paid billions in state and local taxes in 2010.

No, it's not me talking; it's the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (itepnet.org), a prestigious, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that works on federal, state and local tax policy issues.

Obviously the old saying, "Nothing is certain but death and taxes," is not to be believed anymore. Or rather, only half of it can be believed.

Because death, of course, remains as dreaded and inevitable as ever, but with taxes the story is different.

"The rich are different from you and me," the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, is a much more accurate description of what's going on in the country.

To no one's surprise, taxes are still as certain for working people - and whatever is left of the middle class - as they ever were. But for, well, GE and other corporate giants, the only certainty is that many found ways to contribute as little to the country's coffers as possible.

At the same time, Republicans in Washington are involved in a mighty struggle to protect the tax breaks of the country's richest 2%, while happily proposing to cut the most basic social services to Americans who really need them.

Closer to home, Gov. Cuomo has announced the so-called millionaires tax will not be renewed once it expires in December, although since it was established in 2009 it has brought in as much as $5 billion annually.

There is no doubt, when it comes to taxes the rich are really different.

Ironically the vilified undocumented population, among the poorest and most vulnerable in the country, does its part when it comes to taxes.

They pay sales taxes and property taxes - even if they rent, ITEP said. At least half of them pay income taxes. And, I believe, if they were ever legalized, close to 100% would do the same. "Add this all up," ITEP said, "and it amounts to billions in revenue to state and local governments."

ITEP estimates that households that are headed by undocumented immigrants (which may include members who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants) paid $11.2 billion in state and local taxes last year. That included $1.2 billion in personal income taxes, $1.6 billion in property taxes and $8.4 billion in sales taxes.

New York is fourth in the country in tax revenue - $662.4 million - from households headed by undocumented immigrants, after California, Texas and Florida.

"These figures should be kept in mind as politicians and commentators continue with the seemingly endless debate over what to do with unauthorized immigrants already living in the United States," ITEP wisely advises.

"[These] immigrants - and their family members - are adding value to the U.S. economy; not only as taxpayers, but as workers, consumers and entrepreneurs as well."

General Electric of course has added value to the economy as well.

Think about all the money people will make trying to clean up the nuclear holocaust the GE-designed power plants in Japan have wrought.

Bloomberg Meets Obama To Talk Immigration Reform

Whenever I see the words "reform" and "Bloomberg" in the same sentence, my bullshit meter goes up to heavy shit range:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday for a closed-door immigration meeting with President Barack Obama.

In addition to Bloomberg, the bipartisan guest list included former city Police Commissioner William Bratton, the Reverend Al Sharpton, the mayor of San Antonio, Philadelphia's police commissioner and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The mayor has stressed the need for immigration reform because immigrants create new jobs and businesses.

Bloomberg has testified before Congress, and last June he formed a coalition with Rupert Murdoch to advocate for reform.

Obama's plan calls for the federal government to secure the borders, hold accountable business owners who hire illegal immigrants and create a legal immigration system to meet the country's diverse needs.

In a later press conference, the mayor told reporters that he actually doesn't give a flying fuck about immigration or illegal immigrants at all, he just doesn't want to lose his houseboy Manuel to deportation.

Said the mayor, "No one, and I mean no one, makes an old-fashioned on the rocks the way Manuel does. I just can't afford to lose that kind of competence. Frankly, I don't think America can afford to lose that kind of competence. I mean, can we afford to trust NYC public school graduates to make my old-fashioneds the correct way? I don't think so, not until we get rid of LIFO, at any rate."

Warms my heart to hear the Mayor of Money speak so emotionally about such a serious issue.