In 2010 and 2011, despite lower overall growth rates for the economy as a whole, the wealthiest did even better than before the recession. While those at the top captured over 100 percent of all income gains during these two years, the bottom 90 percent experienced a sharp contraction in their incomes. ...
Whereas during the Zelaya administration social spending rose as total spending rose, the Lobo administration has reduced social spending even as total spending has gone up. The reduction in expenditures on health and education is having a visible impact in Honduras. In the past year, health care workers and teachers have gone on strike. ... Goverfnment education programs have been scaled back or eliminated altogether. The Programa Matricula Gratis, which helped increase school enrollment by 28 percent from 2005 to 2009 by making enrollment free, was cancelled in late 2012. Another education program, Merienda Escolar, which provides free meals for students, experienced sharp budget cuts this year. ...
Measures of underemployment have increased greatly since 2009. Visible underemployment has increased from just 3.8 percent in 2008 to over 10 percent of the labor force in 2012 while invisible underemployment has increased from 28.8 percent to 43.6 percent. ...
During the Zelaya administration, the minimum wage was raised significantly, nearly doubling from 2006-2009. ... Still, the invisible underemployment rate remained relatively stable.
Those findings are consistent with those of the thousands of other empirical studies that have been performed in economics, on the results of economic policies in countries around the world. There is nothing that is surprising about them. However, the surge into the United States of desperate children is not merely a matter of economic migrants: these are refugees from a fascist system that the United States itself, under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and congressional Republicans, has enforced upon them and their families living in Honduras. As the New York Times report makes clear, their lives were in great jeopardy back home. But this is because of what the U.S. Government did to their country; the U.S. is responsible for it. While the evidence as to whether the U.S. CIA was involved in the coup there is as yet indeterminate, no question exists that without the continued support for the coup-regime by the U.S. Government (including especially Secretary of State Clinton's refusal to call it a "coup," since doing that would have made illegal our continued financial assistance to that regime), this regime would not have survived, and President Zelaya would almost certainly have been re-elected and restored.
During the period immediately after the coup, Secretary of State Clinton was remarkably discourteous, if not outright contemptuous, toward Zelaya, as he sought every possible means to restore democracy to his country.
So: if President Obama now, with this historical background, treats those desperate children as if they were merely economic migrants, not also refugees, then he will be culminating what he has already done to them, not moving to reverse it, but instead to seal their dooms. That's a policy-choice he now has to make; and he will, yet again, be making it in conjunction with congressional Republicans, because congressional Democrats have pretty much been kept out of the picture on this matter (as, indeed, on many others). Straight along, the opposition to the Clinton-Obama-Republican policy on this has come only from Democrats.
NOTE: This news report and analysis, like most of the ones I do, has been submitted to virtually all English-language news-sites. Thus far, it has been published by only washingtonsblog.com and rinf.com even though the flood of child-refugees at our border is itself currently page-one news. I wonder why news-editors don't think that the source of that flood is of interest to readers.
----------
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
6
4
4
