VivirLatino

The following is a tragic story–and hits a little too close to home. A Californian couple committed suicide after killing all their children–why? Because both the mother and the father had lost their jobs and they didn’t see any way to make it through the situation.

Although I’ve been without a job and know how to survive in dire circumstances (thus would never turn to suicide), I most definitely know that feeling of out of control desperation that this couple must have felt. Like so many other people out there, paying bills is a struggle in this economic time-to the point I’ve had to decide between food to feed my family and pay off utilities.

It’s time for Congress to *forget* about the companies and businesses and start paying attention to the people that are employing them and elected them into office. We all need help–but that doesn’t seem to matter, even in the worst of cases.

May this family rest in peace.

I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t really find much of anything useful about the various stimulus packages that have gone through Congress since the U.S. economy began to fail. They don’t create jobs, they don’t pay my student loans off, they don’t make my roads any better. So I haven’t been a big fan of Obama’s proposed stimulus package–and was even less so when I found out that he (the big mighty feminist) was asking Congress Democrats to cut funded birth control out of the package. And then I discovered that the stimulus package is *also* going to fund E-Verify.

NILC explains why this is not a good thing:

The amendment represents a massive expansion of the E-Verify program. As has been well documented by three different House committees in five separate hearings, the E-Verify program is deeply flawed, inaccurate, and subject to substantial employer abuse. Bottom line – it is not ready for a massive expansion and especially not during the economic crisis.

E-Verify is a voluntary internet-based program intended to allow employers to electronically verify the information that workers present to prove their employment eligibility by accessing information in databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). Approximately 100,000 employers are enrolled in (though not necessarily using) E-Verify — slightly more than 1 percent of the approximately 7.4 million employers in the U.S.

Read more…

I did not vote for Obama for very specific reasons. I prefer to give my vote to 3 party candidates, for one thing. And for another thing, I think he’s too much of a moderate. But every once in a while, he does certain things that catch my ear. This speech was one of them:

One of the better parts:

This crisis did not happen solely by some accident of history or normal turn of the business cycle, and we won’t get out of it by simply waiting for a better day to come, or relying on the worn-out dogmas of the past. We arrived at this point due to an era of profound irresponsibility that stretched from corporate boardrooms to the halls of power in Washington, DC. For years, too many Wall Street executives made imprudent and dangerous decisions, seeking profits with too little regard for risk, too little regulatory scrutiny, and too little accountability. Banks made loans without concern for whether borrowers could repay them, and some borrowers took advantage of cheap credit to take on debt they couldn’t afford. Politicians spent taxpayer money without wisdom or discipline, and too often focused on scoring political points instead of the problems they were sent here to solve. The result has been a devastating loss of trust and confidence in our economy, our financial markets, and our government.

The full text to it can be found here.