Standing in support of Israel, Jews, and believers in all the nations, in the name of Jesus (Yeshua). Sharing biblical truth, encouragement, news and prophecy.
Posted: 04 Dec 2017 Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG
This is what can happen when you go to a socialized healthcare system. A lot of people out there believe that the United States has a free market healthcare system, but that is actually not true. The percentage of the population that receives government-subsidized healthcare is rapidly approaching 50 percent, and the healthcare industry may be the most heavily regulated sector of the entire U.S. economy.
Every year the rules, red tape and regulations seem to get even worse, and every year health insurance premiums rise much faster than the overall rate of inflation. If we don’t start applying free market principles and start getting healthcare costs under control, our entire healthcare system could very easily implode.
I would like to share with you an excerpt from an article by former DEA agent David Hathaway. According to Hathaway, the average cost for an appendectomy in the United States is $33,000…
"My son had an attack of appendicitis late Saturday night. I knew that the Obamacare inflated prices for surgery in the U.S. would be ridiculous and that the service would likely be impersonal, involve long waits, and be nerve-wracking. I have friends in the medical field so I inquired just for grins. The price for the latest routine appendectomy in my area was, my jaw dropped, $43,000. I read on-line that the average cost for an appendectomy in the U.S. is $33,000. I am not near some of the great direct-pay medical facilities in the U.S. like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, but I am near Mexico. I chose that option since I have often utilized foreign medical and dental facilities in the past and find the service and prices to be outstanding."
You can buy a very nice brand new car for $33,000.
How in the world did we get to the point where costs have escalated so far out of control? Should performing an appendectomy really be this expensive?
I can imagine that some of my readers may be thinking that the quality of care down in Mexico is much lower, but this is actually not the case at all. Here is more from David Hathaway…
"My son was checked into a private room with private bath and satellite TV awaiting his surgery. The surgical staff was prepped and ready to start within an hour-and-a half of our arrival. The appendix was ruptured, so extra precautions were taken to clean and flush the abdominal cavity. Since the appendix was ruptured, the chief surgeon said that my son should stay two days to receive intravenous antibiotics to prevent the development of peritonitis.
The surgery was a success, and David’s son did stay in the hospital for two full days in order to receive the antibiotics that the doctor suggested.
But despite the extra time, the bill for the appendectomy was still less than 10 percent of what it would have been if the appendectomy had been performed in the United States…
The hospital stay was for 48 hours in a private room where my wife was allowed to spend the nights with my son sleeping on a couch in his room. This cost would have been significantly less if we hadn’t incurred emergency fees and if the appendectomy had not involved complications which required a longer stay and more medication. Despite all that, I thought the total price of $2,830 dollars was very reasonable."
So why can’t we have hospitals like that on our side of the border?
This is yet another example that shows that Obamacare has got to go and that we need to get government out of the healthcare business.
We once had the greatest healthcare system in the history of the world, and we can do it again if we will just return to free market principles. Elections really matter, and we simply cannot allow the Democrats and the establishment Republicans to take us even further down the road of socialized medicine.
They have already turned our once great healthcare system into a giant disaster zone, and we need to show them the door before they can do even more damage.
Posted: 13 Nov 2017 Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG
Mt. Popocatepetl is one of the most important volcanoes on the entire planet, and yet most Americans are not familiar with it. In ancient Aztec, Popocatepetl means “smoking mountain”, but to the locals the 5,426-meter-high volcano is simply known as “Don Goyo”. A catastrophic eruption of “Don Goyo” would be a nightmare scenario for the more than 20 million people living in the Mexico City metropolitan area, and that is why authorities are watching Mt. Popocatepetl very closely at the moment. In fact, we are being warned that the eruption that just took place could be a precursor to an even larger eruption…
Chilling footage showing the violent eruption emerged online amid fears there could be more. A huge plume of smoke blasted three kilometres in to the air from the summit of Popocatepetl after a series explosions over the course of 24 hours. Surrounding towns were blanketed with ash and debris and authorities are now warning a bigger eruption could threaten the 23.6million inhabitants in the Mexican capital, located just 35 miles (56km) away.
This latest eruption actually resulted in what is known as a “volcanotectonic earthquake”. Such quakes are caused by the movement of magma, and scientists are very concerned about what that might mean. “Don Goyo” has been spewing ash regularly since early this month, and at this point local residents are being told to remain indoors…
Locals have been warned to avoid outdoor activities and to keep doors and windows shut, and it is not yet clear when they can leave their homes. It has been emitting ash since the beginning of the month, reports suggest, before a string of explosions.
Of course the activity at Mt. Popocatepetl has been ramping up for quite a while. Back on September 19th, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake that affected Mexico City also triggered a minor eruption of the volcano. But minor eruptions can be handled. What we want to avoid is the kind of catastrophic eruption that has given Popocatepetl legendary status. In fact, we are told that at one time enormous mud flows from the volcano buried entire Aztec cities…
Historians tell us that Popocatepetl had a dramatic impact on the ancient Aztecs. Giant mud flows produced by massive eruptions covered entire Aztec cities. In fact, some of these mud flows were so large that they buried entire pyramids in super-heated mud. But we haven’t witnessed anything like that in any of our lifetimes, so it is hard to even imagine devastation of that magnitude. In addition to Mexico City’s mammoth population, there are millions of others that live in the surrounding region. Overall, there are about 25 million people that live in the immediate vicinity of Popocatepetl. Thankfully, we haven’t seen a major eruption of the volcano in modern times, but at some point that will change.
Our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, and the magnitude 7.3 earthquake that just hit Iraq is yet more evidence of this fact. A catastrophic eruption of Mt. Popocatepetl would be a disaster unlike anything North America has seen in centuries, and it would almost instantly collapse Mexico’s economy. This isn’t getting a lot of attention from the mainstream media in the United States, but this is a major story. Great shaking is taking place all along the “Ring of Fire”, and that potentially has dramatic implications for people living all over the globe – including the west coast of the United States. Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.
Hurricane Harvey drops 33 trillion gallons of rainfall drop on the U.S. Experts say the floods are a once-in-1,000-years event. Now Hurricane Irma is bearing down on Florida. 185 mile-per-hour winds. Experts say the devastation could be "catastrophic."
At the same time, Mexico experiences the worst earthquake in a century. Record-breaking floods are devastating Asia. Half of Bangladesh is underwater. 100,000 homes are destroyed. Forty million people face severe and potentially life-threatening food and water shortages. Russia is preparing to mass upwards of 100,000 troops on the borders of three NATO countries for a massive series of war games some fear is the prelude to war. The genocidal slaughter continues in Syria. Terror attacks around the globe. North Korea threatens to nuke the United States, then tests a hydrogen bomb and long-range ballistic missiles. And tensions over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem spike and then settle, and then spike again.
People have all kinds of theories as to what is happening, but the answer is quite straightforward -- God is trying to get our attention.
These events are not random. The God of the Bible is allowing these events to shake us, to wake us, to get our attention, that we might turn to Him and ask Him to have mercy on us and help us.
The Lord said through the ancient Hebrew Prophet Haggai that He would shake the nations in the last days. “For thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘Once more in a little while, I am going to shake the heavens and the earth, the sea also and the dry land. I will shake all the nations….I am going to shake the heavens and the earth. I will overthrow the thrones of kingdoms and destroy the power of the kingdoms of the nations.” (Haggai 2:6, 7, 21, 22)
In the New Testament, the Lord reinforced that theme. “See to it that you do not refuse Him who is speaking. For if those did not escape when they refused him who warned them on earth, much less will we escape who turn away from Him who warns from heaven. And His voice shook the earth then, but now He has promised, saying, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth, but also the heaven’….Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:25-29)
The Scriptures are clear: the Lord shakes individuals and nations that we might let go of all of the flawed political, philosophical, intellectual and religions notions that we cling to that won’t give us true peace, that don’t give us real hope, that can’t bring us any security, that can’t provide forgiveness from our sins much less eternal life for our souls. The God of the Bible wants to shake us loose of such things that we might turn to Him, and to the life He offers through faith in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord isn’t letting America and other nations be shaken because He hates us. He’s letting us be shaken precisely because He loves us and wants us to repent and turn to Him and call out to Him, as individuals, as families, as leaders, and as entire nations.
This is a 2 Chronicles 7:14 moment, for the Church, for America, for Israel, for everyone. "If My people who are called by My name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land."
May we humble ourselves and seek the Lord while He still may be found.
"Regardless of where Irma makes landfall, all significant hurricane impact threats are likely this weekend for the entire Florida Keys, including catastrophic and life threatening storm surge flooding and destructive winds, potentially extremely high rainfall amounts, as well as a threat of tornadoes," warns the NHC. "There is still some time to evacuate, and we encourage all residents and visitors to leave the Florida Keys."
Harvey is a 1,000-year flood event unprecedented in scale (Washington Post) -- "A new analysis from the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center has determined that Harvey is a 1-in-1,000-year flood event....There is nothing in the historical record that rivals this, according to Shane Hubbard, the Wisconsin who made and mapped this calculation. 'In looking at many of these events [in the United States], I’ve never seen anything of this magnitude or size,' he said. 'This is something that hasn’t happened in our modern era of observations.'"
Harvey unloaded 33 trillion gallons of water in the U.S. (Washington Post) -- "The overwhelming majority of Harvey’s rains are over, and we have a new calculation for the total volume of water it dispensed on U.S. soil: 33 trillion gallons. This number incorporates the rainfall not only in Texas and Louisiana, but also in Tennessee and Kentucky, which also experienced torrents."
Tracking Harvey's toll: 'This is the costliest and worst natural disaster in American history' (Dallas Morning News) -- "AccuWeather is out with the highest estimate yet of Harvey’s potential price tag. The weather foreasting service now expects damage to reach $190 billion, or a full 1 percent of U.S. economic output. 'This is the costliest and worst natural disaster in American history,' said Joel Myers, AccuWeather's founder, president and chairman."
400% SPIKE IN GLOBAL WEATHER CATASTROPHES SINCE 1970
Since 1970, the number of extreme weather events has quadrupled."
"There are now 400 extreme weather events every year."
"These include storms, landslides, droughts, and forest fires."
"This monsoon season has caused devastating floods in South Asia, killing over 1,200 people. The storm has left millions in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal vulnerable to food and water shortages."
"Almost half of Bangladesh is now underwater. "
Hurricane Irma "has set a new rainfall record in America."
"One of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in Mexico struck off the country's southern coast, toppling hundreds of buildings and sending panicked people fleeing into the streets in the middle of the night," reported the Associated Press. "At least 61 people were reported dead."
David Lebo: "A Tsunami of My Spirit is About to Hit the USA!"
THE ELIJAH LIST Jul 26, 2017
From the desk of Bill Yount:
God is bringing His prophets out of the woods who have preached to trees long before they have preached in pulpits.
David Lebo is such a one who the trees have heard from. He's a trail blazer from the hills of West Virginia, who has been called to the nations.
I have known David for many years and we have ministered together. With fire in his bones, he ministers prophetically, seeing the gold in people, as the Holy Spirit burns away the wood, hay and stubble. From this message you will know that he has hung out in the woods with Jesus. (To Subscribe to the Elijah List subscribe here.)
Enjoy! And thanks for forwarding this to your friends! They can subscribe here. Steve Shultz, Founder and Publisher The Elijah List & Breaking Christian News http://www.elijahlist.com
P.S. – Oh, and a Quick Note to our readers: To EXPLORE our more than 2,500 Christian Prophetic books, CDs, and gifts go to: elijahshopper.com.
"A Tsunami of My Spirit is About to Hit the USA!"
David Lebo, Hedgesville, WV
"A tsunami of My Spirit is about to hit the east coast of the United States of America and sweep across this great land—from the east to the south, moving across into the west, then north into Canada and down into Mexico. The entire Western Hemisphere will be affected by this revival and awakening," says the Lord God Almighty.
"O America, My beautiful: prepare for the impact. For a tsunami of My Spirit, is about to come upon you! Nothing can stop what I am about to do in this nation! Nothing devised by man nor any demon in Hell can stand against this move of God. Only a warning sound can be given!
"Shock waves will be felt throughout this country and around the world. Wave upon wave will come. It will be relentless. It will come from person to person, from church to church, from region to region, and from state to state. For I am breaking open the fountains of the great deep that lie within My people!(Photo via Unsplash)
"It's the power of God that they never knew was there. But I have had reserved for them all along! They will know who they are, Whose they are, and what is at their disposal. They are coming forth with My power and My anointing to take back what has been stolen from them. They will take new ground in My name fully weaponized by My Spirit," says the Lord.
Consuming Waters and a Mighty Shaking
"Nothing will be left untouched by these waters! Everything will be affected! With this tsunami will come a tremendous shaking in the land. I, the Lord God, I will shake everything. Every stone that has been laid by the hands of men will be torn down. Only those stones that are laid by the hand of God shall remain because, I am the Lord God—I am the Architect! I am the Builder!
"Return to your first love! America: I am calling you back! Back to the foundations of what this country was built upon—the truth of My Word."
"I am building My Church. I am building My Tabernacle. I am building My Temple in this day, and in this hour. My people, they are My Temple—individually and corporately—they make up the Bride of Christ. Individual temples making up a larger House of the living God.
"This shaking will be unlike any other shaking that has ever been felt in the earth or in the Body of Christ. Lines will be drawn. Sides will be taken. Some will reject, but more will come in."
Choose This Day Whom You Will Serve
The battle cry of this revival is: Choose this Day Whom You Will Serve! If God be God serve Him! If Baal be God serve him. It is a showdown of the ages. It's like Elijah on top of Mount Carmel. You cannot serve two masters. The days of sitting on the fence are over!
"I, the Lord God, I say unto you: Choose this day whom you will serve! If God be God serve Him. Take Him at His Word. Listen, believe, and do! Walk in obedience to whatever I am saying to you in this hour!
"My sheep know My voice; they hear My cry. They listen to My voice, and My voice alone. They speak the language of My Kingdom, and all other voices are a foreign language! This is critical to listen for My voice of instruction and whatever I may say to you—this is what I require.
"But to hear My voice, you must come into the 'Secret Place' of the Most High God—the Holy of Holies! You must come back to a 'Covenantal Relationship' with Me! Return to your first love!
America: I am calling you back! Back to the foundations of what this country was built upon—the truth of My Word. I have heard the cries of My Remnant," says the Lord, "the tide has shifted! I have heard from Heaven and I am sending down My answer."(Photo via Unsplash)
Blessing Follows the Shaking
"There will be a great shaking in the land, followed by tremendous blessing. Some may have thought it was too late for America, but I want you to know today that I have heard the cries of My Remnant. I have seen your tears in the night time hour and America: you will shine your light once again.
"America will be a 'lighthouse' to the nations once again! She will shine with the flames of My fire burning hot with the glory of God. She will be a 'Burning Bush' for Me, humanity on fire with My glory. Her 'trees' will not be consumed. America's trees will shine brightly with the glory of God! Hallelujah!
"They are coming forth with My power and My anointing to take back what has been stolen from them. They will take new ground in My name fully weaponized by My Spirit."
"She, once again, will affect nations for the Kingdom of God.And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising. America is rising once again. America is on the rise—if she listens to the Most High God. If she humbles herself before My mighty hand.
"'If My people who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from Heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. Now My eyes will be open and My ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place.' (2 Chron. 7:14 NIV) (To Subscribe to the Elijah List subscribe here.)
Rev. David and Vicki Lebo are founders of Tidal Wave Ministries International, Inc. They have a burning passion for revival and awakening among the nations all for the glory of God. Carrying a Jeremiah chapter 1 calling as a prophet to the nations, Dave boldly proclaims the word of the Lord as a voice of "One crying out in the wilderness: prepare ye the way of the Lord."
He has been in the prophetic ministry for 24 yrs. He is author of his first book: Abiding Under The Shadowreleased in 2010. Dave and Vicki have been happily married for 31 years, have 3 children, and 5 grandchildren while currently residing in Hedgesville, WV.
To receive more words like this in YOUR inbox, subscribe FREE to the Elijah List at this link http://elijahlist.com/subscribe.
Weapons seized from criminal gangs are displayed before being destroyed by military personnel at a military base in Tijuana, Mexico. (REUTERS/Jorge Duenes)
Why These Men of God Are Being Hunted and Slaughtered in Mexico
Join us on our podcast each weekday for an interesting story, well told, from Charisma News. Listen at charismapodcastnetwork.com.
Even in a rural Mexican community that has grown accustomed to the news of brutal killings, the abduction and murder of a popular Catholic priest has triggered profound shock and outrage.
The bullet-ridden body of the Rev. Jose Lopez Guillen was found Sept. 24 on the highway outside Puruandiro in the western state of Michoacan, a region plagued by violent conflict. The 43-year-old cleric had been abducted from his home in nearby Janamuato five days earlier.
"He was an engaging personality," said Maria Solorio, a regular at Lopez's church. "He was an excellent priest and very devoted to the community. ... What happened to him was a great injustice."
Such injustices have been piling up and have prompted questions about whether the church is under attack or whether the clergy are just collateral damage in a wider wave of violence.
Lopez was kidnapped on Sept. 19, the same day authorities discovered the bodies of two slain priests in the eastern state of Veracruz; that makes at least 15 priests slain over the past four years.
The murders come at a time of strained relations between church and state in Mexico, in part because Catholic bishops recently supported mass protests against a proposal to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide.
In the wake of the killings the church has also abandoned its normal reluctance to criticize the government and has publicly accused state officials in Michoacan and Veracruz of directing a defamation campaign against the priests.
Mexico is the country with the second-largest Catholic population in the world, with nearly 100 million people, or more than 80 percent of the population, identifying as Catholic. But the country has a long history of anti-clericalism and in the past century the government officially and often violently suppressed the church.
But that dynamic changed dramatically after constitutional reforms in 1992 and the government and hierarchy enjoyed good relations for the most part.
Motives have not been established for the latest killings, but the Catholic Multimedia Center notes that violence against the clergy occurs disproportionately in states with high levels of organized crime, such as Veracruz and Michoacan.
The organization records 31 killings of priests in Mexico since 2006, the year then-President Felipe Calderon deployed troops to Michoacan in an effort to stamp out the drug cartels.
A decade on, the war across Mexico has claimed more than 150,000 lives, while Michoacan remains a hotbed of crime and civil unrest.
Pope Francis visited the state capital, Morelia, during his Mexico trip in February, in a show of solidarity with those most affected by organized crime.
The intensity of the violence in Michoacan has forced some priests into social activism, although the moves are rarely welcomed by the Catholic hierarchy.
One such priest is the Rev. Jose Luis Segura Barragan, who is among the most high-profile opponents of drug cartels in the state.
After he was appointed parish priest in the town of La Ruana in 2013, Segura voiced support for the armed self-defense groups that had sprung up in response to rampant insecurity in the region. Groups of locals soon tried to drive him out of town.
"Because I didn't leave, people fired bullets and threw rocks and fireworks at the church," he told RNS.
Segura, who finally left La Ruana four months ago, came under the media spotlight for his views. Yet for the clergy, even keeping a low profile is no guarantee of safety. In the most dangerous states in Mexico, any resistance against cartels, however minor, can become a motive for murder.
"Priests find themselves in problems when they refuse to provide a service to drug traffickers, like a baptism or Mass," Segura said.
Analysts generally agree, however, that violence against the clergy should be seen within the wider context of the drug war.
"It would be dishonest to say this is a targeted persecution of priests or the church," said the Rev. Hugo Valdemar Romero, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Mexico City. "But the fact that you are a priest does not liberate you from the risk of robbery, murder or torture."
While anti-clericalism is not blamed, the Rev. Omar Sotelo of the Catholic Multimedia Center said the role of the clergy makes them particularly vulnerable to crime. Priests as a matter of course come into contact with a great variety of people, some of whom may be criminals.
"The violence against priests often has to do with their pastoral work," Sotelo said. "These are not just common crimes."
Some critics have accused Mexican bishops of concentrating on social matters such as same-sex marriage while turning a blind eye to the politically sensitive topic of violence.
"The church is focused on sexual issues," said the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, a priest and famous activist. "They don't organize many marches to protest injustice, government corruption and impunity."
But attempts by prosecutors to link recently murdered priests with crime and criminals seem to have convinced church officials to speak out against the government.
Surveillance footage apparently showing Lopez entering a hotel with an underage boy was leaked to a media outlet in Michoacan. It caused an uproar until a woman on social media identified the pair as her ex-husband and son, not the murdered priest.
Similarly, State Attorney General Luis Angel Bravo Contreras was criticized for claiming the two priests in Veracruz had been drinking heavily with their killers before the crimes.
Church officials have responded with a vigorous defense of the victims.
"We demand that no priest, or anyone, be slandered, especially before the investigations are concluded," the Mexican bishops' conference wrote Sept. 26, a day after Lopez's body was discovered.
"This is a common strategy," said Solalinde. "They criminalize victims in an effort to contain the public outcry."
In this Mexican context of crime, corruption and impunity, Solalinde believes violence against priests suggests they are truly living their vocation.
"This persecution is a sign that priests are defending human rights," he said.
Solalinde has himself been threatened by criminals on multiple occasions.
"If one day something happens, it happens," he said. "But I refuse to let that worry me."
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Posted: 14 Sep 2016 Michael Snyder THE ECONOMIC COLLAPSE BLOG
What is going to happen when America finally doesn’t have any manufacturing jobs left at all? On Wednesday, we learned that Ford Motor Company is shifting all small car production to Mexico. Of course the primary goal for this move is to save a little bit of money. This hits me personally, because my grandfather once worked for Ford. He was loyal to Ford all his life, and he always criticized other members of the family when they bought a vehicle that was not American-made.
When I was young I didn’t understand why making vehicles in America is so important, but I sure do now. By shipping jobs overseas, we are destroying jobs, we are destroying small businesses and we are destroying our tax base. If we want to be a wealthy nation, we have got to make things here, and hopefully we can get the American people to start to understand this.
In 1914, Henry Ford decided to start paying his workers $5.00 a day, which was more than double the average wage for auto workers at the time.
One of the reasons why he did this was because he felt that his workers should be able to afford to buy the vehicles that they were making. This is what he wrote in 1926…
“The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”
These days Ford is going in the complete opposite direction. Pretty soon, Ford won’t be making any more small vehicles in the United States at all…
Ford is shifting all North American small-car production from the U.S. to Mexico, CEO Mark Fields told investors today in Dearborn, even though its plans to invest in Mexico have become a lightning rod for controversy in this year’s presidential election.
“Over the next two to three years, we will have migrated all of our small-car production to Mexico and out of the United States,” Fields said.
Could Ford keep jobs in America?
Of course they could. During the second quarter of 2016, Ford reported a net income of 2,000,000,000 dollars.
But if they move production to Mexico they can boost that profit just a little bit higher.
Shame on them.
Needless to say, Donald Trump is quite upset about this move by Ford. This was his response…
“We shouldn’t allow it to happen. They’ll make their cars, they’ll employ thousands of people, not from this country and they’ll sell their car across the border,” Trump said. “When we send our jobs out of Michigan, we’re also sending our tax base.”
And he is exactly right about all of this. We can’t afford to lose more good paying jobs, we can’t afford for the middle class to shrink any more than it already has, and we certainly can’t afford our tax base to continue to deteriorate.
We may think that we can live on borrowed money indefinitely, but that is going to catch up with us in a major way at some point.
Sadly, Ford is not the only auto company doing this. Just like Ross Perot once predicted, there is a giant sucking sound as good paying auto jobs leave the United States and head to Mexico…
Ford isn’t alone. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles said earlier this year it will end production of all cars in the U.S. by the end of this year as it discontinues production of the Dodge Dart in Belvidere, Ill. and the Chrysler 200 in Sterling Heights, Michigan.
In recent years, automakers that include General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Mazda, Toyota and Volkswagen have all announced plans to either expand existing plants or build new ones in Mexico.
The bad news for American workers won’t end once all of our manufacturing jobs are gone.
Today there are millions of Americans that make their living by driving, but the revolution in self-driving vehicles threatens to make large numbers of those jobs obsolete.
Ford, General Motors, Tesla, Google, Apple and a whole host of other big corporations have been feverishly working on this technology, and many of the tests have gone very well so far.
Once this technology starts being rolled out on a widespread basis, the job losses could be absolutely staggering. Just consider the following numbers which come from Wolf Richter…
1.8 million heavy-truck and tractor-trailer long-haul drivers in 2014, expected to grow 4% a year (BLS), with a median pay of $40,260 in 2015. At this growth rate, there will be 1.94 million long-haul drivers by the end of this year.
1.33 million delivery truck drivers in 2014, expected to grow 4% a year (BLS), with a median pay of $27,800 in 2015. They’re picking up and/or delivering packages and small shipments within the city or region, driving a vehicle of 26,000 pounds or less, usually between a distribution center and businesses or households. At this growth rate, there will be 1.44 million drivers by the end of this year.
233,700 taxi drivers and chauffeurs in 2014, growing at 13% annually (BLS). They earned a median pay of $23,510 in 2015. One in five worked part time. This doesn’t – or doesn’t fully – reflect the “rideshare” drivers working for Uber, Lyft, and the like.
“Over 500,000” rideshare drivers are estimated to ply the trade in the US. It’s a high-growth sector: the number of Uber drivers in the US doubled in 2015 from the prior year to 327,000. Half of them worked 15 hours or less per week.
In order to have a thriving middle class, we have got to have middle class jobs.
Unfortunately, big corporations have become absolutely obsessed with finding ways to eliminate expensive American workers by sending jobs overseas or by replacing them with technology altogether.
The elite will always need people to cut their hair and wait on them at restaurants, but those aren’t the kinds of jobs that can support middle class families.
As I noted yesterday, for the first time ever the middle class in America has become a minority and poverty is on the rise all over the nation. The long-term trends that are eviscerating the middle class are accelerating, and there doesn’t appear to be any quick fix which will turn things around dramatically any time soon.
So the middle class is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller, and that has dramatic implications for the future of this country.
Why Mexicans Are Making a Mass Exodus From Catholicism
Pope Francis wears a Sombrero he received as a gift from a Mexican journalist aboard an airplane to Havana. (Reuters)
Join us on our podcast each weekday for an interesting story, well told, from Charisma News. Listen at charismapodcastnetwork.com.
Pope Francis is visiting Mexico, a country that has been a stronghold of Catholicism for centuries. But a growing number of Mexicans are leaving the Catholic faith, and the pope is hoping to use his visit to convince them to stay faithful to the church.
Sara Granados is among those who have left the faith. She was born into a devout Catholic family, and by 17 she had already fulfilled all the required religious rites. But soon she realized that wasn't getting her closer to God.
"After 17 years old, I still had emptiness in my heart," Sara explained. "I had no desire to live and for me, it was better to die than to live. A friend of my mother told me, 'I'm taking you to this place.' She never mentioned church, but she brought me to church. That day the pastor was preaching and he said a word that touched my heart."
Thousands of Mexicans like Sara are embracing evangelical Christianity.
In 1970, 96 percent of Mexicans claimed to be Catholic. According to a 2010 Mexican national census, that figure has dropped to less than 85 percent.
One reason for the decline? Evangelicals leaders are spiritually closer to their flock.
Surveys have found an average of one Catholic priest for every 6,000 Catholics in Mexico, compared to one evangelical pastor for every 200 followers.
"The work of the evangelical Christian church in evangelism has been successful in past few decades. Many have come to hear a different message that brings peace, harmony, blessing, and salvation to human beings," Pastor Benjamin Lomeli of Iglesia El Buen explained.
Other reasons Mexicans have left Catholicism include evangelical outreach and the tarnished image of the Catholic Church.
Catholic Church spokesman Father Jose de Jesus told CBN News that Catholic Church leaders "... must recognize that certain scandals have caused many to be disappointed by the church and to seek a different spirituality."
With a record number of people here now embracing evangelical Christianity, Pope Francis is hoping his visit will re-energize his flock and keep Mexicans faithful to the Catholic Church.
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