The United States has accepted two new immigrants for each additional job created since 2000, according to federal data.

The data shows that 18 million legal and illegal immigrants settled in the United States from 2000 to 2015, while only 9.3 million additional jobs were created, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors a reduced level of immigration.

After subtracting deaths, departures and retirements among the immigrants, the working-age population of immigrants has grown 12 million since 2000, according to data at the Bureau of Labor Standards, said Steve Camarota, the author of the CIS study.

That’s equal to three years of American births.

The population of Americans aged 16 to 65 also grew by 16 million from 2000 to 2014, Camarota told The Daily Caller.

That overall population of working-age immigrants and native-born Americans increased by 28 million, which is three times the number of jobs added since 2000.

...

As the Federal Reserve prepares to begin raising interest rates later this year, it is readying for what may be another big challenge in 2015: the shift to a Republican-controlled Congress.

The Fed’s only Republican governor, Jerome Powell, has begun making the central bank’s case to the GOP, in public and private, against proposals Fed officials say could limit its independence. And the bank has hired and promoted Republicans within its Congressional Liaison Office since the November midterm elections, when the GOP won enough seats to take control of the Senate from the Democrats and expand its House majority.

It is unclear whether these efforts will overcome the perception among many Republicans that the liaison office, which lobbies for the bank’s interests on Capitol Hill, has in recent years been too closely aligned with Democrats, and hasn’t done enough to cultivate relationships within the GOP, according to current and former Hill staffers and financial-industry lobbyists.

“I think there’s a recognition at the Fed that they need to at least make a gesture” to Republicans, said Mark Calabria, a former aide to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R., Ala.) and the director of financial-regulations studies at the Cato Institute. “Whether it changes policy or not I think is an open question.”

In a speech Monday, Mr. Powell laid out his objections to GOP-backed proposals that he said would threaten Fed independence, including legislation to expand congressional oversight of the bank’s interest-rate decisions. Advocates of the proposal say it would bring more transparency to policy decisions.

The so-called Audit-the-Fed bill, introduced by Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), “risks inserting the Congress directly into monetary policy decision making, reversing decades of deliberate effort by the Congress to insulate the Fed from political pressure in carrying out its day-to-day duties,” Mr. Powell said.

Mr. Powell, a former private-equity executive who served in the administration of George H.W. Bush, also met privately on Jan. 22 with Senate Republican chiefs of staff and staff directors.

The Fed last month hired Mike Lee, a former senior Republican economist on the Senate Banking Committee under Sen. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho), to join the Congressional Liaison Office, as well as Mark Libell, the former legislative director for retired Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D., W.Va.), who joined the office in December. And it promoted Jennifer Gallagher, a former aide to Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) on the Banking Committee, to the No. 2 position in the office.

The new hires are only filling existing positions. But the changes signal the Fed may be trying to shift its focus to Republicans after years of tilting toward Democrats while they controlled the Senate, said one Republican Senate aide .

The closer relationships in recent years with Democrats may have a straightforward explanation. Democrats controlled the Senate from 2007 through last year. They controlled the House, too, in 2010 when the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law was passed, the last time the Fed faced a major challenge to its powers from Congress.

Now, GOP-backed proposals to change Fed operations that languished in the last Congress have better prospects of passage. One is the Audit-the-Fed bill. Another, a House bill, would require the bank to use a mathematical rule to guide rate decisions, which it would then have to explain to Congress. Mr. Powell said Monday there also is talk among lawmakers about proposing further curbs on the Fed’s emergency lending powers.

He called all three ideas “misguided.”

The Fed’s first line of defense against such efforts is the Congressional Liaison Office, which coordinates communication between the bank and Congress. At its core, however, it is tasked with defending the Fed’s interests on Capitol Hill. It is a delicate balance: the Fed is accountable to Congress, which sets its mandate, but it operates independently of the other branches of government.

Current and former Hill staffers noted the office is run by a Democrat, former Clinton administration official Linda Robertson, and that many of its lobbyists have worked for Democrats.

The Fed will need to maintain ties with Democrats even while reaching out to Republicans. Congress last month passed a bill with bipartisan support mandating the Fed have at least one governor with community banking experience. Fed officials had opposed the move. And several Senate Democrats say the Fed is opaque and too close to banks it regulates—charges that Fed officials dispute.

Houthi rebels have reportedly seized all the US embassy’s vehicles in Sanaa and the weapons of the Marines, who were guarding it, after the American ambassador and diplomats left Yemen’s capital earlier Wednesday.

Over 20 vehicles were taken by the militants after the Americans left for the airport, Yemeni members of the US embassy staff told Reuters.

A top Sanaa airport official told CNN that the Houthis also prevented the departing US Marines from taking their weapons on the plane with them.

Some of the weapons were seized by the rebels, while the rest was handed over to random airport employees by US troops, he added.

State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki has confirmed that US vehicles and equipment were seized by the Houthis, TASS news agency reports.

Washington views Al-Qaeda in Yemen as the most dangerous off shoot of the global terrorist organization.

On August 13, 1961, the government of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) began to establish an “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”.

The idea was to, you know, protect people… from fascist terrorists who intended to do harm in the country.

Just weeks after government officials stated that they had ‘no intention of erecting a wall’, they closed the border and started reinforcing the defenses with barbed wire. Concrete came soon after.

When it was finally erected, the wall stood for decades as a symbol of tyranny over freedom.

And in the ensuing period, people within the Iron Curtain suffered the misery of secret police, centrally planned bread production, and some of the worst indignities imaginable.

This is starting to happen once again… now in Ukraine. The ongoing conflict with Russia has fueled a resurgence in totalitarianism.

Two days ago, the government registered a draft to ‘improve’ the criminal code of Ukraine, essentially making it a crime to even question Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

In other words, if you don’t buy the Ukrainian government’s official (and US-funded) propaganda, you’re looking at up to three years in prison.

In addition, the Ukrainian government has been arresting people who criticize the war, and they’ve established a hotline where people can rat out anyone with anti-government views.

They’ve also forcibly impressed citizens into military service (and thrown people in jail who refuse).

And as of this morning, the government of Ukraine started… “reinforcing”… the defenses of Kiev with eight barricaded checkpoints.

Why? In order to protect citizens from terrorist attacks.

Walls are never, ever erected to keep people out. They’re built to trap people inside.

This is a country whose economy is in shambles. The currency continues to plummet to levels never seen before. The government is inches away from default. A deep recession is mounting. And the banking system is extremely fragile.

This is an epic disaster. And anytime that happens, history shows that governments reach into a very limited playbook. Their answer is to dig their heels in even further and tighten controls.

Capital controls. Exchange controls. Wage and price controls. Border controls. People controls.

They lie. They deceive. They wave flags and tell people about their patriotic duty to suffer and die...

Police departments throughout the U.S. have been instructed by the FBI to keep quiet about their use of “stingray” cellphone trackers, but a recently uncovered letter from the agency to Minnesota police reveals the FBI is helping them circumvent Freedom of Information Act requests as well.

...

In a letter from June 2012 recently obtained by the Minneapolis Star Tribune and cited in an Ars Technica report, the FBI instructed the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to report any Freedom of Information Act requests related to stingrays to the agency, which would then take steps “to prevent disclosure.”

“In the event that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension receives a request pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (5 USC 552) or an equivalent state or local law, the civil or criminal discovery process, or other judicial, legislative, or administrative process, to disclose information concerning the Harris Corporation [REDACTED] the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension will immediately notify the FBI of any such request telephonically and in writing in order to allow sufficient time for the FBI to seek to prevent disclosure through appropriate channels,” the letter written in conjunction with Harris reads.

The letter is similar to one disclosed via a FOIA request last year between the FBI and police is Tacoma, Wash., which ordered the department to complete a non-disclosure agreement for acquiring the tech — a mandate required by the FCC.

“It is surprising in the sense that it seems like just a completely inappropriate and over-broad use of federal authority,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Nathan Wessler said in the Ars report.

“What is most egregious about this is that, in order for local police to use and purchase stingrays, they have to get approval from the FBI, then the FBI knows that dozens of police departments are using them around the country. And yet when members of the press or the public seek basic information about how people in local communities are being surveilled, the FBI invokes these very serious national security concerns to try to keep that information private.”

Jails Have Become Warehouses for the Poor, Ill and Addicted, a Report Says

Jails across the country have become vast warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to post bail or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves, according to a report issued Wednesday.

The study, “Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America,” found that the majority of those incarcerated in local and county jails are there for minor violations, including driving with suspended licenses, shoplifting or evading subway fares, and have been jailed for longer periods of time over the past 30 years because they are unable to pay court-imposed costs.

Herbert Nelson Jr., Allison Nelson's brother, said, “I’ve been trying to imagine a way out of this for years.” Ms. Nelson, 23, and Mr. Nelson, 26, said they had struggled to pay off traffic tickets since they were 18.Ferguson One of 2 Missouri Suburbs Sued Over Gantlet of Traffic Fines and Jail FEB. 8, 2015

The report, by the Vera Institute of Justice, comes at a time of increased attention to mass incarceration policies that have swelled prison and jail populations around the country. This week in Missouri, where the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer stirred months of racial tension last year in the town of Ferguson, 15 people sued that city and another suburb, Jennings, alleging that the cities created an unconstitutional modern-day debtors’ prison, putting impoverished people behind bars in overcrowded, unlawful and unsanitary conditions.

While most reform efforts, including early releases and the elimination of some minimum mandatory sentences, have been focused on state and federal prisons, the report found that the disparate rules that apply to jails is also in need of reform.

“It’s an important moment to take a look at our use of jails,” said Nancy Fishman, the project director of the Vera Institute’s Center on Sentencing and Corrections and an author of the report. “It’s a huge burden on taxpayers, on our communities, and we need to decide if this is how we want to spend our resources.”

The number of people housed in jails on any given day in the country has increased from 224,000 in 1983 to 731,000 in 2013 — nearly equal to the population of Charlotte, N.C. — even as violent crime nationally has fallen by nearly 50 percent and property crime has dropped by more than 40 percent from its peak.

Inmates have subsequently been spending more time in jail awaiting trial, in part because of the growing reluctance of judges to free suspects on their own recognizance pending trial dates, which had once been common for minor offenses.

As a result, many of those accused of misdemeanors — who are often poor — are unable to pay bail as low as $500.

No precise numbers are available “but the trend lines are clear and concerning,” Nicholas Rasmussen, NCTC director, said in prepared remarks for a congressional hearing on Wednesday.

“The rate of foreign fighter travel to Syria is unprecedented. It exceeds the rate of travelers who went to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia at any point in the last 20 years,” he said.

The volunteers come from a range of backgrounds and “do not fit any one stereotype,” Rasmussen said.

“The battlefields in Iraq and Syria provide foreign fighters with combat experience, weapons and explosives training, and access to terrorist networks that may be planning attacks which target the West,” he said.

President Barack Obama has said the reality of “American leadership” at times entails “twisting the arms” of states which “don’t do what we need them to do,” and that the US relied on its military strength and other leverage to achieve its goals.

In a broad-ranging interview with Vox, which Obama himself described as a venue "for the brainiac-nerd types," the US president both denied the efficacy of a purely “realist” foreign policy but also arguing that at times the US, which has a defense budget that exceeds the next 10 countries combined, needed to rely on its military muscle and other levers of power.

Lauding the rule-based system to emerge in the post-World War II era, Obama admitted it wasn’t perfect, but argued “the UN, the IMF, and a whole host of treaties and rules and norms that were established really helped to stabilize the world in ways that it wouldn't otherwise be.”

He argued, however, that the efficacy of this idealistic, Wilsonian, rule-based system was severely tested by the fact that “there are bad people out there who are trying to do us harm.”

In the president’s view, the reality of those threats has compelled the US to have “the strongest military in the world.” Obama further says that “we occasionally have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn't do what we need them to do if it weren't for the various economic or diplomatic or, in some cases, military leverage that we had — if we didn't have that dose of realism, we wouldn't get anything done, either.”

'We occasionally have to twist the arms of countries that wouldn't do what we need them to do'
Obama argues that the US doesn’t have “military solutions” to all the challenges in the modern world, though he goes on to add that “we don’t have a peer” in terms of states that could attack or provoke the United States.

“The closest we have, obviously, is Russia, with its nuclear arsenal, but generally speaking they can't project the way we can around the world. China can't, either. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined,” he said.

Within this context, Obama said that “disorder” stemming from “failed states” and “asymmetric threats from terrorist organizations” were the biggest challenges facing the international community today.

Rand Paul endorsed Senate colleague David Vitter for Louisiana governor, potentially giving him a boost with Tea Party supporters.
In a fundraising e-mail sent Tuesday, Paul called Vitter a “stalwart supporter of limited government, states’ rights and the taxpayer’s best interest.” Paul, a GOP senator heading toward a likely presidential bid, is a favorite among Tea Party activists and won his 2010 race in Kentucky with their support.
“David Vitter will bring confidence, knowledge and experience to the governor’s seat,” Paul said, noting they have worked together on issues such as balancing the budget, immigration and auditing the Federal Reserve — all favorites issues among Tea Party advocates.
Vitter is the leading Republican in this year’s race to succeed Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who cannot run again because of term limits. Several Republicans have already declared their interest in running for governor, including Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle.

The legislation has bipartisan support and passed the house last year with over 300 votes from both republicans and democrats on board.

The legislation is clearly called for in the constitution, so I can’t even imagine why they need to legislate it..

The Federal Reserve claims they are exempt from oversight and they have been.

But they should not be exempt…

No other agency is exempt from congressional oversight. And the agency that regulates our currency certainly should not be exempt either.

I support Senator Paul’s legislation to audit the Fed. It makes sense. Dollars and cents, that is. Yours and mine.

We have a constitutional right to know. I am calling on the Federal Reserve to open the books and let the American people know to whom and where we are loaning our money.

On the positive side, we had a nice gathering of quite prominent people (my ticket to the party, the Bitcoin castle, was among the most expensive ones though), the place and the weather there was nicer than what I left in Finland when leaving (coming back, it was a surprising +6°C here, considering midwinter), my talk (about the 3 approaches to investing, and why the gambling/VC one is actually both the least risky and the most profitable) was well received with almost half of the ones listening giving personal positive feedback afterwards, I got a much needed update on what is happening in Bitcoinworld (after all, this was my first BTC conference ever, apart from the ones I organized), and an even more exclusive event in the castle is already planned for the next summer

State legislatures in the US are considering more than 200 bills – from gun rights to marijuana accessibility – that would nullify or work around various federal laws and regulations crafted in Washington, according to a states’ rights advocacy group.

The Tenth Amendment Center told The Hill the 200-plus pieces of current legislation seeking to challenge or wrest control from the federal government mark a climate of both suspicion and empowerment. The center tracks and supports states’ rights initiatives across the country.

“People are becoming more and more concerned about the overreach of the federal government,” said the group’s spokesman, Mike Maharrey. “They feel the federal government is trying to do too much, it’s too big and it’s getting more and more in debt.”

While federal law ultimately supersedes state law – if enforcement power is exercised – the Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, says that the federal government is limited to powers granted in the US Constitution.

For instance, a bill that would “block any future federal bans on firearms or magazines” passed the Montana state House on Monday. Montana’s bill is one of eleven nationwide, according to the center, that aim to counter federal gun control measures.

Twelve states are seeking to challenge federal surveillance authority vested in the likes of the National Security Agency, revealed in June 2013 to be operating a global spying regime to advance American domestic and foreign policy goals.

In another 12 states, bills have been introduced to legalize some form of marijuana, whether it be medical, recreational, or both.