53percenter's Blog

“What’s really incredible is that the Venezuelan state has now confirmed that Maduro’s government has caused the economy to shrink by 50 percent. This is confirmation of what an economic disaster Maduro has been for Venezuela,” Geoff Ramsey of the Washington Office on Latin America observed, as quoted by the Epoch Times.

The Epoch Times speculated Maduro decided to allow publication of the central bank report to dampen support for Maduro’s opponent Juan Guaido at the IMF and World Bank, which are both running out of patience for Maduro keeping Venezuela’s appalling economic data secret.

The central bank is also attempting to push a narrative that hyperinflation is slowing down, an analysis the IMF does not share. Outside analysts believe inflation may have been temporarily slowed by Maduro imposing tight monetary restrictions to prevent Venezuelans from buying dollars on the black market – restrictions that would reduce inflation at the cost of slowing down the moribund economy even further.

“The Maduro regime has been quietly taking steps to liberalize the economy. It is possible that the government perceives that the posture of not acknowledging the dire economic reality being felt by the Venezuelan people is untenable,” Paula Garcia Tufro of the Atlantic Council told Al-Jazeera News last week.

“However, it is more likely that this data will be used as part of an official narrative on the part of the Maduro regime that seeks to point to external sanctions as the cause of the economic collapse,” she added.

Garcia Tufro noted the central bank’s report would weaken Maduro’s preferred narrative if studied carefully, as it shows the economic crisis was “well underway prior to the significant ratcheting up of sanctions on Venezuela, and importantly, preceded the imposition of US sanctions on Venezuelan oil in January 2019.”

White enrollment has also fallen while Asian enrollment has ballooned. Among the most drastic shifts: Brooklyn Technical High School’s black population dropped to 6 percent in 2016 from 51 percent in 1982 …

Black and Hispanic students currently represent 70 percent of the school system, but make up just 10 percent of the enrollment in the specialized schools.

…

From 1970 to 2011, the number of Asia-born immigrants living in New York City increased about eightfold to 843,000 from 105,000.

The New York Times article tries to hide another big shift amid the immigration — a huge drop in the share of school slots going to white students. For example, the percentage of white students in Stuyvesant fell from roughly 65 percent in 1976 to just 19 percent in 2016. During the same period, the percentage of black and Latino students fell from roughly 14 percent to just 4 percent, while the Asian percentage spiked to from roughly 17 percent to 74 percent.

While trying to blame test prep courses, the New York Times article tiptoes close to the central issue — immigration — which it indirectly and passively describes as “demographics.”

Since … 1978, the specialized school admissions process has been transformed by changes in the city’s demographics, its public school system and the culture around the schools’ entrance exam, which is at the center of the debate over the future of the elite schools.

Yet the city’s demographics are not a passive, inanimate thing, like gravity, earthquakes or the tides.

The city’s demographics are shaped by federal, state, and city policies, for example, which could try to encourage Americans to migrate to New York and to get married and have more kids.

But federal, state and city policies are instead encouraging the inflow of Asian immigrants, as part of the deliberate federal policy of stimulating the economy by legally importing 1 million foreign workers, consumers, and residents each year.

That huge foreign influx adds roughly one new legal immigrant for every four Americans who turn 18 each year. That influx is welcomed in New York City which has declared itself a “sanctuary city” to shield its roughly 500,000 cheap-labor illegal immigrant service workers from deportation. The illegal and legal cheap workers are a boon to the city’s elite, which gains cheaper services, higher rents and more wealth as more migrants crowd into the city’s labor market, apartments and groceries.

The federal policy also makes it difficult for Americans to have kids — especially in New York — because the flood of legal and illegal migrants cuts their wages and drives up their housing costs, especially for blue-collar Americans of every color and hue.