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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; middle class</title>
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		<title>Illiberal &#8216;Liberalism&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/illiberal-liberalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=illiberal-liberalism</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2014 04:50:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fred Siegel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolt Against the Masses]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224511</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Fred Siegel's new book exposes the history of the Left's hatred of ordinary Americans -- and its commitment to tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/41eaIef4eCL.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224513" alt="41eaIef4eCL" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/41eaIef4eCL-233x350.jpg" width="186" height="280" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/175281">Hoover Institution</a>. </em></p>
<p>During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama let slip his disdain for the middle-class when he explained his lack of traction among such voters. “It’s not surprising then,” Obama said, “that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” More recently, U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Braley mocked his opponent incumbent Chuck Grassley as “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” The liberal disdain for ordinary Americans has been around for a long time. Beneath the populist rhetoric and concern for the middle class that lace the campaign speeches of most liberal politicians, there lurks a palpable disgust, and often contempt, for the denizens of “flyover country,” that land of God, guns, religion, and traditional beliefs.</p>
<p>In <em>Revolt Against the Masses</em>, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow and <em>New York Post </em>columnist Fred Siegel presents a clearly written and engaging historical narrative of how nearly a century ago this strain of illiberal liberalism began to take over the Democratic Party. Along the way he also provides an excellent political history of the period that illuminates the “ugly blend of sanctimony, self-interest, and social-connections” lying at the heart of liberalism today.</p>
<p>Siegel begins with a valuable survey of the “progenitors,” the early twentieth-century thinkers and writers whose ideas shaped the liberal ideology. Those who know English writer H. G. Wells only as an early pioneer of science-fiction novels may be surprised to find how popular and widely read in America his philosophical and political writings were in the first few decades of the century. Wells’s 1901 <em>Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought</em> laid out the argument for a quasi-aristocratic elite of technocrats free of traditional values such as “monogamy, faith in God &amp; respectability,” all of which Wells’s book “was designed to undermine and destroy,” as he frankly admitted. Applying Darwinism to social, political, and economic life, Wells envisioned, as Siegel explains, “scientist-poets and engineers” who would “seize the reins in the Darwinian struggle,” so that instead of “descending into savagery, we would follow their lead toward new and higher ground.” In Wells’s work we see the melding of attacks on traditional authority and middle-class morality, with the scientistic faith in technocratic elites that still characterizes modern liberalism.</p>
<p>Wells’s kindred American spirit was Progressive theorist Herbert Croly, whose 1901 <em>The Promise of American Life </em>Siegel calls the “first political manifesto of modern American liberalism.” Croly “rejected American tradition, with its faith in the Constitution and its politics of parties and courts, and argued for rebuilding America’s foundation on higher spiritual and political principles that would transcend traditional ideas of democracy and self-government.”</p>
<p>As much as Wells, or for that matter Mussolini and Lenin, Croly “wanted the collective power of society put ‘at the service of its ablest members,’ who would take the lead roles in the drama of social re-creation.” Similarly, leftist intellectual Randolph Bourne wondered “whether there aren’t advantages in having administration of the State taken care of by a scientific body of men with social sense.” Bourne seasoned his antidemocratic elitism with a romantic idealization of “Youth,” which was a time when the ideals “will be the highest…the insight the clearest, the ideas the most stimulating,” an early example of the worship of adolescents that exploded in the 1960s and is still felt in our culture today. And perhaps most famously, journalist H.L. Mencken serially displayed his contempt for the American people, whom he called a “rabble of ignorant peasants.”</p>
<p>In Siegel’s reading, modern liberalism was midwifed in the 1920s by the break with Progressivism over Woodrow Wilson’s decision to take the United States into World War I, and the “wartime conscription, the repression of civil liberties, Prohibition, and the overwrought fears of Bolshevism in America.” The scorn of patriotism and the American masses, brutally described by Mencken as a “timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob,” became the default sensibility of litterateurs, journalists, and intellectuals alike, who viewed “American society and democracy” as “agents of repression,” sentiments that “deepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.” The influential literary manifestation of this prejudice remains Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 bestseller <em>Main Street</em>, which along with <em>Babbitt </em>two years later fixed the caricature of Middle America uncritically endorsed by liberals nearly a century later.</p>
<p>Siegel moves briskly through the subsequent events and developments that seemingly legitimized liberal bigotry against the middle class as objective history. The 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, a “contrivance from the start,” as Siegel writes, and immortalized in the historically challenged 1955 Broadway hit <em>Inherit the Wind</em>, established the meme of the brave and noble man of “science” battling slack-jawed, oppressive Christian fundamentalists. This cliché predictably surfaces in liberal commentary on issues ranging from teaching Darwinian evolution, to the validity of global warming. In the 1930s idolizing the Soviet Union and communism, a reflex of liberal disdain for capitalism and its déclassé obsession with getting and spending, began its long march through American culture and education.</p>
<p>A corollary to this admiration has been the fervent liberal belief that America is to some degree “fascist,” and in imminent danger of becoming a fascist state, a preposterous notion made famous by Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel <em>It Can’t Happen Here</em>. This hoary received wisdom has managed to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives, which established beyond doubt that Communist subversion and infiltration of America’s institutions were in fact by far a greater threat to democracy than a fascist takeover. Despite that history, in 2004 Philip Roth published <em>The Plot Against America</em>, which indulged to high praise the same long-exploded fantasy.</p>
<p>Particularly valuable are Siegel’s brief portraits of once prominent liberal commentators and critics like Arthur Schlesinger, whose influence lives in the “aristocratic aping of professional liberals who expect, given their putative expertise, to be obeyed.” They refined and perpetuated the old caricature of Americanism “as the mass pursuit of prosperity by an energetic but crude, grasping people chasing their private ambitions without the benefit of a clerisy to guide them,” enslaved to “their futile quest for material well-being, and numbed by the popular entertainments that appealed to the lowest common denominator.” In the 1950s, the liberal critic Dwight Macdonald groused of a America blessed with “money, leisure and knowledge” that had merely given the average American “masscult” and “midcult,” the vulgar “American culture of the cheap newspaper, the movies, the popular song, the ubiquitous automobile,” fit fare for the “hordes of men and women without a spiritual country . . . without taste, without standards but those of the mob.”</p>
<p>Yet as Siegel points out, this same period saw an explosion in the numbers of average people studying and experiencing the artistic and literary masterpieces of Western civilization. Local symphony orchestras increased by 250 percent between 1940 and 1955, and in that same year “35 million paid to attend classical-music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million,” almost 10 percent of the population. Fifty million televisions viewers watched Laurence Olivier in <em>Richard III</em>, book-sales doubled, and paperback versions of highbrow novels like Saul Bellow’s <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em> or non-fiction works like anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s <em>Patterns of Culture</em> became bestsellers. Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins introduced the pricey Great Books series, which by 1951 was being purchased by 50,000 Americans a year, who met in 2,500 Great Books groups to talk about the classics of Western civilization. As Siegel mordantly observes, “<em>This</em>was the danger against which critics of mass culture, inflamed with indignation, arrayed themselves against.”</p>
<p>Siegel’s survey ends with the presidency of Barack Obama. As <em>The</em> <em>Revolt Against the Masses</em> comes to a close, the policies and philosophy of Obama’s administration––best represented by the Affordable Care Act–– will strike the reader as the inevitable culmination of the ideological development Siegel has skillfully traced. The liberal elite’s disdain for a middle America of businessmen and churchgoers, which has always been linked to an uncritical admiration for Europe, has with Obama’s reelection created a political order teetering on the edge of fiscal collapse: “[Liberalism’s] sustained assault on the private-sector middle class and the ideals of self-restraint and self-government have, particularly in the blue states, succeeded all too well in achieving the dream of the 1920s literary Bolsheviks: an increasingly Europeanized class structure for America.”</p>
<p>One might argue with Siegel’s assertion of the “sharp break” between Progressivism and liberalism. On foreign policy this disagreement is obvious, and the liberals’ endorsement of illiberal identity politics in the 1960s would have horrified old-school Progressives, who were Darwinian eugenicists anxious over being swamped by the inferior races. The Progressives, even more than the liberals, disdained the masses, viewing them as an abstract collectivist “people,” Woodrow Wilson’s ideal “single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.” This conception of the “people” ignored the great variety of regional, sectional, and religious identities, Madisonian factions, and clashing interests comprising flesh-and-blood Americans.</p>
<p>Progressives, moreover, like liberals homogenized and nationalized those various interests and aims as these were defined and chosen by techno-political elites. One hears H. G. Wells’s and Randolph Bourne’s impatience with democratic self-rule and preference for a managerial elite in Wilson’s call to “open for the public a bureau of skilled, economical administration,” comprising the “hundreds who are wise” empowered to guide the “thousands” who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” What liberalism shares with the Progressives––the “living” Constitution, big government, regulation of the economy, and the redistribution of property to achieve “social justice”––far outweighs their differences.</p>
<p><em>The Revolt Against the Masses</em> is an important book, a first-rate intellectual history that clearly and crisply explains much of the political and cultural dysfunctions roiling the United States today. Siegel’s well-researched analysis of the liberal abandonment of self-government and individual freedom–– a betrayal of the Constitutional order justified in the main by social prejudice, class snobbery, and bad Continental philosophy––is a brilliant exposition of a century of bad ideas that have led to today’s bloated Leviathan state, these days on track to bankrupt the treasury and diminish our freedom.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>1/5 of the Middle Class Disappeared Under Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/15-of-the-middle-class-disappeared-under-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=15-of-the-middle-class-disappeared-under-obama</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/15-of-the-middle-class-disappeared-under-obama/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Apr 2014 15:00:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222628</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's mentor did campaign against middleclassness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Suburban-Poverty-2013.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-222629" alt="Suburban-Poverty-2013" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Suburban-Poverty-2013-450x253.jpg" width="450" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>The middle class doesn&#8217;t own a lot of banks, solar power panel manufacturers or sensitivity training centers <a href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/04/obamanomics-in-action-one-fifth-of-middle-class-falls-into-poverty/">so they haven&#8217;t done too well under Obama Inc</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>A sense of belonging to the middle class occupies a cherished place in America. It conjures images of self-sufficient people with stable jobs and pleasant homes working toward prosperity.</p>
<p>Since 2008, the number of people who call themselves middle class has fallen by nearly a fifth, according to a survey in January by the Pew Research Center, from 53 percent to 44 percent. Forty percent now identify as either lower-middle or lower class compared with just 25 percent in February 2008.</p>
<p>According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who say they’re middle or upper-middle class fell 8 points between 2008 and 2012, to 55 percent.</p></blockquote>
<p>Obama&#8217;s mentor did campaign against middleclassness. His pupil is just making sure that Americans <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2307">don&#8217;t think of themselves as middle class</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>TUCC promotes a “Black Value System” that encourages African Americans to patronize black-only businesses, support black leaders, and avoid becoming “entrapped” by the pursuit of a “black middle-classness”</p></blockquote>
<p>Looks like the plan is working well.<a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-07/news/ct-met-black-middle-class-austerity-20121007_1_black-middle-class-black-households-national-rate"> Especially in the black community</a>.</p>
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		<title>Is There Wage Stagnation?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/is-there-wage-stagnation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=is-there-wage-stagnation</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/is-there-wage-stagnation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 04:10:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[benefits]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wages]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221377</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Debunking the Left's phony statistics. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/111.png"><img class=" wp-image-221378 alignleft" alt="111" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/111.png" width="300" height="227" /></a>Many economists, politicians and pundits assert that median wages have stagnated since the 1970s. That&#8217;s a call for government to do something about it. But before we look at the error in their assertion, let&#8217;s work through an example that might shed a bit of light on the issue.</p>
<p>Suppose that you paid me a straight $20 an hour in 2004. Ten years later, I&#8217;m still earning $20 an hour, but in addition, now I&#8217;m receiving job perks such as health insurance, an employer-matched 401(k) plan, paid holidays and vacation, etc. Would it be correct to say that my wages have stagnated and I&#8217;m no better off a decade later? I&#8217;m guessing that the average person would say, &#8220;No, Williams, your wages haven&#8217;t stagnated. You forgot to include your non-monetary wages.&#8221; My colleagues Donald Boudreaux and Liya Palagashvili discuss some of this in their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, &#8220;The Myth of the Great Wages &#8216;Decoupling&#8217;&#8221; (http://tinyurl.com/oq7z4a3).</p>
<p>They start out saying: &#8220;Many pundits, politicians and economists claim that wages have fallen behind productivity gains over the last generation. &#8230; This story, though, is built on an illusion. There is no great decoupling of worker pay from productivity. Nor have workers&#8217; incomes stagnated over the past four decades.&#8221; There are two routinely made mistakes when wages are compared over time. &#8220;First, the value of fringe benefits — such as health insurance and pension contributions — is often excluded from calculations of worker pay. Because fringe benefits today make up a larger share of the typical employee&#8217;s pay than they did 40 years ago (about 19 percent today compared with 10 percent back then), excluding them fosters the illusion that the workers&#8217; slice of the (bigger) pie is shrinking.&#8221;</p>
<p>The second comparison problem is a bit technical, when the consumer price index is used to adjust workers&#8217; pay for inflation while a different measure (the gross domestic product deflator) is used to adjust the value of the nation&#8217;s economic output for inflation.</p>
<p>Harvard University&#8217;s Martin Feldstein noted in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper in 2008 that it is misleading to use different deflators. Boudreaux and Palagashvili point out that when more careful measurements have compared worker pay (including the value of fringe benefits) with productivity using a consistent adjustment for inflation, they move in tandem. The authors say: &#8220;The claim that ordinary Americans are stagnating economically while only &#8216;the rich&#8217; are gaining is also incorrect. True enough, membership in the middle class seems to be declining — but this is because more American households are moving up.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Many economists and other social scientists determine well-being by looking at income brackets instead of people. When one looks at people, he finds considerable income mobility. According to a report by the Department of the Treasury titled &#8220;Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005,&#8221; there was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during that period (http://tinyurl.com/5sv8799). Using Internal Revenue Service tax return </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">data</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the report says that more than half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile over this period. More than half of those in the bottom income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher income group by 2005. The mobility also goes in the opposite direction. Of the highest income earners in 1996 — the top one-hundredth of 1 percent — only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005. The percentage increase in the median incomes of those in the lower income groups, between 1996 and 2005, increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.</span></p>
<p>Boudreaux and Palagashvili conclude that &#8220;middle-class stagnation and the &#8216;decoupling&#8217; of pay and productivity are illusions. Yes, the U.S. economy is in the doldrums, thanks to a variety of factors, most significantly the effect of growth-deadening government policies like ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank Act. But by any sensible measure, most Americans are today better paid and more prosperous than in the past.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Leftists Love Global Warming Because They Hate the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/leftists-love-global-warming-because-they-hate-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leftists-love-global-warming-because-they-hate-the-middle-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 05:25:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Noah]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219387</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Hollywood turned the story of Noah into a warning against carbon sin. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/flooded_ny.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219393" alt="flooded_ny" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/flooded_ny-432x350.jpg" width="302" height="245" /></a>This week, Secretary of State John Kerry announced to a group of Indonesian students that global warming was &#8220;perhaps the world&#8217;s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.&#8221; He added, &#8220;Because of climate change, it&#8217;s no secret that today Indonesia is &#8230; one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth. It&#8217;s not an exaggeration to say that the entire way of life that you live and love is at risk.&#8221;</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Hollywood prepared to drop a new blockbuster based on the biblical story of Noah. The film, directed by Darren Aronofsky, centers on the story of the biblical character who built an ark after God warned him that humanity would be destroyed thanks to its sexual immorality and violent transgressions. The Hollywood version of the story, however, has God punishing humanity not for actual sin, but for overpopulation and global warming &#8212; an odd set of sins, given God&#8217;s express commandments in Genesis 1:28 to &#8220;be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.&#8221;</p>
<p>This weird perspective on sin &#8212; the notion that true sin is not sin, but that consumerism is &#8212; is actually nothing new. In the 1920s, the left warned of empty consumerism with the fire and brimstone of Jonathan Edwards; Sinclair Lewis famously labeled the American middle class &#8220;Babbitts&#8221; &#8212; characters who cared too much about buying things.</p>
<p>In his novel of the same name, Lewis sneered of his bourgeois antihero, &#8220;He had enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty.&#8221; Lewis wrote, through the voice of his radical character Doane, that consumerism has created &#8220;standardization of thought, and of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows it that they&#8217;re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent.&#8221;</p>
<p>Lewis, of course, was a socialist. So were anti-consumerism compatriots like H.G. Wells, H.L. Mencken and Herbert Croly. And their brand of leftism was destined to infuse the entire American left over the course of the 20th century. As Fred Siegel writes in his new book, &#8220;The Revolt Against The Masses,&#8221; this general feeling pervaded the left during the 1950s, even as more Americans were attending symphony concerts than ballgames, with 50,000 Americans per year buying paperback version of classics. That&#8217;s because if the left were to recognize the great power of consumerism in bettering lives and enriching culture, the left would have to become the right.</p>
<p>Of course, consumerism is not an unalloyed virtue. Consumerism can be utilized for hedonism. But it can also be utilized to make lives better, offering more opportunity for spiritual development. It&#8217;s precisely this latter combination that the left fears, because if consumerism and virtue are allied, there is no place left for the Marxist critique of capitalism &#8212; namely that capitalism makes people less compassionate, more selfish, and ethically meager. And so consumerism must be severed from virtue (very few leftists critique Americans&#8217; propensity for spending cash on Lady Gaga concerts) so that it can be castigated as sin more broadly.</p>
<p>In a world in which consumerism is the greatest of all sins, America is the greatest of all sinners. Which, of course, is the point of the anti-consumerist critique from the left: to target America. Global warming represents the latest apocalyptic consequence threatened by the leftist gods for the great iniquity of buying things, developing products, and competing in the global marketplace. And America must be called to heel by the great preachers in Washington, D.C., and Hollywood.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>ObamaCare&#8217;s Ruthless Assault on the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2014 05:15:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219272</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And our health. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/healthcare.gov__0.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219279" alt="healthcare.gov__0" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/healthcare.gov__0-450x310.jpg" width="270" height="186" /></a>Liberals are winning wild praise for their candor in admitting problems with Obamacare. It shows you the level of honesty people have come to expect of our liberal friends. Now, liberals are applauded for not lying through their teeth about something.</p>
<p>What are they supposed to say? <i>This Obamacare website is fantastic! And really, haven&#8217;t you already read all the magazines in your current doctor&#8217;s office anyway?</i></p>
<p>The New York Times has described Obama&#8217;s repeated claim that you could keep your insurance plan and keep your doctor under Obamacare as a mere slip of the tongue: &#8220;Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that.&#8221;</p>
<p>Misspoke? How exactly does one misspeak, word for word, dozens of times, over and over again?</p>
<p>That wasn&#8217;t misspeaking &#8212; it was a deliberate, necessary lie. Even Democrats couldn&#8217;t have voted for Obamacare if Americans had known the truth. It was absolutely vital for Obama to lie about people being able to keep their insurance and their doctors.</p>
<p>Of course, it was difficult for voters to know the truth because every time Republicans would try to tell them, the White House and the media would rush in and call the critics liars.</p>
<p>The White House posted a specific refutation of the &#8220;disinformation&#8221; about not being able to keep your doctor or insurance plan. That claim, the website said, was being disseminated by Republicans &#8220;to scare people.&#8221;</p>
<p>Their proof consisted of a video of Obama <i>clearly </i>stating, &#8220;If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you&#8217;ve got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor.&#8221;</p>
<p>A video of someone asserting the very fact in dispute does not rise to the level of &#8220;evidence,&#8221; but it was more than enough for MSNBC.</p>
<p>Even when pretending to be critical of Obamacare, liberals lie about the real problems. They tell us they&#8217;re worried about the percentage of young people signing up for Obamacare. The mix of young and old people in Obamacare is completely irrelevant. It won&#8217;t help if a lot of young people sign up because their premiums are negligible.</p>
<p>To keep the system afloat, what Obamacare really needs is lots of healthy people, preferably healthy older people. Their premiums are astronomical &#8212; and they won&#8217;t need much medical treatment.</p>
<p>Premiums are set by your age, not your health. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you never go to the doctor. Obamacare punishes you for having a healthy lifestyle. The Obamacare tax is a massively regressive poll tax on the middle-aged and the middle class.</p>
<p>Apart from those who are subsidized, everyone pays the exact same amount in penalties or insurance premiums for his age group. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you don&#8217;t make as much money as Bill Gates. Any 58-year-old male who doesn&#8217;t qualify for a subsidy will pay the same Obamacare tax as Gates.</p>
<p>When Margaret Thatcher tried to impose the same tax per person, as a &#8220;community charge,&#8221; there were riots in the street.</p>
<p>Our extremely progressive tax system, where nearly half the country pays no income tax at all, and the other half pays about 40 percent of their income, may not be fair. But most people also don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s fair to tax a guy making $80,000 a year the identical amount as one making $80 million a year. That&#8217;s exactly what Obamacare does.</p>
<p>With Obamacare, the Democratic Party has foisted the most regressive tax possible on America. This ruthless assault on the middle class is all so we can have a health care system more like every other country has.</p>
<p>Until now, the United States has had the highest survival rates in the world for heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Cancer comparisons are the most useful because all Western countries keep careful records for this disease.</p>
<p>For all types of cancers, European men have only a 47.3 percent five-year survival rate, compared to a 66.3 percent survival rate for American men.</p>
<p>European women have only a 55.8 percent chance of being alive five years after being diagnosed with any type of cancer, compared to 62.9 percent of American women.</p>
<p>American survival rates for breast, prostate, thyroid and skin cancer are higher than 90 percent. Europeans do not have a 90 percent survival rate for one of those cancers.</p>
<p>The European rates are even worse than they sound because many cancers are not discovered until the victim&#8217;s death &#8212; twice as many as in the U.S. All those cancers were excluded from the study.</p>
<p>Canadian cancer survival rates aren&#8217;t much better than the European rates &#8212; and they&#8217;ve been able to sneak into to the U.S. for treatment! Women in the U.S. have a 61 percent survival rate for all cancers, compared to a 58 percent survival rate in Canada. Men in the U.S. have a 57 percent survival rate compared to 53 percent in Canada.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why your insurance premiums have to go through the roof and your Obamacare tax is the same as Bill Gates&#8217;. So across the world, we&#8217;ll all be equal, dying of cancer, heart disease and diabetes as often as everyone else.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not that Obama doesn&#8217;t believe in American exceptionalism; it&#8217;s that he wants to end it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Killing the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/killing-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=killing-the-middle-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 20 Dec 2013 05:50:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Federal Reserve]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[interest rates]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Money]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wall Street]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213596</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Federal Reserve continues to sign on to Obama's war on the poor. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tim-geithner-barack-obama-and-ben-bernanke.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213597" alt="tim-geithner-barack-obama-and-ben-bernanke" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tim-geithner-barack-obama-and-ben-bernanke-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>If one takes the mainstream media seriously, Ben Bernanke&#8217;s <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101285003">announcement</a> that the Federal Reserve would begin &#8220;tapering&#8221; its purchase of government bonds and mortgage securities by $10 billion dollars per month was the reason for Wall Street&#8217;s rally on Wednesday. Yet as the chart <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/18/investing/stocks-markets/">here</a> reveals, the reaction to the Fed&#8217;s decision was a rapid and precipitous drop <i>first</i>, followed by a large rally, when Bernanke dropped the far more important shoe: interest rates would remain near zero for the foreseeable future. Thus, the nation remains wedded to a policy best <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303763804579183680751473884">described</a> by Andrew Huszar, who was responsible for executing the first round of Quantitative Easing (QE), as &#8220;the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.&#8221;</p>
<p>And while Wall Street has flourished, Main Street remains mired in the &#8220;new normal.&#8221; It is the new normal where a staggering <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/part-time-job-creation_n_3788365.html">75 percent</a> of the jobs created this year have not only been part-time, but low-paying. It is the new normal where the &#8220;decline&#8221; in unemployment to 7 percent is belied by the reality that a record high 91,541,000 of Americans are <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/11/record-high-91-5-million-people-not-included-in-labor-force/">no longer</a> in the labor force as of October, and the workforce participation rate is 63 percent, the lowest its been since 1978. Some of that decline can be attributed to Baby Boomers retiring, but the participation rate of workers aged 16-54 also <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/08/the-u-s-labor-force-is-still-shrinking-rapidly-heres-why/">declined</a> during the recession&#8211;and has yet to recover.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s assuming the figure of 7 percent unemployment itself hasn&#8217;t been manipulated, apart from not counting those who are no longer looking for work. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/11/19/census-jobs-data-manipulation/3645819/">initiated</a> an investigation into a <i>New York Post</i> <a href="http://nypost.com/2013/11/18/census-faked-2012-election-jobs-report/">report</a> that employment data leading into the 2012 election may have been deliberately manipulated. &#8220;Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy,&#8221; writes the <i>Post&#8217;s</i> John Crudele. &#8220;And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee&#8211;that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.&#8221;</p>
<p>Tellingly, the Fed&#8217;s announcement on Wednesday makes yet another reference to the reality that the continuing implementation of QE has been <a href="http://www.foxbusiness.com/investing/2013/12/19/how-fed-tapering-could-impact-interest-rates/">predicated</a>, at least in part, on the unemployment rate. For months, Bernanke insisted he would continue QE and its low-interest rate environment until the unemployment rate dipped below 6.5 percent. How the Fed could base <i>anything</i> on employment figures that are deceiving at best, or an outright hoax at worst, demonstrates how desperate they are to pursue their policies irrespective of reality.</p>
<p>Yet a little reality intruded nonetheless. As CNBC noted, in the midst of Wednesday&#8217;s stock market euphoria &#8220;a sharp jump in new jobless claims in the latest week to 379,000 and an upward revision to the number of the prior week&#8217;s new claims offered the market little support.&#8221;</p>
<p>What really offered the market support was the far less subtle change in interest rate policy that accompanied the taper. Just under two years ago, Bernanke announced that the Fed planned to keep interest rates low through 2014, as part of a policy that even the <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/economy/fed-to-maintain-rates-near-zero-through-late-2014.html?_r=1&amp;adxnnl=1&amp;pagewanted=all&amp;adxnnlx=1387490503-dxfFpsNF29L+l3s42gyjpg">characterized</a> as one “that began as shock therapy in the winter of 2008” and transformed “into a six-year campaign to increase spending by rewarding borrowers and punishing savers.&#8221;</p>
<p>Last month, Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-05/rosengren-says-fed-may-keep-interest-rate-near-zero-until-2016.html">contended</a> that particular brand of shock therapy could continue into 2016. “You could easily imagine if we have relatively slow growth in the overall economy, even though it picks up from where we are now, that it could be 2016,” he said. “You’d certainly need to have growth 3 percent or faster if you’d want to see short-term rates rising at that point.”</p>
<p>On Wednesday, that assessment changed once again. The Fed will now keep interest rates near zero, &#8220;well past&#8221; the time when the unemployment rate falls below 6.5 percent. What does “well past” mean? Whatever the Fed decides it means.</p>
<p>Those interest rates have been a godsend for Wall Street, forcing many investors out of low-yield bonds into equities, which have soared. But the harsh reality of the Wall Street boom underscores the phoniness of Democrats&#8217; concern with regard to addressing the &#8220;income inequality&#8221; President Obama <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303722104579238192948534258">characterized</a> as a &#8220;fundamental threat&#8221; to American prosperity: 5 percent of Americans <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101283037">hold</a> 60 percent of stock market wealth, and the top 10 percent own 80 percent of it.</p>
<p>It is that asset wealth that has fueled income inequality more than anything else over the last five years. A <a href="http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf">study</a> conducted by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University reveals that the top one percent of earners garnered 19.3 percent of household income in 2012. That&#8217;s their largest share of the pie since 1928.</p>
<p>One of the study&#8217;s authors, Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-gains-for-1-break-records/">contends</a> that the surge may be due in part to those Americans cashing in stocks to avoid higher capital gains taxes that kicked in last January. He admits that some of the data is based on projection and could be revised, but his <i>established</i> data covering the years 2009-2012 is equally telling. &#8220;Top 1 percent incomes grew by 31.4 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes grew only by 0.4 percent from 2009 to 2012,&#8221; he writes. &#8220;Hence, the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery.&#8221;</p>
<p>In spite of this data, Bernanke insists that the Fed&#8217;s objectives &#8220;are squarely tied to Main Street,” as he insisted in response to questions at the National Economists Club last month. “The economy has been growing, jobs have been coming back and the Fed has been an important factor in maintaining that momentum.”</p>
<p>Again, this is the <a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/110713-678405-obama-recovery-remains-worst-since-the-depression.htm">weakest recovery</a> since the Great Depression, job growth is overwhelmingly part-time and low-paying, and the Fed has created a massive asset bubble best <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101230045">described</a> by David Stockman, who was President Reagan&#8217;s director of the Office of Management and Budget: &#8220;The Fed is exporting this lunatic policy worldwide,&#8221; he explained. &#8220;Central banks all over the world have been massively expanding their balance sheets, and as a result of that there are bubbles in everything in the world, asset values are exaggerated everywhere.&#8221; This is due to the reality that there is a virtually unlimited supply of money&#8211;printed out of thin air, no less&#8211;chasing a fixed set of assets. As a result, Stockman noted one other unfortunate reality: most bubbles come to a violent end.</p>
<p>Thus, the art is letting the air out of the bubble gently, which is what the taper is all about. Yet there is an unseemly level of hubris attached to the idea that the Federal Reserve can maintain that kind of control. As the <i>NY Post&#8217;s</i> John Crudele <a href="http://nypost.com/2013/12/18/taper-a-bow-ben/">explains</a>, there comes a point in time when those willing to finance American&#8217;s unconscionable level of debt begin to realize &#8220;they too are being fleeced&#8221; by near-zero interest rates &#8220;simply because the Fed has been the shill in the crowd at each bond auction for half a decade.&#8221;</p>
<p>That would be the same half a decade in which the rich got much richer and the middle class stagnated, even as Americans have been told time and again by this administration that things are getting better&#8211;even as interest rates remain at historic lows precisely because they <i>aren&#8217;t.</i> Art Cashin, director of floor operations for UBS, best explains what is occurring after five years of unrestrained stimulus: &#8220;This market, this whole economy has kind of a split personality,&#8221; Cashin said. &#8220;Wall Street is making a record, and yet your brother-in-law can&#8217;t find a job.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Middle Class Is the New Poor</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/middle-class-is-the-new-poor/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=middle-class-is-the-new-poor</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Nov 2013 04:34:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209090</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Those who don’t work are the new rich.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/middleclasssave2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209158" alt="middleclasssave2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/middleclasssave2.jpg" width="266" height="178" /></a>Uncertainty and struggle are what we most often associate with poverty. Not knowing if you can still afford to pay next month&#8217;s bills and worrying over how much more you can cut back when you&#8217;re already barely getting by. This way of life has become more associated with the middle class than with those at the very bottom.</p>
<p>The statistic that shows that average black household worth is at $4,955 while average white household worth is at $110,729 is often quoted, but these numbers are not comparing similar things.</p>
<p>The $110,729 and $4,955 don&#8217;t reflect different standards of living; but different ways of living.</p>
<p>The $110,729 and $4,955 families both have large flat screen televisions, smartphones and the usual consumer toys. They could both eat equally well, except that the $4,955 family doesn&#8217;t bother watching its food budget. It just takes whatever it wants off the shelf and worries about prices later.</p>
<p>In terms of personal satisfaction, the $4,955 family is happier than the $110,729 family.</p>
<p>To understand this, think of the &#8220;Cloud.&#8221; You can buy a laptop powerful enough to store all your programs and data. Or you can get by with a mobile device whose apps connect online to a &#8220;Cloud&#8221; of someone else&#8217;s servers which store your data. The laptop is heavier to carry than the mobile device, but makes you more independent. Or you can just live in the &#8220;Cloud&#8221; confident that no matter how you mess up your device; your data will be backed up.</p>
<p>America is being divided between the workers and the dwellers in the government cloud.</p>
<p>The $110,729 families are independent while the $4,955 families are living in the cloud. Their cloud is &#8220;Social Capital.&#8221; Instead of using real capital, they use the collective Social Capital of family resources and government aid.</p>
<p>The $110,729 family pays for everything. The $4,955 family pays for very little. The $110,729 family earns and saves money because that is its medium of exchange which it uses to obtain food, shelter and clothing. The $4,955 family uses money for luxury goods like televisions or sneakers. It doesn&#8217;t need to save money because cash is just bonus points. Its necessities like food, medicine and shelter are covered by the social capital of the government.</p>
<p>The $110,729 family is isolated while the $4,955 family is part of a social network that extends to the entire government. It’s no wonder that the $4,955 family also has much less worries than the $110,729 family living in the house they don&#8217;t own and worrying what will happen to their standard of living if they lose their jobs tomorrow.</p>
<p>The $4,955 family is single parent, but is built around a large extended family, mostly female, and mostly on various government benefits. That family is capable of providing valuable aid, not just in government money, but also by babysitting and helping out at home.</p>
<p>That extended family is one reason why Clan $4,955 has 5 to 8 kids, while the mother of the two-parent $110,729 household is tearing her hair out trying to figure out how to manage two kids and a full-time job.</p>
<p>Since the $110,729 family is actually funding the lifestyle of the $4,955 family, that&#8217;s a problem, but it&#8217;s a problem that no one talks about. And when social capital gets tight, Medicare for the $110,729 family&#8217;s grandpa is more likely to be cut than the endless community grants that help keep the $4,955 family and all their kids comfortable and voting Democrat early and often.</p>
<p>The $110,729 family is responsible. It understands that money is finite and that the government can only do so much. The $4,955 family doesn&#8217;t understand that and won&#8217;t accept it and has a lot more free time and energy to do something about it. The $110,729 family looks at a variety of factors before voting. The $4,955 family is practical; it looks only at its own bottom line.</p>
<p>No money, no vote.</p>
<p>On paper, the $4,955 family is poor. But in a society where hundreds of billions of dollars go into funding social capital, the old dollar-and-cent household values no longer apply.</p>
<p>On paper, the $110,729 family has an impressive household worth, but much of that worth comes from a mortgaged home that it is struggling to keep up the payments on. The $4,955 family lives in a housing project that they can’t lose no matter how many payments they miss on their high interest credit cards.</p>
<p>There are still plenty of working poor in America, but the broken families that pad out the bottom of that $4,955 statistic rarely work for a living. They work for extras. Social capital has freed them of the need to work for anything except luxuries.</p>
<p>The middle class is trapped by its own aspirations. Though the middle class still has the majority of the vote, it has the least political influence because it has the least disposable time and wealth, and lacks a dedicated political class to represent its interests.</p>
<p>The United States is no longer a middle class country. Politicians have a vested interest in catering to very rich donors or welfare voters because they have the time, money and organizations to get their way. And what they want is more wealth redistribution upward and downward from the middle class.</p>
<p>The middle class is being looted by crony capitalists and welfare clans. The liberal Robin Hoods who direct billions in stolen money to Green Energy companies and ghetto voters do their best to convince the middle class that it should vote for them because it&#8217;s actually poor.</p>
<p>The middle class is poor, but it has all the disadvantages of poverty and none of the advantages.</p>
<p>The Obama vision is a &#8220;Cloud&#8221; America where all the money is in the government cloud and each family is given support according to its needs and is taken for whatever its abilities earn. That vision is already true on the $4,955 scale and is coming true on the $110,729 level as well.</p>
<p>The government money &#8220;Cloud&#8221; works about as well as Healthcare.gov. Its brand of central planning has failed everywhere it&#8217;s been tried. But the experiment won&#8217;t completely crash until the middle class does.</p>
<p>Margaret Thatcher famously said that Socialism works until it runs out of other people&#8217;s money. The &#8220;other people&#8221; are the middle class who have the most money and the least ability to protect it from the cloud dwellers.</p>
<p>There are two Americas; the America of the working class and the Obamerica of the government class. Measuring poverty in net worth is relevant in only one of these Americas. To measure poverty across both nations, we must speak of the poverty of freedom, the poverty of marriage, the poverty of economic security and the poverty of leisure time.</p>
<p>These are the true measures of modern poverty in an America where some people are living in a postmodern government cloud that uses social capital instead of personal income and others are scratching out an uncertain living to support the &#8220;Cloud Dwellers&#8221; who manage the government bureaucracy, work at non-profits and squat in the $4,955 space.</p>
<p>Our postmodern economy punishes personal aspiration and rewards the surrender of economic independence to the government. More Americans are vanishing into the government cloud and dropping out of the system until the cloud becomes too heavy to float in the sky and sinks down to earth or until the New Poor get tired of living fearful lives to subsidize the $4,955.</p>
<p>An American workers&#8217; revolution will not be a Socialist revolution, it will be an Anti-Socialist revolution of the new poor of the middle class.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <strong></strong> <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> about The Left&#8217;s Unholy Alliance with Radical Islam, Obama&#8217;s Brotherhood Romance, the Huma Abedin-Anthony Weiner saga, and much, much more:</em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/hpyoCFF-iL8" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.  </b></p>
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		<title>New York, Bloomberg and Affordable Housing</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/new-york-bloomberg-and-affordable-housing/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=new-york-bloomberg-and-affordable-housing</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/new-york-bloomberg-and-affordable-housing/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 20 Oct 2013 13:31:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Housing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=207932</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's not quite racism, but of course it is, and practiced by liberal anti-racists. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Mortgage+Default+Crisis+Spreads+NYC+Apartment+OX2U_WL7lVkl.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-207933" alt="Mortgage+Default+Crisis+Spreads+NYC+Apartment+OX2U_WL7lVkl" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Mortgage+Default+Crisis+Spreads+NYC+Apartment+OX2U_WL7lVkl-450x300.jpg" width="450" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Both De Blasio and Lhota are running on a promise to &#8220;build more affordable housing&#8221; which means building more housing projects by plowing more money into the corrupt New York City Housing Authority, which is about out of money, and into associated slumlords who manage housing projects.</p>
<p>Then Bloomberg decided to announce that the lack of affordable housing is a good thing because it means there&#8217;s full occupancy. Or something like that. In a way he&#8217;s right, but also wrong.</p>
<p>New York City does indeed have an affordable housing problem.</p>
<p>The housing problem however is that there is no middle class housing. There are only 2,000 dollar per square foot apartments for the rich and &#8220;affordable housing&#8221; for the welfare class poor.</p>
<p>The problem is caused by that dynamic in which a maze of government regulations make building new housing very difficult. Between the various rent control regs and community boards and allocation grants, building housing is tricky. And considering property values, it becomes easier to build for the rich. The amount of land taken off the market for housing projects makes the remaining land that much more expensive.</p>
<p>Much of New York&#8217;s middle class housing was built until the 70s. Since then the boom has mainly added more poor and rich housing. And both conspire to lock the middle class out.</p>
<p>A housing project automatically trashes property values. No one wants to live near drug markets and muggings and all the rest.  The area becomes a lost cause fit only for more housing projects.</p>
<p>And if you invest in a 500k condo, then you make sure to protect your property values by making the area too expensive for anyone else to live in. It&#8217;s not quite racism, but of course it is, and practiced by liberal anti-racists.</p>
<p>There are also pragmatic reasons. Evicting tenants is very difficult. If you&#8217;re going to build, it makes more sense to aim at the class of people who won&#8217;t announce that they refuse to pay rent and then use pro bono housing lawyers to drag out evicting proceedings for a year or two.</p>
<p>So New York City, like so many other places inhabited by liberals, is broken down into a sharp class divide with no room for the middle class.</p>
<p>And that may be the future of America.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s War on the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/obamas-war-on-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-war-on-the-middle-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 24 May 2013 04:30:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Curley effect]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=190671</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real story behind "hope" and "change." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NEPplan.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-190732" alt="NEPplan" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NEPplan.jpg" width="280" height="186" /></a>How many times have you heard President Obama express concern for the middle class? More than you can count.  Even his website begins “Learn more about Barack Obama and why he’s fighting for the middle class.”<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a></p>
<p>But if we look at Obama’s actual record rather than his rhetoric, it is plain that the middle class has been one of the leading victims of his presidency.</p>
<p>The decline in median family and median net worth that began during George W. Bush’s presidency has continued under Obama. Citing recent Census Bureau data, the Pew Research Center published data showing that the only one of nine income levels whose net worth increased in the 2009-2011 period was the highest-earning cohort—those earning over $500,000 per year.</p>
<p>Income, too, showed a similar pattern: During Obama’s first term, the wealthiest 20% of households eked out a 2% gain while incomes for the rest fell.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Obama may talk tough about “the rich,” but they have been the only group that have gotten richer on his watch.</p>
<p>Further evidence of Obama’s silent war on the middle class is the explosion in the number of Americans receiving food stamps. When Obama took office in January 2009, there were approximately 32 million Americans on food stamps; as of April 5, 2013, that numbered had swollen by nearly 50% to 47.3 million.<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> Poor Americans already had been receiving food stamps before Obama became president; the increase came from members of the middle-class Americans that his policies had initiated into hard times.</p>
<p>Another dramatic indicator of economic hardship has been the unprecedented increase in the number of Americans receiving federal disability payments—8.8 million, a 19% increase in only four years. Working conditions haven’t become more dangerous;  the disturbing rise in these numbers means that many  have found it easier to get on disability than to get a job. The 1.4 million net increase in disability enrollments is five times greater than the growth in net jobs during the same period—a meager 291,000 jobs.<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a></p>
<p><b>Lowering The Economic Hammer</b></p>
<p>The three primary sources of income in a market economy are labor, investment and entrepreneurial business startups. All three have fared poorly under Obama’s policies.</p>
<p><i>Investment Income</i></p>
<p>Millions of middle-class Americans, especially seniors, prefer to stick to safe, ultralow-risk interest-paying investments, such a savings accounts, interest-earning checking accounts, money-market accounts, and certificates of deposit. A normal market rate of return on such investments would be around 3%, but today’s savers have been zeroed out by  the Federal Reserve’s “Zero Interest-Rate Policy.”<a title="" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a></p>
<p>Obama’s extraordinary increase in federal spending is the culprit. His big-spending policies far exceeded federal revenues, so they had to be financed by borrowing. The massive amount of new debt that was incurred was beyond the capacity of capital markets to finance at interest rates low enough for the federal treasury to afford. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke became Obama’s compliant accomplice, essentially bailing out the treasury by employing extraordinary measures (the series of “quantitative easing” programs) to cram interest rates down to near zero. In doing so, Bernanke deprived millions of Americans of the option of earning safe interest income. The Fed has rigged the markets so that middle-class seniors who want the safety of U.S. Treasury debt instruments are losing income while, in effect, granting virtually interest-free loans to the federal government.</p>
<p><i>Entrepreneurial Income</i></p>
<p>Obama’s policies have had a dampening effect on business startups—foundation for the middle class. Citing a study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in studying startups, respected social scientist Joel Kotkin writes, “&#8230;today fewer than 8% of U.S. companies are five years old or younger, down from between 12% and 13% in the early 1980s, another period following a deep recession.”<a title="" href="#_ftn6">[6]</a></p>
<p>There are several reasons for the sluggishness in small business startups, but one of the central ones is been the administration’s heavy-handed regulatory practices. The Mercatus Center, which maintains a database of federal regulations, tabulated an average of 17,212 regulatory rules and restrictions added per year by Obama, compared to 13,441 per year under George W. Bush.<a title="" href="#_ftn7">[7]</a></p>
<p>Obama’s second term will see even more new regulations—and therefore more trouble for the middle class&#8211; as his administration proceeds to implement the most significant, complex laws passed during Obama’s first term—the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).  Both of these pieces of legislation will remove people from the middle class and make it harder for those trying to climb the economic ladder to reach this rung.</p>
<p><i>Labor Income</i></p>
<p>The official unemployment rate has fallen at historically slow post-recession rates under Obama. At the end of April 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the rate was 7.5%—the lowest it has been since he became president.</p>
<p>On the surface, it might seem that this statistic points to an increasingly healthy job market. But <i>Investor’s Business Daily</i> reports, “The average workweek in April was 2% shorter than it was a year ago, marking the ‘steepest decline since 1980.’” Employers are reducing the number of hours they employ workers to avoid incurring the heavy costs of impending ObamaCare rules.<a title="" href="#_ftn8">[8]</a></p>
<p>The participation rate of the US labor force is lower than it has been in decades&#8211;63.30% as of April 30, 2013. This rate has been declining, counter-intuitively, in lockstep with the official unemployment rate.<a title="" href="#_ftn9">[9]</a> This means that the middle class is not only having a hard time finding jobs, but even giving up on the prospect of employment.</p>
<p>More than half of Americans under age 25 holding a bachelor’s degree are either unemployed or underemployed.<a title="" href="#_ftn10">[10]</a></p>
<p>Economic statistician John Williams, who maintains the well-known Shadowstats website, pegs the actual unemployment rate at the end of April 2013 at 23.0%.<a title="" href="#_ftn11">[11]</a></p>
<p>Obama channeled millions of stimulus dollars to increase employment for such favored constituencies as teachers, construction workers, and federal employees in his first two years without significantly reducing unemployment. The economic explanation is this: When a job exists (or earns as much as it does) only because of a government subsidy, then the job is costing more than the value it is producing. This imposes a net loss on society, and the wealth that is diverted from the private sector reduces its ability to create and sustain economically viable jobs.</p>
<p align="center"><b>Is the Obama-Caused Economic Weakness Intentional?</b></p>
<p>Was this Obama&#8217;s goal? Either he didn’t understand that his policies would be so detrimental, in which case he is economically illiterate and incompetent, or he knew what he was doing and was willing to sacrifice the middle class to achieve his overall goals. I think the latter is the case.</p>
<p><i>Signs of Antipathy</i></p>
<p>Five days before the 2008 election, Obama told a crowd of his supporters that “we” were on the verge of “fundamentally transforming” the country. Since the American system was designed to maximize economic opportunities and the standards of living, middle-class Americans might well wonder why Obama wanted to fundamentally change it.</p>
<p>Obama revealed his antipathy for middle-class values in the 2008 presidential campaign when he spoke contemptuously of Americans who cling to guns and religion. For 20 years, he attended Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church where the message from the pulpit was a vehement “God damn America!”</p>
<p>It is well known that Obama is a disciple and practitioner of the strategy and tactics of the late revolutionary Saul Alinsky, who despised the middle class, denigrating them as “materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt.”<a title="" href="#_ftn12">[12]</a></p>
<p>Obama repeatedly displayed his disrespect for the middle class in his policy approach to the deflating housing bubble he inherited. His proposals to bail-out underwater mortgage holders—many of whom had put little or no money down on their houses—was blatantly unfair to the tens of millions of middle-class Americans who had faithfully made the monthly mortgage payments for ten, twenty, or thirty years, and to those who had deferred Hawaiian vacations, new cars, and other enjoyments to save for large down payments on their houses. Obama pushed for bailouts not only to rich Wall Street firms, but to homeowners whose adjustable-rate mortgages had been reset higher—hardly fair to more financially prudent middle class Americans who had bitten the bullet and locked in fixed-rate mortgages that initially (and potentially permanently) were at higher interest rates than those who took out ARMs.<a title="" href="#_ftn13">[13]</a></p>
<p><i>The Green Agenda</i></p>
<p>President Obama is what I call a “mean green.” Like the radical environmentalists, he objects to the American middle class’s standard of living. He disapproves of Americans living comfortably when there are poor nations in the world. In his words: “We can’t drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes, you know, 72 degrees at all times&#8230;and then just expect that every other country is going to say OK&#8230;[when we] keep using 25 percent of the world’s energy.”</p>
<p>That explains why Obama chose Dr. Steven Chu to be Secretary of Energy for his first term. Chu’s most famous policy goal was encapsulated in his statement, “Somehow we have to figure out a way to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Well, Chu didn’t succeed fully, but the price of gasoline is approximately double what it was at the outset of the Obama presidency.</p>
<p><i>Chicagoland Politics and the “Curley Effect”</i></p>
<p>Chicago politicians are known for being particularly ruthless in their pursuit of political power. They play hardball. Their goal is to demolish their competition and forge a permanent majority. It hardly seems surprising, then, that Barack Obama is doing his best to take the Curley effect, historically an urban phenomenon, nationwide.</p>
<p>As defined by Harvard scholars Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer in a famous 2002 article, the Curley effect (named after its prototype, James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston in the first half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century) is a political strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.”  Translation: A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that reward their political allies and punish their opponents, even if the overall result is economic decline. Yes, strange as it seems, making a city poorer often increases the power of those who engineer that impoverishment.</p>
<p>Here is how the Curley effect works: Politicians adopt policies that bestow tax-financed favors on various special interest groups—welfare constituencies, unions, the public sector in general, and select corporations. In demonstration of George Bernard Shaw’s astute axiom, “The government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul,” the recipients of those favors and handouts loyally support their political patrons, giving them reliable electoral support in the form of votes, campaign contributions, get-out-the-vote drives, etc.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, those segments of the population who bear the economic burden of supporting the favored special interests often flee. This reduces the number of political opponents on the city’s voter registration rolls, thereby tilting the electoral balance and making it more likely that the political party running the wealth redistribution scheme stays in power. So successful has this strategy been for Democrats that they have retained uninterrupted control of many large American cities for decades, and in the more extreme cases, have created virtual one-party fiefdoms.</p>
<p>Perhaps you have seen the chain e-mail listing the ten poorest US cities with a population of at least 250,000: Detroit, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Miami, St. Louis, El Paso, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Newark. Besides all having poverty rates between 24% and 32% and a vanishing middle class, these cities share a common political factor: Only two have had a Republican mayor since 1961, and those two (Cincy and Cleveland) haven’t had one since the 1980s. Democratic mayors have had a lock on City Hall despite these once-great and prosperous cities stagnating on their watch. This is the Curley effect in action.</p>
<p>The strategic mistake of the Democratic leaders of those poor cities have adopted policies so virulently anti-business that they have hollowed out the economic base of the city and caused stagnation, decline, and bankruptcy.</p>
<p>Obama is trying to achieve the Curley effect nationwide. He is striving to forge a political coalition that will give the Democrats a permanent electoral majority. He has adopted a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, he has done everything he could to strengthen Democratic constituencies (e.g., stimulus spending steered predominantly toward unions and strategically allied state and municipal entities; waivers from Obamacare for unions; continual increases in the Index of Dependence on Government during Obama’s presidency);<a title="" href="#_ftn14">[14]</a> on the other, he has endeavored to weaken Republican constituencies by strengthening alliances with Big Business while making things difficult for small businesses, because the latter are “a building-block of the Republican base.”<a title="" href="#_ftn15">[15]</a></p>
<p>If Obama and his fellow progressives succeed in achieving the Curley effect on the national level, Americans will no longer be able to move to a new city or state to escape the withering economic impact of Curley-style politics. Their only option would be to leave the country.  However, it appears that Obama has anticipated that response. To close the escape hatch from an Obama-led, Curley-effect America, the president has signed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act that mandates closer monitoring of Americans’ offshore accounts. He also seems to favor policies that would impose financial penalties on anyone desiring to give up U.S. citizenship, and he has called for “global minimum taxes.”<a title="" href="#_ftn16">[16]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>An Enduring Crisis of the Middle Class</b></p>
<p>Obama’s policies are enlarging the twin millstones around the neck of the middle class&#8211; taxation and inflation. While it is true that income tax rates haven’t yet risen under Obama and inflation has surfaced only in a few areas (e.g., food and energy) these twin curses are quietly gathering strength for a future whirlwind of destruction. The six trillion dollars of new debt resulting from Obama’s spending binge (plus trillions more of accumulated unfunded federal liabilities) are tax hikes on future taxpayers. As mentioned earlier, the costs of this flood of red ink has been obscured by the Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy and its willingness to buy approximately 60% of new federal debt with newly created dollars. Whenever ZIRP ends, some combination of massive tax hikes and/or raging inflation will ensue. .</p>
<p>Already, Obama’s economic policies have hurt the middle class. They have sapped the job market, raised food and energy bills, and resulted in falling incomes and net worth. Now the table is set for additional economic pain in the future.</p>
<p>A contracting middle class in retreat from the optimism and affluence that have always been its hallmark is, at this stage of his presidency, Barack Obama’s legacy.</p>
<div>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> <a href="http://www.barackobama.com/about/barack-obama/">www.barackobama.com/about/barack-obama/</a> accessed May 5, 2013.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> Obamanomics: Rich Get Richer, Everyone Else Poorer,” (unsigned editorial) Investors Business Daily, Posted 04/24/2013 6:69 PM ET. news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/042413-653244-rich-get-richer-poor-poorer-under-obama.htm</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> Matt Trivisonno’s blog, accessed May 5, 2013; <a href="http://www.trivisonno.com/food-stamps-charts">www.trivisonno.com/food-stamps-charts</a></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a> John Merline, “Nearly 90,000 Apply for Disability, December Record,” posgted 12/21/12 01:19 PM ETnews.investors.com/122112-637978-disability-ranks-continue-to-explode-under-obama.htm?p=full</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref5">[5]</a> Mark W. Hendrickson, “We’ve Been ZIRPed,” Grove City PA: The Center for Vision &amp; Values, October 12, 2011; <a href="http://www.visionandvalues.org/2011/10/we-ve-been-zirped/">www.visionandvalues.org/2011/10/we-ve-been-zirped/</a></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref6">[6]</a> <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/03/13/wall-streets-hollow-boom-with-small-business-and-startups-lagging-employment-wont-pick-up/">www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/03/13/wall-streets-hollow-boom-with-small-business-and-startups-lagging-employment-wont-pick-up/</a></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref7">[7]</a> Joseph Lawler, “President Obama Leads in Regulations Issued,” posted on realclearpolicy.com on November 2, 2012; <a href="http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2012/11/02/president_obama_leads_in_regulations_issued_338.html">www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2012/11/02/president_obama_leads_in_regulations_issued_338.html</a></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref8">[8]</a> “The ObamaCare Train Wreck Is Already Here,” IBD Editorial, posted May 6, 2013 07:18 PM ET; news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/050613-655037-the-obamacare-train-wreck-is-already-here.htm?p=full</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref9">[9]</a> data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000; cf. “US Labor Force Participation Rate,” ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref10">[10]</a> Mark Hendrickson, “Myth-Busting 101,” posted on forbes.com August 16, 2012; <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/08/16/mythbusting-101-uncomfortable-truths-your-college-wont-tell-you/">www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/08/16/mythbusting-101-uncomfortable-truths-your-college-wont-tell-you/</a></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref11">[11]</a> Bill Quick, A Reality Check from Shadowstats.com, posted on dailypundit.com, May 3, 2013; <a href="http://www.dailypundit.com/?p=71610">www.dailypundit.com/?p=71610</a></p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref12">[12]</a> Saul Alisky, <i>Rules for Radicals</i>, p. 185, quoted in James R. Keena, <i>We’ve Been Had</i>, Nahsville TN: Twin Creek Books, 2010, p. 68.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref13">[13]</a> Mark W. Hendrickson, “Tough Times for Wise Virgins,” Grove City: The Center for Vision &amp; Values, posted February 18, 2009; www.visionandvalues.org/2009/02/tough-times-for-wise-virgins/</p>
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<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref14">[14]</a> Patrick Tyrrell, “Index of Dependence on Government Jumps for the Fourth Year in a Row,” posted on “The Foundry,” a Heritage Foundation blog Sept. 18, 2012; blog.heritage.org/2012/09/18/index-of-dependence-on-government-jumps-for-the-fourth-year-in-a-row/</p>
</div>
<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref15">[15]</a> Kotkin, “Wall Street’s Hollow Boom.”</p>
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<div>
<p><a title="" href="#_ftnref16">[16]</a> Mark Hendrickson, “Team Obama: Tax Predators On The Prowl,” posted on forbes.com, 4/19/2012 @ 5:45PM; <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/04/19/team-obama-tax-predators-on-the-prowl/">www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/04/19/team-obama-tax-predators-on-the-prowl/</a></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Islamic Terrorism Caused by Poverty?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/islamic-terrorism-caused-by-poverty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamic-terrorism-caused-by-poverty</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/islamic-terrorism-caused-by-poverty/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Oct 2012 04:37:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Fjordman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[imperialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[oppression]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=147588</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How many more lives will be lost before this leftist dogma is sent to the ash heap of history?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/islamic-terrorism-caused-by-poverty/6a00e55188bf7a8834010536336067970b-800wi/" rel="attachment wp-att-147609"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-147609" title="6a00e55188bf7a8834010536336067970b-800wi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/6a00e55188bf7a8834010536336067970b-800wi.gif" alt="" width="450" height="349" /></a>The prominent journalist Sven Egil Omdal, a former leader of the Norwegian Union of Journalists, has warned in the regional daily <em>Stavanger Aftenblad</em> against my dangerous critical views on <a href="http://www.aftenbladet.no/kultur/anmeldelser/bokanmeldelser/Islamismeifeilselskap-2895932.html">Islam</a>. At the same time, he thinks we should look into economic factors and social exclusion of Muslim immigrants in order to explain radicalization in ghettos, and not focus on Islamic ideas or culture. According to such socialist thinking, jihad is seen as caused by European and Western <a href="http://www.aftenbladet.no/nyheter/utenriks/Belgia-i-sorg_-spor-Hvorfor-2906055.html">xenophobia</a>, oppression and racism rather than the Islamic mentality.</p>
<p>For some strange reason, this theory has never been able to explain why Islamic expansionist aggression started about a thousand years before European colonialism, and long before the USA or Israel existed as countries.</p>
<p>Symptomatically, Mr. Omdal <a href="http://www.adressa.no/meninger/article1629039.ece">criticized</a> the supposedly inhumane acts of American special forces who in 2011 killed the Islamic terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, after his terror network had murdered thousands of American civilians. At the same time, Omdal does not hesitate in defining society’s “enemies” as Islamophobes on the political Right, who in his view held “<a href="http://www.aftenbladet.no/meninger/medieblikk/De-ansvarlige-bak-den-tilregnelige-3022158.html">responsibility</a>” for creating the basis for Breivik’s massacre.</p>
<p>If you follow this line of thinking, Islamic terrorism is caused by poverty and oppression, whereas non-Muslim terrorism is caused by evil ideologies. But is this view correct? Does Islamic terrorism really have absolutely nothing to do with Islamic doctrines? And if we are to look for underlying problems causing radicalization in the Islamic world, should we not also look at real problems causing potential radicalization in the West?</p>
<p>Omdal has previously compared Israel to Adolf <a href="http://www.aftenbladet.no/meninger/medieblikk/Ord-pa-veien-til-helvete-2934512.html">Hitler</a> and Nazi Germany. No, not Israel’s jihadist enemies in Iran or elsewhere who <a href="http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=279864">openly</a> advocate genocide, nor Hamas which does the same, but rather Israelis who might conceivably defend themselves against those who <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/renewed-iranian-calls-for-israels-annihilation/">publicly</a> brag about their nation’s coming annihilation.</p>
<p>Serious studies have time and again documented that Islamic jihadist terrorists often have above average education and income. In <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049646/The-middle-class-terrorists-More-60pc-suspects-educated-comfortable-backgrounds-says-secret-M15-file.html">2011</a>, a secret MI5 file was leaked which indicated that two-thirds of terror suspects in Britain are from middle-class backgrounds. Those who become suicide bombers are often highly educated. The security service stated that most Islamic terrorists and suicide bombers have a large number of friends.</p>
<p>Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist, had conducted an earlier analysis of 500 members of the Islamic terror organization al-Qaida which revealed that the majority of them were <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jun/19/iraq.peterbeaumont">well-educated</a>, upwardly mobile men in their twenties from a middle-class background. The recruits also tended to come from the wealthier Arab countries. <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/04/al-qaeda-lures-middle-classes-to-join-its-ranks.html">The common</a> stereotype of Islamic terrorism as a product of poor men is clearly wrong, Sageman indicated.</p>
<p>The perpetrators of the attacks on September 11<sup>th</sup> 2001 that killed thousands of unarmed civilians largely came from Saudi Arabia, a very wealthy oil country which has never been under European colonial rule but is itself the cradle of one of the world’s most brutal imperial traditions, as noted by the gifted author V. S. Naipaul.</p>
<p>Mohamed Atta has been identified by the FBI as the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center in New York City during the September 11, 2001 attacks. <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2009/the_architect_of_911/what_can_we_learn_about_mohamed_atta_from_his_work_as_a_student_of_urban_planning.html">Atta</a> was trained as an architect and pursued a master’s degree in city planning at the Hamburg University of Technology. As a student in Germany, he was described as quiet and polite. This strategy of using religious deception, smiling at the infidels while plotting to kill them, is a common feature of many would-be Jihadists in Western countries.</p>
<p>The medical doctor Bilal Abdullah, a British-born Muslim of Iraqi descent, has been sentenced to life in prison for plans to use car bombs to murder as many people as possible in London, England and Glasgow, Scotland. He is said to be a “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7786884.stm">religious</a> extremist and a bigot” who promotes violent Jihad against non-Muslims. This does not square with the Hippocratic Oath of “never do harm to anyone,” but then Hippocrates was a part of the European tradition.</p>
<p>The Koran (<a href="http://www.multimediaquran.com/quran/003/003-110.htm">3:110</a>) teaches Muslims – Arabs in particular – that they are “the best of peoples,” far better than non-Muslims in every conceivable way. They have a God-given right to impose their rule on the rest of humanity, by force of necessary. Their claim to be “hurt” is mainly the complaint of a people who see themselves as a divinely ordained “master race” who have been tricked out of their rightful rule and privileges solely because of scheming Jews, Crusaders, Americans, Europeans, Hindus or other evil infidels.</p>
<p>Muslims make up a vastly disproportionate number of the inmates in many Western jails. That is not because of “discrimination.” The free-thinking psychologist and writer <a href="http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/27476">Nicolai Sennels</a>, who worked with Muslims in Denmark that had been convicted of serious crimes, reports how these inmates rarely feel any personal responsibility for what they have done. They usually see themselves as innocent victims of outside forces. In their own minds, these Muslims never do anything wrong, but many wrongs are imposed upon them by others.</p>
<p>The TV host, columnist and author Michael Coren covered a 9/11 vigil in Toronto, Canada, in 2012. At the same time, Muslim protesters clashed with the police in Sydney, Australia during a wave of unrest against an obscure movie that mocked Islam. They carried slogans such as “<a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/sydney-protesters-call-for-beheadings/story-e6frg6nf-1226474756501">Behead</a> all those who insult the Prophet.”</p>
<p>As Coren remarked about this threatening Muslim crowd, “<a href="http://www.torontosun.com/2012/09/14/a-night-with-the-fanatics">We are</a> supposed to be free to speak our minds. The issue here is not the movie but the Islamic reaction to the movie. Remember, the same week this tiny film was made public, the internationally celebrated Venice Film Festival gave an award to a movie showing a naked woman masturbating with a crucifix. The Christian response was an e-mail.” Most of these Muslims seemed to have the latest iPhones, iPads or other electronic gadgets. Coren did not see any signs of poverty among them.</p>
<p>As the author Ibn Warraq has repeatedly stated, the root cause of Islamic terrorism is Islam’s teachings and the example of Muhammad and his companions as described in traditional sources. Those who claim that Islamic terrorism is caused by poverty and oppression are parroting Marxist dogma, where violence is caused by “oppression.”</p>
<p>Sven Egil Omdal was suspiciously quiet during the international Islamic riots in September 2012, with their attacks on Western embassies and calls for beheading those who insult Islam. Was all of this really caused by poverty? By contrast, the same month he interviewed the pro-multicultural author Carsten Jensen in Denmark about where to put the external “<a href="http://www.aftenbladet.no/kultur/Ansvaret-etter-Behring-Breivik-3036595.html">responsibility</a>” for Breivik’s ideas. As was to be expected, hardly a single critical word was uttered about the largest and fastest mass migrations in recorded human history. Instead, the two men focused only on the supposedly irrational and hateful reaction of native Europeans against their own displacement.</p>
<p>Interestingly, although he was normally against the death penalty, Carsten Jensen was of the opinion that he might be willing to reconsider his stance in the exceptional individual case of Breivik, given the latter’s immense cruelty and total lack of remorse. Yet, although he considered ABB to be unique, the author indicated that he grew out of a fertile soil of right-wing extremism and the hateful, anti-Islamic xenophobia of the Danish People’s Party, whose long-time leader Pia Kjærsgaard in 2012 stepped down in favor of Kristian Thulesen Dahl.</p>
<p>It is unclear what kind of “hate” the DPP has been spreading, however. The party’s former MP Søren Krarup has been one of the country’s sharpest conservative and Christian intellectuals for decades. The priest Jesper Langballe, who was Member of Parliament for the DPP from 2001 to 2011, is renowned for talking about serious subjects with a great sense of humor. Should any mention of problems caused by mass immigration be a social taboo?</p>
<p>Yet unless these organizations are willing to engage in a thorough self-criticism and change their ways, Carsten Jensen averred that groups which are critical of Islam, multiculturalism and mass immigration “share a responsibility” for the massacre at Utøya with Breivik. The author took it for granted that Anders Behring Breivik is a rational but evil person who committed his atrocities based on a certain ideological world view.</p>
<p>This is not beyond dispute. It is conceivable that Breivik’s twisted, unbalanced and borderline insane mind, filled with medieval knights and a strange fetish for self-made uniforms, was at least as much motivated by family issues and problems in his private life, which he wrapped in an ideological mantle to justify his misdeeds.</p>
<p>However, if we assume that Anders Behring Breivik was at least partly affected by the undercurrents of fear and quiet anger that are present in nearly all Western nations now, which seems likely, then we must also admit that these undercurrents have been fueled by the policies of mass immigration promoted for decades by the Western ruling elites, including opinion-shapers such as Sven Egil Omdal and Carsten Jensen in the mass media.</p>
<p>Consequently, one might claim with considerable justification that Breivik’s radicalization was to some extent facilitated by the extreme immigration policies promoted by the ruling multicultural establishment. If that is indeed the case then Western multiculturalists, too, need to engage in some healthy self-criticism regarding the rapidly rising tensions caused by their dangerous polices and failed ideological experiments.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Fantastical Myth of &#8216;Middle-Class&#8217; Joe Biden</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/michellemalkin/the-fantastical-myth-of-middle-class-joe-biden/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-fantastical-myth-of-middle-class-joe-biden</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Mar 2012 04:07:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=125860</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The wheeler-dealer vice president and his family have reaped the benefits of public office for nearly a half-century. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/bidern.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-125898" title="bidern" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/bidern.gif" alt="" width="375" height="261" /></a>This has got to be the bazooka of all Joe Biden blowhardisms. The nation&#8217;s vice campaigner in chief went on the attack against Republicans this week, clad in full populist armor. &#8220;These guys don&#8217;t have a sense of the average folks out there,&#8221; said The Everyman. &#8220;They don&#8217;t know what it means to be middle class.&#8221; But who was his audience?</p>
<p>Nope, not blue-collar workers in Allentown, Pa. Biden was speaking to an exclusive club of $10,000-per-couple campaign donors gathered at the home of the Senate&#8217;s $200 million man, Democratic Mass. Sen. John Kerry, in Georgetown, D.C.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s smack dab in the middle of Beltway America, where they like a twist of cognitive dissonance with their aperitifs.</p>
<p>The White House is once again drawing on the fantastical myth of middle-class Joe to portray Republicans as out-of-touch elitists. A Washington Post headline described Biden &#8220;digging back into his roots to move Obama forward.&#8221; But the administration&#8217;s leading populist poster child is a wretched symbol of entrenched Washington power. And his fables are getting oldy-moldy.</p>
<p>At another campaign event in Ohio, Regular Joe rolled up his sleeves and pumped out the common-man colloquialisms. &#8220;It&#8217;s good to have a dad in the automobile business, man,&#8221; he said. Yeah, man. Preach it, man. Oh, hey, weren&#8217;t you the man who savaged average-guy Joe &#8220;the Plumber&#8221; Wurzelbacher in Ohio four years ago by lying about his income and mocking his American dream to own a small business? Man.</p>
<p>While Biden&#8217;s family came from humble beginnings, the wheeler-dealer politician and his family (including two lobbyist sons) have reaped the benefits of public office for nearly a half-century. The entrenched senior senator from Delaware amassed wealthy donors and crooked cronies over six Senate terms. These are some of the stories, reported in my book &#8220;Culture of Corruption,&#8221; that have been whitewashed out of the loquacious veep&#8217;s campaign folklore:</p>
<p>—Biden&#8217;s custom-built house in Delaware&#8217;s ritziest Chateau Country neighborhood, assessed at $2.5 million four years ago, is the Bidens&#8217; most valuable asset. He secured the estate with the help of a corporate executive who worked for Biden&#8217;s top campaign donor, credit card giant MBNA.</p>
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		<title>Defining the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/tait-trussell/defining-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=defining-the-middle-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:00:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tait Trussell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=116074</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Progressives wrongly portray a middle class with suppressed earnings.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/mc.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-116077" title="mc" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/mc.jpg" alt="" width="427" height="236" /></a></p>
<p>Obama has called the restoration of the middle class the defining issue of our time. He said in a “60 Minutes” interview Dec 11 “we should be building a <a href="vhttp://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/111210/obama-american-middle-class">broad-based middle class</a> &#8230;.”</p>
<p>All politicians say they’re for the “middle class,” Some call it the “working class.” But what is the middle class? No one knows precisely. It has been defined in several ways over the years.</p>
<p>Almost everyone thinks he or she is in the middle class. Even though we’re supposedly a classless society.</p>
<p>When Democrat candidates talk of helping the “middle class” or “working class,” they refer more generally to blue collar workers—as if white collar workers did no work.</p>
<p>The most recent federal figures on <a href="http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/trio/incomelevels.html">poverty levels</a> range from a one person family having $16,335 to a family of eight having $56,445. Some in poverty might well be seen as making middle class income.</p>
<p>Today the Democrats, with aid from some news media, are presenting a <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/16/news/economy/middle_class/index.htm">distorted picture</a> of a nation where “median incomes” have remained a straight line for scores of years while incomes of the rich, particularly in the past couple of decades have rising sharply.</p>
<p>A recent CNNMoney.com article included just such a chart. Incomes for 90 percent of Americans have been stuck in neutral, the story said. Other liberal media carried the same story.</p>
<p>Progressive Elizabeth Warren has her definition. She has been the Chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel that oversees TARP (Toxic Asset Relief Program) and is the Leo Gottlieb Professor at Harvard Law School. A darling of the liberal left, she now wants to be the next Democrat Senator from Massachusetts.</p>
<p>She has written: “The <a href="http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/trio/incomelevels.html">crisis facing</a> the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully employed male have been flat since the 1970s.</p>
<p>“Pundits talk about ‘populist rage’ as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class,” she wrote. “But they have it wrong. Families understand with crystalline clarity that the rules they have played by are not the same rules that govern Wall Street&#8230;.They understand that their economic security is under assault and that leaving consumer debt effectively unregulated does not work.”</p>
<p>You would think she has just huddled with the Wall Street occupiers.</p>
<p>“America today,” she continues in her Dec. 11 op ed piece in the Huffington Post, “has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security&#8230;.Tens of millions of once secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, waiting as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pick slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff,” she sobbed.</p>
<p>That’s the ironclad leftist view of middle class woes. And, if she should exercise an ounce of honesty, she would lay blame at the feet of Barack Obama, certainly in the past three years.</p>
<p>Examining Census Bureau data, the picture is <a href="http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/2010/P01AR_2010.xls">much different</a> from that depicted by liberal Prof. Elizabeth Warren. The middle incomes listed for 1970, ranged from $3,638 to $10,276. But in 2000, the middle household incomes ranged from $17,920 to $52,174. The Census put incomes per capita in 1970 at $15,920; in 2000 at $28,293—a sizeable increase, not the “flat” income Warrant contended. In 2010, Obama’s recession pulled per capita income <a href="http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/2010/P01AR_2010.xls">down</a> to $26,487.</p>
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		<title>Obama on the (Class) Warpath</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/jlaksin/obama-on-the-class-warpath/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-on-the-class-warpath</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:53:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The president bets on redistribution to guarantee his reelection. 
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Obama-Kansas-speech-thumb-400xauto-26955.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-115016" title="Obama-Kansas-speech-thumb-400xauto-26955" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Obama-Kansas-speech-thumb-400xauto-26955-300x224.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="224" /></a></p>
<p>Republicans have yet to settle on a nominee, but President Obama has already decided whom he will run against: the rich.</p>
<p>If his populism-fueled speech this Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kansas, is any guide, Obama’s reelection platform will be centered on class warfare.<strong> </strong>In his <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/07/full-text-barack-obama-speech">speech</a>, Obama conjured a grim image of middle class struggle. As he told it, a combination of unfettered free markets and “breathtaking greed” has created a dismal economic situation for the middle class, one that “gives lie to the promise that’s at the very heart of America:  that this is the place where you can make it if you try.” Instead, Obama suggested, this is a place where you can make it as long as you take from the rich, and that America’s problems could be solved if only “our wealthiest citizens would agree to contribute a little more.” For good measure, Obama also caricatured the Republicans as believing that “we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”</p>
<p>While the speech was well-received by the left, Obama’s attempt to cast himself as a paladin of the middle class is singularly implausible. Rail as he may about the hard lot of the middle class, Obama himself deserves much of the blame. After all, it was his administration that passed a largely failed $787 billion stimulus package that distributed taxpayer funds to an already privileged constituency in public sector unions. It was this same president that increased the national debt to <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20095704-503544.html">$4 trillion dollars</a>, a tab that the middle class and its children will be paying off for some time to come. And for all of his opportunistic attacks on Wall Street, Obama himself supported the bailouts for the banking industry. Exactly why the middle class should look to this president as its savior is unclear.</p>
<p>Indeed, beyond tax increases on the rich, Obama’s speech failed to offer any detailed policy proposals to help the middle class. Elevating style over substance, Obama instead made an elaborate attempt to liken himself to Theodore Roosevelt, to whose “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie in 1910 Obama’s remarks were intended as a not-so-subtle parallel.</p>
<p>Politically, the comparison was certainly convenient. An outspoken critic of the “great malefactors of wealth” who defected from the Republican Party for his own Progressive Party, Teddy Roosevelt has long been rhetorical fodder for Democrats who want to portray modern Republicans as beholden to the rich. Obama continued that partisan tradition, citing Roosevelt several times in the course of his indictment of Republicans. Obama also enlisted Roosevelt to preempt charges that he was engaging in class warfare, pointing out that Roosevelt himself was called a “radical, a socialist, and even a communist” after his “New Nationalism” speech.</p>
<p>What Obama did not mention is that this criticism of Roosevelt’s speech was not unjustified. As Jonah Goldberg observes in <em>Liberal Fascism</em>, his recent history of the American Left, Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech could fairly be described as socialist. Among other things, Roosevelt avowed that “every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” Such socialist overtones are hardly surprising, since Roosevelt was far more of supportive of centralized power than the modern Republican Party. It is also worth noting that Roosevelt’s critique of the wealthy took place in a starkly different context than Obama’s calls for higher taxes. At the time that Roosevelt delivered his speech, there was no income tax, and hence the argument that the rich were not paying their fair share was far more credible than it is today, when the top 1 percent pays nearly 40 percent of all federal income taxes.</p>
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		<title>Black Opportunity Destruction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/walter-williams/black-opportunity-destruction/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=black-opportunity-destruction</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/walter-williams/black-opportunity-destruction/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Feb 2010 05:00:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49687</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How political correctness is holding black students back. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/black-students-on-steps.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49690" title="Studying" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/black-students-on-steps-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a></p>
<p>&#8220;Do you mean he is taller than me am?&#8221; sarcastically barked Dr. Martin Rosenberg, my high <a href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/walter-williams/black-opportunity-destruction.html#" target="_blank">school</a> English teacher, to one of the students in our class. The student actually said, &#8220;He is taller than me,&#8221; but Rosenberg was ridiculing the student&#8217;s grammar. The subject of the elliptical (or understood) verb &#8220;am&#8221; must be in the subjective case. Thus, the correct form of the sentence is: He is taller than I.</p>
<p>This correction/dressing down of a student, that occasionally included me, occurred during my attendance at North Philadelphia&#8217;s Benjamin Franklin High School in the early &#8217;50s. Franklin was predominantly black; its students were poor or low middle class. On top of that, Franklin had just about the lowest academic standing in the city. All of our teachers, except two or three, were white. Despite the fact that we were poor, most of Franklin&#8217;s teachers held fairly high standards and expectations.</p>
<p>Today, high standards and expectations, at some <a href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/walter-williams/black-opportunity-destruction.html#" target="_blank">schools</a>, would mean trouble for a teacher. Teachers, as pointed out in one teaching program, are encouraged to &#8220;Recognize and understand the cultural differences among students from diverse backgrounds, and treat such differences with respect. Intervene immediately, should a fellow student disparage a Black student&#8217;s culture or language.&#8221; That means if a black student says, &#8220;I be wiff him&#8221; or &#8220;He axed me a question,&#8221; teachers shouldn&#8217;t bother to correct the student&#8217;s language. What&#8217;s more, should anyone disparage or laugh at the way the student speaks, the teacher should intervene in his defense. Correcting the student&#8217;s speech might be deemed as insensitive to diversity at best and racism at worst, leading possibly to a teacher&#8217;s reprimand, termination and possibly assault.</p>
<p>A teacher&#8217;s job is to teach and failure to correct a student&#8217;s speech, just as failure to correct a math error, is a dereliction of duty. You might say, &#8220;Williams, Ebonics or black English is part of the cultural roots of black people and to disparage it is racism.&#8221; That&#8217;s utter nonsense.</p>
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<p>During the 1940s and 1950s, I lived in North Philadelphia&#8217;s Richard Allen housing project, along with its most famous resident, Bill Cosby. We all were poor or low middle class but no one spoke black English. My wife was the youngest of 10 children. Listening to her brothers and sisters speak, compared to many of her nieces and nephews, you wouldn&#8217;t believe they were in the same family. The difference has nothing to do with cultural roots of black people. The difference is that <a href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/walter-williams/black-opportunity-destruction.html#" target="_blank">parents</a>, teachers and others in authority over youngsters have become less judgmental, politically correct and lazy; therefore, speaking poorly is accepted.</p>
<p>Language is our tool of communication. If a person has poor oral language skills, he&#8217;s likely to have poor writing, reading and comprehension skills. To my knowledge, there are no books in any field of study written in Ebonics or black English. It is very likely that a person with poor language skills will suffer significant deficits in other areas of academic competence such as mathematics and the sciences. It doesn&#8217;t mean that the person is unintelligent; it means that he doesn&#8217;t have all the tools of intelligence. That is what&#8217;s so insidious about the state of black <a href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/walter-williams/black-opportunity-destruction.html#" target="_blank">education</a> today; so many blacks do not have a chance to develop the tools of intelligence. Many might have high native intelligence but come off sounding like a moron.</p>
<p>Black Americans should thank God that non-judgmental, politically correct people weren&#8217;t around during the early civil rights movement when blacks began breaking discriminatory barriers. Discriminatory employers would have had ready-made excuses not to hire a black as a trolley car motorman, cashier or department store sales clerk.</p>
<p>There are some significant challenges to being judgmental and politically incorrect and insisting on proper language. A professor or teacher can get cursed out by students or parents. A black student who speaks well, carries books and studies can be accused of &#8220;acting white&#8221; and find himself shunned and assaulted by other students.</p>
<p>I would be interested in hearing the teaching establishment&#8217;s defense of permitting poor language.</p>
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		<title>On the Road to Trouble</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/vasko-kohlmayer/on-the-road-to-trouble/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=on-the-road-to-trouble</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:00:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vasko Kohlmayer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47504</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How will our government pay all its debts?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47507" title="road" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/road.jpg" alt="road" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>“Is America&#8217;s Financial Collapse Inevitable?” asks the title of a recent <a href="http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&amp;pageId=122030">piece</a> by Patrick Buchanan. The article points out something we have repeatedly discussed here: There is no way the federal government can meet its financial obligations.</p>
<p>If our government were ever to do so, it would first have to eliminate its colossal deficits. For this to happen deep budget cuts would be required. But this is something that is not conceivable in today&#8217;s environment. We will understand why when we look at the largest budget items, which are Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, defense and interest on the debt. Since these constitute the bulk of government expenditures, any meaningful deficit reduction would require that substantial cuts be made there. The problem is that all of the above are for all practical purposes untouchable.</p>
<p>Interest on the debt is out of question, since not paying it in full would put our federal government in default. This cannot be allowed to happen as it would result in the immediate collapse of our currency. As far as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid are concerned, no elected official will touch them with a ten foot pole, since doing so would mean political suicide. When it comes to defense the prospect of any reductions is likewise nil. The ongoing operations in Iraq, our deepening commitment in Afghanistan as well as numerous challenges presented by the War on Terror make any deep cuts a practical impossibility.</p>
<p>But what about taxes? Could they not be raised to increase revenue and close the budget gap that way? To begin with, any sharp hikes are out of question for the increasingly unpopular president who pledged during the campaign not to raise taxes on the middle class. To even suggest such a thing would be politically precarious if not suicidal. But even if Obama would somehow managed to do it, higher taxes would only further depress the already-overtaxed and over-regulated economy. This would in turn shrink the tax base and forestall the possibility of higher revenue intake.</p>
<p>Buchanan asks how are we ever going to get a handle on our runaway finances if “taxes are off the table, Afghan war costs are inexorably rising and cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and entitlement programs are politically impossible.” There is, of course, no satisfactory answer. The truth is that our government is not going to get its fiscal house in order. And even though Buchanan does not state so explicitly, the implied answer to his starting question – is America&#8217;s financial collapse inevitable – is “yes.”</p>
<p>Pat Buchanan is not alone suffering from dark premonitions. Last week legendary investor and market commentator Marc Faber pulled no punches when asked what he thought of America&#8217;s prospects. “We are doomed,” was his <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-marc-faber-we-are-doomed-2010-1">response</a>. The reason for his bleak assessment? The immense and rapidly growing indebtedness of the federal government. In addition to all the other problems, Faber predicts that the rate interest that the government has to pay on the debt will shoot up rapidly in the next few years. Last year interest claimed about 12 percent of the government&#8217;s tax revenue. Faber estimates that within five years the figure will climb to some 35 percent. It goes without saying that such a jump would have a devastating impact on the already overextended federal budget.</p>
<p>Marc Faber is not the only one who worries about this. It has been pointed out by a number of finance experts that up until now the federal government has been able to borrow at very low rates due to the dollar&#8217;s status as the world&#8217;s reserve currency. But there are clear signs that this favorable situation is coming to an end. Sensing that the US will not be able to make good on its debt, governments and investors have been growing increasingly wary of financing our borrowing by buying treasuries. But even as they plead with Washington to end its spendthrift ways, they have been earnestly searching for an alternative to the dollar. Admittedly, this is no easy task, since there is no major government today that can be trusted to conduct its fiscal affairs in a way that would guarantee a stable currency.</p>
<p>It would seem that long-term currency stability is not a realistic possibility in the era of central banking. This is because politicians will invariably exploit the looseness of fiat money to satisfy their insatiable spending urges. But the advantage is only temporal. In the end there is always a price to pay for spending more than one has. This applies to everyone including sovereign governments. In their case the price that is paid is the depreciating currency as central banks print money in order to pay for politicians&#8217; promises. It is paradoxical that the brunt of this is born by ordinary people and not by those who are most directly responsible for the situation. While politicians keep promising and getting elected, the population bears the cost as the real value of their assets and savings decreases with the depreciating currency. This is the situation that we see taking place in this country today.</p>
<p>It may be objected that the people themselves are ultimately responsible, because they vote for politicians who promise all those expensive programs. Perhaps so. There are, however, encouraging signs that the American people are becoming increasingly aware of where the problem lies. In what amounted to a referendum on President Obama&#8217;s expansive agenda, the victory of Scott Brown in Massachusetts showed that even a left-leaning electorate can grow wary of government&#8217;s ability to provide and finance massive undertakings such as national healthcare. Another sign of shifting sentiment can be detected in a recent Washington Post ABC News <a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/59933">poll</a> which asked this question: “Generally speaking, would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?” Only 38 percent wished for a larger government with more services while 58 percent wanted a smaller government with fewer services.</p>
<p>This is good all news, but it still does not solve that <a href="http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/ba662.pdf">$100 trillion question</a>: How is our government going to pay for all the massive obligations that it has so unadvisedly assumed?</p>
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		<title>The Educated Muslim Terrorist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/wm-b-fankboner/the-educated-muslim-terrorist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-educated-muslim-terrorist</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:04:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Wm. B. Fankboner]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46792</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why so many jihadists are Westernized and come from the upper middle class.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em> </em></p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46795" title="richterr" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/richterr.gif" alt="richterr" width="450" height="287" /></p>
<p><em>East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.</em> ––Rudyard Kipling</p>
<p>Nidal Hasan, Abdulmutallab and Humam al-Balawi are jihadists who were educated and came from privileged middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Hasan was an American-trained U. S. Army doctor, Abdulmutallab was a London engineering student and the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, and double-agent Dr. Humam al-Balawi was a member of the Jordanian professional class.</p>
<p>Many Westerners are confused by the willingness of university-educated middle-class Muslims to perpetrate barbarous acts of terrorism. It appears to be a reversal of the usual process: typically college students raised in religious households become more secularized by exposure to the humanities and sciences, and the rationalist values of the European Enlightenment. Yet when embryonic jihadists attend Western universities they graduate with their faith intact: 9/11 terrorists Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were both beneficiaries of Western university educations. These men, who sought to advance themselves with Western training and technical skills, ultimately turned against, and attempted to destroy, the very society that provided them with the means to that advancement. Instead of employing their newly acquired learning and knowledge to improve the lot of their fellow countrymen and co-religionists, they turned this very learning and knowledge against their Western benefactors.</p>
<p>This phenomenon begs the question: How do jihadists reconcile such hypocrisy and ingratitude in their own minds?</p>
<p>As the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie proved, the list of Jihad’s grievances against the West is subtle and inventive. The exquisite sensitivities of the faithful guarantee the manufacture of injury and insult without end, providing inspiration for Islam’s perennial street theater; for no sooner does the Arab street grow tired of one threadbare grievance, e.g. Israel, than it discovers another in an irreverent Danish cartoon.</p>
<p>The familiar explanations for the fierce hatred of Muslim extremists for the West—the presence of Western military forces in sacred Arab lands, that holy war against infidels is a duty sanctioned by the Koran, or the millennial fantasy that a supreme caliphate is destined to rule the world—are as irrational as they are implausible. For example, before 9/11, America’s military deployment in Islamic countries, in Bosnia, Kosovo and in Kuwait, had been in the defense of Islam itself; but for the timely intervention of American forces in these three places, tens of thousands of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims would have perished in an orgy ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and Kuwait (and eventually Saudi Arabia) would have become provinces of Iraq. (The only other time Muslims were likely to encounter the U.S. military was when a Navy relief task force arrived with aid for victims of a natural disaster in an Islamic state like Bangladesh.) And though some imams, mullahs and ayatollahs may harbor utopian dreams of world domination and of heavenly rewards for martyrdom, it is hard to believe such apocalyptic visions could motivate educated Muslims.</p>
<p>There is evidently something else at play here.</p>
<p>Genetic biologists tell us that the principle stages of man’s evolution, from the fish to primate, can be discerned in time-lapse photography of the human embryo. The evolution of the educated Muslim terrorist is one of those mysteries that, like human evolution, resides in the terms of the problem itself and is only waiting to be made explicit, i.e. the very fact of the terrorist’s contact with the West. The common strand running through the backgrounds of middle-class jihadists is prolonged and close interaction with Western society, a clue in plain sight that is too often overlooked in the search for esoteric causation, such as religion and culture. Indeed, according to British historian Arnold Toynbee, contact with the dominant universal society is always the first step in the radicalization of Third World revolutionaries and terrorists. Here is the critical path:</p>
<p align="center"><strong>Crucial Events in the Evolution of the Terrorist</strong></p>
<p align="center">Intrusive Civilization (Western Society)<br />
|<br />
Intelligentsia (Expatriate Liaison-Class)<br />
|<br />
Alienation, Humiliation, Loss of Identity<br />
|<br />
Voluntary Sorting of Affinity Groups<br />
|<br />
Concentration of True Believers<br />
|<br />
Information Deprivation<br />
|<br />
Radicalization<br />
|</p>
<p align="center">Terrorism</p>
<p>Thus, the evolution of Third World terrorists begins with Westernization, out of which emerges an expatriate liaison-class or intelligentsia. The job of this liaison-class is to interpret the dominant society. At first glance this might appear to be a salutary development, a bridging of the divide between East and West that Kipling dismissed as impossible, a convergence and melding of the dominant Western society with the underdeveloped one. But, according to Toynbee, the rise of an intelligentsia is a symptom of social pathology:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Wherever we find an intelligentsia we may infer, not only that two civilizations have been in contact, but that one of the two is in process of being absorbed into the other&#8217;s internal proletariat. We can also observe another fact in the life of an intelligentsia which is written large upon its countenance for all to read: An intelligentsia is born to be unhappy.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote><p>This liaison-class suffers from the congenital unhappiness of the hybrid who is an outcaste from both the families that have combined to beget him. An intelligentsia is hated and despised by its own people because its very existence is a reproach to them. Through its presence in their midst it is a living reminder of the hateful but inescapable alien civilization which cannot be kept at bay and therefore has to be humored. The Pharisee is reminded of this each time he meets the Publican, and the Zealot each time he meets the Herodian. And, while the intelligentsia thus has no love lost on it at home, it also has no honor paid to it in the country whose manners and tricks it has so laboriously and ingeniously mastered.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>In short, the liaison-class (chiefly professionals: doctors, lawyers, educators and engineers, etc.) which mediates between the dominant Western society and its own backward society, is welcomed in neither. Jihadists like Atta, Hasan and KSM advertised themselves as the spiritual emissaries of Islam and the Islamic people, but they had actually lost touch with their culture and belonged to neither societies, Western or Islamic. They believed themselves inferior to the Western society to which they have apprenticed themselves, and superior to the one they have left behind, thereby condemning themselves to spiritual homelessness. They flutter back and forth between the two worlds, never landing firmly in either. This keen loss of identity engenders a sense of humiliation and loss of face, which quickly boils over into fierce resentment and rage. They are ideal recruits for self-annihilating acts of terrorism.</p>
<p>In <em>Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century</em>, Marc Sageman notes that eruptions of terrorist violence have little to do with economic social conditions; terrorist movements evolve slowly, spike quickly, and disappear with unexpected suddenness, and &#8220;cannot be explained through slow-moving societal forces and cultural templates.&#8221; Sageman disputes the popular notion that terrorists are mentally ill, poor, uneducated sociopaths: most of the 9/11 terrorist were, like Mohammed Atta, well-educated, many of them university graduates, i.e. psychologically stable individuals from middle-class families. Most telling of all, four fifths of these jihadists were expatriates, or the offspring of expatriates, who had immigrated to the West. In a word, they were members of the <em>intelligentsia</em>, confirming Arnold Toynbee&#8217;s observation that this class is fertile ground for revolutionary violence.</p>
<p>I gained firsthand knowledge of this phenomenon when I taught English at a teacher training college in northeastern Thailand. Most of the students at the college had come from humble rural backgrounds and never traveled outside the province, let alone the country; but a small percentage of them had spent a year or two as guest students in American schools, and it was always easy to tell them apart from the general student body. Thai students are courteous to a fault, especially to their teachers, to whom they bow; but the repatriated exchange students were sullen, disrespectful and contemptuous not only of their fellow students, but of their instructors, especially their American instructors. I vividly recall a disagreement in a neighboring college so acrimonious that an exchange student was removed from an American instructor’s class and reassigned. I puzzled over this for some time after I left the country. Why should guest students, who had been fortunate enough to travel to, and study in, America, be so bitter and unhappy? Then I came across the passage above in Arnold Toynbee’s <em>A Study of History</em> and I thought it mapped well to the problem.</p>
<p>It is not clear if Toynbee’s insight (made in 1934 by the way) will be of any practical value in our current relations with Islam, but as Marshall McLuhan once remarked, &#8220;Nothing is inevitable so long as we are willing to contemplate what is happening.” Perpetual conflict with Islam is not inevitable if we are willing to apply sufficient intellectual candlepower to the problem; and it is possible that this window opened on the mind of Islam’s intelligentsia will pay dividends at some future time. America is a technological, military and political powerhouse that does not always know its own strength or understand the daunting effect this has on less fortunate nations. Or as Toynbee put it, “America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.”</p>
<p>On the other hand, intellectual objectivity and self-knowledge are not qualities one customarily associates with Islam. Maybe a recognition of its manifest inferiority complex and its pathological jealousy of the West will prompt militant Islam to question its dependence on blind, fanatical hatred as a substitute for reason. Perhaps the failed states of the Middle East will at long last accept the fact that their social ineptitude and political impotence are problems of their own making rather than the fault of Western colonialism. And perhaps the Muslim community at large can be persuaded that Islam’s enemies are not in Israel, Europe or America but within Islam’s own tent. That is a grand hope.</p>
<p>But is it a realistic one? What if Toynbee was telling us something entirely different? I.e. that Kipling was right? That the only place East and West are destined to meet is on the battlefield. What if the monumental misunderstanding that he and Kipling documented seventy-five years ago means the end of cooperative multilateralism and that we are in this fight alone, i.e. that we cannot rely on a rational response from an enlightened Moslem community. If so, we in the West should no longer be shocked and unprepared when educated, middle-class Muslims participate in brutal acts of terrorism. Indeed, we should assume that this modus operandi will be a fact of life for some time to come.</p>
<p><strong>William Fankboner is the author of <em>The Triumph of Political Correctness</em> and <em>A Hypertext Field Guide to Marshall McLuhan&#8217;s Understanding Media</em>. He runs a web site at: http://home.roadrunner.com/~lifetime. His e-mail address is: williefank@aol.com.</strong></p>
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		<title>Have We Stopped Trying to Make Good People? &#8211; by Dennis Prager</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/dennis-prager/have-we-stopped-trying-to-make-good-people-by-dennis-prager/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=have-we-stopped-trying-to-make-good-people-by-dennis-prager</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:02:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The most important question a society can ask. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-41874" title="good" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/good.jpg" alt="good" width="450" height="416" /></p>
<p>The most important question any society must answer is: How will we make  good people?</p>
<p>That is the question Judeo-Christian values have grappled with. There are  many and profound theological and practical differences between Judaism and  Christianity. But in the American incarnation of Judeo-Christian values &#8212; and  America is really the one civilization that developed an amalgamation of Jewish  and Christian values &#8212; the emphasis has been on individual  character.</p>
<p>One cannot make a good society if one does not begin with the arduous  task of making good individuals. Both Judaism and Christianity begin with the  premise that man is not basically good and therefore regard man&#8217;s nature as the  root of cause of evil.</p>
<p>This may sound basic and even obvious, but it is not. In the Western  world since the Enlightenment, belief in the inherent goodness of human beings  has taken over. This has resulted in an increasing neglect of character  development because evil has come to be regarded not as emanating from human  nature (which is essentially good) or from morally flawed individuals but from  forces outside the individual &#8212; especially material ones. Thus, vast numbers of  the best educated in the West have come to believe that &#8220;poverty causes  crime.&#8221;</p>
<p>Now, while no one could possibly refute the argument that starving people  will steal bread for their families (an act that is morally defensible), the  argument that poverty causes crime posits that when poor people in America  commit murder and other violent crimes, it is because they are  poor.</p>
<p>This is irrational dogma, as much a matter of faith as any theological  doctrine. Two simple facts illustrate this: First, the vast majority of poor  people, in America and elsewhere, do not commit violent crimes. Second, a large  amount of crime is committed by the middle class and even by the wealthy.  Neither fact prompts the &#8220;poverty causes crime&#8221; believers to rethink their  position.</p>
<p>They need to, however, not only because the poverty-causes-crime thesis  is so demonstrably false, but because it prevents societies from making good  people. When society blames evil on forces outside the individual rather than on  the individuals who perpetrate evil, society will work to change those forces  rather than work to improve the character of individuals. That is a key to  understanding why the left constantly attempts to radically change society &#8212;  how else make a better world?</p>
<p>Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the way to &#8220;repair the  world,&#8221; in the oft-used Hebrew phrase of those most concerned with &#8220;social  justice,&#8221; is far less dramatic, far less revolutionary and far less  macro-oriented. It is the laborious process of raising every generation from  scratch with good values and self-discipline. Without both of these, individual  goodness and therefore societal goodness is impossible.</p>
<p>That is why the most important question a society can ask is how to raise  young people to be good adults. American society, under the influence of the  left, asks other questions: How do we make young people environmentally aware?  How do we teach them to fight allegedly rampant racism, sexism, homophobia and  xenophobia in society? How do we fight AIDS and breast  cancer?</p>
<p>It is, of course, good to be environmentally aware, to fight AIDS and  breast cancer, and to oppose bigotry. But before training young people to be  social activists, they must first learn character traits &#8212; truth telling,  financial honesty, humility, honoring parents and, above all, self-control.  Before learning to fight society, people need to fight their own nature. The  world is filled with activists of all varieties who are loathsome  individuals.</p>
<p>In general, we would do well to be far more impressed with a young person  who sits next to the less popular fat kid who is eating alone at lunch, who  fights the class bully, who doesn&#8217;t cheat on tests and who refrains from drug  use.</p>
<p>There  is no federal budget, no Senate or House bill, no social policy, no health care  fix that can do as much good as a society that is filled with decent  people.</p>
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