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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Poor</title>
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		<title>Why &#8216;Diversity&#8217; Means Quotas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-cohen/why-diversity-means-quotas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-diversity-means-quotas</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2014 04:03:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Cohen]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Education]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[quota]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sonia Sotomayor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239667</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The truth about racial preferences in higher education. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/diversity.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239669" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/diversity-442x350.jpg" alt="diversity" width="327" height="259" /></a>Earlier this year, Sonia Sotomayor appeared on ABC’s the week to plug her new book, <em>My Beloved World</em>. ABC reporter George Stephanopoulos declared that the Supreme Court Justice “knows that affirmative action made a difference in her life, and believes it’s still necessary.”</p>
<p>Stephanopoulos continued,</p>
<blockquote><p>“There’s been a lot of scholarly work that says it’s not the best way to insure diversity in schools, and maybe if you focus on where people live, and how much money they make, you can get the same results, in a way that is less fractious.”</p></blockquote>
<p>To which the Justice responded,</p>
<blockquote><p>“…the problem with that answer is that it doesn’t work….it’s not that I don’t believe that it doesn’t work, it’s that the statistics show it doesn’t work.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Sotomayor, as you may recall, read a lengthy dissent in Schuette v. Coalition, the case which determined that states may ban racial preferences in higher education – a conclusion Sotomayor vehemently disagreed with.</p>
<p>Unmentioned in this discussion were the words &#8220;quotas&#8221; or &#8220;Bakke.&#8221; After being twice rejected by UC Davis medical school, Allen Bakke sued. His suit alleged that UC Davis’s two tiered admissions process, for whites and non-whites, violated his rights under both the fourteenth amendment and the civil rights act.</p>
<p>UC Davis medical school had two separate admissions programs: a regular program, and a special program intended to help disadvantaged students. Applicants to the special program would compete against each other, and would not be compared to regular applicants.  Importantly, the special program accepted applicants with college GPA’s below 2.5.</p>
<p>Ostensibly intended for the disadvantaged of all races, the special program had never accepted a white applicant, although many had applied. Also, racial minorities composed a majority of the committee members who determined admission to the special program. UC Davis also denied that the special admissions program operated as a quota; the Supreme Court disagreed.</p>
<p>The Supreme Court found UC Davis’s admissions scheme to be unconstitutional, and ordered UC Davis to admit Allen Bakke to medical school. The court’s ruling explicitly stated that both quotas and two-tiered systems were unconstitutional &#8212; something confirmed by future Supreme Court rulings.</p>
<p>The court did allow an exception to this general prohibition on the use of race or ethnicity. Colleges could consider race as a factor, if they used it in the same manner as they did other factors. Colleges could not reserve spots for different ethnic or racial groups, but they could consider the value that a student from an under-represented group would bring. This would be the fig leaf that allowed colleges to pursue their racial and ethnic balancing schemes.</p>
<p>At the 2013 University of Michigan “Future of Campus Diversity Symposium,” the fig leaf came right off. Attorney Mark Rosenbaum – fresh from convincing the Sixth Circuit court of appeals that Michigan’s ban on racial preferences violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment – delivered the <i>second </i>keynote address.<i> </i></p>
<p>After telling his audience that “diversity is about how one lives a life,” and “is about respecting the dignity of every single person,” he got down to brass tacks. Bans on racial and gender preferences in higher education had reduced the enrollment numbers of some ethnic and racial groups. According to Rosenbaum, Michigan’s ban on racial preferences in admissions caused African American freshman enrollment to decline from 8.1% to 5.2% at the University of Michigan. “In a state where the number of African American’s are between fifteen and twenty percent,” Rosenbaum informed his audience.</p>
<p>And this isn’t just talk. Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radcliffe studied admissions preferences at both public and private institutions. Although they wouldn’t characterize it this way, their data clearly shows that both public and private institutions employ admissions preferences for the purpose of balancing their racial and ethnic demographics.</p>
<p>When comparing similar applicants to highly selective private schools, being black instead of white is worth the equivalent of 310 extra SAT points, being Hispanic instead of “non-Hispanic white” is worth the equivalent of 130 SAT points, and being Asian instead of white costs you the equivalent of 140 SAT points.</p>
<p>At public institutions, being Hispanic instead of non-Hispanic white doesn’t help your odds much, the equivalent of .3 ACT points. But at these same institutions, being black instead of white increases your odds of acceptance by the equivalent 3.8 ACT points, and being Asian instead of white decreases the odds of acceptance by the equivalent of 3.4 ACT points.</p>
<p>These statistics can only be explained as deliberate efforts at demographic balancing.</p>
<p>The numbers become even more disturbing when one considers social class. At public institutions, socio-economic factors play little role in admissions, but the same cannot be said for private ones. Non-white applicants from lower class backgrounds enjoy considerable class-based affirmative action; not so for whites. Whites are the only group where lower class applicants have less chance at being admitted than middle class applicants; in this case, the numbers are 8% and 28% respectively. For comparisons sake, 81% of lower class, and 50% of middle class, black applicants are accepted.</p>
<p>Elite private institutions, all of which receive federal and state money, offer class-based admissions preferences to every group except one: whites. While offering financial aid and admissions preferences to low-income people of other races, these institutions treat poor white kids as an unwanted financial burden. Imagine the outrage if government benefits granted to everyone else were denied to any other group aside for whites. In his Bakke opinion, Justice Powell specifically cited the denial of surplus food stuffs to African Americans as an example of unequal treatment.</p>
<p>When we debate race-conscious admissions, we have to debate such programs as they exist, not as we would like them to be. When a college administrator says that it is unacceptable for the proportion of under-represented groups to fall below a certain threshold, for all intents and purposes, he is calling for a quota. To those who support these programs, do you support quotas?</p>
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		<title>Poor Regulations</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/poor-regulations/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=poor-regulations</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/poor-regulations/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Aug 2014 04:40:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal bureaucracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Ryan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Victims]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238995</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Paul Ryan shines a light on the biggest victims of federal bureaucracy.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/red-tape_2810803b.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239013" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/red-tape_2810803b-450x334.jpg" alt="red-tape_2810803b" width="304" height="226" /></a>“Paul Ryan is moving to reframe the debate on regulations,” <a href="http://thehill.com/regulation/215486-paul-ryan-opens-new-front-in-war-on-poverty"><span style="color: #0433ff;">notes <i>The Hill</i></span></a>, “arguing that the nation’s poor are the real victims of the red tape spewing from Washington.” The Wisconsin Republican’s “Expanding Opportunity in America” initiative intends to address what the Obama administration calls “income equality,” which persists despite massive federal efforts.</p>
<p>According to the House Budget Committee majority staff, <a href="http://budget.house.gov/waronpoverty/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">at least 92 federal programs purport to help lower-income Americans</span></a><span style="color: #343434;">. These include dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 food-aid programs, and more than 20 housing programs. In fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $799 billion on these programs. Ryan is hardly alone in charging that some of these programs hurt the poor. </span>He cites Creighton University economics professor Diana Thomas, who says that Department of Transportation regulations requiring rear-view cameras will impact low-income car buyers, who prefer to spend their money elsewhere.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="color: #000000;">Those in the lowest fifth of income spend the greatest share of their incomes on energy. </span>Earners in the lowest income quintile spend 24 percent of their pre-tax income on energy, as opposed to 4 percent in the highest quintile. Therefore, as this analysis from the Manhattan Institute notes, “<a href="http://budget.house.gov/waronpoverty/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">America’s poorest citizens will be hurt most by the new EPA regulations</span></a>” on emissions and “it is the poor who will have their budgets squeezed as they struggle to pay for gas and electricity.”</p>
<p>Sofie E. Miller, senior policy analyst at the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center,<i> </i>writes that federal<i> </i>regulations <a href="http://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/opinion-paul-ryan-anti-poverty-plan-targets-regressive-regulation"><span style="color: #0433ff;">“often leave low-income Americans paying a heavier price than their neighbors.”</span></a> Energy standards for appliances “cause prices to increase and push some low-income consumers out of the market.” Likewise, Diana Thomas says “regulation has a regressive effect: It redistributes wealth from lower-income households to higher-income households by causing lower-income households to pay for risk reduction worth more to the wealthy.”</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.moneynews.com/Economy/Furchtgott-Roth-EPA-emission-carbon/2014/06/02/id/574557/">Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist for the Department of Labor</a></span> argues that new “cap and trade” environmental regulations “will reduce opportunities for the poorest Americans.” The regulations “impose real costs on the economy,” and deprive workers of  “the security of employment that comes from industrial activity.” Citing rent control, <a href="http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/stephanie-slade/2013/07/22/dc-and-new-yorks-real-estate-regulations-hurt-the-poor"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Stephanie Slade charges</span></a> that “<span style="color: #1a1a1a;">it’s liberals who continue to support laws that, whatever their intentions, have turned out to be disproportionately harmful to the poorest members of society.”</span></p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">As Patrick Fagan and Robert Rector observed nearly 20 years ago, it’s not exactly news that War on <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1996/06/bg1084nbsp-how-welfare-harms-kids"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Poverty programs such as Aid to Families With Dependent Children have been a bust</span></a>. </span>Welfare dependency “has a negative effect on the earnings and employment capacity of young men.” The more welfare income received in childhood, the lower the earnings as an adult, the very “income inequality” lamented by the Obama administration.</p>
<p style="color: #1a1a1a;">Beyond the consequences of those laws and regulations stands the regulatory establishment and its enormous cost. As the late William F. Buckley observed, a tax dollar cannot travel to Washington DC, go out on the town, and return intact to the needy in the form of benefits. Even low-income workers must support the vast bureaucratic establishment churning out regulations that Paul Ryan charges are detrimental to the poor.</p>
<p><span style="color: #1a1a1a;">His plan would require agencies to </span>conduct a “distributional analysis” on proposed regulations to see if they would have a disproportionate economic effect on low-income households or low-wage workers.  He wants block grants to replace federal welfare programs, expand the Earned-Income Tax Credit and make it work better. Ryan wants to get rid of regressive regulation and emphasize “evidence-based policy-making.”</p>
<p>Some Democrats welcome Ryan’s initiative but Chris Van Hollen, ranking Democrat on the budget committee, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/24/paul-ryan-poverty_n_5616609.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">told reporters it was “nothing more than a block grant gussied up with some bells and whistles”</span></a> and “<span style="color: #272727;">would dramatically slash the resources available to help struggling families.”</span></p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">Advocates of limited government might note that Ryan did </span>not announce plans to eliminate any federal agencies, not even the federal Department of Education, which dates from 1980 and was a payoff to the National Education Association for endorsing Jimmy Carter. Ryan wants to fix federal education funding and make it more flexible, so even if given the chance, his plan might not deliver. But as it gets the hearing it deserves, Americans might recall the back story, <span style="color: #272727;">the 50-year federal War on Poverty whose strategic weapons were federal spending and federal regulation.</span></p>
<p>On January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, famously declared a “War on Poverty.”  In his State of the Union address, LBJ said, <span style="color: #343434;">“Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” </span>Fifty years later, those curious about how the war came out should consult Sasha Abramsky, leftist author of <i>The American Way of Poverty</i> and who also writes for the <i>Nation</i>. Abramsky concedes that LBJ’s war “failed,” and “not since the Great Depression have so many people been beaten down by vast, destructive forces.”</p>
<p>He wants Obama to do it all again, only more so, a War on Poverty Mark II.  The enemy is the anti-tax, anti-government movement that has managed to convince people “that taxes are a mugging rather than an investment.” In this vision, government regulations and government spending are always the solution, and Big Brother always knows best.</p>
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		<title>Jesus, Today’s Church, and ‘Inequality’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jack-kerwick/jesus-todays-church-and-inequality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jesus-todays-church-and-inequality</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jul 2014 04:20:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Bible]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What Jesus really said (and didn’t say) about the poor, the rich, and inequality.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pl.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-237236" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/pl.jpg" alt="pl" width="245" height="300" /></a>That Jesus commanded His disciples—of which I am one—to love “the poor” is beyond dispute. Equally beyond dispute, however, is that, regardless of what growing legions of left-leaning clerics would have us believe, Jesus <em>never—</em>never <em>ever—</em>addressed the issue of “inequality.”</p>
<p>The head of my church and the most visible religious leader on the world stage today, Pope Francis, is as guilty a culprit as is anyone on this score. The Pope made headlines on more than a few occasions since his tenure began when His Holiness condemned “inequality” generally, and the traditional American economic system in particular, with a bluntness that would have made Barack Hussein Obama blush.</p>
<p>Ours is “an economy of exclusion and inequality,” Pope Francis insisted. Our system of “inequality” both results from and encourages “laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless.” Thus, “masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”</p>
<p>Worse, the Pope informs us, our “capitalist” system with its “inequality” violates the divine injunction against “killing,” for “such an economy <em>kills</em>” (emphasis added).</p>
<p>Pope Francis may be the most well known Christian leader to conflate Jesus’ teachings on the proper treatment of <em>the poor </em>with the issue of income and wealth “inequalities.” But he speaks for countless lesser known representatives of Christianity.</p>
<p>Take Norma Cook Everist, a professor of church and ministry. In an article that she penned for <em>The Lutheran, </em>Everist insists that things haven’t changed a lick since Martin Luther said that “the poor” are routinely “defrauded” by “the rich.”</p>
<p>“Inequality,” Everist remarks, divides the world into “makers” and “takers” while fostering the godless fiction that some people, and even “some children,” are “worth more” than others, and that some, “the poor,” are of “‘of no worth’[.]”</p>
<p>The project of reducing the Gospel to an activist’s manual on addressing “inequality” is fraught with difficulties.</p>
<p>First, as already noted, it is simply <em>dishonest: </em>there is no basis, Biblical or otherwise, for equating an obligation to care for the poor with an obligation to endorse political policies ostensibly aimed at reducing “inequalities” in income and wealth. Decent minded people of all faiths and no faith have long recognized the need to care for those in poverty, and Christians specifically have always been acutely aware of this as a moral imperative.</p>
<p>But it hasn’t been until the emergence of large, centralized governments, immensely affluent, industrialized societies, and the dominance of secular, egalitarian ideologies—i.e. phenomena that don’t appear until relatively late in Christian history—that anyone, much less any Christian cleric, has thought to identify compassion for the poor with the amelioration of “inequalities.”</p>
<p>Second, even the tireless emphasis that pastors place upon Jesus’ relationship with “the poor” is less than fully honest, for it is grounded in a selective reading of the New Testament.</p>
<p>“The poor” is as ambiguous as it is emotionally-charged a term. Most of the people among whom Jesus spent His time were certainly not rich by the standards of their day, and some of them did indeed live in grinding poverty. While it’s true that there was no “middle class,” it’s equally true that just because the tax collectors, farmers, fishermen, carpenters and so forth with whom He appears to have fraternized were not rich, neither were they all impoverished.</p>
<p>That today’s clerics fail to make these discriminations between those to whom Jesus ministered by referring to them all as “the poor” reflects their awareness of the emotional <em>and </em>moral appeal of this moniker. After all, “the poor” are, well, poor: only the heartless could fail to feel for them. And “the poor” also lends those so designated moral authority, for being the <em>victims</em> of their circumstances, “the poor” are always <em>blameless</em>.</p>
<p>Third, this <em>exclusive stress</em> on Jesus’ fondness for “the poor,” whether by accident or design, conveys the impression that He was <em>exclusively fond</em> of “the poor,” a respecter of persons by virtue of their socio-economic condition—exactly what the Bible insists God <em>is not. </em></p>
<p>This notion, in turn, further underscores a sense of moral superiority among “the poor” by fueling it with the fiction that their poverty is a saving grace. “The poor,” in other words, can too easily think that it is <em>they, </em>not “<em>the rich,” </em>that count for more in God’s eyes.</p>
<p>Some observers, like the 19<sup>th</sup> century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, thought that this, in fact, was the whole purpose behind Christianity. In referring to it as a “slave morality,” Nietzsche’s point is that it serves, and was always meant to serve, the psychological and emotional interests of the poor masses, namely their interest in exacting a sort of imaginary vengeance against the wealthy by demonizing them while insisting upon their own “blessedness.”</p>
<p>Admittedly, Nietzsche was an enemy of Christianity. But he <em>became </em>an enemy <em>after </em>having been raised Christian by his Lutheran minister father. In any event, one needn’t accept Nietzsche’s reading of Christianity—I do not—in order to see that those Christian leaders who use their pulpits to blast “inequality” lend it considerable plausibility.</p>
<p>Finally, Jesus excoriated “the rich,” yes; but He was no less hard on “the poor,” including and particularly His closest followers. Conversely, sometimes Jesus lavished praise upon “the rich.”</p>
<p>For 2,000 years, whether rightly or wrongly, Christendom’s worst villain has been, not the rich and famous Herod, Pilate, or Nero, but Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’ closest disciples and a “poor” man who relinquished what possessions he may have had in order to follow Him. Moreover, Jesus regularly castigated his “poor” disciples for their lack of faith, and, sometimes, compared them unfavorably with wealthy Gentiles, like the Roman Centurion whose <em>servant </em>Jesus healed.</p>
<p>Moreover, it is worth noting that besides Himself, the greatest example of Christian charity that Jesus extolled is that of the Good Samaritan, a <em>rich </em>man who deployed some of his ample resources to help a stranger in need.</p>
<p>We also shouldn’t forget that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were rich members of the priestly class with whom Jesus must’ve been particularly close, for not only did they attempt to prevail upon their fellow Pharisees to refrain from turning Jesus over to the Romans. Following Jesus’ crucifixion, both prepared His body for burial in the tomb that Joseph secured for Him.</p>
<p>All of this can be found easily enough in the four canonical Gospels which are read in Christian churches throughout the world every Sunday. That these points are neglected by so many ministers is due, I submit, to their obsession with combating, not poverty, but “inequalities” in income and wealth—a topic, this Christian has been at pains to show, having nothing to do with either the whole of the Bible or The New Testament.</p>
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		<title>Poor Little Rich Liberals</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/poor-little-rich-liberals-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=poor-little-rich-liberals-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2014 04:54:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[100 million]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235052</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s hard out there for a $100 million Hillary.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hb.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235055" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hb-450x253.jpg" alt="hb" width="288" height="162" /></a>No group has been hit harder by the Obama economy than America&#8217;s liberals. From Marin County, where bundlers have had to struggle to scrape together a few ten grand bills to attend Obama fundraisers, to Washington D.C., whose bedroom communities now have <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/seven-of-nations-10-most-affluent-counties-are-in-washington-region/2012/09/19/f580bf30-028b-11e2-8102-ebee9c66e190_story.html?hpid=z1">seven of the ten highest household</a> incomes in the country, poverty is hitting poor rich little liberals hard.</p>
<p>In 2006, Alaska had the highest household income. But voters chose Obama over Palin and these days it’s Maryland because six-figure government consultants on sustainable development and diversity need McMansions to go home to after a long day of team building exercises.</p>
<p>Despite numbers like these, liberals are barely making ends meet. Some like Hillary Clinton are &#8220;dead broke&#8221;. Forget about a dollar not buying what it used to. Not even a hundred million dollars does. And there&#8217;s poor Joe Biden who claimed not to have a savings account or any stocks and bonds. And he doesn&#8217;t. He has five savings accounts and eleven investment funds.</p>
<p>But wealth is relative. Despite earning $100 million, Hillary Clinton claims that she isn&#8217;t &#8220;truly well off&#8221;. And if a woman with a colonial mansion for every occasion is, in the words of her adviser, still just &#8220;trying to earn a living&#8221;, the economy must really be bad.</p>
<p>With income inequality such a hot topic, the Democratic Party&#8217;s presidential frontrunners are working hard at pretending to be poor.</p>
<p>If Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden can&#8217;t convince Democrats that they&#8217;re just one step away from begging for spare change on street corners, Elizabeth Warren is waiting in the wings. After all who better than a Harvard professor who made $429,981 in her last full year of teaching to understand how hard it is to barely get by under income inequality.</p>
<p>Elizabeth Warren has a net worth of around $15 million, making her more working class than Hillary, but less working class than Joe Biden. Like Biden, Elizabeth Warren <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/elizabeth-warren-says-shes-not-in-the-1">also isn&#8217;t big on investing</a>.</p>
<p>&#8220;I realize there are some wealthy individuals – I’m not one of them, but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios,&#8221; Warren told an MSNBC host.</p>
<p>Like &#8220;Dead Broke&#8221; or &#8220;Truly Well Off&#8221;, “Wealthy Individuals” and &#8220;A Lot of Stock Portfolios&#8221; are relative terms. Warren only had $8 million in investments. It&#8217;s not a lot if you&#8217;re a millionaire who, like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, spends a lot of time around billionaires.</p>
<p>When you have twenty bucks in your wallet, a million seems like a lot. But when you have a million and hang around those who have fifty million, it doesn&#8217;t seem like so much anymore. And when you earn a hundred million and go to cocktail parties with billionaires, you no longer feel that you are “truly well off”. It&#8217;s hard to convince the working class that you “feel their pain” when what you really feel is your pain at having to borrow private jets from <a href="http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/mayoral-candidate-says-he-has-lent-his-private-jet-to-the-clintons/">your billionaire grocery mogul friend to fly to Africa</a>, instead of being able to buy your own fleet of jets.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s nothing wrong with making money, unless you&#8217;re a liberal or unless your money comes from dubious sources, such as charging the Boys and Girls Club of Los Angeles $150,000 for a speech (the Clintons), ripping off asbestos victims (Elizabeth Warren) or getting your brother some juicy contracts (Joe Biden).</p>
<p>After rich liberals unleashed class warfare against Mitt Romney, they have been reduced to competing against each other in a game of &#8220;Who Is the Poorest Democrat?&#8221;</p>
<p>Bill Clinton tried to bail out his wife by rephrasing the question as being which candidate can connect to the plight of ordinary people.</p>
<p>The answer is none of them.</p>
<p>Biden has been in politics for over four decades. Hillary Clinton hasn&#8217;t held a non-government job in two decades and most of her work before that was really an extension of her husband&#8217;s politics. Elizabeth Warren spent decades in academia.</p>
<p>When Hillary Clinton talks about &#8220;working hard&#8221; for her money, she means putting her name on books that someone else wrote and reading speeches that someone else wrote to groups that would pay her even if all she did was bark for five hours straight. Bill Clinton may be a compelling and interesting speaker, but no one has ever accused Hillary of either of these things.</p>
<p>Hillary isn&#8217;t being paid six figures to appear in front of some trade group to talk about how much she cares about the children of the world because she is a powerful and inspirational speaker. The money is being paid out to buy influence with the likely future president. Hillary&#8217;s speaking fees, like her law work, are essentially legal bribes from special interests.</p>
<p>The concentration of wealth around Washington D.C. is not the work of the Tea Party. It certainly isn&#8217;t something that the Koch Brothers did. It&#8217;s what happens around an imperial capital. It&#8217;s not that the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer; it&#8217;s that the politically connected get richer while the politically disconnected get poorer.</p>
<p>The significant division is not along lines of class, but of corruption. The working poor may be suffering, but the politically connected welfare poor have plenty of opportunities to game the system. Most of all it&#8217;s the politically disconnected private sector middle class that invests its time in working instead of voting that is sliding down the hole and taking the economy with it.</p>
<p>The radical technocrats of the Democratic Party champion big government policies that concentrate wealth in a smaller number of hands while campaigning against income inequality. They denounce the rich at fundraisers for the rich. They buy mansions so that they can run for higher office and then claim to be dead broke. They create the income inequality they condemn.</p>
<p>Faking poverty isn&#8217;t just an election strategy; it&#8217;s also protective camouflage as the politicians robbing the country cry poverty.</p>
<p>The Clintons want to enjoy the privileges of their ill-gotten wealth without accepting any of the responsibility. They want to have their mansions and their class warfare. They want to pile up vast fortunes and then talk about the problems of income inequality. They want to have the radical privileges of poverty and the prosperous luxuries of wealth.</p>
<p>The poor little rich liberals have made themselves wealthier and the country poorer. Now they are exploiting the miserable economy that they are responsible for with more class warfare.</p>
<p>They are poor, but not in money. They suffer from severe poverties of honesty, decency and shame. They hardly have a single truth to their name and their poverty is as fake as their concern for the poor.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><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"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Education and Moral Bankruptcy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/education-and-moral-bankruptcy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=education-and-moral-bankruptcy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/education-and-moral-bankruptcy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2014 04:10:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224870</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Left wastes poor students' time with destructive non-educational programing. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/092712-national-schools-test-testing-taking-classroom-sat-teens.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224879" alt="092712-national-schools-test-testing-taking-classroom-sat-teens" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/092712-national-schools-test-testing-taking-classroom-sat-teens-450x350.jpg" width="270" height="210" /></a>If you want to get some idea of the moral bankruptcy of our educational system, read an article in the May 4th issue of the New York Times Magazine titled, &#8220;The Tale of Two Schools.&#8221;</p>
<p>The article is not about moral bankruptcy. But it is itself an example of the moral bankruptcy behind the many failures of American education today.</p>
<p>Someone had the bright idea of pairing public high school kids from a low-income neighborhood in the Bronx with kids from a private high school that charges $43,000 a year.</p>
<p>When the low-income youngsters visited the posh private school, &#8220;they were just overwhelmed&#8221; by it, according to the New York Times. &#8220;One kid ran crying off campus.&#8221; Apparently others felt &#8220;so disheartened about their own circumstances.&#8221;</p>
<p>What earthly good did that do for these young people? Thank heaven no one was calloused enough to take me on a tour of a posh private school when I was growing up in Harlem.</p>
<p>No doubt those adults who believe in envy and resentment get their jollies from doing things like this — and from feeling that they are creating future envy and resentment voters to forward the ideological agenda of the big government left.</p>
<p>But at the expense of kids?</p>
<p>There was a time when common sense and common decency counted for something. Educators felt a responsibility to equip students with solid skills that could take them anywhere they wanted to go in later life — enable them to become doctors, engineers or whatever they wanted to be.</p>
<p>Too many of today&#8217;s &#8220;educators&#8221; see students as a captive audience for them to manipulate and propagandize.</p>
<p>These young people do not yet have enough experience to know that posh surroundings are neither necessary nor sufficient for a good education. Is anyone foolish enough to think that making poor kids feel disheartened is doing them a favor?</p>
<p>This school visit was not just an isolated event. It was part of a whole program of pairing individual youngsters from a poverty-stricken neighborhood with youngsters from families that can pay 43 grand a year for their schooling.</p>
<p>What do these kids do? They tell each other stories based on their young lives&#8217; unripened judgment.</p>
<p>They go to a big park in the Bronx together and take part in a garden project there. They talk about issues like gun violence and race relations.</p>
<p>They have a whole lifetime ahead of them to talk about such issues. But poor kids, especially, have just one time, during their school years, to equip their minds with math, science and other solid skills that will give them a shot at a better life.</p>
<p>To squander their time on rap sessions and navel-gazing is unconscionable.</p>
<p>This is just one of many programs dreamed up by &#8220;educators&#8221; who seem determined to do anything except educate. They see school children as guinea pigs for their pet notions.</p>
<p>The New York Times is doing these youngsters no favor by publishing page after page of their photographs and snippets of things they said. More than two centuries ago, Edmund Burke lamented &#8220;everything which takes a man from his house and sets him on a stage.&#8221;</p>
<p>Setting adolescents on a stage is even more ill-advised, at a time of life when they do not yet have the experience to see what an inconsequential distraction such activities and such publicity are.</p>
<p>At a time when American youngsters are consistently outperformed on international tests by youngsters in other countries, do we have the luxury of spending our children&#8217;s time on things that will do absolutely nothing for them in the years ahead? Are children just playthings for adults?</p>
<p>Maybe the affluent kids can afford to waste their time this way, because they will be taken care of, one way or another, in later life.</p>
<p>But to squander the time of poor kids, for whom education is often their only hope of escaping poverty, is truly an irresponsible self-indulgence by adults who should know better, and it is one more sign of the moral bankruptcy of too many people in our schools.</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>De Blasio&#8217;s War on Minority Education</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/de-blasios-war-on-minority-education/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=de-blasios-war-on-minority-education</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Mar 2014 04:50:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220912</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Democratic political machine versus the students. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/winters13e-1-web.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220913" alt="winters13e-1-web" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/winters13e-1-web-448x350.jpg" width="269" height="210" /></a>One of the biggest challenges to the miserable status quo of public school education is taking place in New York City. On one side are leftists like Mayor Bill De Blasio, Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, and NAACP President Hazel Dukes. Along with their allies in city government and the teachers unions, they want to keep city children, especially minority children, in the failing, Democrat-run public school quagmire. On the other side are the advocates of school choice and charter schools that have provided poor minority students with superior educations that threaten the status quo. Their champion is Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academy Charter Schools. The former group embraces the status quo of languishing students and bleak futures. The latter group embraces hope and change.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We begin with the Mayor. De Blasio, who promised to close some charter schools during his election campaign, made good on that pledge in February, when he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://politicker.com/2014/02/chancellor-says-we-are-turning-the-page-while-pulling-plug-on-some-co-locations/">closed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> three charter schools run by fellow Democrat, but arch-nemesis, Eva Moskowitz. Moskowitz&#8217;s crime? The 6,700 students at her 22 Success Academy Charter Schools </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304434104579382993628994458">scored</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in the top 1 percent in math and top 7 percent in English on the most recent state test. These are students who come overwhelmingly from poor, minority families, who overcame the achievement gap progressives regularly bemoan. Even &#8220;worse,&#8221; four in five charters in the Big Apple outperformed comparable schools, posing a dire threat to the aforementioned status quo of dismal results. Dismal results that would be held up as a national disgrace were it not for campaign contributions provided to Democratic politicians who continue to con New Yorkers and other Americans with promises of &#8220;reform&#8221; that never happen.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">De Blasio didn&#8217;t stop with Moskowitz. Since becoming Mayor, he cut off funding for </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">all</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> charter school construction that was to occur after 2015, and announced a &#8220;moratorium&#8221; on co-locating charters in existing schools. He is also looking for a way to roll back 25 of those co-locations that were already approved for next year. Ten of them involve Success Academies. He did all of this despite the reality that there is a waiting list of 50,000 New Yorkers determined to get their kids in charter schools. A lottery process that literally determines the city&#8217;s educational winners and losers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Or at least it did. Public Advocate Letitia James, who along with City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito is already planning a lawsuit to shut down co-located charter schools, is now </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/03/09/public-advocate-wants-to-suspend-charter-school-lottery/">asking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a judge to suspend the admission lottery for the 2014-2015 school year while that lawsuit proceeds. “We may ask the court to push the deadline back,” said lawyer Arthur Schwartz who is leading the effort on behalf of James. Unsurprisingly the suit is being backed by the teachers union. Incredibly, both James and the union claim De Blasio isn&#8217;t doing enough to inhibit the growth of charter schools. “We’re moving forward with the litigation because, clearly, the process is broken,” James said at a parent forum in Downtown Brooklyn. “The mayor did not engage parents today on this issue, so we’re looking for an expedited review.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which parents would that be? Last fall, when De Blasio looked like he was going to be elected, Moskowitz amassed a crowd of 2,000 parents, teachers and students for a pro-charter rally at the Brooklyn Bridge. At least 4,500 families scheduled to enter next year&#8217;s charter class would be put in limbo by James&#8217;s lawsuit &#8212; along with the thousands of parents with kids already in the charter school system whose lives would also be thrown into turmoil if James and the union prevail.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York City Charter School Center CEO James Merriman got to the heart of the issue. “The destructive tactics . . . would create havoc and uncertainty for tens of thousands of New York City families from low-income communities,” he explained. He also blasted James. “She would do well to remember that her title is public advocate, not advocate for the teachers union,” he added.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who heads the City Council Education Committee, is a staunch advocate for the teachers union. He has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/03/12/councils-education-head-ask-charter-network-boss-about-corruption/">scheduled</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a hearing next month aimed at pressing Moskowitz and other charter school executives to explain how they spend public funds. His real agenda is transparent. A spokeswoman told the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Post</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that Moskowitz has not received an invitation to testify, even as the paper itself noted that it &#8220;isn&#8217;t clear&#8221; that Dromm has any jurisdiction over Moskowitz, who is not a city employee.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Dromm remained undaunted. &#8220;We need accountability, we need transparency, and we need to know who is giving them the money and what they’re doing with that money,” he contended. “This is an opportunity, if corruption were to exist . . . I can’t just let it go.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No one has ever accused Moskowitz of corruption, and this is not Dromm&#8217;s first effort to defame and single her out. On March 1, he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/03/8541138/dromm-hold-hearing-moskowitzs-rally-day">announced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> he would hold an oversight hearing to investigate whether Moskowitz acted illegally when she closed her schools on March 4 so that her students could participate in a pro-charter rally in Albany. &#8220;I am deeply concerned about the legality of a school leader closing schools for entirely political purposes,&#8221; Dromm said in a statement, adding, &#8220;no educator should be allowed to use children as pawns for their political agenda.&#8221; That would be a rally </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://politicker.com/2014/03/cuomo-joins-charter-advocates-at-rally-critical-of-de-blasio/">attended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, who said he was “committed” to making sure charter schools will succeed. </span></p>
<p>A competing rally for universal pre-kindergarten was <a href="http://www.wgrz.com/story/news/education/2014/03/04/albany-new-york-state-education-rally/6020581/">held</a> by De Blasio and his supporters on the same day. As this <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Albany,+rally+for+pre-K&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;hs=Sc7&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;channel=sb&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=E4AgU7m-C4mokQexyYGYBA&amp;ved=0CGwQ7Ak&amp;biw=1552&amp;bih=830#facrc=_&amp;imgdii=_&amp;imgrc=Xa0-o4nZPYzWWM%3A;LYV85PlkQrTrsM;https%3A%2F%2Ffbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net%2Fhphotos-ak-prn2%2Ft1%2Fs403x403%2F1900065_10152273957080970_1643039222_n.jpg;https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FOpportunityToLearn%3Fref%3Dstream%26hc_location%3Dstream;403;302">picture</a> indicates, it also included student &#8220;pawns&#8221; advocating on behalf of a political agenda.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With regard to political agendas, perhaps nothing makes the Mayor&#8217;s unstinting support for the miserable status quo clearer than his reaction to the results of the latest entrance exam for the city&#8217;s elite public schools. Tragically, but predictably, the achievement gap of black and Hispanic students relative to their white and Asian peers made itself evident once again. Out of the 5,096 students accepted by eight top-end schools, only 5 percent were black and 7 percent were Hispanic, despite an increase in the percentage of black and Hispanic students taking the test from 43 percent in 2012, to 46 percent last October.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Did De Blasio demand accountability from the public school system for failing these students? No. The Mayor&#8217;s answer is lowering standards &#8212; yet more degradation of the education children are entitled to. De Blasio has called for an overhaul of admissions system, insisting that one exam shouldn&#8217;t be the sole criteria that determines admission to the city&#8217;s best schools. He was echoed by David Jones, CEO of the Community Service Society of New York. “We have to come up with an admission system that is wider than this one-size-fits-all exam,” he contended, further suggesting that schools consider grade point averages and teacher recommendations along with the test. Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña played the diversity card. “We must do more to reflect the diversity of our city in our top-tier schools&#8211;and we are committed to doing just that,” she said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Mona Davids, head of the New York City Parents Union, cut right through the blather. “Leave the exam alone and help our students meet the standards,&#8221; she said. &#8220;The solution is to improve the elementary and middle schools in neighborhoods of color so the students can perform and pass the exam.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is precisely that kind of improvement </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">already</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> demonstrated by Success Academy Harlem 4, where the same minority students achieved some of the highest math scores in the entire state and 55 percent passed English exams last year. Both rates far exceeded city averages. For reference, only about a <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/story/311178-fewer-one-third-new-york-city-students-pass-state-tests/">quarter</a> of New York City students in third through eight grade earn passing scores on English and math tests; 26.4 percent passed in English proficiency and 29.6 percent passed math proficiency, according to statistics from last year. Moreover, there is compelling </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.calcharters.org/understanding/research/africanamericanreport/?utm_source=africanamericanreport&amp;utm_medium=go">evidence</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that some charter schools are closing that very same achievement gap reflected on the entrance exams. Yet late last month, Success Academy Harlem 4 was one of the charter schools De Blasio </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/nyregion/de-blasio-seeks-to-halt-3-charter-schools-from-moving-into-public-spaces.html?_r=1">kicked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> out of its space in a New York City public school building.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is a tragedy with real victims. “We’re lost right now,” said Tisha Hatch, 38, whose son Robert Loveless, 9, would be unable to attend fifth grade there next fall. “I refuse to let my son go to any public school in New York City because you have failing schools that need to be closed.” Maria Rodriguez&#8217;s three children share the same fate. “This is the future of my children they are playing games with,” she said, explaining that nearby traditional &#8212; and failing &#8212; public schools were not an option.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chancellor Fariña&#8217;s initial reaction revealed that her commitment to diversity did not breach the boundaries of union loyalty. “They’re charter schools. They’re on their own now,” she </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/charter-school-families-left-searching-article-1.1712379#ixzz2vC1qiSse">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. “That’s part of what they do. They’re an independent structure, and that’s how they function.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s exactly that independence &#8212; coupled with success &#8212; that is utterly anathema to the teachers unions and their political puppets. Yet both De Blasio and Fariña were unable to withstand the firestorm they created. Two days after Farina made her callous remarks the city backed down and said it will find space for the charter school.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Regardless, Moskowitz and her supporters are taking no chances. They are </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/03/10/de-blasio-faces-three-new-charter-school-lawsuits/">filing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> three lawsuits of their own against the Mayor on two separate fronts. The Success Academy is filing a federal civil rights lawsuit to overturn De Blasio&#8217;s decision preventing them from co-locating in a public school building. They are also filing papers in Albany with state Education Commissioner John King, seeking a reversal of De Blasio&#8217;s decision to prevent two elementary schools from opening at all. They had been approved by former Mayor Mike Bloomberg before De Blasio axed them. </span></p>
<p>NAACP President and union water-carrier Hazel Dukes was enraged by the Success Academy’s efforts. “This lawsuit is an outrageous and insulting attempt by Wall Street hedge fund managers to hijack the language of civil rights in their shameless political attack on Bill de Blasio,” she wrote.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Duke’s class warfare rhetoric is transparent. Moreover, the irony of her position is breathtaking. The president of the nation&#8217;s foremost civil rights organization &#8212; ostensibly tasked with advancing the agenda of black Americans &#8212; is upset that someone is fighting tooth and nail to save the educational future of black American children. If there&#8217;s a better indication of the poisonous influence exerted by the the teachers union, one is hard-pressed to imagine what it is.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The children of New York City are up against enormous foes. The pipeline of taxpayer money flowing to De Blasio and the Democratic Party through the teachers union will not be parted with willingly. Powerful allies like the NAACP are circling the wagons as well. Only a substantial public outcry will be able to right this ship, but it remains to be seen if such a backlash will emerge. </span></p>
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		<title>Refuting Robert Reich</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/refuting-robert-reich/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=refuting-robert-reich</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/refuting-robert-reich/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:55:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food stamps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[moveon org]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Robert Reich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218816</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Seven tired left-wing arguments and why they fail. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-218824" alt="6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi-279x350.jpg" width="279" height="350" /></a>Former Clinton Labor Secretary and lifelong leftist Robert Reich has just released a new <a href="http://front.moveon.org/war_on_the_poor_reich/#.UvzUvV5CD1y">video</a> for MoveOn.org, <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">alleging that there is a &#8220;war&#8221; being waged on the poor and working families. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;What are they really after?&#8221; Reich begins, never bothering to explain who &#8220;they&#8221; are. His rant connects &#8220;seven dots&#8221; that point to a conspiracy of class oppressors who are &#8220;sinking&#8221; the poor with their opposition to big-government dependency programs, such as Food Stamps and long-term unemployment benefits. And once &#8220;they&#8221; get their way, &#8220;you&#8217;ll do exactly as they tell you,&#8221; Reich says. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reich&#8217;s seven spurious claims, as over-worn and tired as they are, deserve to be responded to individually. It should be no surprise that each of Reich&#8217;s proposed &#8220;solutions&#8221; does its own damage to the poor, while offering little in the way of genuine social improvement.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>1.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re against extending unemployment benefits for people who have been out of work for more than six months.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The framing of this issue is dishonest at best. On first inspection, someone unfamiliar with the recent history of unemployment compensation extensions on Capitol Hill might sympathize with the idea of extending benefits for those out of work for &#8220;more than six months.&#8221; Six months, after all, is not an unimaginable amount of time to be chronically unemployed in the Obama economy. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The problem is, the recent benefit extension fight in Congress was not targeted just at workers who find themselves still treading water after six or seven months. Combined with state emergency benefits that usually last 26 weeks, federal add-ons initiated after the 2008 recession </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">raised that total to 73 weeks, meaning people were eligible to collect benefits for almost a year and half. This was an unprecedented extension of the unemployment compensation program, and many Americans justifiably question the wisdom of such exceedingly long durations of unemployment benefits. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One reason for this skepticism has to do with the indisputable capacity of benefit extensions to exacerbate long-term unemployment. <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/01/05/unemployment-insurance-extensions-competitive-enterprise-institute-editorials-debates/4330603/">Analyses</a> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) concluded that such extensions over the past five years have kept more than 600,000 out of the labor force by paying people not to work. Those claims were echoed in a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://ideas.repec.org/e/pmu176.html">survey</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of recently unemployed people in New Jersey commissioned by Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Andreas Mueller of the University of Stockholm. They discovered that after a burst of initial activity, people slack off on their job search and wait for something to happen. Moreover, it is likely more workers have been drawn into the mire of unemployment due to the benefit extensions: Another <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/368047/study-extending-unemployment-benefits-increased-unemployment-more-3-percentage-points">study</a> from the NBER concluded that unemployment benefit extensions have increased overall unemployment by over 3 percent. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Workers are not benefited by being encouraged to remain unemployed for such long periods of time. Long-term unemployment dulls skill sets and makes workers less attractive to potential employers. The longer workers are enticed to stay unemployed, prolong the job hunt, or even dismiss jobs with lower pay, the weaker their resumes become when they inevitably reenter the job market. </span></span></p>
<p>Leaving this aside, if Reich&#8217;s &#8220;they&#8221; bogeymen are meant to refer to Republican congressional leadership, his claim that &#8220;they are against&#8221; the benefits extension is also untrue. Republicans have approved renewal of the extension numerous times. This year, Republican lawmakers, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, requested that the renewal of the extension be <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303595404579321010229177576">offset</a> elsewhere in the budget and accompanied by job-creations measures, which Democrats refused. If Democrats had conceded to these commonsense compromises, it is more than likely unemployment insurance extension would have been approved for 2014.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>2.</strong> <em>&#8220;They don&#8217;t want to raise the minimum wage.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A 2007 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=961374">survey</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">100 studies</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on the effects of raising the minimum wage was conducted David Neumark and William Wascher at the National Bureau of Economic Research. It revealed that a &#8220;sizable majority&#8221; of those studies, including those with the &#8220;most credible evidence,&#8221; concluded that raising the minimum wage produced &#8220;negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries.&#8221; Even more tellingly, &#8220;the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ibtimes.com/most-benefits-minimum-wage-increase-would-not-go-poor-households-1541342">according</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only 5 percent of hourly U.S. workers made the federal minimum wage or less in 2012. Among those earning it, 63 percent were second- or third-wage earners from households with incomes equal to three times the poverty line or more. Only 11.3 percent of workers who would experience the increase live in households officially designated as poor. As the BLS survey also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, most minimum wage earners are young, part-time workers with an average family income of $53,000 per year. If Reich wishes to help teenage, middle class burger-flippers he might have a point. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>3.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re against extending Medicaid benefits.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, the disaster known as ObamaCare is doing precisely this. More than </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://freebeacon.com/factcheck-obamacare-and-the-state-of-the-union/">double</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the number of people who have signed up for healthcare via the exchanges have enrolled in Medicaid. Since Medicaid is government-subsidized insurance, it is paid for by a combination of funds from state and federal budgets. </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Prior</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to its expansion under ObamaCare, Medicaid had already become the largest line item in a typical state&#8217;s budget, exceeding such items as public safety, infrastructure, roads and, since 2009, education spending for kindergarten-through-12th-grade.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet there is a far bigger problem. Since Medicaid payments are 61 percent </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/11/physicians-hesitant-medicaid-patients.html">less</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that what private insurance pays, an increasing number of doctors </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/26/doctor-wont-see-analysts-warn-obamacare-plans-could-resemble-medicaid/">refuse</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to accept new Medicaid patients. &#8220;About half of the physicians in many communities refuse to take Medicaid patients because the payment system is just too low,&#8221; reports James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Many doctors are still willing to take a certain percentage of such patients in order to fulfill a moral obligation, but they are not willing to put themselves out of business to do so. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In other words, many Americans enrolled in Medicaid are going to discover a reality that invariably eludes people like Robert Reich: &#8220;extending Medicaid benefits&#8221; isn&#8217;t remotely the same thing as getting actual healthcare. The end result will be rationing and denial of care for the millions of poor sold empty promises.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>4.</strong> <em>&#8220;They want to cut food stamps.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As with much of the progressive lexicon, &#8220;cut&#8221; is a euphemism. In reality, food stamp usage has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-20-households-food-stamps-2013">exploded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, with a record-setting one-in-five American households on the program in 2013, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/16SNAPpartHH.htm">according</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Furthermore, the cost of the program has increased a whopping 164 percent over the last decade, and 36.8 percent since the Obama administration assumed control in 2009. Thus a program that cost the nation $58.2 billion in 2009 cost $79.6 billion last year. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The latest Farm Bill under which the food stamp program operates does cut food stamp spending, but those cuts </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.latinpost.com/articles/7126/20140211/president-obama-signs-farm-bill-what-will-the-cut-to-food-stamps-mean-for-you.htm">amount</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to $800 million per year, or approximately one percent of the overall total &#8212; a total that has grown exponentially, even as America remains saddled with a national debt of more than $17 trillion, along with unfunded liabilities that exceed $85 trillion. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>5.</strong> <em>&#8220;They refuse to invest in education and job training.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In reality the federal government alone </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-there-are-49-different-federal-jo/">has</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 47 job-training programs run by nine different agencies, according to the the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). These programs </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/17/senator-questions-18b-spent-on-job-training-as-study-suggest-rampant-waste/">cost</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the taxpayer $18 billion per year, and a 2011 report by the same GAO concluded that some of them are riddled with mismanagement, waste, fraud, abuse and corruption. The report further noted that since 2004, only 5 of the 47 agencies involved kept tabs on whether participants had actually secure jobs. &#8220;Little is known about the effectiveness of most programs,&#8221; the GAO concluded.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for education, the federal government </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/education-federal-budget">spent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $138 billion in FY2013. In both real dollars and as a percentage of GDP, the United States </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/">outspent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> most of the world&#8217;s developed nations in education. When one factors in vocational training and college as well, the United States outspends all of them. Yet if bang for the buck counts, America comes up woefully short, routinely scoring well below other nations on international exams. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But this is only part of the story. Every one of America&#8217;s true educational wastelands &#8212; namely, most of our major inner cities where graduation rates hover around 60 percent or less, where budgets are routinely on the verge of bankruptcy or already there, and where teachers unions fight tooth and nail for the miserable status quo &#8212; are Democrat </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/atrocity/">strongholds</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. If Reich were truly interested in helping the poor and working class Americans he professes to care so deeply about, he&#8217;d be far more interested in challenging that status quo, which revolves around the unholy alliance of education unions and a Democratic Party beholden to their campaign contributions and marching orders.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>6.</strong> <em>&#8220;They don&#8217;t want to rebuild America&#8217;s crumbling infrastructure.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reich has an exceedingly short memory. The American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, more familiarly known as the stimulus bill, was supposed to target the lion&#8217;s share of its $787 billion appropriation (</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://useconomy.about.com/od/candidatesandtheeconomy/a/Obama_Stimulus.htm">increased</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to $840 billion in 2012) on &#8220;shovel-ready jobs.&#8221; One year later, President Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17obama-t.html?_r=3&amp;ref=magazine&amp;pagewanted=all%22">admitted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> “there&#8217;s no such thing.&#8221; To be fair to Reich, infrastructure spending has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/24/u-s-infrastructure-spending-has-plummeted-since-2008/">taken</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a nosedive since its peak before the recession began, but it&#8217;s not because the state and local governments that provide the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/why-cant-we-just-leave-infrastructure-spending-to-the-states/2012/03/21/gIQAjpYBSS_blog.html">vast majority</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of infrastructure spending don&#8217;t want to spend the money. It&#8217;s because they </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">can&#8217;t</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> afford to do so.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet even in the midst of such cuts, America </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2013/04/01/infrastructure-gap-look-at-the-facts-we-spend-more-than-europe/">spends</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> more on infrastructure than the progressive stronghold known as the European Union, at 3.3 percent of our GDP from 2006-2011, compared to only 3.1 percent for the EU. The clamor for increased spending is all about doing it with more borrowed money, with the American Society of Civil Engineers (hardly a neutral entity) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/">calling</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for a $3.6 trillion &#8220;investment&#8221; between now and 2020. Congress&#8217;s most recently passed budget </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://news.agc.org/2014/01/18/congress-passes-spending-bill-to-fund-government-in-2014-2/">allocates</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $108 billion for federal construction accounts.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The only way we will likely see more infrastructure spending is with a growing economy. Obama could contribute to that growth if he would approve the Keystone pipeline, among other things. Perhaps he could explain why he won&#8217;t to Robert Reich.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>7.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re out to bust unions.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unions are doing a good job of busting themselves. Nothing speaks louder to this reality than the debacle Big Labor perpetrated in Wisconsin, where their thug-like tactics were rejected by both Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the voters themselves. As a result of Walker&#8217;s triumph, a projected $3 billion-plus deficit </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/hey-who-wants-to-talk-about-wisconsins-economic-miracle/?singlepage=true">turned</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> into a projected $300,000 surplus in 2011. Much of it was accomplished by getting government union members to pay for a portion of their own healthcare and pensions and eliminating automatic pay and benefit increases that are strangling states like New York, Illinois and California.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the national level, a recent </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.mackinac.org/19051">study</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the Mackinac Center reveals that right-to-work states have seen greater improvements in employment rates, income, and population growth than non-right-to-work states over the last 60 years. Critics attempt to obscure this reality by pointing to the fact that states with right-to-work laws have lower per capita incomes. Yet they </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/18222">fail</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to factor in the cost of living, which is far more expensive in states where union monopolies push government budgets, and the taxes that pay for them, ever higher. When cost of living is factored in,  people in right-to-work states have 4.1 percent higher per-capita personal incomes than those in non-right-to-work states.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, in cities that have gone bankrupt, such as Stockton, and Detroit, the primary drivers of that bankruptcy were out-of-control legacy costs for government union workers. Of Detroit&#8217;s $12 billion in outstanding debt, $9.2 billion of it is comprised of health and pension benefits owed to retired workers. When the city filed for bankruptcy, it </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/07/24/detriot-mess-why-future-stalled-in-motor-city/">had</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 47 different public employee unions, and a worker at the Water and Sewer Department who collected $56,000 in pay and benefits for his job as a horse-shoer despite the department having no horses. Detroit also has three retired municipal workers collecting a pension for every two that are still working.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to Heritage Foundation&#8217;s chief economist Stephen Moore, more than 60 American cities may be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2014/02/us-is-going-bankrupt-one-city-at-time.html">facing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the same fate as the Motor City. “Keep an eye on ‘too big to fail’ cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York,” he warns.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Moore goes on to cite the progressive ideology in general championed by Reich and others as the primary impetus for such failure. “For at least the last 20 years major U.S. cities have been playgrounds for left-wing experiments—high taxes on the rich; sanctuaries for illegal immigrants; super-minimum wage rules; strict gun-control laws; regulations and paperwork that makes it onerous to open a business or develop on your own property; crony capitalism with contracts going to political donors and friends; and failing schools ruled by teacher unions, with little competition or productivity.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If Robert Reich had any intellectual honesty, he would answer his question, &#8220;What are they really after?&#8221; by examining who really benefits from</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> large swathes of the population kept mired in poverty and being sucked into the mentality of dependency. It is no accident that every major American city </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/">besieged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by poverty, crime, economic disfunction and failing schools is a Democratic stronghold. </span>Reich&#8217;s proposals offer more of the same. They merely reassert a long-held belief by the American left that success is measured by how many people they get <i>on</i> government programs, not <i>off</i> government programs. Americas would do well to &#8220;connect the dots&#8221; regarding the utter bankruptcy of such ideology.</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>You Can&#8217;t Save the World</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/you-cant-save-the-world/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=you-cant-save-the-world</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2014 05:31:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[aid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Philanthropy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[third world]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217638</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why giving out free stuff isn’t the answer.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/78053880.83p4ISsW.MaliNov063588.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217640" alt="78053880.83p4ISsW.MaliNov063588" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/78053880.83p4ISsW.MaliNov063588-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>For only ten dollars a day or a month you can feed all the starving children in Africa. For only the price of a cup of coffee a year, you can make sure that no one in Kansas City ever goes hungry again. For just a third of your paycheck, you can subsidize a vast bureaucracy that will conduct studies on the best way to save the world and then come up with proposals that will only cost you half your paycheck.</span></p>
<p>This misplaced philanthropic confidence is the idiot stepchild of a free enterprise society where anything can be accomplished for the right price. Do you want to build a house on the edge of a cliff? Do you want to play on every golf course in the world? Do you want to clone a dinosaur so you can hunt it?</p>
<p>It hasn&#8217;t been done yet, but it&#8217;s probably doable.</p>
<p>So why can&#8217;t we end world hunger for only the price of a cup of coffee every six seconds or forty percent of the national debt or some other appealing figure that looks good on an infographic?</p>
<p>Hunger isn&#8217;t a resource shortage problem. The Soviet dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich told an American cab driver about meat rationing in the USSR. The cab driver demanded to know why people didn’t just set up more chicken farms.  Voinovich tried to explain to the incredulous driver that under Socialism, setting up more chicken farms doesn’t produce more chickens.</p>
<p>The USSR had plenty of land, labor and experts. It went from exporting wheat to importing wheat despite throwing everything it had into agriculture because there was a disconnect at every level in the process of planning and production.  Like a sack race with three hundred legs in one sack, the harder the USSR tried to increase yields and production, the worse they became.</p>
<p>Sending the USSR food, as the United States repeatedly did from its early years when Hoover fought famine with an army of aid workers to its waning days when the Evil Empire went deep into debt buying American wheat, didn&#8217;t solve anything. Soviet attempts at copying American successes in agriculture actually backfired leading to worse disasters. The only solution to the USSR&#8217;s agriculture problems came with the collapse of Soviet feudalism whose central planning had created the meat shortages and bread shortages.</p>
<p>Most &#8220;hungry&#8221; countries aren&#8217;t Communist, but they are dysfunctional. They aren&#8217;t going to be fixed for the price of a cup of coffee a day, an hour or a second. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into Africa and it&#8217;s the opinion of African economic experts that the money did more harm than good by crippling developing economies with a weak global social safety net.</p>
<p>Every &#8220;free&#8221; item sent to another country is one item that isn&#8217;t going to be sold or manufactured there. An aid economy works a lot like a regular economy except that it can&#8217;t sustain domestic production or domestic experts. Its doctors move to the West and are replaced by Western professionals who enjoy the philanthropic credentials of helping out in an exotic country.</p>
<p>An aid economy is planned, instead of responsive, and depresses local production without fully satisfying local demand leaving the population in a state of semi-deprivation. The aid never reaches the people who need it because of the corruption that caused the deprivation that made the aid necessary. This cycle of corruption feeds an aid economy by knocking out the middle class who might otherwise step into the roles of merchants and professionals and rewards anyone with enough guns to hijack the aid and shake down the charities that distribute it.</p>
<p>Trying to save Africa for the cost of a cup of coffee a day has made it a much worse place. And that&#8217;s as true of the United States as it is of Africa.</p>
<p>Domestic warlords don&#8217;t have child soldiers who drive around with machine guns on pickup trucks. Instead they wear suits, coordinate with community organizers and clamor for more money for broken inner city neighborhoods so they can siphon it off. There are parts of the United States that are just as broken as any Third World country because they run on the same aid economy that rewards political warlords and discourages independence and initiative.</p>
<p>Activists and politicians announce that for only twenty billion or two hundred billion we can end world hunger, educate every child or give every family their own cow. These proposals apply the free enterprise logic of solving a problem by &#8220;buying&#8221; a solution. But helping people isn&#8217;t mass production. Throwing more money and people at the problem makes it that much harder to solve.</p>
<p>Buying a homeless man a sandwich for two dollars feeds that man. Appropriating twenty billion dollars to feed a sandwich to every homeless man in America will only provide sandwiches to a small percentage of the homeless at a cost of four thousand dollars a sandwich.</p>
<p>Once you try to buy sandwiches for millions of homeless men, the sandwich money is eaten up by the expenses of studying how to identify the homeless, learning what kind of sandwiches they would like, studies on marketing sandwiches to homeless people over social media, the costs of diversity training for the sandwich makers and a million other things.</p>
<p>You can buy a homeless man a sandwich, but you can&#8217;t buy them all sandwiches because once you do that, you are no longer engaging in a personal interaction, but building an organization. You don&#8217;t need a homeless man to exist so that you can buy him a sandwich, but once an agency exists that is tasked with buying homeless men sandwiches; it needs the homeless men to exist as &#8216;clients&#8217; so that it can buy them sandwiches and buy itself steak dinners.</p>
<p>The biggest piece of the aid economy is in the hands of the aid organizations that profit from an unsolvable problem that they have no interest in solving. Africa&#8217;s misery is their wealth. The worse Africa becomes the more incentive the guilty of the West will have to pour money into their latest plan to buy everyone in Africa a goat, a laptop or a sandwich.</p>
<p>The aid recipients, distributors and providers have achieved a dysfunctional equilibrium. In aid economies, the scale of the problem grows slightly faster than the amount of aid and activists hold out the tempting promise that by increasing spending to stay ahead of the problem, it can be solved completely.</p>
<p>But the West can&#8217;t fix Africa no matter how much of the price of a cup of coffee it donates.</p>
<p>No one can save Africa except Africans. No one can fix Detroit except the people who live there. Social problems aren&#8217;t solved by nationalizing them or internationalizing them. They aren&#8217;t solved by guilt-tripping those who have already solved those problems and live thousands of miles away, but by engaging the people who live right there and are part of the problem.</p>
<p>If a man is drowning, you toss him a rope. But if a man jumps into the water, tossing him a rope doesn&#8217;t accomplish anything. A physical problem can be solved by applying the right resources, but a problem rooted in attitudes and behavior can only be solved when the people change.</p>
<p>Trying to solve a problem rooted in behavior with monetary rewards only perpetuates that behavior. Instead of saving the world, throwing money at it destroys it instead.</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>The Inequality Boogeyman</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/the-inequality-boogeyman/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-inequality-boogeyman</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2014 05:15:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OIL]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rockefeller]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wealth]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217498</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real cause of wealth differentials in society. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/income-inequality-99-prtest-occupy-wall-street1.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217519" alt="income-inequality-99-prtest-occupy-wall-street1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/income-inequality-99-prtest-occupy-wall-street1.gif" width="263" height="178" /></a>During a recent lunch in a restaurant, someone complimented my wife on the perfume she was wearing. But I was wholly unaware that she was wearing perfume, even though we had been in a car together for about half an hour, driving to the restaurant.</p>
<p>My sense of smell is very poor. But there is one thing I can smell far better than most people — gas escaping. During my years of living on the Stanford University campus, and walking back and forth to work at my office, I more than once passed a faculty house and smelled gas escaping. When there was nobody home, I would leave a note, warning them.</p>
<p>When walking past the same house again a few days later, I could see where the utility company had been digging in the yard — and, after that, there was no more smell of gas escaping. But apparently the people who lived in these homes had not smelled anything.</p>
<p>These little episodes have much wider implications. Most of us are much better at some things than at others, and what we are good at can vary enormously from one person to another. Despite the preoccupation — if not obsession — of intellectuals with equality, we are all very unequal in what we do well and what we do badly.</p>
<p>It may not be innate, like a sense of smell, but differences in capabilities are inescapable, and they make a big difference in what and how much we can contribute to each other&#8217;s economic and other well-being. If we all had the same capabilities and the same limitations, one individual&#8217;s limitations would be the same as the limitations of the entire human species.</p>
<p>We are lucky that we are so different, so that the capabilities of many other people can cover our limitations.</p>
<p>One of the problems with so many discussions of income and wealth is that the intelligentsia are so obsessed with the money that people receive that they give little or no attention to what causes money to be paid to them, in the first place.</p>
<p>The money itself is not wealth. Otherwise the government could make us all rich just by printing more of it. From the standpoint of a society as a whole, money is just an artificial device to give us incentives to produce real things — goods and services.</p>
<p>Those goods and services are the real &#8220;wealth of nations,&#8221; as Adam Smith titled his treatise on economics in the 18th century.</p>
<p>Yet when the intelligentsia discuss such things as the historic fortunes of people like John D.Rockefeller, they usually pay little — if any — attention to what it was that caused so many millions of people to voluntarily turn their individually modest sums of money over to Rockefeller, adding up to his vast fortune.</p>
<p>What Rockefeller did first to earn their money was find ways to bring down the cost of producing and distributing kerosene to a fraction of what it had been before his innovations. This profoundly changed the lives of millions of working people.</p>
<p>Before Rockefeller came along in the 19th century, the ancient saying, &#8220;The night cometh when no man can work&#8221; still applied. There were not yet electric lights, and burning kerosene for hours every night was not something that ordinary working people could afford. For many millions of people, there was little to do after dark, except go to bed.</p>
<p>Too many discussions of large fortunes attribute them to &#8220;greed&#8221; — as if wanting a lot of money is enough to cause other people to hand it over to you. It is a childish idea, when you stop and think about it — but who stops and thinks these days?</p>
<p>The transfer of money was a zero-sum process. What increased the wealth of society was Rockefeller&#8217;s cheap kerosene that added hundreds of hours of light to people&#8217;s lives annually.</p>
<p>Edison, Ford, the Wright brothers, and innumerable others also created unprecedented expansions of the lives of ordinary people. The individual fortunes represented a fraction of the wealth created.</p>
<p>Even those of us who create goods and services in more mundane ways receive income that may be very important to us, but it is what we create for others, with our widely varying capabilities, that is the real wealth of nations.</p>
<p>Intellectuals&#8217; obsession with income statistics — calling envy &#8220;social justice&#8221; — ignores vast differences in productivity that are far more fundamental to everyone&#8217;s well-being. Killing the goose that lays the golden egg has ruined many economies.</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>The War on Poverty&#8217;s Biggest Casualties</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-povertys-biggest-casualties/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-war-on-povertys-biggest-casualties</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2014 05:16:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[50 years]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anniversary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[black community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[illegitimacy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war on poverty]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=215052</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left's 50-year destruction of the black community. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/black-and-homeless-4x31.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-215053" alt="black-and-homeless-4x31" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/black-and-homeless-4x31-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>Fifty years after liberals launched their sacrosanct &#8220;War on Poverty,&#8221; Americans, and black Americans in particular, aren&#8217;t better off.</p>
<p>But neo-Marxist ideologue that he is, President Obama is determined to double-down on leftist failure, widening the so-called war by calling for the biggest welfare spending increases in American history— amounting to more than $10 trillion over a decade, according to the Heritage Foundation&#8217;s Robert Rector.</p>
<p>This War on Poverty that Obama wants to escalate came on the heels of the death of President John F. Kennedy.</p>
<p>As the country was reeling in shock just seven weeks after Kennedy was assassinated, his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, <a href="http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/640108.asp">urged</a> Congress to embark on a new metaphorical war effort against poverty. In that State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, Johnson said, &#8220;Let this session of Congress be known &#8230; as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.&#8221;</p>
<p>This &#8220;unconditional war on poverty in America &#8230; will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won,&#8221; Johnson said. &#8220;The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.&#8221;</p>
<p>The War on Poverty also gave taxpayers’ money to so-called community groups like ACORN and Saul Alinsky&#8217;s Industrial Areas Foundation in order to encourage them to agitate against the status quo. This, in turn, stimulated demand for more government spending as taxpayer dollars became a kind of ever-increasing subsidy for pro-Big Government activism. The federal government still hands out huge grants to left-wing groups to subsidize their efforts to take away our economic freedoms.</p>
<p>A half a century later, federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is now 16 times greater. The country has spent $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars over the past 50 years on welfare programs, far exceeding what the U.S. has spent on every war it has fought.</p>
<p>Already the federal government administers 80 different means-tested welfare programs. Government blew $916 billion on these programs in 2012 alone, and about 100 million Americans accepted aid from at least one of the programs, costing $9,000 per recipient on average, a figure, Heritage&#8217;s Rector notes, that doesn&#8217;t include Social Security or Medicare benefits.</p>
<p>Yet &#8220;victory&#8221; in the War on Poverty is nowhere in sight. In 2012, 15 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line, roughly the same percentage as in the mid-1960s. Currently, around 50 million Americans <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/poverty-line-grows-under/2014/01/08/id/545892">live below</a> the poverty line, which the government defines as a four-member family earning $23,550 a year. And 47 million Americans receive food stamp benefits, 13 million more than when President Obama was first sworn in.</p>
<p>&#8220;Liberals argue that we aren&#8217;t spending enough money on poverty-fighting programs, but that&#8217;s not the problem,&#8221; <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2014/1/how-the-war-on-poverty-was-lost">according to</a> Rector. &#8220;In reality, we&#8217;re losing the war on poverty because we have forgotten the original goal, as LBJ stated it half a century ago: &#8216;to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>Despite an orgy of federal spending, blacks and other minorities have suffered the most from big government poverty alleviation efforts. The anti-marriage, anti-family tilt of welfare policies has devastated black communities.</p>
<p>“The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do, and that is to destroy the black family,” says economics professor Walter E. Williams of George Mason University, a black man who rose from poverty.</p>
<p>As a result of misguided government policies that grew out of the War on Poverty, out-of-wedlock birthrates have mushroomed, David Horowitz and John Perazzo <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/government-versus-the-people/">report</a> in &#8220;Government vs. the People.&#8221;</p>
<p>By 1976, the illegitimacy rate for whites jumped to 10 percent from 3 percent in 1965. Blacks fared far worse, as their illegitimacy rate skyrocketed to 50.3 percent, more than double the percentage in 1965. &#8220;In 1987, for the first time in the history of any American racial or ethnic group, the birthrate for unmarried black women surpassed that for married black women,&#8221; they wrote.</p>
<p>Currently, whites have an illegitimacy rate of 29 percent, compared to a shocking 73 percent for blacks. Overall, the poverty rate for single parents with children was 35.6 percent in 2008, but for married couples with children it was a much lower 6.4 percent.</p>
<p>The poverty rate for single Hispanic parents with children was 37.5 percent in 2008, but for married Hispanic couples with children it was 12.8 percent. The poverty rate for single black parents with children was 35.3 percent in 2008, but for married black couples with children it was 6.9 percent.</p>
<p>The economic situation of blacks <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/obama-blacks-poverty-education/2014/01/08/id/545866">has deteriorated</a> sharply during Barack Obama&#8217;s presidency, in particular. Nationally, unemployment stands at 7 percent but among black Americans unemployment has essentially stood still. When Obama was inaugurated in 2009 black unemployment was 12.7 percent. Today it is 12.5 percent.</p>
<p>In 2008 the black poverty rate was 12 percent; now it is 16.1 percent. Median income fell by 3.6 percent in white households to $58,000 in the same time frame, but slid 10.9 percent to $33,500 for black households, according to the Census Bureau.</p>
<p>&#8220;The data is [sic] going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category,&#8221; Tavis Smiley, a black, left-wing radio talk show host said in the fall. &#8220;On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.&#8221;</p>
<p>These terrible numbers help to explain the president&#8217;s recent attempt to change the subject from the economy to &#8220;income inequality,&#8221; an abstraction that fails to register with most Americans.</p>
<p>They also help to explain why Obama intends to push for an increase in the federal minimum wage, currently $7.25 an hour, in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28.</p>
<p>Left-wingers have successfully been changing the subject, moving the discussion away from their policy failures for 50 years now.</p>
<p>Why should they change a winning formula now? They know they can continue to count on taxpayer funding for their adventures in leftist activism.</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>Big Dem Cities, Big Dem Poverty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 05:57:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213333</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The startling truth about America's biggest poverty centers and the politics that produces them.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/110811-national-homeless-poverty-poor.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213335" alt="110811-national-homeless-poverty-poor" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/110811-national-homeless-poverty-poor-450x312.jpg" width="270" height="187" /></a>On Sunday&#8217;s ABC <i>This Week </i>telecast, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/12/15/gingrich-schools-reich-every-major-city-which-poverty-center-run-demo">squared off</a> with former Clinton Labor secretary Robert Reich, who tried to blame the increase in poverty over the last five years on the GOP. “Here’s the baloney,&#8221; Gingrich fired back. &#8220;Every major city which is a center of poverty is run by Democrats. Every major city. Their policies have failed, they’re not willing to admit and the fact is it’s the poor who suffer from bad government.” Unfortunately for the millions of Americans, Gingrich is right on the money. Here is a breakdown of the ten cities with populations above 250,000 that have borne the brunt of Democratic ideology.</p>
<p>St. Louis&#8217;s poverty rate is 26 percent overall, and <a href="http://www.deaconess.org/ChildreninSt.Louis_5.aspx">four-in-ten</a> children live in poverty. Like Detroit, the city has <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/2013/07/bankruptcy-risk-st-louis-is-not.html">experienced</a> a major population decline, from 850,000 in the mid-20th century to 318,000 in 2013. Last year&#8217;s Annual Performance Report <a href="http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/st-louis-schools-score-unaccredited-range-under-new-grading-scale-wont-lose-accreditation">gave</a> the city&#8217;s public schools a rating of 24.6 percent on a scale of zero to 100 percent. The city, which is also reeling from $640 million in unfunded pension liabilities, is currently rated the <a href="http://lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/crime/10-dangerous-large/">third</a> most dangerous large city in the nation. St. Louis&#8217;s current mayor is Francis G. Slay, who has served since 2001. There hasn&#8217;t been a Republican mayor in St. Louis since 1949.</p>
<p>Newark, New Jersey&#8217;s <a href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/34/3451000.html">poverty rate</a> is 26.1 percent. Its former mayor, Cory Booker, who was recently elected to the United States Senate, was the latest in a long, unbroken line of Democratic mayors dating back <i>106 years</i> to 1907. Former Newark Mayor Sharpe James was <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/swamps-jersey-69529">convicted</a> of five counts of fraud in 2008. Yet he is hardly an anomaly: with the exception of Booker, <i>every</i> Mayor of Newark since 1962 has been indicted for crimes committed during their tenure in office. Between 2005 and 2012, the city&#8217;s population declined from 281,063 to 278,906, while violent crime totals increased from 2,821 to 3,219.</p>
<p>The residents of Cincinnati, OH are afflicted by a <a href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39/3915000.html">poverty rate</a> of 27.4 percent overall, with a staggering 53.1 percent child poverty rate as of 2012. Former Democratic Mayor Mark Mallory left recently-elected Democrat Mayor John Cranley a $60 million deficit throughout 2012, and an annual budget shortfall of 20 percent, leading many to believe that bankruptcy is imminent. Cincinnati&#8217;s last non-Democrat mayor, Charter Party member Arnold L. Bortz, served until 1984.</p>
<p>In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/11/21/246413432/weighing-the-role-of-poverty-in-philadelphia-s-schools">28 percent</a> of city residents overall live in poverty, a number that balloons to 40 percent in terms of child poverty. Democratic voter registration <a href="http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/philadelphia/61597-no-surprise-democrats-cruise-to-big-wins-in-philly">outnumbers</a> Republican registration by a six-to-one margin in a city where the last Republican mayor to hold office, Bernard Samuel, was <a href="http://thesis.christopherwink.com/thesis-paper/part-two-the-past/">voted</a> out in 1952. Current mayor Michael Nutter is presiding over a city with the lowest credit rating of the country&#8217;s five most populous cities ($8.75 billion in outstanding debt) and a pension system that is only funded at a level of 47.6 percent. Last March, city officials voted to close 9 percent of the city&#8217;s public schools due to a five-year $1.35 billion spending gap.</p>
<p>Milwaukee, Wisconsin sports a <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/milwaukee-poverty-a-regional-problem-mayor-tom-barrett-says-b99101258z1-224346311.html">poverty rate</a> of 29.9 percent overall, including 42.6 percent of children under 18. Like Camden, Milwaukee boasts a track record of non-Republican mayors going back 105 years to 1908. But they weren&#8217;t all Democrats. In 2011, the city <a href="http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-043/?action=more_essay">marked</a> the 101st anniversary of the election of Emil Seidel, the first of three <i>Socialist</i> Party mayors of Milwaukee. Current Mayor Tom Barrett claims the poverty experienced in his city is a &#8220;regional problem,&#8221; but 71 percent of those who live in poverty in a four-county area were concentrated in Milwaukee.</p>
<p>In Buffalo, New York, 29.9 percent of residents overall are living below the poverty level, with children enduring a poverty rate of <a href="http://www.buffalonews.com/20130628/buffalo_kids_living_in_poverty.html">46.8 percent</a>, third highest in the nation behind Detroit and Camden. Mayor Byron Brown presides over a city that has lost 11 percent of its population over the last dozen years, due in large part to a stagnating economy. Buffalo&#8217;s last Republican mayor served until 1965.</p>
<p>In El Paso, Texas, one-in-four live in poverty, rising to <a href="http://blog.metrotrends.org/2013/02/high-rates-child-poverty-hidden-smaller-metro-areas/">35 percent</a> for children. Oscar Leeser is the 53rd mayor of that city, whose history dates back to 1873. In all that time, the city has <i>never</i> elected a Republican mayor. The proposed 2014 budget asked a 4 percent tax increase, due to what City Manager Joyce Wilson <a href="http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_23553901/el-paso-city-officials-propose-tax-increase">characterizes</a> as &#8220;a budget gap too extensive to overcome without significant impact to existing service levels.&#8221; El Paso&#8217;s current debt level <a href="http://newspapertree.com/articles/2013/08/22/city-approves-$801-million-budget-increase-tax-rate-by-2-cents">stands</a> at $893 million.</p>
<p>In Cleveland, Ohio, <a href="http://www.wfmj.com/story/23480704/18m-people-in-ohio-fall-below-poverty-line">36 percent</a> of its residents live in poverty. In 1978, when current U.S. House of Representatives Democrat Dennis Kucinich was mayor, the city became the first one since the Great Depression to default on its debt. It remained in default until 1987. In 2011, the city&#8217;s credit rating was <a href="http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/04/fitch_ratings_downgrades_city.html">downgraded</a> by Fitch, due to concerns about the city’s struggling economy and shrinking population. Cleveland, whose current mayor is Frank G. Jackson, hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1989. During Jackson&#8217;s tenure, the police, fire and sanitation departments have been <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/cityhall/index.ssf/2013/10/cleveland_mayor_frank_jacksons_4.html">cited</a> for excessive use of force, payroll abuse, and chronic billing problems, respectively.</p>
<p>And then, there is Detroit, Michigan, in a class by itself, with 36.2 percent of residents living in poverty, along with an astounding <a href="http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2013/01/24/report-childhood-poverty-high-in-detroit-but-teen-pregnancy-down/">60 percent</a> of the city&#8217;s children in the same boat. The city itself is <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-21/25-facts-about-fall-detroit-will-leave-you-shaking-your-head">utterly dysfunctional</a> with $20 billion of debt, 78,000 abandoned homes, collapsing or nonexistent municipal services, and 47 percent illiteracy rate. It is also the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/10/22/detroit-again-tops-list-of-most-dangerous-cities-but-crime-rate-dips/">most dangerous</a> city in the nation. Yesterday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/16/detroit-bankruptcy-eligibility-appeal/4044607/">allowed</a> his rulings declaring the city eligible for bankruptcy, and leaving public employee pensions systems vulnerable to cuts for retirees, to proceed to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Detroit is on track to becoming the largest city in the nation to go bankrupt. Democrat Dave Bing is the current mayor, representing an unbroken string of Democrats going back to 1962.</p>
<p>Camden, New Jersey rounds out the top ten, with a poverty rate of <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/camden_flow/170812236.html">42.5 percent,</a> and child poverty rate of 56.7 percent. In one poll, Camden was rated the <a href="http://www.curiosityaroused.com/world/the-10-most-dangerous-cities-in-america-in-2013/">second</a> most dangerous city in the nation, with gang violence cited as a chief contributing factor. Democrat Dana Redd is the current mayor of the city. Frederick Von Nieda was Camden&#8217;s <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/people/camdenpeople-FrederickVonNieda.htm">last</a> Republican Mayor &#8212; he served until 1936.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the line up regarding poverty. Yet there are also <a href="http://moneymorning.com/2013/07/23/eight-new-cities-on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy/">eight</a> large American cities facing bankruptcy, a reality that would undoubtedly exacerbate each city’s poverty rate. Cincinnati and Camden hold the distinction of being on both lists. The other six cities are Baltimore, Washington, D.C., San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Note that the last four are in California, the nation&#8217;s foremost Democratic stronghold. As for Baltimore, it has been <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/toxic-government-by-democrats-baltimore/">run</a> by Democratic mayors and city councils since 1967. Since Washington, D.C&#8217;s home rule began in 1975, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/colbert-king-a-dc-mayor-whos-not-a-democrat/2013/11/22/e5a97f18-531e-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html">every</a> mayor has been a Democrat.</p>
<p>Democrats like to make the case that the poorest states are run by Republicans. Yet they conveniently ignore the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/06/07/are-the-10-poorest-u-s-states-really-republican/">history</a> of those states, where two facts loom large. First, most of them were part of the Old South, where the vestiges of slavery, combined with national policies that favored highly industrialized northern states (one of the factors leading to the Civil War, produced economic stagnation by comparison. Furthermore, most of those states were staunchly Democratic for over a century following the Civil War.</p>
<p>Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson<i>, </i>adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College, illuminates the glaring difference between the comparisons. &#8220;The most fundamental difference between the data that conservatives prefer&#8211;that the 10 poorest cities are longtime Democratic strongholds&#8211;and the data that liberals will be more inclined to cite&#8211;that the 10 poorest states are predominantly Republican, is that conservatives can point to actual policies that Democrats implemented that contributed to the impoverishment of the cities, while the liberals cannot point to specific GOP policies that have caused the poorer states to lag behind,&#8221; he explains.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a shame Gingrich didn&#8217;t have more time to educate Robert Reich. It&#8217;s even sadder that millions of poor Americans are forced to endure their own “education” regarding poverty on a daily basis, even as Reich and his fellow Democrats refuse to recognize, much less admit, that their odious policies are responsible for 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>Don’t Forget the Other Entitlement Monsters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/dont-forget-the-other-entitlement-monsters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dont-forget-the-other-entitlement-monsters</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Nov 2013 04:46:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[snap]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209917</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the ObamaCare train wreck is temporarily eclipsing.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/obama1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209934" alt="obama1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/obama1-361x350.jpg" width="289" height="280" /></a>The continuing attention devoted to the blunders, incompetence, and lies surrounding the Obamacare rollout is much deserved. But we shouldn’t forget that the President’s health-care monstrosity is merely the latest and biggest of scores of government entitlement programs suffering from the same flawed progressive assumption––that government “experts” armed with coercive power alone can solve problems better left to the states, civil society, and the free market. In reality, such programs relentlessly metastasize, increasing as well fraud, waste, abuse, and costs.</p>
<p>One such program is SNAP, the kinder and gentler name for what we used to call food stamps. Apparently the old coupons were too hurtful, so they have been replaced by the Electronic Benefits Transfer card that looks like a debit or credit card. Over the last decade, <a href="http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43175">SNAP</a> recipients have increased from 21 million to 47 million, 1 in 7 Americans. But benefits paid out have nearly quadrupled from $21 billion to $75 billion. This total, by the way, doesn’t count the $7.2 billion spent on the Women Infants and Children program that also provides taxpayer-funded food. And don’t forget the other <a href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/SNAPsummary.htm">costs</a> of the program, which tack on another nearly $4 billion. Part of this expansion reflects Obama’s relaxation of work and income requirements, and the increase of benefits by 13.6% as part of the 2009 stimulus bill (that increase expired on November 1). Worse yet, some speculate that Obamacare, by expanding the number of people eligible for Medicaid, might further increase the number of SNAP recipients by 3%-5%.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, fraud and abuse are rampant in the SNAP program. Since 2008, the number of able-bodied adults without children but receiving benefits has increased by 3.5 million. Many stores accepting SNAP cards are involved in selling ineligible items and trafficking. According to a USDA <a href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/fraud/fraud_2.htm">report</a>, “In FY 2012, over 100 analysts and investigators reviewed over 15,000 stores and conducted nearly 4,500 undercover investigations. Close to 1,400 stores were permanently disqualified for trafficking and nearly 700 stores were sanctioned for other violations such as the sale of ineligible items . . . OIG [USDA’s Office of the Inspector General] SNAP investigations resulted in 342 convictions, including a number of multi-year prison terms for the most serious offenses, and approximately $57.7 million in monetary results.” And those are just the stores getting caught. SNAP EBT cards are regularly bought and sold, even listed on Craig’s List. According to a report by a Sacramento CBS affiliate, the fraud costs $750 million a year.</p>
<p>In response, in September House Republicans approved cutting $39 billion in funding, about 5% per year over the next decade, much lower than the rate of increase over the last decade. Under the Republican plan, the next decade’s cost for the program would be $700 billion rather than $770 billion. The bill also eliminates eligibility loopholes, ensures work requirements, and weeds out ineligible recipients such as college students and lottery winners. Not exactly the “slashing” of benefits the media have been decrying.</p>
<p>The reaction from the progressive entitlement lobby, otherwise known as Democrats, has rounded up the usual suspects of callous Republicans indifferent to starving children. This bloated program gets by on such manipulation of Dickensian emotional rhetoric about poverty and hunger in America. A recent piece by the in-house liberal for <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> keeps harping on “poverty” and the “poor,” and claims that the real issue “is about the extent of our collective obligation to the least fortunate Americans.” But the way the government defines “poverty,” by income alone, ignores consumption levels and income from the off-the-books economy such as cash work or illegal activities.</p>
<p>When one looks at material goods, however, a different picture of poverty emerges. According to an American Heritage <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty">report</a> based on an analysis of Census Bureau data, 43% of statistically poor households own their own homes, and on average these houses have 3 bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths. One also has to wonder what notion of the “poor” would include those who have a microwave (81% of the statistical poor), air-conditioning (78%), more than one television (65%), at least one DVD player (65%), and cable or satellite television (64%), among other amenities. How about food? Leaving aside the point that those who possess non-essentials like DVD players and cable television probably can afford adequate food, the Heritage report points out that “most poor children are super-nourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.”</p>
<p>As the Heritage report summarizes, “In 2005, the typical poor household, as defined by the government, had air conditioning and a car. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. In the kitchen, it had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker. The family was able to obtain medical care when needed. Their home was not overcrowded and was in good repair. By its own report, the family was not hungry and had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.” The recession since then has not significantly altered this reality. The fact is, compared to the vast majority of human beings who have inhabited the planet, or who today live in the Third World, the statistical poor in America are part of the global rich.</p>
<p>The liberal melodrama of millions of under-nourished, hungry Americans cannot be squared with this data, or with the fact of rampant obesity and bad eating habits among the statistical poor. Though no doubt some Americans fit the liberal picture of the “deserving poor” who need help to keep from going hungry, the majority of those getting food stamps make the personal choice to spend their money on other goods rather than on food.</p>
<p>I have lived and shopped for food in socio-economically mixed neighborhoods for nearly 40 years, and have repeatedly seen people buying groceries with food stamps. During that time, I have frequently seen people with the SNAP two-piles: the goods food stamps pay for, and the other products like liquor, beer, and cigarettes. In the food pile, I cannot remember ever seeing bulk rice, beans, meat, or the other groceries one would expect the poor to buy. More typically, pricey products like processed foods, chips, snacks, sodas, cereal, and other nutritionally toxic items make up most of the pile. I have stood in line behind people in $100 sneakers and expensive NFL jackets, and more than once followed such shoppers to the parking lot and seen them get into cars better than the one I was driving.  Even an illiterate village explainer knew that if you can afford cigarettes, candy, and snazzy sneakers, you shouldn’t be getting taxpayer-funded food stamps.</p>
<p>Of course, progressives will dismiss this argument as heartless indifference to the “less fortunate,” and my own experience as “anecdotal” evidence. But as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is data. But even liberals know their arguments about the poor in America are weak. That’s why they rely on rhetorical pathos and invented the notion of  “relative poverty,” the idea that one is considered poor by comparison to the better off, rather than by a measurement of life-style and material wellbeing.</p>
<p>Like Obamacare, the SNAP program takes a small problem that in the past was addressed by churches, families, mutual aid societies, and fraternal organizations, inflates it into a crisis by hyperbolic rhetoric, and then claims only a massive federal entitlement and regulatory regime can solve the problem. That has been the progressive playbook for nearly a century, and the result has been a bloated federal bureaucracy, ruinous debt, and taxes appropriated from the producers of economic growth. That’s how we got the entitlement monsters that were on track to bankrupt the country even before Obamacare.</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>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rich]]></category>

		<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>Destroying Household Jobs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/thomas-sowell/destroying-household-jobs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=destroying-household-jobs</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2013 04:15:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extension]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Laws]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[low-skill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[worker]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206010</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's latest attack on the poor through wage-control regulations. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/National-Unemployment-Rat-007.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206011" alt="National-Unemployment-Rat-007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/National-Unemployment-Rat-007.jpg" width="270" height="218" /></a>Despite evidence from around the world that minimum wage laws can price low-skilled workers out of jobs, the U.S. Department of Labor is planning to extend minimum wage coverage to domestic workers, such as maids or those who drop in from time to time to do a few household chores for the sick and the elderly.</p>
<p>This coverage is scheduled to begin in January 2015 — that is, after the 2014 elections and nearly two years before the 2016 elections. Politicians show a lot of cleverness in protecting their own interests, even if they show very little wisdom as far as serving the public interest.</p>
<p>If making household workers subject to the minimum wage law is expected to produce good results, why not let those good results begin early, so that voters will know about them before the next election?</p>
<p>But, if this new extension of the minimum wage law opens a whole new can of worms — as is more likely — politicians who support this extension want to insulate themselves from a voter backlash. Hence artfully choosing January 2015 as the effective date, to minimize the political risks to themselves.</p>
<p>The reason this particular extension of the minimum wage law is likely to open a can of worms is that both household workers and those who employ them will face more complications than employers and employees in industry or commerce.</p>
<p>First of all, ill or elderly individuals who need someone to help them from time to time are not like employers who have a business that regularly hires people and may have a personnel department to handle all the paperwork and keep up with all the legal requirements when government bureaucrats are involved.</p>
<p>Often the very reason for hiring part-time household workers is that some ill or elderly individuals have limited energy or capacity for handling things that were easy to handle when they were younger or in better health. Bureaucratic paperwork and legal technicalities are the last thing they need to have to add to their existing problems.</p>
<p>The people being hired to do household chores also have special problems.</p>
<p>Often such people have limited education, and may also have limited knowledge of the English language.</p>
<p>Why make it harder for ill or elderly people to get some much-needed help in their homes, and harder for low-skilled people to get some much-needed jobs?</p>
<p>Despite all the talk about how we need more people with high-tech skills, there is also a need for people who can help clean a home or carry groceries or do other things that need doing, and which do not require years of schooling. As the elderly become an ever growing proportion of the population, there will be a growing demand for such people.</p>
<p>More precisely, there would be more jobs for such people if the government did not step in to complicate the hiring process and price potential workers out of jobs, with minimum wages set by third parties who do not, and cannot, know what the economic realities are for either the ill and the elderly or for those whom the ill and the elderly wish to hire.</p>
<p>Minimum wage laws in general are usually set with no real knowledge of the economic realities and alternatives for either employers or employees. Third parties are simply enabled to indulge themselves by imagining what is &#8220;fair&#8221; — and pay no price for being wrong about the actual economic consequences.</p>
<p>That is why countries with minimum wage laws usually have much higher rates of unemployment than those few places where there have been no minimum wage laws, such as Switzerland or Singapore — or the United States, before the first federal minimum wage law was passed in 1931.</p>
<p>Government interventions in labor markets have already created needless complications, and not just by minimum wage laws. The welfare state has already taken out of the labor market millions of people who could perform work that would be well within the capacity of inexperienced young people or people with limited education.</p>
<p>With welfare, such people can stay home, watch television, do drugs or whatever — or else they can hang out in the streets, often confirming the old adage that the devil finds work for idle hands.</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>Rubio: No Friend to Immigrants and the Working Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mary-grabar/rubio-no-friend-to-immigrants-and-the-working-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rubio-no-friend-to-immigrants-and-the-working-class</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Sep 2013 04:20:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mary Grabar]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rubio]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203434</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The path to ending the conservative movement -- and prosperity for the poor -- begins with amnesty. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Sen.-Marco-Rubio_immigration-cropped-proto-custom_28.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203435" alt="John McCain, Charles Schumer, Marco Rubio, Robert Menendez" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Sen.-Marco-Rubio_immigration-cropped-proto-custom_28-431x350.jpg" width="259" height="210" /></a>When it comes to immigration, our terms have been redefined in an Orwellian sleight of hand.  Today, the one who comes over the border illegally is called the same thing as the one who waits to come over legally, as those of my parents’ generation did.</p>
<p>Back in the late 1950s when my parents and aunts and uncles escaped from communist Yugoslavia being an immigrant meant staying off the government dole and having “sponsors” guaranteeing that you would.  My relatives spent years as refugees in Austria, where they worked on farms, often living in barracks.  Once here, they were greeted by sponsors who guaranteed housing, food, and medical care until the new immigrants could find jobs.  It was a mark of shame to receive public assistance.  Immigrants skimped and saved.  They struggled to learn English and what they could not learn they demanded their children learn.  When I and my cousins went to public school, we were inculcated with American values and strove to become Americanized.</p>
<p>This is not true today where government-paid workers search out immigrants, offering them government assistance.  In schools, immigrant and illegal alien children get anti-American lessons, and often in their own language.</p>
<p>Now Republicans are embracing the same ideas.  They even use the language of the Marxists who have been behind the push to legalize millions of illegal aliens in order to gain Democratic voters.</p>
<p>As New Zealand blogger and researcher Trevor Loudon documents in his <a href="http://www.trevorloudon.com/2013/08/trevor-loudon-presents-his-new-book-the-enemies-within-tues-aug-27th-in-columbia-sc/">new book</a>, <i>The Enemies Within</i>, the push for amnesty for new Democratic voters began in 1995 when the unions, that had previously fought amnesty to protect jobs, were taken over by Marxists who then infiltrated the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>A key player is SEIU leader, and Honorary Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Elisco Medina.  In 1999, he convinced the AFL-CIO convention that U.S. immigration policy was “broken and needs to be fixed.”  In 2000, the AFL-CIO called for a new amnesty and the repeal of the 1986 law that criminalized hiring illegal aliens.</p>
<p>In 2009, Medina spoke about the need for “’comprehensive immigration reform’” at America’s Future Now! conference in Washington, D.C.   Noting that two out of three Latino voters voted for Barack Obama, he presented a two-part strategy:</p>
<p>In order to expand their power, he said progressives need to be “solidly on the side of immigrants,” who would remember “who was there with you.”</p>
<p>Second, with “reform of immigration laws,” 12 million people would be put on “the path to citizenship, and eventually voters.”  Medina asked attendees to imagine the gain in voters even if only two out of three voted Democrat.</p>
<p>But if one does not believe Loudon that Democrats/Marxists are using the case of “immigration” for vote harvesting, one should listen to esteemed political science professor Alan Abramowitz, author of <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Polarized_Public.html?id=JhLSygAACAAJ"><i>The Polarized Public</i></a><i>: Why American Government Is So Dysfunctional</i>.  A year ago, at our annual Labor Day book festival in Decatur, Georgia, he told an Obama-pumped audience that the demographics were on their side.  Abramowitz is known for his accuracy in predicting election outcomes.  But it’s not rocket science.  Abramowitz<i> </i>simply looked at the demographics and correctly predicted a Democratic victory.  (Political polarization was attributed to conservative “extremism” on the part of conservatives, which would disappear once they were outnumbered.)</p>
<p>As Abramowitz showed the charts and graphs, as well as photos of multihued Obama rallies, I thought of how sad it was that he would brag that the gains in Democratic voters was not due to the appeal of ideas but to racial and ethnic pandering. It was a celebration of vote-buying.</p>
<p>This Labor Day weekend, at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation conference, I heard hecklers interrupt Senator Marco Rubio’s speech with chants of “no amnesty.” Rubio has used rhetoric about the “broken system” to sell the “Gang of Eight’s” senate bill 744.  Many in the audience were annoyed by the hecklers, still seeing Rubio as a shining star, an old-fashioned immigrant success story.  “He’s right on most of the issues,” a woman told me.</p>
<p>Yes, Rubio did hit all the talking points about economic freedom.  But these were the same canned lines that I had heard in the summer of 2008 at the first Red State conference in Atlanta.</p>
<p>In 2013, in front of nearly 2,000 activists he became flustered as he tried to ignore calls of “traitor.”</p>
<p>As I left the room, I saw three individuals in bright pink t-shirts emblazoned with “Pink Slip Rubio.com” standing in the hall.  One was Jack Oliver, legislative director for Floridians for Immigration Enforcement, a decade-old group.  Oliver feels betrayed by Rubio, who had shaken his hand and promised that he would never support comprehensive reform, legalization, or the Dream Act.  According to his group’s <a href="http://www.flimen.org/">website</a>, Senate Bill 744 gives work permits and legalization to over 11 million illegal aliens, doubles authorized immigration to 22 million over the next decade, and adds millions to welfare and entitlement rolls.  Oliver calls it “amnesty first and a promise for enforcement lager,” and contends that the bill never would have gotten through the Senate without Rubio acting as the immigrant “poster child” of the sponsoring “Gang of Eight.”</p>
<p>Oliver began his career in construction as a plasterer laborer in 1968, a time when such a trade could support a family.  He got involved in the immigration fight when he heard George W. Bush claim that illegal aliens were needed to do the jobs Americans wouldn’t do.  He saw his wages drop 30 percent under Bush’s lax policies.  He had left Florida in 1986 and returned in 2002.  As a field superintendant he saw that construction workers were making less in actual dollars than what they had been making in 1986.</p>
<p>“I saw how devastating illegal labor is to the domestic labor market,” he says, citing the millions of young people who aren’t going to college.  “If they’re not going to make a living in the trades we’re going to have to subsidize those families.  It’s an expansion of the welfare state.”  Especially hard hit is the black community.  He estimates that 75 percent of the construction laborers with whom he worked in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., were black.</p>
<p>The immigration bill will change demographics forever, he contends, with Democrats fast-tracking the newly legalized immigrants to citizenship and voting rolls.   It will end the conservative movement.</p>
<p>Post-election quarterbacks attributed Mitt Romney’s loss to a “conscious decision to blow off Hispanic voters.” Republicans sounded like a party that “hates brown people,” said <a href="http://www.redstate.com/2012/11/07/status-quo-ante/">Erick Erickson</a>. Others made similar analyses until the real numbers came in, showing that the deciding factor in the Republican loss was the abandonment by white working class voters—like Oliver.  Furthermore, as <a href="http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/11/07/gop-outreach-to-hispanics-wont-work/">J. Christian Adams</a> pointed out, going back to the George W. Bush administration, the policies of the left don’t work with conservative Hispanics, the only ones the GOP can realistically count on.</p>
<p>I am reminded by Jack’s story about my immigrant family, about an uncle who was a bricklayer, about my father who was a welder.  Other legal immigrants I knew worked in manufacturing or such skilled labor jobs.  Today they would not have a chance.</p>
<p>So Rubio, despite the rhetoric from the powerful large business interests in the Republican Party, is no friend of the middle class or of legal immigrants.</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>Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism (Part VI)</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-vi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-vi</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 14 Aug 2013 04:12:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200478</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The free market: the great enemy of social class systems. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/capital.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200556" alt="capital" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/capital.jpg" width="280" height="210" /></a>Editor’s note: The following is the sixth, and final, installment of the FrontPage series “Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism” by Dr. Mark Hendrickson. Click the following for <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-i/">Part I</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-ii/">Part II</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii/">Part III</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iv/">Part IV</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-v/">Part V</a>. </em></p>
<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">We have already discussed how, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, most progressives and other advocates of more government intervention believe that Washington should have greater control over economic activity in order to increase prosperity for more people. We also have examined the glaring holes in their arguments of advocates of intervention who insist that government redistribution of property is fairer and morally superior to allowing free markets to distribute wealth. The third point they make in support of their statist agendas is the alleged problem of class divisions inherent in capitalism. Their arguments in this case are equally feeble. In fact, charges that capitalism divides people into irreconcilable classes is a hollow canard.</span></b></p>
<p>When one surveys the history of capitalism, starting with the onset of the Age of Capitalism in the 18<sup>th</sup> century, one can’t help but notice its revolutionary effects on social structure in addition to its pronounced positive economic effects. Pre-capitalist societies in Europe had been characterized by rigid social stratifications. A person born into a certain social stratum was doomed, barring a miracle, to die there. Royals, aristocrats, and their retinues enjoyed the privileges of a rigged Big Government system that enriched them and left the common man with such scant economic opportunities that having enough to eat was a recurring problem.</p>
<p>Capitalism changed all that. By virtue of its superiority in producing goods, capitalism “provided sustenance for the masses of paupers. Capitalists emptied the poor houses, the workhouses, and the prisons. They converted starving beggars into self-supporting breadwinners.”<sup>1</sup> Capitalism liberated millions from hereditary poverty. By shifting control of economic production from the privileged few to the masses (i.e, consumer sovereignty in free markets), new fortunes were made and old fortunes were eclipsed.</p>
<p>In short, tremendous upward mobility supplanted social stasis as capitalism multiplied opportunities for individual advancement. Capitalism sundered pre-existing class divisions and made it possible for the talented and industrious to make the proverbial leap from rags to riches. When Karl Marx and his successors fixated on the theory of class conflict, they were like the proverbial general fighting the last war. They were obsessed with the rigid, antagonistic class divisions that characterized the politico-socio-economic orders—feudalism and mercantilism—that preceded capitalism.</p>
<p>Capitalism, in fact, broke up the old order, supplanting rigid social hierarchies with social mobility. Capitalism unlocked the doors of economic progress for the masses, both by lowering the cost of goods so that those once too poor to purchase various goods now could afford to do so; and also by increasing the amount of capital in society so that it became possible for citizens from poor backgrounds to become entrepreneurs and make the proverbial leap from rags to riches.</p>
<p>It is historically inaccurate for socialists to accuse capitalism of sowing the seeds of class conflict by dividing society into classes whose interests were implacably opposed to each other. The calumny that capitalism would keep workers in a permanent state of inferiority has been disproved millions of times throughout American history. Worse, though, than the socialists’ diagnosis is their proposed cure for the class divisions allegedly created by capitalism. Socialism commits the very sin of which it accuses capitalism: It divides society into two classes, a dominant upper class and submissive lower class—the elite government planners and the masses of people, respectively.</p>
<p>Whereas capitalism represented a radical departure from the class divisions inherent in mercantilism, socialism seeks to reinstitute such divisions. Socialism is, in some very fundamental ways, a neo-mercantilist system. Indeed, by deposing the sovereign consumer—the democratic economic rule of Everyman—and replacing it with a privileged ruling class, socialism is politically reactionary.</p>
<p>The reason why capitalistic systems like the United States never fell prey to a worker’s revolt or class warfare was because the vast majority of Americans have seen that they could advance themselves economically without bloodshed or revolution. Instead, they could take advantage of the opportunities that capitalism continually presents. Why resort to force and violence if the system offers your children a better life by peaceful means? How can anyone organize a proletarian army of oppressed, impoverished malcontents if the members of the would-be army are climbing out of poverty and rising above (sometimes considerably above) their previous social status?</p>
<p>In the United States, the individual liberty that accompanies and characterizes capitalism has allowed millions of Americans to rise two, three, or even four quintiles in social rankings of income and net worth. America&#8217;s perennial economic, social, and political mobility has been a healthy antidote to class conflict, since anyone with the talent and initiative was free to go up the social/economic ladder, rendering notions of rigid class distinctions untenable. A U.S. Treasury study found that “over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile” in the ten-year period, 1996-2005.<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>It seems incredible that anyone would try to fan the flames of class conflict in the U.S. today when a middle-income American enjoys a standard of living that in many ways is more affluent than the lifestyle enjoyed by 19<sup>th</sup>-century monarchs. Today, the average poor American “has more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France, or the United Kingdom”; “80 percent of poor households have air conditioning” (as recently as 1970, only 36 percent of Americans had A/C); “31 percent have two or more cars”; “nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite TV,” etc.<sup>3</sup> It has to be hard to organize a movement based on income when society is so fluid and large numbers of people continually move up to higher income levels.</p>
<p>Socialists, progressives, and other opponents of capitalism are nothing if not persistent. As latter-day ideological heirs of Marx, they continue to see the world in terms of class conflict. They seem to need class conflict so badly that if they can’t find it, they will do their best to manufacture it. Whether consciously or not, government interference with free markets over the past two or three generations have managed to thwart capitalism’s natural tendency to lift people out of poverty and have produced a long-term (some sociologists even use the adjective “permanent”) underclass in American society.</p>
<p>Many social scientists—Charles Murray preeminent among them—have documented the secular trend toward declining poverty rates over the course of American history.<sup>4</sup> Except when this trend was interrupted during the Great Depression of the 1930s (itself a tragic sequence caused by a succession of pernicious policy mistakes in Washington)<sup>5</sup> free-market capitalism reduced the incidence of poverty in every decade—until the mid-1960s when the poverty rate quit declining and has remained range-bound ever since.<sup>6</sup></p>
<p>What policies interrupted capitalism’s progress against poverty? One has been the devastation and even literal destruction of thriving black business communities in the name of urban renewal.<sup>7</sup> Another was the breakdown of the black family, famously warned about by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965, and then abetted by a series of government anti-poverty programs that created what Heritage Foundation analyst Robert Rector memorably dubbed “the incentive system from hell” that financially rewarded and incentivized single parenthood. Another was the strategy resulting in the Curley effect, by which interventionist politicians kept large numbers of inner-city residents in various misnamed <i>social welfare</i> programs in exchange for their political loyalty. This deal with the devil lured many urban residents to accept a state of permanent economic dependence on the political plantation of slick politicians who purveyed their status as <i>defenders of the poor</i> into permanent control of city governments. Thus, we have essentially one-party hegemony in America’s poorest, most rundown cities.<sup>8</sup></p>
<p>By blaming stubborn poverty on capitalism, those advocating more government economic intervention are projecting their own faults onto others. It is government intervention that is responsible for the unnecessarily large size of the chronically poor in America. Capitalism is no panacea; people can still be poor where there is capitalism (read the book of <i>Proverbs</i> for numerous reasons why that is the case), but the historical record of capitalism has proven that it does more to promote upward economic mobility than any form of socialism or interventionism.</p>
<p>The assertion that capitalism leads to class conflict is not only historically false; it is a cynical lie. Rigid class divisions—economic, social, and political—are only possible where governments subvert free markets and impede people’s ability to advance economically. It takes a powerful government, or a strong cultural-religious caste system, to maintain rigid class distinctions. Capitalism does not erect divisions between economic classes; it demolishes them. Far from being the cause, as Marx and his followers claimed, capitalism is the antidote for class conflict.</p>
<p>The left talks a lot about “peace.” What could be more peaceful than free individuals choosing with whom to interact economically for mutual benefit in the noble framework known as <i>capitalism</i>? In such a system where voluntary action is the rule and individual rights are respected, human beings encounter allies, not enemies, and individual self-interest tends toward harmony instead of conflict. Perhaps this is the greatest and most blessed feature of capitalism, and a primary reason for why capitalism is worth defending and preserving.</p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p><sup>1</sup> Ludwig von Mises, <i>Human Action</i>, Scholar’s Edition, p. 615.</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005,” Report of the Department of the Treasury, November 13, 2007.</p>
<p><sup>3</sup> Official government data cited in “Understanding Poverty in the United States&#8230;”  March 22, 2012, <a href="http://www.projectworldawareness.com/2012/03/understanding-poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor/">www.projectworldawareness.com/2012/03/understanding-poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor/</a>.</p>
<p><sup>4</sup> Charles Murray, <i>Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980</i>, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984.</p>
<p><sup>5</sup> Cf. Lawrence Reed, “Great Myths of the Great Depression,” <a href="http://www.mackinac.org/4013">www.mackinac.org/4013</a>; Burton Folsom, <i>New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America</i>, New York: Threshold Editions/Simon &amp; Schuster, 2008.</p>
<p><sup>6</sup> Ezra Klein’s “Wonkblog,” “Poverty in the 50 years since ‘The Other America,’ in five charts,” The Washington Post, posted July 11, 2012, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-other-america-in-five-charts/">www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-other-america-in-five-charts/</a>.</p>
<p><sup>7</sup> Cf. Ellen Pierson, “Race and City Planning in Pittsburgh’s Hill District,” 16 May 2008, posted in “The Not-So-New Face of Urban Renewal,” <a href="http://documents.kenyon.edu/americanstudies/">documents.kenyon.edu/americanstudies/</a>; Matt Lakin, “1960s brought end to segregation, prohibition,” July 29, 2012.<a href="http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/jul/29/1960s-brought-end-to-segregation-prohibition/?print=1">www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/jul/29/1960s-brought-end-to-segregation-prohibition/?print=1</a>; Peter Dreier, “Jane Jacobs’ Radical Legacy,” National Housing Institute Issue #146, Summer 2006, <a href="http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/146/janejacobslegacy.html">www.nhi.org/online/issues/146/janejacobslegacy.html</a>.</p>
<p><sup>8</sup> Edward L. Glaeser &amp; Andrei Shleifer, “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate,” Department of Economics, Harvard University,2005, <a href="http://www.economics.harvard.edu/facutly/shleifer/files/curley%E2%80%94effct.pdf">www.economics.harvard.edu/facutly/shleifer/files/curley—effct.pdf</a>.</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 Environmental Apocalypse</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-environmental-apocalypse/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-environmental-apocalypse</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Aug 2013 04:50:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Environmentalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[first world]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The movement to destroy human civilization as we know it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/35a86fbc31a241f9d6874cb5965983c9.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-199015" alt="An Indian ragpicker searches for re-cycl" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/35a86fbc31a241f9d6874cb5965983c9-450x319.jpg" width="315" height="223" /></a>Early in the morning, while most are still sleeping, groups of elderly Chinese women spread out across city streets. They tear open trash bags, pick through the litter and sort out bottles and cans that come with a deposit. And then they bring them to the local supermarket to a machine that scans and evaluates each can, accepting and rejecting them one by one, and finally printing out a receipt.</p>
<p>The interaction between the elderly immigrant who speaks broken English or the homeless man who is barely holding it together&#8230; and the machine is a stark contrast between what the new smart clean green economy pretends to be and what it actually is.</p>
<p>The machine, like so much else that we design, is impressive, but its existence depends on someone digging through the trash with their hands for much less than minimum wage to extract a generally useless item.</p>
<p>The entire bottle economy, which has more than a passing resemblance to the trash sorting operations in the Third World carried out by despised and persecuted minorities, like the Zabbaleen in Egypt, is artificial. The United States is not so poor that it actually needs to recycle. It recycles not under the impulse of economic imperatives, but of government mandates.</p>
<p>The elderly Chinese women dig through the trash because politicians decided to impose a tax on us and an incentive for them in the form of a deposit. All those useless 1980s laws created a strange underground economy of marginalized people digging through the trash.</p>
<p>Every time politicians celebrate a recycling target met and show off some shiny new machine, hiding behind the curtain are the dirty weary people dragging through the streets at the crack of dawn, donning rubber gloves and tearing apart trash bags. They are the unglamorous low-tech reality of environmentalism.</p>
<p>These are the Green Jobs that aren&#8217;t much talked about. They pay below minimum wage and have no workplace safety regulations. They are the Third World reality behind the First World ecology tripe. It&#8217;s not that the people who plan and run the system don&#8217;t know about them. But they don&#8217;t like to talk about them because they come too close to revealing the unsavory truth about where environmentalism is really going.</p>
<p>Environmentalism, like every liberal notion, is sold to the masses as modern and progressive. It&#8217;s the exact opposite. It&#8217;s every bit as modern and progressive as those sacks of cans being hauled by hand through the streets to the machine.</p>
<p>Prince Charles, that avid idiot and environmentalist, visited a Mumbai slum a few years ago and said that it had some lessons to teach the West.</p>
<p>“When you enter what looks from the outside like an immense mound of plastic and rubbish, you immediately come upon an intricate network of streets with miniature shops, houses and workshops, each one made out of any material that comes to hand,” Prince Charles wrote in his book, Harmony.</p>
<p>The Prince of Wales is quite the author. In addition to <i>Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World</i>, he has written <i>Shelter: Human Habitats from Around the World</i>, <i>The Prince&#8217;s Speech: On the Future of Food</i> and <i>The Illustrated Guide to Chickens: How to Choose Them, How to Keep Them. </i></p>
<p>One might be forgiven for assuming that the royal brain twitching behind those watery eyes is preparing for some sort of apocalypse. And it is. The apocalypse is environmentalism. Or from the point of view of the environmentalists, who spare some time from their public appearances and their mansions to pen tomes on the future of food and how to choose chickens, the apocalypse is prosperity.</p>
<p>People of that sort think that instead of getting the slum dwellers of Mumbai into apartments, we ought to be figuring out how to build shelters out of random garbage. Think of it as the recycling can solution as applied to your entire life.</p>
<p>That is the sort of lifestyle that environmentalists think of as sustainable. Or as Hobbes put it, &#8220;In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth.&#8221; That is the natural state to which environmentalists would return us to.</p>
<p>More recently another deep thinker, Peter Buffett, Warren Buffett&#8217;s son, took to the editorial pages of the New York Times to denounce Third World philanthropy.</p>
<p>&#8220;Microlending and financial literacy — what is this really about?&#8221; Buffett asks. &#8220;People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?&#8221;</p>
<p>To the slum dwellers, the beast isn&#8217;t capitalism, it&#8217;s that gnawing feeling in your stomach when you haven&#8217;t eaten for a day. But Peter Buffett, who lives a life almost as privileged as Prince Charles, bemoans the idea of getting people to the point where they aren&#8217;t worried about where their next meal is coming from because it just turns them into capitalists and consumers. And before you know it, they&#8217;re buying big screen televisions and writing op-eds in the New York Times on the futility of philanthropy.</p>
<p>Instead of helping the Third World live like us, the perverse children of the rich dream of making us live like the Third World.</p>
<p>The elderly Chinese woman picking through the trash in search of empty beer bottles isn&#8217;t the past. She&#8217;s the future.</p>
<p>Recycling is big business because the government and its affiliated liberal elites decided it should be. It&#8217;s just one example of an artificial economy and it&#8217;s small stuff compared to the coming carbon crackdown in which every human activity will be monetized and taxed somewhere down the road according to its carbon footprint.</p>
<p>The ultimate dream of the sort of people who can&#8217;t sleep at night because they worry that children in India might be able to grow up making more than two dollars a day, is to take away our prosperity for our own good through the total regulation of every area of our lives under the pretext of an imminent environmental crisis.</p>
<p>The Global Warming hysteria is about absolute power over every man, woman and child on earth.</p>
<p>Environmentalism is wealth redistribution on a global scale. The goal isn&#8217;t even to lift all boats, but to stop the tide of materialism from making too many people too comfortable.</p>
<p>The liberal billionaire who clamors about sustainability likes progress. What he dislikes is the middle class with its mass produced cars and homes, cheap restaurants full of fatty foods and television sets and daily deliveries of cardboard boxes full of stuff and shopping malls. He thinks, in all sincerity, that they would be happier and more spiritually fulfilled as peasants.</p>
<p>Beneath all the empty chatter about social riches and sustainability is that need to impose progressive misery. Beneath the glossy surface of environmentalism is a vision of the American middle class learning to dig through bags of garbage, the detritus of their consumerism for which they must be punished, to become better people.</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>Toxic Government by Democrats: Detroit</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/toxic-government-by-democrats-detroit-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=toxic-government-by-democrats-detroit-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:40:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=186067</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Minorities and the poor have suffered the most under decades of progressive rule. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/unhealthy1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-186069" alt="A012-BlightCourt001-1107y_11-12-2007_O7NEO0E.jpg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/unhealthy1-450x316.jpg" width="270" height="190" /></a><strong>Editor’s note: The following is the fourth in a series of articles that will expose the misery of life in America’s poorest cities, all of which have one thing in common: they are controlled exclusively by Democrats. Each article presented by FrontPage will reveal how the production of mass urban poverty is much more than just a failure of leadership, but a means of political survival for the Left. To read the background pamphlet by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, “Government Versus The People,” click <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/upload/pamphlets/government-vs-the-people.pdf">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Perhaps no other city in America illuminates the failure of Democratic Party policies more brightly than Detroit. Two stories, separated by only four, days are emblematic. On March 11, former Mayor Kwame Kilpatick was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/us/kwame-kilpatrick-ex-mayor-of-detroit-convicted-in-corruption-case.html?_r=0">found guilty</a> of 24 of 30 charges leveled against him, including fraud, racketeering and extortion. Four days later, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder <a href="http://www.independent.ie/world-news/americas/us-city-detroit-taken-over-by-financial-experts-to-avoid-bankruptcy-29132641.html">appointed</a> attorney Kevyn Orr as the city&#8217;s emergency financial manager, in a last ditch effort to avoid what would be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation&#8217;s history. From 1961 to the present, the tragic history of Detroit itself has been written entirely by Democrats such as these individuals.</p>
<p>It was 1961 when Louis C. Miriani, Detroit&#8217;s last Republican Mayor, <a href="http://www.rightmichigan.com/story/2011/12/21/191126/29">lost</a> his re-election bid. It was a well-deserved loss. Miriani was a criminal who served 10 years in prison for tax evasion. The victor in the race was Democrat James Jerome Cavanagh, the only elected official to serve on LBJ&#8217;s Model Cities task force, a program that emulated Soviet efforts to reconstruct entire urban areas in Eastern European cities. Cavanagh decided that a nine-square mile section of Detroit should follow suit, and he got a new income tax, as well as a commuter tax, through the state legislature to pay for Detroit&#8217;s very own &#8220;Model City.&#8221;</p>
<p>The program became a disaster when residents resisted the command-and-control edicts from Democratic mayors and federal officials, telling people where to live, what to build, and what businesses to open in return for cash, training and healthcare. As a result of such heavy-handedness, a breakdown in civil order occurred, as did the beginnings of Detroit&#8217;s precipitous population decline. On July 23, 1967, that decline was accelerated when police arrested more than 80 people at a &#8220;blind pig,&#8221; a name given to black American after-hours clubs, in the heart of Model City. Outraged residents staged the worst race riot of the 1960s in retaliation, during which businesses were looted and burned. Five days later, LBJ was forced to send in two divisions of paratroopers to restore calm. Over the next year and a half, 140,000 residents, mostly white, fled the city.</p>
<p>Despite such failure, Democratic policies <a href="http://www.policymic.com/articles/20567/america-s-future-looks-too-much-like-detroit">continued</a> to be implemented. Public employee unions were granted high salaries, exorbitant benefit packages, and allowed to implement inefficient work rules and other requirements that raised the cost of doing business in the city. The same Democrat-fostered union mentality took hold in the private sector with a vengeance, to the point where Detroit’s auto industry began moving to right-to-work states in the South in order to survive.</p>
<p>While this economic catastrophe-in-the-making was taking place, Democrats were also undermining the school system. By 2009, Detroit Public Schools (DPS), a system U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124813472753066949.html">called</a> a &#8220;national disgrace,&#8221; was also put under the control of an emergency financial manager in order to prevent bankruptcy. And 2009 was the year that DPS students turned in the lowest scores ever recorded in the national math proficiency test over its then-21-year history. As of last June, only <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20120628/NEWS06/120628034/Michigan-student-tests-2012-MEE-ACT-Michigan-Merit-Exam">1.8 percent</a> of DPS students were considered capable of doing college level work, the <a href="http://gomasa.org/news/percentage-high-school-students-career-and-college-ready-increasing-statewide">achievement gap</a> remained one of the highest in the nation,  and <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20121011/METRO01/210110335/1409/metro/Detroit-parents-embrace-school-choice-poll-says">79 percent</a> of residents said they don&#8217;t want their child educated by DPS. Moreover, by 2016, the system that had educated approximately 160,000 students as recently as 2000, will be reduced to serving less than 40,000 children.</p>
<p>Detroit residents have paid a heavy price for such a dysfunctional system: a mind-blowing <a href="http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2011/05/04/report-nearly-half-of-detroiters-cant-read/">47 percent</a> of Detroit <i>residents</i> are functionally illiterate.</p>
<p>Considering the quality of leaders running the city, Detroit’s descent into ruination should surprise no one. From 1974 to 1993, Coleman Young was mayor. Young may have run as a Democrat, but he was subsequently <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/childs-play_591433.html?nopager=1">revealed</a> to be a member of the Communist Party. His brand of &#8220;us against them&#8221; politics, essentially <a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&amp;dat=19930626&amp;id=lVdPAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=VAMEAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=6310,6814490">branding</a> anyone who disagreed with him as &#8220;racist,&#8221; exacerbated Detroit’s descent into chaos. In 1992, his police chief was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/08/us/former-detroit-police-chief-convicted-of-embezzlement.html">convicted</a> of stealing $2.6 million from city taxpayers, even as Young defended him. Michigan’s hard-left U.S. Senator Carl Levin was Young’s chief supporter, serving as Detroit City Council president.</p>
<p>Such corruption was hardly anomalous. In 2006, former Detroit City Council member Alonzo Bates was <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20130311/NEWS0102/130311042/Elected-leaders-their-legal-issues">convicted</a> of putting a relative on the payroll, for which he served a 33-month sentence. In 2009, City Council member Monica Conyers, wife of  U.S. House Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who has <a href="http://newsone.com/1771615/john-conyers-says-possible-detroit-takeover-racist/">represented</a> Detroit for 47 years, pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges and served 27 months in a federal prison. As for former Mayor Kwami Kilpatrick, his corruption wasn&#8217;t limited to the aforementioned conviction. In 2008, he <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/us/05detroit.html?pagewanted=2&amp;ref=kwamemkilpatrick">agreed</a> to resign and spend 120 days in jail for two felony counts of obstruction of justice. In 2010, he was <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05/25/judge-sentences-detroit-mayor-kwame-kilpatrick-years-prison/">sentenced</a> to up to five years for violating the terms of his probation stemming from the 2008 conviction.</p>
<p>In 2012, Kilpatrick was also linked to a dubious pension deal involving ex-Detroit Treasurer and Kilpatrick appointee Jeffrey Beasley, who has been <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20120229/NEWS01/202290401/Detroit-corruption-probe-Ex-treasurer-indicted-accused-of-taking-bribes-kickbacks">indicted</a> by the federal government for taking bribes and kickbacks as part of a corrupt bargain that cost two Detroit pension funds $84 million in investment losses. Last month, two more city officials, pension fund lawyer Ronald Zajac, and Detroit Police and Fire pension trustee Paul Stewart, were also <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130321/METRO01/303210371">indicted</a> in the widening pension fund bribery scandal. Also in 2012, Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20121008/NEWS01/121008028">retired</a> as the result of a scandal surrounding his sexual involvement with a female officer in the department.</p>
<p>Along with the corruption, Detroit has paid a heavy price for an economy that has been based on Democrats’ ideas of governance that derive from &#8220;fairness&#8221; and &#8220;social justice.&#8221; The city stands on the brink of bankruptcy with a $327 million <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/02/20/detroit-is-in-financial-emergency-state-appointed-review-finds/">budget deficit</a> that could have been $900 million if the city hadn&#8217;t borrowed lots of money. It has an overall liability of $14 billion, that includes an underfunded (read: “looted”) municipal pension fund. The city population, as high as 1.8 million in the 1950s, has <a href="http://cnsnews.com/blog/terence-p-jeffrey/obamas-america-will-become-detroit">declined</a> to just over 700,000 currently. Only 54.3 percent of Detroit residents who could be part of the labor force participate in it, meaning they have a job or looking for one. The other 45.7 percent don&#8217;t have a job and aren&#8217;t looking. And 15.3 percent of those employed have jobs with the government.</p>
<p>Detroit is in free-fall socially as well. 34.5 percent of residents are on food stamps. Only 9.2 percent are married couple families with children under 18. Single parent households run by females account for 29.7 percent of Detroit&#8217;s population, and the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the year prior to the Census Bureau survey was more than 75 percent.</p>
<p>Of the 363,281 housing units in Detroit, 99,072 are vacant, and <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130221/METRO01/302210375">47 percent</a> of Detroit property owners have paid their property taxes in a city whose 139 square miles have been broken down into <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20120520/NEWS01/205200478/In-Detroit-s-distressed-areas-the-neighbors-left-and-now-services-disappear">four</a> separate categories of deterioration that determine the level of city services they receive &#8212; if they receive any at all.</p>
<p>To top it all off, Detroit was the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2012/10/18/detroit-tops-the-2012-list-of-americas-most-dangerous-cities/">most dangerous</a> city in America in 2012, with a murder rate <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/business/stuck-reverse-detroit-edges-closer-bankruptcy-1C8149698">11 times</a> that of New York City.</p>
<p>Despite these daunting realities, Detroit residents remained hitched to the Democratic Party wagon. In the 2012 election, Barack Obama received <a href="http://www.punditpress.com/2012/11/obama-received-astounding-98-of-vote-in.html">98 percent</a> of the vote, and other Democrats, including <a href="http://www.bet.com/news/features/vote-2012/news/politics/2012/11/12/detroit-voters-elect-a-convicted-felon-to-serve-in-state-legislature.html">convicted felon</a> Brain Banks, were elected with <a href="http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012-election-results/">large margins</a> of victory.</p>
<p>Emergency financial manager Kevyn Orr has been tasked with finding a way to save Detroit from bankruptcy. Yet even if he does somehow succeed, it would likely be a Pyrrhic victory at best. As long as Detroit residents continue voting for a Democratic Party whose ideology has run their city into the ground, bankruptcy will come &#8212; sooner or later.</p>
<p><strong>Previous articles in the series:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/toxic-government-by-democrats-baltimore/">Toxic Government by Democrats: Baltimore</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/toxic-government-by-democrats-minneapolis/">Toxic Government by Democrats: Minneapolis</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/toxic-government-by-democrats-chicago/">Toxic Government by Democrats: Chicago.</a></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>Toxic Government by Democrats: Baltimore</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/toxic-government-by-democrats-baltimore/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=toxic-government-by-democrats-baltimore</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Apr 2013 04:46:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Baltimore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The poorest cities in America have one thing in common: decades of monolithic control by the Left. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/toxic-government-by-democrats-baltimore/baltimorepoverty/" rel="attachment wp-att-184745"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-184745" title="baltimorepoverty" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/baltimorepoverty-450x307.jpg" alt="" width="284" height="194" /></a>Editor’s note: The following is the second in a series of articles that will expose the misery of life in America’s poorest cities, all of which have one thing in common: they are controlled exclusively by Democrats. Each article presented by FrontPage will reveal how the production of mass urban poverty is much more than just a failure of leadership, but a means of political survival for the Left. To read the background pamphlet by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, “Government Versus The People,” click <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/upload/pamphlets/government-vs-the-people.pdf">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The city of Baltimore, Maryland, which in the <a href="http://www.nathanielturner.com/robertmooreand1199union3.htm">1950s</a> was an employment mecca for a number of thriving industries, has been governed exclusively by Democratic mayors and city councils since 1967. William Donald Schaefer, who served as Baltimore&#8217;s mayor from <a href="http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/001400/001489/html/msa01489.html">1971-87</a>, helped set the stage for economic decline in his city by championing an ever-expanding public sector coupled with extensive government regulation of private business enterprises. Moreover, he relied heavily on federal grants and city bonds to finance a host of development projects throughout Baltimore. As the <em>City Journal</em> <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_can_mayor_omalley.html">reports</a>: “[W]hen those monies proved insufficient, [Schaefer] &#8230; created his own city bank to seed development: the Loan and Guarantee Fund. The fund financed itself by selling city property and then leasing it back to itself, and by selling bonds that would stick future taxpayers with much of the bill.”</p>
<p>Rampant with corruption, Schaefer&#8217;s administration virtually made an art form of cronyism. Once, for instance, the mayor&#8217;s finance director, Charles Benton, successfully <a href="http://citypaper.com/news/saint-or-sinner-1.1144574">steered</a> $5.6 million in public money to a repair project on an apartment building owned by a Schaefer political supporter. On another occasion, Benton directed more than $4 million in taxpayer funds to the refurbishing of a hotel owned by a longtime friend of the mayor. Every penny of that money was wasted, however, as the hotel went bankrupt shortly after Schaefer&#8217;s mayoral tenure ended.</p>
<p>In 1986 the Brookings Institution <a href="http://citypaper.com/news/saint-or-sinner-1.1144574">reported</a> that “only projects that had been endorsed by [Schaefer] were funded, and only the neighborhoods that were most loyal to City Hall got community grants.” In dozens of cases, Schaefer&#8217;s administration took federal funds that had been earmarked for poor people and diverted them to other, more politically expedient, uses. As the Baltimore <em>City Paper</em> <a href="http://citypaper.com/news/saint-or-sinner-1.1144574">reveals</a>: “Fifteen million dollars from a program to provide rent subsidies to low-income families was used to build housing for the elderly (a reliable voting bloc). Another $15 million earmarked for disadvantaged schoolchildren was spent on other items, including the salaries of [politically influential] school bureaucrats.”</p>
<p>In the 1970s, Schaefer&#8217;s deputy public works director was <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_can_mayor_omalley.html">incarcerated</a> for rigging bids on city contracts. And in the &#8217;80s, the federal government shut down the city&#8217;s Urban Development Action Grants program due to its many abuses.</p>
<p>In 1987 Schaefer was succeeded as mayor by Kurt Schmoke, who continued his predecessor&#8217;s policy of extracting as much taxpayer money as possible from Annapolis and Washington, respectively. By 2001, such state and federal <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_can_mayor_omalley.html">subsidies</a> accounted for an incredible 40% of Baltimore&#8217;s operating budget.</p>
<p>Thanks to Schmoke&#8217;s <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_can_mayor_omalley.html">close ties</a> to Clinton administration officials, the federal gravy train, bearing large cargoes of cash to fund city programs, made frequent stops in Baltimore. One such program (bankrolled by a <a href="http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-2240408.html">$100 million</a> federal grant) was the <a href="http://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc3500/sc3520/011600/011606/html/schmoke.html">establishment</a> of an <a href="http://carnegie.org/about-us/board-of-directors/kurt-l-schmoke/">Empowerment Zone</a> that <a href="http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/2416/index.php">failed</a> miserably to achieve its stated goal of spurring job creation. That boondoggle, however, did not hurt Schmoke at all politically. Rather, the influx of (wasted) federal funds helped convince Baltimore voters to re-elect him in 1991, and again in 1995.</p>
<p>Like Schaefer before him, Mayor Schmoke was no stranger to corruption. In the mid-1990s, for instance, federal officials were <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_can_mayor_omalley.html">alerted</a> to the fact that Schmoke&#8217;s housing authority had squandered—via no-bid contracts, massive cost overruns, and blatant cronyism—some $25.6 million in <a href="http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD">HUD</a> funds that were intended for housing repairs.</p>
<p>Even as the nation flourished economically in the 1990s, Baltimore’s economy lost at least 58,000 jobs. The city&#8217;s <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_can_mayor_omalley.html">unemployment</a> rate was twice that of the rest of Maryland. Part of the problem was the fact that Baltimore&#8217;s property taxes were the highest in the state, causing many of the city’s leading private-sector firms to relocate in the more business-friendly suburbs.</p>
<p>While Baltimore&#8217;s industry and finance were in steep decline, crime was on the rise—thanks, in large measure, to Schmoke&#8217;s <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_1_can_mayor_omalley.html">ineffective</a>, soft-on-drugs policing strategy. By the end of the 1990s, the murder rate in Baltimore was six times higher than in New York (where a <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1633">variety</a> of proactive policing <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1629">practices</a> had reduced violent crime dramatically). Three-fourths of Baltimore&#8217;s homicides were drug-related—symptoms of an ongoing, brutal drug-turf war that was engulfing many nonwhite neighborhoods. Police, meanwhile, were frustrated by the fact that the drug dealers whom they arrested were routinely released a short time later, free to resume their criminal activities on the streets.</p>
<p>Yet another Democrat, Martin O’Malley, won Baltimore&#8217;s 1999 mayoral race by campaigning on a law-and-order platform, but ultimately he was unable to fulfill his crime-reduction pledges. <a href="http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=12855">In 2005</a>, criminal-justice statistics for Baltimore indicated that 17.6 violent crimes were committed for every 1,000 residents—a figure almost 80% higher than America&#8217;s big-city average. Baltimore&#8217;s murder rate, meanwhile, was nearly three times higher than the big-city average—just as it had been when O&#8217;Malley first took office in 2000. Robberies and aggravated assaults (including shootings) had dropped slightly since 2000, but were still more than twice as prevalent as in other large American cities.</p>
<p>Baltimore&#8217;s economy also lagged under O&#8217;Malley. Between 2001 and 2004, the city <a href="http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=12855">lost</a> nearly 5% of all its jobs, including a quarter of its manufacturing jobs, 15% of its banking and finance jobs, and 5% of its retail jobs.</p>
<p>In 2007 O&#8217;Malley was succeeded as mayor by Sheila Dixon, who <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/former-baltimore-mayor-sheila-dixon-violates-probation">resigned</a> three years later when convicted of embezzlement and perjury charges. Replacing Dixon was city council president Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. By the start of 2013, Baltimore&#8217;s population stood at <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/02/06/city-baltimore-is-on-path-to-financial-ruin-report-says/">619,000</a>—a 35% dropoff from its peak of 950,000 six decades earlier, when it had been an economically and socially healthy city.</p>
<p>Baltimore&#8217;s experience has played itself out in many U.S. cities: Democratic tax-and-spend policies, coupled with toothless and ineffective approaches to crime, destroy the quality of life and leave people no choice but to uproot themselves and move away.<br />
<strong>Previous articles in the series:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/toxic-government-by-democrats-minneapolis/">Toxic Government by Democrats: Minneapolis</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>The Left&#8217;s War on Minorities, the Poor, and Working Americans</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/discover-the-networks/the-lefts-war-on-minorities-the-poor-and-working-americans/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-war-on-minorities-the-poor-and-working-americans</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Apr 2013 04:41:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Discover The Networks]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[DTN Profiles]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minorities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Left's war]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[working americans]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[ Overview of a special section of Discover the Networks.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/discover-the-networks/the-lefts-war-on-minorities-the-poor-and-working-americans/reid-pelosi-obama/" rel="attachment wp-att-184393"><img class=" wp-image-184393 alignleft" title="Reid-pelosi-obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Reid-pelosi-obama-450x195.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="137" /></a>The “progressive” policies of the socialist left, under the banners of “social justice,” “equality,” and “compassion,” have inflicted catastrophe in many forms—poverty, moral decline, criminality, violence, illness, and death—upon countless millions of people. The programs and policies that led to these disastrous outcomes were often promoted by “progressives” as expressions of high-minded “liberal” idealism that promised to improve the living conditions not only of people in great need, but also of those in the middle class.</p>
<p>Progressives view their own prescriptions for all manner of social ills—racism, sexism, homophobia, intolerance, greed, alienation—as solutions uniquely rooted in enlightenment and decency. By contrast, they portray conservative social policy as the outgrowth of selfish greed and mean-spiritedness. But the solutions they have advanced in the form of social and ideological crusades, often prosecuted with messianic zeal, have actually brought immense, needless suffering to the very same “victims” in whose names they have acted.</p>
<p>We have devoted <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1681">a special section</a> of DiscoverTheNetworks &#8211; titled &#8220;<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1681">The Left&#8217;s War on the Poor, Minorities, and Working Americans</a>&#8221; &#8211; to these realities:</p>
<ul>
<ul>
<li>how a host of progressive attitudes and public policies—particularly the ever-expanding welfare state—have devastated African Americans, miring them in decade upon decade of family breakdown, poverty, and criminal victimization;</li>
<li>how the housing crisis of 2008, which was a direct result of progressive government policies that forced lending institutions to abandon the common-sense practices they had traditionally employed, plundered the wealth of nonwhites and wiped out literally decades of economic progress they had made;</li>
<li>how the public education system, dominated by progressive ideology and unfailingly supportive of the Democratic Party, has consigned generations of blacks &amp; Hispanics to academic failure and, consequently, to lives of poverty and underachievement;</li>
<li>how the ineffective law-enforcement strategies of progressives have caused many U.S. cities to become hotbeds of criminal activity where millions of minorities are sent needlessly to early graves;</li>
<li>how the ill-advised tax-and-spend policies of progressives have turned many urban centers with large numbers of minorities and poor people in the U.S. into economic disaster areas;</li>
<li>how the ever-expanding welfare state imposes massive costs on American taxpayers; and</li>
<li>how radical gay progressives&#8217; refusal to respect traditional public-health practices needlessly caused hundreds of thousands of young homosexuals to die of AIDS.</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<p>To view this special section of DiscoverTheNetworks, <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1681">click here</a>.<strong></p>
<p>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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