<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; welfare</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/welfare/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:20:06 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>The Constitution or Good Ideas?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/the-constitution-or-good-ideas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-constitution-or-good-ideas</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/the-constitution-or-good-ideas/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2014 04:10:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[general welfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224477</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Which should we be ruled by? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/constitution-2-SC.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224491" alt="Stock Photo of the Consitution of the United States and Feather Quill" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/constitution-2-SC.jpg" width="341" height="226" /></a>Let me run through a few good ideas. I think it&#8217;s a good idea for children to eat healthful, wholesome foods. In the raising of our daughter, before-dinner treats were fresh vegetables, and after-dinner treats were mostly fruits.</p>
<p>I arrive at my gym sometime between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., at least four times a week, to lift weights and use the treadmill. During the warmer months, the treadmill is substituted by a weekly total of 40 to 60 miles on my bike. My exercise regimen is a good idea. Another good idea is to wear a bike helmet while bike riding and wear a seat belt when driving my car. Among many other good ideas is the enjoyment of two, maybe three, glasses of wine with each evening meal.</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;So what, Williams? What&#8217;s your point?&#8221; There&#8217;s no question that all of those actions, with the possible exception of the last, are indeed good ideas. As evidence that my exercise regimen is a good idea, my doctors tell me that at 78 years of age, I&#8217;m in better health and conditioning than most of their male patients many years my junior. My question to you is whether these commonly agreed-upon good ideas should become the law of the land. To be more explicit, should Congress enact a law requiring every able-bodied American to lift weights four times a week and bike 40 to 60 miles each week? Just look at all the benefits of such a law. Americans would be healthier, and that would mean lower health care costs. People would have a longer working life. Men would have the strength to protect their women and children folk from thugs. In a word, there would be no downside to the fitter population that would come from a congressional law mandating physical fitness programs. We might title such a law the &#8220;Improving American Health Act.&#8221; The law would impose fines and penalties on any able-bodied person not found to be in compliance. What congressman would have the callousness to vote against such a beneficial measure?</p>
<p>Needless to say, there would be attacks against the Improving American Health Act, launched mostly by libertarians, conservatives and some Republicans.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These people would argue that Congress has no constitutional authority to enact such a liberty-intrusive law. Their arguments would be on weak grounds. Our Constitution&#8217;s Article 1, Section 8 says, &#8220;The Congress shall have Power To &#8230; provide for the &#8230; general Welfare of the United States.&#8221; Our Constitution further empowers Congress to enact the Improving American Health Act by its Article 1, Section 3 — sometimes referred to as the commerce clause — which grants Congress the power &#8220;To regulate Commerce &#8230; among the several States.&#8221; After all, good health lends itself to more efficient interstate commerce and a larger gross domestic product. Sick Americans adversely affect interstate commerce and are a burden on economic activity.</span></p>
<p>I have no doubt that people who don&#8217;t want to see a healthier America — again, mostly libertarians, conservatives and Republicans — will bring suit before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Congress has no such authority under either the general welfare clause or the commerce clause. Would you prefer that Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., speaking for a majority, concur by saying, &#8220;This court is guided by the U.S. Constitution, and we find no constitutional authority for the Improving American Health Act, despite Congress&#8217; nonsense claims alleging authority under the general welfare and commerce clauses&#8221;?</p>
<p>Or would you prefer that Justice Roberts, speaking for the majority, engage in mental contortions in which he agrees that forcing people to exercise exceeds congressional authority under both the commerce clause and the general welfare clause but says the Improving American Health Act is indeed constitutional under Congress&#8217; taxing authority?</p>
<p>My bottom line question is: Should we be ruled by what are seen as good ideas or by what&#8217;s permissible by the U.S. Constitution?</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/the-constitution-or-good-ideas/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>9</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The War on Poverty &#8212; $21 Trillion Later</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2014 04:53:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war on poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222428</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The big fat leftist failure. Now where is the mea culpa? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/poverty.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222437" alt="poverty" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/poverty.jpg" width="280" height="280" /></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Fifty years and trillions of dollars after the &#8220;War on Poverty&#8221; was launched, poor Americans aren&#8217;t much better off, according to a study published by Republican reformers in Congress.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The War on Poverty has barely made a dent in actual poverty, states the 205-page </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://budget.house.gov/waronpoverty/">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> unveiled last month by the House Budget Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The paper, created in the hope of starting a discussion in Congress about reforming America&#8217;s bungled poor-relief programs, came out before Ryan </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/us/politics/paul-ryan-budget.html?_r=0">released</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the GOP&#8217;s new budgetary blueprint yesterday that lays out how to balance the budget in 10 years. That document calls for reducing federal government spending by $5.1 trillion over a decade largely by getting a grip on out-of-control social programs. The House Budget Committee could vote on the fiscal plan as soon as Friday. Leadership in the Democrat-dominated Senate, which hasn&#8217;t even tried to adopt a budget in recent years, isn&#8217;t planning to craft a fiscal blueprint this year, either.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The heart of the War on Poverty report is its observation that most federal poverty-alleviation programs are essentially useless or incapable of having their impact measured in the real world.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The study observes that in 1965, the poverty rate was 17.3 percent. In 2012, it was 15 percent. This means taxpayers blew a staggering $20.7 trillion over the last half century in order to achieve a paltry 2.3 percentage point decrease in poverty.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Broken down into less mind-blowing, easier-to-grasp figures, between 1965 and 2012 the average family of four spent roughly $146,000 per percentage-point drop in poverty, or $335,000 per family for the whole 2.3 percentage-point reduction.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Only the most blinkered or jaded among us in the body politic believe that sucking $9 trillion out of the private, productive economy for each single percentage-point reduction in the poverty rate constitutes an acceptable return on investment.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which brings us to the modern &#8220;progressive&#8221; Left.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Those on the Left consider the gentle statistical dip in poverty over five decades to be social progress achieved by way of holy coercive redistribution. Mere results have always been less important to the Left than intentions.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Although a sane person would consider the extremely modest reduction in poverty a humiliating defeat, left-wingers have successfully been changing the subject, hurling epithets, smearing opponents, and intimidating adversaries, all in an effort to move the discussion away from their 50 years of human misery-generating policy failures.</span></p>
<p>The Obama White House self-servingly slices and dices the statistics to portray the War on Poverty as a smashing, if flawed, success.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While the Obama administration admits that some of the government&#8217;s poverty-fighting approaches are less than optimal, President&#8217;s Obama Council of Economic Advisers issued a ringing endorsement of the War on Poverty.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50th_anniversary_cea_report_-_final_post_embargo.pdf">that body</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, poverty has declined by more than one-third since 1967. &#8220;The percent of the population in poverty when measured to include tax credits and other benefits has declined from 25.8 percent in 1967 to 16.0 percent in 2012.&#8221; Predictably, the council opines that &#8220;[d]espite real progress in the War on Poverty, there is more work to do.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>The council also obsequiously slaps President Obama on the back, praising him for taking steps to &#8220;further increase opportunity and economic security by improving key programs while ensuring greater efficiency and integrity.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It then moves from servile flattery to outright revisionism, claiming that Obama&#8217;s actions have &#8220;prevented millions of hardworking Americans from slipping into poverty during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ever the class warrior, in a December address on income inequality, Obama showed just how much a prisoner he is of his own self-imposed ideological bubble. Without mentioning the devastating impact that the high tax rates and runaway social spending he ardently supports have had on American society, the president argued that it&#8217;s all deterministic, all the fault of capitalism. He said:</span></p>
<p>&#8220;But we know that people’s frustrations run deeper than these most recent political battles. Their frustration is rooted in their own daily battles &#8212; to make ends meet, to pay for college, buy a home, save for retirement. It’s rooted in the nagging sense that no matter how hard they work, the deck is stacked against them. And it’s rooted in the fear that their kids won’t be better off than they were.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Big government, a lawless administration, and radical attacks on civil society aren&#8217;t worth worrying about, according to Obama.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is &#8220;a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain &#8212; that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is &#8220;the defining challenge of our time,&#8221; he said, even though Americans don&#8217;t give a farthing&#8217;s cuss about economic inequality. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That challenge consists of &#8220;making sure our economy </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">works</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for every working American,&#8221; Obama declared, slyly anthropomorphizing the economy, an intangible abstraction, in order to push the illusion that markets, like animals or streams, can somehow be controlled and centrally managed.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">All of this rhetorical blatherskite had its heyday in the awful 1960s, an era historian Paul Johnson correctly described as &#8220;America&#8217;s suicide attempt.&#8221; Instead of being satisfied with New Deal-era programs like Social Security, left-wingers resolved to move America even farther away from its founding ideals, fundamentally changing the country by erecting a supremely sclerotic behemoth welfare state answerable to no one.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The War on Poverty itself was a part of the massive left-wing social engineering and vote-buying scheme known as the Great Society. This war really should have been called the war on American values. As a result of misguided government policies that grew out of the War on Poverty, social evils have not only been encouraged but subsidized with taxpayer dollars. For example, out-of-whack financial incentives have caused out-of-wedlock birthrates to mushroom, as David Horowitz and John Perazzo </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/government-versus-the-people/">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in &#8220;Government vs. the People.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">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 and society at large.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In his first State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ushered in a half-century of government-incentivized sloth, indolence, dependency, and social decay. He exhorted Congress to launch a new belligerency against a perpetually ineradicable foe.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Let this session of Congress be known,&#8221; Johnson exclaimed, &#8220;as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 became the centerpiece of the new war.  It expanded the nation&#8217;s social safety hammock, turning government resources into war materiel to be used against the American system of constitutionally limited government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The War on Poverty 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 significant grants to left-wing groups to subsidize their efforts to take away our economic freedoms. Many of the EOA-created programs still exist today, including VISTA (Volunteers In Service To America), now known as AmeriCorps VISTA, Job Corps, and Head Start.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Many more excuses for handouts were created after the mid-1960s &#8212; so many, in fact, that it is difficult nowadays for poor people to tiptoe through the ever expanding minefield of government assistance unscathed. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Loud calls for yet more welfare spending continue unabated from the echo chambers of the Left every single day whether the national economy is good or bad.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These calls come even after the country has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-povertys-biggest-casualties/">saturation-bombed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> poor people with welfare over the past 50 years, to the tune of $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars, far exceeding what the U.S. has spent on every actual, non-figurative war it has fought. Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is now 16 times greater than when this phony war was declared, according to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While millions of Americans remain stuck in poverty, the House Budget Committee&#8217;s white paper from March inventories a dizzying array of expensive failed programs on which mountains of money have been lavished.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The federal government now administers at least 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans. There are dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 different food-aid programs, and over 20 housing programs. The federal government spent $799 billion on these programs in fiscal 2012 alone, according to the report.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Among more than 15 programs, more than $100 billion was spent on food aid. More than $200 billion was spent on cash aid. Spread over more than 20 programs, more than $90 billion was spent on education and job training. Almost $300 billion was spent on health care and close to $50 billion was spent on housing.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Let&#8217;s look at some of the eye-popping numbers involved in the major aid category of cash aid.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There were three federal agencies involved in spending $220 billion on cash aid in fiscal 2012. They are the Social Security Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of the Treasury.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Created in 1974, the Supplemental Security Income program provides cash benefits to elderly, blind, or disabled persons with limited income and assets. It weighs in at $50 billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), created in 1935, provides assistance to needy families. In 2012 it weighed in at $16.7 billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Earned Income Tax Credit, established in 1975, provides cash assistance to low-income working families. The EITC, which some analysts consider to be a rare federal anti-poverty success, is the largest measure in the tax code that is aimed at reducing poverty. In 2012, its budget was $59 billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Child Tax Credit, enacted in 1997, provides assistance to families with children. The IRS spent a little over $57 billion on total child credits in 2013.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Title IV-E Foster Care/Adoption Assistance program, created in 1997, helps states pay for arranging temporary homes for disadvantaged children or for facilitating their adoption. The federal government spent $6.8 billion on the program in 2012.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But most of the 92 federal poverty-alleviation programs have a mediocre to downright dreadful track record of helping people in need.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To make matters worse, over the past three years, “deep poverty” has reached its highest level on record and about 21.8 percent of children live below the poverty line, the report states. Although changing demographics and slow economic growth contribute to continued poverty, federal policies are also discouraging work. For example, a rapid increase in disability caseloads has shrunk the labor force.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;But a large problem is the &#8216;poverty trap,&#8217;&#8221; the report states. &#8220;There are so </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">many anti-poverty programs—and there is so little coordination between them—that they often work at cross purposes and penalize families for getting ahead.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Because these programs are means-tested—meaning that benefits fall as recipients earn more money—poor families face very high implicit marginal tax rates. The federal government, in effect, is discouraging them from making more money.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Congress has taken a haphazard approach to this problem; it has expanded programs and created new ones with little regard to how these changes fit into the larger effort. Rather than provide a roadmap out of poverty, Washington has created a complex web of programs that are often difficult to navigate.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Some programs work, some don&#8217;t, and with many of them, &#8220;[t]here&#8217;s little evidence either way.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Federal programs are not only failing to address problems in society; in some ways they are making the problems worse. &#8220;Changes are clearly necessary, and the first step is to evaluate what the federal government is doing right now,&#8221; the report said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But President Obama, neo-Marxist ideologue that he is, isn&#8217;t interested in making changes to anti-poverty programs. Obama is </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-budget-proposal-obama-to-seek-more-money-for-anti-poverty-programs/2014/03/03/e86cf5bc-a306-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html">seeking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $56 billion in new spending for a variety of programs expanding educational offerings for preschoolers and job training for laid-off workers. No doubt he&#8217;ll find a way to lard still more billions of dollars in so-called emergency spending onto the budget as the year progresses.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“The two sides have converged in terms of the problems they’re diagnosing,” said Alan D. Viard of the American Enterprise Institute. “But the solutions are very far apart.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><i>That</i> is an understatement.</p>
<p><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" 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 style="line-height: 1.5em;">.  </b></p>
<p><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>29</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Race-Hacks Defend Their Industry</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-race-hacks-defend-their-industry/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-race-hacks-defend-their-industry</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-race-hacks-defend-their-industry/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2014 04:20:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[industry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[race hacks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221889</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When will the Left address the real racism holding back millions of black people? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/sharpton_obama.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221900" alt="sharpton_obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/sharpton_obama-444x350.png" width="311" height="245" /></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The race-hack usual subjects recently attacked Congressman Paul Ryan for stating that the problems plaguing the poor––incarceration, fatherless children, drug abuse, rampant violence, and welfare-dependence–– are a consequence of a dysfunctional culture that scorns marriage, parenthood, education, work, and virtues like self-control. Given that blacks are overrepresented among the underclass, these unexceptional observations––regularly made by others, including Barack Obama––called down a firestorm of racialist invective on Ryan. The abuse ranged from the usual clichés about “blaming the victim” and racist “dog-whistles,” to a </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> columnist accusing Ryan of being as callous as the Brits were about the 19</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> century Irish famine. Such ad hominem calumny suggests that somebody’s ox is being gored and doesn’t like it.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The overfed “ox,” of course, is the race industry and its enablers in the federal Leviathan. It’s understandable why these grievance-mongers want to deflect attention away from Ryan’s message. Since the rise of identity politics and anti-poverty programs in the 60s, the plight of the black underclass has worsened, even as the self-selected race tribunes––professors, “activists,” lobbyists, government employees, celebrities, politicians––have flourished. Given that the moral capital financing the race industry comes from the misery and suffering of underclass blacks, race-grievance entrepreneurs must ward off solutions to those problems that challenge the narrative justifying their own power.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That narrative is simple: white racism explains the epidemic of black-on-black murder, children without fathers, lack of education, and dependence on the government dole. Since Klan-style racist violence and Jim Crow legal racism have disappeared, “racism” has to be redefined in ever more subtle manifestations like “institutional racism.” The best example of this scam is the “disparate impact” standard for identifying racism, a favorite of the current Department of Justice. By this metric, a mere statistical imbalance in minority participation in car loans or home mortgages is a sign of racism even if no intent can be proven or even identified. This kind of thinking led to the federal regulations pressuring lenders to lower qualifying standards for home loans, which was a major factor in the housing bubble and the ensuing Great Recession of 2008. The hysteria over “profiling” is another example of this racialist voodoo. Even if a group is overrepresented among perpetrators of a crime, identifying suspects from that group when such a crime occurs is automatically racist. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The biggest victims of the narrative, of course, are those minorities who bear the brunt of the misguided programs and illiberal ideologies that buttress the race industry. The some 80 anti-poverty programs have created well-paying federal and state jobs for bureaucrats and enriched public employee unions, at the same time they reward dysfunctional behavior and punish the hardworking. Rather than gaining the self-respect and sense of achievement that comes from earning one’s daily bread by one’s own efforts, the clients of what Robert Woodson </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2012/08/10/transcending-the-poverty-industry/">calls</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the “poverty-industrial complex” are kept mired in dependence, the passive recipients of largess from above, traumatized victims who, like children, must be taken care of by somebody more capable. In short, their inferiority is institutionalized by government social welfare agencies, and rationalized by the “white racism” narrative that excuses bad behavior and absolves those indulging it of all responsibility. Meanwhile the public employee unions deliver millions in campaign contributions to the politicians that work night and day maintaining and expanding these programs, despite their 70-year record of worsening the problems they have spent trillions of tax-payer dollars attempting to solve.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet the identity politics at the heart of the narrative is even more destructive because it is more insidious. At the same time that civil rights legislation and the dismantling of de jure segregation were achieved––clearing away the impediments to access to the opportunities created by the post-war expanding economy and shifting social mores––a new de facto segregation appeared in the promotion of an illiberal “black identity” the essence of which was separate and distinct from that of white people. This mythic identity embodied old cultural-Marxist critiques of the soul-killing, inhibited, sexually repressive, “air-conditioned nightmare” of white middle class American life, fused with race-hatred and the sick glamor of revolutionary violence. Elite left-wing whites enthusiastically embraced the version of black identity, for they despised a middle class they had long characterized as rubes and squares inferior to the cultural mandarins safely ensconced in tony neighborhoods and prestigious professions into which black street-rebels rarely ventured. The problem, of course, is that the virtues and habits needed for success––delayed gratification, self-control of appetite, self-discipline, and education in the skills and mores valued by the larger culture––were stigmatized as “acting white” and the acts of race betrayal.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Worse yet, this new identity was in many respects simply the recycling of the old vicious stereotypes racists had used to justify segregation and second-class status for blacks. Those slanders had characterized blacks as less rational, less able to control their impulses of sex and violence, and utterly incapable of the development of mind and character necessary for full inclusion in the dominant culture. Listen to Norman Mailer, in his influential 1957 essay “The White Negro,” reversing the poles of these stereotypes from negative to positive. Scorning bourgeois “conformity and depression,” Mailer admires the black “rebel” and “frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life,” who free of the “sophisticated inhibitions of civilization” lives “in an enormous present,” subsisting “for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.” The old racist “jungle instincts” had been transformed into black “soul,” and tropes of black inferiority once propagated in every Klan Klavern came to comprise authentic black identity. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">For disaffected whites whose social and economic privilege were secure, a black man who dressed like middle-class Americans, spoke like them, and lived by the same codes and virtues became a figure to be mocked and despised, not encouraged and praised. As a result, today comfortable whites enjoy pop-cultural caricatures of black people as glamorous gangsters and rebels who disdain the codes and protocols of respectable society, the very tools necessary for economic advancement. Meanwhile, more blacks are murdered by other blacks in one year than were lynched by racist mobs between 1882 and 1968, more black babies in New York are aborted than are born, nationally black unemployment remains twice as high as white, 1 in 3 black men will go to prison in their lifetime, the black high school graduation rate is 12 points lower than white, black male college graduation rates are nearly 25 points lower than other students––by almost every measure of social and economic well-being from infant mortality to longevity, blacks lag behind whites despite nearly 70 years and trillions of dollars worth of programs that were supposed to improve these dismal statistics.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rather than rhetorically kill messengers like Paul Ryan, those truly concerned with these problems need to address the genuine racism holding back millions of black people: a dysfunctional culture created by the unholy marriage of government social welfare entitlements and the self-interested identity politics of race hacks.</span></p>
<p><b style="line-height: 1.5em;">Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" 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 style="line-height: 1.5em;">.  </b></p>
<p><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-race-hacks-defend-their-industry/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>32</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Sacrificing the Military to Entitlements</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Mar 2014 05:30:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220088</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Achilles' heel of democracy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/hagel-defense-cuts.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220112" alt="hagel-defense-cuts" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/hagel-defense-cuts.jpg" width="267" height="210" /></a>Vladimir Putin, playing geopolitical chess while our president plays tiddlywinks, has effectively taken over Crimea. Armed men, looking suspiciously like Russian military personnel, have seized both airports and established border checkpoints decorated with Kalashnikovs and Russian flags. This comes after other armed men seized two government buildings and raised Russian flags, as the legislature appointed a pro-Russian regional leader. Meanwhile Russian military forces are gathering on the border, with Russia’s parliament unanimously voting to approve deploying troops in Ukraine.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is just Putin’s latest revanchist expansion of Russian power throughout the region. He’s been at this for a while. Remember that during the Bush administration he stole chunks of Moldova and Georgia, using the same argument of ethnic self-determination that served Hitler so well in 1938, when he made the Sudeten Germans the pretext for gobbling up Czechoslovakia. Remember when in 2005 Putin said that after the collapse of the Soviet Union––the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> century, as he put it–– “tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory”? And just as England and France did nothing except talk about Hitler’s aggression, so too the West has blustered and threatened and indulged “diplomatic engagement” in response to Putin’s depredations. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Vladimir is dismissing Obama’s flabby threat of “costs” and damage to Russia’s “standing in the international community” if Russia annexes part of Ukraine––as if the ruthless Putin, currently arming and backing the Syrian butcher Assad and the genocidal mullahs in Iran, gives a hoot about his international reputation. And after so many of Obama’s toothless “deadlines,” “red lines,” “game-changers,” “I don’t bluffs,” and “no options are off the table,” who can possibly take this administration seriously? </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But let’s not forget why the president has gotten away with this foreign policy of apology, retreat, and appeasement in a world bristling with brutal aggressors. Too many Americans are sick of military involvement abroad, with 52% in a Pew </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.people-press.org/2013/12/03/public-sees-u-s-power-declining-as-support-for-global-engagement-slips/">poll</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> last December saying the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” More important, many don’t want to spend money on defense if it means cuts to entitlements.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Consider that at the same time the Ukraine crisis was heating up, more cuts to our defense budget were announced. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel unveiled plans to reduce the army’s strength from 520,000 active-duty personnel to between 450,000 and 420,000 soldiers, eliminate the A-10 Warthog ground-support aircraft, mothball 11 Navy cruisers, put in doubt funds needed to retrofit the USS George Washington aircraft carrier, and cut 8,000 Marines from the Corps. And things could get much worse if sequestration remains in effect after 2015. Max Boot </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/02/24/defense-budget-incoherence/">points out</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the obvious dangers of these cuts: “The world is a more chaotic place than ever and we face the need to respond to a multiplicity of threats, from pirates and terrorists and narco-traffickers to rogue states like Iran and North Korea to potential great power rivals such as China and Russia to failed states such as Yemen and Syria. And not only do we have to be able to project power in traditional ways, but we also have to be able to protect new domains such as outer space and cyberspace.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Prudence dictates that we be prepared for those contingencies. But apologists for the cuts premise their arguments on a lack of money and on fantastic projections about the future. A </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> editorial approving the cuts asserts, “The truth is that the United States cannot afford the larger force indefinitely, and it doesn’t need it. The country is tired of large-scale foreign occupations and, in any case, Pentagon planners do not expect they will be necessary in the foreseeable future.” The claim that we cannot “afford” a larger military is preposterous. The same week Hagel announced the cuts, Obama proposed spending $302 billion on roads. In 2013 defense spending was 4% of GDP, while mandated entitlement spending and interest payments on the debt were 14.5%. The cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over eleven years, $1.4 trillion, was only 4% of federal spending, and nine-tenths of 1% of the $163 trillion the economy produced during that same period. Yet half the amount of the $1 trillion in the 2011 budget sequester cuts are coming from defense, while the real engines of our debt and deficits, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, were left untouched. We have the money, but we just choose to spend it on ourselves rather than on ensuring that we have the military power to defend our security and interests.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for the rosy projections that large forces will not “be necessary in the foreseeable future,” such rationalizing prognostications are dangerous, as history shows. After World War I, English military planners formulated the “Ten Year Rule,” which assumed that “the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years, and that no Expeditionary Force is required for that purpose,” as military planners announced. The defense budget was reduced by four fifths in just 2 years. In 1928, the rule was extended. There were similar reductions in shipbuilding and air power, with the result that in 1934, the whole defense budget would have been necessary just to restore the cuts to the army. Meanwhile, Germany was secretly rearming, training its officer corps, and improving its tanks and planes. By 1938-39, Germany was spending 5 times more on its military than England was. Wishful projections about future threats forget that the enemy always has a vote on what is “necessary.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> editorial, however, does hit on one accurate cause: many Americans don’t want to spend more money on defense </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">if</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it means reductions in entitlement spending. That’s why cutting the defense budget isn’t the political “third rail” that reducing Social Security or Medicare is. The preference for butter over guns, except when there are direct attacks on the homeland, is typical of democracies going back to Athens in the 4</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> century B.C. Then citizens received state-pay for serving on juries or in the Assembly, and even for attending the tragic performances and other religious festivals. Indeed, it was a capital crime even to propose transferring surplus funds to the war-fund rather than to the fund for subsidizing attendance at religious festivals.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even as Philip II of Macedon began his campaign of aggression against the southern Greek city-states, the Athenians refused to finance a defense build-up. While trying to rouse the Athenians to defend the city of Olynthus against Philip’s attacks, the great orator and defender of political freedom Demosthenes scolded the Athenians on just this score. “With regard to the supply of money,” he orated, “you have money, men of Athens; you have more than any other nation has for military purposes. But you appropriate it to yourselves, to suit yourselves.” Later historians linked Philip’s defeat of Athens and its subsequent loss of political freedom to the Athenians’ refusal to spend money on their military instead of on themselves. The historian Theopompus blamed the law financing festival attendance for making the Athenians “less courageous and more lax” and for “squandering state revenues.” Two millennia later, England’s reductions in defense spending during the twenties and thirties were similarly motivated in part by the desire to devote more funds to social welfare programs. Cuts in military spending were more politically palatable than cuts in subsidized housing.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As justified as the criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy are, we have to remember that we citizens create priorities with our votes. If we do not vote into office effective leaders who can convince us that we must prepare for future threats by building a military deterrence, and who have the political spine to back up words with deeds to make sure that deterrence works, then we must share some of the blame for the consequences sure to follow when our enemies and rivals are emboldened by our seeming acceptance of empty bluster as an instrument of foreign policy, and by our willingness to prefer butter to guns.</span></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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/sacrificing-the-military-to-entitlements/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>20</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Bill de Blasio’s Red Apple Agenda</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bill-de-blasios-red-apple-agenda/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-de-blasios-red-apple-agenda</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bill-de-blasios-red-apple-agenda/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2014 05:55:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dinkins]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state of the city]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218507</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[State of the City speech delivers a goody bag for criminals, illegal aliens and welfare voters.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BN-BL397_NYSTAT_G_20140210131313.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218509" alt="BN-BL397_NYSTAT_G_20140210131313" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BN-BL397_NYSTAT_G_20140210131313-450x347.jpg" width="315" height="243" /></a>The further left a radical politician wants to go, the more likely he is to wrap his agenda in a mainstream Republican brand. In his interview with Bill O’Reilly, Obama compared himself to Nixon (not for the reason most Republicans would expect) and in his State of the City address, Bill de Blasio compared himself to Fiorello H. La Guardia; a former Republican mayor of New York City.</span></p>
<p>The constant mentions of La Guardia, a universally popular figure, were a poor mask for a radical address filled with ugly divisive rhetoric, class warfare and schemes that will bankrupt the city.</p>
<p>If William Wilhelm Jr., aka Bill de Blasio, had been more honest, he would have compared himself to Mayor Dinkins, his old boss, who was sitting in the audience, while the first Democratic mayor since the end of the disastrous Dinkins era unveiled a package of class warfare, high taxes and ID’s for illegal aliens.</p>
<p>But Dinkins, despite being almost as friendly with Al Sharpton as De Blasio, was a moderate compared to Red Bill whose State of the City address was another call for a Red Apple. For all his many shortcomings, Dinkins had never embraced divisive rhetoric to the same extent that Bill de Blasio did in his address.</p>
<p>Instead of simply laying out a series of programs, Bill de Blasio ranted about the rich (a group that he is a member of) and announced that he wanted to discuss “the core values we share as New Yorkers pursuing progressive change.”</p>
<p>Not every New Yorker is a fan of progressive change, especially once he finds out that it means dangerous streets, high taxes, poor services and lots of buck passing, but Red Bill was really saying that non-progs who weren’t committed to his extremist program had no place in the city that his corrupt allies had taken over.</p>
<p>Instead of uniting New Yorkers, Bill de Blasio harped on his “Tale of Two Cities” story that is as much a work of fiction as the Dickens original.</p>
<p>If you believe Red Bill, the biggest problem in a city with a $70 billion annual budget is that the taxes aren’t high enough and that not enough money is being spent on education and social services.</p>
<p>“The children of this city deserve billions more in educational resources and now is the time to provide it,” De Blasio demanded.</p>
<p>The question is, how many billions more?</p>
<p>New York City debt is at $110 billion and the school budget has already hit $25 billion. Not only is the school budget for a single city bigger than the entire state budgets of Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska and South Dakota combined, but Bill de Blasio is claiming that it somehow still isn’t high enough.</p>
<p>“Raising taxes on the rich makes our commitment to our kids more than just words. It makes that commitment REAL. It makes that commitment fair,” Bill de Blasio ranted.</p>
<p>Our commitment to his kids is about the same amount of money it cost to put a man on the moon. That’s more than the average public school grad will ever do no matter how much Red Bill raises taxes. New York City already spends $19,000 per student. It can spend $190,000 per student and it still won’t match the results in Utah which spends $8,224 per student. But some things, money just can’t buy.</p>
<p>In the city budget, the Department of Social Services eats up $9.3 billion and Health and Welfare consumes another $5.5 billion. Eight billion goes to pensions for city workers; a number that will skyrocket under Bill de Blasio as his union backers cash in their support for the 150 pending municipal union contracts that he mentioned in his address.</p>
<p>“We will navigate towards a future that is progressive and fiscally responsible,” De Blasio boasted. It’s safe to say that he doesn’t know what the words “fiscally responsible” mean or that they go together with “progressive” the way that “safe” goes together with “nuclear disaster.”</p>
<p>Another $4.7 billion of the city budget already goes to debt service and $865 million goes to the City University of New York, whose total budget is $2.5 billion. In his address, Bill de Blasio pledged to incorporate a dedicated science, technology, engineering and math program into CUNY “to start preparing more graduates of our public high schools for jobs in the city’s tech industry.”</p>
<p>“Our aim is that within eight years, the majority of skilled technology-related jobs in New York City are being filled by those educated in New York City schools,” Bill de Blasio added.</p>
<p>That fanciful plan fails to take into account the fact that <a title="" href="http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/officials-most-nyc-high-school-grads-need-remedial-help-before-entering-cuny-community-colleges/" target="_blank">80% of public school grads</a> need remedial education in reading and writing to even get started at CUNY.  Unlike Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio didn’t discuss any plans for reforming schools. That’s not surprising considering what his backers in the educational unions think of reforms that would actually force them to do their jobs for a change.</p>
<p>Instead, Red Bill continued his bizarre showdown with Governor Cuomo over universal Pre-K. Cuomo had already promised universal Pre-K, but Bill de Blasio insisted that he was “asking Albany to allow New York City to tax itself – its wealthiest residents” for a program that Albany was already going to pay for.</p>
<p>The red and red-faced mayor also demanded that Cuomo give him the power to raise the minimum wage. Like most radicals, Bill de Blasio is unable to keep from picking fights even with fellow Democrats.</p>
<p>Bill de Blasio pledged to shift money from “corporate subsidies” to “tuition assistance.” Considering how huge the education budget is and that the unemployment rate is at 8 percent for the general population and at 30 percent for the young, that’s a formula for handing out a lot of useless diplomas with no jobs.</p>
<p>But that’s an economic logic that extreme leftists like Bill de Blasio are incapable of understanding.</p>
<p>Red Bill threatened Wall Street, but <a title="" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/business/finance-jobs-leave-wall-street-as-firms-cut-costs.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">it’s already shifting</a> jobs outside the city. While other cities are providing incentives to lure Wall Street firms, Bill de Blasio is giving them more reasons to leave while promising a science and technology diploma for every CUNY illiterate who can point to a picture of a cat.</p>
<p>Since all those grads without jobs will need someplace to live, Bill de Blasio repeated his promise of 200,000 units of subsidized housing for 500,000 people living at someone else’s expense to be achieved by blackmailing developers. Considering the kind of developers who will be willing to meet his demands, it’s a formula for the disastrously mismanaged housing that can be experienced in Sochi or the Bronx.</p>
<p>For those New Yorkers looking forward to the return of Dinkins era crime, Red Bill took credit for scrapping Stop and Frisk, which kept down gang violence and shootings of mainly black men, and he offered municipal ID’s to illegal aliens so that they can obtain “bank accounts.”</p>
<p>“We will protect the almost half-million undocumented New Yorkers whose voices too often go unheard,” Bill de Blasio said. But their voices were heard when they cast someone else’s votes for him.</p>
<p>Bill de Blasio boasted that shootings were down. In fact, murders had risen by 33%, an <a title="" href="http://nypost.com/2014/01/28/nyc-sees-33-percent-spike-in-murders/" target="_blank">increase that police sources</a> blamed on Red Bill’s dismantling of the successful Stop and Frisk program.</p>
<p>With his first State of the City address, Bill de Blasio had demonstrated that he had nothing to offer working people. His address was full of goodies for gang members, illegal aliens and welfare voters.  It had nothing to offer New Yorkers except more crime, taxes, bankruptcy and the fast lane to Detroit.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <em>Robert Gates’ Revelations Confirm Horowitz&#8217;s “Party of Defeat,”</em> <em>Abandoning Iraq, </em><em> How Americans Died For a War Obama Didn&#8217;t Believe In</em>, <em>The Release of Terrorist Lawyer Lynne Stewart</em>, <em></em>and much, much more:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xwp_CUfwAss" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/TywIVHDnwxc" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for <em>The Glazov Gang,</em> <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Click here</a>.</strong></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><br />
<b></b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bill-de-blasios-red-apple-agenda/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>230</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Welfare Recipients Take EBT to Disney World and Vegas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/welfare-recipients-take-ebt-to-disney-world-and-vegas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=welfare-recipients-take-ebt-to-disney-world-and-vegas</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/welfare-recipients-take-ebt-to-disney-world-and-vegas/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Jan 2014 14:27:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Maine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214984</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You're on welfare, what do you want to do now? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Obama-Disney-1-19-12.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-214985" alt="Obama-Disney-1-19-12" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Obama-Disney-1-19-12-450x344.jpg" width="450" height="344" /></a></p>
<p>You just got on welfare, what do you want to do now? <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/sarahjeanseman/2014/01/07/maine-welfare-cash-being-spent-in-disney-world-and-hawaii-n1773200?utm_source=thdailypm&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=nl_pm">Go to Disney World</a>. It&#8217;s cold out in Maine, but it&#8217;s really warm in Florida, just like back home in Somalia. Leave the polar vortex behind and catch some rays, <a href="http://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/welfare-as-transitional-living-at-disney-world/">withdraw some cash and enjoy the good life</a>.</p>
<p>Working people are paying for it.</p>
<blockquote><p>According to Department of Health and Human Service records, cash welfare users from Maine have spent $2.8 million outside of the state over the last three years – and not just in neighboring New Hampshire.</p>
<p>According to HHS records, the top recipients of Maine’s welfare cash are: New Hampshire: $1.4 million; Massachusetts: $360,000; Florida: $206,000; and New York: $100,000.</p></blockquote>
<p>New York&#8217;s tourism board really needs to do more outreach to Maine welfare recipients. We&#8217;ve got to pay for all the people Bill de Blasio is going to put on welfare. Maybe he can innovate welfare tourism.</p>
<blockquote><p>On Aug. 1, 2011, one or more EBT cards were used within a three-minute time frame to access nearly $500 in welfare cash at an ATM in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. That particular ATM happens to be located almost on top of the campus of Disney World Resorts.</p>
<p>On March 1, 2011, at 3:20AM, a Maine EBT cardholder accessed an ATM in Cape Canaveral, Florida, twice, withdrawing $400. The address of the ATM corresponds with Ron Jon Cape Caribe Resort.</p>
<p>Additional Sunshine State transactions occur at the Kennedy Space Center in Orlando, the Family Fun Center of Lakeland, and at North Miami Beach, Miami Beach, Vero Beach, Ormond Beach and Daytona Beach – all hotspots for Mainers on vacation.</p>
<p>The list goes on to include Las Vegas, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands and Four Seasons Resort Aviara in California.</p></blockquote>
<p>The Four Seasons Resort Aviara is a five star hotel. I couldn&#8217;t afford it, but I&#8217;m not a welfare recipient in Maine.</p>
<p>But don&#8217;t worry Governor Moonbeam, <a href="http://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/welfare-as-transitional-living-at-disney-world/">California is still number one</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Californians have, of course, been the undisputed 50-state champions of transitional-living-fund spending across state lines.  At a stratospheric <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/04/local/la-me-welfare-20101004">$69 million from 2007 to 2010</a>: well, can’t touch <i>that</i>, transitional-living-fund-wise.  The top out-of-state venue for poverty-stricken, transitional-living-fund-wielding Californians?  Las Vegas.  $11.8 million spent by starving California children, much of it at casinos and co-located ATMs.</p></blockquote>
<p>Remind me, wasn&#8217;t Obama lecturing CEOs about spending money in Vegas? I guess that doesn&#8217;t apply to his voting base.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/welfare-recipients-take-ebt-to-disney-world-and-vegas/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>53</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>&#8216;Labor Negotiations&#8217;: Goodyear Union Kidnaps Bosses</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/labor-negotiations-goodyear-union-kidnaps-bosses/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=labor-negotiations-goodyear-union-kidnaps-bosses</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/labor-negotiations-goodyear-union-kidnaps-bosses/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Jan 2014 05:35:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boss]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Goodyear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[kidnap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214858</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to compassionate, socialist France. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ALeqM5hwyLOxB8KUtip3H0xzodoj4Yr56Q.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214859" alt="ALeqM5hwyLOxB8KUtip3H0xzodoj4Yr56Q" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ALeqM5hwyLOxB8KUtip3H0xzodoj4Yr56Q-450x305.jpg" width="315" height="214" /></a>This weekend, when management-labor negotiations broke down at a tire factory, employees kidnapped their bosses. Where, you ask, did this happen? In the Central African Republic? Somalia? Burkina Faso? No – in Amiens, France. Turns out it&#8217;s become something of a Gallic custom.</p>
<p>It started this way: Goodyear decided last year that it wanted to wash its hands of the plant; when the French government tried to get another U.S. firm, Titan, to take it over, the company head, Maurice Taylor, Jr., checked it out, found the union confrontational and the workers unproductive loafers, and asked: “How stupid do you think we are?” Unable to find a buyer, Goodyear decided to shutter the operation – but in exchange for letting it do so, workers demanded “severance packages of 80,000 euros, or about $110,000, plus €2,500 for each year worked.” When Goodyear balked, the kidnapping commenced.</p>
<p>Welcome to <i>la belle République</i>, A.D. 2014.</p>
<p>But first a flashback to 2007. About an hour and twenty minutes into <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hHnSlZsVRI"><i>Sicko</i></a><i>, </i>his paean to socialized medicine that was released that year, Michael Moore sits at a table at what looks like a swank Paris bistro with a group of expatriate Americans – young, upscale professional types – who sing the praises of the French health-care system. As they regale him with stories about all the services they get for nothing, or next to nothing, he feigns astonishment. It&#8217;s not just the free first-class medical care. The day care, they tell him, is also terrific – and also virtually free. One of the Americans gushes that because she lives in France she can count on her kids receiving “a certain level of care, a certain education. College, I don&#8217;t have to worry about” because “you get a college education for free.” The French freebies seem well-nigh unlimited: for heaven&#8217;s sake, when you have a baby, the government will even send somebody over to cook and do your laundry for you.</p>
<p>What a country. Everything&#8217;s free! Nobody pays! There&#8217;s a thirty-five-hour work week, five weeks minimum paid vacation, and employment laws that provide almost total job security for everybody, competent or not. What could go wrong? If any of Moore&#8217;s worldly, well-heeled, presumably well educated interlocutors sees any potential problem with this system, there&#8217;s certainly no hint of it in the movie. Yes, one of them does hint that the government would cut back on the largesse if it could get away with it. But it <i>can&#8217;t </i>get away with it: as she explains, “one of the things that keep everything running here” – one of the things, she means, that keep the gravy flowing – “is that the government is afraid of the people, afraid of protests&#8230;.In France, that&#8217;s what people do.” And why, pray tell, would the government want to rein all this in? That question goes unanswered – indeed, unasked.</p>
<p>Seven years after Moore&#8217;s film, the <i>poulets</i> have<i> </i>come home to roost. Indeed, during the last year or so, even publications that one might have expected to join Moore in celebrating the French welfare state&#8217;s munificence have run stunningly frank accounts of its dire consequences. In November 2012, <i>The Economist </i>served up a <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2012/11/fran%C3%A7ois-hollande">piece</a> entitled “Battling French Decline.” Last January, under the headline “France is in free fall,” CNN <a href="http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/09/france-economy-crisis/">reported</a> on the country&#8217;s “shocking deterioration in competitiveness,” noting that its workforce boasts “the lowest number of working hours in the developed world” and the highest social expenditures (“42 euros for every 100 euros in total expenses go to social charges, versus 34 euros in Germany, 26 in the UK, and 20 in the US”). Last June, in a piece <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/economic-decline-in-france-the-failed-leadership-of-hollande-a-903732-druck.html">headlined</a> “Bonjour Tristesse: The Economic and Political Decline of France,” <i>Der Spiegel </i>described the Hexagon as being “in the grip of a crisis”: “The mood hanging over the country is depressed&#8230;.It feels as if the French model had reached an end stage.” In August, the <i>New York Times </i>asked: “can the Socialist government&#8230;pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?” And in July, predictably enough, the <i>Times</i>&#8216;s house numbskull, Roger Cohen, put an idiotically positive spin on all the bad news under the headline “France’s Glorious Malaise.” Cohen&#8217;s argument, if you can call it that, was that “French malaise, moroseness and melancholy” is “a perennial state” – “a fierce form of realism,” “a bitter wisdom,” a “badge of honor.”  Yes, he admitted, France is saddled with an unaffordable welfare state, but, hey, it&#8217;s also got “superb medicine, good education, immense beauty, the only wine worth drinking,” and so on. “Better,” he concluded, “to be miserable than a hypocrite, nauseated than naive — and far better to be morose than a fool.” Well, if he knows about anything, it&#8217;s about being a fool.</p>
<p>Then came the November-December issue of the <i>National Interest. </i>In a long essay entitled “The Decline and Fall of France,” economist Milton Ezrati stated flatly that “France&#8217;s economy&#8230;is in profound decline,” and provided the data: “More than one thousand factories have closed in France since 2009….Government in France now constitutes some 57 percent of the entire economy&#8230;.France’s share of global exports has fallen from 7 percent in 1999 to only 3 percent today&#8230;.employers in France pay the government the equivalent of almost 64 percent of their payrolls&#8230;.some 54 percent of the working-age population holds themselves outside the workforce, compared with 42 percent in Germany and 32 percent in the United States.” France, concluded Ezrati, “is beginning to resemble a less developed economy.” (Of course, a major factor in this decline – but one that hardly any of these accounts so much as mentions – is the presence within the French borders of some five to ten million Muslims, a high percentage of whom are social clients.)</p>
<p>Even after all these tales of gloom and doom, however, a <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/fall-france-225368">piece</a> published last week in the just-relaunched <i>Newsweek </i>counted as a head-turner. Under the headline “The Fall of France,” Janine di Giovanni recalled Louis XIV&#8217;s persecution of the Huguenots, “the worker bees of France,” hundreds of thousands of whom fled the realm for safer climes. Today&#8217;s France, like the Sun King&#8217;s, is suffering a “brain drain”: now that productive Frenchmen – those who actually earn a decent living by the sweat of their brow – are taxed at rates upward of 70 percent, “there has been a frantic bolt for the border by the very people who create economic growth – business leaders, innovators, creative thinkers, and top executives. They are all leaving France to develop their talents elsewhere.” Two years ago, part-time <i>Parisienne</i> Claire Berlinski <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_diarist-france.html">observed</a> in <i>City Journal </i>that while “France can no longer pay for its comfortable way of life,” Paris still felt “like a city whose troubles are far away.” No more, says di Giovanni: “the past two years have seen a steady, noticeable decline in France. There is a grayness that the heavy hand of socialism casts.” Di Giovanni, herself a British expat living in the City of Light, has been at the receiving end of a lot of the government goody bags that were acclaimed by Michael Moore&#8217;s American-expat pals, but she, unlike them, recognizes some of those perks as “pure waste”: for example, after she gave birth, the government – without even asking her if she wanted it – sprung for twice-a-week physical-therapy sessions so she could lose her baby fat. Di Giovanni summed up the whole sad situation by quoting a corporate lawyer: “France is dying a slow death. Socialism is killing it.”</p>
<p>Last fall, a cousin of mine who lives in Paris drew my attention to a story that perfectly demonstrates just how France is doing itself in. Monoprix, a big supermarket chain, wanted to extend its opening hours and do business on Sunday as well. It would&#8217;ve been good for the economy – and for the chain&#8217;s employees, who backed the idea. But France&#8217;s largest union, the extremely powerful General Confederation of Labor (CGT), threatened Monoprix with an 80,000-euro fine for every worker affected. So that was the end of that.</p>
<p>So it goes in France these days. While protecting even the most unproductive employees by making it almost impossible to fire anyone, the government punishes entrepreneurs brutally. “You&#8217;d have to be crazy to start a business here now,” my cousin lamented recently. The self-employed are drained dry: “you almost pay more to the state than what you can gross in a year,” he told me. In order to be able to declare and pay taxes on his hard-earned freelance income, he was obliged to cough up a hefty fee – around seven thousand euros the first year, ten thousand the second – for the right to identify himself as a “microenterprise.”</p>
<p>“No one in France,” wrote Berlinski two years ago, “seems to have grasped the connection between the country’s army of ceaselessly striking civil servants and the prospect of economic doom.” Well, some of them plainly grasp it now. But all too many, it appears, are – like those American expats in <i>Sicko </i>– still in heavy denial, enjoying their free ride while clinging to the illusion that it&#8217;ll go on forever. Moore, with his socialist magical thinking, was doubtless sure when he made that stupid film that if only Americans kicked up more of a fuss, as the French do, they could live like kings – getting not only free health care, but free <i>everything –</i> while not necessarily doing much of anything to pay their way. Now, however, as Ezrati notes, France, far from being able to cure everyone&#8217;s ills without cost, is itself increasingly being described as the “sick man of Europe” (which, Ezrati adds, is “quite a distinction at a moment when Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy share the hospital ward”). As it turns out, Moore was absolutely right to single out France as a splendid example for Americans. He just didn&#8217;t realize it was a <i>cautionary </i>example.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/labor-negotiations-goodyear-union-kidnaps-bosses/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Obama&#8217;s Welfare Cost More than Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Combined</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-welfare-cost-more-than-iraq-and-afghanistan-wars-combined/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-welfare-cost-more-than-iraq-and-afghanistan-wars-combined</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-welfare-cost-more-than-iraq-and-afghanistan-wars-combined/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2013 16:11:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare state]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=208376</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Over the last 5 years, the U.S. has spent about $3.7 trillion on welfare. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/obama-food-stamp-card1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-208377" alt="obama-food-stamp-card1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/obama-food-stamp-card1-450x309.jpg" width="450" height="309" /></a></p>
<p>America isn&#8217;t a warmonger. It&#8217;s a welfare-state monger.</p>
<p>Liberals like to talk about how much money we could spend on welfare if we weren&#8217;t fighting all those wars. The good news is we&#8217;re already spending more on welfare than war.</p>
<p>Average estimates of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars come out at under 4 trillion dollars. The 2011 Costs of War estimate put it at under 3 trillion dollars.</p>
<p>Meanwhile t<a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/report-us-spent-37-trillion-welfare-over-last-5-years_764582.html">he cost of the welfare state easily tops that</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>New research from the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee shows that over the last 5 years, the U.S. has spent about $3.7 trillion on welfare.</p>
<p>&#8220;We have just concluded the 5th fiscal year since President Obama took office. During those five years, the federal government has spent a total $3.7 trillion on approximately 80 different means-tested poverty and welfare programs. The common feature of means-tested assistance programs is that they are graduated based on a person’s income and, in contrast to programs like Social Security or Medicare, they are a free benefit and not paid into by the recipient.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;The enormous sum spent on means-tested assistance is nearly five times greater than the combined amount spent on NASA, education, and all federal transportation projects over that time.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>But what&#8217;s a few trillion dollars here and there.</p>
<p>Sure the National Debt has hit 17 trillion dollars. That&#8217;s our entire economy. But when we pass 20 trillion, then the fireworks will really begin. The McConnell rule will protect Republicans from outraged constituents while letting Obama raise the debt ceiling until; America is Detroit.</p>
<p>The War on Poverty will never be won. But the American economy will be soundly defeated. Capitalism will be crushed and we can all enjoy living in just another bankrupt Socialist state.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/U.S.-Has-Spent-3.7-Trillion-On-Welfare-Over-Past-5-Years.preview.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-208390" alt="U.S. Has Spent $3.7 Trillion On Welfare Over Past 5 Years.preview" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/U.S.-Has-Spent-3.7-Trillion-On-Welfare-Over-Past-5-Years.preview-450x328.jpg" width="450" height="328" /></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-welfare-cost-more-than-iraq-and-afghanistan-wars-combined/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>29</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>How Fed Food Assistance Fattens Corporate America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/how-fed-food-assistance-feeds-corporate-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-fed-food-assistance-feeds-corporate-america</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/how-fed-food-assistance-feeds-corporate-america/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Jul 2013 04:14:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[corporations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food stamps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nutrition]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[snap]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=196352</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One-third of Americans dependent on aid? Big business approves. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/101103-food_stamps.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-196365" alt="Image: Bloomberg Asks Fed Gov't For Permission To Ban Food Stamp Purchases Of Sugary Drinks" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/101103-food_stamps-450x337.jpg" width="252" height="189" /></a>On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) <a href="http://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/27001-0001-10.pdf">revealed</a> that a mind-blowing total of <i>101 million</i> Americans participate in at least one of 15 different nutrition programs made available by the federal government. That surpasses the 97.2 million of Americans who represent the total number working full time in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This is a disgraceful indictment of the Obama administration&#8217;s big-government policies. Many of those policies are pushed by corporate entities looking to feed at the government trough.</p>
<p>First, a look at the scope of the problem. Since the total population of the United States is approximately 316 million people, nearly <a href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/101m-get-food-aid-federal-gov-t-outnumber-full-time-private-sector-workers">one-in-three</a> Americans are receiving some kind of food benefits. The largest individual program is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) more commonly known as food stamps. An average of 46.7 million Americans from 22.5 million households participate in the food stamps program on a monthly basis, at a cost of $7.4 billion per month.</p>
<p>The food stamps program is followed by the National School Lunch program, which is used by a daily average of 32 million students. The School Breakfast Program is used by 10.6 million per day; Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is used by 8.9 million per month; the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program was used by 7,100 schools during the 2011-2012 school year; the Child and Adult Care serves daily meals and snacks to 3.3 million children, along with 120,000 adults receiving care in nonresidential adult day care centers; the Senior Farmers’ Market is used by 864,000 low-income seniors. Other programs include the Commodity Supplemental Food Program for infants, children and the elderly; the Special Milk Program; the Summer Food Service Program for needy children during summer or when schools are closed; and the Disaster Food Assistance program, which provides people with food following any number of emergencies.</p>
<p>Four more programs round out the list, including the Commodity Program (Schools-Child Nutrition), costing $1.1 billion in FY 2012; the Emergency Food Assistance Program at $483 million in FY 2011; the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations used by 276 tribes; and the WIC Farmers&#8217; Market Nutrition Program, which provides coupons to 1.9 million women infants and children.</p>
<p>In a remarkable understatement, the USDA notes that the Food and Nutrition Service’s (FNS) nutrition programs &#8220;may be duplicating its efforts by providing total benefits that exceed 100 percent of daily nutritional needs to program participants when households and/or individuals participate in more than one of FNS’ nutrition programs simultaneously.&#8221;</p>
<p>This kind of massive dependency is a boon to corporate America. In 2011, YUM! Brands, the parent company of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver&#8217;s and A&amp;W <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-17/yum-s-campaign-to-allow-food-stamps-at-kfc-runs-afoul-of-usda.html">lobbied</a> government officials in Ohio Pennsylvania, Florida and Kentucky to allow its restaurants to participate in the SNAP program. “Everybody wants to get a piece of that action,” Marion Nestle, a New York University professor of nutrition and public health said at the time. “Right now it’s going to grocery stores; restaurants think that’s not fair.” According to the USDA, which was against the effort, &#8220;prepared foods&#8221; are not generally available under the SNAP program. However, the 1977 Food Stamp Act allows states to grant restaurants permission to accept food stamps from the homeless, disabled or elderly.</p>
<p>As of 2012, California, Arizona and Michigan were allowing restaurant participation in SNAP on a large scale, with Florida and Rhode Island committed to pilot programs. The USDA, which voiced opposition to YUM! Brands&#8217; efforts in 2011, is seemingly of two minds on the subject. Here is a <a href="http://www.snaprmp.org/">website</a> dedicated to promoting the Restaurant Meals Program, a federally approved effort implemented at a state and county level. In 2011, the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel characterized it as a &#8220;win-win for the recipients, the restaurants, the community and the economy.&#8221;</p>
<p>Between 2005-2010, the number of businesses approved by the USDA to accept food stamps grew by 33 percent, from about 156,000 to nearly 209,000, according to USDA data. They included convenience stores, dollar discount stores, pharmacies and gas stations. When YUM! wanted a piece of the action, they were supported by the National Restaurant Association. They were opposed by the Association of Conveniences Stores, whose spokesman, Jeff Lenard, was refreshingly honest in explaining why. &#8220;If the pie&#8217;s only so big, nobody&#8217;s going to want to see the pie sliced thinner,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I&#8217;m not sure that&#8217;s in the best interest of public health.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 2012, that &#8220;pie,&#8221; which is the largest part of a farm bill Congress <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/it-s-not-really-farm-bill_652901.html">enacts</a> every five years, <a href="http://blog.heritage.org/2013/06/18/farm-bill-barely-nibbles-at-food-stamps/">cost</a> American taxpayers a record-setting $80 billion &#8212; double the $40 billion it cost only four years earlier in 2008.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the machinations of food providers with regard to the SNAP program is only half the story. A <a href="http://g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/GAI-Report-ProfitsfromPoverty-FINAL.pdf">report</a> by the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) reveals that “only three corporations have cornered the market for providing SNAP services to the needy and destitute.&#8221; Those companies are J.P. Morgan EFS, Affiliated Computer Services, and eFunds, and they provide &#8220;EBT services for 49 states and 3 US territories.&#8221; The largest player is JP Morgan, which says EBT is “a very important business to JP Morgan. It’s an important business in terms of its size and scale&#8230;Right now volumes have gone through the roof in the past couple of years or so. The good news from JP Morgan’s perspective is the infrastructure that we built has been able to cope with that increase in volume.”</p>
<p>The GAI report further illuminates the symbiotic relationship between such companies and the USDA, noting that since 2009 &#8212; when the recession officially ended and the so-called recovery began &#8212; 32 states have followed their suggestion to use Broad Based Categorical Eligibility to &#8220;increase SNAP participation and reduce State workloads.&#8221; The Broad Based Categorical Eligibility policy was implemented by the Clinton administration and heavily promoted by the Obama Administration. It allows states more &#8220;flexibility&#8221; with regard to asset and income limits, enabling more people to enroll in the program. The GAI estimates that such changes have increased food stamp participation by 70 percent from 2007 to 2011.</p>
<p>In 2009, as part of the &#8220;stimulus package,&#8221; the Obama administration also <a href="http://blog.heritage.org/2012/08/15/obama-administration-already-tossed-the-food-stamp-work-requirement/">suspended</a> the the food stamp program&#8217;s work requirements for able-bodied adults. Welfare reform enacted 1996 mandated that after three months of food stamp participation, able-bodied recipients had to be engaged in some kind of work activity for at least 20 hours a week. In 2010 and 2011, Obama requested the suspension be extended. Yet as is often the case with this president, Obama did not wait for Congress to act. The USDA issued waivers, and the number of able-bodied SNAP recipients went from 1.7 million people in 2009 to 3.9 million in 2010. Moreover, the administration has allowed the waivers to continue, despite the reality that they were only <a href="http://blog.heritage.org/2013/06/18/farm-bill-barely-nibbles-at-food-stamps/">supposed</a> to be temporary.</p>
<p>The trio of companies mentioned above certainly don&#8217;t mind. The lion&#8217;s share of their revenues come from the total number of people enrolled in the SNAP program on a monthly basis. This &#8220;Cost Per Case Month (CPCM)&#8221; is a fee for each individual enrolled in the program. It ranges from $0.65 to $1.45 depending on the state, with higher fees for the contracting company if the state combines multiple welfare services, such as SNAP and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), on a single EBT card. The corporations also make money on monthly fees garnered from Point of Sale (POS) machines that are used to make EBT purchases and transmit purchase information to the government, ATM machines that take EBT cards for cash withdrawals, card replacement fees for lost or stolen cards, and customer service charges for calls made by EBT users.</p>
<p>In other words, a combination of Americans&#8217; dependency and sense of entitlement is quite profitable. So much so that JP Morgan&#8217;s donations to members of Congressional Agriculture Committees have more than doubled, from the time they entered the EBT services market, through the 2010 election cycle. And for those who invariably associate Wall Street banks with the Republican party, it should be noted that JP Morgan contributed $345,505 to John McCain during the 2008 election cycle. Obama received $807,000 from the bank.</p>
<p>Several members of Congress and the Executive Branch have substantial holdings at JP Morgan. This might explain why legislation known as the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed by Congress in December 2010 and signed by the president. The law requires every state to add the USDA&#8217;s WIC program to their EBT cards by October 1, 2020. Since WIC services 8.9 women and children, a host of new &#8220;customers&#8221; will be added to the corporate bottom line.</p>
<p>Yet that addition comes with a heavy price. In the same way EBT cards removed the stigma that actual food stamps carried, the &#8220;stigma&#8221; of dignity itself is being removed from a large swath of the American population. And lest anyone think that all of the increased usage in food programs directly correlates to increased levels of poverty, think again. In 2002, nearly 12 percent of Americans lived below the official poverty line. In 2012, it was 15 percent. Thus, in ten years poverty increased by 25 percent, while as spending on food assistance <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/it-s-not-really-farm-bill_652901.html">grew</a> by <i>400 percent.</i> Economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute, who analyzed the disconnect in 2012, saw an ominous future. &#8220;Perhaps most troubling is that the expansion in the SNAP program means that even when our economy returns to full activity and much lower unemployment, the food stamp benefits will not decline commensurately,” she wrote. “Food stamps have become more of a permanent entitlement rather than a temporary stop-gap for the temporarily unemployed.”</p>
<p>No doubt the executives at J.P. Morgan, Affiliated Computer Services, and eFunds are thrilled.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/how-fed-food-assistance-feeds-corporate-america/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>3</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Left&#8217;s War on Father&#8217;s Day</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-elder/the-lefts-war-on-fathers-day/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-war-on-fathers-day</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-elder/the-lefts-war-on-fathers-day/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Jun 2013 04:00:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Elder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[birth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fathers Day]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[out of wedlock]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=192418</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the holiday became a yearly reminder of progressives' assault on minorities.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Black-father-and-son-from-clipart-j0428644.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-192421" alt="Lifestyles" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Black-father-and-son-from-clipart-j0428644-450x329.jpg" width="270" height="197" /></a>&#8220;We know the statistics,&#8221; said President Barack Obama, &#8220;that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Journal of Research on Adolescence found that even after controlling for varying levels of household income, kids in father-absent homes are more likely to end up in jail. And kids that never had a father in the house are the most likely to wind up behind bars.</p>
<p>Tupac Shakur, the rapper killed in an unsolved and possibly gang-related murder, once said: &#8220;I know for a fact that had I had a father, I&#8217;d have some discipline. I&#8217;d have more confidence.&#8221; Tupac admitted he began running with gangs because he wanted structure and protection: &#8220;Your mother cannot calm you down the way a man can. Your mother can&#8217;t reassure you the way a man can. My mother couldn&#8217;t show me where my manhood was. You need a man to teach you how to be a man.&#8221;</p>
<p>Where have all the fathers gone?</p>
<p>When I was a child, my father and mother often complained about &#8220;people going on the county,&#8221; a term they used for the rare young mother in our neighborhood who relied on government welfare. My parents, who often disagreed politically, saw eye-to-eye in their opposition to what they called wrongheaded incentives that encourage people to have children without marriage. &#8220;The worst thing that ever came down the pike,&#8221; Dad would often call &#8220;county money.&#8221;</p>
<p>In &#8220;Dear Father, Dear Son,&#8221; my latest book, I write about my rough, tough World War II Marine staff sergeant father, whose gruff exterior I mistook for lack of love. Born in the Jim Crow South of Athens, Ga., he was 14 at the start of the Great Depression.</p>
<p>He never knew his biological father. The man with the last name of &#8220;Elder&#8221; was one of his mother&#8217;s many boyfriends, only this one stayed in my dad&#8217;s life a little longer than the others. A physically abusive alcoholic, Elder would give my father&#8217;s mom money from his paycheck to ensure it would not blow it on booze and gambling. After a couple of days, Elder would get drunk and demand his money back. She would refuse. He would beat her and take the money back.</p>
<p>My father witnessed this ugly scenario over and over. &#8220;Why she just didn&#8217;t give him the damn money,&#8221; Dad told me, &#8220;I&#8217;ll never understand.&#8221;</p>
<p>One day, my father, then 13, came home from school, and his mom&#8217;s then-boyfriend accused him of making too much noise. They quarreled. His mother, siding with the boyfriend, threw my father out of the house. He never returned.</p>
<p>Growing up, I watched my father work two full-time jobs as a janitor. He also cooked for a rich family on the weekends and somehow managed to go to night school to get his GED. When I was 10, my father opened a small restaurant that he ran until he retired in his mid-80s. &#8220;Hard work wins,&#8221; Dad would tell my brothers and me. &#8220;The world doesn&#8217;t owe you a living.&#8221; My parents drilled into us the importance of education and self-reliance. &#8220;Go out into the world unprepared,&#8221; Dad would say, &#8220;and you&#8217;re going to get your behind kicked and your feelings hurt.&#8221;</p>
<p>Studies back up the link between the explosive growth in government welfare — begun in the &#8217;60s — and the increase of out-of-wedlock births.</p>
<p>In 1960, 5 percent of America&#8217;s children entered the world without a mother and father married to each other. By 1980 it was 18 percent, and by 2000 it had risen to 33 percent. Today, the number is 41 percent. For blacks, out-of-wedlock births have gone from 25 percent in 1965 to 73 percent today. The ethnic group with the next-highest percent of births to unmarried mothers is that of Native Americans, at 66 percent. For whites, out-of-wedlock births stand at 29 percent. For Hispanics, out-of-wedlock births are at 53 percent.</p>
<p>In every state, a woman with two children &#8220;makes&#8221; more money on welfare than were she to take a minimum wage job. The array of federal and state programs amounts to over $60K spent for every poor household. But because of costs, the recipient household ends up getting far less.</p>
<p>How do we know that the welfare state creates disincentives that hurt the people we are trying to help? They tell us. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times asked whether poor women &#8220;often&#8221; have children to get additional benefits. Most of the non-poor respondents said no. When the same question was asked of the poor, however, 64 percent said yes.</p>
<p>People, of course, need help. A humane society does not ignore those who cannot or even will not fend for themselves. But good faith does not substitute for sound policy. The welfare state is an assault on families.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-elder/the-lefts-war-on-fathers-day/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>No, You Can&#8217;t Have Closed Welfare and Open Borders</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/no-you-cant-have-closed-welfare-and-open-borders/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=no-you-cant-have-closed-welfare-and-open-borders</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/no-you-cant-have-closed-welfare-and-open-borders/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:16:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Markets]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=191986</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A free market is not meant to be a suicide pact.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/welfare1.gif"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-99211" alt="welfare1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/welfare1-300x199.gif" width="300" height="199" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323728204578513151809466978.html">Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal</a> writes,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Republicans and conservatives might want to coalesce around a position of tight welfare and generous immigration rules. That is something Milton Friedman would no doubt regard as the ideal outcome. As another late great economist—William Niskanen, a member of President Reagan&#8217;s Council of Economic Advisers and chairman of the Cato Institute—once put it: &#8220;Better to build a wall around the welfare state than the country.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The trouble with that formula is that you can&#8217;t build a wall around the welfare without also building a wall around the country. You can have both or neither. But you can&#8217;t have open borders and no welfare. Not without restricting voting rights.</p>
<p>Moore&#8217;s own article mentions that Obama relaxed welfare rules. Obama&#8217;s victories and the subsequent pandering has made some conservatives obsessed with winning the votes of Mexican immigrants by relaxing immigration rules and then hoping that somehow the resulting electoral landscape will be compatible with fiscal conservatism.</p>
<p>It can&#8217;t be. It won&#8217;t be.</p>
<p><a href="http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell060413.php3#.Ua0FsUC7Pq4">Thomas Sowell responds quite</a> comprehensively to the incompatibility of these premises.</p>
<blockquote><p>Too much of our current immigration controversy is conducted in terms of abstract ideals, such as &#8220;We are a nation of immigrants.&#8221; Of course we are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of people who wear shoes. Does it follow that we should admit anybody who wears shoes?</p>
<p>The immigrants of today are very different in many ways from those who arrived here a hundred years ago. Moreover, the society in which they arrive is different. The Wall Street Journal column ends by quoting another economist who said, &#8220;Better to build a wall around the welfare state than the country.&#8221;</p>
<p>But the welfare state is already here— and, far from having a wall built around it, the welfare state is expanding in all directions by leaps and bounds. We do not have a choice between the welfare state and open borders. Anything we try to do as regards immigration laws has to be done in the context of a huge welfare state that is already a major, inescapable fact of life.</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s key here. There&#8217;s no point in arguing abstractions. The welfare state is a reality we have to deal with. And open borders only empowers it. And Sowell adds another important point about the free market and immigration&#8230;</p>
<blockquote><p>Among other facts of life utterly ignored by many advocates of de facto amnesty is that the free international movement of people is different from free international trade in goods.</p>
<p>Buying cars or cameras from other countries is not the same as admitting people from those countries or any other countries. Unlike inanimate objects, people have cultures and not all cultures are compatible with the culture in this country that has produced such benefits for the American people for so long.</p></blockquote>
<p>And quite importantly, goods do not change the composition and character of a country. People do. The importation of people who do not believe in a free market economy into a country with a free market economy would mean the end of a free market economy.</p>
<p>A free market is not meant to be a suicide pact.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/05/30/anti-immigrant-advocates-have-it-wrong-on-the-labor-market/">Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post</a> writes,</p>
<blockquote><p>It is ironic that the right-wingers who argue against protectionism, against the minimum wage, against unions (which inflate wage rates) and against Obamacare want to keep domestic wages artificially high by restricting the labor market (e.g. keeping out immigrant workers).</p></blockquote>
<p>We&#8217;ve had a great deal of immigration for a while now. Wages haven&#8217;t gone down. But real wages have as the tax bills have taken a bigger share of the paycheck.</p>
<p>Immigration won&#8217;t allow employers to pay workers less. It will however cause workers to earn less as more money is taken out of their paychecks to subsidize the welfare state and the social chaos associated with it.</p>
<p>Consider the cost of a family of Chechen immigrants from Dagestan.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/no-you-cant-have-closed-welfare-and-open-borders/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>8 Percent of Low Income Children are Enrolled as SSI Disabled</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/8-percent-of-low-income-children-are-enrolled-as-ssi-disabled/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=8-percent-of-low-income-children-are-enrolled-as-ssi-disabled</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/8-percent-of-low-income-children-are-enrolled-as-ssi-disabled/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:37:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=168645</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[About four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs — about 1 percent of all poor children. But now 55 percent of the disabilities it covers are fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation, where the diagnosis is less clear-cut. More than 1.2 million children across America — a full 8 percent of all low-income children — are now enrolled in S.S.I. as disabled, at an annual cost of more than $9 billion. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/8-percent-of-low-income-children-are-enrolled-as-ssi-disabled/obama-kids/" rel="attachment wp-att-168646"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-168646" title="obama-kids" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/obama-kids.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="267" /></a></p>
<p>Either the children of low income families have gotten really stupid or <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/opinion/sunday/kristof-profiting-from-a-childs-illiteracy.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=1&amp;">there&#8217;s something seriously wrong here</a>. And this is from the New York Times, believe it or not.</p>
<blockquote><p>Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.</p>
<p>Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it’s best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month.</p>
<p>“One of the ways you get on this program is having problems in school,” notes Richard V. Burkhauser, a Cornell University economist who co-wrote a book last year about these disability programs. “If you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It’s a terrible incentive.”</p>
<p>About four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs — about 1 percent of all poor children. But now 55 percent of the disabilities it covers are fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation, where the diagnosis is less clear-cut. More than 1.2 million children across America — a full 8 percent of all low-income children — are now enrolled in S.S.I. as disabled, at an annual cost of more than $9 billion.</p>
<p>That is a burden on taxpayers, of course, but it can be even worse for children whose families have a huge stake in their failing in school. Those kids may never recover: a 2009 study found that nearly two-thirds of these children make the transition at age 18 into S.S.I. for the adult disabled. They may never hold a job in their entire lives and are condemned to a life of poverty on the dole — and that’s the outcome of a program intended to fight poverty.</p></blockquote>
<p>They are transitioning into a lifetime of welfare parasitism. And their kids are going to be more likely to register as disabled so that the proportions keep increasing. Meanwhile schools will be pressured to help them learn, their parents will pressure them to learn less, and we&#8217;ll have a perfect storm of educational and social welfare spending.</p>
<blockquote><p>Of American families living in poverty today, 8 out of 10 have air-conditioning, and a majority have a washing machine and dryer. Nearly all have microwave ovens. What they don’t have is hope.</p></blockquote>
<p>What they don&#8217;t have is a reason to break the cycle. On the one hand government fosters dependency, on the other hand its regulations make it harder for businesses to function and add to the expenses of owners and workers until it becomes easier not to work and not to hire.</p>
<p>The New York Times, predictably, can only offer more social welfare spending and supervision, little realizing that Big Brother is the problem here.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/8-percent-of-low-income-children-are-enrolled-as-ssi-disabled/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Nation of Takers Hurtles Toward the Fiscal Abyss</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/a-nation-of-takers-hurtles-toward-the-fiscal-abyss/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-nation-of-takers-hurtles-toward-the-fiscal-abyss</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/a-nation-of-takers-hurtles-toward-the-fiscal-abyss/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:58:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fiscal cliff]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicaid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Social Security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=168573</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama shows the future of the country is the last thing on his mind. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/a-nation-of-takers-hurtles-toward-the-fiscal-abyss/money-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-168580"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-168580" title="Money" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Money1-450x337.jpg" alt="" width="270" height="202" /></a>The on-going negotiations over avoiding the tax hikes and spending cuts we call the “fiscal cliff” are the simply the latest act in a farce of self-serving political denial. For decades now both parties have overseen and nurtured the expansion of the entitlement state all the while ignoring the slow-motion economic implosion whose predictable end can be seen today in a bankrupt Greece currently surviving on EU handouts. But American voters and politicians are so marinated in expectations of endless federal and state largess that modest reductions in spending, such as those proposed earlier this year by Congressman Paul Ryan, are attacked as draconian “cuts” that will “shred” the safety net and throw millions into Dickensian penury.</p>
<p>And make no mistake. The “cliff” might not be reached in January, even without a deal. But it’s still waiting down the road. Baby Boomers, 75 million strong, are retiring at a rate of 200,000 a month, and they can expect to live on average until 84 if they make it to the retirement age of 65. The two big drivers of entitlement spending, Social Security and Medicare, weren’t designed to transfer money to retirees for so long, or pay for artificial knees and hips for Boomers who want to be active in their 70s and 80s. If left unreformed, spending just on Social Security and Medicare will eat up 14% of GDP in 40 years, necessitating even more federal borrowing than the 40 cents currently borrowed for every dollar the feds spend. That’s not a cliff, that’s an economic abyss.</p>
<p>Reining in entitlement spending, then, is the major problem that everybody needs to focus on. And a good place to start is Nicholas Eberstadt’s <em>A Nation of Takers</em>. Eberstadt’s grim documentation of the reckless expansion of what he calls the “vast and colossal empire of entitlement payments that it [the state] protects, manages, and finances,” and his analysis of the ill effects such transfers have had on the American character should be read by everyone serious about the fiscal threats to our way of life.</p>
<p>Redistributing wealth through programs like income maintenance, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment insurance has become the federal government’s most important function. This development would have astonished the Founders, who codified national security and defense as the national government’s primary role. And this momentous shift has led to an accelerating number of Americans on some sort of dole. In the early 1980s, 30% of Americans received at least one government benefit. By 2011 just over 49% were. The costs of this increase have accelerated as well. In 1960, entitlement spending by government at all levels was $24 billion in today’s dollars. In 2011, the cost was almost $2.2 trillion. As Eberstadt glumly prophesizes, we are heading for “the day in which entitlement spending comes to exceed all other activities of all levels and branches of the U.S. government.”</p>
<p>The costs of such profligacy, however, are more than economic. These wealth transfers have had deleterious effects on traditional American character. Observers of the American character traditionally had remarked on what Eberstadt describes as a “fierce and principled independence” and “proud self-reliance.” This independence extended to financial self-reliance as well. Americans “viewed themselves as accountable for their own situation through their own achievements in an environment bursting with opportunity,” Eberstadt writes, and had “an affinity for personal enterprise and industry” and a “horror of dependency and contempt for anything that smacked of a mendicant mentality.” Accepting help or handouts was considered “an affront to their dignity and independence.” These are the strengths of character and virtue that have created the richest, freest, and most powerful nation in world history. But the federal government’s ever- increasing handouts––which these days are not considered signs of shame, but deserved legal and civil rights––are eroding these virtues.</p>
<p>This corruption of character insidiously spreads throughout the culture, enabling politicians to expand these benefits in order to create electoral clients. One malign result has been what Eberstadt calls the “male flight from work.” The government has replaced husbands and fathers as providers, leading to “the proliferation of fatherless families and an epidemic of illegitimacy.” This change can be seen in the decline of men participating in the labor force. Between 1948 and 2011, male labor force participation sank from 89% to 73%, a drop twice as large as the number of men who left the workforce because of the Great Recession. For more and more Americans food stamps and welfare have replaced the wages of a working male.</p>
<p>Or consider the abuse of Social Security disability insurance. In 1960, Eberstadt reports, an average of 455,000 workers were receiving monthly disability payments. In 2010, 8.2 million were, four times the number of people on welfare. Worse yet, the average age of those receiving disability insurance has lowered. In 2011 the rate of workers in their thirties and forties receiving disability was more than double that of the same cohort in 1960. Given the big improvements in health care and longevity during that time, these increases do not reflect a more dangerous work environment. What happened was the addition of “mood disorders” and “musculo-skeletal” ailments to the diagnostic categories that made workers eligible for disability. Since doctors can’t disprove the existence of potentially subjective conditions like “depression” or “back pain,” we shouldn’t be surprised that these days nearly half of all disability claims are based on these ailments.</p>
<p>The costs of food stamps, welfare, or disability insurance, however, are spare change compared to the monstrous costs of Social Security and Medicare, which in fiscal 2012 totaled $1.2 trillion, 37% of non-interest federal spending. Nor are these programs “earned” through payroll taxes that were saved. As economist Robert Samuelson wrote recently, “But they weren’t saved; they paid the benefits of earlier retirees. Even had they been saved and earned interest, they typically wouldn’t cover lifetime Social Security and Medicare benefits, estimate the Urban Institute’s C. Eugene Steuerle and Caleb Quakenbush. A couple with average wages retiring in 2010 would receive $966,000 in benefits against taxes of $722,000.” Rather than endowments funded by worker contributions, Eberstadt writes, Social Security and Medicare funding are “accounting contrivances built upon a mountain of future IOUs.” And this problem will only worsen as the number of retired Boomers reaches 72 million by 2030. According to the Heritage Foundation, Social Security alone is projected to run a $344 billion deficit in 2035. Looking farther down the road, the unfunded liabilities of Social Security for the next 75 years is $8.6 trillion, and those of Medicare from $27 to $37 trillion.</p>
<p>The monstrous deficits and debt the government has been amassing for four decades correspond in part to the need to borrow money to pay for these two programs. But this downward spiral of increasing entitlements and growing debt––which in Obama’s first term has increased 83%–– will damage more than just our budget and character. We have already seen defense budgets targeted for reductions, even though we spend 3 times as much on entitlements as on defense. When President Eisenhower in 1961 warned of the “military-industrial complex,” the ratio was 2-1 in favor of defense spending, which represented 9.4% of GDP compared to 4.8% in 2010. And we are looking at another half a trillion of cuts over the next decade, on top of the half a trillion Obama has already slashed. The point is not that we can’t afford to spend more on defense, but that we have other priorities. As Eberstadt notes, “By the calculus of American policymakers today, then, U.S. defense capabilities seem to be the primary area sacrificed to make the world safe for the unrestrained growth of American entitlements.”</p>
<p>Yet despite this looming disaster, President Obama and the Democrats have taken entitlement reform off the table in the current negotiations over the “fiscal cliff.” Indeed, Obama’s latest offer included $600 billion in vague future spending cuts, but $200 billion in new spending along with $1.6 trillion in new taxes. According to economist <a href="http://keithhennessey.com/2012/12/03/potus-offer-1/">Keith Hennessy</a>, in reality this offer would lead to a spending <em>increase</em>, not a reduction. Clearly, Obama is not interested in heading off the fiscal disaster Eberstadt documents. Rather, he is pursuing the old progressive dream of income equality through the redistribution of wealth. Unfortunately, for future generations that dream will be a nightmare of bankruptcy at home and compromised national security abroad.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/a-nation-of-takers-hurtles-toward-the-fiscal-abyss/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>80</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>America Nears the Demographic Tipping Point</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/america-nears-the-demographic-tipping-point/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=america-nears-the-demographic-tipping-point</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/america-nears-the-demographic-tipping-point/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Dec 2012 04:28:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[demographics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=168170</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The youth vote doesn't hold a candle to the effects of immigration. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/america-nears-the-demographic-tipping-point/crowd-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-168183"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-168183" title="crowd" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/crowd.jpg" alt="" width="248" height="186" /></a>I apologize to America&#8217;s young people, whose dashed dreams and dim employment prospects I had laughed at, believing these to be a direct result of their voting for Obama.</p>
<p>On closer examination, it turns out that young voters, aged 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Romney. But only the white ones.</p>
<p>According to Pew Research, 54 percent of white voters under 30 voted for Romney and only 41 percent for Obama. That&#8217;s the same percentage Reagan got from the entire white population in 1980. Even the Lena Dunham demographic &#8212; white women under 30 &#8212; slightly favored Romney.</p>
<p>Reagan got just 43 percent of young voters in 1980 &#8212; and that was when whites were 88 percent of the electorate. Only 58 percent of today&#8217;s under-30 vote is white and it&#8217;s shrinking daily.</p>
<p>What the youth vote shows is not that young people are nitwits who deserve lives of misery and joblessness, as I had previously believed, but that America is hitting the tipping point on our immigration policy.</p>
<p>The youth vote is a snapshot of elections to come if nothing is done to reverse the deluge of unskilled immigrants pouring into the country as a result of Ted Kennedy&#8217;s 1965 immigration act. Eighty-five percent of legal immigrants since 1968 have come from the Third World. A majority of them are in need of government assistance.</p>
<p>Whites are 76 percent of the electorate over the age of 30 and only 58 percent of the electorate under 30. Obama won the &#8220;youth vote&#8221; because it is the knife&#8217;s edge of a demographic shift, not because he offered the kids free tuition and contraception (which they don&#8217;t need because it&#8217;s hard to have sex when you&#8217;re living with your parents at 27).</p>
<p>In 1980, Hispanics were only 2 percent of the population, and they tended to be educated, skilled workers who got married, raised their children in two-parent families and sent their kids to college before they, too, got married and had kids. (In that order.)</p>
<p>That profile has nothing to do with recent Hispanic immigrants, who &#8212; because of phony &#8220;family reunification&#8221; rules &#8212; are the poorest of the world&#8217;s poor.</p>
<p>More than half of all babies born to Hispanic women today are illegitimate. As Heather MacDonald has shown, the birthrate of Hispanic women is twice that of the rest of the population, and their unwed birthrate is one and a half times that of blacks.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s a lot of government dependents coming down the pike. No amount of &#8220;reaching out&#8221; to the Hispanic community, effective &#8220;messaging&#8221; or Reagan&#8217;s &#8220;optimism&#8221; is going to turn Mexico&#8217;s underclass into Republicans.</p>
<p>Any election analysis that doesn&#8217;t deal with the implacable fact of America&#8217;s changing demographics is bound to be wrong.</p>
<p>Perhaps the reason elections maven Michael Barone was so shockingly off in his election prediction this year was that, in the biggest mistake of his career, Barone has been assuring us for years that most of these Third World immigrants pouring into the country would go the way of Italian immigrants and become Republicans. They&#8217;re hardworking! They have family values!</p>
<p>Maybe at first, but not after coming here, having illegitimate children and going on welfare.</p>
<p>Charles Murray recently pointed out that &#8212; contrary to stereotype &#8212; Hispanics are less likely to be married, less likely to go to church, more supportive of gay marriage and less likely to call themselves &#8220;conservative&#8221; than other Americans.</p>
<p>Rather than being more hardworking than Americans, Hispanics actually work about the same as others, or, in the case of Hispanic women, less.</p>
<p>It seems otherwise, Murray says, because the only Hispanics we see are the ones who are working &#8212; in our homes, neighborhoods and businesses. &#8220;That&#8217;s the way that almost all Anglos in the political chattering class come in contact with Latinos,&#8221; he notes. &#8220;Of course they look like model Americans.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Black males would apparently like to work more. Nearly 20 percent of black males under 30 voted for Romney, more than three times what McCain got.)</p>
<p>An article by Nate Cohn in the current New Republic argues, as the title puts it: &#8220;The GOP Has Problems With White Voters, Too.&#8221; As proof, Cohn cites Jefferson County, Colo.; Loudoun County, Va.; Wake County, N.C.; and Somerset County, N.J., all of which went Republican in presidential elections from 1968 through 2004, but which Romney lost in 2012.</p>
<p>Smelling a rat, I checked the demographic shifts in these counties from the 2000 to the 2010 census. In each one, there has been a noticeable influx of Hispanics (and Asians, who also vote Democrat), diminishing &#8220;the white vote&#8221; that Cohn claims Republicans are losing.</p>
<p>Between the 2000 and 2010 census, for example, the white population of Jefferson County declined from more than 90 percent to less than 80 percent, while the Hispanic population more than doubled, from 6 percent to 14 percent.</p>
<p>In Loudoun County, the Asian population tripled from 5 percent to 15 percent and the Hispanic population doubled from 6 percent to 12 percent. Meanwhile, whites plummeted from 83 percent to 69 percent of the population.</p>
<p>Similarly, Wake County shifted from 74 percent white to 66 percent white in the past decade, while the Hispanic population doubled, from 5 percent to 10 percent, and the black population stayed even at about 20 percent.</p>
<p>In Somerset County, the Hispanic population grew by 63 percent and the Asian population grew by 83 percent since 2000. The number of whites has remained steady, resulting in a population that is now just 62 percent white.</p>
<p>These were the counties chosen by Cohn, not me, to show that Republicans are losing &#8220;the white vote.&#8221; Except they&#8217;re not so white, anymore. With blacks, Asians and Hispanics voting 93 percent, 73 percent and 71 percent for Obama, Republicans have to do more than just win the white vote. They have to run the table.</p>
<p>Romney got a larger percentage of the white vote than Reagan did in 1980. That&#8217;s just not enough anymore.</p>
<p>Ironically, Romney was the first Republican presidential candidate in a long time not conspiring with the elites to make America a dumping ground for the world&#8217;s welfare cases. Conservatives who denounced Romney as a &#8220;RINO&#8221; were the ones doing the bidding of the real establishment: business, which wants cheap labor and couldn&#8217;t care less if America ceases to be the land of opportunity that everyone wanted to immigrate to in the first place.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ann-coulter/america-nears-the-demographic-tipping-point/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>53</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Problem With Multiculturalism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/the-problem-with-multiculturalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-problem-with-multiculturalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/the-problem-with-multiculturalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2012 04:48:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assimilation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[canada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Multiculturalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167025</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Opening the gates to seditionists and parasites.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/the-problem-with-multiculturalism/dorkhold-sign-freedomgotohell/" rel="attachment wp-att-167127"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167127" title="dorkhold sign freedomgotohell" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/dorkhold-sign-freedomgotohell.jpg" alt="" width="272" height="209" /></a>Most conservative observers are of the opinion that multiculturalism as it has been understood and practiced is nothing short of a social and economic disaster. And it must be said they are largely, if not entirely, correct. The multicultural project in its contemporary form suffers from two grievous flaws: the filter is too wide, allowing into the country unskilled people who are poorly equipped to participate in a modern, technologically oriented economy and who consequently become a financial burden to the nation, disproportionately swelling the welfare rolls; and, no less critical, many of these immigrant groups import the hatreds, prejudices and conflicts of their countries of origin, sequester themselves with official approval into closed or aggressive enclaves, and often cause violence and disruption in the public life of their new home. (Rape and “<a href="http://www.angelfire.com/mi/collateral/victims.html">grooming</a>” statistics <a href="http://www.israpundit.com/archives/50936">compiled</a> in the U.K. give a dataset that leaves in no doubt the ethnic make-up of the great majority of offenders.)</p>
<p>Of course, in those cases where immigrant societies, while preserving their cultural habits and religious beliefs in the private sphere, make every effort to integrate into the public domain, to respect the laws, assumptions and folkways of their host, and to contribute to the economic vitality of their adopted country—in such cases, multiculturalism may be said to have succeeded. We are, after all, a country of immigrants. Nearly everyone has an ancestor who was not born here. But in every Western country, whether in North America, Europe or parts of Australasia, there is one immigrant group whose more radical members refuse to adapt to the heritage culture, insist on the supremacy of their ideas and customs, shamelessly milk the dole, create havoc and mayhem, and pose a serious threat to the security and wellbeing of the larger population.</p>
<p>Not long ago I spent an afternoon at Kingsmere Park, the historic estate of legendary Canadian prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, near the capital city, Ottawa. It was filled with thousands of weekend visitors enjoying the vast landscaped gardens, rustic dwellings and architectural ruins erected by King, who was prone to eccentric visions of grandeur. I was, however, more impressed by the people than by the site itself. They represented a microcosm of the Canadian census, the changing and multi-hued face of the country, brown, black, white and every shade in between, some speaking languages I could not identify, others in languages that I could, and English in a bewildering variety of accents and intonations. Many were garbed in a panoply of exotic costumes. But they were Canadians, experiencing a piece of Canadian history, reading the pamphlets and brochures provided by the service personnel, pointing out objects of interest to their children, and participating in the festive atmosphere of the place.</p>
<p>I spent most of the afternoon strolling about Kingsmere fascinated by the prism of citizenship before me. But I did not see a single hijab, or burka, or abaya, or chador, or niqab, or shalwar. I did not hear a syllable of Arabic. So far as I could tell, or at any rate on that particular day, a certain ethnic cohort seemed to be entirely absent.</p>
<p>A month or so later I attended the November 11 Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa, a profoundly moving event that brought me to tears, as it did many others among a multitude so large it could not be reliably counted. The laying of wreaths, the war veterans parading by, some in wheelchairs, the busby-topped buglers, the multi-denominational speeches, the jets flying at low altitude, the 21-gun salute—all brought to mind the debt of gratitude we owed to our soldiers and relit the candle of patriotism, too often guttering or extinct, for one of the more decent and tolerant countries on the planet. Recalling my earlier experiment at Kingsmere, I began canvassing as much of the crowd as was feasible under the circumstances to determine its composition; and, as at the national site, it seemed no less chequered and comprehensive. I did note one woman in a hijab staring impassively at the proceedings, but apart from this anomaly, even after several hours, I was unable to detect a single one of her congeners. Again, a certain ethnic cohort appeared to be massively un-or under-represented.</p>
<p>The parallel memorial in Toronto, however, featured at least two Muslim women, who made their presence felt not by honoring Canada’s war dead and her living heroes but by <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/wild-video-fist-fight-breaks-out-after-anti-war-afghan-women-disrupt-ceremony-honoring-canadas-war-dead/">disrupting the ceremony</a>, screaming obscenities at the crowd. A scuffle then broke out among some of the participants although no arrests were made—probably because this would have been offensive to a certain ethnic group. Food for thought, although not especially appetizing fare.</p>
<p>The fact that Luton in the U.K. saw much greater abuse, the <a href="http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3223873/Muslim-mob-burn-giant-poppy-and-disrupt-Remembrance-Day-silence.html">burning of poppies</a> and the jeering at and <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1242335/Muslims-called-British-soldiers-rapists-cowards-scum-exercising-freedom-speech-court-hears.html">taunting of British soldiers</a> returning from Afghanistan, is no consolation. The point is, to put it bluntly, that such people should not have been welcomed into a democratic country with a history of sacrifice and traditions of loyalty that require respect. They are not genuine citizens but an obstreperous and unproductive fifth column that works against the viability of the country that has taken them in. And many seem to have all the time in the world to attend protests and demonstrations when other people are busy at their jobs—as I recently observed at a vehement pro-Hamas rally before the Israeli embassy—so that it seems clear they are the welfare beneficiaries of the very society they seek to subvert.</p>
<p>Here, once again, we are presented with the problem of multiculturalism as it is currently implemented: we have opened the gates to seditionists on the one hand and parasites on the other, two categories that frequently coalesce. We need not be as strictly exclusionary as, for example, Switzerland, where citizenship is difficult to obtain. (My aunt, who worked for the International Labor Organization in Geneva and has resided there for most of her life, waited for years before citizenship was finally granted.) But if we are to be candid and scorn the travesty of political correctness, we should admit that citizenship is a precious gift and that it needs to be earned and deserved.</p>
<p><em>This does not militate against any race, religion or ethnicity, and we know that there are peaceful, law-abiding, responsible and productive members of any and every immigrant group, without exception</em>. Therefore, the argument I am making for a rational immigration policy is neither “racist” nor “xenophobic,” the favorite slanders of the liberal-left political class that has a vested interest in promoting indiscriminate multiculturalism. On the contrary, as philosopher Roger Scruton, in a speech reported by <a href="http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1126"><em>The Brussels Journal</em></a>, has eloquently maintained, “the problem posed by the large-scale immigration of people who do not enter into our own…way of life” affirms the right “of indigenous communities to refuse admission to people who cannot or will not assimilate.” The host society’s failure to sift wisely among aspirants to citizenship leads inevitably to “inter-communal strife” and to the political and cultural trauma of “states that have been irreversibly changed through immigration”—changed by those who refuse allegiance “to a shared home and the people who have built it.”</p>
<p>The principle holds. Immigration policy in general should be louvered toward the proper criteria of admissibility: capacity to contribute to the life and prosperity of the nation, and willingness to integrate. Anything less produces costs in political dissidence, cultural upheaval and fiscal extortion we are increasingly unable to defray.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/david-solway/the-problem-with-multiculturalism/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>46</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Palestinian in Texas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-pipes/a-palestinian-in-texas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-palestinian-in-texas</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-pipes/a-palestinian-in-texas/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Nov 2012 04:47:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Pipes]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[child]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FBI]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lawsuit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Riad Elsolh Hamad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suicide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163658</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The lurid tale of Riad Elsolh Hamad.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-pipes/a-palestinian-in-texas/pols_feature18/" rel="attachment wp-att-163664"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163664" title="pols_feature18" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/pols_feature18-410x350.gif" alt="" width="287" height="245" /></a>Originally published by <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/12062/riad-elsolh-hamad">The American Spectator</a>.</em></p>
<p>On April 14, 2008, Riad Elsolh Hamad, 55, left his family&#8217;s apartment in Austin, Texas, to get some prescription drugs. The immigrant from Lebanon and middle school computer teacher never returned home. Three days later, the <a href="http://home.kxan.com/news_PDFs/4.17.08APD-hammad.pdf">police</a> found his body, bound with tape, floating in nearby Lady Bird Lake, and concluded that &#8220;all signs indicate this may have been a suicide.&#8221;</p>
<p>His family indicated that he had been under stress lately and even <a href="http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2008/04/17/authorities_identify_man_found.html">suicidal</a>. And with good reason: the <a href="http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/18/0418body.html">Federal Bureau of Investigation</a> along with the Internal Revenue Service had searched his house on February 27, 2008, when the FBI declared him a &#8220;person of interest&#8221; in a criminal investigation.</p>
<p>Despite this cloud around the dead man, local news outlets reported nothing but kind words and high praise for him. After Hamad&#8217;s <a href="http://www.kvue.com/news/mmcguire/stories/041708kvueAISDteacher-cb.7215ba7a.html">family</a> issued a statement describing Riad as a &#8220;peace activist who worked tirelessly on behalf of those less fortunate than him and was loved and admired by many members of the local, as well as international community,&#8221; the press duly picked up on this moniker and regularly called him a &#8220;<a href="http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2008/04/17/authorities_identify_man_found.html">peace</a> <a href="http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2008-05-09/621848/">activist</a>&#8221;</p>
<p>Television station KVUE quoted <a href="http://www.kvue.com/news/local/stories/041708kvuebody2-bkm.745e13f5.html">Joshua Howell</a>, assistant manager at the office where Hamad had a postal box, recalling him as &#8220;always in a good mood. Never upset. Never even heard him say a harsh word about anybody.&#8221; The principal at the school where he taught sent a letter to students&#8217; parents calling Hamad &#8220;a longtime and valued&#8221; member of the faculty whose &#8220;love and passion for education touched us all.&#8221; At Hamad&#8217;s memorial service, retired Episcopal Priest <a href="http://texascivilrightsreview.org/phpnuke/modules.php?name=News&amp;file=article&amp;sid=1238">Edward M Hartwell</a> praised &#8220;his humanitarian work to help the children of Palestine [as] some of the most creative and effective work that I know of.&#8221;</p>
<p>Hamad himself boasted of his <a href="http://www.newsradioklbj.com/News/Story.aspx?ID=89252">peaceable approach to politics</a>: &#8220;All of our work is very transparent. We don&#8217;t work with any militant group or violent group, or anybody with a militant affiliation.&#8221;</p>
<p>That was the Riad Hamad praised by family, friends, admirers, and even himself. But Hamad had another side, the one that brought the FBI to search his house, that got him fired from <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=17684">Austin Community College</a> for &#8220;making racist slurs and sexist jokes in the classroom,&#8221; and that made him a foul and unwelcome presence in my life. Thanks to the recent testimony by a former ally of Hamad who has turned against him, several years later, we now know something approaching his full story.</p>
<p><strong>The Summons</strong></p>
<p>Hamad brought himself to my attention in early June 2006 by sending me, via certified mail, a<a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/rr/hamad-summons.pdf"> summons</a> to appear in court in Austin. The document bore a scrawled, unkempt handwriting on a form issued by the U.S. District Court, Western District of Texas, informing me that Hamad was suing me and Campus Watch for libel. (Campus Watch being a project of the Middle East Forum, he was effectively suing the Forum.)</p>
<p>This turned out to be the second amended complaint; I found myself in good company, as the summons also listed the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now known as the David Horowitz Freedom Center), David Horowitz personally, the Center for Jewish Community Studies, the State of Texas, Joe Kaufman, Americans Against Hate, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, and an internet provider called CB Accounts. Hamad proceeded to file another three amended complaints and in them he tacked on yet more defendants (Freerepublic LLC, Jim Robinson, Laurence Simon, and Dotster Inc.)</p>
<p>His was a <em>pro se</em> summons, meaning that Hamad, a non-lawyer, had filled it out by himself and was representing himself – i.e., it cost him next to nothing to sue one and all.</p>
<p>Hamad charged each of us with 21 offences: libel and slander, malicious libel, malicious slander, defamation of character, defamation of character with intent to cause mental anguish, libeling and slandering a business name, defamation through fraud of a business name, interference with a business contract, tortious interference with a business contract, conspiracy to interfere with a business contract, interference with interstate commerce, interference with Internet commerce, conspiracy to interfere with Internet commerce, intentional infliction of mental anguish with the intent to injure, invasion of privacy, fraud, negligence, gross negligence, disparagement of a business name, disparagement of business products, and dilution of a business name.</p>
<p>In compensation for this long list of alleged abuses, Hamad demanded from his many defendants US$5 million in compensatory damages, $10 million for his loss of income, and $50 million in exemplary and punitive damages. Nor was that all: he sought a permanent injunction against our calling his business an &#8220;Islamic charity&#8221; or he personally a &#8220;Muslim fundamentalist.&#8221; He wanted a Department of Justice investigation into us for &#8220;criminal and racketeering work as lobbyists for a foreign country [i.e., Israel] without the proper permits and licenses.&#8221; He also insisted on public apologies by us in ten media outlets chosen by him, as well as payment for his court costs and &#8220;any and all other relief that Plaintiff might show that he is entitled to in a jury trial.&#8221;</p>
<p>Hamad gave insight into his mentality and his motives in the course of his lawsuit. His <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/rr/hamad-horowitz.pdf">discovery requests of David Horowitz</a> are particularly colorful, including:</p>
<ul>
<li>Document the &#8220;Religious affiliation of members of the board of CSPC, its affiliates and editors of Frontpagemag.org.&#8221;</li>
<li>Provide a &#8220;Blood and urine sample of David Horowitz &#8230; to identify his ethnicity and religious affiliations.&#8221;</li>
<li>&#8220;Identify any and all staff of the Israeli embassy that David Horowitz and CSPC are associated with, amounts of money paid for their services by the Israeli embassy.&#8221;</li>
<li>Answer whether &#8220;David Horowitz is a devout Jews [sic] and observes the Sabbath.&#8221;</li>
<li>Answer whether &#8220;David Horowitz eats pork and violates Jewish traditions.&#8221;</li>
<li>Answer whether &#8220;David Horowitz is not a Semite and pretends to be Jewish to gain sympathy for his views and make money.&#8221;</li>
</ul>
<p>This summons came as a total surprise, as a I had previously never heard of or mentioned Riad Hamad. Sleuthing revealed only the slightest and most indirect connection between us: Hamad had created and headed an organization called the Palestine Children&#8217;s Welfare Fund (PCWF) and in a January 18, 2004, weblog entry, &#8220;<a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/187">Lamyaa Hashim, Supporting Burqas and Suicide Bombers</a>,&#8221; I had quoted Joe Kaufman who alluded to PCWF as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>The site belongs to the medical director for the Palestine Children&#8217;s Welfare Fund, Rosemary Davis</p></blockquote>
<p>That&#8217;s it. I quoted 15 words from someone who mentioned someone who worked for Hamad&#8217;s organization. For this glancing reference, my pro-rated share of payments to Hamad would come to my share of at least $65 million, or about a million dollars per word.</p>
<p>What is the PCWF? NGO Monitor <a href="http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/palestine_children_s_welfare_fund_pcwf_0">analyzed the organization in 2003</a> and found its primary mission to be &#8220;propagating the delegitimization of Israel.&#8221; As a <a href="http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/_court_dismisses_frivolous_case_against_ngo_monitor_">2007 summary</a> by NGO Monitor put it, &#8220;Gaza-based PCWF openly exploits children&#8217;s issues for radical politicized agendas that promote the conflict. These activities are entirely inconsistent with its claims to be a humanitarian organization.&#8221; By way of example, NGO Monitor tells about PCWF&#8217;s children&#8217;s drawing contest in which</p>
<blockquote><p>The judges rewarded, almost without exception, entries that featured fierce and violent hatred of Israel. The winning picture features a fire, in the shape of a map of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, consuming the Star of David with the word &#8220;Israel&#8221; written inside the flag. Another entry depicted a Palestinian flag dropping flames on an Israeli flag and burning Israelis standing next to it. Such activities serve only to advance a culture of violence and hatred.</p></blockquote>
<p>In brief, PCWF is as crude and hate-mongering as its leader.</p>
<p><strong>The Lawsuit</strong></p>
<p>Hamad might have been a <em>pro se</em> plaintiff but I could not take the chance of being a <em>pro se</em> defendant and so turned for representation to the law office of Levine Sullivan Koch &amp; Schulz, L.L.P., which specializes in defamation issues. We responded to Hamad with a motion to dismiss on June 29, 2006, citing three grounds:</p>
<blockquote><p>First, this Court lacks personal jurisdiction over Pipes and MEF. Neither Pennsylvania defendant has had any contact with Texas that would establish either general or specific jurisdiction.</p>
<p>Second, even if the Court had jurisdiction, plaintiff himself admits that his defamation claim is barred by the one-year statute of limitations because any alleged publication occurred &#8220;as late as July 2004.&#8221;</p>
<p>Third, plaintiff has not pled facts sufficient to allege that Pipes and MEF published any defamatory statements about him. Indeed, he cannot do so: Neither defendant has ever written a word about him or engaged in any action that would justify plaintiff&#8217;s hauling them into a Texas court.</p></blockquote>
<p>My motion also noted that Hamad is a <em>pro se</em> plaintiff with a history of filing what one judgment against him (<em>Hamad v. Austin Community College</em>) called &#8220;patently frivolous&#8221; litigation efforts that &#8220;repeatedly abuse the legal system.&#8221;</p>
<p>Three days before this motion to dismiss, Judge Sam Sparks of the Western District of Texas had already dismissed with prejudice Hamad&#8217;s case against David Horowitz. On July 25, he dismissed the case against me and later awarded me court costs. For good measure, Sparks called Hamad a litigant with &#8220;a history in this Court of filing lawsuits without merit for the purpose of harassment and making outrageous allegations.&#8221;</p>
<p>Undaunted by his failure to gain any legal traction, Hamad appealed. This prompted Judge Sparks to issue an even more vehement order on September 6 in which he characterized Hamad&#8217;s complaints as espousing &#8220;no legal theory for which recovery can be made against any of the multitude of defendants sued in this case&#8221; and dismissed his pleadings on the grounds that they were &#8220;not filed for any purpose and simply harass and cause unnecessary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation.&#8221; Sparks again granted my motion to dismiss, agreeing with all three of my claims, ruling that the court cannot exercise jurisdiction over the Middle East Forum or myself (because of our lack of connections to Texas); that Hamad filed after the statute of limitations had expired; and that I never made defamatory statements concerning Riad Hamad. He also ordered Hamad to pay me a $1,000 penalty.</p>
<p>For a second time, Hamad responded belligerently, this time going public with his claims against us defendants. Talk about libel! He announced to the world on Sept. 14 (including a comment sent to the Campus Watch website) that we</p>
<blockquote><p>are engaged in criminal activities and fraud upon the public by collecting donations amounting to tens of millions of dollars. The donations are being used to fund illegal activities in the United States and Israel and with the knowledge of the government of the United States and the judicial branch.</p></blockquote>
<p>Four days later, Hamad sent out an appeal to his mailing list, stating that &#8220;closely linked&#8221; websites &#8220;are using false information and collection donations … to attack and discredit Arabs, Muslims&#8221; and asking for at least one thousand people to call the office for internet crimes belonging to the attorney general of Illinois.</p>
<p>Encouraged by the court&#8217;s attitude toward Hamad, I requested on Oct. 6 that he be compelled to pay my court costs. On January 17, 2007, Judge Sparks delivered his final judgment and granted my request for fees totaling $12,915. Sparks made clear his intense irritation with Hamad:</p>
<blockquote><p>Plaintiff Riad Elsolh Hamad first filed this wholly frivolous claim on April 13, 2006. Since that time, his &#8220;Petition&#8221; has gone through five revisions. None of the five Amended Petitions was authorized by the Federal Rules or leave of this Court, and not one version of Hamad&#8217;s complaint states any claim for which relief can be granted under any law of the United States or the State of Texas against any defendant. The Court dismissed Hamad&#8217;s complaint with prejudice in its second incarnation in an Order dated June 26, 2006. Nevertheless, Hamad has continued to file Amended Petitions presenting claims for relief identical to the ones dismissed in the Second Amended Petition. Each Amended Petition merely drags yet another group of defendants into the same unintelligible morass of vitriolic accusations for which no basis in law has ever been established. Moreover, Hamad continues to name dismissed parties as defendants in his repetitive pleadings.</p></blockquote>
<p>The next fourteen months saw several more rounds of the same: Hamad appealing and all the judges turning down every aspect of every effort of his, culminating with a March 12, 2008, judgment by the 5<sup>th</sup> Circuit Court of Appeals slamming Hamad for his &#8220;ten year history of filing frivolous suits in this court.&#8221; The appeals court upped the award to me to $32,944.50 in attorney&#8217;s fees.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/_court_dismisses_frivolous_case_against_ngo_monitor_">Gerald Steinberg</a> of NGO Monitor noted, Hamad&#8217;s lawsuit &#8220;was a clear attempt to use the courts and intimidation to prevent independent analysis and exposure of the incitement by anti-Israel NGOs.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>The Search</strong></p>
<p>By early 2008, however, Hamad had other and larger concerns on his mind. Two weeks before, on February 27, 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Internal Revenue Service had jointly raided his house. <a href="http://biggovernment.com/mvadum/2010/04/13/exclusive-radical-awakening-from-america-hater-to-hero/">Brandon Darby</a>, a former leftist, anti-Zionist, and longtime friend of Hamad who now works for <a href="http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/05/29/brandon-darby-moves-from-radical-leftist-to-conservative-activist/">conservative causes</a> and on behalf of Israel, has <a href="http://biggovernment.com/bdarby/2012/01/12/thoughts-from-a-former-leftist-revolutionary-a-day-at-the-national-holocaust-museum-and-memorial/">explained</a> how this raid came to pass:</p>
<p>Darby, who had helped Hamad raise money and recruit &#8220;human shields&#8221; against the Israel Defense Forces and himself almost went to the Palestinian territories for that purpose, wanted to create a group, to be called Critical Response, to send medics into war zones such as Lebanon and Darfur to help civilians. Hamad liked this idea, regaling Darby with plans to use the cover of medics to place explosives on motorcycles and booby-trap ambulances in Israel to kill Jews. Hamad also devised a plan using the PCWF to send money to Hamas and Hezbollah. Darby recounted at Breitbart.com:</p>
<blockquote><p>Hamad had approached me and shared that he had been able to skim off money [from PCWF] that he intended sneak to Palestinian comrades in Israel. I asked him why he needed to sneak anything when he was able to send funds legally. He responded with a detailed analysis of all the ways suicide bombers could get through checkpoints and achieve their goals. I declined and he told me that I had fallen back into my white privilege, but would come back to the revolution soon.</p></blockquote>
<p>This talk of violence, Darby reports, caused him to rethink his relationship with Hamad. &#8220;I couldn&#8217;t sleep and I debated within myself if I should go to the FBI.&#8221; Learning from another left-wing activist about Hamad&#8217;s plans to set up &#8220;a fake business to help Hamad funnel money for Palestinians&#8221; then nudged Darby to confront Hamad. The two met for coffee. On hearing of Darby&#8217;s disapproval, &#8220;Hamad responded by saying it would be good for white people to get caught in the war on terror and that people would limit what the government could do if the war on terror had whites in Guantanamo instead of just Arabs.&#8221;</p>
<p>This settled matters. Darby agonizing over his past actions – &#8220;wondering if my previous support and efforts for the Palestinian Children&#8217;s Welfare Fund meant I had blood on my hands&#8221; – and resolved to stop Hamad. &#8220;I ended up meeting with the FBI. They were kind and gracious. Hamad and the Palestinian Children&#8217;s Welfare Fund were raided.&#8221;</p>
<p>The search warrant focused on fraud, not terrorism, as indicated by the supporting financial affidavit:</p>
<blockquote><p>RIAD ELSOLH HAMAD failed to file his federal income tax returns for the years 1999 through 2003 and 2005, evaded payment of his federal income taxes for the years 1999 through 2006, and is engaged in preparing false documents used to obtain federally subsidized loan from various University of Texas campuses. The affidavit will show that HAMAD earned taxable income from the Austin Independent School District (AISD). HAMAD also runs/operates the Palestinian Children&#8217;s Welfare Fund (PCWF) which he claims raises money for the children of Palestine. HAMAD sends large amounts of money to the Middle East and/or to charities that forward the funds to the Middle East. The disposition of these funds is unknown at this time, A large amount of these &#8220;donated&#8221; funds have also been traced into various stock accounts controlled by Riad Hamad and/or his son Abdullah Hamad.</p></blockquote>
<p>An investigator with the <a href="http://texascivilrightsreview.org/phpnuke/modules.php?name=News&amp;file=print&amp;sid=1222">Internal Revenue Service</a> put the last part more bluntly: &#8220;Riad Hamad, with the assistance of his son, Abdullah Hamad, his ex-wife, Diana Hamad, and his daughter, Rita Hamad, are using the &#8216;donated funds&#8217; for personal use and not paying federal income taxes on these funds.&#8221;</p>
<p>Lacking a news account, here is <a href="http://progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&amp;forum=222&amp;topic_id=1438">how Hamad himself reported</a> the raid on his house: a dozen federal agents, armed with a search warrant based on probable cause to investigate wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering, &#8220;searched every nook and cranny&#8221; of his apartment and took away &#8220;more than forty boxes of papers, files, computers and CDs.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>The Suicide</strong></p>
<p>After the raid, Darby recounts,</p>
<blockquote><p>I heard from Hamad one last time. He called me and said it was &#8220;just a matter of time.&#8221; I asked what he meant. He told me of the raids and said they had taken all of his documents, and that I would know soon. He said he had to go and he did. His body was found in Austin, TX in Lady Bird Lake a few days later. He apparently chose not to face the consequences of his actions.</p></blockquote>
<p>Even in death, Hamad perpetuated a fraud. First, he <a href="http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/04/18/a_friend_brother_comrade_has_either_comm">wrote a letter</a> to his circle, creating the premise for violence against him (all spellings and ellipses exactly as in the original):</p>
<blockquote><p>besides the government harassment, the hateful environment from some students at school because I am an Arab and a Muslim&#8230;and their racist comments, I have been getting phone calls around midnight by some one saying &#8220;where is your camel..&#8221; and last&#8230;a car was vandalized about two years ago&#8230;.last night around 1 30 in the morning..someone rang the bell and ran away&#8230;.and you could hear all the dogs in the neighborhood barking when the person who rang the bell ran away&#8230;A real loving environment towards Arabs and Muslims&#8230;.</p></blockquote>
<p>(Reflecting back on his lawsuit, one sees the source of his fantasies about harassment, hateful environment, and racism.)</p>
<p>Second, evidence suggests that Hamad staged his death to make it appear that he wanted the honor of being murdered when in fact he checked out on his own. Based in part on the <a>autopsy</a>, a <a href="http://home.kxan.com/news_PDFs/4.17.08APD-hammad.pdf">police statement</a> asserted:</p>
<blockquote><p>When the body was removed from the lake, tape was found around the eyes, and the hands and legs were loosely bound. The bindings of his hands and legs and placement of the tape were consistent with Hamad having done this to himself. Detectives know that Hamad walked from his vehicle to the water on his own based on evidence retrieved from the scene.</p>
<p>At this time, the Austin Police Department does not suspect foul play was involved. Witnesses and family members have confirmed with police that Hamad had extreme stressors in his life. This incident is still an ongoing investigation, but all signs indicate this may have been a suicide. According to the preliminary results from the Medical Examiner&#8217;s Office there were no signs of trauma to the body or signs of a struggle.</p></blockquote>
<p>Even <a>Paul Larudee</a>, Hamad&#8217;s colleague and the last known person to speak to Hamad before his death, says that Hamad &#8220;did take his own life but he took it with a view of fueling the speculation that has in fact accompanied his death.&#8221; Translation: He wanted it to appear like a hit job. Despite his skepticism about Hamad&#8217;s demise, <a href="http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2008-05-09/621848/">Larudee insists</a> &#8220;I still think he was a hero.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>The Conspiracy Theory</strong></p>
<p>Palestinian extremists, Islamists, leftists, and assorted conspiracy theorists accepted Hamad&#8217;s fakery. According to <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7989635686215905989">Ibrahim Dremali</a> of the Islamic Center of Greater Austin, who says after an autopsy he washed Hamad&#8217;s body, which was &#8220;cut all from the right shoulder all the way to the stomach, and from the left shoulder all the way to the stomach again, and from the stomach all the way to the bladder, … from all the back of his skull is completely cut, is empty completely, empty. … His wrists were all slit open and cut. … His eyes actually dropped all the way down. … It is a barbaric act. … Like somebody is eating the body. … This is a message for all Muslims.&#8221; Dremali said it appeared as &#8220;something in the jungle, an animal attacking another animal.&#8221;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.infowars.com/?p=1582&amp;cp=2">Kurt Nimmo</a>, a prominent conspiracy theorist, asked &#8220;Is it possible a neocon hit team or as likely a Mossad &#8216;bayonet&#8217; team took out the school teacher Riad Hamad?&#8221; Radio host Alex Jones and others spoke ominously of Israeli hit teams surveilling Hamad&#8217;s house. <a href="http://pastebin.com/EF4UFMMh">Some</a> even accused &#8220;sociopathic FBI informant Brandon Darby&#8221; of killing Hamad. A Twitter site (riad_hamad) keeps these theories alive almost five years later.</p>
<p>In contrast to these lurid accounts, the Travis Country medical examiner, David Dolinak, who inspected Hamad&#8217;s body on the morning of April 17, found nothing alarming. Quite contrary to Dremali&#8217;s description of the body being variously cut up, the <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/rr/hamad-autopsy.pdf">medical examiner</a> reporter found little to report:</p>
<blockquote><p>IDENTIFYING MARKS AND SCARS:</p>
<p>A 10 inch vertical scar is in the lateral aspect of the right thigh. There are no tattoos.</p>
<p>EVIDENCE OF THERAPY [meaning needle puncture marks, surgical stitches, etc.]</p>
<p>None.</p>
<p>EVIDENCE OF INJURY:</p>
<p>None. …</p>
<p>BODY CAVITIES:</p>
<p>The organs are normally developed and are in their normal locations. The diaphragms are intact. There is no fluid accumulation in the pleural cavities or the pericardial sac. There is no fluid accumulation in the peritoneal cavity. There are no pleural adhesions or abdominal adhesions.</p>
<p>HEAD:</p>
<p>There is no subscalp blood extravasation. The calvarium is intact. The dura is intact. There is no epidural or subdural blood. …</p>
<p>MUSCULOSKELETAL SYSTEM:</p>
<p>No fractures of the clavicles, sternum, ribs, vertebrae, pelvis or extremities are detected.</p></blockquote>
<p>Dolinak concluded that he saw &#8220;No evidence of traumatic injury,&#8221; that Hamad &#8220;died as the result of drowning.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
<p>Hamad died as he lived, in a miasma of hate and duplicity. Darby informs me that &#8220;Riad publicly claimed to be a Christian but when he died it became evident that he had been lying and was actually a Muslim.&#8221; We, the victims of his lurid and manic lawsuits never saw a dime of the money he owed us. His embezzlement and skipping on taxes having caught up with him, he perpetrated his final and grandest fraud – a pretend-murder. Not surprisingly, his venomous Palestine Children&#8217;s Welfare Fund is now defunct, reduced to a homepage plaintively stating that &#8220;PCWF website coming again soon to carry on some of the great work of Riad Hamad.&#8221;</p>
<div id="attachment_163663" style="width: 460px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-pipes/a-palestinian-in-texas/attachment/1946/" rel="attachment wp-att-163663"><img class="size-medium wp-image-163663" title="1946" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/1946-450x71.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="71" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">The Palestine Children&#8217;s Welfare Fund&#8217;s defunct website.</p></div>
<p>Some observations about Hamad: First, the lofty praise for this wretch would make one think him a decent man, pointing to how political sympathy creates blinders. Second, even as he lived in the civilized quiet of Austin, Texas, Hamad contaminated his adopted home by importing political nihilism from the Middle East. Third, I may be out nearly $33,000 in court costs, but it was not all lost; Hamad&#8217;s legal assault inspired me to expose this malign excrescence of anti-Zionism. Finally, if one truly is judged by the quality of one&#8217;s opponents, we who defend Israel are thriving.</p>
<p>Most Muslim immigrants are law-abiding and constructive citizens in the West. But Hamad&#8217;s case fits into a persistent pattern of immigrants who bring with them the bad habits imbued by the tyrannical politics and radical ideologies. Combining Islamic supremacism with nihilist disdain, they despise all that is non-Muslim, import a mélange of extremist ideas, and feel free of moral constraints. Consequently, they engage disproportionately in antisocial behavior, criminal activities, and terrorism. Reluctantly, I concluded <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/1009/the-enemy-within-and-the-need-for-profiling">almost a decade ago</a> that &#8220;Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks.&#8221; I reiterate this now, lest more Riad Hamads be allowed in.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-pipes/a-palestinian-in-texas/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>52</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Government Welfare Hits 1 Trillion Dollars</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/government-welfare-hits-1-trillion-dollars/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=government-welfare-hits-1-trillion-dollars</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/government-welfare-hits-1-trillion-dollars/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Oct 2012 20:52:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=148944</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Federal welfare programs increased $563.413 billion in fiscal year 2008 to $745.84 billion in fiscal year 2011 — a 32 percent increase.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/?attachment_id=148945" rel="attachment wp-att-148945"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-148945" title="large" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/large-450x280.png" alt="" width="450" height="280" /></a></p>
<p>And we are not talking about entitlements here. We are talking food stamps, Medicaid, the works. This isn&#8217;t &#8220;Pay in, Get a Social Safety Net&#8221; stuff. This is &#8220;<a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/18/report-welfare-governments-single-largest-budget-item-in-fy-2011-at-approx-1-03-trillion/">Economy in Freefall Turns Into Welfare State</a>&#8220;.</p>
<blockquote><p>The government spent approximately $1.03 trillion on 83 means-tested federal welfare programs in fiscal year 2011 alone — a price tag that makes welfare that year the government’s largest expenditure,</p>
<p>According to the CRS report, which focused solely on federal spending for federal welfare programs, spending on federal welfare programs increased $563.413 billion in fiscal year 2008 to $745.84 billion in fiscal year 2011 — a 32 percent increase.</p>
<p>When state spending on federal welfare programs — specifically Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program — was thrown into the mix, the amount spent on federal welfare increased 28 percent, from $798.813 billion in fiscal year 2008 to $1.028.54 trillion in fiscal year 2011.</p>
<p>CRS reports that food assistance programs — the third largest welfare category behind health and cash assistance — experienced the greatest increase in spending, with 71 percent more spending in 2011 than in 2008. The agency explained that this spending increase was largely due to the growth in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps.</p>
<p>CRS further noted that the largest expenditure category, health, was 37 percent higher in fiscal year 2011 than fiscal year 2008. In that same period, education assistance increased 57 percent</p></blockquote>
<p>Health care welfare spending has dramatically increased under Obama, despite talk of cutting costs, it was up almost 40 percent. And food stamps are off the charts, with added expenses from Michelle Obama&#8217;s food nazi mandates. This includes some state spending and is a partial look at how we&#8217;re going bankrupt funding the welfare state.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/government-welfare-hits-1-trillion-dollars/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>How California Could Stop Its Population Exodus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/how-california-could-stop-its-population-exodus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-california-could-stop-its-population-exodus</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/how-california-could-stop-its-population-exodus/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Oct 2012 04:25:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arizona]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Exodus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nevada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[population]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Texas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wealthy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=147425</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A draconian idea perfect for a state that disdains personal liberty.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/day-20-CA-state-line-wide.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-147428" title="day-20-CA-state-line-wide" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/day-20-CA-state-line-wide.gif" alt="" width="375" height="261" /></a>California was once the land of opportunity, but it is going down the tubes. Several of California&#8217;s prominent cities have declared bankruptcy, such as Vallejo, Stockton, Mammoth Lakes and San Bernardino. Others are on the precipice, and that includes Los Angeles, California&#8217;s largest city. California&#8217;s 2012 budget deficit is expected to top $28 billion, and its state debt is $618 billion. That&#8217;s more than twice the size of New York&#8217;s state debt, which itself is the second-highest in the nation.</p>
<p>Democrats control California&#8217;s Legislature, and its governor, Jerry Brown, is a Democrat. California is home to some of America&#8217;s richest people and companies. It would then appear that the liberals&#8217; solution to deficit and debt would be easy. They need only to raise taxes on California&#8217;s rich to balance the budget and pay down the debt — or, as President Barack Obama would say, make the rich pay their fair share.</p>
<p>The downside to such a tax strategy is the fact that people are already leaving California in great numbers. According to a Manhattan Institute study, &#8220;The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look,&#8221; by Thomas Gray and Robert Scardamalia (October 2012), roughly 225,000 residents leave California each year — and have done so for the past 10 years. They take their money with them. Using census and Internal Revenue Service data, Gray and Scardamalia estimate that California&#8217;s out-migration results in large shares of income going to other states, mostly to Nevada ($5.67 billion), Arizona ($4.96 billion), Texas ($4.07 billion) and Oregon ($3.85 billion). That&#8217;s the problem. California politicians can fleece people in 2012, but there&#8217;s no guarantee that they can do the same in 2013 and later years; people can leave. Also, keep in mind that rich people didn&#8217;t become rich by being stupid. They have ingenious ways to hide their money.</p>
<p>California has one-eighth of the nation&#8217;s population but one-third of its welfare recipients.</p>
<p>According to Businessweek, &#8220;it is one of the few states that continue to provide welfare checks for children once their parents are no longer eligible.&#8221; There&#8217;s nothing new about the handout strategy. As far back as 140 B.C., Roman politicians found that the way to win votes is to give out cheap food and entertainment, what came to be known as &#8220;bread and circuses.&#8221;</p>
<p>Given the widespread contempt for personal liberty and constitutional values, there might be a way for California politicians to solve their fiscal mess. They can simply stop wealthy people from leaving the state or, alternatively, like some Third World nations, set limits on the amount of assets a resident can take out of the state. This would surely be within their jurisdiction and would not raise any constitutional issues, because it would serve a compelling state purpose. In other words, if California were to set up border controls to stop people, as East Germans did at Checkpoint Charlie, before they cross the state line, such action would be protected by the 10th Amendment.</p>
<p>The fact that many Californians have managed to get their assets out of the state complicates the issue. Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution authorizes Congress &#8220;To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.&#8221; This is known as the commerce clause. There&#8217;s no question that people who pull up stakes and leave California affect interstate commerce; California has less tax revenue, and recipient states have more. What California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris might do is sue Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Oregon in the federal courts for enticing, through lower taxes and less onerous regulations, wealthy California taxpayers.</p>
<p>Were California to take such measures and have a modicum of success, one wonders how many Americans would be offended by such an encroachment on personal liberty. After all, how would forcing an American to remain in a state differ in principle from forcing him to purchase health insurance?</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/walter-williams/how-california-could-stop-its-population-exodus/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>17</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Obama Policy Encouraging Immigrants to Go on Public Dole</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/volpe/the-obama-policy-encouraging-immigrants-to-go-on-public-dole/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obama-policy-encouraging-immigrants-to-go-on-public-dole</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/volpe/the-obama-policy-encouraging-immigrants-to-go-on-public-dole/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Oct 2012 04:44:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Volpe]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[food stamps]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[immigrants]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[public charge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state department]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[US Department of Agriculture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=146947</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Food stamps don't count as public assistance? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/100824_tom_vilsack_ap_328.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146957" title="100824_tom_vilsack_ap_328" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/100824_tom_vilsack_ap_328.gif" alt="" width="375" height="245" /></a>FrontPage Magazine has acquired evidence that suggests that the Obama administration is actively promoting a little-known regulation first created by the Clinton administration. In so doing, the Obama administration is actively recruiting immigrants and encouraging them to sign up for things like food stamps, reminding that under this obscure regulation they suffer no marks against them in any future immigration proceeding if they receive food stamps and other non-cash benefits.</p>
<p>According to a recent US Department of Agriculture (USDA) publication geared toward immigrants called &#8220;Guidance on Non-Citizen Eligibility Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,&#8221; the USDA emphasized that the rules on receiving food stamps and being approved for all sorts of immigration-related procedures are not what many may think they are.</p>
<blockquote><p>There is a perception that participating in SNAP could affect immigration status or hurt a non-citizen’s chances of becoming an American citizen, but this is not true. It is important for non-citizens to know they will not be deported, denied entry to the country, or denied permanent status because they apply for or receive SNAP benefits.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/01/obama-usda-met-30-times-with-mexican-govt-to-promote-food-stamp-use-among-mexican-immigrants/">The Daily Caller recently reported that USDA officials met with officials from the Mexican government</a> on a number of occasions to discuss encouraging more use of SNAP and welfare-type programs by immigrants from Mexico into the US.</p>
<p>“Since the partnership began, Vilsack wrote, USDA personnel have met at least 151 times with officials from the Mexican government ‘to discuss nutrition assistance programs as well as to provide program updates.’ Those instances included 91 meetings with embassy and consulate staff in 25 U.S. cities; 29 health fairs in 19 U.S. cities; and 31 roundtable discussions, conferences and forums in 20 U.S. cities,” read part of the story.</p>
<p>Both revelations together suggest the Obama administration is actively encouraging, promoting, and recruiting immigrants to take advantage of public non-cash benefits by reminding them repeatedly that they face no punishment for applying for non-cash benefits, said Jessica Vaughan, a policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies.</p>
<p>The entire brouhaha revolves around an obscure regulation first instituted by immigration authorities in the Clinton administration. The controversy has received added attention since a group of four Republican senators from the Senate Budget Committee demanded answers, as part of their oversight duties, in a letter in August 2012. The letter came after a staffer noticed that this regulation was referenced in the Question-and-Answer section of the US Citizen and Immigration Services&#8217; (USCIS) website under the “public charge” section. A “public charge” is an individual that is deemed to be highly likely to wind up taking public funds.</p>
<p>In 1999, the Clinton administration changed the definition of public charge by bureaucratic fiat. In a white paper published in 2011 also for the Center for Immigration Studies, James Edwards Jr.<a href="http://www.cis.org/PublicChargeDoctrine-AmericanImmigrationPolicy"> explained how</a> the Clinton administration accomplished this. With a new regulation, the Clinton administration first introduced the idea of food stamps no longer necessarily meaning that a person would be considered a “public charge.” (According to his bio, James R. Edwards, Jr., Ph.D., is an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute and teaches government in the Claremont McKenna College Washington Semester Program.) He wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Clinton administration in 1999 proposed its own definition of &#8220;public charge&#8221; by regulation. Its definition allows immigrants broad usage of public assistance.<span style="font-size: 11px;"> </span>The INS rule defines &#8220;public charge&#8221; as an alien who has become or likely will become &#8220;primarily dependent on the government for subsistence, as demonstrated by either: (i) the receipt of public cash assistance for income maintenance or (ii) institutionalization for long-term care at government expense.&#8221;</p>
<p>The INS rule lists welfare programs counted under the rule as cash assistance for income maintenance or long-term institutionalization: Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (formerly AFDC), state and local cash assistance programs helping recipients maintain income (known as &#8220;general assistance&#8221;), and programs that support institutionalized long-term care. The INS also lists a number of non-cash benefit programs that it does not count in a public charge determination (see Table 3). These include Medicaid and other public health benefits, housing assistance, and child care services.<span style="font-size: 11px;"> </span>Even receipt of cash assistance does not automatically render an alien a public charge, but must be considered in one&#8217;s &#8220;totality of circumstances.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>In other words, Clinton carefully changed the definition of “public charge” to someone needing public <em>monetary</em> assistance. This left those who would receive &#8220;non-monetary&#8221; assistance, like food stamps, to still apply for immigration benefits.</p>
<p>At the time Clinton imposed this regulation, little was made of it. In fact, it took about thirteen years for almost anyone to notice. In August 2012, four Republican members of the Senate Budget Committee &#8212; Jeff Sessions, Charles Grassley, Pat Roberts, and Orrin Hatch &#8212; were concerned by an answer to the Q-and-A section of the USCIS website. In particular, the four were concerned about the numerous programs listed in answer to the question, “What publicly funded benefits may not be considered for public charge purposes?”</p>
<p>The answer included programs like food stamps. The answer indicated that immigrants with a high probability of becoming the recipients of such programs as food stamps were not necessarily going to be denied a Visa.</p>
<p>Since then, as FrontPage previously reported, the four senators have tried, with no luck, to get answers from both the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Both State and DHS have oversight over Visa applications.</p>
<p>The answer appears to be this little-known regulation first instituted under President Clinton.</p>
<p>The Obama administration has been interpreting it the same way as it was originally written. In fact, Christopher Bentley, a spokesperson for USCIS, told FrontPage Magazine that USCIS changed nothing during the Obama administration in their internal policy regarding the definition of public charge.</p>
<p>“We haven’t made nor are we aware of any changes to our Public Charge materials.”</p>
<p>During the course of investigating this story, FrontPage Magazine also confirmed that an internal State Department manual also treats food stamp and other such welfare programs as not necessarily impacting public charge considerations. In that manual, the new Clinton definition of non-cash payments was specifically cited.</p>
<blockquote><p>There are many forms of U.S. Government assistance that an alien may have accepted in the past, or that you may reasonably believe an alien might receive after admission to the United States, that are of a non-cash and/or supplemental nature and would not create an inadmissibility.</p></blockquote>
<p>All of it is, in fact, right in line with the way that the Clinton administration regulations were written. The Clinton regulation exempted all alleged &#8220;non-cash&#8221; benefits from the definition of public charge, which would include programs like food stamps.</p>
<p>Jessica Vaughan, a policy analyst also with CIS, said that where the Obama administration differs from prior administrations is in its promotion of this rule. The Bush administration was never accused of meeting with Mexican officials to promote food stamps for their citizens that were likely to come to the USA. Nor did the Bush administration draw attention to the food stamp rule, said Vaughan.</p>
<p>“There’s no way that the Bush administration would produce a USDA piece highlighting to immigrants that they can get on the public dole and still get immigration approval.”</p>
<p>That may be one reason that all of this is coming out now, said Vaughan.</p>
<p>Far from being an obscure bureaucratic issue, the above policy and culture of dependency promoted by the Obama administration have a very real impact on ordinary Americans. Studies have shown that <a href="http://www.cis.org/immigrant-welfare-use-2011">close to 60% </a>of immigrant households end up using government programs. Yet the &#8220;public charge&#8221; regulation was implemented to ensure that as few immigrants as possible become dependent on public assistance. Something has gone terribly wrong. It is quite clear the dual efforts of the Clinton and Obama administrations, through their bureaucratic tyranny, have played a substantial role in undermining this protection for American taxpayers.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/volpe/the-obama-policy-encouraging-immigrants-to-go-on-public-dole/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>9</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Why Ryan’s Medicare Is Better for Seniors Than Obamacare’s Medicare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/peter-thomas-and-peter-ferrara/why-ryan%e2%80%99s-medicare-is-better-for-seniors-than-obamacare%e2%80%99s-medicare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-ryan%25e2%2580%2599s-medicare-is-better-for-seniors-than-obamacare%25e2%2580%2599s-medicare</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/peter-thomas-and-peter-ferrara/why-ryan%e2%80%99s-medicare-is-better-for-seniors-than-obamacare%e2%80%99s-medicare/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Oct 2012 04:43:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Peter Thomas and Peter Ferrara]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medicare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Ryan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reform]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[welfare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=146902</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The plan that really turns the government program into a "death trap" for its beneficiaries. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Paul_Ryan6295.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-146945" title="Paul_Ryan6295" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Paul_Ryan6295.gif" alt="" width="375" height="248" /></a>Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz described the Medicare reforms proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) as “literally a death trap for seniors.”  White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that Ryan’s reforms would “change Medicare as we know it.”</p>
<p>But it was Obamacare that already changed Medicare as we know it, transforming it literally into a death trap for seniors.  Obamacare cuts Medicare by $716 billion over the next 10 years alone, mostly by slashing Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals.  And that is just a downpayment on what is to come.</p>
<p>Medicare’s Chief Actuary Rick Foster reports that by the end of this decade, Medicare will be paying less to doctors and hospitals for health care for seniors than Medicaid pays for health care for the poor.  And Medicare will be falling farther and farther behind Medicaid each year.</p>
<p>Already, Medicaid does not pay enough for the poor on the program to get timely, essential health care, particularly the sickest and those most in need of the best health care.  Academic studies show that the poor suffer worse health outcomes as a result, including premature death.</p>
<p>But under Obamacare, soon enough, seniors will be lined up behind welfare mothers in trying to find doctors who will see them, and hospitals that will admit them.  These cuts affect seniors already retired today, not just those years into the future.</p>
<p>Foster reports that, even before these cuts, two-thirds of hospitals were already losing money on Medicare patients.  In a few short years, hospitals serving seniors in particular will begin closing, and retirees will have increasing difficulty obtaining access to care.  As Harvard University health economist Joe Newhouse explains, seniors will likely have to seek care at community health centers and safety net hospitals.</p>
<p>And this does not even count any further cuts that may be adopted by Obamacare’s Medicare “death panel,” the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).  That Board will be composed of unelected, appointed, Washington bureaucrats with the power to adopt still more Medicare cuts that would become effective even without the approval of Congress.</p>
<p>Contrary to the childish silliness of Wasserman Schulz and Carney, Ryan’s Medicare reforms, in sharp contrast, would simply extend the more modern, popular, and successful policies of Medicare Parts C and D to the old fashioned Medicare Parts A and B.</p>
<p>Medicare Part D is the prescription drug program.  Just like Ryan’s proposed Medicare reforms, Part D provides premium support payments to seniors, which they use to purchase the private prescription drug coverage of their choice.  Because of private market competition, and incentives for seniors to choose lower cost plans, Part D costs have run 40% below projections.  Compare that to Parts A and B, which, by 1990, cost 10 times the original projections for that year when the program was adopted.</p>
<p>Medicare Part C is Medicare Advantage, under which nearly 25% of seniors have already chosen private insurance to provide all of their Medicare coverage.  Seniors believe they get a better deal through this highly popular program due to choice and competition.</p>
<p>Ryan would empower workers under age 55 today, when they retire in the future, with the choice of a private plan competing alongside traditional Medicare.  Medicare would provide these seniors with a premium support payment they could use to pay for, or offset, the premium of the private health insurance they chose, providing at least the exact same benefits as Medicare.  That premium support payment is set by competitive bidding under rules ensuring it will be enough to pay for at least two of the competing plans providing at least the same benefits as Medicare.  Or seniors, even in the future, could just stay in Medicare just like it is today.</p>
<p>Unlike under Obamacare, these reforms would involve no change for anyone retired today.  This plan was actually developed by a bi-partisan commission under President Clinton and chaired by Democrat Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana.</p>
<p>Ryan’s reforms are better for seniors than Obamacare’s Medicare, most of all because they free seniors from the cuts and government health care rationing involved in Obamacare’s mangling of Medicare, by allowing them to choose private insurance, paying market rates instead.  Only through such private insurance will seniors be able to continue to enjoy the high-quality, most advanced care they have come to expect from Medicare.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/peter-thomas-and-peter-ferrara/why-ryan%e2%80%99s-medicare-is-better-for-seniors-than-obamacare%e2%80%99s-medicare/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1454/1636 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 12:08:03 by W3 Total Cache -->