The sad state of the American worker

Obamanomics has yet to deliver jobs, while many incomes have declined



By Stephen Moore

My 22-year-old son lives at home, still depends on his old man for spending money, and my profoundest fear is that like Will Ferrell in the “Wedding Crashers,” he will never leave the nest. I’m not alone. There are some 20 million college grads living at home. A 2014 study reported by CNN Money found that half of kids who are two years out of college rely on their parents to pay some or all of their bills. It’s the new normal for 20-somethings.

Gee, parents sure are getting a great financial return on the $150,000 they’ve shelled out for four years of college.

Sure, some of this dependency is an entitlement mentality of millennials whose parents have given them almost everything they’ve ever wanted. But it also reflects how dismal the economy still is today. Today we have college grads — along with working moms and 60-somethings — flipping burgers at Wendy’s and stocking the aisles at Wal-Mart. Left-wing groups and union leaders are now demanding “a living wage” for jobs that were never intended to be for heads of households. Who’s against higher wages for American workers? But wasn’t this what Obamanomics was supposed to deliver?

Seven years ago, Barack Obama promised a progressive worker paradise — a recovery from recession that would leave no one behind. “Hope and change” would deliver high employment and rising wages, and no one bought into this idyllic vision more than college kids.

President Obama and his supporters proclaim that he has saved America from the second great depression — a message we will start to hear again over and over in the months ahead. But even his own voters don’t believe him anymore, now that we’re just ending the seventh summer of no real recovery.

Start with the jobless rate. Yes, unemployment is down to 5.1 percent officially. Raise your hand if you believe that number is even close to accurate. The real unemployment rate counting labor force quitters and those forced into part-time jobs is, according to Mr. Obama’s own Labor Department: 10.5 percent. That number is actually down from more than 15 percent recently, but these still feel like recession rates. Nearly 90 million Americans over the age of 16 are out of the full-time workforce, and many millions of them are plopped in front of the TV watching “Seinfeld” reruns and living off food stamps or their parents because they have given up looking for a good job.

If we had experienced a normal recovery from recession, we’d have roughly 5 million to 6 million more of these Americans working today. With a Reagan-style recovery, more than 8 million Americans would be working and collecting a paycheck.

The more than 100 million Americans who are working are feeling a financial crunch, too. Most of them haven’t seen a pay raise that keeps pace with inflation for a decade.

The Census Bureau has released the latest data on family income, and it has been analyzed by the statisticians at Sentier Research. Through this past June, the median income family has lost $1,700 in real income since Team Obama took the reins (see chart).

The sad irony is that the steepest declines in income have been suffered by blacks, Hispanics, single women and, of course, those stay-at-home millennials. Oddly enough, these are the Obama voters. They also tend to be concentrated on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Imagine the scathing indignation and the cries of racism and sexism if this were the record of an incumbent Republican president rather than a liberal Democrat. Call it Mr. Obama’s “war on women.”

Here’s yet another bitter irony of this president’s labor policies. Mr. Obama obsesses over income inequality — almost as fanatically as he does climate change. But the standard measure of income inequality — the so-called Gini Coefficient — shows a wider gap between rich and poor than during the George W. Bush years. Using his own metrics, Obamanomics is a dismal failure.

The progressives think that the best way to drive up wages is to smack down businesses as greedy, self-serving and corrupt. But you need an employer before you can have an employee. Sorry, to be anti-business and pro-labor is like being anti-chicken and pro-egg. When Hillary Rodham Clinton said earlier this year that “businesses don’t create jobs,” she didn’t misspeak, she was expressing a profound ignorance of how the private sector hiring machine works. Donald Trump said it well: As a businessman, “if I have more money, I can hire more workers.”

The employment recession didn’t start with Mr. Obama but with George W. Bush. Voters are distrustful of both parties and justifiably so. Even the simplest reforms — like building pipelines, cutting the corporate tax rate, letting banks lend money to businesses and homebuyers, or requiring work for able-bodied welfare recipients — don’t get done. But this past week, the president was up in the Arctic lecturing us about climate change. The unemployed probably feel that if he relishes cold weather so much, he should stay there

SOURCE
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/6/stephen-moore-the-sad-state-of-the-american-worker/

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The Iran deal bait-and-switch

Jeff Jacoby

BARACK OBAMA has never made a secret of his determination to reach a deal with Iran regarding its nuclear program. Very early in his run for the White House, he announced that he was prepared to meet, without preconditions, with the rulers of Iran and other hostile regimes. "I think it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them," he said during a 2007 debate with Hillary Clinton. As president, Obama's outreach to Tehran began on Day 1. "We will extend a hand," he promised in his inaugural address, "if you are willing to unclench your fist." By 2011, he had dispatched then-Senator John Kerry to open a secret dialogue with Iran.

It has long been clear that Obama envisions a grand nuclear bargain with Iran as a cornerstone of his presidential legacy. "It's my name on this," he says. "I have a personal interest in locking this down."

But the terms of that bargain haven't been so clear. Far from being "locked down," the goals and guarantees of the Iran nuclear deal have been a moving target. In one critical area after another, the nuclear accord so enticingly advertised doesn't resemble the nuclear accord actually on the table. When unscrupulous merchants do that, it's called bait-and-switch. The seller may clinch the sale, but customers resent being conned.

Similarly, while Obama's nuclear deal will almost certainly survive a congressional vote of disapproval, public skepticism runs deep. A Pew Research poll released Tuesday found just 21 percent support for the agreement. Gallup reports only one in three Americans approve Obama's handling of US policy toward Iran. That's not typical — the public usually backs presidents on arms-control agreements. But voters don't like being conned any more than shoppers do.

How has the administration engaged in bait-and-switch on the Iran deal? Here are five ways.

Inspections. The White House claimed any agreement with Iran would supply international weapons inspectors with the ultimate all-access pass — round-the-clock authority to enter any suspected nuclear site. In a CNN interview in April, Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, confirmed that "under this deal, you will have anywhere/anytime, 24/7 access as it relates to the nuclear facilities that Iran has." When a leading Iranian general scoffed at the suggestion that foreigners would be permitted to investigate possible nuclear activity at Iranian military sites, the Obama administration pushed back. "We expect to have anywhere/anytime access," Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz reiterated bluntly.

But in the final accord, "anywhere/anytime" is nowhere to be found. The administration claimed it had never existed. (Switch!) "We never sought in this negotiation the capacity for so-called anytime/anywhere," Rhodes told CNN's Erin Burnett. Secretary of State Kerry went even further. "There's no such thing in arms control as anytime/anywhere," he insisted. "This is a term that, honestly, I never heard."

Sanctions snap back. The administration acknowledged that stiff economic sanctions had brought the Iranians to the negotiating table. It repeatedly assured skeptics that sanctions would automatically "snap back" into effect if Iran violated any terms of the nuclear accord. "The UN sanctions that initially brought Iran to the table can and will snap right back into place," Kerry told reporters in Vienna. That echoed what his boss had been saying all along. "We can crank that dial back up," Obama told an interviewer in 2013. "We don't have to trust them."

Yet now they sell the deal as a last chance to salvage some Iranian compliance from a sanctions regime that is crumbling anyway. (Switch!) Our allies "certainly are not going to agree to enforce existing sanctions for another 5, 10, 15 years," Obama said in his American University speech last month. And in any case, "sanctions alone are not going to force Iran to completely dismantle all vestiges of its nuclear infrastructure." Snap back? That was merely bait.

Right to enrich. A deal with Iran absolutely would not invest the Islamic Republic with a right to enrich uranium, the administration firmly asserted. "No — there is no right to enrich," Kerry declared. "In the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it's very, very clear that there is no right to enrich." This was a key point, since Iran insisted not only that it did have a right to enrich uranium, but that the West must acknowledge that right, or there would be no deal.

Before long, however, Kerry had changed his tune. "The NPT is silent on the issue," he conceded in testimony before a House committee. The final deal authorizes Iran to operate 6,000 centrifuges and to continue enriching uranium. "We understood that any final deal was going to involve some domestic enrichment capability," a senior administration official told The Wall Street Journal in April. "We always anticipated that." (Switch!)

Military option. Over and over and over, Obama proclaimed that he meant to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and that all options — including military attack — were "on the table." But that assurance has gone down the memory hole. (Switch!) As he lobbied for the nuclear deal that was signed in Vienna, his message was reversed. A military option is not on the table and will not eliminate an Iranian nuclear threat, Obama told Israeli TV. "A military solution will not fix it. Even if the United States participates, it would temporarily slow down an Iranian nuclear program but it will not eliminate it."

Deal or no deal. But perhaps the most egregious bait-and-switch of all involves the standard by which any accord with a deadly regime like Tehran's should be assessed. From President Obama on down, administration officials used to affirm constantly that "no deal is better than a bad deal."

They were right. And the deal they produced is indeed a bad deal. It does not dismantle Iran's nuclear program, nor constrain its murderous ambitions, nor lessen its influence. It will not enhance the security of America and its allies, nor make the world more peaceful.

Yet the president and his allies have abandoned their old standard. Their case for this bad agreement comes down to: It could be worse. It may be flawed and far from what was promised, but any deal with Iran is better than no deal. Most Americans, and most members of Congress, don't agree. And the bait-and-switch that was used to clinch this sale is going to leave a bad taste in a lot of mouths for a long time to come.

SOURCE

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Report: Murder Arrests up 55%, Rape Arrests up 370%, in ‘Sanctuary City’ San Francisco

Arrests for murder in San Francisco jumped 55% and arrests for rape jumped 370% between 2011 and 2015, during the time the city expanded its sanctuary city policies, according to new figures obtained by Judicial Watch.

San Francisco has been a sanctuary city for nearly 30 years, and since 2009 has incrementally added sanctuary policies to the point that Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez–although five times previously deported and a seven-time convicted felon–was still in San Francisco to shoot and kill Kathryn Steinle on July 1 on the city’s Pier 14.

But numbers uncovered by Judicial Watch show that Steinle’s death–as tragic and shocking as it was–remains but one piece of a larger picture of skyrocketing arrests for murder and rape in the city.

According to CBS San Francisco, the city officially became a sanctuary city in 1989. Incremental expansions of the original sanctuary policies followed, such as a 2009 Board of Supervisors bill exempting juvenile illegals from deportation, even if they were “arrested for felonies.”

Then came 2013, the year in which San Francisco’s Sheriff and City Council changed policies via an ordinance requiring San Francisco law enforcement to ignore most U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers. That not only laid the groundwork for illegals like Lopez-Sanchez to remain in the city, but also correlated with a surge in arrests for murder and rape.

Upon releasing these arrest percentages, Judicial Watch told Breitbart News that the massive jump in arrests for murder and rape does not include all arrests. Rather, the percentages only include “charges for arrests and bookings.”

Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton commented, “Citizens understand that when San Francisco and other sanctuary cities release illegal alien criminals onto the streets, crime is going to increase. These new crime statistics suggest that there are more murders and an epidemic of rape linked to San Francisco’s releasing illegal alien criminals in violation of law.”

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Are immigrants economically desirable?

I wrote this  for my AUSTRALIAN POLITICS blog but I think its interest extends well beyond Australia

One would have thought that the obvious answer to the question above would be:  "It depends on the immigrant".  Some immigrants are obviously better than others.  But there is an argument popping up rather a lot lately, mainly from the Left and people of recent immigrant origin, claiming that ALL immigration is desirable.

There is a completely empty such argument consisting of nothing but hand-waving assertions by neo-Marxist economist Thomas Piketty here. One could with complete adequacy reply to Piketty simply by saying:  "No.  Immigration is NOT good for a country".  Both the reply and the original would be equally free of relevant data.

Another example  written by Mat Spasic is here. It does at least mention Australia so I will say a little about it.

Spasic's argument is basically just a load of old cobblers.  He sedulously avoids mentioning any relevant statistics about the different immigrant groups.  No mention that Muslims and Africans tend to be highly welfare dependent, for instance.

If all immigrants were equal, his argument would be sound.  He points out well-known demographics which show sub-replacement birth rates and an ageing population.  Adding a large number of younger newcomers to the workforce would be very helpful in those circumstances.  But that's the point. How many of the current crop of "refugees" will enter the workforce?  And how many will go onto welfare? Mr Spastic offers no information on that.

And some of the arguments he puts up are quite laughable. He argues that Germany is prosperous because it has a large immigrant population.  That Germany is prosperous because Germans work and study hard he does not consider.  There is no chance that he would have mentioned the fact that Germany is the only country where members of the national parliament (Bundestag) normally hold a doctorate.  Germany has ALWAYS been prosperous, with or without immigrants.

So here are just a few of the things that the Spastic ignores:

Sweden's immigrants are almost entirely Muslims from the Middle East.  And there is ten times higher welfare dependency among them than among native Swedes.  How beneficial is that to Sweden?

And in Germany, 80% of those Turkish Muslim "guest workers", that Mr Spastic praises, claim welfare payments.  "Guest parasites" would be a franker description

And in the Netherlands: 50-70% of former Muslim ‘asylum seekers’ live permanently on welfare.

And in Denmark the crime rate among Somalis (African Muslims) is ten times the rate among native born Danes.

And according to the most recent figures released by Australia's Immigration Department, Muslims had an unemployment rate of 12.1 per cent in 2011 while the national average was 5.2 per cent.  And if we look more closely at the statistics, the unemployment rate among some migrant communities is 20% -- all living off the Australian taxpayer.

It is quite simply unreasonable to generalize about immigrants.  All men are not equal.  If we care for our national wellbeing, we have to ask:  "Which immigrants?".

Even official economic research acknowledges that.  I quote:

"It is clear that the experiences of immigrants in the labour market vary between NESB [non-English-speaking-background] and ESB [English-speaking-background] immigrants. The experiences of ESB immigrants are generally very similar to those of people born in Australia, while NESB immigrants are generally less successful in the labour market than the other two birthplace groups.

It is clear that NESB immigrants, when compared with the Australia-born, are less likely to participate in the labour force (partly due to NESB immigrants being more likely to be discouraged in their job search), have higher rates of unemployment, and are more likely to be underemployed"


A good example of how much ESB background matters is the large number of white South Africans who have fled to Australia to escape the racism of the "rainbow" regime there.  They just do not show up anywhere in any statistics.  They blend seamlessly into the prior population.  Were all other "refugees" like them! -- JR

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Refugees, bleeding hearts and the danger of moral bullying

By British doctor Max Pemberton

Back in the Seventies, a psychologist from Yale University identified a phenomenon he called ‘groupthink’.  It’s what happens when people are so anxious to conform and get along together that they ignore alternative viewpoints and end up making bad decisions.

Anyone who’s sat in an office meeting knows how it can work. Someone comes up with an idea that, frankly, isn’t terribly good. But everyone around the table is so keen to avoid conflict and reach a consensus that they talk themselves into agreeing.

It feels disloyal to point out inconvenient flaws in the argument, or suggest other ways to solve the problem. Creativity and independent thinking are suppressed; facts that don’t fit are ignored.

Before long, it starts to seem morally wrong to pipe up against the prevailing view. Who wants to be the mean-spirited contrarian, standing in the way of progress and contradicting what all right-thinking people in the room clearly believe?

The irony is that everyone is so busy agreeing with each other, it makes them even more convinced they’re all wise and wonderful, when they’re blinding themselves to reality.

The Yale researcher, Irving Janis, suggested groupthink was one of the factors behind various fiascos involving the U.S. government — from the failure to anticipate Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor to the Bay Of Pigs invasion of Castro’s Cuba.

But I’m starting to wonder if there’s some dangerous groupthink going on in Britain right now, about the awful refugee crisis engulfing the Mediterranean.

Maybe I’m heartless. Maybe I’m mistaken. But I’m not convinced that the answer to the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Syria is to open our borders to tens of thousands of refugees.

I’m not sure it’s right for our country and I’m not sure, ultimately, it’s right for the Syrian people. And according to a number of polls conducted this week, I am not alone in having these concerns.

In one survey, only one in four people favoured taking in more than 10,000 refugees. In another, two-thirds said they were worried that the images of drowned children risked distorting the debate.

Yet on social media and among our broadcasters and politicians, there’s a very different consensus.

In fact, people in these groups —often privileged, always fond of their own voices — have been competing with each other to insist we offer asylum to ever greater numbers. Those who haven’t joined this collective orgy of emotion are condemned as immoral, cruel and stupid.

This is itself a classic example of how Janis suggested groupthink works. The group insiders not only over-rate their own goodness and competence, but they also dangerously underrate the abilities and humanity of those who dare disagree with them.

Now, I challenge anyone not to be moved by that awful image of poor little Aylan Kurdi lying dead in the surf. Of course it was horrific. Of course we must seek a solution to this crisis and do what we can to ease the suffering of all involved.

However, I’ve worked with many refugees over my years as a doctor, including in outreach projects that helped asylum seekers. I am acutely aware they require a lot of support.

Inevitably, they will have witnessed and endured terrible things that can leave deep mental scars. The language barrier makes helping them cope with these problems especially hard. It’s no small burden for a country to take on.

It is entirely disingenuous for our leaders not to acknowledge that an influx of refugees has an impact on public services — not just in health but in education, housing and welfare. What frustrates me is that the people so enthusiastically insisting that we welcome large numbers are not the ones who will feel the pain of all this.

The Twitter hashtag mob will, largely, continue with their comfortable lives untouched. It’s mostly the poor and the sick who will feel the impact of refugees coming into their community.

There are countless other arguments here — not least the danger of encouraging yet more people to risk their lives on dangerous journeys.

But it’s not the specifics of these arguments that I’m worried about today. It’s the way influential groups in society are exerting pressure — consciously or unconsciously — to stop those arguments, and the feelings behind them, being expressed.

It’s psychologically unhealthy for people to think they have no right to voice sincerely held convictions. And at a practical level, it’s dangerously counterproductive for dissenting voices to be shouted down by a chorus of people desperate to show how caring they are.

Surely we need open, rational debate so we can thrash out solutions. If people’s worries or objections are unfounded, then expose them to the light and watch them wither away. Don’t try to shove them under the carpet.

The idea of groupthink was partially inspired by George Orwell’s nightmarish novel 1984, which used a similar term ‘doublethink’ to describe the way people manage to live with totally contradictory ideas to survive under a dystopian dictatorship.

But in the age of social media, fostering competitive compassion and intellectual conformity, groupthink may be a bigger threat than anything Orwell imagined.

SOURCE

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The British Labour Party is now led by an unambiguous hater of Britain (shades of Obama!)

Stephen Pollard

It has become a cliche to say that Jeremy Corbyn is not fit to be the leader of the Labour Party – at least for anyone who didn’t vote for him in yesterday’s leadership ballot.

But it’s worse than that. He is barely fit to be an MP. Corbyn doesn’t just hate America, Nato and the West. He appears to hate Britain itself.

Every one of his foreign policy positions involves supporting our enemies and attacking our friends. Last week he attacked David Cameron for launching the drone strike that killed British IS terrorist Reyaad Khan.

Corbyn said he would not have authorised the attack and that it was ‘unclear as to the point of killing’ Khan. Most of us might think the point is simple: Khan is now dead.

To Corbyn, everything Britain and the West does is wrong, which leads to the barmy conclusion that any enemy of Britain and the West must, at the very least, have a point.

IS might have burned people alive, plunged them in cages into water, raped them and beheaded them. But it would be wrong, says Corbyn, to ‘make value judgments’ about Brits who travel to Syria to join IS.

It is not just terrorist groups who benefit from his warped world view. Most of us think the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest events in the modern world. Not Corbyn. In his view, Poland should never have been allowed to join Nato because it was a deliberate provocation of Russia.

When Putin invaded Ukraine last year, he was not demonstrating Russian imperialism but acting defensively against US and Nato provocation, says Corbyn.

In the Middle East, Hamas might murder its opponents, kill homosexuals and be committed to the extinction of the Jewish people, but to Corbyn they are welcome ‘friends’.

When his welcoming language towards Hamas and Hezbollah was exposed, he said he was simply being polite and it was important to speak to people of all political stripes. But you will struggle to find him introducing representatives of the Israeli government as ‘friends’. Because he hasn’t. Ever.

The point is that in the Corbyn world view, any enemy of the West is worthy of support. Any ally is opposed. So he was happy to invite Raed Salah, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist with a conviction for spreading the blood libel (that Jews drink the blood of gentile children), to take tea with him at the Commons.

Bizarre and dangerous as these alliances may be, they are wrapped up in the language of concern – for the poor, for the rule of law and for the powerless.

Consider this quote from 2006 by John Rees, the national officer of Corbyn’s Stop the War Coalition: ‘Socialists should unconditionally stand with the oppressed against the oppressor, even if the people who run the oppressed country are undemocratic and persecute minorities, like Saddam Hussein.’

Some things are beyond parody. And one of them is now leading the Labour Party.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Interesting book?

Below is a blurb about  “The Origin of Our Left-Wing Species” by John Hayberry. I haven't had time to look at it so would be glad to get comments about it.  The blurb does not say so but I gather that the book has a Christian orientation -- JR

Political madness has overwhelmed the United States of America, thanks to the politics of liberal psychopathology. That’s the claim of this new book by John Hayberry, released by Dog Ear Publishing. He writes with a dash of humor about a new theory that helps explain what he calls the “anthropo-psychiatric reasons” for society’s left-wing metamorphosis and how it’s destroying the nation he loves.

“The Origin of Our Left-Wing Species” covers Hayberry’s theory of human (D) evolution, clarifying things about liberals and what happens when they serve government; fantasy addiction disorder, which explains liberal thought; and the PETS hypothesis, about people enabled to survive, which explains liberals’ origin and behavior. He explores the Darwinian origins of liberalism and discovers what makes liberal socialist Democrats (known as L.S.Ders in the book) tick.

In addition, rampant drug use, legal abortion, a weakened economy and other factors connected to liberals are all related to the downfall of the United States, which faces a staggering debt of nearly $18 trillion, Hayberry writes. The issue is serious enough that the author notes that he has published the book in the interest of national security, calling for nothing less than a radical change of thought to bring the United States of America back to the standards it once held dear.

Author John Hayberry describes himself as a comedic human zoologist. For additional information, please visit here

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The Democrats stoke class warfare

By Meredith Warren

DONALD TRUMP’S detractors love to characterize his brash and mouthy comments about the state of our union as “divisive.”

“Not Donald Trump, not anyone else will be successful in dividing us based on race or our country of origin,” declared Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to a gathering of Hispanic voters recently.

But Sanders should take a long look in the mirror. Both he and many of his Democratic cohort, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, are fiercely pushing a campaign message specifically intended to divide America along different lines — economic ones.

For years, Democrats have used an economic inequality argument to attract voters to their cause and pit certain groups of Americans against others. But they go beyond just making intellectual policy points. It’s a call to arms in a class war they are trying to incite for their own political gain.

And they’re not shy about calling it a “war.” In June, Sanders wrote an op-ed for the Globe in which he decried the “war against the American middle class.” Warren is famous for saying the middle class is “getting hammered.”

The enemy? It’s the wealthy and successful. “Millionaires and billionaires,” as President Obama likes to call them. According to Democrats, you’re not making it because Wall Street tycoons and greedy CEOs are holding you back.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claims it in her 2016 campaign announcement video: “The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” she says. Warren says it on the stump: “The system is rigged.” Sanders heralds it on his website: “The reality is that for the past 40 years, Wall Street and the billionaire class has rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people of this country.”

In a country still experiencing vast underemployment and the lasting effects of the 2008 recession, their campaign rhetoric resonates. A recent Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans think of the United States as being divided into groups of “haves” and “have-nots.”

Once the message has gained traction, it doesn’t take much for it to spill onto the streets. From Occupy Wall Street to rioting in Baltimore and Ferguson, images of America at war with itself have become part of our daily headlines. And, rather than trying to cool tensions, Democrats use civil unrest as talking points in their campaign to further divide the country into haves and have-nots.

Obama has tied rioting to unemployment and a lack of investment, which he calls “opportunity gaps.” “That sense of unfairness, of powerlessness . . . that’s helped fuel some of the protests we’ve seen in places like Baltimore, and Ferguson, and right here in New York,” he said in a speech in West Bronx last May.

Four years earlier, Occupy Wall Street set up camp in New York City’s Zuccotti Park to protest economic inequality at the hands of big banks. Warren would later say in an interview with The Daily Beast that she supported their efforts and claimed she “created much of the intellectual foundation” for what the group — whose website tagline is “We kick the [expletive] of the ruling class” — does.

It’s a tried and true political strategy – divide and conquer. If you split the electorate and capture a majority with your message, you win.  But America loses.

When the dust settles from the election and the candidates have all gone home, Americans will be left to pick up the pieces. And in 2016, the fault lines they’ll be forced to bridge will be that much deeper.

SOURCE

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From Lenin to Obama

by ALEXANDER G. MARKOVSKY, a Russian émigré

Much has happened since and the spate of violence has begun just as I predicted. How did I know this? I have been inside this monster and I know him well.

In the world of Marxist dialectical materialism, change is the product of a constant conflict between opposites, arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas, and movements. Therefore, any significant change in a society, according to Marxism, must be accompanied by a period of upheaval.

"Our task," wrote Lenin in 1902 in What Is to Be Done, "is to utilize every manifestation of discontent, and to collect and utilize every grain of rudimentary protest." Indeed, if you want to change a society, here is Lenin's script: cause the problem. Spread the misery. Send a cadre of professional community organizers to unite all of the angry and disinherited spirits to fuel an organized revolt. Entice chaos and violence. Exploit chaos for larger political objectives. Blame your political opponents, demonize and criminalize them. Move decisively to request a temporary suspension of civil liberties in exchange for the restoration of law and order. Usurp power before the deceived masses realize that there is nothing more permanent in politics than something temporary.

From Lenin to Obama the political landscape has changed, but the scheme remains assertively consistent.

As an ardent student of Marxism, Obama is acting in a predictable ethical and moral fashion, consistent with Marxist dialectical materialism. First it was the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. Unlike Lenin, who had proletariat-organized masses of working people who, according to Marx, had "nothing to lose but their chains," to be used as a revolutionary force to make fundamental changes in the society, Obama had to settle for non-working people who had "nothing to lose" to stoke street violence and resurrect an appearance of proletarians. Predictably, this premeditated unrest imitating Mao's Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution failed miserably.

Instead of storming the bulwarks of bourgeois institutions of power such as banks and corporations, as real revolutionaries would be expected to do, they were more interested in drugs and easy sex than presidential politics. After urinating on the streets of American cities and creating riots accompanied by vandalism and confrontations with police, the militant movement became an embarrassment for the Liberals. Subsequently, after spending a great deal of money on police overtime, cleaning the streets, and restoring damaged property, this organized banditry had to be quietly shut down.

The failure of the movement to create a virtuous dynamic that would lead to the socialist revolution in the United Sates became a source of contention among Marxists and socialists. Since 2011 a sizeable body of socialist and communist literature has been published to explore and analyze the failure of the movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. The most notable books are those of prominent Marxist Paul Mason, Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolution (Verso, 2013), and radical socialists Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy, Beyond Capitalism? The Future of Capitalist Politics (Zero Books, 2012) pinpointed the failure of the movement to the organizers' disregard of Lenin's conception of the vanguard party as the inspiration for and organizer of the proletarian revolution. The following excerpt from the book is indicative of the left's perception of the movement, "We need to take advantage of the antagonisms of the current social crisis to build and renew forms of dynamics of struggle that can deepen the cracks in the capitalist order." Inadvertently, the contemporary socialists confirmed what some of us familiar with Marxism knew all along; the socialist tactic is merely grabbing power through violence and destruction.  

The White House took a notice and endorsed the socialists' thesis. When an opportunity presented itself-the killing of a black teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014-the president and his party decided to take direct control of events. They mobilized professional organizer Al Sharpton, a sympathetic media, the Department of Justice and the prestige of the Oval Office to organize a nationwide revolt under the banner of victims of racism.

In the process the administration embraced a system of justice ruled by staged mass demonstrations and introduced its distinct concept of legitimacy based on racial chauvinism. This combination of mob justice and peculiar legitimacy redefines the limits of permissible; it entitles a segment of the population to riot, loot, assault, burn down buildings and otherwise destroy property, and provide false and misleading testimony to a grand jury with impunity, all   in the name of defending human rights while viciously disregarding the rights of humans.

Whether the ongoing revolt is labeled as "Occupy Wall Street", "Hands up, don't shoot", or "Black lives matter," the "near" objective of this campaign is to weaken law enforcement, forcing it to choose between security and political posturing. Should law enforcement get overwhelmed, the radical turmoil could gain momentum and expand merging various liberal grievances-social, economic, racial, and gender-and turn them into a broader replay of the 1960s upheavals. Determined not to "allow a crisis to go to waste," the administration is enticing violent rules of conduct and manipulating a multiplicity of divergent political interests, keeping them cohesive enough to support ideological conquest. This potentially explosive ploy inevitably leads to a bloody outcome. The recent murder of two New York police officers is a prelude to what's to expect.

The Liberals who support this movement are either impervious to or undaunted by the prospect that the inflamed rhetoric of Al Sharpton and other provocateurs gives a false sense of purpose and an aura of heroism to disturbed souls looking for a motive to unleash their anger, which may result in catastrophic destruction and massive loss of life.

In any event, given the unwavering support the participants are getting from the administration, is a sign that the president is comfortable with the greater level of anarchy if it can bring about his vision of CHANGE.

Hence, we shall not be deceived by Obama, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and other Liberals' morally irrelevant backpedaling on their racist rhetoric and shedding crocodile tears for the slaying police officers.

Motivated by political imperatives, the president and the Liberals will continue to emulate Marxist tactics and ideological oratory, instigating class warfare, civil disobedience, and riots dividing the nation along racial lines and income brackets to implement the CHANGE.

SOURCE

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Marines Think Armed Recruiters Might Scare Recruits

How ridiculous can you get?

Nearly two months after the July 16 terrorist attack in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Marine Corps announced that it will not heed calls to arm military personnel at recruitment centers. Sadly, those centers will remain gun-free, target-rich zones for jihadists. On Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Mark Brilakis, commanding general of the Marine Corps Recruiting Command, explained, “The arming piece is one of those things on the recruiting side that myself and [Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford] still have great concerns over. All the services … said they don’t want to arm their folks.”

The decision mostly has to do with public perception. The Marine Corps Times noted, “The Marine Corps has worked hard to build strong relationships with members of the communities in which they recruit, Brilakis said. That isn’t something leaders want to jeopardize.” Added Brilakis, “Whichever way you stand on the Second Amendment, recruiters showing up armed is not going to make either educators or parents comfortable.”

This isn’t about making people comfortable; it’s about giving our warriors the chance to defend themselves against bloodthirsty jihadists. Moreover, police officers also do a lot of work with the community. Should they be prohibited from carrying firearms too?

Rather than arming military personnel, “Changes being considered include more security cameras, remote-locking doors, and better ballistic protection, such as movable shields or desk partitions that could protect troops from bullets,” the Times continues. And the most ridiculous part of all? Marines will also continue conducting security training, which, according to Brilakis, proved vital to those involved in the attack on the Chattanooga facility. As Brilakis put it, “Marines in Chattanooga got out of that recruiting station in less than a minute. And they did so because, one, they were trained, and two, they sat down and talked about it before.” In other words, they’re being trained to retreat. They can take on the world’s most brutal terrorists, but taking on a domestic jihadi is somehow different? Our bravest souls shouldn’t be forced to flee the battlefield — here at home, no less — especially when the reason is that you wouldn’t want people to think that joining the military meant you had to be around icky guns.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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In Memoriam

Remembering those who died at the hands of a Satanic religion on this day in 2001.  Islamic supremacism should be no more acceptable than racial supremacism

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Is a meritocracy closer than we think?

I am putting up below just the first part of a very searching essay on the implications of meritocracy.  The most interesting claim is that our society may already be very meritocratic.  In Britain, the 7% of the population who go to private schools end up running just about everything in the whole country.  They even make up about a third of Britain's Olympic team.

This leads Leftists to claim that inherited social class governs one's opportunities in Britain.  But that may not be so.  Toby Young argues  below that those who go to private schools are already genetically advantaged.  They are by and large the children of economically successful people and such people tend to have higher IQs  -- which they pass on to their children genetically.  So the issue of social class and private schools is a red herring.  It is actually higher IQs that are easing the way for that top 7%

So schemes to improve education for the hoi polloi will not work unless the pupils concerned are already intellectually gifted.  And it was precisely that precondition that made Britain's "Grammar Schools" (academically selective schools) so successful at elevating children from poor families.  They were bright to start with.

Toby Young does not want that now nearly extinct Grammar School system to be revived but he does want marks and awards in existing schools to be strongly achievement-based.  He wants real ability recognized and rewarded -- just the opposite of the "dumbing down" that has for some time been the existing tendency.  In his system, those with genuine ability will be eased in their upward path, regardless of where they come from.

So it is possible to argue that MOST people already end up at a level within society that is commensurate with their innate intellectual abilities.  And even if that is not already so we are well on the road towards it.

My own experience bears that out.  I have a top 2% IQ but was born into a very humble and not very congenial family.  But, despite that background, I cruised through life mostly doing what I felt like and ended up as a well-paid university teacher.  I ran from one end of the occupational status scale to the other.  And I hardly worked at it.  What I did came easily and was fun.  Education for me was like solving a series of easy puzzles.  So I ended up where my IQ placed me, not where my birth placed me.

But society's responsiveness to IQ creates a problem.  What will happen if it becomes known that society has already placed just about everyone where they belong in the staus hierarchy and that there is no real possibility of an aspiring person cracking that?  Will it not lead to social unrest among the less gifted and maybe  even a bloody revolution against the existing order?

If that is a possibility, the present Leftist myth that it can all be solved by better education is in fact highly beneficial.  It gives hope and diverts attention from the "unfair" reality -- JR


The left  loathes the concept of IQ -- especially the claim that it helps to determine socio-economic status, rather than vice versa -- because of a near-religious attachment to the idea that man is a piece of clay that can be moulded into any shape by society

In 1958, my father, Michael Young, published a short book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2023: An Essay on Education and Equality. It purported to be a paper written by a sociologist in 2034 about the transformation of Britain from a feudal society in which people’s social position and level of income were largely determined by the socio-economic status of their parents into a modern Shangri-La in which status is based solely on merit. He invented the word meritocracy to describe this principle for allocating wealth and prestige and the new society it gave rise to.

The essay begins with the introduction of open examinations for entry into the civil service in the 1870s—hailed as “the beginning of the modern era”—and continues to discuss real events up until the late 1950s, at which point it veers off into fantasy, describing the emergence of a fully-fledged meritocracy in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. In spite of being semi-fictional, the book is clearly intended to be prophetic—or, rather, a warning. Like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), The Rise of the Meritocracy is a dystopian satire that identifies various aspects of the contemporary world and describes a future they might lead to if left unchallenged. Michael was particularly concerned about the introduction of the 11+ by Britain’s wartime coalition government in 1944, an intelligence test that was used to determine which children should go to grammar schools (the top 15 per cent) and which to secondary moderns and technical schools (the remaining 85 per cent). It wasn’t just the sorting of children into sheep and goats at the age of eleven that my father objected to. As a socialist, he disapproved of equality of opportunity on the grounds that it gave the appearance of fairness to the massive inequalities created by capitalism. He feared that the meritocratic principle would help to legitimise the pyramid-like structure of British society.

In the short term, the book achieved its political aim. It was widely read by Michael’s colleagues in the Labour Party (he ran the party’s research department from 1945 to 1951) and helped persuade his friend Anthony Crosland, who became Labour Education Secretary in 1965, that the 11+ should be phased out and the different types of school created by the 1944 Education Act should be replaced by non-selective, one-size-fits-all comprehensives. Crosland famously declared: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.” Today, there are only 164 grammar schools in England and sixty-eight in Northern Ireland. There are none in Wales.

But even though my father’s book helped to win the battle over selective education, he lost the war. The term “meritocracy” has now entered the language, and while its meaning hasn’t changed—it is still used to describe the organising principle Michael identified in his book—it has come to be seen as something good rather than bad. [1] The debate about grammar schools rumbles on in Britain, but their opponents no longer argue that a society in which status is determined by merit is undesirable. Rather, they embrace this principle and claim that a universal comprehensive system will lead to higher levels of social mobility than a system that allows some schools to “cream skim” the most intelligent children at the age of eleven.[2]

We are all meritocrats now

Not only do pundits and politicians on all sides claim to be meritocrats—and this is true of most developed countries, not just Britain—they also agree that the principle remains stillborn. In Britain and America there is a continuing debate about whether the rate of inter-generational social mobility has remained stagnant or declined in the past fifty years, but few think it has increased.[3] The absence of opportunities for socio-economic advancement is now seen as one of the key political problems facing Western democracies, leading to the moral collapse of the indigenous white working class, the alienation of economically unsuccessful migrant groups, and unsustainable levels of welfare dependency. This cluster of issues is the subject of several recent books by prominent political scientists, most notably Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2015) by Robert Putnam.

Unlike my father, I’m not an egalitarian. As Friedrich Hayek and others have pointed out, the difficulty with end-state equality is that it can only be achieved at too great a human cost. Left to their own devices, some men will inevitably accumulate more wealth than others, whether through ability or luck, and the only way to “correct” this is through the state’s use of coercive power. If the history of the twentieth century teaches us anything, it is that the dream of creating a socialist utopia often leads to the suppression of free speech, the imprisonment of a significant percentage of the population and, in some extreme cases, state-organised mass murder.

Having said that, I recognise that a lack of social mobility poses a threat to the sustainability of liberal democracies and, in common with many others, believe the solution lies in improving our education systems. There is a consensus among most participants in the debate about education reform that the ideal schools are those that manage to eliminate the attainment gap between the children of the rich and the poor. That is, an education system in which children’s exam results don’t vary according to the neighbourhood they’ve grown up in, the income or education of their parents, or the number of books in the family home. Interestingly, there is a reluctance on the part of many liberal educationalists to accept the corollary of this, which is that attainment in these ideal schools would correspond much more strongly with children’s natural abilities. [4] This is partly because it doesn’t sit well with their egalitarian instincts and partly because they reject the idea that intelligence has a genetic basis. But I’m less troubled by this. I want the clever, hard-working children of those in the bottom half of income distribution to move up, and the less able children of those in the top half to move down.

In other words, I think the answer is more meritocracy. I approve of the principle for the same reason my father disapproved of it, because it helps to secure people’s consent to the inequalities that are the inevitable consequence of limited government. It does this by (a) allocating wealth and prestige in a way that appears to be fair; and (b) creating opportunities for those born on the wrong side of the tracks, so if you start with very little that doesn’t mean you’ll end up with very little, or that your children will. If you think a free society is preferable to one dominated by the state, and the unequal distribution of wealth is an inevitable consequence of reining in state power, then you should embrace the principle of meritocracy for making limited government sustainable.

Much more HERE

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"Refugees" from Middle East ‘Richer than Some Hungarians’ Says Hungarian MEP



A Hungarian MEP has said that many of the ‘refugees’ who have come to his country are little more than economic migrants and are even wealthier than some of the poorest people in Hungary.

György Schöpflin, a member of the governing Fidesz party, told Sky News that some of refugees who swamped Budapest’s main railway station last week were not as desperate as media outlets had made them out to be.

“When you’re looking at some of these refugees, they’re actually rather better off than some of the rather poorer people in Hungary.

“They do have very sophisticated smart phones, designer clothes – they’re not the poorest of the poor.”

Schöpflin, a Europhile and former Jean Monnet Professor of Politics at University College London, added: “Many of them are desperate of course, but some of them are only economic migrants and that’s a different situation. They have to be sorted out.”

He added that Hungary will accept “somewhere around 2,000″ migrants permanently, but called on other EU nations to take action, and laid particular blame on Germany and Austria for causing the crowds after they insisted the migrants be processed.

The crowds continued to grow until Friday evening when, in a surprise move, the Hungarian government authorised buses to take thousands of migrants to the Austrian border where they disembarked and gathered in the small town of Nickelsdorf.

They then crowded into the town’s station while the Austrian government laid on two trains an hour to take them to Vienna.

Some migrants even walked all the way from Budapest to the Austrian border after they grew tired of waiting and distrustful of the Hungarian authorities. Even when the buses arrived, some believed they may actually be taken to refugee camps instead of Austria.

Germany and Austria have already pledged to take in as many migrants as possible with the head of Germany’s Federal Office from Migration and Refugees saying there was “no upward limit” on how many they could accept.

SOURCE

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Is there only one sane national leader left?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara left this morning on an official visit to London. Upon boarding the plane, the Prime Minister said:

"I am leaving now to meet British Prime Minister David Cameron. This is in continuation of the dozens of calls and meetings I have had since the elections with prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers of dozens of countries, including meetings with the Italian Prime Minister, and with Lithuanian and European Union leaders just yesterday.

In these talks I explain one thing: Europe needs to support Israel, not pressure Israel and not attack Israel, but support Israel, which is the only true protection Europe has in the Middle East against surging extremist Islam. We are prepared to act together with Europe in Africa and other places to fight extremist Islam but this requires a change of approach. This change will take time but we will implement it. This will be one focus of my talks with David Cameron.

The second thing is that we need to fight extremist Islam not only at the borders, as we are doing, but also within our territory. As soon as I return I will hold a meeting to summarize a meeting that I already had about boosting forces, stepping up enforcement, minimum sentences, blowing up suicide terrorists' houses and other steps that we are determined to carry out against all those who try to attack us here, within the country. My policy is zero tolerance for terrorism and this is what we will do."

Press release

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Baltimore reaches $6.4million settlement with Freddie Gray's family almost five months after he died

This clearly pre-empts the outcome of a court case so is a gross breach of proper procedure.  Black solidarity at work, it seems

The family of Freddie Gray, who died after being critically injured in police custody, reached a $6.4million wrongful death settlement with the city of Baltimore, resolving civil claims about a week after the first hearing in the criminal case against six police officers, officials said on Tuesday.

Six Baltimore police officers face criminal charges stemming from Gray's death. Gray, who was black, was critically injured on April 12 in the back of a prisoner transport van after he was arrested.

His death sparked protests, rioting and unrest that shook Baltimore for days.

The settlement still needs the approval of a board that oversees city spending. The five-member board controlled by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake meets on Wednesday.

'The proposed settlement agreement going before the board of estimates should not be interpreted as a judgment on the guilt or innocence of the officers facing trial,'Rawlings-Blake said in a news release.

She continued: 'This settlement is being proposed solely because it is in the best interest of the city, and avoids costly and protracted litigation that would only make it more difficult for our city to heal and potentially cost taxpayers many millions more in damages.'

The proposed settlement does not resolve any factual disputes, and expressly does not constitute an admission of liability on the part of the city, its police department or any of the officers.

The payment is larger than the sum of settlements from more than 120 other alleged police brutality and misconduct lawsuits brought against Baltimore Police since 2011, according to the Baltimore Sun.

SOURCE

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Fight Over North Carolina Election Rules Shows Obama Will Stop at Nothing to Win Elections

The recently concluded federal trial over North Carolina’s election rules proved one thing beyond a reasonable doubt: The Obama administration and its partisan, big-money, racial-interest-group allies will stop at nothing to win elections. And using the courts to change election rules is a key part of their strategy.

That was clearly evident in the federal courtroom in Winston-Salem. The plaintiffs, including the Justice Department, challenged a number of election reforms implemented in 2013 that were designed to reduce the cost and complexity of running elections and make it harder to commit voter fraud.

The administration pushed a novel legal argument. In its telling, if a change in election rules might statistically affect blacks more than whites, it constitutes illegal discrimination. For example, if 98 percent of whites have a voter ID but only 97.5 percent of blacks have one, then requiring voters to present ID violates federal law. Never mind the fact that getting an ID is free, easy, and open to everyone without regard to race. And never mind if a policy change is in line with the rules of many other states, or if it’s explicitly sanctioned by federal law. The mere act of changing the law in the wrong direction is discriminatory.

In other words, the Obama administration would turn the Voting Rights Act into a one-way ratchet to help Democrats. The court refused to go along.

None of the reforms had an obvious racial angle. For example, North Carolina required voters to vote in the precinct where they actually live. This commonsense reform—returning to the law the state had prior to 2003—prevents chaos on Election Day, from overcrowded polling places to precincts running out of ballots because election officials can’t predict how many voters will show up. Thirty-one states do not allow voting outside of your precinct. The Justice Department claims that North Carolina broke the law when it returned to this policy.

North Carolina was wrong to end same-day registration, too, according to Justice. North Carolina implemented same-day registration in 2007. Shortly thereafter, a local election in Pembroke, N.C., had to be done over because of voter fraud and unverified ballots. The problem with same-day registration is that people can register and cast a ballot simultaneously—leaving election officials unable to verify the accuracy of a voter’s registration information. So the state changed that. In North Carolina, you now have to register at least 25 days before the election, well within the voting standard set by federal law, which makes 30 days the maximum. Only about a dozen states today have same-day registration.

The state also shaved a few days off early voting to cut down costs, but North Carolina’s new ten-day period falls well within the norm. The number of early-voting days allowed by states varies from just four to 45, with the average being 19. At least 16 states don’t allow early voting at all. Additionally, more than 20 early-voting states do not allow either any weekend voting or Sunday voting, both of which are available in North Carolina. And yet, according the Justice Department, this reform was also illegal.

The rule in most states is that you can register to vote if you will be 18 prior to Election Day. In 2009, North Carolina changed the law to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register, apparently causing a logistics nightmare for election officials, who were forced to create two different voter-registration lists and integrate them when the pre-registered teenagers actually became eligible to vote. So the state went back to the prior rule, which the vast majority of states follow. Justice challenged this decision as well.

To no one’s surprise, given the current Justice Department’s partisan history on voting-related issues, North Carolina’s new voter-ID requirement was also challenged, although that law will not be in effect until 2016.

Incredibly, the Justice Department, the NAACP, and the other plaintiffs claimed that all of these changes were “discriminatory” and violated the Voting Rights Act—a law designed to break down racial barriers to the ballot box. Apparently, in 2015 North Carolina, not being able to register when you are 16, having to register 25 days ahead of time, having only ten days before the actual date of an election to vote, and being required to vote on Election Day in the precinct where you actually live are not only racist, but barriers to voting itself.  Contrast these “conditions” with the ugly discrimination of the early ’60s.

Times have certainly changed. When the racial interest groups sued North Carolina over its reforms, a swarm of lawyers from gigantic law firms donated their services. The Justice Department devoted hundreds of thousands of dollars and man-hours to attack the law. But no witnesses could be found to say they couldn’t vote because of the changes.

The Justice Department also pumped untold thousands of dollars into a database run by a company called Catalist. This database has been populated with data provided by the Democratic National Committee, unions, and other liberal organizations and is used to help them win elections. Catalist’s infrastructure and database are expensive to maintain, but fear not: the Justice Department, in the North Carolina trial and elsewhere, has provided federal tax dollars to its expert witnesses so that they could purchase Catalist’s proprietary data. Yes, federal dollars were used to fund a database that will be used next year to try to win the 2016 election for Democratic candidates.

For all the resources expended, the Justice Department’s entire case was built on speculative claims. Not able to produce a single eligible voter who was or would be unable to vote, the plaintiffs relied on hypothetical statistical arguments to claim that the turnout of black voters would be “suppressed” because they might use early voting and same-day registration slightly more than white voters, and because black voters are “less sophisticated voters.” DOJ experts actually made the borderline racist argument that “it’s less likely to imagine” that black voters could “figure out or would avail themselves of other forms of registering and voting.” That’s a shameful way to enforce a law that was used to protect real victims of real discrimination in the Deep South.

In the end, real statistics destroyed the Justice Department’s case. The reforms the plaintiffs claimed would disenfranchise “less sophisticated” black voters didn’t depress turnout at all. Indeed, in comparison with the 2010 primary, the turnout of black voters actually increased a whopping 29.5 percent in the May 2014 primary election, while the turnout of whites increased only 13.7 percent. The same thing happened in the general election. This knocked the stuffing out of the plaintiff’s discrimination claims.

The Justice Department still holds a thoroughly demeaning view of civil-rights law. It is a view that insists that blacks are incapable of performing basic societal functions, and therefore the law must step in any time they are asked to comply with a simple procedural step to participate in the electoral process. This is not only an abuse of the department’s authority; it’s a misuse of the Voting Rights Act. It should not be tolerated.

SOURCE

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Obesity has plateaued

So the excerpt of the most recent journal article (below) tells us.  The obesity warriors can now take a bow and relax

Obesity is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes. The prevalence of obesity in US adults, defined as a body mass index (BMI; calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared) of 30 or greater, changed little between 1960 and 1980 (from 13% in 1960 to 15% in 1980). Subsequently, between 1980 and 2000, the prevalence of obesity in the United States doubled from 15% to 31%.1 Since then, there has been relatively little change in the prevalence of obesity among infants and toddlers, children and adolescents, or adults. Nevertheless, the prevalence of obesity is high with 8% of infants and toddlers, 17% of those aged 2 to 19 years, and 35% of US adults aged 20 years or older estimated to be obese.

SOURCE

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The absurd tanning tax:  Moron bureaucrats at work

This somehow reminds me of Bastiat

A supposed revenue-generating provision of Obamacare is an expensive bust. Among the many items buried in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a new federal tax on indoor tanning salons that added 10 percent to customers’ bills. The “tanning tax,” according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), originally was projected to generate some $2.7 billion in new revenue through 2019 — $1 billion in the years 2011 through 2014 alone — which would be used to offset part of the estimated $940 billion that Obamacare was expected to cost through 2019.

The tax committee’s rosy projection was way off. Instead of $1 billion in revenue during its first four years, the tanning-salon tax has actually produced only about $362 million, slightly more than one-third of the JCT’s forecast. Revised estimates from the Internal Revenue Service and the White House Office of Management and Budget, released last year, now peg total tax revenue at $955.7 million through 2019.

But even that number appears overly optimistic. Why? Because the tax, along with public concerns that tanning might contribute to skin cancer, has helped put a lot of tanning salons out of business — some 9,658 nationwide over the past four years, according to the American Suntanning Association trade group. In New York State, the number of tanning salons has plummeted from 612 in 2009 to 284 today. In New Jersey, there were 431 in 2009; there are 197 today.

The JCT fell prey to a mistake commonly committed by revenue forecasters: They assume that consumers will meekly go along with price increases and that the volume of market transactions will stay the same. In that sense, the JCT’s bureaucrats behaved like Adam Smith’s “man of system,” who thinks he can move people around willy-nilly as if they were lifeless pieces on a chessboard impelled to action only by a player’s hands.

But humans have minds of their own and often respond rationally and predictably to tax increases and other external interventions. And their responses often differ from those the bureaucrats naïvely expect of them. When a tax is imposed on any good or service, increasing its cost, many consumers will seek out substitutes — in this case, buying sunlamps to tan at home, tanning themselves by natural sunlight, applying artificial tans from a bottle, reducing the frequency with which they visit tanning salons, or forgoing tanning altogether.

Such responses are bad news for the owners and employees of tanning salons. In 2009, the industry employed more than 164,000 people, according to the Suntanning Association; in 2015, it employs just over 83,000 — a loss of nearly half the industry’s jobs. Workers unable to find employment elsewhere are no longer paying income or payroll taxes — something else the JCT didn’t count on.

Obamacare’s tanning tax also turns out to be a tax on women. According to the Suntanning Association, women own 70 percent of U.S. tanning salons, compared to an average of 26 percent of all other businesses. Women also account for approximately 95 percent of tanning-salon staffs, and 75 percent of the customers are female.

This is another example of Washington’s know-it-all bureaucrats getting it all wrong. The misnamed Affordable Care Act, which becomes less affordable every day, is the poster child for bad policymaking. It needs to be dismantled — one piece at a time, if necessary. Repealing the tanning tax is a good place to start.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The West’s huge cost disadvantages, particularly because of   regulations

By economic historian MARTIN HUTCHINSON

Modern telecommunications shrank the cost differential between rich and poor country product sources, making global supply chains easily feasible. Ever since the middle 1990s, therefore, the rich world has been getting poorer, as living standards across the planet began to converge. In the last decade, however, government actions have hugely increased costs in rich countries, making them less and less competitive – and lowering their citizens’ living standards far below the level dictated by the market. It’s time for Western citizens to rise up against this oppression.

Many commentators are currently bemoaning the parlous state of emerging markets’ economies. Yet their diagnosis is precisely the reverse of reality. Emerging markets now have a massive cost advantage compared to their developed brethren, they have further to grow without outrunning their living standards, they have by and large avoided the mistakes of the developed world and their growth rates remain safely in the black, even after population growth is factored in. It is the developed economies, not the emerging ones, which are in serious danger of falling backwards in absolute terms.

Before the 1980s, it was difficult for emerging markets to compete. Communications were expensive and difficult and most emerging markets were not fully aware of the needs of a modern economy, with poorly trained workers and whimsical regulations. Hence most production for the rich world was done in the West, with only a few industries, notably textiles/garments, fully open to competition from poor countries (and high protectionist barriers against poor country textile production until the 1990s.)

Since 1994, emerging markets have become fully competitive with Western countries. Under the influence of the fall of Communism and the emergence of new producers in Eastern Europe, they made a bonfire of many of the silly regulations that had hindered them. The surge in foreign investment which followed, which was partly motivated by the new ease of communication, rapidly improved the skill levels of emerging market workforces. Today, emerging markets are competitive against the West in almost any manufacturing sector and most services, so the West needs to up its game in order to ensure the preservation of its living standards – not the differential against emerging markets living standards, which is bound to erode over time, but the living standards themselves in absolute terms.

Instead of upping their game to meet the new tougher competition, Western countries have done the opposite, especially since 2008. They have added costs to the economy in a number of different areas, weakening their economic performance and their ability to compete with emerging markets. As a result the living standards of Western workers, especially those of only modest attainments, have gone into steady decline and many have withdrawn themselves from the workforce.

The most important area where additional costs have been imposed is through regulation, especially in the energy area. The global warming hysteria from about 2007 has caused government after government to pass heavy regulations forcing the closure of electricity plants while subsidizing hopelessly uneconomic energy sources. This has not only affected living standards directly, by increasing energy costs, it has also driven out many high-paid jobs in heavy industry, which depend on cheap energy to remain competitive with emerging market producers. The German saga, where energy costs almost double those in other countries have reduced the German steel industry to a fraction of its former size, is just one case where ideological fanaticism on the part of the elite has wrecked the livelihoods of ordinary people.

As important as the restriction of existing efficient power capacity has been the subsidization of new inefficient power capacity. Scams such as Solyndra in the United States, and the massive cost-inefficient wind farms in Britain, have all been instituted at enormous cost to the public, either directly through state subsidy or indirectly through regulations forcing utilities to take the uneconomic power at rates that make no sense in the context of their overall business.  Each wind farm may represent only a relatively modest waste of taxpayer or utility-user money, but collectively they place a colossal drag on the Western economies concerned.

The “green” cost to Western economies is not limited to the global warming campaign. The regulation outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, which imposed $10 billion of costs on electric utilities for a benefit of only around $5 million, thereby achieving a cost/benefit ratio of 2,000 to 1 in the wrong direction, is just one of a myriad of additional costs that enthusiastic Obama-era zealots have imposed on the U.S. economy. Similarly in Europe, there is little or no democratic control over the regulatory enthusiasms of the EU bureaucracy. Globally also, the various international bureaucracies impose massive costs primarily on the “rich” West without any form of democratic control. As the $10 billion example above shows, the individual regulations may be obscure and fairly modest in their economic effects, but they quickly add up.

Infrastructure costs have soared through the roof due mostly to the regulatory bureaucracy but also to the excessively favorable climate for obstructive lawsuits. When a new tunnel under the Hudson River costs in real terms fifteen times what a functionally identical tunnel cost in the 1920s, the burden on the economy has become grotesque. Big-government politicians observe crumbling bridges and call for more infrastructure spending, but society has rationally taken the decision to spend less on infrastructure while its cost is so great. It is not greater Chinese efficiency that enables them to build new facilities at one tenth or less of the cost in the U.S., it is sclerotic U.S. bureaucracy and regulation and uncontrolled parasitic U.S. lawyers.

Government’s additional cost burdens on Western economies go far beyond regulation itself. The orgy of fines and related costs imposed on the banking system since 2008 now totals over $260 billion, according to Morgan Stanley research quoted in the Financial Times, and there is no sign of any slowdown soon. Extraordinarily, most of the fines have not been related to the outrageous bad behavior of the banks in the run-up to the crisis, such as Goldman Sachs’ deliberate design of securities destined to fail in the “Fabulous Fab” case, but have instead related to tiny manipulations of LIBOR and other systems that were never designed to take the stresses of multi-trillion volumes through the derivatives markets. Either way, that $260 billion alone represents about 0.6% of rich country GDP, and it is sheer dead weight on economic output, especially damaging because it has mostly been imposed for faults that nobody could have spotted at the time, with penalties imposed in entirely arbitrary and excessive amounts.

The West’s costs are also increasing for a reason entirely independent of government: a higher dependency ratio as the baby boomers age past retirement and the workforce shrinks. Governments have however persistently attempted to worsen this problem by mass immigration, adding immeasurably to the welfare burdens of society by letting in poor immigrants with few skills who languish at the bottom of the economic totem pole. While the higher dependency ratio should reduce the income of society as a whole, by reducing the number of workers, it should increase the earnings of the workers themselves (by all means, while making them look after an increasing number of dependents.) It is a bitter condemnation of the West’s immigration policies over the last couple of decades that this is not happening; instead, wages are declining even as dependency ratios increase, as the flood of immigrants pressures the lower end of the earnings scale.

The additional costs imposed by the higher dependency ratio are being exacerbated by the soaring costs of healthcare, which has been subsidized by government for far too long. Pharmaceutical prices are bloated by excessive intellectual property rights, while hospital care prices are bloated by sheer maddening bureaucracy and the trial bar. Patients are now flying to Third World clinics to get their non-urgent healthcare carried out at reasonable cost. The additional burden of a healthcare sector that absorbs 18% of GDP is a major burden on U.S. living standards and to a large extent those in the rest of the rich West where the market in healthcare services has been distorted.

The greatest recent additions to the West’s burdens however have come from the grossly misguided economic policies pursued since 2008. Economies have been loaded up with extra debt to pay for wasteful government boondoggles, and it has all been financed by a monetary policy far more extreme than any since the 1920s, making government debt cheaper but forcing up asset prices, especially those of real estate. I wrote two weeks ago about how big cities were now hopelessly uncompetitive as business locations; that is true only in the West and not by and large in emerging markets where real interest rates have been kept safely positive and real estate bubbles have been avoided. There is a certain “feel-good factor” to rising house prices which prevents their full cost from being felt until after prices stop rising, but in reality the economic damage they do is both immediate and long-lasting. The money wasted in superfluous real estate and on projects that are economic at normal interest rates is an additional burden on the Western economies, invisible now but crippling in the next downturn.

Western politicians are right to worry about declining living standards, and their countries’ strange inability to compete with emerging market production. However this failure is very largely the result of their own hugely damaging policies.

SOURCE

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Beefing Up Obama's Pro-Amnesty Agenda

The Obama administration’s intention to force-feed a pro-amnesty agenda to a recalcitrant American public has reached a new low. The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced it had reached an immigration-related settlement with Nebraska Beef Ltd., a meat packing company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. The DOJ had accused the company of discrimination — because the meat packing company demanded that workers show proof of immigration status to demonstrate they were eligible to work legally in the United States.

The DOJ insisted Nebraska Beef violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) because it required “non-U.S. citizens, but not similarly-situated U.S. citizens, to present specific documentary proof of their immigration status to verify their employment eligibility.” Yet the act itself states that “employers may hire only persons who may legally work in the United States (i.e., citizens and nationals of the U.S.) and aliens authorized to work in the U.S. The employer must verify the identity and employment eligibility of anyone to be hired, which includes completing the Employment Eligibility Verification Form (I-9).” Adding insult to injury, the act warns employers that they can be penalized if they fail to complete and/or retain those I-9 forms.

Judicial Watch put this outrage in the proper perspective: “You know the nation is in trouble when a U.S. business gets investigated by its own government for following the law.”

Regardless, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, was adamant. “The department is committed to ensuring that individuals who are authorized to work in the United States can support their families and contribute to our country’s economic growth without facing unnecessary and discriminatory barriers to employment,” she stated. “We will vigorously enforce the law to remove such barriers where we find them, and ensure that affected individuals have a means of seeking relief.”

“Relief” in this case amounts to Nebraska Beef paying $200,000 in a civil penalty settlement, establishing an uncapped back-pay fund for people who lost wages because they could not prove they are in the country legally, and two years of compliance monitoring. The company is also required to train employees on the anti-discrimination provision within the Immigration and Nationality Act and to revise policies within its office.

The anti-discrimination provisions of the act can be seen here. The germane clause states that employers “may not treat individuals differently based on citizenship or immigration status. U.S. citizens, recent permanent residents, temporary residents, asylees and refugees are protected from citizenship status discrimination.” All well and good, save for one seemingly inherent contradiction:

How is a company supposed to determine a potential employee’s status and eligibility to work in the United States without documentary proof?

A 2014 federal audit conducted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general revealed the bigger stakes in play here, noting the Obama administration has not only been “inconsistent” in enforcing the provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), but it reduced the average fine for businesses caught hiring illegals by a whopping 40% between 2009 and 2012. Now the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is getting in on the act, helping to facilitate the administration’s pro-amnesty agenda.

All Americans should be outraged, but none more so than black Americans. Another disappointing jobs report Friday revealed that only 173,000 jobs were created in August, despite predictions of 220,000. And though the unemployment rate dropped to 4.4% for whites, a drop of 0.2% from July, black unemployment is 9.5%, up 0.4% from July.

Unfortunately, both of those figures hardly tell the real story. The daunting reality is that a record-setting 94,031,000 Americans were not in the labor force last month, and the labor participation rate is 62.6% — the lowest level since 1977. When those people are counted, the overall unemployment rate, trumpeted to be 5.1%, more than doubles to 10.3%. Even worse, wages for all American workers have declined from the time the so-called recovery began in 2009, right through 2014 — with lowest paid workers taking the biggest hit.

All while Obama champions amnesty for million of illegals who would drive those wages even lower — for as long as a decade.

In short, the fundamental transformation, or more accurately, the balkanization of America, continues. Assimilation has been tossed on the ash heap of history, in favor of the multiculturalist “celebrating our differences” nonsense that is tearing this nation apart. The transnationalists who would abet our descent into Third World-ism for cheaper labor and reliable big-government votes must be thoroughly rejected by an electorate that still treasures national sovereignty. And it’s about time presidential candidates other than Donald Trump heartily embrace the one irrefutable statement he has made (echoing Ronald Reagan, by the way): A nation without borders is no nation at all.

SOURCE

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