RUTHFULLY YOURS

This past month’s media coverage of the protests in Hong Kong omits an important source of tension between the miniscule territory and its huge northern neighbor: Birthright Citizenship. Like the US, Hong Kong is one of the few areas of the world that has some form of this rather nonsensical practice. I worked in Hong Kong for 7 years and I know from friends and colleagues there that the explosion of anger over the past several weeks includes not only the recent political meddling from Beijing but also serious social and cultural tensions related in part to Hong Kong’s immigration policy vis a vis the mainland Chinese.

Under current law, any mainland Chinese can secure permanent residence for their children in Hong Kong if they simply cross the border and give birth within the territory. As a result, those from the mainland, but born in Hong Kong, become entitled to receive generous future welfare benefits, attend superior local schools and travel internationally with much greater ease. This along with the swarm of mainland Chinese that now frequently move and travel to Hong Kong, bringing alien habits with them like spitting and eating in public, has earned them the title of “locusts” by many of Hong Kong’s citizens.

“Birth tourism” from the mainland took off following a decision from Hong Kong’s highest court in 2002 that interpreted the “right to abode”-clause in the territory’s constitution to award permanent residency status to Hong Kong-born children of non-resident mainland Chinese. Soon after the decision, Hong Kong’s hospitals (some of the best in the world) became flooded with “birth tourists” from the mainland. By 2012, one in every three births in the territory was going to mainland Chinese parents – While I lived there (2005-2012), one short-term rental apartment block in my neighborhood was usually almost completely taken up by pregnant mainland wives waiting to give birth – Usually resilient Hong Kongese snapped and protested that the abuse from the northern Chinese not only strained medical resources but also endangered the lives of the other Hong Kong patients.

The practice was finally curbed (but not completely halted) when Hong Kong hospitals became so stretched that doctors, medical staff and taxpayers organized in the streets and forced the government to make mainland mothers prove they were married to Hong Kong men. That Hong Kong’s top-notch schools and nearly free medical care could end up being handed over to foreign “locusts” who contributed nothing to the system was too much to bear for the hardworking local citizens.

The struggle for Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish town on the border with Turkey where the Kurdish forces alone are battling the barbaric hordes of the Islamic State, aka ISIS, is reminiscent of the Polish uprising in Warsaw against the Nazis in August, 1944. While the Polish Home Army fought courageously against the might of the superior armed Nazis, the Soviet Union’s Red Army stood by across the River Vistula, which divides Warsaw, watching the merciless slaughter of Polish civilians and the destruction of the city.

The Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, like the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin before him, showed no consideration for the lives of innocent Kurdish civilians already butchered by the sadists of the Islamic State mercenaries. For those still alive in Kobani, unless rescued by outside intervention or supplied with heavy arms and ammunition, will also die a gruesome death. Turkish tanks, in the meantime, are ensconced on the crest overlooking Kobani. They can help save the remaining Kurds should Erdogan give them the order to fire on the ISIS fighters. But, just as Stalin wanted the Nazis to decimate the Polish nationalist Home Army, Erdogan is wishing for ISIS to destroy the Syrian Kurds.

What is puzzling in all this is the role the U.S. is playing. In his September 10, 2014 speech, President Obama said that, “military advisors are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence, and equipment.” Hitherto, there has been no supply of equipment or training of the Kurds. In fact, the Obama administrations blind support for a unitary Iraqi state led by Shiite ruled Baghdad government is in contradiction with the realities on the ground. The Shiite-led Iraqi army folded in the face of the jihadi ISIS guerrilla offensive, and in the process, abandoning U.S. supplied heavy weapons including tanks, armored cars, Humvees, etc. The Kurdish Peshmergas alone hold the line against ISIS, and they are not getting the promised arms because the U.S. has long insisted that all sales of U.S. weapons must go through Iraq’s central government, despite Kurdish complaints that Baghdad had deprived them of promised military equipment and financial support.

Washington has not overruled Baghdad on issuing direct shipments of arms to the Kurds. The Iraqi government has demanded that all shipments to the Kurds arrive first in Baghdad. Iraqi officials have regularly blocked or delayed these shipments to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil. Moreover, U.S. State Department regulations bar the KRG from purchasing U.S. made weapons without “end-user certificates” issued by Baghdad. According to the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, “Baghdad is bent on wielding this authority to prevent the KRG from developing antitank and antiaircraft arsenals.”

At a conference last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen recycled a shopworn Democrat talking point about the supposed crisis of income inequality and stalled economic mobility. “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me,” Yellen said, going on to wonder “whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history,” especially “equality of opportunity.”

Like the mythic “war on women,” this progressive sound bite is misleading and duplicitous, based on statistical sleight of hand. Worse yet, it is a pretext for more and more government expansion and intrusion into the economy, and for more and more redistribution of income through entitlement programs. It makes one wonder what one of the most powerful government officials impacting the economy, supposedly a politically neutral technocrat, is doing recycling Democratic campaign slogans.

The “income inequality” claim depends on ignoring numerous data that contradict it. For one thing, it glosses over the mobility among the 5 income cohorts over time, assuming that the same people are rich or poor year after year. But as Stephen Moore and James Pierson point out, “In America they [the rich] don’t generally stay rich for long. A few years ago the Department of Treasury examined what happens to the wealth of families across several generations. Guess what: the poor got richer and the rich got poorer. The incomes of poor households rose 80 percent from 1987 to 1996 and then more than doubled from 1996 to 2005. The richer people were at the start of this period, the more income losses they suffered in subsequent years.”

The Treasury study indeed confirms this mobility, finding that between 1996 and 2005 over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile. Half of taxpayers in the bottom quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group in 2005. Meanwhile, only 25% of the richest 1/100 of 1% in 1996 were still that rich in 2005. This mobility has indeed stalled, but not for “several decades,” as Yellen claimed, and not because of the sinister machinations of the wealthy. Its cause rather is the sluggish economic growth after the recession ended 5 years ago, and the blame for that in large part falls on Obama and the Democrats’ regulatory overreach, trillion-dollar deficits, “you didn’t build that” anti-business rhetoric, and redistributionist economic policies. Get the feds out of the way of the economy so it can grow, and we will see income growth and mobility again.

The “income inequality” meme ignores other facts as well. It focuses only on “money income,” neglecting the value of government transfers like Medicaid, Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (formerly known as food stamps and welfare checks), emergency-room health care, Section 8 housing subsidies, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, all of which boost the buying power of the statistical poor and lower middle class. For the middle class, “money income” ignores the value of employer-provided fringe benefits such as health care. As for the rich, “money income” ignores the highly progressive taxes they pay to fund those government programs. As Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution writes, “To disregard the impact of transfers and progressive taxation on the distribution of income and family well-being is to ignore America’s most expensive efforts to lessen the gap between the nation’s rich, middle class, and poor.”

However the US campaign against ISIS goes, the beneficiaries will be its Sunni Muslim allies who are also doubling as our allies. While on the surface ISIS appears to have cut all ties, threatening even former allies like Turkey and Qatar, underneath the surface the pragmatic connections remain as strong as ever.

Terrorism is the fire of the Muslim world. Everyone plays with it and everyone gets burned. The trick is burning someone else with it first.

Americans still think of the relationship between terrorist groups and countries as servant and master. However it’s often more like feeding a rabid dog and then luring it into your neighbor’s yard. It’s less about direct control of a terrorist group and more about maneuvering it to reshape the political and military environment that your enemies and allies operate in.

That’s why Al Qaeda and Iran, religious enemies, could still occasionally cooperate.

The current campaign against ISIS is a typical example. By empowering ISIS, the Sunni Muslim oil states dragged the United States into an alliance with the bands of Islamic Jihadists commonly known as the Free Syrian Army. When the West balked at intervention even after reports of WMD use, the smart money went to ISIS. By turning Al Qaeda into a major regional threat, the United States would be dragged into the conflict and then forced to make common cause with the Free Syrian Army anyway.

When that still didn’t happen on schedule, mass murder and rape by ISIS did the trick. Now the Kurds have been forced out of their neutral position and into an alignment with the Sunni rebels. Western countries have gotten deeper into an alliance with the Free Syrian Army which will ultimately force them into a NATO intervention in Syria to protect the FSA. That was always the endgame. ISIS was the means.

The ISIS gamble was a dangerous one, especially under Obama, but now it’s beginning to pay off.

IS A $1 BILLION PAYROLL Enough- to Safe
Guard the Health of American Citizens?

“Taxpayers paid out $6 billion in salaries and $25 million in bonuses to an elite corps of health care experts at the Center for Disease Control since 2007.”
Adam Andrzejewski
Chairman American Transparency, OpenTheBooks.com

Can the elite group of doctors and health care professionals at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention safeguard the health of the nation?

It’s an open question and the results so far do not inspire confidence…

But, payroll resources are certainly not a problem. Since 2007, data at OpenTheBooks.com, shows over $6 billion in total salaries and $25 million in “performance bonuses” flowed to the approximately 10,000 CDC employees. Total CDC payroll costs increased by 38% since 2007 and even during the federal wage freeze $12 million in bonuses flowed.

Review our CDC Cash Compensation Report by City 2007-2013 click here

Amongst the findings:

1. #1 Bonus of $63,845 went to the Donald Shriber, Deputy Director of Policy & Communication at the Center for Global Health in 2011.

2. CDC Employee Counts Up By a Quarter since 2007. The gross number of CDC employees increased from 8,325 in 2007 to 10,213 in 2013- this is an all-time high.

3. $1 Billion in total payroll at CDC in 2013, that’s up from $726,000,000 in 2007- that’s a 38% increase in total payroll spending.

4. $21.504 Million in 2013 salaries flowed to the Top 100 Highly Compensated Executives at CDC.

5. Isn’t it time to fire the Interior Decorators, Gardeners, other extraneous employees at CDC. Millions of dollars of salaries and bonuses have flowed into positions such as these since 2007.

Rep. Henry Waxman testified at yesterday’s congressional hearings that the overall CDC budget was cut or impacted during sequester, but it’s just not the case with the pay and perks to CDC employees. Cash compensation and number of employees have all increased from 2007-2013 and stand at an all-time high.

The CDC must simply do their jobs: Protect the health of citizens.

For the Good of America

Matthew Tyrmand
Deputy Director, American Transparency

Barack Obama isn’t running merely the worst American presidency since James Buchanan’s, but the worst imaginable presidency in this day and age. And every single Senate Democrat is thoroughly complicit in Obama’s horrendous record.

Is there a single Obama initiative that has actually worked as advertised, or even one that has improved the lives of most Americans or improved the U.S.’s standing in the world? Surely there must be a small success or two, somewhere, but everywhere we look, we see failure and calamity. And in almost every case, the disaster has been aided and abetted by Senate Democrats such as Tom Udall, Kay Hagan, Jeanne Shaheen, Mary Landrieu, Mark Udall, Mark Warner, Mark Begich, and Mark Pryor. (One might say Senate Democrats have been “off their Marks.”)

For the so-called stimulus act of 2009, Obama promised hundreds of thousands of “shovel-ready jobs.” There were instead, approximately . . . none. The president later tried to turn his own prior promise into a punch line, quipping, at a meeting of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” Hilarious. What’s not so funny is that every Democratic senator voted for the bill. It blew deficits and the debt through the roof, gave oodles of taxpayer dollars to favored insiders who produced nothing for it, and did nothing to stop (and possibly worsened) the rise in unemployment from 8.3 percent to 10 percent. It took three full years before unemployment dipped below what it was when Obama took office.

Obamacare, famously enacted with the vote of every Democratic senator, has limited patient choices (including taking away the chosen insurance plans of as many as 5 million Americans, who saw their policies canceled as a direct result of Obamacare); jacked up premium prices by an average of 202 percent; imposed more than a trillion dollars in new taxes, including on medical-device companies, that have resulted in many thousands of job losses and a slowdown in medical innovation; trampled on religious liberty and the rights of conscience; driven people crazy with a bollixed website; added potentially $6.2 trillion to federal deficits; and destroyed as many as 2 million jobs.

Obama’s jihad against fossil fuels resulted in the rapid doubling of gasoline prices (and they stayed that high until a minor recent abatement). Its Consumer Products Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, National Labor Relations Board, and other astonishingly interventionist regulators have put a wet blanket on jobs, inconvenienced consumers, and even interfered with yard sales and tried to outlaw outdoor Christmas lights. (Ever the Grinch, Obama also is taxing Christmas trees.)

Ron Klain is a sharp-elbowed Democratic political operative with no medical expertise. Tapping him as “Ebola czar” may not be the president’s best move when, as it is, no one can believe a word the Obama administration says. And that’s not just because Mr. Klain is yet another lobbyist recruited despite Mr. Obama’s vow that his administration would shun lobbyists.

Klain was also a central player in the president’s Solyndra fraud, which soaked taxpayers for over half a billion dollars for the benefit of Obama cronies.

In Faithless Execution, I recount the Solyndra fraud. It never got the attention it deserved — involving, as it did, potential felony fraud violations of federal law. Even for people who did give it attention at the time, Solyndra is so many Obama scandals ago that its unseemly details are tough to recall. The story is thus worth retelling. As our nerves fray over the Ebola crisis, it is a valuable window into the administration’s priorities and an indicator of the level of trust we can put in the new czar’s assurances.

Solyndra was a solar-energy company backed by the family foundation of George Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil magnate and major Obama fundraiser. Prior to Obama’s coming to power, Solyndra had sought government funding under the economically absurd 2005 Energy Policy Act. That law lets the government play venture capitalist, investing taxpayer money in private “green energy” boondoggles that cannot attract adequate market financing.

Notwithstanding the Bush administration’s zeal to hop on this politically correct bandwagon, it declined Solyndra’s application. As one private analyst later put it, the company was “an absolute complete disaster,” with operating expenses, including supply costs, nearly doubling its revenue — and that’s without factoring in high capital and other costs in an industry with low profit margins. Given that solar-panel competitors backed by China were producing energy at drastically lower prices, the chance that Solyndra would ever become profitable was practically nonexistent.

But in 2008, Americans elected as president a devotee of renewable-energy experiments who had enjoyed major support from Kaiser. Obviously, Solyndra backers were thrilled. The Department of Energy (DOE) continued to stiff-arm the company in the days just before Obama’s inauguration, citing unresolved concerns. Yet, within just a week of the new president’s taking office, a DOE staffer noted in an e-mail, “We are approaching the beginning of the approval process for Solyndra again.”

The “Arab Spring” did not erupt as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, it was the outcome of decades of tyranny and corruption in the Arab world. The Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans and Yemenis who removed their dictators from power did not do so because of the lack of a “two-state solution.” This is the last thing they had in mind.

The thousands of Muslims who are volunteering to join the Islamic State [IS] are not doing so because they are frustrated with the lack of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The only solution the Islamic State believes in is a Sunni Islamic Caliphate where the surviving non-Muslims who are not massacred would be subject to sharia law.

What Kerry perhaps does not know is that the Islamic State is not interested in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at all. Unlike Kerry, Sunni scholars fully understand that the Islamic State has more to do with Islam and terrorism than with any other conflict.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim that the lack of a “two-state solution” has fueled the rise of the Islamic State [IS] terrorist group reinforces how clueless the U.S. Administration is about what is happening in the Arab and Islamic countries.

Speaking at a State Department ceremony marking the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, Kerry said that the resumption of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians was vital in the fight against Islamic extremism, including Islamic State.

Scroll down the RealClearPolitics poll summary for the last few days, and you see a lot more red than blue in the latest surveys [1] released for Senate, House and governor’s races. Many races are very close in all three categories, but over the past two weeks the GOP position — particularly in House and Senate races — has generally improved.

Governor’s races are the biggest crapshoot. RealClearPolitics counts 14 races as tossups: Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado, Hawaii, Alaska, Arizona, Kansas, and Michigan. Since eight of the 14 are currently in Republican hands, this may be the biggest opportunity for gains for Democrats. There is little chance Democrats will gain seats in either house of Congress.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is now focusing on only 25 races, and 18 of them are seats currently held by Democrats. If the Democrats won all 25, they would still be 10 seats short of the 218 seats needed to take control of the House. A more likely result at this point, given that Democrats are on defense in most of the competitive races, is for the GOP to hit 240 or more, maybe even to hit a number higher than the party has achieved at any time in the past 65 years.

The RCP House summary [2], as well as those of Larry Sabato [3]and Stuart Rothenberg [4], suggests that more Democratic-held seats are likely to shift than Republican-held seats, since more of the tossup races are for Democratic-held seats. As an example, today there are no Republicans in the U.S. House from any of the six New England states — but Republicans are competitive in both New Hampshire districts, Maine 2, and Massachusetts 6, the last two being open seats. The GOP also has excellent pickup opportunities in Illinois 10 and 12, and has a decent chance in Iowa 1 and 2, two seats thought safe for Democrats a few months back. These are districts in states where Republicans have underperformed in recent cycles. With unhappiness with Congress expressed quite strongly in every poll, the few dozen House districts that are competitive after the last post-census redistricting (which was performed skillfully by both parties where they had the opportunity) could well see a lot of turnover.

Nothing much the Republicans have done explains why they are on the verge of taking back the Senate and making gains in the House.

Not since the summer of 1974 [1] or October 1980 have we see a presidency in a total meltdown [2]. Abroad, ISIS, Putin, and the bullying Chinese have revealed that the Obama administration is either clueless or has subordinated foreign policy decisions to rank politics — or both. At home we have Ebola. Meanwhile, the list of corrupt, incompetent or politically rogue federal agencies keeps growing — the VA, ICE, the NSA, the IRS, the Secret Service … even the Patent and Trademark Office. Each day we learn yet another story about how corrupt Eric Holder’s Justice Department is — the latest a vendetta against a California timber company [3].

Allowing flights to Monrovia, Liberia, follows the same sort of script that told us Benghazi was a spontaneous demonstration caused by a right-wing video maker. Susan Rice still goes on Sunday television shows and tells whoppers. Another partisan czar, Ron Klain, knows little [4] about what he is supposed to salvage other than to finesse the politics of disaster — reminding us of Rahm Emanuel’s “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” When Obama’s starts out with “make no mistake about it,” we know something along the lines of the Obamacare falsehoods inevitably follows.

Those not working are at all-time highs [5]. Zero-percent interest rates have impoverished the middle class and enriched the Wall Street elite. Our youth, saddled with $1 trillion in student debt, will have to pay back much of the $18 trillion national debt, more than a third of it piled up by this administration. Unsustainable entitlements will strangle the futures of anyone under thirty.

In reaction, Democratic congressional and Senate candidates choose to orphan themselves from Obama. Even Jimmy Carter finds Obama wanting [6]. Two former Obama secretaries of defense describe him as vacillating, predicating foreign policy decisions on politics.

Given such a disastrous Democratic landscape, it may be penny-wise for Republicans to eek out a midterm victory to win back the Senate by being against anything Obama is for. But it is a pound-foolish strategy that won’t do anything to stop Hillary Clinton or a Democratic resurgence in 2016.