RUTHFULLY YOURS

Wages for Americans are dropping at a rapid rate, instead of rising as the feds had claimed. This shocking news – making President Obama’s claim that the economy has recovered from the great recession laughable – was buried in a report on second-quarter earnings and has barely registered in the nation’s media, which are anxious to elect Hillary Clinton.

Neil Munro of Breitbart summarizes the changes:

“Real hourly compensation decreased 0.4 percent after revision, rather than the previously-published increase of 4.2 percent,” the BLS admitted. Compensation also fell another 1.4 percent in the second quarter, from April to June, the BLS admitted in the same report. That’s 2 percent drop in wages since December.

Pay shrank 0.3 percent in 2013, rose a mere 1.1 percent in 2014, but rose a promising 2.7 percent in 2015, according to the BLS.

Based on the erroneous data, President Obama has been taking victory laps on the economy.

In June, Obama cited the mistaken 2016 wage-growth claim while arguing the economy was finally helping ordinary Americans. “Let’s get wages rising faster,” Obama declared in a speech at Concord Community High School, Elkhart, Indiana.

I also know that I’ve spent every single day of my presidency focused on what I can do to grow the middle class and increase jobs, and boost wages … Here’s the good news: Wages are actually growing at a rate of about 3 percent so far this year. That’s the good news. Working Americans are finally getting a little bigger piece of the pie. But we’ve got to accelerate that.

That speech was advertised as his first speech of the 2016 campaign, and he continued his wage-boosting theme during his July 27 speech at the Democratic Convention;

True to its brand name, Fox News styles its women as vixens with furry false lashes, short pencil skirts and stratospheric shoes that might be dangerous if anyone had to actually walk in them. But seated so that their long legs show more thigh than one-time bathing suits, the women cross their legs and let the camera help their heels to send a loud, clear message of sexual availability. With the exception of Greta von Susteren, whose name alone sounds like an admonition to step back, the Foxy ladies exude sex appeal – Kimberly Guillfoyle, Megyn Kelly, the erstwhile Gretchen Carlson even had glamorous names to go with their form-fitting latex dresses, their sleeveless arms even in winter, their long wavy hair, their perfectly made-up faces no matter the time of day. Since all the Fox women are super-bright and ambitious, one can only question how they failed to get the message of the part they were designed to play. Were they so naive that they didn’t think their attractiveness was essential to their being hired? When they looked at their boss and heard his instructions as to their Stepford-similar make-up and get-ups, did it never cross their minds that this gig might come with the expectations of extra-curricular activity?

These are obvious rhetorical questions since I’ve already stated that the women are smart and ambitious. It doesn’t actually matter whether some of them participated willingly in office interludes or just titilating flirtations – the point is that they were working in a hot-house atmosphere whose message leaches off-screen into people’s bedroom fantasies. So where’s the big scandale? Aren’t these ladies all big girls who know how to deal? Did Roger Ailes really get canned because Gretchen Carlson accused him of having made some suggestive remarks to her – all of which were in the past tense? Doubtful. Was it Megyn Kelly’s supportive complaint that did him in?

Forty-four more work email exchanges Clinton hadn’t turned over. She continues to insist she gave everything.

On Tuesday, Judicial Watch released 296 pages of Hillary Clinton’s email records as part of its lawsuit against the State Department. Within the release are 44 government email exchanges that had not previously been turned over to the State Department, falsifying Clinton’s oft-repeated claim that she had turned over all of her government emails.

The messages were found during a search of agency computer files of long-time Clinton aide Huma Abedin. They reveal that while in office — and in violation of ethics agreements she agreed to when she was appointed secretary of State — Hillary Clinton interacted with lobbyists, political and Clinton Foundation donors, and business interests:

The new documents reveal that in April 2009 controversial Clinton Foundation official Doug Band pushed for a job for an associate. In the email Band tells Hillary Clinton’s former aides at the State Department Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin that it is “important to take care of [Redacted]. Band is reassured by Abedin that “Personnel has been sending him options.” Band was co-founder of Teneo Strategy with Bill Clinton and a top official of the Clinton Foundation, including its Clinton Global Initiative.

Included in the new document production is a 2009 email in which Band directs Abedin and Mills to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire and Clinton Foundation donor Gilbert Chagoury in touch with the State Department’s “substance person” on Lebanon. Band notes that Chagoury is “key guy there [Lebanon] and to us,” and insists that Abedin call Amb. Jeffrey Feltman to connect him to Chagoury.

As a close friend of Bill’s and a top donor to the Clinton foundation, Chagoury was indeed a “key guy” to the Clintons:

He has appeared near the top of the Foundation’s donor list as a $1 million to $5 million contributor, according to foundation documents. He also pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. According to a 2010 investigation by PBS Frontline, Chagoury was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for laundering money from Nigeria, but agreed to a plea deal and repaid $66 million to the Nigerian government.

The highly politicized Department of Justice swatted down pesky FBI requests to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, CNN reported yesterday.

CNN buried the lede, as it frequently does on news stories that make Democrats look bad. The online version bears the innocuous-sounding headline, “Newly released Clinton emails shed light on relationship between State Dept. and Clinton Foundation.”

It is not until the 25th paragraph that the article states that an unidentified law enforcement official gave CNN a heads-up earlier this year. As the probe of Clinton’s private email servers was ramping up “several FBI field offices approached the Justice Department asking to open a case regarding the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.”

At that time, the article continues, the Justice Department “declined because it had looked into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation around a year earlier and found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to open a case.”

Not even enough evidence to look into the foundation’s affairs?

Not more than a year after the publication of Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, opened the floodgates for investigative reporters to dig into the matter.

As I’ve written before, various lawyers have told me there is already a strong legal case against Mrs. Clinton. The fact that she destroyed email evidence — evidence subject to a congressional subpoena, no less — is already evidence in itself that she obstructed justice through spoliation of evidence. Spoliation means you can take as evidence the fact that evidence has been destroyed. Courts are entitled to draw spoliation inferences and convict an accused person on that basis alone.

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Cynthia E. Ayers is currently Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. Prior to accepting the Task Force position, she served as Vice President of EMPact Amercia, having retired from the National Security Agency after over 38 years of federal service.

“A few blows from a sledge hammer in the right place, can stop a power station working [sic].”

George Orwell

George Orwell, in his 1942 essay entitled “The Meaning of Sabotage,” discussed the ability of a few within Europe to significantly inhibit the workings of Hitler’s military industrial base. His discription of active, physical sabotage was instructive; but he also explained the concept of “passive sabotage” – a form of willful demolition that is much less recognizable as such. This type of vandalism can be accomplished by slowing processes; encouraging confusion, complexity and chaos; and otherwise “preventing it [e.g. the system, organization, etc.] from working smoothly.”

If Orwell were alive to analyze the current status of U.S. federal bureaucracies, what would his findings be? Can fraud and waste be categorized as vandalism? Do our federal systems work “smoothly?” If not – why?

The extent to which governmental megasystems have become bogged down in red tape, regulatory obstacles, remunerative favoritism, and politically biased tendencies should be obvious, at this point, to even the casual observer. Extensive scandals associated with the VA, IRS, GSA, EPA, OPM, DOJ, and other “alphabet soup” organizations that would have been unimaginable 15 or 20 years ago seem almost as if ripped from the pages of an Orwellian novel. Confusion, complexity and chaos? Yes! Sabotage? Perhaps. Intent may be hard to prove, yet it appears that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence.

What about waste? In addition to the wasteful spending on vacant buildings and unused property, reports of bad accounting practices and unwanted/unnecessary “stimulus” projects fuel the fire of taxpayer fury. Billions of dollars have been spent on dubious research, programs such as commodity advertisements, subsidies for alternative energy sources, community restoration and entertainment (beach re-sanding, private golf courses, teen centers), “humanitarian” benefits (broadband access, cell phones), and unneeded equipment (jets, airplanes, cars, tanks, office decor). Some estimates include at least a few billion dollars of the huge amounts exported under the label “foreign aid.” Is there waste? Unquestionably.

On Aug. 1, the Black Lives Matter coalition (BLM) of groups and partners published a platform of objectives and demands ostensibly constructed to correct heavy-handed policing, educational negligence, and economic inadequacy in black communities.That platform did no such thing.

Instead, organizers offered up a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas in the service of creating a new world order, one in which defunding police, releasing all political prisoners from jail, and redistributing of land are imperative.

Moreover, apparently believing that societal reforms in America’s inner cities are somehow related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, BLM included a section on Israel in its list of demands. With trite talking points, the group called for a divestment from the Jewish state as it is allegedly “complicit in the genocide against the Palestinian people.”

What this means is unpleasant to contemplate. An organization formed to confront systemic prejudice against black Americans—which predates the reestablishment of the state of Israel—is now intimating that such prejudice is caused by the Jewish state’s supposed genocidal tendencies (which, according to census reports, have led to a population increase among Palestinians).

Though I find no intrinsic value in “rebutting” crackpot conspiracy theories, it’s worth demonstrating how far removed BLM is from honoring the legacy of its ancestors by reminding readers just how pro-Zionist prominent leaders in the black community have been throughout history—and how Zionism helped shape black politics in America.

Edward Wilmot Blyden, founder of the 19th-century American Pan-African movement, famously wrote,“[I have] the deepest possible interest in the current history of the Jews—especially in that marvelous movement called Zionism.”

W.E.B. Dubois, founder of the NAACP, declared in 1919, “The African movement must mean to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial front. … For any ebullition of effort and feeling that results in an amelioration of the lot of Africa tends to ameliorate the conditions of colored peoples throughout the world.”