NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Growth Dividend for Workers The October jobs report shows the shared gains of a stronger economy.

Posted By on November 3rd, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-growth-dividend-for-workers-1541201213

Don’t think tax reform and deregulation matter for working people? Consider the evidence from Friday’s gangbuster jobs report for October that showed the tangible dividend for workers from faster economic growth resulting from better economic policy: More jobs to choose from and higher pay to boot.

That’s the essence of the news that the marvelous machine called the American economy created 250,000 new jobs last month, including 246,000 in private industry. Average hourly wages rose again and are now 3.1% above a year ago, the fastest increase in a decade. (See the nearby chart.) This is the growth dividend that Republicans promised if the dead weight of Barack Obama’s policies could be lifted from the backs of American business and workforce.

The economy has now added 218,000 jobs on average over the last three months, up from 210,000 over the last year, as the unemployment rate held steady at 3.7%. That’s remarkably strong labor growth for an expansion that is nine years old at what some economists claim is already full employment.

Apparently thousands of Americans have been waiting for the right job, or a better paying one, because the civilian labor force grew by 711,000 in October and four-fifths of them found jobs. Job growth was especially robust in leisure and hospitality (42,000), health care (35,600), manufacturing (32,000) and transportation and warehousing (24,800).

Hurricane Florence, which struck the Carolinas in September, has caused some noise in the data. But the big job gains in October offset tepid payroll growth in September. Labor force participation ticked up 0.2 percentage points last month to 62.9%, which is at the higher end of its range in recent years.

BOOKS Comments turned off

An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt—A Review by Nick Cohen

Posted By on November 2nd, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/an-

A review of An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt by Pascal Bruckner. Polity (November 2018), 204 pages.

It is embarrassingly easy to write about the collapse of the Left in the twenty-first century. The explosion in identity politics that has led to the automatic use of “white” as an ethnic insult in condemnations such as “white privilege” and “white, straight men” has made race as defining a factor in left-wing politics as it is in extreme right-wing politics. Meanwhile, the willingness to excuse antisemitsm, misogyny, tyranny, and obscurantism, as long as the antisemitic, misogynistic, tyrannical obscurantists are anti-Western, has called into question whether leftists—or at least the noisiest voices on the Left—have lost all connection to their better values.

I have said as much many times, and in his new book the French political theorist Pascal Bruckner says it again. Bruckner once struck me as the best the French intelligentsia had to offer. In 2007, he provoked an intellectual scandal with the “Racism of the Anti-Racists”, an essay for Sign and Sight, in which he excoriated liberals who denied Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim dissidents the rights they took for granted. Meanwhile, I admired his Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism enough to call it “a brilliant defence of liberalism and a deservedly contemptuous assault on all those intellectuals who have betrayed its best values.”

The title of Bruckner’s new polemic ought to have warned me that betrayal is not an exclusively left-wing vice. Far from being a principled defence of liberal and secular values, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt is an unconscious illustration of how easily those who profess to hold enlightened ideals can slip into the ethnic favouritism and intellectual double-standards of the counter-Enlightenment.

Most liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims recoil from the word “Islamophobia.” TellMama, the main monitoring centre for violence and abuse against British Muslims, fought a doomed campaign to enshrine the use of “anti-Muslim hatred” instead. Hard won experience had taught its activists that “Islamophobia” was a weapon in the arsenal of the Islamist Right. Opposing bigotry with the language of bigots, who sought to re-define criticism of religion as racism, struck them as self-defeating to put it mildly.

TellMama keeps its office address secret. Its workers receive threats, not only from white racists, but also from Islamists. (They have taken advice from Jews who monitor antisemitic violence in Britain, and gay rights campaigners who monitor homophobia, and are thus damned in the eyes of the fanatical.) If all Bruckner wanted to do was to criticise the use of the term “Islamophobia” to incite violence against freethinkers and feminists who challenge clerical power, he would be performing a useful service—albeit one that has been performed many times before. But his book is representative of our debased times because it’s far from clear that Bruckner can extend his opposition to Islamism to cover the purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry.

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Gulag Archipelago: A New Foreword by Jordan B. Peterson written by Jordan B. Peterson

Posted By on November 2nd, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/01/the-gulag

Editor’s note: The following essay is Jordan B. Peterson’s new foreword to the new edition of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Penguin, November 2018, 544 pages). Reproduced with the kind permission of the author.

Once we have taken up the word, it is thereafter impossible to turn away: A writer is no detached judge of his countrymen and contemporaries; he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his country or by his people. And if the tanks of his fatherland have bloodied the pavement of a foreign capital, then rust-colored stains have forever bespattered the writer’s face. And if on some fateful night a trusting Friend is strangled in his sleep—then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his youthful fellow citizens nonchalantly proclaim the advantages of debauchery over humble toil, if they abandon themselves to drugs, or seize hostages—then this stench too is mingled with the breath of the writer. Have we the insolence to declare that we do not answer for the evils of today’s world?…

The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me. But it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph! Visibly, irrefutably for all! Lies can prevail against much in this world, but never against art…

One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.

–From the speech delivered by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the Swedish Academy on the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

* * *

First, you defend your homeland against the Nazis, serving as a twice-decorated soldier on the Eastern front in the criminally ill- prepared Soviet Red Army. Then, you’re arrested, humiliated, stripped of your military rank, charged under the auspices of the all-purpose Article 58 with the dissemination of “anti-Soviet propaganda,” and dragged off to Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. There, through the bars of your cell, you watch your beloved country celebrating its victory in the Great Patriotic War. Then you’re sentenced, in absentia, to eight years of hard labor (but you got away easy; it wasn’t so long afterward that people in your position were awarded a “tenner”—and then a quarter of a century!). And fate isn’t finished with you, yet—not by any means. You develop a deadly cancer in the camp, endure the exile imposed on you after your imprisonment ends, and pass very close to death.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Here’s The Key Clause In The Birthright Citizenship Debate, Briefly Explained When a person is in the United States illegally, he or she is still governed by and owes loyalty to a ‘foreign’ entity or government. Elad Hakim

Posted By on November 2nd, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/02/heres-key-clause-birthright-citizenship-debate-briefly-explained/

President Trump recently disclosed plans to sign an executive order ending so-called “birthright citizenship” for babies of non-citizens born on U.S. soil. This would mark a major overhaul of immigration policy and almost certainly trigger a legal battle.

The 14th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” While opponents to Trump’s proposed action opine that the constitutional language is cut and dry, this might not necessarily be the case.

Putting aside the question of whether Trump may end birthright citizenship by way of executive order, the main issue of contention revolves around the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” language in the 14th Amendment. Some opine that the 14th Amendment “was only intended to provide citizenship to children born in the U.S. to lawful permanent residents — not to unauthorized immigrants or those on temporary visas.” In other words, if a parent is in the country illegally and is, therefore, not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, then, by association, neither is his or her newborn child.

Conversely, others interpret this provision to mean “the legal obligation of all foreigners and immigrants to follow U.S. law.” Stated another way, if a child is born to an illegal immigrant in the United States, the baby is automatically a citizen because he or she is obligated to follow U.S. law. The country of birth is paramount.

John C. Eastman highlighted the flaw(s) associated with this latter argument by way of a simple example in an article in National Review. He wrote:

When a British tourist visits the United States, he subjects himself to our laws as long as he remains within our borders. He must drive on the right side of the road, for example. He is subject to our partial, territorial jurisdiction, but he does not thereby subject himself to our complete, political jurisdiction. He does not get to vote, or serve on a jury; he cannot be drafted into our armed forces; and he cannot be prosecuted for treason if he takes up arms against us, because he owes us no allegiance. He is merely a ‘temporary sojourner,’ to use the language employed by those who wrote the 14th Amendment, and not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States in the full and complete sense intended by that language in the 14th Amendment.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Republicans, Yet Again, Do Right by Black Americans By Deroy Murdock

Posted By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/republicans-do-right-by-black-americans/

The party that freed the slaves continues to liberate black Americans today.

‘What the hell do you have to lose?” candidate Donald J. Trump queried black Americans in 2016, as he asked for their votes with characteristically blunt eloquence. Eight percent of black voters bought his pitch. While this seems like a rout, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney by one-third; 6 percent of blacks backed 2012’s GOP nominee. Trump’s total was astonishing, given that the Left/media slandered him as the guy who brings the lighter fluid to a cross burning.

So, what do blacks think of Trump today? Rasmussen’s tracking poll Monday found Trump’s approval among blacks at a record-high 40 percent, versus 50 percent nationwide. How could this be? The Trump-hating Left/media’s attacks have been ruthless, relentless, and more one-sided than a flounder. Answer: President Trump and Republican leadership have made black Americans better off than they were two years ago.

• Black unemployment was 8.6 percent in October 2016. Last month, it hit 6.2 percent, marginally above May’s lowest-ever 5.9 percent.

• The Labor Department counted 18.1 million blacks employed in October 2016 versus 19.3 million last month. In short, 1.2 million more black Americans have found work since Donald J. Trump was elected.

• Blacks below poverty fell from 21.8 percent in 2016 to 21.2 percent in 2017, the latest and historically lowest such reading.

This great news flows from Republican policies: abundant tax relief, robust deregulation, and a pro-business tone in Washington that is healing Obama’s “You didn’t build that!” public abuse of American enterprise.

The party that freed the slaves has done even more to liberate black Americans today:

• The GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which every single Democrat in Congress opposed, includes Opportunity Zones. These areas “offer tax incentives for businesses to invest in economically distressed communities, making them a powerful vehicle for economic growth and job creation,” a White House statement explains. Across America, 8,761 communities have been declared Opportunity Zones, not unlike the Enterprise Zones that the late Congressman Jack Kemp (R., N.Y.) advocated during the Reagan era. “Through these tax incentives, we will jumpstart our American communities, create momentum for economic recovery, and attract investment to diverse areas across our Nation.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Administration to Reimpose Last of Sanctions Lifted by Iran Deal By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-administration-to-reimpose-last-of-sanctions-lifted-by-iran-deal/

The Trump administration will reimpose the rest of the sanctions lifted under the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with early next week, officials announced Friday.

“This part of the campaign about which we’re speaking today is simple: It is aimed at depriving the regime of the revenues that it uses to spread death and destruction around the world,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a call with reporters.

The 2015 nuclear deal, which was also signed by the U.K., France, Germany, China, and Russia, gave Tehran billions of dollars in relief from sanctions in exchange for a promise to curb its nuclear program. President Trump pulled out of the deal in May, and allowed two periods of 9o and 180 days to let companies phase out their business with Iran.

After the first period, which ended in August, the U.S. reimposed sanctions affecting transactions with U.S. dollar banknotes and trade in gold and precious metals, graphite, and cars. On Monday, the administration will reimpose the more hefty batch of sanctions, affecting the energy, shipping, shipbuilding, and financial sectors.

Eight countries will be granted a waiver from oil and gas sanctions and will still be able to import Iranian oil temporarily, Pompeo said. A list of those countries will be published Monday.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. job growth soars; annual wage gain largest since 2009 Lucia Mutikani

Posted By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy/u-s-job-growth-surges-annual-wage-gain-biggest-since-2009-idUSKCN1N70AJ

U.S. job growth rebounded sharply in October and wages recorded their largest annual gain in 9-1/2 years, pointing to further labor market tightening that could encourage the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again in December.

The Labor Department’s closely watched monthly employment report on Friday also showed the unemployment rate was steady at a 49-year low of 3.7 percent as 711,000 people entered the labor force, in a sign of confidence in the jobs market.

Sustained labor market strength eased fears about the economy’s health following weak housing and business spending data. President Donald Trump cheered the robust jobs report, which came less than a week before the midterm elections that will decide who controls the U.S. Congress.

“These are incredible numbers,” Trump tweeted.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 250,000 jobs last month as employment in the leisure and hospitality sector bounced back after being held down by Hurricane Florence, which drenched North and South Carolina in mid-September.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Hezbollah in America: ‘Unit 910’ Exposed in Court Proceedings Remarkable information is revealed in Ali Kourani’s federal trial. By Todd Bensman

Posted By on November 2nd, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/hezbollah-in-america-unit-910-exposed-in-court-proceedings/

Brooklyn-based Ali Kourani faces trial for multiple charges related to his work as a double agent for the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hezbollah; specifically for its “External Security Organization” known as “Unit 910.” Kourani’s federal trial is tentatively set for March 2019.
Ali Kourani

As a card-carrying, read-in intelligence operative for Hezbollah’s noxious foreign terrorism wing, Ali Kourani was expected to do far more than videotape a Manhattan armory and gather names of Jewish businessmen from LinkedIn to knock off one day (as reported in Part I of this series). He was expected to keep his killing skills sharp.

In Part I, I revealed part of what Kourani — a U.S.-educated engineer with an MBA — told FBI agents in a series of confessionary interviews about his alleged double life with Hezbollah’s foreign terrorist service Unit 910. He said it recruited him to become a U.S.-based asset in 2008 during a visit to Lebanon, where his extended family clan was deeply enmeshed with the group (this included two brothers and his father, who once illegally entered the U.S. through the U.S.-Mexico border).

Kourani allegedly told of how, at just the time he qualified for U.S. citizenship in 2008, he received some initial cloak-and-dagger tradecraft training and was sent to his new homeland, America, with his first easy assignments. He was to apply for U.S. citizenship so he could get a cherished U.S. passport, videotape an armory and FBI office, and gather names of local Jewish businessmen or high-ranking Israeli Defense Forces veterans worth killing. He also sent back to Lebanon intelligence about how passengers disembark from planes at John F. Kennedy International Airport, how U.S. Customs officers screen and collect luggage, and the locations of security personnel, cameras, and magnetometers.

But much more was to come after he achieved citizenship in 2009, and he would need to prepare.

Kourani told the FBI he understood that in the event of war with Israel, he could be called home to fight; that this was expected of all Unit 910 agents throughout the United States, Canada, in Latin America, and across the globe. Kourani believed he and many of the others were overseen by a ranking Hezbollah handler in Lebanon known only as “Fadi.” In July 2011, according to the court records, Fadi summoned Kourani to the homeland for more and better weapons training. CONTINUE ATE SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pompeo: Sanctions ‘Just a Part’ of Iran Regime Behavior-Change Plan By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on November 2nd, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/pompeo-sanctions-just-a-part-of-iran-regime-behavior-change-plan/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this morning that snapback sanctions on Iran will be “just a part of the U.S. government’s total effort to change the behavior of the Ayatollah Khamenei” and the regime in Tehran.

Sanctions on Iran’s energy, shipbuilding, shipping and banking sectors that were lifted as a result of the P5+1 nuclear deal will go back into effect Monday, Pompeo told reporters on a call.

Eight countries, though, are receiving waivers that will allow them to keep buying oil from Iran without coming under U.S. sanctions: Pompeo did not identify the countries, but Bloomberg reported that four are Japan, India, China and South Korea.

“We expect to issue some temporary allotments to eight jurisdictions, but only because they have demonstrated significant reductions in their crude oil and cooperation on many other fronts and have made important moves towards getting to zero crude oil importation. These negotiations are still ongoing,” Pompeo said. “Two of the jurisdictions will completely end imports as part of their agreements. The other six will import at greatly reduced levels.”

He stressed that “our actions today are targeted at the regime, not the people of Iran who have suffered grievously under this regime”; the U.S. “will maintain many humanitarian exemptions to our sanctions, including food, agriculture commodities, medicine and medical devices.”

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the U.S. has “gone after the financial networks that the Iranian regime uses to fuel its terrorist proxies in Hezbollah and Hamas, to fund the Houthis in Yemen, and to support the brutal Assad regime in Syria.”

On Monday, Treasury will add more than 700 names to the list of blocked entities, he said, which includes “hundreds of targets previously granted sanctions relief under the JCPOA, as well as more than 300 new designations.”

Senate Republicans including Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) want the administration to cut off Iranian banks from conducting global transactions using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, and are expected to introduced legislation to force President Trump’s hand after the election. CONTINUE AT SITE

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

U.S. Troops May Use Force Against Caravan Members Who Initiate Violence Trump gets tough on illegal aliens and would-be invaders. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271831/us-troops-may-use-force-against-caravan-members-matthew-vadum

U.S. troops that are confronted by the illegal migrant caravans now in Central America that are approaching the nation’s southern border will be authorized to use force to defend themselves, President Trump said Thursday as he promised a new executive order next week that will prevent those entering the country illegally from making asylum claims.

Trump’s comments came the day after he released a hard-hitting video reminding voters of Democrat shortcomings on immigration policy. The ad features an expletive-spewing Luis Bracamontes, an illegal alien who was sentenced to death for murdering two cops in 2014 in Sacramento, California, when Barack Obama was president. “I’m going to kill more cops soon,” the smiling, remorseless killer is shown saying in the video.

“It is outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our Country,” Trump wrote Oct. 30 in a tweet that included the video.

Meanwhile, there are now four caravans of thousands of border-busting foreigners from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras that are headed for the United States. Many are violent or reportedly are suffering from communicable diseases. The first is currently near Matias Romero in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The second is around Huixtla in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The third and fourth caravans are near Escuintla, Guatemala, and Ahuachapan, El Salvador, respectively.

“Migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry,” Trump said Nov. 1 at the White House, according to The Epoch Times. “Those who choose to break our laws and enter illegally will no longer be able to use meritless claims to gain automatic admission into our country.” Trump also called human traffickers “the lowest scum on earth.”