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No More Gravy Train for the United Nations Trump administration contemplates 50% reduction in U.S. funding. Joseph Klein

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

Bureaucrats and diplomats at the United Nations are scrambling to adjust to the new Trump administration. One thing seems certain. The Obama days of wine and roses for the UN are over. The Trump administration is reportedly laying the groundwork for cuts of at least 50% to U.S. funding for United Nations programs. U.S. diplomats warned key UN member states to “expect a big financial restraint” on American spending at the UN at a meeting earlier this month in New York City, according to sources cited by Foreign Policy.

The United States spent nearly $10 billion in total on the United Nations in 2015 alone, based on available data. This includes U.S. payment of 22 % of the UN’s regular budget and about 28.5% of its peacekeeping budget, which together add up to over $3 billion annually. The U.S. has contributed billions of dollars more in voluntary donations to various UN agencies, programs and flash humanitarian appeals. Based on available 2015 data, cutting just the U.S. voluntary contributions by 40 % would save about $2.7 billion a year.

It has been estimated that the U.S.’s mandatory assessment for funding of the UN’s regular budget is more than that of 176 other UN member states combined. The 56 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation are estimated to have constituted approximately 8.6% of global production in 2015. However, they only paid 5.6% of the UN’s regular budget and 2.4% of the UN’s peacekeeping budget.

United Nations mandatory assessed budget funding is based on the socialist formula of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The starting point is to calculate each member state’s mandatory budget assessments based on the proportion of each member state’s gross national product in comparison to the global gross national product. However, that is only the starting point. Many “less developed” nations’ assessments are then adjusted downward through manipulative concessions such as a debt burden discount and a low per capita income discount. Wealthier nations find themselves having to make up the shortfalls.

The United States is bearing an unfair burden in the funding of the United Nations. Yet the U.S. has only one vote out of 193 member states in the General Assembly when it comes to approval of the final budget for which it pays the lion’s share. This redistributionist practice must end and give way to more equitable sharing of mandatory assessments so that all member states have some real skin in the game.

The UN is also way overdue for a major overhaul, including significant cuts in its bloated budgets.For example, UN bureaucrats based in New York have been receiving net remuneration (i.e., take-home salary) at a level about 25% higher than that of their U.S. equivalents, according to the International Civil Service Commission. There are highly generous benefits that the UN provides its staff on top of that. UN salaries and benefits need to be frozen, or even rolled back, to eliminate any differential that still remains with what comparable U.S. civil servants receive, as a condition for continued U.S. funding.

The UN’s aid agencies are cumbersome and non-transparent. One independent study published a few years ago concluded that “many of the UN agencies have an extremely bad record on transparency” and are “among the least accountable aid agencies.” UN agencies also carry heavy overhead costs, which reduce the amount of contributions from donor countries going directly to those who need the assistance. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and United Nations Population Fund “actually spend more on administrative costs than aid disbursements (129% and 125%, respectively),” according to the study. The UNDP also has the highest salary/aid ratio at 100 percent. Perhaps for that reason, the UNDP’s transparency record is particularly bad.

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Another American City Destroyed by the Democrats The tragic story of Minneapolis. John Perazzo

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

“American politics is dominated by an enduring myth,” writes author Peter Collier—the myth “that Democrats are the party of the common man, the voiceless, the powerless, the poor. That if you care about what happens to the least among us, you will cast your vote in the Democratic column.”

But as Collier also points out, the vast majority of America’s voiceless, powerless, and impoverished people are concentrated in cities that have been run exclusively by Democrats for decades—even generations—without interruption. These are cities where stratospheric rates of crime, poverty, unemployment, out-of-wedlock births, homes without fathers and failed school systems have become a way of life—along with oppressive and confiscatory taxes whose only discernible achievement is to keep the leaky ship of city government afloat for as long as possible before it is inevitably capsized by economic and social calamity.



Minneapolis, Minnesota is perhaps the least likely case in point. Camouflaged by the state as a whole, a synonym for plainspoken stability, it is just one of the many American cities that were once thriving centers of industry, prosperity and optimism—until Democrats took them over. Since 1978, Minneapolis has been governed exclusively by mayors from the Democratic Farmer Labor Party (DFLP)—the state affiliate of the Democratic Party.

Prior to this long era of Democratic dominance, Minneapolis’ poverty rate was consistently lower than the national average. Throughout the 1980s, when the trickle down of the Reagan economic boom had a positive effect on cities nationwide, Minneapolis shared in these good times, adding some 3,000 new jobs to its downtown area each year from 1981-87. As of 1983, only 8% of the city’s metropolitan-area population lived below the poverty level, as compared to approximately 15% of the national population.



But by 1988, then-mayor Donald Fraser—a member of the DFLP—had grown troubled by the stark contrast he saw between the majority of his city and who were thriving economically, and a number of African-American neighborhoods where crime, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency were experiencing a growth spurt. Taking a page out of the same playbook other big city Democrat mayors were using, Fraser believed that the cure was redistribution of income. He decided to revamp the way in which social-welfare expenditures were allocated and believed, specifically, that federal and local agencies needed to focus more of their resources on the economic problems confronting unwed mothers (who were disproportionately black) and their children.



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The Real Hamas: Sorry, Folks! by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

What Hamas says, day and night, in Arabic, tells the real story. In fact, Hamas officials are very clear and straightforward when they address their people in Arabic. Yet some Western and Israeli analysts do not want to be bothered by the facts.

Some reports have suggested that Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh are the ones pushing for the changes in the movement’s charter. However, even if Mashaal and Haniyeh succeed in their mission, there is no guarantee that Hamas’s military wing would comply.

Hamas has also denied its intention to cut off its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. “The reports are aimed at tarnishing the image of Hamas in the eyes of the world,” explained a top Hamas official. He also denied that Hamas was planning to abandon the armed struggle against Israel in favor of a peaceful popular “resistance.”

What does Hamas mean when it says that it “accepts” an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem without recognizing Israel’s right to exist?

Is this a sign of moderation and pragmatism on the part of the extremist Islamic terror movement? Or is it just another ploy intended to deceive everyone, especially gullible Westerners, into believing that Hamas has abandoned its strategy of destroying Israel in favor of a two-state solution?

Recent reports have suggested that Hamas is moving towards “declaring a Palestinian state over the 1967 borders.”

According to the reports, Hamas is also contemplating changing its charter so that it would no longer include anti-Semitic references. The charter, which was drafted in August 1988, contains anti-Semitic passages and characterizations of Israeli society as Nazi-like in its cruelty. The same reports also claimed that Hamas’s revised charter will also state that the terror movement is not part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Some analysts in Israel and the West have interpreted these reports as a sign that Hamas is finally endorsing a policy of pragmatism toward Israel and Jews. They are particularly excited about Hamas’s purported intention to declare (in its revised charter) that its conflict is “only with Zionism and the occupation, and not with Jews around the world.”

Judging from the analyses published by some commentators and Palestinian affairs “experts” in the past few days, one might conclude that Hamas is on its way to making a dramatic change in its vicious ideology. Unfortunately, however, the facts suggest otherwise.

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Merkel’s Migrant Deception by Vijeta Uniyal

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

As it now turns out, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was right about a “secret deal” all along.

In a government report published last month by the German newspaper Rheinische Post, experts recommended an annual intake of up to 300,000 migrants a year for the next 40 years, to counter lower German birth rates.

As they embark on a bizarre social engineering project on a continental scale, members of Germany’s political class evidently do not see the need to consult even their own electorates. Instead, they apparently believe in creating irreversible facts on the ground, and giving voting rights to migrants permanently residing in Germany.

“Never believe anything until it has been officially denied,” people use to say in days of the Soviet Union. Today, the same seems to be true for the European Union’s migrant policy. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel engineered the EU-Turkey deal on migrants, it was widely described by the European politicians and the media as a “breakthrough”. Merkel and other EU leaders agreed on offering a down payment of €3 billion to the regime of Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in return for its promises to “stem migrant flows”.

In December 2015, nearly four months before the EU-Turkey agreement was even formalized, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán accused Chancellor Merkel of working on a “secret deal” with her Turkish counterparts. President Orbán was quite specific in his claims, apparently certain that Berlin would soon reveal the details to the public.

“Beyond what we agreed with Turkey in Brussels there’s something that doesn’t figure in the agreement,” President Orbán said in December 2015. “We’ll wake up one day — and I think this will be announced in Berlin as soon as this week — that we have to take in 400,000 to 500,000 refugees directly from Turkey.”

President Orbán was ridiculed for his claims. European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans dismissed President Orbán’s allegations of a secret deal with Turkey as “nonsense”.

Bloomberg News reported the German and French outrage to President Orbán’s allegations at that time:

“France and Germany are working together to manage the flow of migrants, which is a challenge to everyone,” French government spokesman Stephane Le Foll told reporters in Paris on Wednesday. “Last weekend the union reached an agreement with Turkey,” and Orban should be aware of the details since he was there, Le Foll said.

A German government official, requesting anonymity because EU-Turkey talks are ongoing, said Orban’s claim that Germany made a secret deal is false.

As it now turns out, PM Orbán was right about a “secret deal” all along. According to the latest revelations made by the German newspaper Die Welt, Chancellor Merkel, along with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, had agreed to accept 150,000 to 200,000 Syrian migrants from Turkey into the EU without consulting other European member states.

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EU Court Rules Companies Can Bar Muslim Head Scarf Ruling comes amid the rise of prominent anti-Muslim political candidates in the Netherlands and France By Emre Peker

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

BRUSSELS—The European Union’s top court ruled that private employers can ban the Muslim head scarf, saying in its first decision on the continentwide controversy that curbs on religious symbols in the workplace don’t constitute discrimination.

Tuesday’s ruling by the 15-judge panel of the European Court of Justice comes as Europe is roiled by disagreement over how to address the influx of mostly Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa and what represents an acceptable level of religious expression at work and in public.

The issues are at the center of Wednesday’s elections in the Netherlands, where the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, a far-right, anti-Islam lawmaker, is posing a stiff challenge to Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

They are also reverberating in France, where polls indicate that anti-Islam right-wing politician Marine Le Pen will win the first round of voting in April’s presidential elections.

In their decision, the judges of the Luxembourg-based court said a private company’s prohibition on wearing a head scarf didn’t constitute “direct discrimination based on religion or belief.”

It follows years in which populist movements have ramped up attacks on Islam, portraying the religion as incompatible with European values. Their anti-immigrant rhetoric has resonated with many voters, forcing centrist political parties that for decades championed EU diversity to also embrace tough stances on divisive matters.

“The ruling is surely an ingredient for cohesion and social peace throughout Europe and notably in France,” said François Fillon, the conservative French presidential candidate who lost his lead in the polls amid a corruption probe.

Ms. Le Pen publicized her stance against Islam during a February visit to Lebanon, where she refused to cover her head to meet the country’s top Sunni Muslim cleric.

Last summer, France was gripped by controversies as dozens of towns pushed to ban the full-body swimsuit known as burkini worn by Muslim women. A top French court suspended the orders, citing fundamental freedoms.

In the Netherlands, Mr. Wilders has seen his popularity peak as he called for shutting mosques and banning the Quran. Mr. Rutte eventually hardened his stance to counter Mr. Wilders’s rise, telling immigrants to either adapt to the Netherlands or go home.

Amid a groundswell of populism, Tuesday’s court decision risks being a harbinger of broader discrimination, rights activists said. CONTINUE AT SITE

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For George Eliot, to Appreciate the Jews Was to Save England by Alan Arkush

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

“I am Daniel Deronda.” https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/03/for-george-eliot-to-appreciate-the-jews-was-to-save-england/

With these words, Colonel Albert Edward Goldsmid, formerly of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, presented himself to Theodor Herzl in 1895 when the latter, who was soon to found the World Zionist Organization, made his first trip to England in search of supporters. There was some truth to what Goldsmid said. Like the eponymous hero of George Eliot’s 1876 novel, Goldsmid grew up as an Englishman, unaware of his Jewish origins, but ultimately returned to his people and became an early lover of Zion.

Goldsmid’s story, however, was much simpler than Deronda’s. The son of baptized Jews, he was a young officer serving in India when he first learned the truth about his background and reverted to Judaism—much as, in recent years, some Portuguese descendants of conversos have rejoined the Jewish people after uncovering their family history. By contrast, the coincidence-strewn path that leads Daniel Deronda, the ward of an English aristocrat, to the happy discovery that he is a Jew unwinds over hundreds of pages.

It all begins with Deronda’s rescue of a young waif named Mirah Cohen, who is about to drown herself. His efforts to assist Mirah in locating her long-lost mother and brother lead him to London’s Jewish East End, where he makes the acquaintance of a certain Mordecai, who is actually, as Deronda eventually learns, none other than Mirah’s brother, Ezra Mordecai Cohen.

And who or what is Mordecai to Deronda? Consumptive, not far from death, he is a Jew who clings to a vision of his people’s restoration to the Holy Land. This vision he struggles to transmit to Deronda, of whose own Jewishness Mordecai is almost completely convinced despite the latter’s honest but ignorant demurrals. Still, before he has any inkling of his own true identity, Daniel does figure out the two siblings’ relationship and succeeds in reuniting them. In the course of doing so, he falls in love with Mirah.

Not long afterward, the unrelated intervention of a friend of Daniel’s grandfather induces the Jewish mother whom Daniel has never met to summon him to Genoa, where she explains the lengths to which she has gone to spare him the burden of Jewishness. To her dismay, but not to the reader’s surprise, Daniel proclaims himself glad and proud to learn that he was born a Jew.

Upon returning to England, Daniel shares the good news with his new Jewish friends. Mordecai dies shortly afterward, content that he has breathed his soul into Daniel, and the novel ends with the newlywed Daniel and Mirah heading east together to fulfill Mordecai’s Zionist dreams. As the novel is set during the time in which Eliot was writing it, Daniel and Mirah would have moved to the land of Israel roughly two decades before Herzl would come to write The Jewish State.

So this,in a nutshell, is the story of Daniel Deronda. But it is by no means all there is to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, an 800-page novel of which the tale of Daniel’s Jewish and Zionist initiation constitutes but a part. Indeed, in the eyes of one prominent 20th-century literary critic, the Jewish component of the book was wholly dispensable. The illustrious Cambridge professor F.R. Leavis dreamed of “freeing by simple surgery the living part of [this] immense Victorian novel from the dead weight of utterly different [that is, Jewish] matter that George Eliot thought fit to make it carry.”

And what was that “living part”? Specifically, Leavis proposed to sever, from the story I’ve just summarized, the “compellingly imagined human truth of Gwendolen Harleth’s case-history” and make it into the core of a presumably renamed novel. But who or what is Gwendolen Harleth to Daniel Deronda? A vivacious, alluring young woman suddenly reduced from a coddled existence to one of “poverty and humiliating dependence,” Gwendolen has been maneuvering to claw her way out through a marriage of convenience to a wealthy aristocrat she knows is unworthy of her. Her life intersects with that of Deronda already in the novel’s first pages, but they do not converse with each other until halfway through. As Gwendolen’s wretched marriage becomes more and more excruciating, Deronda becomes at first her moral adviser and then the object of her strongest affections. But not even the fortuitous death of her husband can bring him within her reach.

Apparently unimpressed by Gwendolen’s sad story, the book’s first Hebrew translator, David Frischman, made it his business, as Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed, to perform Leavis’s surgery “in reverse” by publishing a Hebrew edition “without the Gwendolen distraction.” Indeed, many appreciative readers of Daniel Deronda, even if they have never entertained the thought of operating on it, have found themselves wondering about the relationship between its two rather disparate parts.

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The Middlebury Aftermath Robert George and Cornel West issue a defense of free speech.

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

Amid the icy Nor’easter that hit the east coast Tuesday, a clear ray of intellectual sunshine emerged: Professors Robert George of Princeton University and Cornel West of Harvard University posted online, for national signatures, a petition in defense of freedom of speech. You may find it at http://jmp.princeton.edu/statement.

Their statement—“Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression”—follows on the heels of last week’s remarkable free-speech statement by professors at Middlebury College, which now has more than 100 signatures at that small Vermont institution.

Both efforts come in the aftermath of a protest at Middlebury against scholar Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute. That protest turned into a mob action, including an assault on Middlebury professor Allison Stanger, who had questioned Mr. Murray on stage.

For years, Professors George and West, the former a conservative and the latter a socialist, together taught a class at Princeton on how to listen to contrary points of view. Middlebury’s violence drove home what many in academia have come to see more clearly now—that the most basic tenets of free inquiry and exchange are under unprecedented pressure in the U.S., not least at universities.

The George-West statement stands as a forceful rebuttal to the all-too-frequent attempt to stigmatize opponents into silence. We hope it gains the national support it deserves.

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The Next Litvinenko Another Russian whistleblower is poisoned in Britain.

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

Watch what you eat, please. That’s our plea to Russian defectors as evidence mounts that the death of a U.K.-based whistleblower may have been caused by poisoned soup.

Alexander Perepilichny was jogging in Surrey in November 2012 when he collapsed and died. Investigators initially blamed natural causes, though there was reason to suspect foul play in his death at age 44.

Perepilichny had been cooperating with a Swiss probe into Russian money laundering and official corruption. He had also offered information in the case of Sergei Magnitsky—the lawyer who died in a Moscow prison in 2009 after blowing the whistle on Russian corruption—to the fund that hired Magnitsky. Perepilichny had received death threats from the Russian underworld, according to police investigators.

A formal inquest into the Perepilichny case was launched in 2014, but it hasn’t gotten under way in part due to delays over the disclosure of U.K. government intelligence. Lawyers for Perepilichny’s life insurer told a pre-inquest hearing Monday that traces of a deadly toxin derived from the gelsemium plant had been found in his stomach. Police experts discovered the substance but concluded it was sorrel from a soup. The inquest, which formally begins June 5, must examine whether the gelsemium was substituted for the harmless sorrel.

This echoes the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian intelligence defector who died in London after being poisoned with polonium, along with the more recent case of Vladimir Kara-Murza, the opposition activist who recently survived his second poisoning in as many years. Perepilichny’s family, not to mention the British public, deserve to know whether Russian authorities have perpetrated a second such crime.

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The Health Bill’s Fiscal Bonus The best chance in a generation to control a runaway government.

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

The furor over the Congressional Budget Office’s report on the House GOP health bill is concentrated on predictions about insurance coverage, which suits Democrats fine. Lost amid the panic is that CBO shows the bill is a far-reaching advance for the market principles and limited government that conservatives usually favor.

The CBO is not omniscient, but if its projections are even close to accurate then ObamaCare repeal and replacement is the most significant government reform in perhaps three decades. Under conventional (static-revenue) scoring, the bill cuts spending on net by $1.22 trillion and eliminates a raft of new taxes worth $883 billion through 2026.

Despite this tax reform and new refundable tax credits for individual insurance purchases, the bill still reduces the deficit by $337 billion. Reducing spending, the tax burden and further debt generation is an enormous pro-growth fiscal bonus.

President Obama sought to permanently increase the government’s share of the economy to redistribute income to reduce inequality. ObamaCare was his spending wedge to force tax increases long after he had left office. The House health-care bill is the first crucial step to limit that wedge and restore the federal fisc to a more sustainable long-term path.

Absent reform, the brutal budget math is that the U.S. is headed for a debt crisis; major tax increases that subtract from GDP and living standards; or deep and immediate cuts to entitlements that Americans have planned their lives around—or maybe all three. The longer Washington waits, the more painful and politically convulsive the corrections will be.

We keep reading that President Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan are on a collision course over entitlements, though when was Medicaid demoted from entitlement status? The bill transitions the program’s funding formula to block grants starting in 2020—for the first time, limiting the automatic and open-ended commitment that defines an entitlement.

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GOP Senators Say House Health Bill Won’t Pass Without Changes Concerns mounted after independent report showed millions would be uninsured By Kristina Peterson, Michelle Hackman and Louise Radnofsky

Posted By on March 15th, 2017

WASHINGTON—Republican senators, alarmed by a nonpartisan report showing millions would lose insurance under the GOP health-care plan, warned Tuesday that the bill wouldn’t become law without fundamental changes.

At least a dozen Republican senators, including some who had previously kept a low profile in the health debate, made clear they had concerns over the bill’s policy proposals, complicating House leaders’ hopes that the bill’s momentum would overpower internal GOP infighting over legislative details.

Flashpoints included the potential loss of insurance coverage, changes to Medicaid, the trajectory of premium prices and the bill’s impact on costs paid by older, low-income and rural Americans.

Concerns mounted on Capitol Hill after the Congressional Budget Office, the independent legislative analyst, released a report on Monday that estimated the GOP health plan would reduce deficits by $337 billion over the coming decade and increase the number of uninsured by 24 million in 2026, compared with current law.

While many Republicans lauded the plan’s impact on the deficit and the high cost of premiums, the rising chorus of concerns means congressional GOP leaders and the White House will have to delicately balance modifying the bill in ways that appease one faction of Republicans without alienating another.

On Tuesday, the White House sought to discredit the report’s projections as unreliable, while Republican senators said they would push for an array of changes, including more assistance for older and low-income people to buy health insurance.

“This is difficult—it’s 18% of the economy,” said Sen. John Boozman (R., Ark.). “My concern is not with the timeline; my concern is doing it right.” CONTINUE AT SITE