RUTHFULLY YOURS

Oh Puleez! What have we a jihadist multitasker ? And we are being led to believe that he acted alone and not part of a cell? rsk

The Justice Department filed charges late Tuesday against bombing suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami, saying that he ordered many of his explosive components online and raged in a journal against what he viewed as U.S. attacks on Muslims.

Mr. Rahami, who is suspected of setting off homemade bombs in New York and New Jersey last weekend, including one in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that injured 31 people, was captured on Monday after a gunfight with police in Linden, N.J. The charges filed in Manhattan federal court included use of weapons of mass destruction, bombing a public place, destruction of property using an explosive, and using an explosive in furtherance of a crime.

Nearly identical charges were filed against him by federal prosecutors in New Jersey Tuesday, though officials said they planned to try him first in New York.

The 13-page criminal complaint contains excerpts from a blood-soaked notebook found on the suspect after he was arrested. The writings—parts of which are difficult to read because pages are covered in the suspect’s blood, officials said—suggest he was inspired by terrorists at home and abroad and looked to avenge a U.S. war on Muslims.

“You [US government] continue your [unintelligible] slaught[er] against the mujahidean be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Sham [Syria], Palestine,” he wrote, according to the complaint. In another section of the notebook, he allegedly wrote that his guidance came from radical jihadist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki who “said it clearly attack the kuffar [nonbelievers] in their backyard.” CONTINUE AT SITE

CHICAGO—A former Army National Guard soldier and his cousin were sentenced on Tuesday to lengthy prison terms for plotting to join Islamic State and to attack an Illinois military base.

The two men, who were arrested early last year, reached plea agreements in December 2015 with the U.S. attorney’s office after initially pleading not guilty.

Jonas Edmonds pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization” and making a false statement to police in relation to international terrorism, according to a spokesman for the Northern District of Illinois branch of the U.S. attorney’s office. He was sentenced to 21 years by U.S. District Judge John Z. Lee.

His cousin Hasan Edmonds pleaded guilty to one count of “conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq,” and one count of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. He was sentenced to 30 years.

Hasan Edmonds was arrested in March 2015 at Chicago’s Midway Airport as he attempted to board a plane bound for Cairo, where authorities say he intended to join Islamic State. He had been a supply specialist in the Illinois National Guard, though he was never deployed abroad.
Jonas Edmonds was arrested last year at his home in the Chicago suburb of Aurora, Ill. He had been planning to attack Hasan’s National Guard base using his cousin’s uniform.

Lawyers for the two men couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

The FBI had been tracking the pair for months on social media, and an undercover FBI agent posing as an ISIS agent corresponded online and met in person with the two men.

Hasan Edmonds said his National Guard training and experience with weapons would be an asset to Islamic State, according to prosecutors.

During the sentencing hearing on Tuesday, the U.S. attorney’s office showed a video of Hasan Edmonds telling an undercover FBI agent how best to attack his National Guard base and how to target higher ranking members of the military.

The Obama administration and some economists argue that the recovery since the Great Recession ended in 2009 has been unusually weak because of the recession’s severity and the fact that it was accompanied by a major financial crisis. Yet in a recent study of economic downturns in the U.S. and elsewhere since 1870, economist Tao Jin and I found that historically the opposite has been true. Empirically, the growth rate during a recovery relates positively to the magnitude of decline during the downturn.

In our paper, “Rare Events and Long-Run Risks,” we examined macroeconomic disasters in 42 countries, featuring 185 contractions in GDP per capita of 10% or more. These contractions are dominated by wartime devastation such as World War I (1914-18) and World War II (1939-45) and financial crises such as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Many are global events, some are for individual or a few countries.

On average, during a recovery, an economy recoups about half the GDP lost during the downturn. The recovery is typically quick, with an average duration around two years. For example, a 4% decline in per capita GDP during a contraction predicts subsequent recovery of 2%, implying 1% per year higher growth than normal during the recovery. Hence, the growth rate of U.S. per capita GDP from 2009 to 2011 should have been around 3% per year, rather than the 1.5% that materialized.
Arguing that the recovery has been weak because the downturn was severe or coincided with a major financial crisis conflicts with the evidence, which shows that a larger decline predicts a stronger recovery. Moreover, many of the biggest downturns featured financial crises. For example, the U.S. per capita GDP growth rate from 1933-40 was 6.5% per year, the highest of any peacetime interval of several years, despite the 1937 recession. This strong recovery followed the cumulative decline in the level of per capita GDP by around 29% from 1929-33 during the Great Depression.

Given the lack of recovery in GDP, a surprising aspect of the post-2009 period is the strong employment growth. The growth rate of total nonfarm payrolls averaged 1.7% a year from February 2010 to July 2016, despite the drop in the labor-force participation rate. The post-2009 period is not a jobless recovery; it is a job-filled non-recovery. Similarly, the drop in the unemployment rate—from 10% in October 2009 to 4.9% in July 2016—has been impressive, though overstated because of the decrease in labor-force participation. CONTINUE AT SITE

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Anne Pasternak, the public-art impresario and museum neophyte who one year ago became director of the Brooklyn Museum, quickly set about unraveling much of what her predecessor, Arnold Lehman, had done over his 18-year tenure. Her concept was commendable—to simplify and clarify installations that many visitors had regarded as chaotic, confusing and cluttered. But the results—particularly as seen in the sweeping overhaul of the encyclopedic museum’s distinguished permanent collection of American art in a mere seven months— suggest that Ms. Pasternak’s ambitions may have exceeded her know-how.

Brought to fruition by assistant curator Connie Choi, a month before Brooklyn’s new full curator of American art, Kimberly Orcutt, arrived on the scene, the reinstallation displays 35% fewer objects than before, eliminating the practice of double-hanging works (one above the other). This means that you no longer have to strain to see works that were hung too high, but it also means that certain artists are no longer shown in depth: For example, Marsden Hartley, an American Modernist painter whose styles ranged from realism to abstraction, was formerly represented by four paintings; now there’s only one.

More problematically, the new installation is sabotaged by political polemics: It seems perversely fixated on what’s shameful in our country’s past. While it’s legitimate to raise uncomfortable issues, the relentlessness of the negative critique makes the installation sometimes seem less a celebration of American culture and achievements than a recitation of our nation’s faults.

The introductory wall text fires a warning shot: “Some of the objects . . . raise difficult, complex issues, since many works were made for and collected by racially and economically privileged segments of society.” In our “Occupy” era, which takes aim at the disparities between the 1% and the 99%, “privilege” attracts potshots.

In the opening section, “The Americas’ First Peoples,” overseen by curator Nancy Rosoff, we are reminded of the “massacre of millions” that haunts our nation’s past. The gold, ceramics and carvings of Native Americans from North, Central and South America take their rightful place at the beginning of this chronological story of American art, with other American Indian objects interspersed throughout the galleries. Latin American artists are included under the rubric of “American Art” and integrated with their U.S. contemporaries.

There was a time when the Democratic Party provided a voice for American workers. The Democrats of the 20th century advocated for higher wages and better working conditions and opportunities for upward mobility for blue-collar workers.

This was the concept behind the “American Dream” — the notion that anyone who got an education and worked hard and, perhaps, benefited from a bit of luck could write the next great American success story.

Today the Democratic Party, still politically backed by labor unions, has become the main driver behind providing millions of illegal aliens with lawful status.

The Democratic Party viewed itself as the counterpoint to the Republican Party — which, for the most part, was aligned with business owners who predominantly wanted cheaper labor and fewer regulations.

Labor laws and immigration laws were enacted to protect American workers from dangerous working conditions and from unfair competition that foreign workers might provide. In fact, prior to World War II, the enforcement and administration of the immigration laws were the responsibility of the Department of Labor. The authority for the enforcement of immigration laws only shifted to the Justice Department during World War II — when it became apparent that foreign spies and saboteurs could pose a national security threat.

There was balance to America’s politics. Both sides had understandable goals and desires, and through compromise America and Americans benefited and the middle class grew. Wages increased and along with those increasing middle-class wages came more disposable income that enabled large numbers of Americans to live the American Dream.

On Saturday evening, a bomb packed with metal shrapnel exploded in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea, injuring 29 people, eleven hours after an explosion in Seaside Park, N.J., along the route of a planned Marine Corps charity run. Both bombings — and at least two other attempts, one in Manhattan and one in Elizabeth, N.J. — appear to be the work of Ahmad Khan Rahami, a 28-year-old naturalized citizen from Afghanistan.

The sequence of events, culminating in Rahami’s capture on Monday morning, has coincided with liberal attempts to make the weekend’s goings-on anything other than what they obviously are: Islamic terrorism. On Saturday night, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio called the bombing “an intentional act,” making his own contribution to the roll of Obama-era euphemisms (cf. “man-caused disaster” and “workplace violence”), while on Monday, news that Rahami may not have acted alone prompted a CNN terrorism expert (we use that word advisedly) to propose that “two or three lone wolves may have gotten together.”

We do not yet know much about Ahmad Rahami, but we know a great deal about Islamic terrorism in the United States, on account of a growing catalogue of horrors — Boston, Chattanooga, San Bernardino, Orlando, etc. — and it’s almost certain that Rahami was hoping to stake out a place on that list: According to law enforcement, he traveled to Afghanistan multiple times in recent years, and acquaintances told the New York Times that he had changed dramatically following a trip four years ago. That Rahami failed to do more damage was largely a matter of incompetence and luck. (It’s worth keeping in mind, too, that this is not the first time that New York City has dodged a deadly bombing. In 2010, a car bomb planted in Times Square by Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistan native, ignited but failed to explode.)

Liberals refuse to acknowledge that the United States faces a deadly threat grounded in a distinct ideology. Terrorism is not an expression of frustration at a lack of economic opportunity; Ahmad Rahami was not “acting out” because he couldn’t score a position at the GAP. Terrorism is violence intended to subvert the existing political order, and, in the case of people such as Rahami, to replace it with the political framework required by supremacist Islam. Acknowledging this fact does not require condemning Islam as such; it simply requires acknowledging that there is a strain of Islam, with broad appeal today, that opposes the American way of life.

Our policymaking should be designed around this recognition. Instead, liberal leaders have been hampering counterterror efforts. The Obama administration, incapable of uttering the phrase “Islamic terror,” has drawn down our intelligence efforts at home and abroad, while smearing police departments across the country as racist. Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor de Blasio caved to the demands of Islamist activists earlier this year and ordered the NYPD to stop using a report that helped officers identify individuals who might be considering terrorism. Far from encouraging profiling of Muslims, the report helped investigators make the distinctions that are crucial to preempting acts of terror.