RUTHFULLY YOURS

Do black lives matter?

Hispanic lives? Muslim lives? Gay lives? Women’s lives?

Black lives matter – to me, at least – if blacks adhere to reason, lead productive, non-parasitical lives, do not demand the unearned, and, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., if blacks judge others, blacks, whites, Asians, Arabs, Hispanics, Muslims (not actually a “race,” just as Islam is not a “race,” either), Mexicans, Cubans, and so on, that is, judge an individual by the content of his character. This is how I expect to be judged, and how I judge others. I otherwise place no importance on a person’s color.

But this is not what Black Lives Matter (BLM) means. BLM is grounded on race and a hatred for whites and the police. The hatred is so severe that BLM has declared war on the police. It is a terrorist organization, whether or not the government recognizes it as one. It has declared war on the police to effect “change” in how the police handle blacks in their encounters. Often it is black policemen who shoot or “mistreat” violent blacks in the course of self-defense, and these policemen have also been deemed “fair targets” by BLM for murder and harassment. Their “blackness” does not exempt them from murder.

It is a black subculture, perpetuated by the government and the welfare state, which rejects civilization, which BLM perceives as an oppressor. Although what blacks as a “collective” would replace it with has never been answered except for a “racial supremacy of blacks.” In that respect it is similar to Islam’s goal of dominating every country in the world.

Readers should be reminded that nothing like Locke’s Two Treatises of Government ever came out of the Congo or Egypt or the Sub-Sahara. Whatever there is to value in the West that serves as a benchmark of life-affirming progress was produced in the “lily-white” north – across the Mediterranean.

Some historians and cultural writers contend that climate played a big role in the development or Western civilization, so that blacks living in deserts or in fetid, smothering jungles were at a disadvantage to improve agriculture or invent steam engines and even to study the skies.

This is not an endorsement of the racist notion (advanced by creatures like the Aryan Nation and others) that whites are genetically superior to blacks or any other race.

Left out of the narrative is the role of reason.

This will not be the central subject of this column, but I am repelled by today’s black subculture. It is anti-reason, anti-esthetics, anti-everything that comports with a civilized society, and is a belligerent expression of self-hatred projected onto the “white race.” Today’s black “entertainers” are not of the caliber of past black singers and musicians as Cab Calloway and Louis
Armstrong and Billy Holiday.

For once, Donald Trump was guilty of understatement. “Our airports are like from a Third World country,” he said during a debate year. It’s a common complaint but inaccurate: Comparing America’s airports with the Third World’s is unfair to the Third World.

Even in the poorest countries, a traveler can expect to reach the terminal by car. At New York’s LaGuardia Airport, traffic is so nightmarish that passengers jump from cabs along the highway and schlep their bags on foot. In the Third World, people typically fly out of their home city. At Newark Airport, the landing fees are so high that New Jerseyans often drive hours to Philadelphia to find affordable fares.

The highest-ranked American airport on the list of the world’s top 100, as determined by the Passengers Choice Awards, is Denver—at 28. Atlanta comes in at 43, Dallas at 58, Los Angeles at 91.

Why do American passengers pay so much to get so little? Because their airports, by global standards, are terribly managed.

Cities from London to Buenos Aires have sold or leased their airports to private companies. To make a profit, these firms must hold down costs while enticing customers with lots of flights, competitive fares and appealing terminals. The firm that manages London’s Heathrow, currently eighth in the international ranking, was so intent on attracting passengers that it built a nonstop express train to the city’s center. It’s also seeking to add another runway, as is the rival firm running Gatwick Airport.

American airports are typically run by politicians in conjunction with the dominant airlines, which help finance the terminals in return for long-term leases on gates and facilities. The airlines use their control to keep out competitors; the politicians use their share of the revenue to reward unionized airport workers. No one puts the passenger first.

New York City’s problems are even worse. All three of the major airports serving the city are under the control of a single agency, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Because the governors of those two states appoint the Port Authority’s executives and board, no single politician ever gets blamed.

Freed of competition, the Port Authority spends $156,000 in wages and benefits per worker. It also diverts profits from the airports to other projects, meaning passengers’ money isn’t reinvested in better terminals or additional runways. Federal law generally requires that airport revenues be spent on aviation, but that statute, passed in 1982, contains a grandfather provision excluding the Port Authority.

That was fast. Less than an hour after President Trump’s swearing in, his Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended the Obama Administration’s last-minute gift to the housing lobby to cut mortgage insurance rates.

Former Secretary Julian Castro announced last week that HUD would lower by 0.25% what the Federal Housing Administration charges on a risky mortgage backed by taxpayers. On loans exceeding $625,000, the premium cut would have been 0.45%. The reductions were scheduled to take effect next Friday.

Mr. Castro promoted the reductions as a way to lower costs for homeowners as he went out the door, but the move was a classic example of the clout of the housing lobby. Realtors, home builders and “fair-housing” advocates have been lobbying for the cut as interest rates begin to rise. They hoped the lower cost of this government subsidy would help them originate more mortgages. Mr. Castro, who has future political ambitions, also didn’t mind doing a favor for potential campaign donors.

The suspension of the premium cut is good government and good for taxpayers. HUD said the suspension is indefinite, which will give the new Trump team time to inspect the FHA’s books and make its own decision. Mr. Trump’s nominee as HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, isn’t even on the job and might not be for a while if Democrats continue to stonewall confirmation votes.

FHA has become a giant guarantor of mortgages with too little scrutiny. Homeowners can score FHA mortgage insurance with a credit rating as low as 580 and a mere 3.5% down payment. When home prices are rising, too few people pay attention when politicians put taxpayers more at risk. But we learned from hard experience in the previous decade that these policies can come back to haunt.

Washington’s housing-industrial complex may squawk, but the new Administration has sent the right message in reversing a bad Obama decision.

Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you.

We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people.

Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for many, many years to come. We will face challenges, we will confront hardships, but we will get the job done.

Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power, and we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent. Thank you.

Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning because today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people.

For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

That all changes starting right here and right now because this moment is your moment, it belongs to you.

It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country.

What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.

January 20th, 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.

The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.

Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.

At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction, that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public.

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

When Sen. Joseph McCarthy died, shockingly, at the age of 48, he, his aides and his committee had identified at least fifty Soviet agents, ideological communists and Fifth Amendment pleaders, dedicated to the overthrow of our constitutional system, and loyal/sympathetic to Stalin, Mao and a new wave of genocidal dictators. It was the late M. Stanton Evans, America’s greatest McCarthy expert, author of Blacklisted by History, who created the table of fifty (link above), drawing proofs from personal papers, declassified FBI memos, congressional archives, intercepted Soviet communications, defector testimonies, and the like.

He wrote:

Looking at this mass of materials and matching them up with McCarthy’s cases, the main thing to be noted is a recurring pattern of verification. Time and again, we see the suspects named by McCarthy and/or his committee–treated at the time as hapless victims–revealed in official records as what McCarthy and company said they were–except, in the typical instance, a good deal more so.

To normal Americans, some large number of Deplorables among them, this probably sounds like a monumental record of accomplishment for a US Senator, who, while beating back the media-political-complex of the 1950s seeking to destroy him (as they did), upheld his oath to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” If this is not a record elected officials today would do well to emulate I don’t know what is.

However, after more than 60 years of “McCarthyism” — the perpetual slander of Joseph McCarthy as a “witch-hunter,” as opposed to an honest accounting of this fearless investigator of deep and widespread infiltration of the US government by Stalin’s secret agents, which had become a virtual Soviet intelligence army occupation of FDR’s Washington by the time of World War II — Americans have been conditioned to react entirely differently. We are supposed to hate, loathe and revile McCarthy. This not only does grievous injury to a great patriot gone six decades, it imperils the safety of our nation today. The slander of “McCarthyism,” wielded like a cudgel, has had the dire effect of bludgeoning our abilities to detect or even acknowledge the existence of any constitutional enemies, especially “domestic.”

To avoid triggering foaming denunciations and tribal acts of ostracism over “McCarthyism,” Americans have become hard-wired not to understand and not to identify and not to tell the truth about the enemy, any enemy, any threat, in order to remain in fluffly-good standing with the flock. Every now and then, a free-thinker comes along — former Rep. Michele Bachmann comes to mind for her eminently responsible and national-security-minded efforts to ensure that Muslim Brotherhood agents were not penetrating the government policy-making chain. The Keepers of “McCarthyism” roasted Bachmann alive as the second coming of Joseph Raymond McCarthy. Remaining sheep shuddered and closed ranks.

Samantha Power had been waiting her entire adult life for this moment. “To the Assad regime, Russia, and Iran, your forces and proxies are carrying out these crimes,” the outgoing U.S. ambassador to the United Nations thundered from her seat at the United Nations Security Council briefing as Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, succumbed to a brutal and bloody siege by government forces. “Your barrel bombs and mortars and airstrikes have allowed the militia in Aleppo to encircle tens of thousands of civilians in your ever-tightening noose.” Then Power dropped the hammer: “Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you? Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin, that just creeps you out a little bit? Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?”

It’s not that Power was wrong. Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been able to continue to carry out its slaughter thanks to Russian airpower (and diplomatic cover) and reinforcements from Iranian terror proxies. But the key part of Power’s speech came a few lines earlier, when she said: “Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later. Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, now, Aleppo.”

The line makes for a fitting epitaph for Power’s own time in President Barack Obama’s Cabinet. The problem is that she spoke these words on December 13, 2016, five weeks before the end of the Obama presidency—and three and a half years into her tenure as America’s UN ambassador. Before she entered Obama’s service in 2009, she had devoted her meteoric career to heaping shame on America’s history of standing aside, hands in pockets, as mass murders occurred. She has famously and publicly called out individual officials as “bystanders to genocide” while lauding those who resigned in protest of the same.

Power, who at 42 became America’s youngest-ever ambassador to the UN, has now become that bystander. It is her particular contribution to genocide scholarship that illuminates the frustration and despair engendered by her toleration of Obama’s dithering. “It is daunting to acknowledge, but this country’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective,” she writes in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2003. “The system, as it stands now, is working. No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.”