http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/amb-power-puts-huge-foot-in-mouth-with-cycle-of-violence-comment/2014/02/24/ Amb. Power Puts Huge Foot in Mouth with ‘Cycle of Violence’ Comment Posted by Samantha Power on Twitter: Samantha Power @AmbassadorPower Daniel Pearl’s story is reminder that individual accountability & reconciliation are required to break cycles of violence. @DanielPearlFNDN Last night, the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, the Daniel Pearl […]
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-coming-collapse-of-the-welfare-state/print/
In 1935, the year that FDR signed the Social Security Act into law, the birth rate was 18.7 per 1,000. In 1940, when the first monthly check was issued, it had gone up to 19.4. By 1954, when Disability had been added, the birth rate at the heart of the Baby Boom stood at 25.3.
In a nation of 163 million people, 4 million babies were being born each year.
By 1965, when Medicare was plugged in, the birth rate had fallen back to 19.4. For the first time in ten years fewer than 4 million babies had been born in a country of 195 million. Medicare had been added in the same year that saw the single biggest drop in birth rates since the Great Depression.
There could not have been a worse time for Medicare than the end of the Baby Boom.
Today in a nation of 317 million, 4.1 million babies are being born each year for a birth rate of 13.0 per 1,000. 40.7% of those births are to unmarried mothers so that it will be a long time, if ever, before they pay back into the system, and most will never put back in as much as they are taking out.
Liberals and libertarians both act as if the crisis facing us can be fixed if we take more from the “wealthy elderly” or give them less. The crisis is born of demographics. It can’t be fixed by targeting the elderly because they haven’t been the problem in some time.
It’s the same crisis being faced by countries as diverse as Russia and Japan. The difference is that Russia is autocratic and has little concern for its people while Japan shuns immigration and has a political system dominated by the elderly.
The United States however takes in a million immigrants a year. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Barack Obama praised Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old Haitian woman who moved to the United States at the age of 79 and never learned to speak English, but did spend hours waiting in line in Florida to vote for Obama.
Between 1990 and 2010, the number of immigrants over 65 doubled from 2.7 million to 5 million. Twenty-five percent of these senior immigrants were over 80. Elderly immigrants are also much more likely to become citizens, in part because the requirements for them are lower. Many, like Desiline Victor, don’t even have to learn English to be able to stand in line and vote.
15 percent of senior immigrants come from Mexico largely as a result of family unification programs. If amnesty for illegal aliens goes through, before long the country will be on the hook not just for twelve million illegal aliens, but also for their grandparents.
The welfare state has been spending more money with an unsustainable demographic imbalance. There are fewer working families supporting more elderly, immigrants and broken families. The Russians invest money into increasing the native birth rate. Instead we fund Planned Parenthood because liberal economic eugenics dictates that we should extract “full value” from working women as a tax base to subsidize the welfare state while discarding the next generation.
The “modern” system that we have adopted with its low birth rates, high social spending and retirement benefits is at odds with itself. We can have low birth rates, deficit spending or Social Security; but there is no possible way that we can have all three.
And yet we have all three.
In the European model that we have adopted, men and women are supposed to spend their twenties being educated and their thirties having two children. These Johns and Julias will work in some appropriately “modern” field building apps, designing environmentally sustainable cribs for the few children being born or teaching new immigrants to speak enough English to vote. Then they plan to retire on money that doesn’t actually exist because they are still paying off their student loans.
John and Julia began marriage with tens of thousands in debts, only one of them will work full time, while the other balances part time work, and they will do all this while being expected to support social services for new immigrants and a native working class displaced by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, not to mention the elderly and the entire bureaucracy that has grown around them. If John and Julia are lucky, they will find work in a technology field that is still growing, or, more likely they will pry their way into the social services bureaucracy which will keep on paying them and cover their benefits until the national bankruptcy finally arrives.
In this post-work and post-poverty economy, those most likely to have children are also least likely to work or to be able to afford to have those children.
Birth rates for women on welfare are three times higher than for those who are not on welfare. Within a single year, the census survey found that unmarried women had twice as high a birth rate as married women. These demographics help perpetuate poverty and feed a welfare death spiral in which more money has to be spent on social services for a less productive tax base.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/truth-revolt-enters-the-battle-on-the-glazov-gangx/
This week’s special editon of The Glazov Gang was joined by Jeremy Boreing, a writer and filmmaker who is Executive Director of Friends of Abe and the Managing Editor of TruthRevolt.org, the new conservative media watchdog group started by Ben Shapiro with David Horowitz at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Jeremy’s recent film, The Arroyo, is a modern western that follows one man’s struggle against the lawlessness on America’s southern border.
Jeremy sat down with Jamie Glazov to discuss Mutually Assured Destruction in the Culture War, focusing on TruthRevolt.org’s tactic to confront the Left in our media, Hollywood and society at large.
Jeremy also illuminated the importance of story telling and the vital role it plays in political and cultural battle. In this context, he discussed his film, The Arroyo — a modern western that follows one man’s struggle against the lawlessness on America’s southern border.
Watch the two-part series below:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ryan-mauro/texas-terror-enclave-exposed/print/
The Clarion Project just disclosed the existence of a terrorist enclave in Texas last week, bringing new attention to a network of at least 22 Jamaat ul-Fuqra “Islamic villages” across the country. Newly-declassified documents reveal that the FBI privately considers ul-Fuqra to be a terrorist group, but remains operational in the U.S. because of the State Department.
The “Islamic villages” belong to Muslims of the Americas, an extension of Pakistani cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani’s Jamaat ul-Fuqra terrorist group. Its headquarters is “Islamberg” in Hancock, N.Y and two of the group’s seized videotapes prove that these sites are used for guerilla warfare training. One recording shows women at Islamberg in military fatigue receiving such instructions.
The FBI files released by Clarion confirm that the most loyal MOA members go to Pakistan for advanced religious and terrorist training under Sheikh Gilani. This travel is apparently done through an MOA entity named the American Muslim Medical Relief Team. The website has photos of members in Kashmir. The MOA has also posted videos of members working at “Gillaniville” under Gilani’s watch.
Last week, The Blaze aired a blockbuster half-hour episode of “For the Record” titled “Sleeper Cell” about Jamaat ul-Fuqra featuring the documents obtained by Clarion. The discovery of the camp near the town of Sweeny in Brazoria County, Texas was covered on “Fox and Friends” and the Fox News website. Media Matters immediately responded with a hit piece describing me as “anti-Muslim” that was then distributed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/fat-cats-and-democrats/print/
The progressive mind functions by means of mythic narratives that have tenuous connections to reality. Cops shoot a black man, and Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post begs “please don’t shoot me,” indulging the myth of a lethal American racism endangering black people’s lives, even though black offenders kill 90% of black murder victims, and 85% of interracial crime is perpetuated by blacks against whites. Criticize Sandra Fluke for demanding that a Catholic university’s health care plan subsidize her birth control, and you’re waging a sexist “war on women” for making them pay a whole $30 for their monthly pills. Another particularly persistent and long-lived political folk tale is that conservatives and Republicans are the party of robber barons who use their exorbitant wealth to undermine democracy for their own nefarious ends.
Just recently this hoary myth was used to explain why Volkswagen autoworkers in Tennessee voted against joining the United Automobile Workers Union. According to MSNBC, the union lost because Grover Norquist’s “nonprofit Americans For Tax Reform . . . turned out to be funding a union-busting arm called the Center for Worker Freedom that waged a public campaign against the UAW in Chattanooga.” This is a variation on the same liberal caterwauling over the malign influence of money on politics allegedly enabled by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that held restrictions on political speech by corporations, associations, and unions to be in violation of the First Amendment. In October last year, Obama blamed Citizen United for empowering rich conservative extremists like the Koch brothers: “You have some ideological extremists who have a big bankroll, and they can entirely skew our politics.” Look at the facts, however, and it is the progressives and Democrat elites who are using their fat bankrolls to make the political system serve their ideological and material interests.
http://carolineglick.com/the-israeli-solution-3/
In its annual survey of American Jewry published last October, the American Jewish Committee found that 75 percent of American Jews agree with the statement, “The goal of the Arabs is not a peaceful two-state agreement with Israel, but rather the destruction of Israel.”
And yet, American Jews supported the establishment of a Palestinian state 50% to 47%.
Next week over 10,000 predominantly Jewish American supporters of Israel will gather in Washington at AIPAC’s annual policy conference. Given their high commitment to Israel, probably most of those gathered belong to the 47% of American Jews who opposed Palestinian statehood.
Yet at the conference they will embrace the two-state formula. And on March 4 they will go up to Capitol Hill and tell their representatives that they support it.
They will do so not because they are addled. They will do so because for the past 20 years all they have heard is that Israel has no alternative to the two-state plan.
Careful what you wish for in Ukraine By Spengler Western governments are jubilant over the fall of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, a Russian ally. They may be underestimating Vladimir Putin: Russia has the option to hasten Ukraine’s slide into chaos and wait until the hapless European Union acquiesces to – if not begs for – […]
http://spectator.org/articles/57901/obama%E2%80%99s-assault-first-amendment
The First Amendment provides that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press. That, in the view of President Obama, is no limitation on his ability to make such laws, even indirectly, through executive branch rules and regulations.
Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, the IRS discriminated against conservative groups in investigating, delaying and denying the tax-exempt status many had applied for in order to do what similar organizations do on the left side of the political equation. It was enough for Obama’s operatives in the IRS to detect the use of words such as “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in a group’s name for it to be subjected to this discrimination.
When IRS official Lois Lerner was called to testify about this practice before a House committee, she took the Fifth. And during the Super Bowl halftime show, Obama told Bill O’Reilly there wasn’t a trace of corruption in the IRS’s conduct.
Last November, the IRS proposed a change to the tax regulations that would institutionalize this discrimination.
This all, of course, was in pursuit of the liberals’ goal of overturning the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that both labor unions and corporations had a free speech right to use their general funds for independent expenditures of a political nature. It said, among other things, that the First Amendment “has its fullest and most urgent applications to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.”
And that, in liberal thinking, opened a floodgate of corporate action where only union action had been permitted before. When the IRS got into the act, it quickly determined the obvious: that Dave Bossie’s outfit, Citizens United, is a nonprofit corporation. The best way to block spending by such nonprofits is to block them from becoming nonprofits, which has the effect of blocking most contributions to them. If you block their funding, they can’t spend anything on independent campaign ads for conservative candidates or against liberal ones. That’s what the IRS did in 2012, is doing today, and will continue to do when the new rules take effect.
http://www.meforum.org/3762/palestinian-right-of-return US-backed negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are entering a critical period. With reports suggesting Israeli acceptance of the 1967 lines and land swaps, what about Palestinian concessions? Two issues are paramount: the ‘right of return’ and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently stated, “Let me […]
The revolution in Kiev was televised. Will it now be squandered?
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304610404579402952527651122
How hard can it be to change $60 into a foreign currency? On a visit to Ukraine last fall I found out.
This was in Yalta, the Black Sea resort where Churchill, Stalin and FDR met in 1945 to sort out the future of Europe. The two ATMs I tried, both with the familiar Cirrus logo, wouldn’t dispense cash. So I walked into a bank and went to the teller, who was reading.
Izvinite, excuse me, I said in my phrase-book Russian, since Yalta is a Russian-speaking town. He kept reading. Vybachte I offered in Ukrainian, no doubt badly pronounced. He ignored me. Excuse me, this time in English. Apparently I didn’t exist. I left.
A few blocks away I spotted an old building with a currency-exchange sign. Inside, about a dozen women sat at their desks behind inch-thick windows. I was the only customer. I went to the first window, took three $20 bills from my wallet, and showed them to the woman behind the glass. Wordlessly, she pointed at the woman at the next desk. That woman pointed at another.
