Thought For The Day
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The longer an elected official remains in the swamp of Washington, D.C., the farther he drifts from mainstream Americans. Recycle Congress in 2010 - No exceptions
The indignation of Americans is growing rapidly about the U.S. Air Force granting a French company a $35 billion tanker-aircraft contract that could eventually grow to $100 billion and is estimated to create 100,000 jobs in Europe. French government subsidies are one of the factors that enabled the lucky company (known as EADS) to underbid Boeing.
Rep. Duncan Hunter (CA), the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, is leading the battle in Congress to overturn this decision. He thinks it is outrageous that U.S. taxpayers should be paying to create jobs in foreign countries.
It is bad enough that the United States has been hemorrhaging millions of manufacturing jobs that are critical to sustaining our middle class. It's even worse that government policies are deliberately outsourcing jobs that are critical to our national security.
All during the Clinton and Bush Administrations, U.S. negotiators signed trade agreements that allow foreign competitors to create and maintain unfair border-tax schemes that massively discriminate against U.S. manufacturers and service providers, and give foreign competitors a dramatic advantage in the U.S. market. The principal border-tax scheme used against us is the Value Added Tax (VAT).
When foreign manufacturers export their products to the United States, the Value Added Taxes they paid are generously rebated by their governments. Isn't that cool! General Motors, Chrysler and Ford would surely be in better shape if the U.S. government rebated the heavy U.S. taxes they have paid.
But that's only half the story. When U.S. manufacturers try to sell their products in foreign countries, they are required to pay border taxes not only on the value of the product itself, but also on the value of all transportation, insurance and other costs.
The bottom line is that these border-tax schemes heavily subsidize the products other countries sell to us, while erecting a high tax barrier against our goods when we try to sell overseas. The combination of foreign governments' export subsidies and import taxes amounted to a $428 billion disadvantage to U.S. manufacturers and service providers in 2006.
My late good friend, the well-known Senator Everett Dirksen, used to quip about government policies by saying, "A billion here, a billion there, and soon we'll be talking about real money."
The border-tax problem does, indeed, involve real money. In 2006, it was four times as costly as the Iraq war (VAT: $428 billion; Iraq war: $101 billion, according to Congressional Research Service figures), and two times greater than the U.S.-China trade deficit ($232 billion). The United States has no mechanism to stop or offset this foreign border-tax racket, which creates a severely unlevel playing field. Our complaints and petitions to the World Trade Organization have fallen on deaf ears.
But how could we expect any better treatment? We are only one vote out of 152, and most of the other countries don't like us anyway. This border-tax subsidy started shortly after World War II. U.S. officials, steeped in a Marshall Plan foreign-handout mentality, agreed to allow France to protect its domestic market, going and coming, by border-tax subsidies and taxes. What followed was monkey-see-monkey-do. Other countries found they could play the same anti-American game. Today, 149 countries use the border-subsidy-and-tax scheme to discriminate against U.S. products. In addition, the foreign border-tax rates have grown and grown. France's border tax rate of 2 percent in the late 1940s has risen to 19.6 percent today, and the average for all 149 countries is 15.5 percent.
These figures show that the push for the United States to lower or eliminate our tariffs is one of the costliest con jobs ever perpetrated on Americans. We cut our tariffs in the name of "free trade," but 149 foreign countries simply replaced their tariffs with approximately equivalent border taxes benignly called "Value Added," and then doubled the indignity by handing out subsidies to make their products more saleable in U.S. markets.
The American people rose up with a mighty roar a couple of years ago to kill the Bush Administration deal to outsource control of 22 East and Gulf Coast port operations to Dubai Ports World, which is controlled by a Middle East government. We are looking for a similar grassroots uprising to kill the deal to outsource the building of aircraft essential to our national defense.
America's industrial base is a vital part of our national security. We can't afford to put it under the control of foreign governments. The French tanker-aircraft deal should be a Red Alert about the unfair treatment of Americans by various trade agreements and contracts. Then, perhaps we can build momentum to protect what's left of our manufacturing base and middle-class jobs by establishing a level playing field for foreign trade.
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In his March 26 speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, McCain never mentioned the need to preserve American sovereignty. He could have reassured conservatives by stating his forthright opposition to Senate ratification of the U.N.’s Law of the Sea Treaty, which provides for international control over billions of dollars worth of oil, gas and minerals and undermines American claims to North Pole riches. But he chose not to.
Instead, as the Washington Post put it, McCain promised “a collaborative foreign policy,” conducted in coordination with other nations. The New York Times said he distanced himself from “unilateralism” in foreign affairs.
“Liberals are going to love this speech,” conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh said about the McCain address. He said it sounded like the “global test” that liberal Democratic presidential candidate and Senator John Kerry had proposed for U.S. foreign policy in 2004.
Yet, McCain’s new TV ad calls him “the American president Americans have been waiting for.” The public should not be fooled. He is as much of a globalist as Hillary and Obama.
Noting that McCain committed himself to adoption of a new U.N.-sponsored global warming treaty, which would be even more comprehensive and tougher than the Kyoto Protocol, Limbaugh said that “The theme here is that there’s nothing special about America, and that we’re not going to be able to do anything without involving other nations and making them like us and showing them that we intend them no harm and that we want to be good stewards of the planet just as they want to be good stewards.”
The latter was a reference to McCain declaring that “We need to be good stewards of our planet and join with other nations to help preserve our common home. The risks of global warming have no borders.” McCain sounded like another Democrat―Al Gore.
But despite his preference for what appears to be some kind of New World Order, McCain’s prior endorsement of a new Muslim state in Europe by the name of Kosovo could undermine all of his best-laid plans. Recognition of Kosovo could lead to war with Russia and more terrorist problems for Israel.
Scary Rhetoric
Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA commented, “Sen. McCain delivered a laundry list of all things non-conservative.” He said the speech wasn’t conservative or even Republican.
Amanda Teegarden, a grass roots pro-sovereignty activist, was also alarmed. “It is imperative that conservatives listen to this speech―especially if you are concerned about the sovereignty, and the economic survival, of the United States,” she said.
In addition to a new global warming treaty, she noted that McCain’s proposals included open borders in the Western Hemisphere, nuclear disarmament, and a Transatlantic free trade area.
Eberle focused on a segment of the McCain speech that included the statement that “Relations with our southern neighbors must be governed by mutual respect, not by an imperial impulse or by anti-American demagoguery. The promise of North, Central, and South American life is too great for that. I believe the Americas can and must be the model for a new 21st century relationship between North and South. Ours can be the first completely democratic hemisphere, where trade is free across all borders, where the rule of law and the power of free markets advance the security and prosperity of all.”
McCain’s strange rhetoric about “North, Central, and South American life” reflects a view that nation-states are disappearing and being replaced by regional alliances and institutions. He referred to “the powerful collective voice of the European Union,” as if the U.S. response would have to be submersion of our voice in a larger hemispheric entity. But McCain seems to be calling for something beyond even a North American Union (NAU) of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. He talked about “creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms we cherish,” as if they would be built on top of the EU and the NAU.
Earlier, McCain had declared, “With globalization, our hemisphere has grown closer, more integrated, and more interdependent. Latin America today is increasingly vital to the fortunes of the United States. Americans north and south share a common geography and a common destiny.” But why should trade with America’s neighbors necessarily lead to a “common destiny?” This implies a political merger of the U.S. with other countries.
Nuclear Disarmament
“We should work to reduce nuclear arsenals all around the world, starting with our own,” McCain said. This appeared to be a call for unilateral nuclear disarmament. He went on to call for the U.S. to lead “a global effort at nuclear disarmament.” This, too, seems to require more reliance on international institutions, in this case the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Indeed, McCain in the past has called for more funding for the IAEA.
McCain added, “We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact―a League of Democracies―that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests.” But as I noted in a recent piece, “McCain, Soros, and the New World Order,” this is a liberal project that is being currently funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros and managed by former Clinton officials. It has nothing to do with democracy but is intended to create another global institution that will eventually help strengthen the U.N.
After calling for the closing of the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay (but not saying where he would put the detainees), McCain declared that “There is such a thing as international good citizenship.” This is the kind of rhetoric we would expect from an advocate of world government. If Hillary or Obama were spouting such silly rhetoric, conservatives would be laughing at them.
It goes without saying that McCain is oblivious to the evidence that the man-made global warming theory doesn’t hold up under serious scrutiny. His proposal for “a successor to the Kyoto Treaty” that “delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner” is potentially very damaging to the U.S. economy. But the proposal pleases the Europeans.
McCain talked about the virtues of the “transatlantic alliance,” which served a purpose during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but went on to say that “Americans should welcome the rise of a strong, confident European Union as we continue to support a strong NATO.” The European Union was devised primarily as a counter to the influence of the U.S. in foreign affairs. It has also proven to be a bureaucratic disaster for the people of Europe. The “strong NATO” has proven to be extremely weak in Afghanistan, where it cannot field enough troops to defeat the Taliban terrorists. Expanding NATO has not resulted in making it stronger.
“The future of the transatlantic relationship lies in confronting the challenges of the twenty-first century worldwide: developing a common energy policy, creating a transatlantic common market tying our economies more closely together, addressing the dangers posed by a revanchist Russia, and institutionalizing our cooperation on issues such as climate change, foreign assistance, and democracy promotion,” declared McCain.
So not only is the U.S. going to move toward common policies for North, South and Central America, but it is going to develop common energy and economic policies with the European Union. Developing a common policy on “foreign assistance” is a recipe for more looting of the U.S. taxpayers. The Europeans have long complained that the U.S. isn’t devoting enough money to “official development assistance,” as the U.N. calls it.
Nightmare Vision
Does McCain’s vision look like an emerging world government? It is certainly a variation of “global governance,” which is the proposal that former Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott makes in his book, The Great Experiment. Talbott calls McCain a “pragmatist” in foreign affairs, just like Obama and Hillary, and says that he expects his liberal Brookings Institution to have influence over a McCain presidency.
On other issues in his speech, McCain talked tough about Iran and Russia.
The big problem for McCain, as we noted in a recent column, is that his vision of a New World Order is incompatible with his support for making the Serbian province of Kosovo into an independent state. Carving Kosovo out of Serbia is a threat to international peace and security. It has split NATO, which McCain says he wants to expand and strengthen. This policy, which has also been embraced by the Democrats, threatens a completely unnecessary war with Russia, which backs Serbian control of Kosovo and wants to aid the Serbs remaining in the province.
McCain spoke about Israel’s survival, without addressing the reality that Kosovo’s independence has energized the Arab/Muslim push for a Palestinian state that could threaten Israel.
While McCain said that the threat of radical Islamic terrorism is “the transcendent challenge of our time,” he seemed unaware how some of those same forces are behind the push for Kosovo statehood. It just doesn’t make sense to fight Muslim extremists in one place, Iraq, while helping them in another, Kosovo, and even giving them their own state.
This is a contradiction that McCain has failed to address.
“We have incurred a moral responsibility in Iraq,” the Senator declared. “It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible, and premature withdrawal.”
This rhetoric strikes a chord with conservatives. Yet, some say that genocide is already occurring in Iraq, in regard to the plight of Christians there. More than half have fled the country since the U.S. invasion, and those who remain are being kidnapped, threatened and murdered. Do we not have a moral responsibility to them? Shouldn’t the U.S. be less concerned about the survival of the Muslim government in Iraq and more concerned about the defenseless and unarmed Christians?
McCain seemed blind not only to the issues that conservatives regard as critical in an election year, but he went out of his way to reach out to liberals and Democrats. The only part of the speech they probably didn’t like was on Iraq.
But if the liberals get beyond their differences with McCain on Iraq, they will not only vote for him but promote his agenda as president. Then, as Rush Limbaugh notes, it may eventually be possible to change the name of the United States of America: “We’ll call ourselves New Europe.” In the process, true conservatism as a political force will be finished in the U.S.
The tragedy of this approach is that it comes from a man who served his country in uniform and risked his life on behalf of the U.S. McCain would have been a natural choice to lead a campaign for restoration of American sovereignty in foreign affairs. He could have been “The American President Americans have been waiting for.”
For reasons that remain largely a mystery, he has chosen to take the U.S. down the road of “global governance,” in which the U.N. and other international agencies, institutions and alliances determine our fate as a nation. It is the same road the Democrats are on. It is a tragedy for our country.
By Cliff Kincaid
March 28, 2008
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/mccains-incoherent-new-world-order/
Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
The Fed is bailing out banks that irresponsibly loaned money to home buyers (that the home buyers could not afford to pay back). Meanwhile, many Americans are blithely waiting for their IRS “rebate” checks – a feel-good, election year tactic to “stimulate the economy.” Yet the United States is facing a different – and serious – economic crisis. If this crisis is left unchecked, it could leave grocery stores with empty shelves and the local mall with fewer gadgets and gizmos.
In 1987, I purchased my first truck for $50,000 and my first trailer for $9,000. Fuel was 67 cents per gallon and, as an owner/operator I earned approximately $1.25 per mile. The truck I purchased in 1999 cost $120,000, trailer was $20,000. When I parked my truck and went to Iraq in 2004, fuel cost $1.37 cents per gallon and my rate per mile was still $1.25 per mile.
Today, the American trucker is faced with upcoming emissions controls which will force them to trade in their older trucks for the more expensive, emissions compliant ones. Since my start in the trucking industry, equipment costs have more than doubled, the cost of maintenance, paying taxes, insurance and complying with Federal regulations has tripled, and fuel prices have quadrupled. However, not everything has risen for the American trucker: our miles per trip have been cut in half while freight rates have remained steady, right where they were in 1987. Not a day goes by that we do not receive an e-mail, read a blog or a newspaper article relating the story of yet another independent owner/operator having to park his truck permanently, unable to pay the fuel bill.
Manufacturers are reluctant to pay trucking companies a fair price to haul their goods, fearing public outcry when prices skyrocket to offset the increase in transportation costs. Tensions are rising as frustrated truckers attempt to renegotiate contracts for some type of fuel surcharge that will cover the rising cost of fuel. They see their livelihood – their Freightliner, Peterbilt or Kenworth – driven away by the repo man. They see Congress bailing out banks and Wall Street speculators and giving hard earned tax money to illegal aliens for free health care and education, yet Congress is silent on the plight of the American trucker. Department of Transportation head Mary Peters is so self-absorbed in convincing the American public we need Mexican truck drivers, she is ignoring the very lifeblood of the American trucking industry – American truckers. Is part of Peters’ mindset the same as that of the produce and construction industries? Is there an effort to convince the public we need Mexican drivers, who get paid considerably less than the American truckers, so they can bring in low-wage workers to replace us as we park our trucks? With fewer American truckers on the road, the argument seems to take a life of its own.
Congress, believing in and/or profiting from an Al Gore-inspired global warming hoax, can only come up with such solutions as biodiesel, ethanol and other technology that does absolutely nothing in the short term. For years, they have grabbed their ankles and bent over for militant environmentalists, refusing drilling in ANWR and other domestic locations. Their appeasement has given us a dangerous dependency on foreign oil, giving terrorist-supporting countries a measure of control over the U.S. economy that will have disastrous consequences. With every barrel of oil we buy from the Middle East and Venezuela, we fill the coffers of those very countries who are giving arms to the Islamic enemy I faced while driving a truck in Iraq. All the while, the lunatic, progressive Left still will try to convince you the war in Iraq was “fought for oil.”
As truckers struggle with less-than-minimum wages, the concern in Washington is for ensuring illegal aliens have free health care, free schooling and decent working conditions. Yet Congress ignores the company driver who works 70 hours per week, unable to take time at home because, as fuel increases, his company is cutting back on loads. He is driving less, his “off time” taken in some far away city away from his family. Industry publications pay lip service to the issue by advising truckers to “slow down” to save fuel, as if “slowing down” will alleviate the problem of high fuel costs. Most of us maintain the legal speed limit due, in part, to speed governors on our trucks and general safety. Once again, rather than standing up for the American trucker, Congress and the industry itself toss out cute slogans and “feel good” press releases, while the American trucker must decide between paying for fuel and paying his mortgage.
News stories have increased in recent weeks about talks of “shutdowns” and “strikes,” much as they have in years past. Some desperate truckers have resorted to using “off-road,” “non-taxed” diesel, which is the same fuel used in over-the-road trucks without the added taxes, to fill their tanks. The fuel, which is dyed red, is sold for farm and construction equipment. While legal to use in the fuel tanks of refrigerated trailers, it is illegal to use this red “off-road” diesel in the truck’s fuel tank. The trucker will ultimately get caught and fined outrageously, as DoT officers increase inspections and enforcement.
In addition, locking fuel caps are becoming a necessary security item, as unscrupulous thieves (especially in larger, urban areas) siphon fuel to sell to the highest bidder/trucker desperate for a break from the highway robbery at the pump. This, too, is to the detriment of the trucker if he gets caught buying stolen fuel. Violence is always a possibility, as truckers with no tolerance for such thuggery vigilantly watch for potential fuel thieves.
One of the places truckers can explain their plight and give vent to their frustrations is the blogosphere, as there are few organizations representing the independent trucker. The Owner/Operator Independent Drivers’ Association (OOIDA), born out of the trucker strikes in the 1970s, with lobbyists in Washington, has refused to advocate a strike or shut down, as it would, according to their website, violate Federal anti-trust laws. Their members are getting frustrated as the organization has been unsuccessful in assisting them in obtaining fair freight rates. Bumper stickers proclaiming “Just Say No to Cheap Freight” plaster members’ trucks, yet bumper stickers do not pay the fuel bill and for every trucker who refuses a load at $1.00 per mile, there are three more who will take it. None of them will stay in business long in this climate.
Will 2008 see a repeat of the 1970s, when the striking union truckers shut down factories and nearly brought the nation to its knees? Without the organization of the labor unions, it will be a daunting task, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility. Many of us will refuse to shut down, a lesson in futility that will do more damage to the economy than any election year propaganda piece the mainstream media can spew in support of one candidate or another. Renegade organizers, some reliving the nostalgia of CW McCall’s Convoy, are holding rallies across the country, encouraging truckers to “shut down” with dates ranging from March 24th to April 3rd. While the news reports and blog posts claim the shutdown will “call attention to the plight of the American trucker”, there are few, if any, clear cut answers or solutions to bring to the table. This is not just an election year issue. With military vehicles, first responders and the transportation industry that fuels the American economy struggling to service the needs of the nation, we cannot wait for a Clinton, Obama or McCain to wave their magic wand and walk on rivers of diesel fuel in November. November will be too late.
It will take more than empty rhetoric and nonsensical, make-me-look-good sound bites. It will take immediate and instant solutions, such as permanently lowering fuel tax rates on over-the-road diesel, lowering of tolls and other Federal and state taxes on all truckers – whether the one truck owner/operator or the large fleet owner. The country can afford this – standard business practices dictate that you cut where necessary to absorb immediate costs. We can start by completely cutting funding for National Public Radio and anything named after Robert Byrd (D-WV). Every trucker, every motorist, every family needs to demand we open our lands to domestic drilling – Montana, Alaska, and off the coast of Florida, California and Texas. We must end the reliance on hostile nations to provide oil for our nation. Call the White House; call fax and e-mail your representatives and senators. Demand they take action – NOW. We have the technology – do we have the will?
With more operating funds, the trucks will continue to roll. The stores will be filled with food and other goods. But without an immediate, plausible solution, there will be no need for a $600 rebate check. There will be nothing in the stores to buy with it.
Mark R. Taylor served in Iraq from January 2004 to May 2005 as a civilian convoy commander. His commentary has appeared in Landline Magazine, American Daily and Townhall.com and he has appeared on The Captain’s America and other radio programs. Mark Taylor’s website is: www.americantruckersatwar.com.
Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
So, if we cannot produce energy, what if we cease to import it?
STIFLING AMERICA'S ENERGY PRODUCTION
One year ago, the annual cost of energy imported into the United States was $300 billion. Now in March 2008, the price is about $600 billion – for the same amount of energy. What can we expect to be the course of this price in the future? I expect this price to rise to a maximum and then decrease to essentially zero. U.S. importation of energy will end.
Will it end because the American people build sufficient nuclear and hydrocarbon energy generating capacity to provide this energy for themselves or because Americans do without this energy? Tragically, the answer is almost surely the latter.
U. S. politicians are not showing the slightest interest in rolling back the taxation, regulation, and litigation that has stifled American energy production.
Not a single nuclear power plant is under construction in the U.S.
Not a single nuclear power plant is under construction in the U.S., and the current waiting period for government approval for construction is now estimated to be four years. Demonized by the myth of human-caused global warming, expansion of American hydrocarbon energy has essentially stopped, too. For reasons well familiar to American engineers, there are, at present, no other practical means of generating lots of useful energy.
So, if we cannot produce energy, why will we cease to import it? The reason is simple. We can no longer afford it. We are being outbid for energy in the world market.
Prices, as denominated in U.S. dollars, of the most valuable material things in the world are now rising at historically unprecedented rates. Energy, grain, metals, machines, and luxury real estate are all rising far faster than even the most extreme estimates of monetary inflation would justify. Even ordinary homes are selling at prices that the majority of Americans cannot afford without becoming enslaved to large debts that they are increasingly unable to maintain.
Everywhere one turns, the price of the best of everything is being bid to levels beyond the reach of most Americans. A mundane example is found in used earth-moving equipment – for which a large auction market exists. At auctions in the U.S. of such equipment today, the newest and best one-third of the equipment is purchased by foreign buyers – the poorer, more worn out equipment is purchased by Americans.
Money serves as a medium of exchange, a standard of value, and, if the money is sound, a storage medium for unspent capital. Each day, the choice of money and value of money are determined in the market by hundreds of millions of individual transactions.
The actual market exchanges, however, are goods for goods, services for services, goods for services – things of value for other things of value. Money facilitates these transactions.
Americans are being outbid for energy – and all other things of great value in the world market because they no longer produce sufficient things of value to offer in trade.
With a government-controlled educational system that has sharply reduced the number of productive Americans and with policies of high taxation, regulation, and litigation that constantly increase restrictions upon the activities of the productive people who remain, United States production of useful goods and services has declined to a level that will no longer sustain the current American way of life.
So far as energy and other valuable items are concerned, the American people are attending a world auction. They are weaker buyers than are the people who now supply most of the world's goods. They are being outbid by these people.
Prices at this auction will simply rise until the weaker bidders fall away. These weaker bidders are over-governed, over-taxed, over-regulated, over-litigated Americans who simply can no longer compete in world markets – because their government has placed such huge unproductive burdens upon them.
As the 30% of energy that is now imported into the United States is lost to other bidders, a lot of things are likely to change. Of the remaining 70%, more than half is used for essential activities such as food production and distribution and winter heating. So, at least 60% of U.S. discretional energy use will end.
With this end will consequently come the end of many luxuries. Air conditioning, night-time lighting, vacation and other non-essential travel, non-essential computer and Internet activities, and many other things that Americans now take for granted will become unavailable to them.
It is much easier to rise in prosperity than it is to fall. The political repercussions of the coming sharp fall in American prosperity – which is now inevitable – will be severe.
As a result of this fall, Americans will either succumb to the greed, fear, irrationality, and envy that has led them to elect those who have caused these problems – thereby worsening their plight, or they will cast off their chains and rebuild their country.
In the current election cycle, Americans are clearly choosing more politicians of the kind who have caused this tragic disaster. When conditions become much worse, whom will they choose?
by Arthur Robinson
March 24, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
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Posted March 30, 2008 06:18 PM Permalink
Read more on Energy
Slavery has Not been Abolished
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a liberal Democrat and very much in favor of 'the redistribution of wealth’. She was deeply ashamed that her father had always been a staunch Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the academic lectures that she’d participated in, and the occasional chat with her professors, she felt that her father harbored an evil, profoundly selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.
One day she found herself challenging her father’s opposition to higher taxes on the ‘rich’, the need for more government and expanded welfare programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father.
Her father responded by asking how she was doing in school. She was taken aback by the question. Her father already knew the answer. She responded rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA. She went on to stress the obvious, that a 4.0 GPA was tough to maintain. She informed her father that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying. Her studies left her no time to go out and party like the other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, she complained, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.
Her father listened patiently and then asked, “How is your friend Audrey doing?”
His daughter replied, “Audrey is barely getting by. She takes all the easy classes. She never studies and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. But she is so popular on campus. College for her is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties, and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over.”
Her wise father asked his daughter, “Why don't you go to the Dean's Office at the end of this semester and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend Audrey who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.”
The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, resentfully fired back, “That wouldn't be fair! I’ve worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time and a lot of hard work! Audrey’s done next to nothing. She played while I worked my tail off!”
The father slowly smiled, and said gently, “Welcome to conservatism. Your friend Audrey is really no different than many others. It has nothing to do with race, gender, religion or economic circumstances. Your liberal friends in academia, plus many Republicans and most Democrats, will soon be demanding that you relinquish a portion of your GPA. They, knowing better than you, will redistribute your hard work to one of your classmates, or maybe give it to the child of an illegal alien migrant who is heavily taxpayer subsidized. If you should object, you will likely be denounced as a selfish right-wing racist and treated with contempt.”
“Yes, you should understand that if nothing changes in America very soon, you will be expected to subsidize the good times of many others, most of whom are unwilling, either through conscious choice or because of flawed decision making, to provide for themselves beyond a meager subsistence. They will expect this of you throughout the rest of your life.”
The daughter, angry and shocked at the thought, countered emotionally. “But that’s like slavery, like me being a slave to them.”
“Yes dear, that’s right.” her father lamented. “For all practical purposes, it is slavery for those who work hard at everything they do, from the beginning of their education through the rest of their working life. However, your social status of serfdom is necessary for others to achieve their egalitarian idealism. It is important to many people that you not have more than them. It is even more important to those who seek to rule that your situation is so desperate that you will vote for them and their promises. They’ll keep you and me, and the rest of the country, in desperate straits to insure their continued dominion at the ballot box.”
“Then, we have to consider those people who have exchanged their votes, traded them, in order to be arbitrarily classified as somehow disadvantaged. From their point of view, what you have and they do not have is neither fair nor is it their fault. They expect the government will force you and me to support them. They want their circumstances and consummate personal neglect to be your responsibility. They want you and everyone else to believe the fantasy that the victims of income confiscation (the taxpayers) are somehow evil, and the thieves (the recipients of income redistribution) miraculously have an entitlement to that which for them is unearned.”
“Politicians have come to think that people like you and me, and millions of other hard-working citizens, literally belong to the government. That’s the way of Socialism. They assume they can arbitrarily take from us as much as they want, even what we think of as our private property, even our children.”
Her father continued in a sad voice, “An incredible number of people, across this nation and around the world, live very well with the money taken from our family’s income. It all comes down to who works and who enjoys the fruits of the labor. If the government, any government, forces you to work to support other citizens, illegal aliens, and foreign nations, i.e., people other than your own family, it’s hard to think of it any other way than a form of slavery.”
“It should not make any United States citizen proud --- to ask their own family to sacrifice in order to serve a master class of indolent Americans and non-citizens in a land of ethical and moral anarchy.”
The daughter, disillusioned and with tears in her eyes said, “Like, that’s really wrong. I don’t want to be a slave.”
Lifting his book to continue reading, her father said, “Slavery has not been abolished as long as one man is involuntarily forced to serve another.”
Red State Patriot
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I was suspicious when the Department of the Interior announced it was considering the listing of polar bears as an “endangered species,” particularly since the designation has nothing to do with the current, thriving population, but a computer model projection that in 50 years they might be endangered. Since polar bears have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, the notion they might suddenly go missing in 50 years is questionable.
The fact is polar bears operate in waters around Alaska where geologists believe there are major reserves of undiscovered oil and natural gas. As you may recall, Alaska is also a place where there are vast known reserves of oil in the ANWR area. The refuge is huge. Only the 1.5 million acre or 8% on the northern coast of ANWR is being considered for development. The remaining 17.5 million acres or 92% of ANWR will remain permanently closed to any kind of development. If oil is discovered, less than 2000 acres of the over 1.5 million acres of the Coastal Plain would be affected. That's less than half of one percent of ANWR that would be affected by production activity.
So my suspicions were aroused when I received a March 26th news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration saying that NOAA’s Fisheries Service had accepted a petition from “a California environmental group seeking protection under the Endangered Species Act for an ice seal called the ‘ribbon seal’ that inhabits Alaska’s Bering Sea.”
If this goes forward, then the bearded, spotted, and ringed seals will also be considered for protection. What they need is protection against the polar bears because they are all considered a three-course meal by any one of the 50,000 roaming around that area.
It is now blatantly clear, if it has not been to date, that the Endangered Species Act exists to provide Greens a vehicle by which they can keep Americans from having access to the oil that would reduce to some extent our much vaunted dependence on oil from the Middle East. That would seem a good thing to most people, but not to the enemies of any and all forms of energy – particularly energy on which the U.S. depends to maintain and rebuild a shaky economy. (Thank you Senator John McCain - editorial comment)
These listings are not a coincidence. They are a deliberate attack on the security and economy of the nation. Somewhere in the Bush Administration, the word has gone out that it is okay to consider taking action that will harm the United States of America and its long term energy needs.
From the Great North to the great south, Antarctica, the media has been making a big deal of the potential calving of the Wilkins Ice Shelf. It is cited as yet another example that global warming is happening and we’re all going to die unless we stop driving, shut down all the utilities and manufacturing plants in America, begin to live in tents and cook our meals over an open fire.
A fact that is inconveniently ignored by the media is that the vast majority of Antarctica is in a decades-long cold spell. It has been cooling since around 1979. Indeed, the majority of the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean is accumulating ice, not losing it. So, if the Wilkins Ice Shelf should experience any loss, it would run counter to the trend there.
Joseph D’Aleo, executive director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, points out that, “In reality, the Wilkins Ice Shelf and all the former shelves that collapsed are small and most near the Antarctic peninsula which sticks well out from Antarctica into the currents and winds of the South Atlantic.” It lies over a tectonically active region with surface and subsurface active volcanic activity. If Wilkins breaks up, it will eventually do what other ice masses do. It will refreeze.
The media, besotted and enthralled by the global warming lies, continues to inaccurately report the truth of events like the Wilkins shelf because they just don’t care about the truth any more. They, like their fellow Greens, have an agenda and if that means telling big fat lies by leaving out key elements of a story, that’s okay by them.
Alan Caruba
March 2008
--------------------------
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Response by Les S.:
The enviro's and the media apparently have large numbers of willfully ignorant people in their thrall ... our enemies could ask for nothing more than the weakening of America, happily supplied by the Greens and their lemmings.
Fitna the Movie: Geert Wilders' film about the Quran (English)
Response from an Islamist website:
"If there is no check on the freedom of your words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions," with a picture of Osama bin Laden and the World Trade Towers burning in the background.
Threat noted.
Red State Patriot
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The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer and so is his wife Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate.) Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Benson, went to law school. Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.
The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.
Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office thirty-one years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976. The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work. The Democratic Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history like Gingrich.
The Lawyers' Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America. And so we have seen the procession of official enemies in the eyes of the Lawyers' Party grow. Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.
This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.
Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all consuming. Some Americans become "adverse parties" of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class action suit. We are citizens of a republic which promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.
Today, we are drowning in laws, we are contorted by judicial decisions, we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When lawyers use criminal prosecution as a continuation of politics by other means, as happened in the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, then the power of lawyers in America is too great. When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.
We cannot expect the Lawyers' Party to provide real change, real reform or real hope in America. Most Americans know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789. Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.
Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.
By Bruce Walker
Hat tip: Tom Dworzanski
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New Revelations in Haditha Case – Rumsfeld Set Up Shadow “Body” to Oversee Investigations
Revelations by top Marine Generals, that former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, set up a shadow “body” composed of high-ranking administration officials to oversee the Haditha investigations, could prove to be the most damning evidence of the political motivations and influence over the ongoing prosecutions of Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, USMC, and other combat Marines involved.
Lawyers representing Marine LtCol Jeffrey Chessani uncovered the existence of the extraordinarily unusual oversight body.
The hysteria and media firestorm over Abu Gharib and the Pat Tillman investigations led to fear of a similar media reaction to the Haditha incident, causing the military’s civilian bosses to set up this shadow oversight body. This extraordinary action politicized the military justice system and was a clear signal to top generals that they were expected to hold individuals criminally responsible. The investigation turned into a quest for a prosecution – not justice.
The Marines are being prosecuted for their house-to-house battle to ferret out ambushing insurgents on November 19, 2005. The insurgents fired upon the Marines while hiding amongst woman and children. The ensuing firefight resulted in the deaths of 15 civilians – a result the insurgents wanted to happen.
Details of the battle and the civilian deaths were dutifully reported throughout the chain of command. The chain of command, including the top generals, all concluded this was a tragic and unfortunate consequence of urban warfare, but the Marines were justified in their actions of defending themselves.
Months later, however, a known al Qaeda propaganda operative instigated an inflammatory Time Magazine article written by reporter Tim McGirk – later proven to be false – calling the deaths of the civilians a “massacre.” The military initiated at least three investigations as a result.
Proof that this entire investigation has been a politically motivated quest for a prosecution rather than justice is supported by several details of the investigations, including:
• An admission by the Director of the Naval Criminal Investigation Service (“NCIS”) that over 65 investigators were assigned to the case, which in his opinion was the largest investigative effort in Department’s history.
• Formation of “Legal Team Charlie” composed of military lawyers reassigned from other units and reserve officers activated for the purpose of prosecuting this case—all highly unusual.
• The Secretary of Navy countermanded a determination by General James Mattis, USMC, that Colonel Stephen Davis, USMC, LtCol Chessani’s regimental commander, would receive a Non-Punitive Letter of Caution, which would not be part of his permanent record. Gen Mattis’ decision was overridden by the Navy Secretary, who ordered a Letter of Censure, a more severe punishment, which effectively ended this fine Marine officer’s career. As the consolidated convening authority in all the Haditha investigations, General Mattis’ decision, under normal circumstances, would be absolute and final.
It’s deeply troubling that the desire to appease the liberal anti-war press and politicians has led to the prosecution of innocent Marines for purely political purposes. These prosecutions will become a scandal of historic proportions unless terminated by independently minded and virtuous military judges.
An Undue Command Influence motion had already been filed on behalf of the combat Marines, and LtCol Chessani’s lawyers intend to file its own Undue Command Influence motion on his behalf. Further startling events will be revealed at that time.
Even though LtCol Chessani was not personally present at the scene of the ambush on November 19, 2005, the Marines responding were in his battalion: the Third Battalion, First Infantry Regiment – one of the most decorated battalions in our nation’s history, and the pride of the second Battle of Fallujah. Thus, LtCol Chessani is charged with “dereliction of duty” and “orders” violations. Despite his 20 years of loyal service in defense of his country, he faces a maximum punishment of three years in prison, dismissal (an officer’s equivalent of a dishonorable discharge), and the loss of his retirement benefits. Of course, his wife and six children ranging in ages from 3 months to 8 years old, made untold sacrifices as he left them to defend us on foreign shores as well.
By Richard Thompson
Richard Thompson is president and chief counsel of The Thomas More Law Center, a nonprofit organization that defends and promotes freedom of religion through education, litigation and related activities. www.thomasmore.org
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--------------------------- Follow-up Haditha Charges Against Tatum Dropped
CAMP PENDLETON – The architect of Lance Corporal Stephen B. Tatum’s successful defense in the so-called “Haditha Massacre” case said that Gen. James N. Mattis “made a mistake” when he recommended his client be sent to general court-martial six months ago.
Houston attorney Jack B. Zimmermann, a decorated, retired Marine Corps colonel and former military judge, said Gen. Mattis, should have accepted the recommendations of investigating officer Lt. Col. Paul J. Ware last summer to dismiss the charges against the 26-year old rifleman. At the time Mattis was “convening authority” in the investigation
Ware made his recommendations to dismiss the charges on Aug 23, 2007 at the conclusion of Tatum’s week long Article 32 evidentiary hearing.
Charges against the veteran Oklahoma infantryman were dismissed Friday morning “with prejudice” by Lt. Gen Samuel Helland, the convening authority and final arbiter in the notorious case. His decision means Tatum is free and clear of further prosecution in the case.
“Lance Corporal Tatum wants to make it clear to the Marine Corps – especially other Marines - and everyone else that there were no deals in this decision. I have never had a client who would have more preferred to have a trial rather than have the charges dismissed in a deal. He has believed all along he did nothing wrong and was prepared and anxious to stand trial,” Zimmermann said.
On Dec. 21, 2006, Tatum and eight other Marines were charged with war crimes. The five enlisted Marines who pulled their triggers were charged with unpremeditated murder and other serious related charges and four officers were charged with covering up their subordinate’s alleged misdeeds.
The furor that led to the charges erupted after a March 2006 Time magazine report claimed that nine survivors of Tatum’s 12-man squad slaughtered 24 innocent Iraqi civilians in retaliation for the death of one squad member and the wounding of two others in a November 19, 2005 roadside ambush at Haditha, Iraq.
The Marines belonged to 3rd Platoon, Kilo Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines – the “Thundering Third” - one of the most decorated and celebrated infantry battalions in the Marine Corps.
Helland’s decision surprised his defense team, Zimmermann said. “We were ready to go.”
Last October 19 Tatum’s most serious charges were reduced from unpremeditated murder to involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault. He faced up to 18 years in prison if convicted of all the charges.
Tatum never denied he threw a grenade and fired his weapon as he moved from room to room “clearing” two houses of presumed threats. Inside, however, were 14 civilians cowering in their bed rooms and hallways. The accused Marines testified that in the smoke filled, dimly lit interiors they were unaware of who died until their platoon commander and one of the riflemen went back to investigate.
“He did exactly as he was trained to do,” Zimmermann said. “He reacted like Marines are supposed to.”
Helland’s decision to drop all the charges against Tatum leaves one enlisted Marines and two officers still facing criminal charges in the case. Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, Tatum’s squad leader at Haditha, faces the most serious penalties. Wuterich is charged with nine counts of voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault and other related charges and could spend most of his life in prison.
The government alleges he killed at least nine people without properly obtaining positive identification. Tatum, who entered the same two buildings almost simultaneously with Wuterich, is an eyewitness to what his squad leader was doing.
Zimmermann said his client will stay in the Marine Corps voluntarily for at least six more months to ease the way for the Marine Corps to obtain his testimony if he is called to present it. Both sides of the case think Tatum will bolster their cases, a notion that makes some of the defense teams privately scoff.
Also awaiting general court-martial is 1st Lieutenant Andrew Grayson, an intelligence officer charged with destroying photographs and trying to obtain a fraudulent discharge. He was up for a Bronze Star medal for heroism when charges were brought against him.
Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, the former battalion commander, is the highest ranking officer to still face criminal penalties. His court-martial is scheduled to begin April 28, a date that is more tentative and assured, his defense has said. The career Marine infantry officer had an unblemished career before he was charged with dereliction of duty for not investigating and reporting the matter adequately and failing to obey a standing order to update a combat journal entry.
Three of Chessani’s top commanders were sanctioned administratively. Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, formerly the 2nd Marine Division Commanding General, his chief of staff Col. R. Gary Sokoloski, and Col. Stephen W. Davis, the Regimental Combat Team-2 commander, were given letters of censure by Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter. His action destroyed their careers.(emphasis added)
Winter told the officers they had “betrayed the trust” of the Marine Corps for not investigating and reporting the Haditha matter appropriately. Winter was particularly critical of the three senior Marines’ apparent reluctance to respond to multiple requests by Time magazine to reveal what happened at Haditha.
“Even when made aware of the serious allegations raised by the Time magazine journalist, your response to higher headquarters was to forward incomplete, inaccurate, and inconsistent materials provided by a subordinate unit, rather than to initiate a thorough inquiry into the incident,” Winter rebuked Col. Davis.
In response to a reporter’s recent inquiry, a spokesperson for Secretary Winter said in response to a written question that “Time magazine was mentioned as an example of an incident which garnered significant, national media interest; and yet--initially--was not thoroughly investigated. The Secretary was not giving Time magazine special consideration, nor was he suggesting that media have a specific right and/or need to know.”
The Time magazine allegations led to world-wide condemnation of the Corps by journalists, pundits and politicians opposed to the conduct and policies of the war. Their unrelenting attacks and specious accusations pressured the beleaguered Marine Corps to originally seek criminal charges for murder and cover up against the nine Marines.
Ware, in his final report as investigating officer, told Gen. Mattis that it was his belief “that a case against LCpl Tatum is too weak to pursue” and that he was “not recommending the charges go forward.”
Zimmermann said that Mattis should have listened. He said Ware is an experienced military judge that the Marine Corps imported from Hawaii to investigate the case. He heard 21 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of pages of evidence before making his recommendation. His lengthy report was a rebuke to allegations that Tatum operated outside his standing orders and Rules of Engagement when he attacked a house he believed to contained insurgents ambushers.
A spokesman for the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton said the charges against Tatum were dropped in order to “continue to pursue the truth seeking process in the Haditha incident.”
Zimmermann said that Lt Gen. Helland, who replaced Gen. Mattis November 1 after his promotion to four-star rank, made the “correct decision” to dismiss all charges against Tatum, a veteran of two combat deployments to Iraq.
Defense lawyer Neal Puckett, who represents Staff Sgt. Wuterich, said that the government’s continued insistence on prosecuting his client “speaks to the government’s desperation” in pursuing the languishing case.
Wuterich’s case is on hold while the government argues an appeal to a military judge’s decision not to compel CBS to produce out takes from a 60 Minutes newscast that Wuterich appeared on.
The government argues that it may hold evidence of Wuterich’s guilt. The government’s pursuit of Wuterich is partially based on admissions he made on the national television broadcast.
Puckett said Tatum’s exoneration will enhance his client’s case for a variety of reasons. Tatum‘s presumed testimony is key to the government’s case against Tatum’s former squad leader. Wuterich admitted he ordered Tatum and two other Marines to aggressively attack the suspected insurgent sanctuary, telling them to shoot first and worry about everything else later.
The government says the Rules of Engagement in force at Haditha prohibited unprovoked attacks on civilians.
The battalion’s own training experience suggested otherwise, the evidence in Tatum’s case revealed. The Marines were taught to suppress enemy fire with overwhelming force including tossing a grenade or two into a room before entering it while blasting away with their rifles. The Marines repeated the exercises for three months in an almost daily regimen of combat training before being deployed to Iraq in the fall of 2005, the evidence revealed.
The Marine’s attack on the two houses where 14 civilians died in a maelstrom of fire occurred so fast that machine gunner Lance Cpl Justin Sharratt, rushing six hundred meters to reinforce their attack, testified he reached their location after their attack was over.
“When a junior enlisted Marine finds himself in a firefight and knows his actions are going to be interpreted somewhere else in an air conditioned office six months later it could get him killed,” Zimmermann said. “I wish that he and his family had not been put through this and the decision had been made last summer.”
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Response from Marty D.:
Its not the gun - an inanimate object that has no will of its own. It's the amoral, anti-authoritarian, anti-faith, 'balkanized' anti-American culture that produces people willing to resort to unspeakable violence to establish domination and settle grievances. Without the 2nd Amendment, and re-establishing the rule of law, the whole country would (will) look like Chicago!
Chicago fights rise in teen murders -
Recent wave of violence includes 20 students killed since September
The Associated Press
March. 27, 2008
CHICAGO - The morning trip to school for dozens of teenagers here had all the normal signs: bleary eyes, oversized jackets zipped up against the chill, the seemingly endless wait for the bus.
But there was tension underlying the routine: The trip was under the watchful eyes of parents, an alderman, a principal and police.
The escort to and from Crane Tech High School this week, dubbed "Operation Safe Passage" is just one of the ways Chicago is dealing with a wave of violence that has stunned the city.
Since September, 20 Chicago Public Schools students have been killed, 18 by gunfire. Last school year, 24 of the more than 30 students killed were shot to death, compared with between 10 and 15 fatal shootings in the years before.
"The loss of life that we've seen among our young people is ... devastating," said school district spokesman Michael Vaughn. "This gun nonsense has reached a crisis level."
Dramatic increase
The number of violent deaths involving students in the nation's third-largest school district has increased so dramatically in the last two years that police are increasing school patrols and soon will be the first department in the country with live access to thousands of security cameras mounted outside — and inside — schools.
Chicago Public Schools is one of the only urban districts to track how many students are killed by guns — though none of the slayings have occurred on school property.
Nationally, homicide was the second-leading cause of death for young people ages 10 to 24 in 2004, and of those killed, 81 percent were killed with a firearm, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Chicago's overall homicide rate, like that in other major cities, dropped to a record low in 2007. But the murders that do occur are hitting young people hard, frightening students and parents, and prompting everyone from Mayor Richard M. Daley to activists to call for action.
Operation Safe Passage began this week. It provides escorts for students from the ABLA Homes public housing development to Crane Tech High School. Many of the 120 students from the housing project have not been to school since March 7 because they fear retaliation after a reputed gang member from ABLA shot and killed another student who lived on a rival gang's turf.
Three of Michelle Johnson's children attend Crane, and she says the escorts help — somewhat.
"For right now, I feel it's kinda safe," said Johnson, who added that she is willing to take her children to school every day until the situation improves.
Police to have access to school cameras
Daley recently announced a new resource for police — access to the 4,500 security cameras mounted inside and outside about 200 elementary and high schools.
The real-time video from the cameras once was available only to school officials, but now police and the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications will be able to see it as well. Daley said indoor cameras will be used only in emergencies.
Daley also has rolled back the curfew times for minors by half an hour, to 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on weekends.
Many observers insist the issue isn't a school problem but a symptom of overall violence in the city. In fact, students in some of the city's most violent neighborhoods say school — with metal detectors, private security guards and uniformed police officers — is the one place they feel safe.
Antigun activists and officials say the violence highlights a dangerous reality: Arguments among young people that used to be resolved with fistfights now end in gunfire.
"They're just shooting out of rage," said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, an outspoken priest on the city's South Side whose church is putting up a $2,500 reward for information each time a CPS student is killed. The Chicago Board of Education has promised to match with its own $2,500 reward.
Tio Hardiman, executive director of the anti-violence group CeaseFire, said many young people consider a firearm their only protection. The way to reduce violence is to stop petty arguments among young people before they escalate into gunfire, Hardiman said.
"A lot of young guys in the community, first of all, would rather get caught with a gun than without a gun," Hardiman said. "There's a need a dire need for more conflict resolution training."
Can't Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club
New York Times
Raise your hand if you don't quite understand this whole financial crisis.
It has been going on for seven months now, and many people probably feel as if they should understand it. But they don't, not really. The part about the housing crash seems simple enough. With banks whispering sweet encouragement, people bought homes they couldn't afford, and now they are falling behind on their mortgages.
But the overwhelming majority of homeowners are doing just fine. So how is it that a mess concentrated in one part of the mortgage business -- subprime loans -- has frozen the credit markets, sent stock markets gyrating, caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, left the economy on the brink of the worst recession in a generation and forced the Federal Reserve to take its boldest action since the Depression?
I'm here to urge you not to feel sheepish. This may not be entirely comforting, but your confusion is shared by many people who are in the middle of the crisis.
''We're exposing parts of the capital markets that most of us had never heard of,'' Ethan Harris, a top Lehman Brothers economist, said last week. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and current Citigroup executive, has said that he hadn't heard of ''liquidity puts,'' an obscure kind of financial contract, until they started causing big problems for Citigroup.
I spent a good part of the last few days calling people on Wall Street and in the government to ask one question, ''Can you try to explain this to me?'' When they finished, I often had a highly sophisticated follow-up question: ''Can you try again?''
I emerged thinking that all the uncertainty has created a panic that is partly unfounded. That said, the crisis isn't close to ending, either. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, won't be able to wave a magic wand and make everything better, no matter how many more times he cuts rates. As Mr. Bernanke himself has suggested, the only thing that will end the crisis is the end of the housing bust.
So let's go back to the beginning of the boom.
It really started in 1998, when large numbers of people decided that real estate, which still hadn't recovered from the early 1990s slump, had become a bargain. At the same time, Wall Street was making it easier for buyers to get loans. It was transforming the mortgage business from a local one, centered around banks, to a global one, in which investors from almost anywhere could pool money to lend.
The new competition brought down mortgage fees and spurred some useful innovation. Why, after all, should someone who knows that she's going to move after just a few years have no choice but to take out a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage?
As is often the case with innovations, though, there was soon too much of a good thing. Those same global investors, flush with cash from Asia's boom or rising oil prices, demanded good returns. Wall Street had an answer: subprime mortgages.
Because these loans go to people stretching to afford a house, they come with higher interest rates -- even if they're disguised by low initial rates -- and thus higher returns. The mortgages were then sliced into pieces and bundled into investments, often known as collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.'s (a term that appeared in this newspaper only three times before 2005, but almost every week since last summer). Once bundled, different types of mortgages could be sold to different groups of investors.
Investors then goosed their returns through leverage, the oldest strategy around. They made $100 million bets with only $1 million of their own money and $99 million in debt. If the value of the investment rose to just $101 million, the investors would double their money. Home buyers did the same thing, by putting little money down on new houses, notes Mark Zandi of Moody'sEconomy.com. The Fed under Alan Greenspan helped make it all possible, sharply reducing interest rates, to prevent a double-dip recession after the technology bust of 2000, and then keeping them low for several years.
All these investments, of course, were highly risky. Higher returns almost always come with greater risk. But people -- by ''people,'' I'm referring here to Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Bernanke, the top executives of almost every Wall Street firm and a majority of American homeowners -- decided that the usual rules didn't apply because home prices nationwide had never fallen before. Based on that idea, prices rose ever higher -- so high, says Robert Barbera of ITG, an investment firm, that they were destined to fall. It was a self-defeating prophecy.
And it largely explains why the mortgage mess has had such ripple effects. The American home seemed like such a sure bet that a huge portion of the global financial system ended up owning a piece of it. Last summer, many policy makers were hoping that the crisis wouldn't spread to traditional banks, like Citibank, because they had sold off the underlying mortgages to investors. But it turned out that many banks had also sold complex insurance policies on the mortgage debt. That left them on the hook when homeowners who had taken out a wishful-thinking mortgage could no longer get out of it by flipping their house for a profit.
Many of these bets were not huge, but were so highly leveraged that any losses became magnified. If that $100 million investment I described above were to lose just $1 million of its value, the investor who put up only $1 million would lose everything. That's why a hedge fund associated with the prestigious Carlyle Group collapsed last week.
''If anything goes awry, these dominos fall very fast,'' said Charles R. Morris, a former banker who tells the story of the crisis in a new book, ''The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.''
This toxic combination -- the ubiquity of bad investments and their potential to mushroom -- has shocked Wall Street into a state of deep conservatism. The soundness of any investment firm depends largely on other firms having confidence that it has real assets standing behind its bets. So firms are now hoarding cash instead of lending it, until they understand how bad the housing crash will become and how exposed to it they are. Any institution that seems to have a high-risk portfolio, regardless of whether it has enough assets to support the portfolio, faces the double whammy of investors demanding their money back and lenders shutting the door in their face. Goodbye, Bear Stearns.
The conservatism has gone so far that it's affecting many solid would-be borrowers, which, in turn, is hurting the broader economy and aggravating Wall Streets fears. A recession could cause credit card loans and other forms of debt, some of which were also based on overexuberance, to start going bad as well.
Many economists, on the right and the left, now argue that the only solution is for the federal government to step in and buy some of the unwanted debt, as the Fed began doing last weekend. This is called a bailout, and there is no doubt that giving a handout to Wall Street lenders or foolish home buyers -- as opposed to, say, laid-off factory workers -- is deeply distasteful. At this point, though, the alternative may be worse.
Bubbles lead to busts. Busts lead to panics. And panics can lead to long, deep economic downturns, which is why the Fed has been taking unprecedented actions to restore confidence.
''You say, my goodness, how could subprime mortgage loans take out the whole global financial system?'' Mr. Zandi said. ''That's how.''
March 19, 2008, Wednesday Late Edition - Final
Hat tip: Dave Cogburn
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Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
In the annals of judicial imperialism, we have arrived at a strange new chapter. A California court ruled this month that parents cannot "home school" their children without government certification. No teaching credential, no teaching. Parents "do not have a constitutional right to home school their children," wrote California appellate Justice Walter Croskey.
The 166,000 families in the state that now choose to educate their children at home must be stunned. But at least one political lobby likes the ruling. "We're happy," the California Teachers Association's Lloyd Porter told the San Francisco Chronicle. He says the union believes all students should be taught only by "credentialed" teachers, who will in due course belong to unions.
California law requires children between six and 18 to attend a full-time day school. Failure to comply means falling afoul of the state's truancy laws, which say kids can't play hooky without an excuse. But kids who are taught at home are less likely to be truants. Their parents choose to spend their time teaching English, math and science precisely because they don't think the public schools do a good enough job.
The case was initiated by the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services after a home-schooled child reportedly complained of physical abuse by his father. A lawyer assigned to two of the family's eight children invoked the truancy law to get the children enrolled in a public school and away from their parents. So a single case of parental abuse is being used to promote the registration of all parents who crack a book for their kids. If this strikes some readers as a tad East German, we know how you feel.
That so many families turn to home schooling is a market solution to a market failure -- namely the dismal performance of the local education monopoly. According to the Home School Legal Defense Association, the majority of states have low to moderate levels of regulation for home schools, an environment that has allowed the option to flourish, especially in the South and Western U.S. Between 1999 and 2003, the rate of home-schooling increased by 29%.
For some parents, the motive for home schooling is religious; others want to protect their kids from gangs and drugs. But the most-cited reason is to ensure a good education. Home-schooled students are routinely high performers on standardized academic tests, beating their public school peers on average by as much as 30 percentile points, regardless of subject. They perform well on tests like the SAT -- and colleges actively recruit them both for their high scores and the diversity they bring to campus.
In 1994, a federal attempt to require certification of parent-teachers went down in flames as hundreds of thousands of calls lit up phone banks on Capitol Hill. The movement has since only grown larger and better organized, now conservatively estimated at well over a million nationwide. But what they can't accomplish legislatively, unions are now trying to achieve by diktat from the courts.
If John McCain wants an issue to endear him to cultural conservatives, this would be it. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama rarely stray from the preferences of the teachers unions, but we'd like to know whether they really favor the certification of parents who dare to believe they know best how to teach their children.
Wall Street Journal Online
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120614130694756089.html
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Madam Speaker, allow me, first, to express my sincere thanks to you personally for having planned a debate on Islam on the very day of my birthday. I could not have wished for a nicer present! Madam Speaker, approximately 1400 years ago war was declared on us by an ideology of hate and violence which arose at the time and was proclaimed by a barbarian who called himself the Prophet Mohammed. I am referring to Islam.
Madam Speaker, let me start with the foundation of the Islamic faith, the Koran. The Koran's core theme is about the duty of all Muslims to fight non-Muslims; an Islamic Mein Kampf, in which fight means war, jihad. The Koran is above all a book of war "“ a call to butcher non-Muslims (2:191, 3:141, 4:91, 5:3), to roast them (4:56, 69:30-69:32), and to cause bloodbaths amongst them (47:4). Jews are compared to monkeys and pigs (2:65, 5:60, 7:166), while people who believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God must according to the Koran be fought (9:30).
Madam Speaker, the West has no problems with Jews or Christians, but it does have problems with Islam. It is still possible, even today, for Muslims to view the Koran, which they regard as valid for all time, as a licence to kill. And that is exactly what happens. The Koran is worded in such a way that its instructions are addressed to Muslims for eternity, which includes today's Muslims. This in contrast to texts in the Bible, which is formulated as a number of historical narratives, placing events in a distant past. Let us remind ourselves that it was Muslims, not Jews or Christians, who committed the catastrophic terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid and London; and that it was no coincidence that Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered by a Muslim, Mohammed Bouyeri.
Madam Speaker, I acknowledge that there are people who call themselves Muslims and who respect our laws. My party, the Freedom Party, has nothing against such people, of course. However, the Koran does have something against them. For it is stated in the Koran in Sura 2, verse 85, that those believers who do not believe in everything the Koran states will be humiliated and receive the severest punishment; which means that they will roast in Hell. In other words, people who call themselves Muslims but who do not believe, for example, in Sura 9, verse 30, which states that Jews and Christians must be fought, or, for example, in Sura 5, verse 38, which states that the hand of a thief must be cut off, such people will be humiliated and roast in Hell. Note that it is not me who is making this up.
All this can be found in the Koran. The Koran also states that Muslims who believe in only part of the Koran are in fact apostates, and we know what has to happen to apostates. They have to be killed.
Madam Speaker, the Koran is a book that incites to violence. I remind the House that the distribution of such texts is unlawful according to Article 132 of our Penal Code. In addition, the Koran incites to hatred and calls for murder and mayhem. The distribution of such texts is made punishable by Article 137(e). The Koran is therefore a highly dangerous book; a book which is completely against our legal order and our democratic institutions. In this light, it is an absolute necessity that the Koran be banned for the defence and reinforcement of our civilisation and our constitutional state. I shall propose a second-reading motion to that effect.
Madam Speaker, there is no such thing as "moderate Islam".... As Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said the other day, and I quote, "There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it".... Islam is in pursuit of dominance. It wishes to exact its imperialist agenda by force on a worldwide scale (8:39). This is clear from European history. Fortunately, the first Islamic invasion of Europe was stopped at Poitiers in 732; the second in Vienna in 1683. Madam Speaker, let us ensure that the third Islamic invasion, which is currently in full spate, will be stopped too in spite of its insidious nature and notwithstanding the fact that, in contrast to the 8th and 17th centuries, it has no need for an Islamic army because the scared "dhimmis" in the West, also those in Dutch politics, have left their doors wide open to Islam and Muslims.
Apart from conquest, Madam Speaker, Islam is also bent on installing a totally different form of law and order, namely Sharia law. This makes Islam, apart from a religion for hundreds of millions of Muslims also, and in particular, a political ideology (with political/constitutional/Islamic basic values, etc). Islam is an ideology without any respect for others; not for Christians, not for Jews, not for non-believers and not for apostates. Islam aims to dominate, subject, kill and wage war.
Madam Speaker, the Islamic incursion must be stopped. Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe. If we do not stop Islamification now, Eurabia and Netherabia will just be a matter of time. One century ago, there were approximately 50 Muslims in the Netherlands. Today, there are about 1 million Muslims in this country. Where will it end? We are heading for the end of European and Dutch civilisation as we know it. Where is our Prime Minister in all this? In reply to my questions in the House he said, without batting an eyelid, that there is no question of our country being Islamified. Now, this reply constituted a historical error as soon as it was uttered. Very many Dutch citizens, Madam Speaker, experience the presence of Islam around them. And I can report that they have had enough of burkas, headscarves, the ritual slaughter of animals, so-called honour revenge, blaring minarets, female circumcision, hymen restoration operations, abuse of homosexuals, Turkish and Arabic on the buses and trains as well as on town hall leaflets, halal meat at grocery shops and department stores, Sharia exams, the Finance Minister's Sharia mortgages, and the enormous overrepresentation of Muslims in the area of crime, including Moroccan street terrorists.
In spite of all this, Madam Speaker, there is hope. Fortunately. The majority of Dutch citizens have become fully aware of the danger, and regard Islam as a threat to our culture. My party, the Freedom Party, takes those citizens seriously and comes to their defence.
Many Dutch citizens are fed up to the back teeth and yearn for action. However, their representatives in The Hague are doing precisely nothing. They are held back by fear, political correctness or simply electoral motives. This is particularly clear in the case of PvdA, the Dutch Labour Party, which is afraid of losing Muslim voters. The Prime Minister said in Indonesia the other day that Islam does not pose any danger. Minister Donner believes that Sharia law should be capable of being introduced in the Netherlands if the majority want it. Minister Vogelaar babbles about the future Netherlands as a country with a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, and that she aims to help Islam take root in Dutch society. In saying this, the Minister shows that she has obviously gone stark raving mad. She is betraying Dutch culture and insulting Dutch citizens.
Madam Speaker, my party, the Freedom Party, demands that Minister Vogelaar retract her statement. If the Minister fails to do so, the Freedom Party parliamentary group will withdraw its support for her. No Islamic tradition must ever be established in the Netherlands: not now and also not in a few centuries' time.
Madam Speaker, let me briefly touch on the government's response to the WRR [Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy] report. On page 12 of its response, the government states that Islam is not contrary to democracy or human rights. All I can say to that is that things can't get much more idiotic than this.
Madam Speaker, it is a few minutes to twelve. If we go on like this, Islam will herald the end of our Western civilisation as well as Dutch culture.
I would like to round off my first-reading contribution with a personal appeal to the Prime Minister on behalf of a great many Dutch citizens: stop the Islamification of the Netherlands!
Mr Balkenende, a historic task rests on your shoulders. Be courageous. Do what many Dutch citizens are screaming out for. Do what the country needs. Stop all immigration from Muslim countries, ban all building of new mosques, close all Islamic schools, ban burkas and the Koran. Expel all criminal Muslims from the country, including those Moroccan street terrorists that drive people mad. Accept your responsibility! Stop Islamification!
Enough is enough, Mr Balkenende. Enough is enough.
Geert Wilders Speaks: Anti-Koran Film (Part 2 of 2)
Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).
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