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February 7, 2023

Obama-care all grown up: UK NHS in Crisis, WSJ 2/7/23

Filed under: Econonics, finance, Illegal Aliens, Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 4:39 pm

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The U.K.’s Government-Run Healthcare Service Is in Crisis

The NHS is struggling under the effects of budget cuts, Covid delays and an aging population

An ambulance crew moves a patient outside the Royal London Hospital in London.

An ambulance crew moves a patient outside the Royal London Hospital in London. TOLGA AKMEN/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

By David LuhnowFollow and Max ColchesterFollow

Feb. 6, 2023 10:35 am ETSAVESHARETEXT

1105 RESPONSES

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For more than a decade, the British government has run its National Health Service, the world’s largest government-run healthcare system, on a tight budget. The NHS prided itself on being one of the leanest healthcare systems in the developed world, spending less per head on average than its large European neighbors—and far less than the U.S.

Now the state-funded service is falling apart. People who suffer heart attacks or strokes wait more than 1½ hours on average for an ambulance. Hospitals are so full they are turning patients away. A record 7.1 million people in England—more than one in 10 people—are stuck on waiting lists for nonemergency hospital treatment like hip replacements. The NHS on Monday faced the biggest strike in its history, with thousands of paramedics and nurses walking out over pay.

The NHS’s woes are an extreme example of issues playing out across the developed world. Healthcare systems, hit hard by Covid, are under pressure as people live longer and have a wider range of treatment options. Aging populations mean costs will keep growing. The U.K.’s experience is a warning of what happens when supply in healthcare provision can’t keep up with demand.

“The healthcare system in the U.K. is facing a crisis like no other I have seen in my career,” said Nigel Edwards, the retiring chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, a healthcare think tank, and former chief executive for the NHS. “The U.K. has mistaken cheapness for efficiency in its approach to health, and it’s coming home to roost.”

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The NHS has lost thousands of hospital beds in the past decade in its drive for efficiency. Covid delayed treatments for patients, resulting in a vast waiting list. Hospitals in England were already at 98% capacity in December when the brutal flu season began to take hold. The mass of sick patients gummed up the system to devastating effect.

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An NHS hospital ward in London, Jan. 18.PHOTO: JEFF MOORE/PA WIRE/ZUMA PRESS

Delays in treating people are causing the premature deaths of 300 to 500 people a week, according to estimates from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, a professional association in London. One in five British people were waiting for a medical appointment or treatment by the NHS in December, according to the U.K. Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The NHS said those excess death figures are likely too high but acknowledged delays are costing lives. In late January, the U.K. government announced funding to provide more ambulances, call handlers and 1,000 extra hospital beds to relieve the strain on the health system.

Fixing the service will take time, said NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard. The NHS said that over the next year it aims to cut the average time a heart attack sufferer waits for an ambulance to 30 minutes.

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“No one should be waiting longer than necessary for treatment,” said Will Quince, a minister of state for health, adding that the government is spending up to $17 billion over the next two years to address issues facing the NHS and social care services.

Just before 5 p.m. on Nov. 18, the family of Martin Clark called 999, the U.K. equivalent of 911, after the 68-year-old father of five began having chest pains. After waiting half an hour, the family said, they called again and pleaded for an ambulance, saying Mr. Clark’s condition was getting worse. In another call 15 minutes later, they told the dispatcher they were going to drive him to hospital themselves, according to the family, even though the dispatcher encouraged them to wait for the paramedics.

Twenty minutes after the family had left for the hospital, the dispatcher left a voice mail to say the service still didn’t have an ambulance to send. Mr. Clark died shortly after arriving at the hospital.

About a week later, 5-year-old Yusuf Mahmud Nazir died from what began as a throat infection. His family said they had taken the boy, who was having trouble breathing, to the emergency room at their local hospital in Rotherham, which gave him some antibiotic pills after a six-hour wait and sent him home. The family said it pleaded with the hospital a few days later to let Yusuf be admitted and given further tests, but were told the hospital was full.

By the time the family got Yusuf by ambulance to another hospital, he had severe pneumonia. He died days later from organ failure and cardiac arrest.

“They killed Yusuf—it’s as simple as that,” said Yusuf’s uncle, Zaheer Ahmed, who accompanied the boy’s family at the hospital. “A 5-year-old boy has died of tonsillitis in a rich, industrialized country. It shows the entire system has serious issues.”

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Zaheer Ahmed holds his phone showing a photo of his nephew Yusuf Mahmud Nazir.PHOTO: MARY TURNER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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Mr. Ahmed pleaded with the hospital to admit Yusuf.PHOTO: MARY TURNER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Rotherham hospital said in a public statement it had met with the family, apologized and launched an independent investigation into what happened. It declined to comment further.

Almost every day, media reports allege new horror stories: An 83-year-old woman in Leicester with a suspected stroke waited more than 18 hours in a makeshift tent outside a hospital emergency room. A 90-year-old woman with suspected sepsis waited three days. A man in Wales with diabetes lost his toe after it turned blue and then black after he sat waiting for treatment for three days.

The NHS is Europe’s biggest employer, with around 1.2 million staffers, and has a budget this year of about $188.6 billion, funded through taxes. It now has 2.9 doctors per 1,000 people, compared with a European average of 3.7. The U.S. has slightly less, at about 2.6 doctors per 1,000, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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Aging populations will add to the demand. The elderly consume between three and five times the amount of healthcare compared with younger people, according to an estimate by the OECD. The number of people in the U.K. aged 85 and above is expected to double to more than 3 million by 2041. The U.K.’s current population is around 67 million.

Until 2010, governments of all political stripes kept funding for the NHS growing faster than both population growth and inflation—with annual increases from 2% to nearly 6% per capita, adjusted for inflation. But from 2010 to 2020, per capita, inflation-adjusted funding declined very slightly.

The Conservative government has sharply increased funds to the NHS since 2020, but most of the money has gone toward the pandemic, including for vaccines. Inflation is now eating away at about half the additional yearly funding. Overall, the inflation-adjusted increase in funding amounts to a 2.9% yearly increase, still below the historic average of 3.4%, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank in London.

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Striking nurses picketed outside University College Hospital in London, Feb. 6.PHOTO: ISABEL INFANTES/SPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Healthcare expenditures, both public and private, amounted to around 11.9% of the U.K.’s gross domestic product in 2021, according to the ONS. That compares with 18.3% of GDP in the U.S. that year, according to government data.

For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, Britain’s ill health is acting as a brake on economic growth, said Andy Haldane, a former chief economist at the Bank of England. The growing number of sick people is exacerbating a productivity crisis within the British economy, he said. The number of long-term ill people in the U.K. has shot up by half a million in the past two years, to a record 2.5 million, something economists say is due in part to the NHS’s inability to quickly treat sick people.

The NHS was created after World War II to offer free healthcare to a war-hit population. Every hospital was effectively nationalized and put under government direction. It was a more sweeping overhaul than in any European country. Some countries, such as Denmark, adopted a similar system, while others have varying degrees of private care and publicly funded insurance.

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The NHS has long been a point of pride for many Britons, who have generally received quality care and can simply walk out of hospital without paying a bill. Yet seven in 10 now describe the NHS service as bad, compared with 21% who describe it as good, according to a YouGov poll.

People can pay to access private healthcare in the U.K., and according to the ONS, one in eight adults in Britain said they paid for private healthcare in the past year because NHS waiting lists were too long. Several private healthcare providers have reported a jump in demand.

Still, the overwhelming majority continue to support the NHS’s basic model of a government-run system. Just 3% said they wanted the system totally privatized, according to the YouGov poll.

The government started constraining the NHS’s budget in 2010, at the same time it launched an effort to make the system more efficient, such as adding more internal competition between different parts of the NHS for government funds.

These changes proved a distraction for management, former and current officials say. As part of the drive for efficiency, NHS managers were pressured to keep bed vacancies low. Recruiting and training was given less priority, and salaries for doctors and nurses steadily fell behind inflation.

When the pandemic hit in early 2020, the NHS’s centralized system helped it weather the crisis. The service delayed non-urgent treatments, and successfully rolled out a mass vaccination program.

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From mid-2021 to mid-2022, more than 34,000 nurses left their role in the NHS.PHOTO: VICTORIA JONES/ZUMA PRESS

The ripple effects are being felt now. By December, a total of 401,537 people in England were waiting more than a year for hospital treatment. The total was 1,613 just before the pandemic.

Struggles in the U.K.’s elderly care system, which has major staff shortages and is funded separately from the NHS, has also meant that many patients who would normally be looked after at home or in a retirement home instead languished in hospital wards.

In December, an average of 13,439 beds a day in England out of the roughly 100,000 available were taken up by elderly patients medically fit for discharge—up almost a third from the previous year, according to the NHS.

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The lack of space at hospitals this winter, when the flu began to take hold, had a cascading effect. Ambulances began to form lines outside of hospitals, waiting to discharge patients because of a lack of free beds. That delayed the time it took for ambulances to attend to other people in need.

Patients in England admitted to hospital and waiting for a bed

More than 4 hours

More than 12 hours

200 thousand patients

150

100

50

0

2011

’15

’20

Source: National Health Service
Rosie Ettenheim/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

By this winter, half of all patients in an emergency ward waited four hours or more to be seen by a doctor, and a further four hours on average to get a bed, according to NHS data.

A study of more than 5 million patients published in early 2022 by the U.K.’s top medical journal, the BMJ, found that for every 82 people forced to wait beyond four hours for emergency care, one additional person died who otherwise would not have. The longer the wait, the worse the outcomes.

“Every day, I wake up thinking, how much harm is going to occur to patients that we are responsible for,” said Simon Walsh, head of emergency-room services at a London hospital. “It’s not if harm is going to occur, it’s how much.”

The stress of the pandemic and funding squeeze is exacerbating a staffing crisis in the U.K. As of September last year, there were 133,000 staff vacancies in the NHS, compared with 83,000 before the pandemic, according to government data.

The average fully qualified family doctor in England is now responsible for 2,300 patients on average, compared with 2,100 in 2018, according to government statistics. Average pay has fallen by more than a third since 2008, adjusted for inflation, according to the British Medical Association, a union for doctors. The number of doctors who are retiring early has tripled in the past 13 years.

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While the overall numbers of nurses have remained stable, turnover has grown. From mid-2021 to mid-2022, more than 34,000 nurses left their role in the NHS, an increase of 25% from the previous year, according to the King’s Fund, a healthcare think tank.

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Rotherham Hospital, where Yusuf initially went for a throat infection.PHOTO: MARY TURNER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Demands for increases in spending are coming up against economic pressures. The Bank of England projects the U.K.’s economy will shrink this year, potentially lowering tax revenues. And as changes in demographics and medical technology continue to weigh on the NHS, ever-higher funding risks crowding out state spending in other areas, such as education and infrastructure.

Money alone may not solve the problem, some in the industry warn. In Wales, the regional government has for most years since 2000 spent more money per capita than any region in the U.K. Yet nearly every indicator from waiting times to health outcomes are still worse. One explanation: Wales is both poorer and has the oldest population in the U.K.

Focus is turning to whether the system needs to be revamped. In Scotland, which runs its own NHS, officials have discussed ideas including further rationing of care or having wealthier residents pay for care in order to fund free care for the rest—an option that officials say was discarded.

One former U.K. health secretary recently said patients should pay to see a doctor. The idea was quickly dismissed by the government.

Just over a year ago, Akshay Patel, an IT professional in northern England, made five calls to 999 when his mother, Bina Patel, developed breathing problems. Initially the call handler told him an ambulance would be there soon, Mr. Patel said. His mother’s health quickly worsened and she became too sick to be loaded into a car. He watched his distressed 56-year-old mother gradually go pale and die. The paramedics arrived after an hour and were unable to resuscitate her. The local hospital was a 2-minute drive away.

“We always believe that the NHS exists for us when we’re in need,” said Mr. Patel. “But personally if I had to call an ambulance. I wouldn’t. I don’t trust them. I can’t.”

Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com and Max Colchester at max.colchester@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of the graphic on patients in England admitted to the hospital and waiting for a bed incorrectly added the numbers of those who waited more than 12 hours to the portion of those who waited more than four hours.

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Appeared in the February 7, 2023, print edition as ‘U.K.’s Healthcare Crisis Sounds An Alarm for Aging Countries’.SHOW CONVERSATION (1105)

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September 29, 2021

Fortune Favors the Bold, by Briton Ryle

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Business, Econonics, Political Commentary, Politicians, US Constitution — justplainbill @ 5:21 pm
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Rich and IncompetentBriton Ryle PhotoBy Briton Ryle
Written Sep 29, 2021I guess “histrionics” is a good way to describe what’s been going on in Congress the last few days. Wrangling over raising the debt limit to pay for THEIR spending, calling the Fed chief a “dangerous man”…You gotta love how these shameless senators — who are mostly millionaires — get on their soapboxes and pretend that massive debt load is somebody else’s fault. It’s truly the theater of the absurd. As for Chairman Powell, I’m not sure any senator should be calling him dangerous without taking a good long look in the mirror first. The way I see it, the hyperdrive to make quarterly profit numbers that really got cooking in the 1980s (thanks a lot, Jack Welch) drove corporations to gut their pension plans and now all of our retirements are sitting in the stock market. So if Captain Powell tries to keep a little wind in that sail, well, that’s just fine by me. At least he’s trying. Perhaps the good senator would like to explain to all of us where our Social Security money went…Of course, Powell isn’t getting off the hook so easily. He just had two of his governors quit cuz I guess somebody leaked their brokerage statements that detail their trading activity. Very frequent, very large and, huh, whaddya know, very profitable.It’s almost as if knowing what the Fed is going to do ahead of time could be useful information. Like maybe in March of 2020, when the pandemic hit and the stock market plunged faster than it ever had before. I always wondered who was stepping in to buy that freakin dip…Nancy Pelosi’s $100 MILLION SecretDid you know that between 2008 and 2018, Nancy Pelosi made nearly $100 million?But not from her congressional salary… Think secret investments instead.In fact, U.S. politicians from across the aisle have been using this little-known investment secret to build generational wealth for decades.We’re talking about a former American vice president who has a $200 million fortune largely thanks to this investment secret…A U.S. senator who’s made a $250 million fortune…And let’s not forget the American governor with a net worth of $3.5 billion…This investment secret is so powerful that former U.S. politicians use it regardless of party lines and fought for decades to keep it “off-limits” to investors like you. But for the first time in almost 80 years, you too can make money like an ex-president.Our in-house private investment guru, Jason Williams, has all the tools for you to get started with as little as $100.Click here for full details.When an Insider Isn’t an “Insider” I mean, we all knew there was going to be an opportunity to pick up stocks on the cheap. Check the Wealth Daily archives and you’ll find plenty of articles saying that there would be a great opportunity to buy when there was blood in the streets…And there were plenty of suggestions about which stocks would offer the most upside when the market did indeed turn higher…It was even reasonable to expect that there would be action from Powell and his Fed cronies at some point. But it was the “when” that was difficult to nail down. At least for those of us who aren’t insiders at the Fed. You may not recall, but Powell’s first pandemic rate cut took place on March 3, 2020. That was a Tuesday. The cut was 50 basis points. And the market didn’t respond well. At all. In fact, in the two weeks after that (deliberately?) tepid response, the S&P 500 fell another thousand points, about 30%.It was March 14 when Powell pulled out the really big guns. Now, March 14, 2020, was a Sunday. Investors couldn’t respond right away. Of course, if you had some way of seeing the future, like a magic crystal ball or a seat at the Fed table, you could’ve been ready. This New Battery Could Dethrone TeslaA brand-new type of battery is about to flood the markets and dethrone Tesla forever. This battery is up to 10 times more powerful than Tesla’s famed lithium-ion battery and is absolutely tiny — roughly the size of a drop of water. This is a rare second chance to take part in a world-shifting innovation. Click here to see the details.“Let’s Have Drinks at the Club”I know, the market didn’t bottom for another week after Powell cut rates to zero. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if you’re an insider at the Fed and make investment decisions based on information that only you and a handful of others have, that constitutes insider trading.But of course, for that to be a law, Congress would have to make it a law. And then Congress would have to abide by that law. And then they’d have to stop trading based on information that hadn’t been made public yet or perhaps face some consequences that you can bet your behind would be a lot milder than anything you or I would face. And then it would suddenly get harder for those in Congress to become millionaires.What a travesty that would be! The Founding Fathers would be rolling over in their graves if elected officials suddenly had to actually serve the country instead of doing nothing and getting rich in the process, as Jefferson and his buddies clearly intended. So two Fed governors quit their jobs and promised to sell their stock to prevent any investigations. You gotta admit, it takes some stones to suggest that converting your paper wealth into actual dollars is some kind of punishment.The really funny part is, you know any investigation would be led by Congress. And those senators would bitch and moan about the conflict of interest, do nothing, and then meet their Fed buddies at the club and laugh about over some 50-year-old scotch.What a country.Until next time,brit''s sigBriton Ryle

September 18, 2021

War on Currency and your savings, by Daren Fonda (Barron’s reporter)

Filed under: Econonics, Elections, finance, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Political Commentary, PRC — Tags: , , — justplainbill @ 4:50 pm

[With stablecoin, my position on blockchains has changed. The following is why everyone with more than $600 in savings should be subscribing to both The Wall Street Journal and to Barron’s. Bill]

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Inside the Coming War Over Digital Currencies—and What It Means for Your Money

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Updated September 18, 2021 / Original September 17, 2021

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The war over money is heating up: For the first time in more than a century, the dollar’s supremacy is being challenged. The rise of cryptocurrencies and “stablecoins” has spurred a rethinking of what a currency is, who regulates it, and what it means when it’s no longer controlled by a national government. The dollar itself may be getting an overhaul, transformed into a digital currency that can travel instantly around the world, holding up against Bitcoin or any other token.

The old battle lines between national currencies are being redrawn by an onslaught of crypto insurgents. These privately issued currencies are fragmenting monetary systems, banking, and payments. The landscape calls to mind the “wildcat” money era of the mid-1800s, when a scrum of banks supplied their own notes—prompting the Federal Reserve to establish a national currency. Commerce doesn’t run as efficiently without a “no questions asked” currency, and governments risk losing control over fiscal and monetary policies if multiple currencies vie for economic activity.

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What kind of upheaval will the new currencies wreak? No one knows. And there are plenty of legitimate use-cases for cryptos and applications built on top of blockchain networks. But the technology is so disruptive that it’s triggering calls for a cascade of new regulations, and it’s spurring governments around the world to think about digitizing their currencies, at least partly to remain relevant and maintain control over their economic interests. The Fed itself is expected to weigh in with its own report in coming days.

“The advent of digital currencies may allow people and businesses to get around banks,” says Thomas Hoenig, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. “If cryptos become a substitute for the dollar, they could create a separate money environment that would make monetary policies more difficult to implement.”

Cryptos are now worth $2.1 trillion, doubling in value this year alone. Bitcoin, worth nearly $900 billion, recently became legal tender in El Salvador—a controversial monetary shift in the country, but one that may pave a path for other developing nations. Capital is flooding into companies that are building everything from trading platforms to exchanges for trading new digital assets like non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Investors are also trading tokens on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, and they’re earning high yields by “staking” their tokens to network operators.

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Currencies

Cryptos and other tokens aren’t (yet) close to denting the $19.4 trillion U.S. money supply or the 50% of international trade that’s invoiced in dollars. One measure of the dollar’s hegemony—its share of central bank reserves—has been declining for 25 years, but at 60% it remains three times that of its closest rival, the euro. Vast markets of global commodities are priced in the dollar. Trillions of dollars in sovereign and commercial debt are pegged to the “risk free” rate of Treasuries.

But challenges to the dollar posed by blockchain technologies aren’t so easy to dismiss.

Cryptos, stablecoins and NFTs are becoming the native tokens of gaming and e-commerce platforms. Virtual-reality platforms are being designed to incorporate NFTs or other private currencies. As economic activity shifts to these walled gardens, banks and government-backed money could wind up on the outskirts.

The Trillion Dollar ClubCryptocurrencies have surged in value, led by Bitcoin and EthereumMarket Value of CryptosSource: CoinMarketCap

billionOct. 2019Sept.05001000150020002500$3000

Challenging the Incumbents

Big money is at stake, especially for banks and other companies that effectively charge “rents” for moving dollars around. North American banks, card networks, and nonbank “fintechs” earn huge sums for payment and credit-card services—$500 billion a year, according to data from consultancy McKinsey. That amounts to an estimated 2% toll on U.S. gross domestic product—much of it in credit card fees.

Many banks and financial companies, including Visa (ticker: V) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM), are working to integrate cryptos and stablecoins, aiming to capture fees on brokerage, custodial, and payment services. But they face technologies that threaten their revenues—and, perhaps more important, access to data.

Solana, for instance, is a relative newcomer in crypto. Developed by a former software engineer at Qualcomm, the network claims to handle 65,000 transactions per second at a cost of $0.00025 per transaction, making it far faster and cheaper than bigger rivals like Ethereum. It’s taking off for stablecoins and NFTs—new digital playthings for art, video, and music. Solana’s blockchain network is also attracting high-frequency trading firms that see it as a platform for ultrafast data feeds and trading applications for cryptos, stocks, and other securities.

BTIG analyst Mark Palmer calls Solana the “biggest blockchain breakout of 2021,” noting that it’s powering a much-anticipated “metaverse” game called Star Atlas that uses NFTs for in-game assets. “The speed that Solana’s architecture facilitates is a literal game-changer in the NFT gaming world,” he wrote in a recent report. The network crashed this past week as usage surged, pulling its token down. But its fall may also reflect some profit-taking after a 9,166% rally this year, pushing the token from $1.50 to $139, giving it a $41 billion market value.

The Battle for a Digital Dollar

One of the biggest financial-policy battles that’s shaping up in Washington is over digitizing the dollar—turning it into a token that may be issued directly to consumers by the central bank. A much-anticipated report is expected soon from the Fed, outlining its perspective on a central-bank digital currency, or CBDC. Other countries, led by China, have already launched CBDCs in pilot programs, putting pressure on the Fed to develop a rival.

A digital dollar could take many forms. The basic idea is that the central bank would issue a new digital instrument for transactions and deposits, alongside physical cash or entries on a bank ledger (essentially deposits). Payments could settle in real time, proponents argue, and fees could fall sharply since the Fed doesn’t have a profit incentive. That could be a huge win for the 6% of the population that’s “unbanked” and pays steep fees for check-cashing. People sending money overseas could also pay much lower fees for “remittances,” cutting out middlemen like Western Union (WU) and MoneyGram.

International pressure is building as China and other countries take the lead in CBDCs. “The time has passed for central banks to get going,” said Benoît Coeuré, head of innovation at the Bank for International Settlements, in a speech in September. “We should roll up our sleeves and accelerate our work on the nitty-gritty of CBDC design.”

Fed officials seem split on the idea, however, let alone the specifics. Governor Lael Brainard, who may be in line for Chairman Jerome Powell’s job next year, has indicated support for a CBDC. But governor Christopher Waller is a skeptic, describing a digital dollar as a “solution in search of a problem.” As he sees it, commercial banks and the Fed are already developing real-time settlement; stablecoins may put pressure on banking fees, he argues, and most of the unbanked don’t even want accounts, according to surveys. “The government should compete with the private sector only to address market failures…and I don’t think that CBDCs are the case for making an exception,” he said in a speech last month.

Politicians, not Fed officials, are likely to have the final word. A bill backed by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) envisions the Fed offering “digital dollar wallets.” Commercial banks would maintain the wallets, entitling owners to a share of the bank’s reserves held at the Fed. For consumers without access to branches, he sees the Postal Service turning into a digital-dollar bank.

None of this appeals to bankers, of course, who worry that the Fed could siphon away their deposits and undermine lending. “The drawbacks appear to be more pronounced than the benefits, at least in the U.S.,” says Rob Morgan, a senior vice president with the American Bankers Association.

JPMorgan is calling for “minimally invasive CBDCs,” according to a recent report by Joshua Younger, head of U.S. fixed-income strategy. CBDC deposits that are limited to $2,500 would mitigate the potential for the Fed to “cannibalize” deposits, he argues. He also says that U.S. banks are already “partially nationalized,” with 15% of their assets held as Fed reserves and Treasury securities, levels that may increase if the Fed got into commercial banking.

Taming the Crypto Wild West

Regulators aren’t sitting idly as digital currencies plant roots. Federal and state agencies are working on rules to keep tabs on the industry. Gary Gensler, the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, laid out an expansive agenda to regulate crypto tokens, trading, and lending platforms in a Senate hearing this past week. “Large parts of the field of crypto are sitting astride of—not operating within—regulatory frameworks,” he said. Automated exchanges could be in for more scrutiny, along with lending platforms like BlockFi, where investors can earn high yields on crypto deposits.

Congress sees plenty of opportunity to raise revenue by taxing crypto. Democrats in the House have included “digital assets” in their $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, including a provision that would subject cryptos to “wash sale” rules, which prevent investors from claiming a tax loss if they buy the same security within 30 days (before or after) of the sale. That measure alone could raise an estimated $16 billion over a decade.

Still, it won’t be easy for regulators to tax or police the entire industry. Crypto brokerages outside the U.S. handle much of the trading volume. Exchanges like Uniswap use protocols and “smart contracts” to process transactions, operating independently of any centralized entity like a bank or brokerage firm. “The underlying protocol is operating on its own, and users can still trade the assets, irrespective of the SEC,” says Anthony Georgiades, a crypto investor with Innovating Capital. “It’s sufficiently decentralized so that even if they try to delist the assets, they couldn’t.”

Tokenizing the WorldThe number of cryptos has jumped almost140% in the past two years.Source: CoinMarketCapNote: In Oct. 2020 CoinMarketCap removedinactive cryptocurrencies from the totals.

2020’21200030004000500060007000

Washington still can’t agree on whether to classify cryptos as a currency, security, or commodity. The Internal Revenue Service calls cryptos “property,” while the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has oversight over the crypto futures market, and a patchwork of agencies oversee the banks and exchanges.

A few states aren’t waiting around for more federal rules. BlockFi is in trouble with regulators in New Jersey and Texas, states where it could soon be illegal for residents to open an account with the company. BlockFi CEO Zac Prince says uniform federal banking rules are needed. “It’s gonna come down to federal regulators…creating a path for this type of activity to happen,” he said at a conference this past week.

Stablecoins pose perhaps the biggest regulatory conundrum. The tokens have a fixed value of $1, typically pegged to the dollar. More than $110 billion are in circulation, primarily in Tether and USD Coin. Investors use the coins as dollar substitutes to transact on exchanges; they’re also gaining traction for international payments and peer-to-peer, or P2P, transactions.

A game-changing “stablecoin” may be coming from Diem, a consortium of 26 companies, originally conceived by Facebook (FB). Diem is trying to launch a “regulatory friendly” version, says Christian Catalini, chief economist of the Diem Association. Its underlying network, backed by companies including Uber Technologies (UBER), Coinbase Global (COIN), and Spotify Technology (SPOT), will levy fees expected to be less than 0.10% per transaction, far below what banks and card networks now charge.

Diem could be a blockbuster. The token could quickly gain traction for things like Uber fares, Gucci bags on Farfetch (FTCH), or subscriptions on Spotify—cutting out payment middlemen with lower transaction fees. The network is also designed for P2P transactions, including remittances, and the underlying blockchain technology could move programmable digital assets in the future. The Diem coin itself, however, might be short-lived if a digital dollar launches. “We’ve committed to phasing out the token when there is a digital dollar,” Catalini says.

Diem has pledged to hold high-quality assets as reserves for its coins, backed at least one-to-one by cash or Treasuries. It might not have much choice: Regulators are starting to view stablecoins as a source of financial instability, and they may be close to issuing new rules on capital and reserve requirements for issuers.

The concern is that coin issuers aren’t backing their tokens with 100% cash reserves, using proxies like commercial paper, bank “repo” agreements, and other securities. That might be fine in normal market conditions, but it could be destabilizing in a crisis. Money-market funds have experienced runs that spilled over into other areas, prompting the Fed to stabilize the market, most recently in March 2020. “It’s a central problem that the Fed worries about from a stability point,” says Morgan Ricks, a law professor at Vanderbilt University and former Treasury official.

Tether, the largest stablecoin, has run into legal trouble over its reserves, agreeing last February to more disclosure in a deal with the New York attorney general. But its reserve composition remains opaque. Tether, backed by the Bitfinex exchange, holds only 3.9% of the coin’s reserves in cash and 2.9% in T-bills, according to its latest disclosure, with 65% in commercial paper. Tether says its tokens are “always 100% backed by our reserves.”

The Treasury Department recently convened a task force to develop a framework for regulating stablecoins. Some leading economists say it’s overdue. “Policy makers may view stablecoins as an up-and-coming financial innovation that does not pose any systemic risk,” wrote Yale University economist Gary Gorton in a recent paper co-authored with a Fed attorney, Jeffery Zhang. “That would be a mistake because this is precisely when policy makers need to act.”

The Dollar Won’t Go Away

The dollar won’t go down easily. It has deflected multiple threats since President Richard Nixon ended its peg to gold in 1971, turning it into a free-floating “fiat” currency. A bout of inflation in the 1970s, the rise of the Japanese yen in the 1980s, and the euro’s ascent in the early 2000s all failed to knock it down.

A common marketing case for Bitcoin, the largest crypto, is that it’s “digital gold” with a fixed supply of 21 million tokens; by design, it can’t be increased, unlike fiat currencies that may be depreciated by governments for political or economic gains. Central banks have embarked on a money-printing spree—the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned to $8.3 trillion from $1 trillion in 2008. Crypto backers argue that the dollar’s purchasing power will diminish due to inflationary forces tolerated by central banks, while cryptos will hold more of their value.

Taking a CutBanks and payment companies reap trillions of dollars for moving money aroundGlobal Payments RevenueSource: McKinsey

trillionEstimateAsia-PacificNorth AmericaEMEALatin America20102014201820192020E0.00.51.01.52.0$2.5

Yet for all the carping about currency “debasement,” or an erosion of purchasing power in the dollar, the economics are far more complex. Inflation hasn’t proved deeply problematic in North America since the early 1980s. Before the pandemic, it was so low that policy makers worried about deflation. Rising labor costs and global supply-chain disruptions pose near-term inflationary threats, but their persistence isn’t assured. The forces that have kept a lid on inflation—including aging populations in developed economies and productivity gains from technology—aren’t going away.

History is also on the dollar’s side in the sense that governments have never allowed rival currencies to usurp their authority. Technologies make the job tougher but not insurmountable, and the greater the success of currencies like Bitcoin, the more governments may try to kill it.

What It Means for Investors

What’s the impact for investors in crypto-infrastructure stocks and currencies? For now, not much. Crypto stocks and prices for digital currencies have climbed for months, despite tighter regulatory scrutiny. Capital is flooding into the industry as use-cases for cryptos, stablecoins, and decentralized-finance, or DeFi, networks expand. New rules will take months or years to be written and implemented by regulatory agencies. A digital dollar could become a partisan battle that gets bogged down in Congress.

Clarity from regulators may be welcomed, since they could open the floodgates to investment products and services, expanding the market with advisors and institutional fund managers that oversee trillions of dollars in global assets. Banks also want a level playing field to cut down on “regulatory arbitrage” that may now give pure-play crypto companies an advantage.

The crypto industry, for its part, is also becoming a lobbying force. The industry exerted its influence in August as lawmakers added tax-reporting requirements on crypto companies to the Senate infrastructure bill. The lobbying blitz failed, but the battle isn’t over—it will probably shift to regulatory agencies.

As for the dollar, the very currencies that are nipping at its heels could help preserve it. Cryptos and other tokens haven’t been tested in a crisis when investors dump anything with a whiff of risk. The diciest currencies fall the hardest during panics, and cryptos could follow precedent. “If there is a crisis, all these parallel currencies will take flight into the sovereign,” predicts Hoenig. Digital or not, the dollar will live to fight another day.

Write to Daren Fonda at daren.fonda@barrons.com

[Explains why gold, silver, and copper haven’t risen as they should. With stablecoins not being supported by trimetalicism or necessary fungible commodities, but by debt and tradable assets, the implication is a currency bubble that may lead to a bust, as all bubbles do, and market downturn, as these assets are sold to redeem stablecoins, but the attack on liberty and freedom, as shown by the Harris/Biden cabal’s pushing the IRS to have complete access to all bank accounts over $600 w/o the restrictions of the Vth Amendment or Probable Cause will lead to a Chinese style of global tyranny. Consider, we will all live in the world of Terese Xu of Beijing (WSJ Weekend 9/18-19-2021 p A8). And, of those who died incarcerated in their apartments in Wuhan to prevent the spread of the PLA-Fauci COVID bio-weapon.

Justplainbill]

November 16, 2019

TWSJ Investigative Report: Google [16/11/2019]

Filed under: Business, Econonics, Elections, Global Intel, Historical context, Media Check, Political Commentary, Racism, Religion, US Constitution — justplainbill @ 11:37 pm

  • WSJ Investigation

How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results

The internet giant uses blacklists, algorithm tweaks and an army of contractors to shape what you see

By

Kirsten Grind,

Kirsten Grind
The Wall Street Journal
Sam Schechner,

Sam Schechner
The Wall Street Journal
Robert McMillan and

Robert McMillan
The Wall Street Journal
John West

John West
The Wall Street Journal

Illustration: Martin Tognola

Every minute, an estimated 3.8 million queries are typed into Google, prompting its algorithms to spit out results for hotel rates or breast-cancer treatments or the latest news about President Trump.

They are arguably the most powerful lines of computer code in the global economy, controlling how much of the world accesses information found on the internet, and the starting point for billions of dollars of commerce.

Twenty years ago, Google founders began building a goliath on the premise that its search algorithms could do a better job combing the web for useful information than humans. Google executives have said repeatedly—in private meetings with outside groups and in congressional testimony—that the algorithms are objective and essentially autonomous, unsullied by human biases or business considerations.

The company states in a Google blog, “We do not use human curation to collect or arrange the results on a page.” It says it can’t divulge details about how the algorithms work because the company is involved in a long-running and high-stakes battle with those who want to profit by gaming the system.

But that message often clashes with what happens behind the scenes. Over time, Google has increasingly re-engineered and interfered with search results to a far greater degree than the company and its executives have acknowledged, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

Those actions often come in response to pressure from businesses, outside interest groups and governments around the world. They have increased sharply since the 2016 election and the rise of online misinformation, the Journal found.

Google’s evolving approach marks a shift from its founding philosophy of “organizing the world’s information,” to one that is far more active in deciding how that information should appear.

More than 100 interviews and the Journal’s own testing of Google’s search results reveal:

• Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones, and in at least one case made changes on behalf of a major advertiser, eBay Inc., contrary to its public position that it never takes that type of action. The company also boosts some major websites, such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

• Google engineers regularly make behind-the-scenes adjustments to other information the company is increasingly layering on top of its basic search results. These features include auto-complete suggestions, boxes called “knowledge panels” and “featured snippets,” and news results, which aren’t subject to the same company policies limiting what engineers can remove or change.

• Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law, such as those featuring child abuse or with copyright infringement, and from changes designed to demote spam sites, which attempt to game the system to appear higher in results.

• In auto-complete, the feature that predicts search terms as the user types a query, Google’s engineers have created algorithms and blacklists to weed out more-incendiary suggestions for controversial subjects, such as abortion or immigration, in effect filtering out inflammatory results on high-profile topics.

• Google employees and executives, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have disagreed on how much to intervene on search results and to what extent. Employees can push for revisions in specific search results, including on topics such as vaccinations and autism.

• To evaluate its search results, Google employs thousands of low-paid contractors whose purpose the company says is to assess the quality of the algorithms’ rankings. Even so, contractors said Google gave feedback to these workers to convey what it considered to be the correct ranking of results, and they revised their assessments accordingly, according to contractors interviewed by the Journal. The contractors’ collective evaluations are then used to adjust algorithms.

THE JOURNAL’S FINDINGS undercut one of Google’s core defenses against global regulators worried about how it wields its immense power—that the company doesn’t exert editorial control over what it shows users. Regulators’ areas of concern include anticompetitive practices, political bias and online misinformation.

Far from being autonomous computer programs oblivious to outside pressure, Google’s algorithms are subject to regular tinkering from executives and engineers who are trying to deliver relevant search results, while also pleasing a wide variety of powerful interests and driving its parent company’s more than $30 billion in annual profit. Google is now the most highly trafficked website in the world, surpassing 90% of the market share for all search engines. The market capitalization of its parent, Alphabet Inc., is more than $900 billion.

Google made more than 3,200 changes to its algorithms in 2018, up from more than 2,400 in 2017 and from about 500 in 2010, according to Google and a person familiar with the matter. Google said 15% of queries today are for words, or combinations of words, that the company has never seen before, putting more demands on engineers to make sure the algorithms deliver useful results.

A Google spokeswoman disputed the Journal’s conclusions, saying, “We do today what we have done all along, provide relevant results from the most reliable sources available.”

Lara Levin, the spokeswoman, said the company is transparent in its guidelines for evaluators and in what it designs the algorithms to do.

AS PART OF ITS EXAMINATION, the Journal tested Google’s search results over several weeks this summer and compared them with results from two competing search engines, Microsoft Corp. ’s Bing and DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused company that builds its results from syndicated feeds from other companies, including Verizon Communications Inc. ’s Yahoo search engine.

The testing showed wide discrepancies in how Google handled auto-complete queries and some of what Google calls organic search results—the list of websites that Google says are algorithmically sorted by relevance in response to a user’s query. (Read about the methodology for the Journal’s analysis.)

Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, declined to comment on specific results of the Journal’s testing. In general, she said, “Our systems aim to provide relevant results from authoritative sources,” adding that organic search results alone “are not representative of the information made accessible via search.”

The Journal tested the auto-complete feature, which Google says draws from its vast database of search information to predict what a user intends to type, as well as data such as a user’s location and search history. The testing showed the extent to which Google doesn’t offer certain suggestions compared with other search engines.

Typing “Joe Biden is” or “Donald Trump is” in auto-complete, Google offered predicted language that was more innocuous than the other search engines. Similar differences were shown for other presidential candidates tested by the Journal.

The Journal also tested several search terms in auto-complete such as “immigrants are” and “abortion is.” Google’s predicted searches were less inflammatory than those of the other engines.

See the results of the Journal’s auto-complete tests
Use the lookup tool below to select the search terms analyzed. Percentages indicate how many times each suggestion appeared during the WSJ’s testing.
   Abortion is
   Bernie Sanders is
   Boeing is
   Democratic debate
   Donald Trump is
   Elizabeth Warren is
   Guns are
   Heroin dosage
   Hobbs and Shaw
   How do I kill myself
   Ilhan Omar is
   Immigrants are
   Joe Biden is
   Kamala Harris is
   New England Patriots
   Recession
   Where do I buy heroin
google Show
  • done100%
  • how old100%
  • from99%
  • running for president79%
  • he democrat78%
  • he running for president76%
  • toast71%
  • a democrat70%
bing Show duckduckgo
  • donald trump100%
  • a sen78%
  • he done78%
  • a reclamation project71%
  • presidential64%
  • a grouper58%
  • going to cure cancer58%
  • issues58%
duckduckgo Show bing
  • an idiot100%
  • creepy100%
  • from what state100%
  • too old to run for president100%
  • a moron94%
  • a liar84%
  • a joke78%
  • done22%
  • a creep22%
View more auto-complete suggestions:

  • Donald Trump
  • Immigrants
  • Abortion
  • Democratic debate

View Interactive

Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s chief executive, said that for certain words or phrases entered into the search box, such as ones that might be offensive, DuckDuckGo has decided to block all of its auto-complete suggestions, which it licenses from Yahoo. He said that type of block wasn’t triggered in the Journal’s searches for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo operator Verizon Media said, “We are committed to delivering a safe and trustworthy search experience to our users and partners, and we work diligently to ensure that search suggestions within Yahoo Search reflect that commitment.”

Said a Microsoft spokeswoman: “We work to ensure that our search results are as relevant, balanced, and trustworthy as possible, and in general, our rule is to minimize interference with the normal algorithmic operation.”

In other areas of the Journal analysis, Google’s results in organic search and news for a number of hot-button terms and politicians’ names showed prominent representation of both conservative and liberal news outlets.

ALGORITHMS ARE effectively recipes in code form, providing step-by-step instructions for how computers should solve certain problems. They drive not just the internet, but the apps that populate phones and tablets.

Algorithms determine which friends show up in a Facebook user’s news feed, which Twitter posts are most likely to go viral and how much an Uber ride should cost during rush hour as opposed to the middle of the night. They are used by banks to screen loan applications, businesses to look for the best job applicants and insurers to determine a person’s expected lifespan.

In the beginning, their power was rarely questioned. At Google in particular, its innovative algorithms ranked web content in a way that was groundbreaking, and hugely lucrative. The company aimed to make the web useful while relying on the assumption that code alone could do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to rank information.

But bad actors are increasingly trying to manipulate search results, businesses are trying to game the system and misinformation is rampant across tech platforms. Google found itself facing a version of the pressures on Facebook, which long said it was just connecting people but has been forced to more aggressively police content on its platform.

A 2016 internal investigation at Google showed between a 10th of a percent and a quarter of a percent of search queries were returning misinformation of some kind, according to one Google executive who works on search. It was a small number percentage-wise, but given the huge volume of Google searches it would amount to nearly two billion searches a year.

By comparison, Facebook faced congressional scrutiny for Russian misinformation that was viewed by 126 million users.

Google’s Ms. Levin said the number includes not just misinformation but also a “wide range of other content defined as lowest quality.” She disputed the Journal’s estimate of the number of searches that were affected. The company doesn’t disclose metrics on Google searches.

Google assembled a small SWAT team to work on the problem that became known internally as “Project Owl.” Borrowing from the strategy used earlier to fight spam, engineers worked to emphasize factors on a page that are proxies for “authoritativeness,” effectively pushing down pages that don’t display those attributes.

Other tech platforms, including Facebook, have taken a more aggressive approach, manually removing problem content and devising rules around what it defines as misinformation. Google, for its part, said its role “indexing” content versus “hosting” content, as Facebook does, means it shouldn’t take a more active role.

One Google search executive described the problem of defining misinformation as incredibly hard, and said the company didn’t want to go down the path of figuring it out.

Around the time Google started addressing issues such as misinformation, it started fielding even more complaints, to the point where human interference became more routine, according to people familiar with the matter, putting it in the position of arbitrating some of society’s most complicated issues. Some changes to search results might be considered reasonable—boosting trusted websites like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, for example—but Google has made little disclosure about when changes are made, or why.

Businesses, lawmakers and advertisers are worried about fairness and competition within the markets where Google is a leading player, and as a result its operations are coming under heavy scrutiny.

The U.S. Justice Department earlier this year opened an antitrust probe, in which Google’s search policies and practices are expected to be areas of focus. Google executives have twice been called to testify before Congress in the past year over concerns about political bias. In the European Union, Google has been fined more than $9 billion in the past three years for anticompetitive practices, including allegedly using its search engine to favor its own products.

In response, Google has said it faces tough competition in a dynamic tech sector, and that its behavior is aimed at helping create choice for consumers, not hurting rivals. The company is currently appealing the decisions against it in the EU, and it has denied claims of political bias.

GOOGLE RARELY RELEASES detailed information on algorithm changes, and its moves have bedeviled companies and interest groups, who feel they are operating at the tech giant’s whim.

In one change hotly contested within Google, engineers opted to tilt results to favor prominent businesses over smaller ones, based on the argument that customers were more likely to get what they wanted at larger outlets. One effect of the change was a boost to Amazon’s products, even if the items had been discontinued, according to people familiar with the matter.

The issue came up repeatedly over the years at meetings in which Google search executives discuss algorithm changes. Each time, they chose not to reverse the change, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Google engineers said it is widely acknowledged within the company that search is a zero-sum game: A change that helps lift one result inevitably pushes down another, often with considerable impact on the businesses involved.

Ms. Levin said there is no guidance in Google’s rater guidelines that suggest big sites are inherently more authoritative than small sites. “It’s inaccurate to suggest we did not address issues like discontinued products appearing high up in results,” she added.

Many of the changes within Google have coincided with its gradual evolution from a company with an engineering-focused, almost academic culture into an advertising behemoth and one of the most profitable companies in the world. Advertising revenue—which includes ads on search as well as on other products such as maps and YouTube—was $116.3 billion last year.

Some very big advertisers received direct advice on how to improve their organic search results, a perk not available to businesses with no contacts at Google, according to people familiar with the matter. In some cases, that help included sending in search engineers to explain a problem, they said.

“If they have an [algorithm] update, our teams may get on the phone with them and they will go through it,” said Jeremy Cornfeldt, the chief executive of the Americas of Dentsu Inc.’s iProspect, which Mr. Cornfeldt said is one of Google’s largest advertising agency clients. He said the agency doesn’t get information Google wouldn’t share publicly. Among others it can disclose, iProspect represents Levi Strauss & Co., Alcon Inc. and Wolverine World Wide Inc.

One former executive at a Fortune 500 company that received such advice said Google frequently adjusts how it crawls the web and ranks pages to deal with specific big websites.

Google updates its index of some sites such as Facebook and Amazon more frequently, a move that helps them appear more often in search results, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“There’s this idea that the search algorithm is all neutral and goes out and combs the web and comes back and shows what it found, and that’s total BS,” the former executive said. “Google deals with special cases all the time.”

Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, said the search team’s practice is to not provide specialized guidance to website owners. She also said that faster indexing of a site isn’t a guarantee that it will rank higher. “We prioritize issues based on impact, not any commercial relationships,” she said.

Alphabet’s net income

$30

 billion

20

10

0

2005

’10

’15

Note: 2017 figure reflects a one-time charge of $9.9 billion related to new U.S. tax law. Alphabet was created through a corporate restructuring of Google in 2015. Figures for prior years are for Google Inc.

Source: FactSet

Online marketplace eBay had long relied on Google for as much as a third of its internet traffic. In 2014, traffic suddenly plummeted—contributing to a $200 million hit in its revenue guidance for that year.

Google told the company it had made a decision to lower the ranking of a large number of eBay pages that were a big source of traffic.

EBay executives debated pulling their quarterly advertising spending of around $30 million from Google to protest, but ultimately decided to step up lobbying pressure on Google, with employees and executives calling and meeting with search engineers, according to people familiar with the matter. A similar episode had hit traffic several years earlier, and eBay had marshaled its lobbying might to persuade Google to give it advice about how to fix the problem, even relying on a former Google staffer who was then employed at eBay to work his contacts, according to one of those people.

This time, Google ultimately agreed to improve the ranking of a number of pages it had demoted while eBay completed a broader revision of its website to make the pages more “useful and relevant,” the people said. The revision was arduous and costly to complete, one of the people said, adding that eBay was later hit by other downrankings that Google didn’t help with.

“We’ve experienced significant and consistent drops in Google SEO for many years, which has been disproportionally detrimental to those small businesses that we support,” an eBay spokesman said. SEO, or search-engine optimization, is the practice of trying to generate more search-engine traffic for a website.

Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment on eBay.

Companies without eBay’s clout had different experiences.

Dan Baxter can remember the exact moment his website, DealCatcher, was caught in a Google algorithm change. It was 6 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 17. Mr. Baxter, who founded the Wilmington, Del., coupon website 20 years ago, got a call from one of his 12 employees the next morning.

“Have you looked at our traffic?” the worker asked, frantically, Mr. Baxter recalled. It was suddenly down 93% for no apparent reason. That Saturday, DealCatcher saw about 31,000 visitors from Google. Now it was posting about 2,400. It had disappeared almost entirely on Google search.

Mr. Baxter said he didn’t know whom to contact at Google, so he hired a consultant to help him identify what might have happened. The expert reached out directly to a contact at Google but never heard back. Mr. Baxter tried posting to a YouTube forum hosted by a Google “webmaster” to ask if it might have been a technical problem, but the webmaster seemed to shoot down that idea.

One month to the day after his traffic disappeared, it inexplicably came back, and he still doesn’t know why.

“You’re kind of just left in the dark, and that’s the scary part of the whole thing,” said Mr. Baxter.

Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment on DealCatcher.

(The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, which has complained publicly about Google’s moves to play down news sites that charge for subscriptions. Google ended the policy after intensive lobbying by News Corp and other paywalled publishers. More recently, News Corp has called for an “algorithm review board” to oversee Google, Facebook and other tech giants. News Corp has a commercial agreement to supply news through Facebook, and Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services. Google’s Ms. Levin and News Corp declined to comment.)

GOOGLE IN RECENT months has made additional efforts to clarify how its services operate by updating general information on its site. At the end of October it posted a new video titled “How Google Search Works.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor and faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, said Google has poorly defined how often or when it intervenes on search results. The company’s argument that it can’t reveal those details because it is fighting spam “seems nuts,” said Mr. Zittrain.

“That argument may have made sense 10 or 15 years ago but not anymore,” he said. “That’s called ‘security through obscurity,’ ” a reference to the now-unfashionable engineering idea that systems can be made more secure by restricting information about how they operate.

Google’s Ms. Levin said “extreme transparency has historically proven to empower bad actors in a way that hurts our users and website owners who play by the rules.”

“Building a service like this means making tens of thousands of really, really complicated human decisions, and that’s not what people think,” said John Bowers, a research associate at the Berkman Klein Center.

On one extreme, those decisions at Google are made by the world’s most accomplished and highest-paid engineers, whose job is to turn the dials within millions of lines of complex code. On the other is an army of more than 10,000 contract workers, who work from home and get paid by the hour to evaluate search results.

The rankings supplied by the contractors, who work from a Google manual that runs to hundreds of pages, can indirectly move a site higher or lower in results, according to people familiar with the matter. And their collective responses are measured by Google executives and used to affect the search algorithms.

Mixed Results

Google’s results page has become a complex mix of search results, advertisements and featured content, not always distinguishable by the user. While these features are all driven by algorithms, Google has different policies and attitudes toward changing the results shown in each of the additional features. Featured snippets and knowledge panels are two common features.

Other features

Organic search results

Featured snippet

Knowledge panel

Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.

Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.

search term

Organic search results

Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.

Other features

Organic search results

Knowledge panel

Featured snippet

Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.

Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.

search term

Organic search results

Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.

Other features

Organic search results

Featured snippet

Knowledge panel

Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.

Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.

search term

Organic search results

Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.

Other features

Organic search results

Featured snippet

Highlights web pages that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for. Google says it will remove content from the feature if it violates policies around harmful and hateful content.

search term

Organic

search results

Knowledge panel

Information Google has compiled from various sources on the web, such as Wikipedia, that provides basic facts about the subject of your query. Google is willing to adjust this material.

Links to results that Google’s algorithms have determined are relevant to your query. Google says it doesn’t curate these results.

One of those evaluators was Zack Langley, now a 27-year-old logistics manager at a tour company in New Orleans. Mr. Langley got a one-year contract in the spring of 2016 evaluating Google’s search results through Lionbridge Technologies Inc., one of several companies Google and other tech platforms use for contract work.

During his time as a contractor, Mr. Langley said he never had any contact with anyone at Google, nor was he told what his results would be used for. Like all of Google’s evaluators, he signed a nondisclosure agreement. He made $13.50 an hour and worked up to 20 hours a week from home.

Sometimes working in his pajamas, Mr. Langley was given hundreds of real search results and told to use his judgment to rate them according to quality, reputation and usefulness, among other factors.

At one point, Mr. Langley said he was unhappy with the search results for “best way to kill myself,” which were turning up links that were like “how-to” manuals. He said he down-ranked all the other results for suicide until the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline was the No. 1 result.

Soon after, Mr. Langley said, Google sent a note through Lionbridge saying the hotline should be ranked as the top result across all searches related to suicide, so that the collective rankings of the evaluators would adjust the algorithms to deliver that result. He said he never learned if his actions had anything to do with the change.

Mr. Langley said it seemed like Google wanted him to change content on search so Google would have what he called plausible deniability about making those decisions. He said contractors would get notes from Lionbridge that he believed came from Google telling them the “correct” results on other searches.

He said that in late 2016, as the election approached, Google officials got more involved in dictating the best results, although not necessarily on issues related to the campaign. “They used to have a hands-off approach, and then it seemed to change,” he said.

Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, said the company “long ago evolved our approach to collecting feedback on these types of queries, which help us develop algorithmic solutions and features in this area.” She added that, “we provide updates to our rater guidelines to ensure all raters are following the same general framework.”

Lionbridge didn’t reply to requests for comment.

AT GOOGLE, EMPLOYEES routinely use the company’s internal message boards as well as a form called “go/bad” to push for changes in specific search results. (Go/bad is a reporting system meant to allow Google staff to point out problematic search results.)

One of the first hot-button issues surfaced in 2015, according to people familiar with the matter, when some employees complained that a search for “how do vaccines cause autism” delivered misinformation through sites that oppose vaccinations.

At least one employee defended the result, writing that Google should “let the algorithms decide” what shows up, according to one person familiar with the matter. Instead, the people said, Google made a change so that the first result is a site called howdovaccinescauseautism.com—which states on its home page in large black letters, “They f—ing don’t.” (The phrase has become a meme within Google.)

Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment.

In the fall of 2018, the conservative news site Breitbart News Network posted a leaked video of Google executives, including Mr. Brin and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, upset and addressing staffers following President Trump’s election two years earlier. A group of Google employees noticed the video was appearing on the 12th page of search results when Googling “leaked Google video Trump,” which made it seem like Google was burying it. They complained on one of the company’s internal message boards, according to people familiar with the matter. Shortly after, the leaked video began appearing higher in search results.

“When we receive reports of our product not behaving as people might expect, we investigate to see if there’s any useful insight to inform future improvements,” said Ms. Levin.

FROM GOOGLE’S FOUNDING, Messrs. Page and Brin knew that ranking webpages was a matter of opinion. “The importance of a Web page is an inherently subjective matter, which depends on the [readers’] interests, knowledge and attitudes,” they wrote in their 1998 paper introducing the PageRank algorithm, the founding system that launched the search engine.

PageRank, they wrote, would measure the level of human interest and attention, but it would do so “objectively and mechanically.” They contended that the system would mathematically measure the relevance of a site by the number of times other relevant sites linked to it on the web.

Today, PageRank has been updated and subsumed into more than 200 different algorithms, attuned to hundreds of signals, now used by Google. (The company replaced PageRank in 2005 with a newer version that could better keep up with the vast traffic that the site was attracting. Internally, it was called “PageRankNG,” ostensibly named for “next generation,” according to people familiar with the matter. In public, the company still points to PageRank—and on its website links to the original algorithm published by Messrs. Page and Brin—in explaining how search works. “The original insight and notion of using link patterns is something that we still use in our systems,” said Ms. Levin.)

By the early 2000s, spammers were overwhelming Google’s algorithms with tactics that made their sites appear more popular than they were, skewing search results. Messrs. Page and Brin disagreed over how to tackle the problem.

Mr. Brin argued against human intervention, contending that Google should deliver the most accurate results as delivered by the algorithms, and that the algorithms should be tweaked only in the most extreme cases. Mr. Page countered that the user experience was getting damaged when users encountered spam rather than useful results, according to people familiar with the matter.

Google already had been taking what the company calls “manual actions” against specific websites that were abusing the algorithm. In that process, Google engineers demote a website’s ranking by changing its specific “weighting.” For example, if a website is artificially boosted by paying other websites to link to it, a behavior that Google frowns upon, Google engineers could turn down the dial on that specific weighting. The company could also blacklist a website, or remove it altogether.

Mr. Brin still opposed making large-scale efforts to fight spam, because it involved more human intervention. Mr. Brin, whose parents were Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union, even personally decided to allow anti-Semitic sites that were in the results for the query “Jew,” according to people familiar with the decision. Google posted a disclaimer with results for that query saying, “Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”

Finally, in 2004, in the bathroom one day at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Mr. Page approached Ben Gomes, one of Google’s early search executives, to express support for his efforts fighting spam. “Just do what you need to do,” said Mr. Page, according to a person familiar with the conversation. “Sergey is going to ruin this f—ing company.”

Ms. Levin, the Google spokeswoman, said Messrs. Page, Brin and Gomes declined to comment.

After that, the company revised its algorithms to fight spam and loosened rules for manual interventions, according to people familiar with the matter.

Google has guidelines for changing its ranking algorithms, a grueling process called the “launch committee.” Google executives have pointed to this process in a general way in congressional testimony when asked about algorithm changes.

The process is like defending a thesis, and the meetings can be contentious, according to people familiar with them.

In part because the process is laborious, some engineers aim to avoid it if they can, one of these people said, and small changes can sometimes get pushed through without the committee’s approval. Mr. Gomes is on the committee that decides whether to approve the changes, and other senior officials sometimes attend as well.

Google’s Ms. Levin said not every algorithm change is discussed in a meeting, but “there are other processes for reviewing more straightforward launches at different levels of the organization,” such as an email review. Those reviews still involve members of the launch committee, she said.

Today, Google discloses only a few of the factors being measured by its algorithms. Known ones include “freshness,” which gives preference to recently created content for searches relating to things such as breaking news or a sports event. Another is where a user is located—if a user searches for “zoo,” Google engineers want the algorithms to provide the best zoo in the user’s area. Language signals—how meanings change when words are used together, such as April and fools—are among the most important, as they help determine what a user is actually asking for.

Other important signals have included the length of time users would stay on pages they clicked on before clicking back to Google, according to a former Google employee. Long stays would boost a page’s ranking. Quick bounce backs, indicating a site wasn’t relevant, would severely hurt a ranking, the former employee said.

Over the years, Google’s database recording this user activity has become a competitive advantage, helping cement its position in the search market. Other search engines don’t have the vast quantity of data that is available to Google, search’s market-leader.

That makes the impact of its operating decisions immense. When Pinterest Inc. filed to go public earlier this year, it said that “search engines, such as Google, may modify their algorithms and policies or enforce those policies in ways that are detrimental to us.” It added: “Our ability to appeal these actions is limited.” A spokeswoman for Pinterest declined to comment.

Search-engine optimization consultants have proliferated to try to decipher Google’s signals on behalf of large and small businesses. But even those experts said the algorithms remain borderline indecipherable. “It’s black magic,” said Glenn Gabe, an SEO expert who has spent years analyzing Google’s algorithms and tried to help DealCatcher find a solution to its drop in traffic earlier this year.

ALONG WITH ADVERTISEMENTS, Google’s own features now take up large amounts of space on the first page of results—with few obvious distinctions for users. These include news headlines and videos across the top, information panels along the side and “People also ask” boxes highlighting related questions.

Google engineers view the features as separate products from Google search, and there is less resistance to manually changing their content in response to outside requests, according to people familiar with the matter.

These features have become more prominent as Google attempts to keep users on its results page, where ads are placed, instead of losing the users as they click through to other sites. In September, about 55% of Google searches on mobile were “no-click” searches, according to research firm Jumpshot, meaning users never left the results page.

Two typical features on the results page—knowledge panels, which are collections of relevant information about people, events or other things; and featured snippets, which are highlighted results that Google thinks will contain content a user is looking for—are areas where Google engineers make changes to fix results, the Journal found.

Curated Features

Google has looser policies about making adjustments to these features than organic search results. The features include Google News and People also ask.

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Top stories

News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.

People also ask

A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.

Organic

search results

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Top stories

News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.

People also ask

A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.

Organic

search results

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Top stories

News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.

People also ask

A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.

Organic

search results

Other features

Organic search results

Top stories

News articles surfaced as being particularly relevant. Google blocks some sites that don’t meet its policies.

search term

Organic

search

results

People also ask

A predictive feature that suggests related questions, providing short answers with links. Google says it weeds out and blocks some phrases in this feature as it does in its auto-complete feature.

In April, the conservative Heritage Foundation called Google to complain that a coming movie called “Unplanned” had been labeled in a knowledge panel as “propaganda,” according to a person familiar with the matter. The film is about a former Planned Parenthood director who had a change of heart and became pro-life.

After the Heritage Foundation complained to a contact at Google, the company apologized and removed “propaganda” from the description, that person said.

Google’s Ms. Levin said the change “was not the result of pressure from an outside group, it was a violation of the feature’s policy.”

On the auto-complete feature, Google reached a confidential settlement in France in 2012 with several outside groups that had complained it was anti-Semitic that Google was suggesting the French word for “Jew” when searchers typed in the name of several prominent politicians. Google agreed to “algorithmically mitigate” such suggestions as part of a pact that barred the parties from disclosing its terms, according to people familiar with the matter.

In recent years, Google changed its auto-complete algorithms to remove “sensitive and disparaging remarks.” The policy, now detailed on its website, says that Google doesn’t allow predictions that may be related to “harassment, bullying, threats, inappropriate sexualization, or predictions that expose private or sensitive information.”

GOOGLE HAS BECOME more open about its moderation of auto-complete but still doesn’t disclose its use of blacklists. Kevin Gibbs, who created auto-complete in 2004 when he was a Google engineer, originally developed the list of terms that wouldn’t be suggested, even if they were the most popular queries that independent algorithms would normally supply.

For example, if a user searched “Britney Spears”—a popular search on Google at the time—Mr. Gibbs didn’t want a piece of human anatomy or the description of a sex act to appear when someone started typing the singer’s name. The unfiltered results were “kind of horrible,” Mr. Gibbs said in an interview.

He said deciding what should and shouldn’t be on the list was challenging. “It was uncomfortable, and I felt a lot of pressure,” said Mr. Gibbs, who worked on auto-complete for about a year, and left the company in 2012. “I wanted to make sure it represented the world fairly and didn’t leave out any groups.”

Google still maintains lists of phrases and terms that are manually blacklisted from auto-complete, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company internally has a “clearly articulated set of policies” about what terms or phrases might be blacklisted in auto-complete, and that it follows those rules, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Blacklists also affect the results in organic search and Google News, as well as other search products, such as Web answers and knowledge panels, according to people familiar with the matter.

Google has said in congressional testimony it doesn’t use blacklists. Asked in a 2018 hearing whether Google had ever blacklisted a “company, group, individual or outlet…for political reasons,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of public policy, responded: “No, ma’am, we don’t use blacklists/whitelists to influence our search results,” according to the transcript.

Ms. Levin said those statements were related to blacklists targeting political groups, which she said the company doesn’t keep.

Google’s first blacklists date to the early 2000s, when the company made a list of spam sites that it removed from its index, one of those people said. This means the sites wouldn’t appear in search results.

Engineers known as “maintainers” are authorized to make and approve changes to blacklists. It takes at least two people to do this; one person makes the change, while a second approves it, according to the person familiar with the matter.

The Journal reviewed a draft policy document from August 2018 that outlines how Google employees should implement an anti-misinformation blacklist aimed at blocking certain publishers from appearing in Google News and other search products. The document says engineers should focus on “a publisher misrepresenting their ownership or web properties” and having “deceptive content”—that is, sites that actively aim to mislead—as opposed to those that have inaccurate content.

“The purpose of the blacklist will be to bar the sites from surfacing in any Search feature or news product sites,” the document states.

Ms. Levin said Google does “not manually determine the order of any search result.” She said sites that don’t adhere to Google News “inclusion policies” are “not eligible to appear on news surfaces or in information boxes in Search.”

SOME INDIVIDUALS and companies said changes made by the company seem ad hoc, or inconsistent. People familiar with the matter said Google increasingly will make manual or algorithmic changes that aren’t acknowledged publicly in order to maintain that it isn’t affected by outside pressure.

“It’s very convenient for us to say that the algorithms make all the decisions,” said one former Google executive.

In March 2017, Google updated the guidelines it gives contractors who evaluate search results, instructing them for the first time to give low-quality ratings to sites “created with the sole purpose of promoting hate or violence against a group of people”—something that would help adjust Google algorithms to lower those sites in search.

The next year, the company broadened the guidance to any pages that promote such hate or violence, even if it isn’t the page’s sole purpose and even if it is “expressed in polite or even academic-sounding language.”

Google has resisted entirely removing some content that outsiders complained should be blocked. In May 2018, Ignacio Wenley Palacios, a Spain-based lawyer working for the Lawfare Project, a nonprofit that funds litigation to protect Jewish people, asked Google to remove an anti-Semitic article lauding a German Holocaust denier posted on a Spanish-language neo-Nazi blog.

The company declined. In an email to Mr. Wenley Palacios, lawyers for Google contended that “while such content is detestable” it isn’t “manifestly illegal” in Spain.

Mr. Wenley Palacios then filed a lawsuit, but in the spring of this year, before the suit could be heard, he said, Google lawyers told him the company was changing its policy on such removals in Spain.

According to Mr. Wenley Palacios, the lawyers said the firm would now remove from searches conducted in Spain any links to Holocaust denial and other content that could hurt vulnerable minorities, once they are pointed out to the company. The results would still be accessible outside of Spain. He said both sides agreed to dismiss the case.

Google’s Ms. Levin described the action as a “legal removal” in accordance with local law. Holocaust denial isn’t illegal in Spain, but if it is coupled with an intent to spread hate, it can fall under Spanish criminal law banning certain forms of hate speech.

“Google used to say, ‘We don’t approve of the content, but that’s what it is,’ ” Mr. Wenley Palacios said. “That has changed dramatically.”

Business Model

Google’s search results page has changed over the years, becoming much more ad-heavy.

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Ad

Ads

Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.

Ad

Vertical search results

Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.

Organic search results

As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Ad

Ads

Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.

Ad

Vertical search results

Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.

Organic search results

As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.

Other features

Organic search results

search term

Ad

Ads

Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.

Ad

Vertical search results

Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.

Organic search results

As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.

Other features

Organic search results

Ads

Ads in recent years claim more space at the top of the results page.

search term

Ad

Ad

Vertical

search results

Organic

search results

Various features that present specialized results for specific topics, like hotels or places, often with photos or maps. The results in some of these features are paid advertisements.

As Google has placed more ads and verticals at the top of the page, organic search results have shrunk.

Health policy consultant Greg Williams said he helped lead a campaign to push Google to make changes that would stifle misleading results for queries such as “rehab.”

At the time, in 2017, addiction centers with spotty records were constantly showing up in search results, typically the first place family members and addicts go in search of help.

Google routed Diane Hentges several times over the last year to call centers as she desperately researched drug addiction treatment centers for her 22-year-old son, she said.

Each time she called one of the facilities listed on Google, a customer-service representative would ask for her financial information, but the representatives weren’t seemingly attached to any legitimate company.

“If you look at a place on Google, it sends you straight to a call center,” Ms. Hentges said, adding that parents who are struggling with a child with addiction “will do anything to get our child healthy. We’ll believe anything.”

After intense lobbying by Mr. Williams and others, Google changed its ad policy around such queries. But addiction industry officials also noticed a significant change to Google search results. Many searches for “rehab” or related terms began returning the website for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the national help hotline run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as the top result.

A spokesman for SAMHSA said the agency had a partnership with Google.

Google never acknowledged the change. Ms. Levin said that “resources are not listed because of any type of partnership” and that “we have algorithmic solutions designed to prioritize authoritative resources (including official hotlines) in our results for queries like these as well as for suicide and self-harm queries.”

Google’s search algorithms have been a major focus of Hollywood in its effort to fight pirated TV shows and movies.

Alphabet’s revenue, by type

Advertising

Other

$150

 billion

100

50

0

2005

’10

’15

Note: Alphabet was created through a corporate restructuring of Google in 2015. Figures for prior years are for Google Inc.

Source: the company

Studios “saw this as the potential death knell of their business,” said Dan Glickman, chairman and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America from 2004 to 2010. The association has been a public critic of Google. “A hundred million dollars to market a major movie could be thrown away if someone could stream it illegally online.”

Google received a record 1.6 million requests to remove web pages for copyright issues last year, according to the company’s published Transparency Report and a Journal analysis. Those requests pertained to more than 740 million pages, about 12 times the number of web pages it was asked to take down in 2012.

A decade ago, in concession to the industry, Google removed “download” from its auto-complete suggestions after the name of a movie or TV show, so that at least it wouldn’t be encouraging searches for pirated content.

In 2012, it applied a filter to search results that would lower the ranking of sites that received a large number of piracy complaints under U.S. copyright law. That effectively pushed many pirate sites off the front page of results for general searches for movies or music, although it still showed them when a user specifically typed in the pirate site names.

In recent months the industry has gotten more cooperation from Google on piracy in search results than at any point in the organization’s history, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Google is under great cosmic pressure, as is Facebook,” Mr. Glickman said. “These are companies that are in danger of being federally regulated to an extent that they never anticipated.”

Mr. Pichai, who became CEO of Google in 2015, is more willing to entertain complaints about the search results from outside parties than Messrs. Page and Brin, the co-founders, according to people familiar with his leadership.

Google’s Ms. Levin said Mr. Pichai’s “style of engaging and listening to feedback has not shifted. He has always been very open to feedback.”

CRITICISM ALLEGING political bias in Google’s search results has sharpened since the 2016 election.

Interest groups from the right and left have besieged Google with questions about content displayed in search results and about why the company’s algorithms returned certain information over others.

Google appointed an executive in Washington, Max Pappas, to handle complaints from conservative groups, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Pappas works with Google engineers on changes to search when conservative viewpoints aren’t being represented fairly, according to interest groups interviewed by the Journal, although that is just one part of his job.

“Conservatives need people they can go to at these companies,” said Dan Gainor, an executive at the conservative Media Research Center, which has complained about various issues to Google.

Google also appointed at least one other executive in Washington, Chanelle Hardy, to work with outside liberal groups, according to people familiar with the matter.

Ms. Levin said both positions have existed for many years. She said in general Google believes it’s “the responsible thing to do” to understand feedback from the groups and said Google’s algorithms and policies don’t attempt to make any judgment based on the political leanings of a website.

Mr. Pappas declined to comment, and Ms. Hardy didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Share Your Thoughts

Does Google give you what you expect in search results? Join the discussion below.

Over the past year, abortion-rights groups have complained about search results that turned up the websites of what are known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” organizations that counsel women against having abortions, according to people familiar with the matter.

One of the complaining organizations was Naral Pro-Choice America, which tracks the activities of anti-abortion groups through its opposition research department, said spokeswoman Kristin Ford.

Naral complained to Google and other tech platforms that some of the ads, posts and search results from crisis pregnancy centers are misleading and deceptive, she said. Some of the organizations claimed to offer abortions and then counseled women against it. “They do not disclose what their agenda is,” Ms. Ford said.

In June, Google updated its advertising policies related to abortion, saying that advertisers must state whether they provide abortions or not, according to its website. Ms. Ford said Naral wasn’t told in advance of the policy change.

Ms. Levin said Google didn’t implement any changes with regard to how crisis pregnancy centers rank for abortion queries.

The Journal tested the term “abortion” in organic search results over 17 days in July and August. Thirty-nine percent of all results on the first page had the hostname http://www.plannedparenthood.org, the site of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the nonprofit, abortion-rights organization.

By comparison, 14% of Bing’s first page of search results and 16% of DuckDuckGo’s first page of results were from Planned Parenthood.

Ms. Levin said Google doesn’t have any particular ranking implementations aimed at promoting Planned Parenthood.

View Interactive

See the results of the Journal’s search tests
Use the lookup tool below to select search terms analyzed. Percentages indicate how many times each web page appeared during the WSJ’s testing.
   Abortion
   Bernie Sanders
   Boeing
   Democratic debate
   Donald Trump
   Elizabeth Warren
   Guns
   Heroin dosage
   Hobbs and Shaw
   How do I kill myself
   Ilhan Omar
   Immigrants
   Joe Biden
   Kamala Harris
   New England Patriots
   Recession
   Where do I buy heroin
google Show
bing Show duckduckgo
duckduckgo Show bing
View more search results:

  • Bernie Sanders
  • Donald Trump
  • Guns
  • Recession

The practice of creating blacklists for certain types of sites or searches has fueled cries of political bias from some Google engineers and right-wing publications that said they have viewed portions of the blacklists. Some of the websites Google appears to have targeted in Google News were conservative sites and blogs, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. In one partial blacklist reviewed by the Journal, some conservative and right-wing websites, including The Gateway Pundit and The United West, were included on a list of hundreds of websites that wouldn’t appear in news or featured products, although they could appear in organic search results.

Google has said repeatedly it doesn’t make decisions based on politics, and current and former employees told the Journal they haven’t seen evidence of political bias. And yet, they said, Google’s shifting policies on interference—and its lack of transparency about them—inevitably force employees to become arbiters of what is acceptable, a dilemma that opens the door to charges of bias or favoritism.

Google’s Ms. Levin declined to comment.

DEMANDS FROM GOVERNMENTS for changes have grown rapidly since 2016.

From 2010 to 2018, Google fielded such requests from countries including the U.S. to remove 685,000 links from what Google calls web search. The requests came from courts or other authorities that said the links broke local laws or should be removed for other reasons.

Nearly 78% of those removal requests have been since the beginning of 2016, according to reports that Google publishes on its website. Google’s ultimate actions on those requests weren’t disclosed.

Russia has been by far the most prolific, demanding the removal of about 255,000 links from search last year, three-quarters of all government requests for removal from Google search in that period, the data show. Nearly all of the country’s requests came under an information-security law Russia put into effect in late 2017, according to a Journal examination of disclosures in a database run by the Berkman Klein Center.

Google said the Russian law doesn’t allow it to disclose which URLs were requested to be removed. A person familiar with the matter said the removal demands are for content ruled illegal in Russia for a variety of reasons, such as for promoting drug use or encouraging suicide.

Requests can include demands to remove links to information the government defines as extremist, which can be used to target political opposition, the person said.

Google, whose staff reviews the requests, at times declines those that appear focused on political opposition, the person said, adding that in those cases, it tries not to draw attention to its decisions to avoid provoking Russian regulators.

The approach has led to stiff internal debate. On one side, some Google employees say that the company shouldn’t cooperate at all with takedown requests from countries such as Russia or Turkey. Others say it is important to follow the laws of countries where they are based.

“There is a real question internally about whether a private company should be making these calls,” the person said.

Google’s Ms. Levin said, “Maximizing access to information has always been a core principle of Search, and that hasn’t changed.”

Google’s culture of publicly resisting demands to change results has diminished, current and former employees said. A few years ago, the company dismantled a global team focused on free-speech issues that, among other things, publicized the company’s legal battles to fight changes to search results, in part because Google had lost several of those battles in court, according to a person familiar with the change.

“Free expression was no longer a winner,” the person said.

—Keach Hagey, Andrea Fuller, Rob Copeland, Jim Oberman and Mythili Sankara contributed to this article.

—Illustrations by Martin Tognola

—Graphics by Elliot Bentley and Kara Dapena

Write to Kirsten Grind at kirsten.grind@wsj.com, Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com

August 25, 2017

Dr. Hanson’s response to Southern Poverty Law Center [c]

Filed under: Business, Econonics, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Political Commentary — Tags: , , , — justplainbill @ 1:21 pm

From An Angry Reader:

Angry Reader Southern Poverty Law Center:

Cf: (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/08/22/american-freedom-alliance-event-blames-immigrants-california’s-destruction)

“They keynote speaker for the event was Victor Davis Hanson, a Hoover Institute (sic) fellow and author of Mexifornia, a book that romanticizes the California of old, when whites were a large majority of the state’s population. Davis Hanson (sic) talked about how in parts of California, you can go 10 miles in another direction and it ‘looks like you’re in a different country.’ Hanson also attacked California’s Democrats, saying:

We don’t want assimilation so we’re going to give you as much amnesty, sanctuary states, sanctuary cities, we’ll do whatever we can so you can remain tribal in your outlook. Your tribal racial and ethnic identity is essential, not irrelevant to your character.

Hanson also expounded upon the reconquista conspiracy theory promoted by anti-immigrant activists. It stems from the ‘Plan Espiritual de Aztlan,’ a document produced by MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) in the 1960s calling for Chicanos to reclaim land. It is not endorsed by any mainstream groups, but for nativists it serves as the genesis of a conspiracy theory claiming that Latinos want to take back American land for themselves.

Davis Hanson ended by saying, “The state is regressing into a Third-World country.” He also attacked undocumented immigrants, essentially claiming they are incapable of being law-abiding residents, stating, ‘When I came to the States, the first thing I did was break the law, so why would I follow the rules out of necessity now?’”

________________________
Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Southern Poverty Law Center,

A few preliminaries: Mexifornia, written nearly 15 years ago, was not a romance about “white” California, but a warning that if assimilation, intermarriage, and melting-pot integration continued to be caricatured and eroded, and if massive immigration continued to be illegal, non-diverse, and not based on ethnically blind meritocratic criteria, then one day California would be faced with ethnic polarization, given its various ethnic groups, large numbers of struggling newcomers without legality, English, or high school diplomas, and a state unable to meet its commitments to ensure first-rate public education, infrastructure, transportation, and safety for all its residents. I feel the book was prescient; if you disagree, find an argument instead of using the buzz word “white.”

You state that MEChA advocated “reclaiming” land for “Chicanos,” but then incoherently state that such a supposition is a “conspiracy theory claiming that Latinos want to take back American land for themselves.” Is it a fact or a “claim,” both or neither? And what are “mainstream groups,” given that MEChA for decades has had a sizable presence on most California and southwestern campuses and claims a number of prominent alumni.

When you write “essentially claiming” rather than quoting what I actually wrote in full, we know that “essentially” is a catalyst for more fiction to follow.

In general, I rarely have seen a puerile attack like this in which everything you have alleged is demonstrably false. Since there was an apparent video of my 30-minute speech on “Two Californias” (presented at a Los Angeles symposia on the crisis of California) about the inordinate wealth of the Pacific Coastal strip from La Jolla to Berkeley and the poverty of the state’s interior, you obviously choose not to quote from it accurately if much at all.

And it is easy to see why, since my argument did not serve your circular purposes of fabricating “hate” in turn to whip up hysterias in turn to raise money in turn to justify your comfortable existence in turn to fabricate more “hate.” In contrast, you found that reporting the truth—the lecture offered statistics on education, energy, health care, infrastructure, and taxes in suggesting that Californians are not receiving value for the inordinate taxes and regulations they endure, largely because of incompetent, one-party governance—would have been of utterly no value to your careerist and financial aims.

The lecture was not even on illegal immigration per se, but on the tripartite role of (a) Silicon Valley’s and coastal California’s vast wealth and (in the case of multibillion-dollar tech companies) corporate exemptions from traditional antitrust scrutiny, (b) the aggregate flight of nearly 4 million middle class Californians to no-tax or low-tax states, and (c) the aggregate effects of massive illegal immigration in which the traditional allegiance to melting pot assimilation, integration, and intermarriage has waned due to politics, sheer numbers, and illegality.

Let me detail your fabrications in the order you made them:

1) One truly can go 10 miles in one direction in California and see the radical change from affluence to dire poverty. And that abyss is, as I noted, because that 1/3 of all welfare recipients in the nation live in California, where 1/5 of the population lives below the poverty line, and a fourth of the residents were not born in the United States and in many cases do not have English facility or high school diplomas, critical in a competitive market economy.

I suggest the SPLC staff drive just 3 miles from Woodside or Atherton to Redwood City or East Palo Alto and see whether my assertion is flawed. The proposition rests, as I noted and you omitted, on the fact that California is both the wealthiest of states by a variety of measurements and also by some data the poorest. Or as I colloquially put it, California is a sort of weld of Massachusetts and Mississippi under single state governance.

I am writing this reply on an avenue in which there are numerous houses with inoperative trailers, shacks, and near lean-tos arranged around a single-family dwelling, compounds in which the poor live without proper zoning, in structures that do not meet building codes, and under conditions that would be empirically described as Third World.

Less than 4 miles away there are also 10,000 square-foot gated mansions. That dichotomy illustrates California culture, demography, and governance, in the medieval sense of two classes rather than the past three.

The contrast certainly does look like two different countries: again, in the sense that in the gated mansions English is spoken, there are all the accouterments of upward mobility, and gates keep others out; in the multifamily/trailer residences, Spanish only is spoken, residents are often here illegally, and poverty is endemic. The contrast reflects a vanishing middle class and a state politics designed to reward the connected hyper-wealthy and subsidize the poor and to ignore those in-between—which is why the latter may have fled in droves.

Your next assertion is a flat-out untruth: “Hanson also attacked California’s Democrats, saying: We don’t want assimilation so we’re going to give you as much amnesty, sanctuary states, sanctuary cities, we’ll do whatever we can so you can remain tribal in your outlook. Your tribal racial and ethnic identity is essential, not irrelevant to your character.”

I did not say what you are alleging, but made it very clear that the quote was a reflection of the mentality of the Democratic elite and the La Raza activist leadership. A simpleton in journalism can fathom that the collective “we” is not the person “I, Victor Hanson” but refers to progressive groups, as I carefully noted, who are not eager to see assimilation, integration, and intermarriage proceed in rapid fashion. Such a development might result in a fully integrated immigrant society (in the fashion of the 19th-century and early 20th-century trajectory of Italian-Americans), one that would be less helpful to Democratic tribal politics. Even with the quote out of context anyone can see through your childish effort to suggest the quote reflects my own sentiments rather than my views of the operating principles of progressive identity politics activists.

You allege: “Hanson also expounded upon the reconquistaconspiracy theory promoted by anti-immigrant activists. It stems from the “Plan Espiritual de Aztlan,” a document produced by MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan) in the 1960s calling for Chicanos to reclaim land. It is not endorsed by any mainstream groups, but for nativists it serves as the genesis of a conspiracy theory claiming that Latinos want to take back American land for themselves.”

In fact, I did not discuss in detail Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans seeking to “take back” land, nor did I even go into detail about the racist heritage of MEChA, which is becoming an embarrassment only because its racist sloganeering (e.g., “a bronze state for a bronze people” “everything for the race, nothing for the others”) was so egregious that it has been airbrushed off MEChA sites. What I did say was that La Raza was and is a racialist term (“the Race” [sc. Latin radix] and deliberately employed to resonate racial chauvinism—illustrative of an unfortunate effort to divide and polarize groups.

I added and you omitted that the 1960s rebirth of the term in popular usage was similar to Franco’s and Mussolini’s political use of Raza/Razza (Franco wrote a novel Raza), as a way of copy-catting Hitler’s racist use of the German Volk to denote race as the key criterion of citizenship and definition of one’s “essence.” Apparently, the National Council of La Raza (a key element of the Democratic Party coalition) was recently embarrassed into agreement. After the election of Donald Trump, it suddenly has changed its name to UnidosUS from the former “the race”, and that is a laudable improvement. (Note what Cesar Chavez once said about the La Raza movement: “Today it’s anti-gringo, tomorrow it will be anti-Negro. We had a stupid guy who just wanted to play politics with the union, and he began to whip up La Raza against the white volunteers, and even had some of the farm workers and the pickets and the organizers hung up on la raza.”)

What do you mean when you write “nativist”? Someone who objects to racist terminology, and supports melting-pot integration and assimilation—in contrast to ethnic bigots like those in MEChA and La Raza groups who insist that their race defines their personas to the exclusion of others? What an Orwellian mindset, in which integration is defined as nativism.

You end your slander by more untruths: “Davis Hanson ended by saying, ‘The state is regressing into a Third-World country.’ He also attacked undocumented immigrants, essentially claiming they are incapable of being law-abiding residents, stating, ‘When I came to the States, the first thing I did was break the law, so why would I follow the rules out of necessity now?’”

Would you quote from the transcript of the speech? If you would, you will see that I ended with a call for unity, adding that there had to be more integration between poor and rich, and the restoration of a middle class, given that the state cannot do well when there is such an abyss between classes and a shortage of revenue to address long neglected infrastructure.

I did not attack undocumented immigrants, but said that the restoration of law (such as the end of illegal sanctuary cities and the enforcement of existing immigration statutes) is essential, yet would be difficult when millions of immigrants have not just entered the country illegally, but have done so as their first choice when arriving at a new homeland—a decision that the host de facto unfortunately overlooks or perhaps even rewards. When one breaks the laws without consequences, it insidiously erodes all laws and chaos is the inevitable result.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been in the news recently as a recipient of millions of dollars of grants from large corporations and movie stars, so I am not denying that fictions like the present one are effective in more or less leveraging money through hysteria. Yet your methods are not justified by your ends; the former are reprehensible and the latter self-centered. A growing number of Americans are learning about your group and discovering that when it cannot uncover hate, it invents it—and finds the ensuing smears and slanders quite profitable, resulting ironically in short-term lucre, but in the long-term continued diminution of your reputation. For a fair account of the meeting and speech, see http://citizensjournal.us/afa-focuses-decline-ca/

Davis Hanson

[In various venues, I have had people use the SPLC as a source. It is not. As Dr. Hanson refutes its nonsense, I must point out to all who use it, that, like the ACLU, it is a Leftist agenda agency and not a reliable, non-biased, source.

This is especially directed toward those who criticize without doing extensive research, or at the least going beyond wikipedia, a notoriously inaccurate source.]

May 10, 2017

And Texas Makes Eleven

Filed under: Econonics, Elections, Historical context, Political Commentary, US Constitution — justplainbill @ 3:09 pm

And Texas Makes Eleven

United States Constitution Article V:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress (no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One Thousan Eight Hundred and Eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article) (no State, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate).

Texas has become the 11th State requesting a Constitutional Convention.

Those who have followed my posts, know that the 1787 Constitution has been nullified for over 100 years. The nullification took place through improper Supreme Court rulings, the failure of both the Executive Branch and the Legislature to fulfil their Constitutional obligations and responsibilities. The use of the regulatory process to pass to the Civil Service the duties of both branches in order to avoid the politically inconvenient has led to our current set of crises. The open borders, illegal legalization of drugs, murdering of police, abuse of taxes, theft from taxpayers for unconstitutional purposes, and on and on, are as do to taxpayer ignorance as politicians’ apostacy.

In 1787, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, took numerous templates for consideration. At the convention, Alexander Hamilton, to his enemies’ delight, even proposed a Monarchy so that the convention could cover all workable government forms in their debates.

There are numerous books available to us, which cover this period extensively. I recommend Edwin Meese, III’s “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution”, and that you visit Brion McClanahan’s website, http://www.brionmcclanahan.com and pick from his numerous works, I suggest starting with his “The Founding Fathers’ Guide to the Constitution”.

As much as I dislike Mark Levin, his American Trilogy in which he explains, quite accurately and comprehensively, the origins of the 1787 constitution, where it was felled, and what can be done about it, including his 27 recommended amendments, is another work I recommend.

Judge Andrew Napolitano has several works I recommend and for the same reasons.

“The Albany Plan Re-Visited”, has a template that includes variations and reasons for them including an Article on aggregation, and how weighted voting may be a much better form of direct representation than any proffered so far. ( http://www.bn.com/ebooks ).

Why?

With Texas now on board for an Article V Constitutional Convention, we are now 1/3 of the way there. YOU may soon be asked to vote for delegates from your state to attend and decide on what our next Federal government will have power to do and not do.

In the XVIIIth Century, politics was a major form of entertainment for the populace. Currently, VR, XBOX, & Playstation are the major forms of entertainment. In order for us to pick the correct delegates to such a convention, we must know of the various forms of governments and the templates for constitutions. Waiting until the last minute to educate ourselves on the possibilities, is a losing strategy.

Learn the templates, learn the variations, learn the possibilities available to us that will free all of us, and allow all of us to keep our wealth, and not have it taken at gun point and sent to foreign and domestic tyrants.

May 9, 2017

CAIR, A FIfth Column in the US, by Joseph John [c]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, crime control, Econonics, Islam, Muslim Brotherhood, Racism, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 2:07 pm

To jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org
CC ‘Charles S. LiMandri, Esq.’
May 8 at 9:06 AM

CAIR, A Fifth Column In The US, Targeting American Children In Public Schools

By Capt Joseph R. John, May 8, 2017: Op Ed # 347

Former Special Agent John Guandolo, FBI, US Naval Academy Class of 1989, (USMC) in the below listed recording, discusses how dangerous to the Republic, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is. CAIR was founded in 1994 by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) its subversive activities, guided by the MB, are dangerous to the survival of the Republican form of government, as outlined in the US Constitution. The below listed recording is an extremely important recording and we are encouraging recipients to distribute to those in their address book who oppose replacing the US Constitution with Islamic Sharia Law. The MB created Al Q’ieda, ISIS, Hamas, CAIR, and spawned many other terrorist groups. They are all Radical Islamic Terrorist groups who have the same objectives—to destroy Western Civilization from within.

During the last 8 years, Obama appointed members of CAIR, the MB, and members of the MB Front Groups to thousands of very sensitive and highly classified positions in DHS, NSC, NSA, CIA, DOD, STATE, the White House, the FBI, Congressional Staffs, as well as to other US Government Agencies. The MB, CAIR, and the MB Front Groups have established a dangerous Fifth Column in the US Government, much more dangerous than the Fifth Column the Communist Party was able to establish in the US Government in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

CAIR and the MB have been trying to eliminate Anti-Terror Training Programs from all service branches of the US Armed Forces. CAIR leaders managed to get Muslim Clerics appointed, as supposedly “unbiased” investigators to review the current DOD Anti-Terror Training Programs. CAIR’s goal is to get the appointed Muslim Clerics to make so many major recommendation for change, that they will effectively eliminate the Anti-Terror Training Program—it’s like putting the fox in the chicken coop to guard the chickens.

Air Force Special Agent David Gaubatz, who worked a CAIR headquarters as an undercover agent, convinced CAIR that he was a converted Muslim. He uncovered 12,000 incriminating pages of CAIR internal documents outlining their subversive activities, and acquired incriminating audio and video recordings of their subversive activities. Those CAIR internal documents prove that Radical Islamic Terrorist Agents in the nation’s capital, working closely with CAIR, have developed plans to undermine the authority of the US Constitution, and replace it with the governing authority of the Quran and Sharia Law. The incriminating documents, the audio recordings, and video recordings were turned over to the FBI.

”The documents show that CAIR, despite claiming to cooperate with Law Enforcement Agencies, is actively working behind the scenes to mislead and deceive the FBI and other Law Enforcement Agencies in support of terrorist suspects – and have even cultivated Muslim moles inside of Federal Law Enforcement Agencies who have tipped off FBI terror targets” (those Muslim moles were placed there by the Obama administration). (WND Exclusive by Art Moore May 3, 2016).

The MB and its Front Groups have been outlawed and designated dangerous International Terrorist Organizations by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrein, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia. Israel, Canada, and the United Kingdom announced they are close to designating the MB as an International Terrorist Organization. In 2014, CAIR was designated as an International Terrorist Organization and outlawed by the UAE.

The State Department should designated the CAIR, the MB, and the MB Front groups as International Terrorist organizations. Once they are designated as International Terrorist Organizations, the FBI and the Justice Department will be able to remove their members, from highly sensitive and classified positions in the US Federal Government.

Exposing the MB & CAIR as a Fifth Column in the US Government, and revealing the MB & CAIR’s plans to replace the US Constitution with Sharia Law will permit the FBI and Justice Department to remove them from their government jobs. That can be accomplished by administering lie detector tests to members of the MB &CAIR in government; they can be simply asked if they want Sharia Law to replace the US Constitution. A security screening program could be initiated that is similar to the one that the FBI and the Justice Department employed to eliminate a Communist Fifth Column from the US Government from 1940 to 1960, when members of the Communists Party were located in US government positions, by administering lie detector tests that ferreted out hundreds of Communists who were trying to subvert the US Federal Government.

In 2008, in the Holy Land Foundation Trial (HLF) in Dallas, which was the culmination of 15 years of investigation by the FBI, CAIR was found to be guilty in US Federal Court of a terror-funding plot. It was revealed that CAIR was involved in fraud, sedition, and terrorism, yet Obama appointed them to very sensitive and high security positions in the Federal Government The US Justice Department identified CAIR, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror-financing conviction in the nation’s 240 year history. Prior to HLF, and since, CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce terrorist groups like the MB, ICE, Al Q’ieda, Hamas, and Hizballah.

While CAIR Senior Management repeatedly denied receiving unlimited amounts of foreign funding from off shore sources, the authors of the book “Muslim Mafia” obtained a video of CAIR spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, boasting of his ability to bring in half a million dollars of “overseas money” from Saudi Arabia. (WND Exclusive by Art Moore May 3, 2016).

The FBI specifically identified CAIR as “a Hamas front group in the US, and as an entity of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, a secret body set up to advance the Hamas terrorist agenda.”

“FBI wiretap evidence from the Holy Land Foundation case showed that CAIR’s Executive Director, Nihad Awad, attended an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders, and participated in their activists in Philadelphia, PA. CAIR, according to the evidence, was created by the MB, out of a need to give a “media twinkle” in order to the MB leaders’ agenda, of supporting violent jihad abroad, while slowly institutionalizing Islamic Sharia Law in the US. A federal judge later determined that the Justice Department provided “ample evidence” to designate CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, affirming the Islamic group had been involved in “a conspiracy to support Hamas. In addition, CAIR leaders have made statements affirming that their aim is to establish Islamic rule in the United States.” (WND Exclusive by Art Moore May 3, 2016)

The FBI is involved in prosecuting over 1000 Radical Islamic Terrorist cases in all 50 states, and the subjects under investigation include members of the MB, CAIR, ISIS, Al Q’ieda, MB Front Groups, self-Radicalized Islamic Terrorists, and 1/3rd of the cases concern Muslim Refugees who entered the US from 7 of the 43 Muslim majority countries, that the Trump administration has been trying to put a temporary travel ban. Some of the members of CAIR, who have been appointed to thousands of government positions by Obama, are suspected of engaging in subversive activities, in furtherance of MB goals, that are detrimental to the security of the United States.

Former FBI Agent Mike Rolf stated that the CAIR leaders, listed below, have been charged with or convicted of terrorism-related crimes, documented in “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America” authored by David Gaubatz and investigative journalist Paul Sperry. In addition to the CAIR leaders, listed below, other CAIR members have been involved in the 194 Radical Islamic Terrorist attacks in the US listed in the attachment, that have been perpetrated in 63 cities in the US since 9/11, that the left of center liberal media establishment continue to try to cover up.

1)Ghassan Elashi one of CAIR’s Founding Directors was convicted of terrorism and is in federal prison,

2)Rabith Hadid, a CAIR fundraiser, was blacklisted by the Treasury Department for financing Al Q’ieda and other terror groups, was arrested on terror-related charges and deported to Lebanon,

3)Abdurahman Alamoudi, a CAIR Director is serving 23 years in federal prison for plotting terrorism.

4)Randall “Ismail” Royer, a former CAIR Communications Specialist, is serving 20 years in federal prison in connection with the Virginia Jihad Network which he led,

5)Bassam Khafagi, a CAIR Director of Community Affairs, was arrested and pleaded guilty to bank & visa fraud in supporting Al Q’ieda and advocating suicide attacks on Americans,

6)Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of CAIR, was wiretapped by the FBI and evidence of his plot to disguise payments to terrorists as charitable giving, caused the FBI to sever ties with CAIR in the US.

7)Laura Jaghlit, a CAIR Civil-rights Coordinator, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation as part of the FBI investigation into terrorist financing, money laundering, and tax fraud.

8)Omar Ahmad, Founder & Chairman Emeritus of CAIR, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

9)Nabil Sadoun, a CAIR Board Member, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation and was in a Hamas Front organization; he was deported to Jordan by the Justice Department.

10)Muthanna al-Hanooti, a CAIR Director, whose home was raided by the FBI is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy land Foundation case

San Diego is the second largest city in deep blue California, with a history of being pro-American and pro-military, and it is the initial targeted battleground city in Southern California that George Soros and CAIR are focused on changing San Diego’s pro-American agenda in the future. Soros and CAIR supported the election of the type of San Diego Unified School Board (SDUSB) that would install a progressive, anti-American, and Islam-centric curriculum to indoctrinate students. San Diego is CAIR’s initial city in the US, ground zero, where the MB Islam-centric indoctrination program would be implemented, by “Targeting American Children In Public Schools”, while at the same time, Soros would also be implementing his own progressive anti-American and Marxist indoctrination program described below.

Members of the SDUSB has been endorsed and supported in their elections by CAIR, and by Soros’ funded Progressive, Marxists, Anti-American, and pro-Illegal Aliens & pro-Muslim Refugees organizations (i.e. Free Press, La Raza, America Federation of Teachers, Planned Parenthood, SEIU, NOW, the AFL-CIO Labor Council, the CA Democratic Party, Muslim Advocates, Catholic Alliance For Common Good, the Rotary Peace Committee, the Peace & Freedom Party, and the Communist Party USA).

Members of the SDUSB have formed a close working partnership with CAIR, a dangerous Islamic Terrorist Organization. In 2015, Kevin Beiser and Michael McQuary, two members of the SDUSB, issued a formal proclamation in support of, and in recognition of CAIR San Diego, citing ten years of “constructive civic engagement” in San Diego and Imperial Counties. They praised CAIR’s work to “promote not only religious and cultural tolerance and understanding, but also justice and equality for all who live in the United States.” While CAIR, as you read above, is an international terrorist organization whose leaders have been convicted of terrorism, listed above.

Under the guise of establishing an anti-bullying program, the SDUSB became the first School Board in America to approve the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic indoctrination plan that is discriminatory towards Christians and Jews. The policy violates American parents’ opposition to the indoctrination of their children in the Islamic religion, and violates their opposition to having their children taught to accept Anti-Constitutional Sharia Law.

An anti-bullying policy already exists in the San Diego City Schools, there was no need for the SDUSB to vote for a new discriminatory anti-bullying policy, which is an excuse to issue text books to teach Islam in San Diego City Schools.

A parent’s permission is required, prior to subjecting their child to being indoctrinated in the Islamic Religion, Sharia Law, or any religion in the classroom. By their actions, members of the SDUSB, as individuals, have subjected themselves to a Class Action Law Suit for violating US Federal Law (parents of students or any interested party, can contact Attorney Charles LiMandri, Esq. listed on the copy line of the address bar, to represent them in a class action law suit).

Even though Muslims are allowed to forego religious obligations in a non-Muslim countries like the US. The new MB Islam indoctrinating program voted for by the SDUSB will include adding lessons on Islam in the Social Studies curriculum that emphasize prominent Muslims in history, that creates Muslim-only “safe spaces,” adding Muslim holidays to the school calendar, and providing support and resources for Muslim students during Ramadan. Instead of prescribing detention for those who bully students which is the current bullying policy in San Diego Schools, the SDUSB plans a “restorative justice” program in which students are required to dialogue with each other about perceived bullying words or actions. Special disciplinary measures will also be created for the so-called bullying of Muslims.

At the same time Christmas vacation has been replaced with Winter holiday, Easter break has been replace with Spring break, Christian holidays are not listed to the school calendar, yet Ramadan is called Ramadan on the School Calendar. The SDUSB has not created Christian-only or Jewish –only “safe spaces.” In an intentional discriminatory act, lesson plans in Judaism &Christianity will not be taught to Muslim students in the Social Studies curriculum with emphasis on prominent Christians and Jews in history. A previous request by a student for Christian Bible Study at lunchtime was rejected by the SDUSB. CAIR complained and alleged favoritism when Christian students in Roseville, a Detroit suburb, were given permission slips to attend off-site Bible study classes—CAIR has a double standard and aggressively discriminates against Christians.

The SDUSB plans to use “restorative justice” in their Islamophilic anti-bullying program. “Restorative Justice” is inspired by Marxist “group criticism.” It is not just a punishment for bad behavior, but a Communist technique to reprogram the young impressionable student’s mind in the way they think. Group criticism is a technique, which has long been used by Communist brain-washers and re-education specialists to make independent thinkers conform to group dogma. It is the SDUSB that is actually bullying very young school children, in order to control their thoughts and speech, by indoctrinating them in Islamic Religion, Marxism philosophy, and an Anti-American curriculum where patriotism has been minimized.

The SDUSB is employing Common Core, instituted by Obama. Over the last 8 years Common Core has eliminated most historic Patriotic references in their history books, eliminated references & stories about the Founding Fathers in the curriculum, and failed to teach the analysis of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. US History as it was once taught, for the most part has been removed from grammar and Junior High School curriculum, resulting in millions of graduates with very little knowledge of US History.

The SDUSB is controlled by 5 radical Marxist ideologues. They would not call themselves that, of course, but voters should watch what they have been doing to the school children’s classroom curriculum. Last year they approved a program for all schools in (cultural Marxist) ethnic studies. The votes of the SDUSB demonstrates that they are sympathetic with radical Marxist ideologues.

The President of the SDUSB, Marne Foster, was removed from the Board for criminal corruption, yet all 5 members voted to honor her with a proclamation—that fact should be reason enough to remove all 5 members of the SDUSB from office. Despite the fact that the budget is $134 million in the red, the 5 inept SDUSB members voted to give across the board pay raises to every teacher and all employees. The 5 members of the SDUSB have repeatedly demonstrated their inept financial management and their inability to manage billions of taxpayer dollars; they have effectively bankrupted the city schools.

The 5 member SDUSB have been promoting anti-Christian religious, and anti-Jewish religious policies, and have violated a Supreme Court ruling that prevents teaching religion in Public Schools. The Board’s vote to partner with the CAIR Terrorist Organization, in order to force feed, and indoctrinate millions of very young students with the teachings of Islam, and brow beat them into being compliant with Sharia Law, is in a violation of “Establishment Clause” the US Constitution. The First Amendment prohibits a government agency from attempting to effect a secular goal by the propagation of religious concepts.

It also appears that there are allegation against the School Board for “covering up” the sexual assault on students in city schools, some of the students are as young as 5 years of age. American parents who want to protect their children in the San Diego Schools from bullying by the SDUSB members should attend the May 16th School Board meeting, as their first step in initiating a recall election for every Board member.

The SDUSB should consist of American Patriots who understand generally accepted financial practices, who will no longer partner with a Radical Islamic Terrorist organization to force feed the indoctrination of Islam into the minds of millions of very young Christian and Jewish children, and who will protect and defend the US Constitution, not try to install Sharia Law in the United States to replace the US Constitution.

There are thousands of US Marine Corps, US Navy, and US Army Veterans residing in San Diego who repeatedly put their lives on the line in combat against Radical Islamic Terrorists, who swore to protect and defend the US Constitution, understand generally accepted good financial practices, have been extremely successful managers of large budgets, and have supervised thousands of Military & civilian personnel—-one or more of those veterans should be elected to the SDUSB in a recall election.

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. The material can only posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author.

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USN(Ret)/Former FBI

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

Cell: (310) 989-8778

Fax: (619) 220-0109

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USN(Ret)/Former FBI

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

Cell: (310) 989-8778

Fax: (619) 220-0109

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8

Itemized below are 83 of the 194 Radical Islamic Terrorists attacks on US soil perpetrated since 9/11, by Jihadist, by Muslim refugees, by descendants of Muslim refugees, by Islamists who were radicalized thru the Internet, or Radical Islamic Terrorists who traveled to Syria and Africa to train with ISIS, Al Q’ieda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The countries of origins from which many of the Radical Islamic Terrorists have been entering the US thru the UN Refugee Resettlement Program, and have been killing and raping Americans for 8 years, are Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iran, and Libya. Except for Iran, those countries had effectively no control over the identity of terrorists operating and training within their country’s borders.

The Radical Islamic Terrorist perpetrated attacks on US soil in Sacramento (CA), Houston (TX), Morganton (NC), Philadelphia (PA), San Bernardino (CA), Times Square (NYC), Chelsea Area of Manhattan, Moore (OK), Detroit (MI), Boise (ID), Orlando (FL), West Orange (NJ), Fort Hood (TX), Portland (ME), Chattanooga (TN), Garland (TX), Boston (MA), Portland (OR), Minneapolis (MN), St Cloud (MN), Buffalo (NY), Jonesboro (GA), Ashtabula (OH), Bingham (NY), Glendale (AZ), Phoenix (AZ), Little Rock (AR), Merced (CA), Marquette Park (IL), Fresno (CA), Seattle (WA), Skyway (WA), Denver (CO), Aspen Hill (MD), Baltimore (MD), Oakland (CA), Fresno (Arlington (VA), Fredricksburg (VA), Montgomery County (MO), St Louis (MO), Bowling Green (KY), Scottsville,(NY), Richmond (CA), Washington (DC), Irving (TX), Port Bolivar (TX), Warren (MI), Waltham (MA), Manassas (VA), Buena Vista (NJ), Baton Rouge (LA), Montgomery (AL), Aberdeen, (SD), Chicago (IL), Los Angeles (CA), Hamden, (CT), Colorado Springs (CO), Denver (CO), Niskayuna (NY), Twin Falls (ID). and many other US cities too numerous to be listed here.

After each Radical Islamic Terrorist instigated attack, the identity of the attackers were covered up by the Obama administration and the Muslim Brotherhood for 8 years, working in concert with the left of center liberal media establishment to mislead Americans about who perpetrated the 194 terrorist attacks or threats to injure Americans in the US. They used politically correct language to cover up the identity of the Radical Islamic Terrorists who repeatedly murdered Americans for the last 8 years. It was a continuing conspiracy that resulted in the injury and murder of hundreds of American citizens, the cover up undermined the National Security of the United States! The FBI is evaluating 1000 open cases on potential plots to kill Americans in all 50 states, and uncovered 83 Radical Islamic Terrorist plots, 37 of them were ISIS plots to kill or injure Americans in the United States. A percentage of the 83 uncovered plots to kill or injure America by potential terrorists can be attributed to some of the 900,000+ Middle East and African Muslim Refugees Obama resettlement in 187 cities throughout the US over an 8 year period.

The foreign nationals listed below executed 83 Radical Islamic Terrorists attacks and attempted support for ISIS designed to injure or kill American citizens in the above listed US cities during the last 8 years, and is a partial list of the 194 Radical Islamic Terrorist incidents perpetrated in US cities by Radical Islamic Terrorists since 9/11:

Bilal Abood was a translator who came here on an Special Immigration Visa for Iraqi nationals who provided services for American Forces. He even briefly joined the US Army. On the surface he was exactly the sort of Iraqi Refugee that the media likes to depict as the ideal immigrant, but Abood was also a member of ISIS. When he was arrested, he insisted “America was the enemy of Allah”.
Jasim Mohammed Hasin Ramadon and Ali Mohammed Hasan Al Juboori came to this country with Special Immigration Visas. Then Ramadon, Juboori and three other Iraqi refugees brutally assaulted a 53-year-old Colorado Springs woman. When the police arrived at the scene of the Iraqi Refugee sexual assault, they found blood splattered on the walls. The Iraqi Refugee rapists lured in their victim by complaining about how hard it was living in America and being called terrorists. The victim, a night nurse, took pity on them because they reminded her of her son. By the time the Iraqi Refugees were done, she had been violated and left near death.
Abdullatif Ali Aldosary an Iraqi Refugee who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program set off a bomb outside a Social Security office in Phoenix, Arizona. The authorities found plenty of bomb making materials in his home. He was also accused of a murder that had taken place a few days before the bombing and had previously been sent to jail for harassment. His case had been put on hold for “terrorism-related grounds of inadmissibility”, but he still couldn’t be deported.
On April 18, 2017 Kori Ali Mohammad, age 39, a black suspect was taken into custody on Fulton Street in downtown Fresno, CA by police after firing 16 shots from a large caliber handgun, killing 3 white males; he shouted “Allah Akbar”, and declared a hatred for white people when taken into custody. On April 13th he shot and killed a white security guard at a Motel 6 in Fresno.
On April 12, 2017 the Chicago FBI Field Office and Joint Terrorist Task Force arrested and charged Chicago based Edward Schimenti and Joseph Jones for attempting to provide material support and resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist Organization (FTO).
On March 3, 2017 Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan came here from Iraq as a refugee thru the UN Refugee Program. When the FBI searched his Houston apartment, agents found an ISIS flag. Hardan had been planning to leave bombs in the trash cans of two Houston malls. He had contemplated an attack on the Grand Prairie military base in Texas.
On February 14, 2017, 35 year old Adam Nauveed Hyat of Pakistani descent and a former Marine wrote “Explosives” on a closet door mirror in a Denver, CO Sheraton Downtown Hotel, leading police to find pipe bombs after running up a bill of $10,000 at the hotel; guests were removed from the hotel while the pipe bombs were defused. After flying to Los Angeles on February 17th, Hyat was tracked down and arrested, armed with knives, near the Los Angeles Airport. Adam’s father, Sultan Hyat, said his son has mental problems.
On January 31, 2017, 29 year old Ahmad Bahjat of New Haven, an Iraqi Refugee who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program, posing as Uber Driver, was arrested for raping a woman. The woman had left a New Haven bar and walked to a parking area designated for Uber and taxi drivers, according to Hamden Police who arrested him. Bahjat pretended to be an Uber driver and the woman got into his car, believing he was the Uber driver.
On November 28, 2016, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a 18 year old Somali refugee who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program drove his car into a crowd students on the campus of Ohio State University, then got out of his car and attacked students with a butcher knife injuring 11.
On September 19, 2016 Ahmed Khan Rahimi, a 28 year old Afghani refugee, who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program. He traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to train as a Radical Islamic Terrorist and set off a bomb in the Chelsea District of Manhattan, NY. The explosion injured 29 people; he was arrested after a shootout with Police Officers in Linden, New Jersey, where he wounded two police officers. Ahmed was charged with 5 counts of murder. Earlier in the day, he set off a pipe bomb in Seaside Park, New Jersey; five other bombs were found at his residence.
On September 17, 2016 Dar Ahmed Adnan, a Somali refugee who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program perpetrated a knife attack on 9 shoppers at the St Cloud Crossroads Mall in Minnesota, and was shot to death by an off duty St Cloud police Officer.
In July 8, 2016, Abdirhman Ahmed Noor, a 24 year4 old refugee from Somalia, who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program, jumped bail and remains at large after being charged with 2 counts of attempted murder in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Noor chased two men down, firing at them. One man, Dar’na Tansmore, was hit and laid wounded on the ground when Noor allegedly walked up, stood over his victim and shot him again. Lutheran Social Services South Dakota has been paid by the federal government to resettle 947 Somali refugees in South Dakota since 2002.
On June 12, 2016, Omar Saddiqul Mateen, the son of Afghan refugees, massacred 49 gentle & innocent Americans, and wounded 53 others, in the Orlando night club, Pulse, in the deadliest mass shooting in US history.
On June 2, 2016, one Sudanese refugee boy 14, and two Iraqi refugee boys, aged 7 and 10, lured a special needs 5 year old girl, Jayla Peterson, stripped her naked. then savagely raped her under knife point, in the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls, Idaho; they then urinated in her mouth. An alert 89 year old retired nurse, Jaylene Payne, interrupted the attack when she saw all three of the refugees boys with their clothes off. The three refuges boys pleaded guilty to committing, aiding in committing, and acting as an accessory in committing a felony.
On March 24, 2016 seven Iranians working on behalf of the Iranian Government were indicted for a series of cyber-crimes that cost US financial institutions tens of millions of dollars and compromised critical controls of a New York Dam.
On February 16, 2016, a court magistrate ruled, after hearing the FBI testimony, that Khalil Abu-Rayyan, a 21 year old Iraqi man from Dearborn, MI, who is a son of an Iraqi Refugee. He was considered too much of a threat to public safety and was ordered held without bail. He got excited by thoughts of beheading Americans, burning people alive, and throwing homosexuals off of tall buildings. In conversations with an undercover FBI agent, he actually made plans to shoot 6,000 member of a Christian Church in Detroit. (If I) can’t go do Jihad at the Middle East, I would do my Jihad over here.” He also told the agent that “shooting and death make me excited. I love to hear people begging and screaming. … I wish I had my gun.” The FBI claims that since 2014, Abu-Rayyan used Twitter for “retweeting, liking and commenting” on Islamic State propaganda.
On February 12, 2016 a machete wielding assailant known to the FBI, identified as Mohammad Barry, a Somali refugee who entered the US on the UN Refugee Program, living in Ohio attacked Jewish and Christian patrons at a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, wounding four people. Witnesses said it was carnage. Some of the patrons fought back by throwing chairs. Police later shot and killed Barry after a short chase. Investigators are trying to determine if Barry attacked the Nazareth Mediterranean Restaurant because he thought the owner was Jewish. In actuality, the restaurant is owned by an Israeli Christian.
In Philadelphia, PA, Edward Archer, a 30 year old Jihadi, who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, opened fire in the name of Islam, on Philadelphia Police Officer Jessie Hartnett, who was ambushed sitting in his car on January 8, 2016. Archer fired 11 shots and hit the Officer Hartnett three times, grievously wounding the officer; the officer returned fire and hit Archer three times.
In an unrelated case, also on January 7, 2016, Omar Faraj Saeed al Hardan, an Iraqi Refugee, was arrested in Houston, TX on charges of providing material support to ISIS and going thru terrorist training.
On January 7, 2016, Aws Mohammad Younis Al-Jayab, a Palestine born Iraqi, was arrested in Sacramento, CA on charges of assisting Jihadi organizations.
In December 2015, a Somali-American was arrested after encouraging several friends to leave the United States and join ISIS, and giving one individual over $200 for their passport application.
The son of an Pakistani immigrant Syed Rizwan Farouk, and Tashfeen Malik, who entered the United States on a fiancé visa thru Canada as Syed’s bride, and subsequently became a Lawful Permanent Resident, along with her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, who pledged allegiance to ISIS, killed 14 people at a Christmas Party in San Bernardino, CA on December 2, 2015 , and wounded 22 others, in the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since September 11, 2001. They were recruited to their jihad by a Muslim Somali refugee who has now moved to Syria, but continues to recruit Jihadist in America using social media.
Five Bosnian Muslim refugees (in the same family) were arrested on November 18, 2015, two in Missouri, two in Illinois and one New York for sending arms and cash to ISIS.
In November 17, 2015 A Uzbek Muslim refugee in Boise, ID was convicted of plotting to bomb US military bases.
On November 4, 2015. 18 year old Faisal Mohammad who had a black ISIS flag in his possessions and a terrorist manifesto, stabbed 4 of his fellow student at U C Merced; police had to shoot him to stop his stabbing spree. He had pro-ISIS propaganda on his computer. The FBI said he was a self-radicalized Islamic Jihadist.
A second Immigrant from India, who is married to a US citizen, who was indicted on charges of conspiring to provide thousands of dollars to Al Q’ieda in the Arabian Peninsula, in order to assist them in their global Jihad, and on one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud (November 2015)
On October 1, 2015, Chris Harper Mercer, a black Islamist terrorist who traveled to Syria in September 2015, to train with ISIS, and was identified as a Radical Islamic Terrorist by the Russian Security Service, executed a mass shooting on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Rosebud, Oregon killed 9 people and wounded 7 others. He was associated with Mahmoud Ali Ehsani, but the Obama administration refused to accept the referral from the Russian Security Service, and when he returned from Syria in September, he wasn’t arrested, so he perpetrated his mass shooting. He was shot to death by Police Officers
An immigrant from Egypt, who subsequently was granted U.S. citizenship, was charged with providing, and conspiring to provide, material support to ISIS, for aiding and abetting a New York college student in receiving terrorist training from ISIS, and conspiring to receive such training. (August 2015)
An immigrant from Albania, who applied for and received Lawful Permanent Resident status, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for giving over $1,000 to terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, and for attempting to join a radical jihadist insurgent group in Pakistan. (August 2015)
A refugee from Uzbekistan was convicted of providing material support and money to a designated foreign terrorist organization. According to the Department of Justice, he also procured bomb-making materials in the interest of perpetrating a terrorist attack on American soil. (August 2015)
On August 14, 2015 three Somali Muslims, Mohamud Mohamed, 36, and Osman Sheikh, 31, Abil Teshome, 23, brutally beat and murdered Freddy Akoa, 49 a Christian in Portland, ME. The attack allegedly took place over the span of several hours, in which Akoa suffered cuts and bruises all over his body, a lacerated liver and 22 rib fractures. However, according to the autopsy, Akoa died as a result of blows to his head.
On August 12, 2015, a 39 year old Muslim Somali refugee, Libyan Mohamed, was sentence to three years in prison for attempted sexual assault on a 31 year old severely mentally handicapped woman sitting outside at a group home for the disabled in Aberdeen, South Dakota
Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez murdered five US Armed Forces (1 Navy and 4 Marines) in Chattanooga, TN in July 2015. Mohammad was an immigrant brought here by his family from Kuwait at a young age, and who was later approved for U.S. citizenship, who carried out the Islamist attack that killed the 5 military personnel in Chattanooga.
An Uzbek refugee living in Idaho was arrested and charged with providing support to a terrorist organization, in the form of teaching terror recruits how to build bombs. (July 2015)
An immigrant from Sudan, who applied and received US citizenship, tried to join ISIS and wage Jihad on its behalf after having been recruited on line(June 2015).
An immigrant from Ghana, who applied for and received US citizenship, pledged allegiance to ISIS and plotted a terrorist attack on the US soil (June 2015).
On May 3, 2015 an attack with gunfire was carried by two Radical Islamic Terrorists followers of ISIS at the entrance to the Curtis Culwell Center, in Garland, TX featuring cartoon images of Mohammad—both were shot and killed by a police officer. Just prior to the attack one of the gunmen posted “May Allah accept us as Mujahedeen”—he wrote both pledged allegiance to “Amirul Mu’mineen”, a likely reference to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
An Iraqi immigrant, who later applied for and received US citizenship, was arrested for lying to federal agents about pledging allegiance to ISIS and his travel to Syria (May 2015)
The Somali refugee who recruited the San Bernardino killers also recruited the jihadist who attacked the Garland, TX “Draw Mohammad” contest in May 2015, fled the United States.
On April 20, 2015, Six Somalian Muslim refugees were arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota for attempting to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State and fight for ISIS.
An immigrant from Saudi Arabia, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, swore allegiance to ISIS and pledged to explode a propane tank bomb on U.S. soil. (April 2015).
An immigrant from Yemen, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, along with six other men, was charged with conspiracy to travel to Syria and to provide material support to ISIS. (April 2015).
A Uzbek man in Brooklyn encouraged other Uzbeki nationals to wage Jihad on behalf of ISIS, and raised $1,600 for the terror organization. (April 2015)
An immigrant from Syria, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, was accused by federal prosecutors of planning to rob a gun store to “go to a military base in Texas and kill three or four American soldiers execution style.” (April 2015)
A Kazakhstani immigrant with lawful permanent resident status conspired to purchase a machine gun to shoot FBI and other law enforcement agents if they prevented him from traveling to Syria to join ISIS. (February 2015)
A Bosnian refugee, along with his wife and five others, donated money and supplies, and smuggled arms, to terrorist organizations in Syria and Iraq. (February 2015)
On December 18, 2014 an radicalized ISIS supporter in Morganton, NC shot a 74 year old man in the head multiple times.
On December 14, 2014, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, born to a Muslim African American family, executed two NYC police officers as they sat in their patrol car. Brinsley is reported to have approached the two officers as they were sitting in their patrol car in the notorious crime ridden Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York and began firing rounds into the vehicle before fleeing on foot to the closest subway station where he later committed suicide.
Two Bosnian Muslim refugee in Portland, Oregon was arrested in November 21, 2014 for trying to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
In September 30, 2014, ex-con Alton Nolan, a Muslim convert, a proponent of Sharia Law, who was radicalized to Islam behind bars, wielding a knife, beheaded a female employee, Colleen Hufford, at the Vaughn Foods processing plant in Moor, OK, and was prevented from beheading a second female employee by the company COO, who shot Nolan to stop his rampage.
An immigrant from Afghanistan, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, and a legal permanent resident from the Philippines, were convicted for “join Al Q’ieda and the Taliban in order to kill Americans.” (September 2014)
Five Somali Muslim refugees were charged in July 2014 with fundraising for jihadi groups in Africa.
A Somali immigrant with lawful permanent resident status, along with four other Somali nationals, is charged with leading an al-Shabaab fundraising conspiracy in the United States, with monthly payments directed to the Somali terrorist organization. (July 2014)
An immigrant from Bangladesh, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, tried to incite people to travel to Somalia and conduct violent jihad against the United States. (June 2014)
On June 25, 2014 Ali Muhammad Brown, age 29, a devout Muslim, gunned down Brendan Brown, age 19, in Livingston, NJ. Ali said it was an act of retribution for US Military actions against Muslims in Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
On June,1, 2014, Ali Muhammed Brown confessed to the murder of a 30 year old man on April 27th. in Skyway, WA.
A Moroccan national who came to the U.S. on a student visa was arrested for plotting to blow up a university and a federal court house. (April 2014).
On April 3, 2014, Salam Al Haideri a 24 year old Iraqi Refugee from Niskayuna, NY who entered the US thru the UN Refugee program. He raped a 19 year old 4’11 teenager behind a “I Love NY” pizza place dumpster while slamming her head into the ground. The Iraqi Refugee’s 96-pound teenage victim was left with broken ribs and a fractured nose. Al Haideri was the third refugee to be convicted of a sex crime in the area. He was found guilty of aggravated assault and rape and was sentenced to 22 years to life.
On March 6, 2014 a Muslim man shoots his lesbian daughter and her lover to death a leave a copy of the Quran open to a page condemning homosexuality.
A college student who immigrated from Somalia, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, attempted to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Oregon. (Dec 2013)
On August 4, 2013 in Richmond, CA a radicalized Islamist convert “on a mission from Allah” stabbed a store clerk to death.
On April 19, 2013 in Boston, MA a Radical Islamic Terrorist, the Tsarnaev brothers (the Boston Marathon Bombers) gunned down a University police officer sitting in his car
The April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev; those brothers and their family were Muslim refugees. -The Boston Bombers were granted political asylum and were thus deemed legitimate refugees. The younger brother applied for citizenship and was naturalized on September 11th, 2012. The older brother had a pending application for citizenship.
On March 24, 2013 in Ashtabula, OH a Muslim convert walks into a church service Quran, and guns down his Christian father while praising Allah
On February 7, 2013 in Buena Vista, NJ a Muslim man beheaded two Coptic Christians Immigrants.
On November 11, 2012 in Houston, TX a 28 year old American man is shot to death by a radical Muslim over an alleged role of converting a woman to Christianity.
In September 15, 2012, Amine El Khalifi, and al Q’ieda Radical Islamic Terrorist plotted to do a suicide bombing of the US Capital.
On February 18, 2012, two Radical Islamic Terrorists from Pakistan, who later applied for and received US Citizenship, were apprehended trying to detonate a bomb in New York City
On January 1, 2012 in Houston TX a 30 year old Muslim convert to Christianity is shot to death by a devout Muslim for converting his daughter to Christianity
On September 11, 2011 in Waltham, MA three Jewish men have their throats cut by Radical Islamic Terrorists.
Two Al Qaeda members from Iraq who had spent years in Iraq using IEDs and participated in attacks that killed American soldiers (their fingerprints were recovered from IEDs). Mohamed Hammadi age 25 and Walid Alwan age 31, were arrested in Bowling Green, KY on May 25, 2011 while living in public housing and were receiving public assistance; both entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program as Iraqi refugees! Hammadi was recorded in a telephone conversation plotting a terrorist attack in the US. They were both convicted of terrorism and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
On April 30, 2011 Mohammad Alfatlawi a proponent of Sharia Law was charged with the “Honor Killing” of his wife and daughter in Detroit, Michigan.
In May 4, 2010 Faisal Shahzad conducted a terrorist car bombing plot in Times Square that failed.
In December 25, 2009, the bombing terror plot to kill 290 innocent passengers on a flight from the Netherland to Detroit the Nigerian Radical Islamic Terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutlallab (aka the Underwear Bomber) failed to detonate on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 because the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned, and passengers were able to subdue him until he was arrested.
On December 4, 2009 in Bingham, NY a non-Muslim Islamic Studies professor is stabbed to death by a Muslim graduate student in revenge for Muslims who have been persecuted.
On November 5, 2009, Maj Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 US Army soldiers and wounded 32 others in Fort Hood while yelling “Allah Akbar” at the top of his lungs—Obama insisted it was simply “Work Place Violence” and not a Radical Islamic terrorist attack by a disciple of Anwar Al-Awlaki. Prior to the shooting, in his previous assignment as an intern and resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center his colleagues and superiors were deeply concerned about his behavior and anti-American comments—but because they were cowered by the Obama’s administration’s warnings and perceived threats to their military standing, that they better be “politically correct’ and not disparage such anti-American comments—nothing was done to drum that Radical Islamic Terrorist out of the US Armed Forces.
On November 2, 2009 in Glendale, AZ a Muslim daughter dies from injuries suffered when her Muslim father runs her over with his car for being too “Westernized.”
On June 1, 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a convert to Islam, who had gone to Yemen in 2007 and stayed for about 16 months, open fire on a Little Rock, Arkansas US Armed Forces Recruiting Office in a drive by shooting with a rifle, against a group of US Army Soldiers standing in front of the Recruiting Office. He killed Private William Long and wounded Private Quinton Ezeagwula; he was given 11 consecutive life sentences.
On April 12, 2009 in Phoenix, AZ a Muslim man shoots his Muslim brother-in-law and another man to death, after he finds out that they visited a strip club in contradiction to Islamic values.
On February12, 2009 in Buffalo, NY a Muslim founder of a Muslim TV Station beheads his wife in the hallway of the TV Station for seeking a divorce.
On July 6, 2008 in Jonesboro, GA a devout Muslim man strangles his 25 year old daughter in an honor killing.

[In recent Senate Hearings, Susan Yates, Esq., former acting AG, supported her position of not representing Pres. Trump’s travel ban by citing to her concern over constitutional issues re discrimination by religion. She, as most politicians and media empty heads, have not read the Qu’Ran. Posted elsewhere on this blog are over one hundred direct citations from the Qu’Ran. According to the definition of a Hate Group, as established by the federal Hate Crimes Act, Islam is the Satanic Cult of the pedophile Mohammed to worship the Arab Moon god, god of Darkness, Allah.

Beware! Recently reported, then shushed, a Detroit doctor was discovered performing female genital mutilation surgery on young Muslim girls. Where is NOW? Where is Elizabeth Warren? Where is Hillary? Where is Pelosi? Where is Feinstien? Where are the university academics?

Y’all are, hopefully, forwarding these to your elected officials, municipal, county, state, and federal. Overwhelm their inboxes. Get active in Tea Party and Freedom Caucus politicians.

God Bless America!]

March 28, 2017

UN Amb Haley Statement, by Joseph John, Capt USN [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Econonics, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, gun control, Historical context, Iran, Islam, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism, self-defense, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 3:18 pm

Joseph R. John
To jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org
Today at 8:55 AM

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley’s Statement At The UN And A major Change That Must Take Place

By Capt Joseph R. John, March 28, 2017: Op Ed # 342

If you click on the below listed link, you will be able to view President Donald J. Trump’s UN Ambassador, Niki Haley make a short statement at the UN. Israel recently entered into a defensive alliance with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.

The defensive alliance was prompted by the Obama administrations very dangerous Nuclear Weapons Agreement with Iran, which is allowing Iran to develop an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that will be able to strike the US, with a nuclear weapon, the Obama administration allowed them to develop.

https://www.facebook.com/plugi ns/video.php?href=https%3A%2F% 2Fwww.facebook.com%2Funwatch% 2Fvideos%2F10154172073611561% 2F&show_text=0&width=560

After 8 years, the United States has a frank & responsible UN Ambassador who will ensure that Israel is treated in the same manner as every other member nation!

The US Congress should terminate all funding for the UN Middle East and African “Muslin Only” Refugee & Resettlement Program, controlled by representatives from 43 majority Muslim member nations and members of the Muslim Brotherhood in leadership positions in the UN. The UN Refugee & Resettlement Program has been discriminating against 300,000 Middle East Syrian and Assyrian Christian Refugees being housed by the Greek Catholic Relief Agency for the last 8 years. That UN Program, funded by the Obama administration, has been involved in an ongoing violation of the US Constitutions’ “Freedom of Religion” and US Federal Laws.

For the last 8 years, hundreds of thousands of Middle East Christians have been murdered by ISIS, Al Q’ieda, and the Muslim Brotherhood genocide. They have been crucified, burned alive, beheaded, drowned in cages, shot in the back of the head, throw to their deaths from the roofs of tall buildings, buried alive, their children have been cut in half, their female children &women of all ages have been raped, and they have been sold into slavery.

Yet the Muslim UN Administrators of UN Refugee Relief & Resettlement Program refused to allow any of the 300,000 Middle East Christians refugees being housed by the Greek Catholic Relief Agency from entering the US thru the UN’s corrupt program, which has been funded for 8 years, to the tune of billions of US taxpayer dollars, by the Obama administration.

At the same time, Obama accepted over 900,000 Middle East Muslim Refugees thru the corrupt UN Refugee Relief & Resettlement Program. Then they were resettled in 187 cities across the nation, while refusing to allow the FBI to interview them, to determine if they have terrorist ties, while at the same time, preventing local, county, state, and Federal Law Enforcement Agencies from knowing where those un-vetted Muslim refugees were resettled.

Despite a petitions by 56 US Congressmen from both sides of the aisle, who pleaded with the Obama administration to provide Syrian and Assyrian Christians suffering genocide, with self-defensive small arms weapons, so they could protect their families from the on-going genocide, Obama refused to authorize the delivery of small arms weapons for self-defense.

The net result of the corrupt UN Refugee & Relief Resettlement Program is that there have been 82 terrorist incidents and attacks on Americans in the US over the last 8 years, killing hundreds of Americans citizens, listed in the attachment. Those attacks, for the last 8 years, were covered up by the left of center liberal media establishment, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were in senior appointive positions in The White House, the Justice Department, the State Department, and in DHS. That corrupt UN Refugee Resettlement Program, which violated the US Constitution and US Federal Laws, must be defunded by Congress.

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. The material can only posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author.

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USN(Ret)/Former FBI

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8

Itemized below are 82 of the 192 Radical Islamic Terrorists attacks on US soil perpetrated since 9/11, by Jihadist, by Muslim refugees, by descendants of Muslim refugees, by Islamists who were radicalized thru the Internet, or Radical Islamic Terrorists who traveled to train with ISIS in Syria. The Radical Islamic Terrorist’s countries of origins were primarily the countries of Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iran, and Libya; except for Iran, those countries had little control over the identity of terrorists operating and training within their countries.

The terrorist attacks on US soil, occurred in Sacramento (CA), Houston (TX), Morganton (NC), Philadelphia (PA), San Bernardino (CA), Times Square (NYC), Moore (OK), Detroit (MI), Boise (ID), Orlando (FL), West Orange (NJ), Fort Hood (TX), Portland (ME), Chattanooga (TN), Garland (TX), Boston (MA), Portland (OR), Minneapolis (MN), Buffalo (NY), Jonesboro (GA), Ashtabula (OH), Bingham (NY), Glendale (AZ), Phoenix (AZ), Little Rock (AR), Merced (CA), Marquette Park (IL), Seattle (WA), Skyway (WA), Denver (CO), Aspen Hill (MD), Baltimore (MD), Oakland (CA), Arlington (VA), Fredricksburg (VA), Montgomery County (MO), St Louis (MO), Bowling Green (KY), Scottsville,(NY), Richmond (CA), Washington (DC), Irving (TX), Port Bolivar (TX), Warren (MI), Waltham (MA), Manassas (VA), Buena Vista (NJ), Baton Rouge (LA), Montgomery (AL), Aberdeen, (SD), Hamden, (CT), Colorado Springs (CO), Denver (CO), Niskayuna (NY), Twin Falls (ID). and many other cities too numerous to be listed here.

After each Radical Islamic Terrorist instigated attack, the identity of the attackers were covered up by the Obama administration for 8 years, working in concert with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the left of center liberal media establishment to mislead Americans of the 192 terrorist attacks. They used politically correct language to cover up the identity of the Radical Islamic Terrorists who repeatedly murdered Americans. It was a continuing conspiracy that resulted in the injury and murder of hundreds of American citizens and the cover up undermined the National Security of the United States!

The foreign nationals listed below executed 80 Radical Islamic Terrorists attacks against American citizens in the above listed US cities during the 8 years of the Obama administration, and is a partial list of the 192 Radical Islamic Terrorist attacks perpetrated in US cities by Radical Islamic Terrorists since 9/11:

Bilal Abood was a translator who came here on an Special Immigration Visa for Iraqi nationals who provided services for American Forces. He even briefly joined the US Army. On the surface he was exactly the sort of Iraqi Refugee that the media likes to depict as the ideal immigrant, but Abood was also a member of ISIS. When he was arrested, he insisted “America was the enemy of Allah”.
Jasim Mohammed Hasin Ramadon and Ali Mohammed Hasan Al Juboori came to this country with Special Immigration Visas. Then Ramadon, Juboori and three other Iraqi refugees brutally assaulted a 53-year-old Colorado Springs woman. When the police arrived at the scene of the Iraqi Refugee sexual assault, they found blood splattered on the walls. The Iraqi Refugee rapists lured in their victim by complaining about how hard it was living in America and being called terrorists. The victim, a night nurse, took pity on them because they reminded her of her son. By the time the Iraqi Refugees were done, she had been violated and left near death.
Abdullatif Ali Aldosary an Iraqi Refugee who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program set off a bomb outside a Social Security office in Phoenix, Arizona. The authorities found plenty of bomb making materials in his home. He was also accused of a murder that had taken place a few days before the bombing and had previously been sent to jail for harassment. His case had been put on hold for “terrorism-related grounds of inadmissibility”, but he still couldn’t be deported.
On March 3, 2017 Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan came here from Iraq as a refugee thru the UN Refugee Program. When the FBI searched his Houston apartment, agents found an ISIS flag. Hardan had been planning to leave bombs in the trash cans of two Houston malls. He had contemplated an attack on the Grand Prairie military base in Texas.
On February 14, 2017, 35 year old Adam Nauveed Hyat of Pakistani descent and a former Marine wrote “Explosives” on a closet door mirror in a Denver, CO Sheraton Downtown Hotel, leading police to find pipe bombs after running up a bill of $10,000 at the hotel; guests were removed from the hotel while the pipe bombs were defused. After flying to Los Angeles on February 17th, Hyat was tracked down and arrested, armed with knives, near the Los Angeles Airport. Adam’s father, Sultan Hyat, said his son has mental problems.
On January 31, 2017, 29 year old Ahmad Bahjat of New Haven, an Iraqi Refugee who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program, posing as Uber Driver, was arrested for raping a woman. The woman had left a New Haven bar and walked to a parking area designated for Uber and taxi drivers, according to Hamden Police who arrested him. Bahjat pretended to be an Uber driver and the woman got into his car, believing he was the Uber driver.
On November 28, 2016, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a 18 year old Somali refugee who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program drove his car into a crowd students on the campus of Ohio State University, then got out of his car and attacked students with a butcher knife injuring 11.
On September 19, 2016 Ahmed Khan Rahimi, a 28 year old Afghani refugee, who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program. He traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to train as a Radical Islamic Terrorist and set off a bomb in the Chelsea District of Manhattan, NY. The explosion injured 29 people; he was arrested after a shootout with Police Officers in Linden, New Jersey, where he wounded two police officers. Ahmed was charged with 5 counts of murder. Earlier in the day, he set off a pipe bomb in Seaside Park, New Jersey; five other bombs were found at his residence.
On September 17, 2016 Dar Ahmed Adnan, a Somali refugee who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program perpetrated a knife attack on 9 shoppers at the St Cloud Crossroads Mall in Minnesota, and was shot to death by an off duty St Cloud police Officer.
In July 8, 2016, Abdirhman Ahmed Noor, a 24 year4 old refugee from Somalia, who entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program, jumped bail and remains at large after being charged with 2 counts of attempted murder in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Noor chased two men down, firing at them. One man, Dar’na Tansmore, was hit and laid wounded on the ground when Noor allegedly walked up, stood over his victim and shot him again. Lutheran Social Services South Dakota has been paid by the federal government to resettle 947 Somali refugees in South Dakota since 2002.
On June 12, 2016, Omar Saddiqul Mateen, the son of Afghan refugees, massacred 49 gentle & innocent Americans, and wounded 53 others, in the Orlando night club, Pulse, in the deadliest mass shooting in US history.
On June 2, 2016, one Sudanese refugee boy 14, and two Iraqi refugee boys, aged 7 and 10, stripped a 5 year old special needs girl naked and savagely raped her under knife point in the laundry room of the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls, Idaho. An alert 89 year old retired nurse, Jaylene Payne, interrupted the attack when she saw all three of the refugees boys with their clothes off.
On March 24, 2016 seven Iranians working on behalf of the Iranian Government were indicted for a series of cyber-crimes that cost US financial institutions tens of millions of dollars and compromised critical controls of a New York Dam.
On February 16, 2016, a court magistrate ruled, after hearing the FBI testimony, that Khalil Abu-Rayyan, a 21 year old Iraqi man from Dearborn, MI, who is a son of an Iraqi Refugee. He was considered too much of a threat to public safety and was ordered held without bail. He got excited by thoughts of beheading Americans, burning people alive, and throwing homosexuals off of tall buildings. In conversations with an undercover FBI agent, he actually made plans to shoot 6,000 member of a Christian Church in Detroit. (If I) can’t go do Jihad at the Middle East, I would do my Jihad over here.” He also told the agent that “shooting and death make me excited. I love to hear people begging and screaming. … I wish I had my gun.” The FBI claims that since 2014, Abu-Rayyan used Twitter for “retweeting, liking and commenting” on Islamic State propaganda.
On February 12, 2016 a machete wielding assailant known to the FBI, identified as Mohammad Barry, a Somali refugee who entered the US on the UN Refugee Program, living in Ohio attacked Jewish and Christian patrons at a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, wounding four people. Witnesses said it was carnage. Some of the patrons fought back by throwing chairs. Police later shot and killed Barry after a short chase. Investigators are trying to determine if Barry attacked the Nazareth Mediterranean Restaurant because he thought the owner was Jewish. In actuality, the restaurant is owned by an Israeli Christian.
In Philadelphia, PA, Edward Archer, a 30 year old Jihadi, who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, opened fire in the name of Islam, on Philadelphia Police Officer Jessie Hartnett, who was ambushed sitting in his car on January 8, 2016. Archer fired 11 shots and hit the Officer Hartnett three times, grievously wounding the officer; the officer returned fire and hit Archer three times.
In an unrelated case, also on January 7, 2016, Omar Faraj Saeed al Hardan, an Iraqi Refugee, was arrested in Houston, TX on charges of providing material support to ISIS and going thru terrorist training.
On January 7, 2016, Aws Mohammad Younis Al-Jayab, a Palestine born Iraqi, was arrested in Sacramento, CA on charges of assisting Jihadi organizations.
In December 2015, a Somali-American was arrested after encouraging several friends to leave the United States and join ISIS, and giving one individual over $200 for their passport application.
The son of an Pakistani immigrant Syed Rizwan Farouk, and Tashfeen Malik, who entered the United States on a fiancé visa thru Canada as Syed’s bride, and subsequently became a Lawful Permanent Resident, along with her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, who pledged allegiance to ISIS, killed 14 people at a Christmas Party in San Bernardino, CA on December 2, 2015 , and wounded 22 others, in the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since September 11, 2001. They were recruited to their jihad by a Muslim Somali refugee who has now moved to Syria, but continues to recruit Jihadist in America using social media.
Five Bosnian Muslim refugees (in the same family) were arrested on November 18, 2015, two in Missouri, two in Illinois and one New York for sending arms and cash to ISIS.
In November 17, 2015 A Uzbek Muslim refugee in Boise, ID was convicted of plotting to bomb US military bases.
On November 4, 2015. 18 year old Faisal Mohammad who had a black ISIS flag in his possessions and a terrorist manifesto, stabbed 4 of his fellow student at U C Merced; police had to shoot him to stop his stabbing spree. He had pro-ISIS propaganda on his computer. The FBI said he was a self-radicalized Islamic Jihadist.
A second Immigrant from India, who is married to a US citizen, who was indicted on charges of conspiring to provide thousands of dollars to Al Q’ieda in the Arabian Peninsula, in order to assist them in their global Jihad, and on one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud (November 2015)
On October 1, 2015, Chris Harper Mercer, a black Islamist terrorist who traveled to Syria in September 2015, to train with ISIS, and was identified as a Radical Islamic Terrorist by the Russian Security Service, executed a mass shooting on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Rosebud, Oregon killed 9 people and wounded 7 others. He was associated with Mahmoud Ali Ehsani, but the Obama administration refused to accept the referral from the Russian Security Service, and when he returned from Syria in September, he wasn’t arrested, so he perpetrated his mass shooting. He was shot to death by Police Officers
An immigrant from Egypt, who subsequently was granted U.S. citizenship, was charged with providing, and conspiring to provide, material support to ISIS, for aiding and abetting a New York college student in receiving terrorist training from ISIS, and conspiring to receive such training. (August 2015)
An immigrant from Albania, who applied for and received Lawful Permanent Resident status, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for giving over $1,000 to terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, and for attempting to join a radical jihadist insurgent group in Pakistan. (August 2015)
A refugee from Uzbekistan was convicted of providing material support and money to a designated foreign terrorist organization. According to the Department of Justice, he also procured bomb-making materials in the interest of perpetrating a terrorist attack on American soil. (August 2015)
On August 14, 2015 three Somali Muslims, Mohamud Mohamed, 36, and Osman Sheikh, 31, Abil Teshome, 23, brutally beat and murdered Freddy Akoa, 49 a Christian in Portland, ME. The attack allegedly took place over the span of several hours, in which Akoa suffered cuts and bruises all over his body, a lacerated liver and 22 rib fractures. However, according to the autopsy, Akoa died as a result of blows to his head.
On August 12, 2015, a 39 year old Muslim Somali refugee, Libyan Mohamed, was sentence to three years in prison for attempted sexual assault on a 31 year old severely mentally handicapped woman sitting outside at a group home for the disabled in Aberdeen, South Dakota
Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez murdered five US Armed Forces (1 Navy and 4 Marines) in Chattanooga, TN in July 2015. Mohammad was an immigrant brought here by his family from Kuwait at a young age, and who was later approved for U.S. citizenship, who carried out the Islamist attack that killed the 5 military personnel in Chattanooga.
An Uzbek refugee living in Idaho was arrested and charged with providing support to a terrorist organization, in the form of teaching terror recruits how to build bombs. (July 2015)
An immigrant from Sudan, who applied and received US citizenship, tried to join ISIS and wage Jihad on its behalf after having been recruited on line(June 2015).
An immigrant from Ghana, who applied for and received US citizenship, pledged allegiance to ISIS and plotted a terrorist attack on the US soil (June 2015).
On May 3, 2015 an attack with gunfire was carried by two Radical Islamic Terrorists followers of ISIS at the entrance to the Curtis Culwell Center, in Garland, TX featuring cartoon images of Mohammad—both were shot and killed by a police officer. Just prior to the attack one of the gunmen posted “May Allah accept us as Mujahedeen”—he wrote both pledged allegiance to “Amirul Mu’mineen”, a likely reference to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
An Iraqi immigrant, who later applied for and received US citizenship, was arrested for lying to federal agents about pledging allegiance to ISIS and his travel to Syria (May 2015)
The Somali refugee who recruited the San Bernardino killers also recruited the jihadist who attacked the Garland, TX “Draw Mohammad” contest in May 2015, fled the United States.
On April 20, 2015, Six Somalian Muslim refugees were arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota for attempting to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State and fight for ISIS.
An immigrant from Saudi Arabia, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, swore allegiance to ISIS and pledged to explode a propane tank bomb on U.S. soil. (April 2015).
An immigrant from Yemen, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, along with six other men, was charged with conspiracy to travel to Syria and to provide material support to ISIS. (April 2015).
A Uzbek man in Brooklyn encouraged other Uzbeki nationals to wage Jihad on behalf of ISIS, and raised $1,600 for the terror organization. (April 2015)
An immigrant from Syria, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, was accused by federal prosecutors of planning to rob a gun store to “go to a military base in Texas and kill three or four American soldiers execution style.” (April 2015)
A Kazakhstani immigrant with lawful permanent resident status conspired to purchase a machine gun to shoot FBI and other law enforcement agents if they prevented him from traveling to Syria to join ISIS. (February 2015)
A Bosnian refugee, along with his wife and five others, donated money and supplies, and smuggled arms, to terrorist organizations in Syria and Iraq. (February 2015)
On December 18, 2014 an radicalized ISIS supporter in Morganton, NC shot a 74 year old man in the head multiple times.
On December 14, 2014, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, born to a Muslim African American family, executed two NYC police officers as they sat in their patrol car. Brinsley is reported to have approached the two officers as they were sitting in their patrol car in the notorious crime ridden Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York and began firing rounds into the vehicle before fleeing on foot to the closest subway station where he later committed suicide.
Two Bosnian Muslim refugee in Portland, Oregon was arrested in November 21, 2014 for trying to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
In September 30, 2014, ex-con Alton Nolan, a Muslim convert, a proponent of Sharia Law, who was radicalized to Islam behind bars, wielding a knife, beheaded a female employee, Colleen Hufford, at the Vaughn Foods processing plant in Moor, OK, and was prevented from beheading a second female employee by the company COO, who shot Nolan to stop his rampage.
An immigrant from Afghanistan, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, and a legal permanent resident from the Philippines, were convicted for “join Al Q’ieda and the Taliban in order to kill Americans.” (September 2014)
Five Somali Muslim refugees were charged in July 2014 with fundraising for jihadi groups in Africa.
A Somali immigrant with lawful permanent resident status, along with four other Somali nationals, is charged with leading an al-Shabaab fundraising conspiracy in the United States, with monthly payments directed to the Somali terrorist organization. (July 2014)
An immigrant from Bangladesh, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, tried to incite people to travel to Somalia and conduct violent jihad against the United States. (June 2014)
On June 25, 2014 Ali Muhammad Brown, age 29, a devout Muslim, gunned down Brendan Brown, age 19, in Livingston, NJ. Ali said it was an act of retribution for US Military actions against Muslims in Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
On June,1, 2014, Ali Muhammed Brown confessed to the murder of a 30 year old man on April 27th. in Skyway, WA.
A Moroccan national who came to the U.S. on a student visa was arrested for plotting to blow up a university and a federal court house. (April 2014).
On April 3, 2014, Salam Al Haideri a 24 year old Iraqi Refugee from Niskayuna, NY who entered the US thru the UN Refugee program. He raped a 19 year old 4’11 teenager behind a “I Love NY” pizza place dumpster while slamming her head into the ground. The Iraqi Refugee’s 96-pound teenage victim was left with broken ribs and a fractured nose. Al Haideri was the third refugee to be convicted of a sex crime in the area. He was found guilty of aggravated assault and rape and was sentenced to 22 years to life.
On March 6, 2014 a Muslim man shoots his lesbian daughter and her lover to death a leave a copy of the Quran open to a page condemning homosexuality.
A college student who immigrated from Somalia, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, attempted to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Oregon. (Dec 2013)
On August 4, 2013 in Richmond, CA a radicalized Islamist convert “on a mission from Allah” stabbed a store clerk to death.
On April 19, 2013 in Boston, MA a Radical Islamic Terrorist, the Tsarnaev brothers (the Boston Marathon Bombers) gunned down a University police officer sitting in his car
The April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev; those brothers and their family were Muslim refugees. -The Boston Bombers were granted political asylum and were thus deemed legitimate refugees. The younger brother applied for citizenship and was naturalized on September 11th, 2012. The older brother had a pending application for citizenship.
On March 24, 2013 in Ashtabula, OH a Muslim convert walks into a church service Quran, and guns down his Christian father while praising Allah
On February 7, 2013 in Buena Vista, NJ a Muslim man beheaded two Coptic Christians Immigrants.
On November 11, 2012 in Houston, TX a 28 year old American man is shot to death by a radical Muslim over an alleged role of converting a woman to Christianity.
In September 15, 2012, Amine El Khalifi, and al Q’ieda Radical Islamic Terrorist plotted to do a suicide bombing of the US Capital.
On February 18, 2012, two Radical Islamic Terrorists from Pakistan, who later applied for and received US Citizenship, were apprehended trying to detonate a bomb in New York City
On January 1, 2012 in Houston TX a 30 year old Muslim convert to Christianity is shot to death by a devout Muslim for converting his daughter to Christianity
On September 11, 2011 in Waltham, MA three Jewish men have their throats cut by Radical Islamic Terrorists.
Two Al Qaeda members from Iraq who had spent years in Iraq using IEDs and participated in attacks that killed American soldiers (their fingerprints were recovered from IEDs). Mohamed Hammadi age 25 and Walid Alwan age 31, were arrested in Bowling Green, KY on May 25, 2011 while living in public housing and were receiving public assistance; both entered the US thru the UN Refugee Program as Iraqi refugees! Hammadi was recorded in a telephone conversation plotting a terrorist attack in the US. They were both convicted of terrorism and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
On April 30, 2011 Mohammad Alfatlawi a proponent of Sharia Law was charged with the “Honor Killing” of his wife and daughter in Detroit, Michigan.
In May 4, 2010 Faisal Shahzad conducted a terrorist car bombing plot in Times Square that failed.
In December 25, 2009, the bombing terror plot to kill 290 innocent passengers on a flight from the Netherland to Detroit the Nigerian Radical Islamic Terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutlallab (aka the Underwear Bomber) failed to detonate on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 because the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned, and passengers were able to subdue him until he was arrested.
On December 4, 2009 in Bingham, NY a non-Muslim Islamic Studies professor is stabbed to death by a Muslim graduate student in revenge for Muslims who have been persecuted.
On November 5, 2009, Maj Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 US Army soldiers and wounded 32 others in Fort Hood while yelling “Allah Akbar” at the top of his lungs—Obama insisted it was simply “Work Place Violence” and not a Radical Islamic terrorist attack by a disciple of Anwar Al-Awlaki. Prior to the shooting, in his previous assignment as an intern and resident at Walter Reed Army Medical Center his colleagues and superiors were deeply concerned about his behavior and anti-American comments—but because they were cowered by the Obama’s administration’s warnings and perceived threats to their military standing, that they better be “politically correct’ and not disparage such anti-American comments—nothing was done to drum that Radical Islamic Terrorist out of the US Armed Forces.
On November 2, 2009 in Glendale, AZ a Muslim daughter dies from injuries suffered when her Muslim father runs her over with his car for being too “Westernized.”
On June 1, 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a convert to Islam, who had gone to Yemen in 2007 and stayed for about 16 months, open fire on a Little Rock, Arkansas US Armed Forces Recruiting Office in a drive by shooting with a rifle, against a group of US Army Soldiers standing in front of the Recruiting Office. He killed Private William Long and wounded Private Quinton Ezeagwula.
On April 12, 2009 in Phoenix, AZ a Muslim man shoots his Muslim brother-in-law and another man to death, after he finds out that they visited a strip club in contradiction to Islamic values.
On February12, 2009 in Buffalo, NY a Muslim founder of a Muslim TV Station beheads his wife in the hallway of the TV Station for seeking a divorce.
On July 6, 2008 in Jonesboro, GA a devout Muslim man strangles his 25 year old daughter in an honor killing.

March 16, 2017

Strategika Issue #39, You Say You Want A Revolution? Thomas Donnelly [nc]

Filed under: Chinese Navy, Econonics, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Invasion of Taiwan, Iran, naval assault ships, Political Commentary, US Marine Corps — Tags: , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 8:05 pm

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Strategika
Issue 39
You Say You Want A Revolution?
by Thomas Donnelly
Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Image credit:
Image credit: Poster Collection, CU 032, Hoover Institution Archives.

To paraphrase the Beatles: Well, you know, you’d better free your mind instead; you may want a revolution but ought to settle for some evolution.

It is an article of revealed religion among defense elites that “we live in a relentlessly changing and fiercely competitive world.” Those words were from former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, once a physicist and someone deeply imbued with the idea that technological change and competition were the elements propelling change, and that those who failed to “innovate” were doomed to defeat: “Today’s era of military competition is characterized by the additional variables of speed and agility, such that leading the race now frequently depends on who can out-innovate faster than everyone else, and even change the game.”

Such attitudes took root in the late Cold War, back when the Pentagon had a “director for defense research and engineering”—a powerful post separate from the actual weapons-buying bureaucracy—and invested substantial sums in the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency. These agencies were dominated by engineers, practical people whose goal was not science per say but to find ways to put new technologies into the hands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. But the combination of the Cold War’s end and the endless small wars of the post-9/11 years has inverted this traditional approach; the leaders of the Defense Department have been driven by the immediate need to respond to today’s enemies—all of them unpredicted—and have luxuriated in an extreme form of futurism—dreams that must inevitably go unfulfilled.

The failure to build and field in important numbers the weapons designs of the 1990s has all but deprived U.S. forces of the conventional-force superiority that is a premise of their strategy. The past failures to innovate incrementally have added up, even though the Russians and Chinese—and, increasingly, their Iranian partners in what Walter Russell Mead has dubbed the “Axis of Weevils”—have done little more than attained the level of lethality and sophistication reached by U.S. forces during Desert Storm. And since the Weevils are, for the moment, entirely engaged in moving into the vacuum created by American withdrawals rather than testing their strength directly, it is hard to know what level of tactical competence they have really derived from their belated modernization, but the balance of military power has undoubtedly shifted. National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster put the matter succinctly: “When we minimize our Army, we maximize the risk to our soldiers, the risk that in a crisis they will be forced to enter a fight too few in number and without the training and equipment they need to win.”

In such circumstances, broad programs of military “transformation”—Donald Rumsfeld’s dream or a “third offset,” and Ash Carter’s homage to former Defense Secretary William Perry and the creation of “stealth” aircraft—are not relevant. Photon torpedoes, warp drives, and cloaking devices remain in the realm of the starship Enterprise. Better the urgency of President John Kennedy, who vowed to put an American on the moon “in this decade,” than the spirit of Captain James Kirk. And in fact, there are fairly mature military technologies that meet the test of restoring the tactical advantages that U.S. troops once enjoyed.

Perhaps the most tantalizing near-term technologies are related to the substitution of intense amounts of electrical energy for the explosive power of gunpowder. This comprises a kind of catch-all category that subsumes several developments and could have—at least to leaders with an engineering mindset—multiple applications. Fielding electrical-energy-based weapons depends upon the ability to generate and to store immense amounts of power, and then release it either as a destructive force on its own or to propel a projectile at extremely high speeds. Stored electricity might prove to be the gunpowder of the future.

The Defense Department and the military services have been experimenting with these technologies for a decade and more. The Army and Navy have tested a number of “railgun” designs. Railguns are electromagnetic launchers with a parallel set of conductors—the “rails”—that accelerate a sliding armature by passing a very strong current down one rail, along the armature to the other rail. In essence, it’s a 21st-century slingshot that hurls a very dense, but inert, projectile about twice as fast as a traditional cannon; the kinetic energy of these projectiles is enormous.

It does appear that the science of railguns has reached some level of maturity. The main technological challenges are generating and storing enough electrical power—that is to say, a big engine and a good set of batteries—to allow for repeated pulses of direct current that would yield militarily relevant rates of fire of something like six rounds per minute. Other challenges are to build durable and practical rails, since the launch process generates extreme heat that stresses the rail materials. Further, designing guidance mechanisms that can withstand the heat generated by the speed of the projectile may be difficult. On the plus side, the design of munitions ought to be simplified, as should storage, handling, and logistics, since there is no “warhead” atop a railgun round and explosives are not required. Moreover, the range of railguns would far exceed that of any cannon.

But again, the railgun literature strongly indicates that these are challenges for engineering, not basic science. The Navy is interested in railgun technology as a potential solution to the rising challenges of surface fleet air defense and, especially, cruise and ballistic missile defense. Ironically, the otherwise-disastrous Zumwalt-class destroyer—which is now a $4 billion-per-copy pocket battleship—would make a practical platform for a railgun-based system. The ship is huge for a “destroyer”; at almost 15,000 tons it’s almost twice the size of the current Arleigh Burke-class ships. And it has an electric engine that can not only drive the ship at 30 knots, but also generate huge amounts of additional electricity. The Navy originally planned to buy 32 Zumwalts, but the program has long since run aground—because of its technological and cost problems, but also, most importantly, because the ship was misconceived—and halted at just three. To redesign and revive the project would involve great further expense and be an engineering risk, surely. But it could also result in fielding a game-changing technology that would go far toward solving the “anti-access” problem posed by the growing arsenals of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian anti-ship missiles within the next decade rather than several decades. There is no reason to believe that designing a new class of ships would be any less expensive; indeed it is irrational to think that starting over would save money.

On a smaller scale, electromagnetic guns might become the main armaments on tanks and howitzers. While all the same challenges would recur and be compounded by the need to reduce both the source of the electricity and the storage device to the size of a ground combat vehicle, the fundamental engineering challenges are the same as for ships. And the Army already is experimenting with modifying existing howitzers to shoot the same projectile as an electromagnetic weapon. “It turns out that powder guns firing the same hypervelocity projectiles gets you almost as much as you would get out of the electromagnetic rail gun, but it’s something we can do much faster,” says Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, who has been held over from the Obama Administration to ensure continuity in defense planning. “We are [saying to the next administration]: ‘Look, we believe this is the place where you want to put your money, but we’re going to have enough money in there for both the electromagnetic rail gun and the powder gun.’”

A related development, also resulting from the ability to generate and store immense amounts of power, that is on the cusp of science fiction and reality is the prospect of using directed energy itself as a weapon. Indeed, some low-level forms of directed energy have been employed by the military for some time: microwave systems that heat the water in skin cells, causing irritation, have been used as a crowd-control measure; microwaves also have been fielded to fry enemy electronic systems. Even the radars on combat aircraft may have limited applications in disrupting the sensors of attacking missiles. And, as far back as 2002, the U.S. Air Force began flying an “Airborne Laser”—basically, a giant high-energy chemical laser stuffed inside a 747 commercial aircraft body—as a missile defense test system. In January 2010 the system successfully passed an intercept test and a month later destroyed two targets in a single engagement. But shortly thereafter, amid one of the many rounds of defense budget reductions during the Obama Administration, the effort was scrapped. In many ways, fielding the system as designed was a bad idea—the laser itself needed to be more powerful and would have required a large and vulnerable aircraft to fly within range of enemy air defenses—but the underlying concept was sound and indicative that such systems were technologically feasible, if tactically immature. Also, it was clear that using electricity rather than chemistry as a power source was a better solution.

Electromagnetic guns, hypersonic projectiles or even directed energy death rays would by themselves not necessarily constitute a revolution in warfare. But these technologies could yield a substantial increase in the capabilities of a wide variety of legacy platforms—and, importantly, again provide U.S. forces with a significant battlefield edge. Most of all, such investments could get the American military back in the habit of continuous modernization and the operational innovation that comes from actually fielding new capabilities. The enthusiasts for “transformation” of the past generation have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope; their model of innovation was that, starved of funds, the U.S. armed services would have to think of new ways to fight. But, through history, the process of change in war has been one that more frequently rewards practical tinkering—matching organizations and doctrine to technologies—more than bold conceptualization. Imagining the tank or the fighter aircraft was the basis for a revolution, but to realize it demanded their integration into combined-arms formation and figuring out how to keep that organization supplied with fossil fuel.

Finally, the experience of recent decades ought to debunk the transformationists’ idea that the United States could afford a geopolitical “strategic pause” to pursue a strategy of innovation. Nor can a global power afford an “offset” approach. To paraphrase the Beatles one last time: Evolution is the real solution. And you can see the plan.

March 1, 2017

False Documents, by Victor Hanson [too true, nc]

Filed under: Business, crime control, Econonics, Illegal Aliens, Law Enforcement, Political Commentary — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 5:31 pm

‘False Documents’
March 1, 2017 8:07 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

The Wall Street Journal wrote an unfortunate and misleading op-ed today on the new protocols on illegal immigration issued by the Department of Homeland Security — epitomized by the Journal’s weird sentence, “Mr. Kelly’s order is so sweeping that it could capture law-abiding immigrants whose only crime is using false documents to work.”

Only crime? (And what a string of oxymorons: “law-abiding”/“crime”/“false documents”!)

The WSJ should know that “false documents” are seldom used just “to work,” but are part and parcel of a continuous process of misleading or defrauding the system in nearly every transaction with government and private enterprise.

“False documents” do not imply a misspelled middle name or a day or two off the correct date of birth, or some sort of innocuous pseudonym. No, they involve the deliberate creation of a false identity, sometimes at the expense of a real person, and often with accompanying fraudulent Social Security numbers and photo identifications — crimes that both foul up the bureaucracy for law-abiding citizens, facilitate other crimes, and are the sort of felonies that most Americans would lose their jobs over and face either jail time or stiff fines. And often they are the second crimes — following not “law-abiding” behavior but the initial crime of entering and residing in the United States unlawfully.

The WSJ’s editors some time should wake up and find a wrecked car sitting on their property (that went off the road and airborne and did thousands of dollars of damage), the driver having fled and the registration on the abandoned vehicle proving to be a “false document,” or better yet, discovering that one’s check-routing number was printed on “false document” checks to facilitate theft of thousands of dollars, or having someone speed off after hitting your mailbox only to find from sheriffs that the license-plate numbers revealed a “false document” identity, or going to a market in the San Joaquin Valley while the person ahead of you tries four EBT cards in succession under “false document” names before one is found to have a positive balance, or waiting in line in a doctor’s office as the receptionist politely explains to the person ahead of you that the health card presented has a name that does not match the driver’s license presented. The use of “false documents” is not an end game or mere infraction, but rather the doorway to all sorts of subsequent falsification and fraud that does enormous damage both to the system in general and to individuals in particular.

As I wrote today, Americans are compassionate people and might well countenance allowing illegal-immigrant aliens without subsequent criminal records, but with a record of some years of established residence and a productive work history without dependence on social welfare, to pay a fine, apply for a green card, and become legalized residents — all the while maintaining residence in the U.S.

But the idea that illegal immigrants who assume false identities or lie on government documents thereby commit minor infractions is, well, outrageous.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445176/wall-street-journal-immigration-editorial-false-documents-crime

February 10, 2017

Imprimis 9/16 – Restoring America’s Economic Mobility

Filed under: Econonics, Education, Historical context, Political Commentary, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , — justplainbill @ 3:04 pm

Restoring America’s Economic Mobility
September 2016 • Volume 45, Number 9 • Frank Buckley
Frank Buckley
Author, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America
________________________________________
Frank Buckley is a Foundation Professor at Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where he has taught since 1989. Previously he was a visiting Olin Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and he has also taught at McGill Law School, the Sorbonne, and Sciences Po in Paris. He received his B.A. from McGill University and his LL.M. from Harvard University. He is a senior editor of The American Spectator and the author of several books, including The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America and The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.
________________________________________

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on July 11, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” Today the story of American politics is the story of class struggles. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. We didn’t think we were divided into different classes. Neither did Marx.

America was an exception to Marx’s theory of social progress. By that theory, societies were supposed to move from feudalism to capitalism to communism. But the America of the 1850s, the most capitalist society around, was not turning communist. Marx had an explanation for that. “True enough, the classes already exist,” he wrote of the United States, but they “are in constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their elements and yielding them up to one another.” In other words, when you have economic and social mobility, you don’t go communist.

That is the country in which some imagine we still live, Horatio Alger’s America—a country defined by the promise that whoever you are, you have the same chance as anyone else to rise, with pluck, industry, and talent. But they imagine wrong. The U.S. today lags behind many of its First World rivals in terms of mobility. A class society has inserted itself within the folds of what was once a classless country, and a dominant New Class—as social critic Christopher Lasch called it—has pulled up the ladder of social advancement behind it.

One can measure these things empirically by comparing the correlation between the earnings of fathers and sons. Pew’s Economic Mobility Project ranks Britain at 0.5, which means that if a father earns £100,000 more than the median, his son will earn £50,000 more than the average member of his cohort. That’s pretty aristocratic. On the other end of the scale, the most economically mobile society is Denmark, with a correlation of 0.15. The U.S. is at 0.47, almost as immobile as Britain.

A complacent Republican establishment denies this change has occurred. If they don’t get it, however, American voters do. For the first time, Americans don’t believe their children will be as well off as they have been. They see an economy that’s stalled, one in which jobs are moving offshore. In the first decade of this century, U.S. multinationals shed 2.9 million U.S. jobs while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million. General Electric provides a striking example. Jeffrey Immelt became the company’s CEO in 2001, with a mission to advance stock price. He did this in part by reducing GE’s U.S. workforce by 34,000 jobs. During the same period, the company added 25,000 jobs overseas. Ironically, President Obama chose Immelt to head his Jobs Council.
According to establishment Repub¬licans, none of this can be helped. We are losing middle-class jobs because of the move to a high-tech world that creates jobs for a cognitive elite and destroys them for everyone else. But that doesn’t describe what’s happening. We are losing middle-class jobs, but lower-class jobs are expanding. Automation is changing the way we make cars, but the rich still need their maids and gardeners. Middle-class jobs are also lost as a result of regulatory and environmental barriers, especially in the energy sector. And the skills-based technological change argument is entirely implausible: countries that beat us hands down on mobility are just as technologically advanced. Folks in Denmark aren’t exactly living in the Stone Age.

This is why voters across the spectrum began to demand radical change. What did the Republican elite offer in response? At a time of maximal crisis they have been content with minimal goals, like Mitt Romney’s 59-point plan in 2012. How many Americans remember even one of those points? What we remember instead is Romney’s remark about 47 percent of Americans being takers. That was Romney’s way of recognizing the class divide—and in the election, Americans took notice and paid him back with interest.
Since 2012, establishment Republicans have continued to be less than concerned for the plight of ordinary Americans. Sure, they want economic growth, but it doesn’t seem to matter into whose pockets the money flows. There are even the “conservative” pundits who offer the pious hope that drug-addicted Trump supporters will hurry up and die. That’s one way to ameliorate the class struggle, but it doesn’t exactly endear anyone to the establishment.

The southern writer Flannery O’Connor once attended a dinner party in New York given for her and liberal intellectual Mary McCarthy. At one point the issue of Catholicism came up, and McCarthy offered the opinion that the Eucharist is “just a symbol,” albeit “a pretty one.” O’Connor, a pious Catholic, bristled: “Well, if it’s just a symbol, to Hell with it.” Likewise, the principles held up as sacrosanct by establishment Republicans might be logically unassailable, derived like theorems from a set of axioms based on a pure theory of natural rights. But if I don’t see them making people better off, I say to Hell with them. And so do the voters this year. What the establishment Republicans should ask themselves is Anton Chigurh’s question in No Country for Old Men: If you followed your principles, and your principles brought you to this, what good are your principles?

September 2016 • Volume 45, Number 9 • Frank Buckley

Had Marx been asked what would happen to America if it ever became economically immobile, we know what his answer would be: Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. And also Donald Trump. The anger expressed by the voters in 2016—their support for candidates from far outside the traditional political class—has little parallel in American history. We are accustomed to protest movements on the Left, but the wholesale repudiation of the establishment on the Right is something new. All that was solid has melted into air, and what has taken its place is a kind of right-wing Marxism, scornful of Washington power brokers and sneering pundits and repelled by America’s immobile, class-ridden society.

Establishment Republicans came up with the “right-wing Marxist” label when House Speaker John Boehner was deposed, and labels stick when they have the ring of truth. So it is with the right-wing Marxist. He is right-wing because he seeks to return to an America of economic mobility. He has seen how broken education and immigration systems, the decline of the rule of law, and the rise of a supercharged regulatory state serve as barriers to economic improvement. And he is a Marxist to the extent that he sees our current politics as the politics of class struggle, with an insurgent middle class that seeks to surmount the barriers to mobility erected by an aristocratic New Class. In his passion, he is also a revolutionary. He has little time for a Republican elite that smirks at his heroes—heroes who communicate through their brashness and rudeness the fact that our country is in a crisis. To his more polite critics, the right-wing Marxist says: We are not so nice as you!

The right-wing Marxist notes that establishment Republicans who decry crony capitalism are often surrounded by lobbyists and funded by the Chamber of Commerce. He is unpersuaded when they argue that government subsidies are needed for their friends. He does not believe that the federal bailouts of the 2008-2012 TARP program and the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest and quantitative easing policies were justified. He sees that they doubled the size of public debt over an eight-year period, and that our experiment in consumer protection for billionaires took the oxygen out of the economy and produced a jobless Wall Street recovery.

The right-wing Marxist’s vision of the good society is not so very different from that of the JFK-era liberal; it is a vision of a society where all have the opportunity to rise, where people are judged by the content of their character, and where class distinctions are a thing of the past. But for the right wing Marxist, the best way to reach the goal of a good society is through free markets, open competition, and the removal of wasteful government barriers.

Readers of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose will have encountered the word palimpsest, used to describe a manuscript in which one text has been written over another, and in which traces of the original remain. So it is with Canada, a country that beats the U.S. hands down on economic mobility. Canada has the reputation of being more liberal than the U.S., but in reality it is more conservative because its liberal policies are written over a page of deep conservatism.

Whereas the U.S. comes in at a highly immobile 0.47 on the Pew mobility scale, Canada is at 0.19, very close to Denmark’s 0.15. What is further remarkable about Canada is that the difference is mostly at the top and bottom of the distribution. Between the tenth and 90th deciles there isn’t much difference between the two countries. The difference is in the bottom and top ten percent, where the poorest parents raise the poorest kids and the richest parents raise the richest kids.

September 2016 • Volume 45, Number 9 • Frank Buckley

For parents in the top U.S. decile, 46 percent of their kids will end up in the top two deciles and only 2 percent in the bottom decile. The members of the top decile comprise a New Class of lawyers, academics, trust-fund babies, and media types—a group that wields undue influence in both political parties and dominates our culture. These are the people who said yes, there is an immigration crisis—but it’s caused by our failure to give illegals a pathway to citizenship!

There’s a top ten percent in Canada, of course, but its children are far more likely to descend into the middle or lower classes. There’s also a bottom ten percent, but its children are far more likely to rise to the top. The country of opportunity, the country we’ve imagined ourselves to be, isn’t dead—it moved to Canada, a country that ranks higher than the U.S. on measures of economic freedom. Yes, Canada has its much-vaunted Medicare system, but cross-border differences in health care don’t explain the mobility levels. And when you add it all up, America has a more generous welfare system than Canada or just about anywhere else. To explain Canada’s higher mobility levels, one has to turn to differences in education systems, immigration laws, regulatory burdens, the rule of law, and corruption—on all of which counts, Canada is a more conservative country.

America’s K-12 public schools perform poorly, relative to the rest of the First World. Its universities are great fun for the kids, but many students emerge on graduation no better educated than when they arrived. What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. One study has concluded that if American public school students were magically raised to Canadian levels, the economic gain would amount to a 20 percent annual pay increase for the average American worker.

The U.S. has a two-tiered educational system: a superb set of schools and colleges for the upper classes and a mediocre set for everyone else. The best of our colleges are the best anywhere, but the average Canadian school is better than the average American one. At both the K-12 and college levels, Canadian schools have adhered more closely to a traditional, conservative set of offerings. For K-12, a principal reason for the difference is the greater competition offered in Canada, with its publicly-supported church-affiliated schools. With barriers like America’s Blaine Amendments—state laws preventing public funding of religious schools—lower-class students in the U.S. must enjoy the dubious blessing of a public school education.

What about immigration? Canada doesn’t have a problem with illegal aliens—it deports them. As for the legal intake, Canadian policies have a strong bias towards admitting immigrants who will confer a benefit on Canadian citizens. Even in absolute numbers, Canada admits more immigrants under economic categories than the U.S., where most legal immigrants qualify instead under family preference categories. As a result, on average, immigrants to the U.S. are less educated than U.S. natives, and unlike in Canada, second- and third-generation U.S. immigrants earn less than their native-born counterparts. In short, the U.S. immigration system imports inequality and immobility. If immigration isn’t an issue in Canada, that’s because it’s a system Trump voters would love.

For those at the bottom of the social and economic ladder who seek to rise, nothing is more important than the rule of law, property rights, and the sanctity of contract provided by a mature and efficient legal system. The alternative—in place today in America—is a network of elites whose personal bonds supply the trust that is needed before deals can be done and promises relied on. With its more traditional legal system, Canada better respects the sanctity of contract and is less likely to weaken property rights with an American-style civil justice system which at times resembles a slot machine of judicially-sanctioned theft. Americans are great at talking about the rule of law, but in reality we don’t have much standing to do so.

Then there’s corruption. As ranked by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, America is considerably more corrupt than most of the rest of the First World. With our K Street lobbyists and our donor class, we’ve spawned the greatest concentration of money and influence ever. And corruption costs. In a regression model, the average family’s earnings would increase from $55,000 to $60,000 were we to ascend to Canada’s level of non-corruption, and to $68,000 if we moved to Denmark’s level.

In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center. Sadly, that is a rational response to the way things are. America is a different country today, and a much nastier one. For politically engaged Republicans, the figure is six percent. That in a nutshell explains the Trump phenomenon and the disintegration of the Republican establishment. If the people don’t trust the government, tinkering with entitlement reform is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
American legal institutions are consistently more liberal than those in Canada, and they are biased towards a privileged class of insiders who are better educated and wealthier than the average American. That’s why America has become an aristocracy. By contrast, Canadian legal institutions aren’t slanted to an aristocracy.

The paradox is that Canadians employ conservative, free market means to achieve the liberal end of economic mobility. And that points to America’s way back: acknowledge that the promise of America has diminished, then emulate Canada.

September 1, 2016

Diversity: History’s Pathway to Chaos, victor hanson [nc]

Filed under: crime control, Econonics, Education, Elections, Historical context — Tags: , , , , , — justplainbill @ 8:34 pm

Diversity: History’s Pathway to Chaos
September 1, 2016 12:02 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

America’s successful melting pot should not be replaced with discredited salad-bowl separatism.
By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history.

The Roman Empire worked as long as Iberians, Greeks, Jews, Gauls, and myriad other African, Asian, and European communities spoke Latin, cherished habeas corpus, and saw being Roman as preferable to identifying with their own particular tribe. By the fifth century, diversity had won out but would soon prove a fatal liability.

Rome disintegrated when it became unable to assimilate new influxes of northern European tribes. Newcomers had no intention of giving up their Gothic, Hunnish, or Vandal identities.

The propaganda of history’s multicultural empires — the Ottoman, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the British, and the Soviet — was never the strength of their diversity. To avoid chaos, their governments bragged about the religious, ideological, or royal advantages of unity, not diversity.

Nor did more modern quagmires like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Rwanda, or Yugoslavia boast that they were “diverse.” Instead, their strongman leaders naturally claimed that they shared an all-encompassing commonality.

When such coerced harmony failed, these nations suffered the even worse consequences of diversity, as tribes and sects turned murderously upon each other.

For some reason, contemporary America believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism.

Is there any evidence from the past that institutionalizing sects and ethnic grievances would ensure a nation’s security, prosperity, and freedom?

America’s melting pot is history’s sole exception of e pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language, and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt.

Some students attending California’s Claremont College openly demand roommates of the same race. Racially segregated “safe spaces” are fixtures on college campuses.

We speak casually of bloc voting on the basis of skin color — as if a lockstep Asian, Latino, black, or white vote is a good thing.

We are reverting to the nihilism of the old Confederacy. The South’s “one-drop rule” has often been copied to assure employers or universities that one qualifies as a minority.

Some public figures have sought to play up or invent diversity advantages. Sometimes, as in the cases of Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal, and Ward Churchill, the result is farce.

Given our racial fixations, we may soon have to undergo computer scans of our skin colors to rank competing claims of grievance.

How does one mete out the relative reparations for various atrocities of the past, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the American Indian wars, the Asian or Catholic exclusion laws, indentured servitude, or the mid-18th-century belief that the Irish were not quite human?

Sanctuary cities, in the manner of 1850s Richmond or Charleston invoking nullification, now openly declare themselves immune from federal law. Does that defiance ensure every city the right to ignore whatever federal laws it finds inconvenient, from the filing of 1040s to voting laws?

The diversity industry hinges on U.S. citizens still envisioning a shrinking white population as the “majority.” Yet “white” is now not always easily definable, given intermarriage and constructed identities.

In California, those who check “white” on Orwellian racial boxes are now a minority. Will white Californians soon nightmarishly declare themselves aggrieved minorities and thus demand affirmative action, encourage Viking-like names such as Ragnar or Odin, insert umlauts and diereses into their names to hype their European bona fides, seek segregated European-American dorms, and set up “Caucasian Studies” programs at universities?

Women now graduate from college at a higher rate than men. Will there be a male effort to ensure affirmative action for college admissions and graduation rates?

If the white vote reaches 70 percent for a particular candidate, is that really such a good thing, as it was considered to be when President Obama was praised for capturing 95 percent of the black vote?

It is time to step back from the apartheid brink.

Even onetime diversity advocate Oprah Winfrey has had second thoughts about the lack of commonality in America. She recently vowed to quit using the word “diversity” and now prefers “inclusion.”

A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not “culturally appropriating” anyone’s white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity.

Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats.

African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not “acting white” but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents.

Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one’s essence and is irrelevant to one’s character and conduct.

No one is impinging on anyone’s culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids.

Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars.

Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations — just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another.

August 18, 2016

Mine Worker Pension Fund to be Bailed Out by YOU, [c]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Bail-out, Business, Econonics, Elections, Political Commentary, Politicians, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 1:59 am

[The following may be found in .pdf at: http://thf-reports.s3.amazonaws.com/2016/IB4600.pdf . In its original form, the charts are readable and the format is reader friendly. Now, as to why it is here:

As already explained in its proper place in the document, if the UMWA pension fund is bailed out, then more money that that spent on the entire defense budget will be spent bailing out underfunded union pension plans. This will lead to the bailing out of public sector pension plans, like the teachers in all of the states, especially California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts. Also the various police, fire, administrative staff, clerks, janitors, and any and all public employees. It means that those states who have voluntarily bankrupted themselves, will be bailed out.

Consider the following:

1. the deals made to fund these pensions was made by the properly elected union leaders, and the managers of the various industries;
2. As in the UMWA situation, consider how the interference of the various government entities, especially the EPA and FDA, have ruined so many businesses that those businesses cannot fund their pensions. Notice how the various regulations ruined the automotive industry and contributed to the failed UAW pension fund and how that contributed to the Clinton/sub-prime HUD meltdown in 2008;
3. consider how this violates constitution article IV ( might be VI, I don’t have a copy to hand ) prohibiting federal government messing with contracts; and,
4. did YOU have anything to do with these various contractual commitments? I did not. Under what legal or moral proposition should we be held to a contract that we were not party to? What is the difference between this and someone who buys a car and gets a lemon? Isn’t that person’s remedy to sue the dealer with whom he had that contract for sale? What legal or moral concept drags me into that problem?

Y’all need to contact your federal legislators and demand that they commit to NOT bailing these people, or any others similarly situated, out!]

ISSUE BRIEF
Why a Coal Miner Pension Bailout Could Open the Door to a
$600 Billion Pension Bailout for All Private Unions
Rachel Greszler
No. 4600 | August 15, 2016
Congress is looking to pass legislation that would
use taxpayer dollars to bail out the overpromised,
underfunded pension plan of the United Mine
Workers of America (UMWA). Such an unprecedented
move would send the message that Congress
will stand behind sending trillions of dollars in overpromised,
underfunded public and private pension
obligations across the country. The federal government
already provides a backstop for failed union
and other private pension plans by insuring them
through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
(PBGC). Congress should avoid bailing out select
pension plans at all costs and should instead reform
the PBGC so that it can meet its obligations without
a taxpayer bailout.
Coal Miner Bailout Just Tip of the
Iceberg
The UMWA pension plan is massively underfunded.
It has promised $5.6 billion more in pension
benefits than it will be able to pay.1 Although
the UMWA pension plan is among the worst-funded
pension plans, it represents only one of more than
1,300 multiemployer (union) pension plans across
the U.S. Almost all of these plans have made promises
they cannot keep.
According to the PBGC, a whopping 96 percent of
all multiemployer plans have funding ratios of less
than 60 percent—meaning they have less than 60
percent of the funds necessary to pay promised benefits.
2 In total, multiemployer plans have promised
over $600 billion more than they are estimated to be
able to pay.3
If Congress passes legislation to bail out the
UMWA pension plan with nearly a half a billion dollars
a year, what will stop it from passing legislation
to bail out the other 1,200 plans that have more than
$600 billion in unfunded promises? If Congress
forces taxpayers to bail out private union plans, why
not also private non-union plans that have $760 billion4
in unfunded liabilities, and public plans that
have as much as $4 trillion to $5 trillion5 in unfunded
liabilities?
UMWA Is Not Unique
Some policymakers argue that the UMWA is
unique—that the federal government was somehow
involved in the promises made to UMWA workers
and that the bailout would come from a coal-related
fund. The only thing unique about a UMWA bailout,
however, is that it would mark the first time in history
that Congress would force federal taxpayers to
bail out the unfunded pension promises of private
unions.
The notion that the government was somehow
involved in promises made to mine workers comes
from President Harry Truman’s intervention in
a 1946 coal-mining strike, including the government’s
involvement in an agreement that established
the UMWA health and welfare programs.
While the federal government helped to facilitate
This paper, in its entirety, can be found at
http://report.heritage.org/ib4600
The Heritage Foundation
214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE
Washington, DC 20002
(202) 546-4400 | heritage.org
Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views
of The Heritage Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage
of any bill before Congress.
2
ISSUE BRIEF | NO. 4600
August 15, 2016 
the establishment of the UMWA’s health and pension
plans, it was the union and its plan trustees—
not the federal government—that vigorously fought
to pay out benefits to retirees who did not earn
those benefits. And, it was the union and its plan
trustees—not the federal government—that consistently
promised pensions and health care benefits
as part of employees’ total compensation packages
and then failed to collect the funds necessary to pay
those benefits.
The Money Will Come from Taxpayers,
Not Just a Coal Fund
Neither policymakers nor the public should be
fooled by the claim that the $490 million per year
UMWA bailout would be paid by the existing Abandoned
Mine Land (AML) reclamation fund (AML).
The AML fund was established in 1977 exclusively
to cover the clean-up costs of damage caused by coal
mines prior to the federal government’s increased regulation.
6 The proposed UMWA pension bailout would
allow the UMWA to use interest from the AML fund
not only for its unfunded retiree health care costs (as
already allowed), but also for its unfunded pensions.
As Senator Mike Enzi (R–WY) pointed out in a recent
floor speech, this would be akin to allowing the massively
underfunded pension plan of the Central States
trucking union to access the highway trust fund.7
Regardless, it is unlikely that much, if any, of
the $490 million per year in pension bailout costs
would come from the AML fund. In recent years, the
entirety of interest earned on the AML fund, plus
hundreds of millions more in taxpayer dollars, has
gone to the UMWA for its unfunded, yet gold-plated,
retiree health care costs, leaving nothing for a
potential pension bailout. Moreover, the Administration’s
most recent budget included a request for
$363 million in taxpayer funds to “strengthen the
health care and pension funds” of UMWA retirees.8
Clearly, taxpayers—not a coal fund—would be on the
hook for the nearly half-billion dollars a year UMWA
pension bailout.
A Pension Backstop Already Exists
When a multiemployer pension plan runs out of
funds, it turns to the PBGC, which provides financial
assistance to the plan to cover insured benefits
as well as the plan’s expenses. Virtually all private
pension plans are required to purchase PBGC
insurance. The PBGC covers up to $12,870 per year
in pension benefits for a worker with 30 years of
service.9
In 2015, the PBGC paid $103 million to about
54,000 retirees of failed multiemployer pension
plans.10 This pales in comparison, however, to what
the PBGC’s liabilities will be over the coming decade
1. According to the UMWA’s form 5500 filing for the year ended December 2014, the plan has $5.6 billion in “current value” unfunded liabilities,
with assets of $4.165 billion and liabilities of $9.735 billion.
2. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, “Data Book Listing,” Table M-13, Plans, Participants and Funding of PBGC-Insured Plans by
Funding Ratio (2013) Multiemployer Program, http://www.pbgc.gov/documents/2014-data-tables-final.pdf?source=govdelivery&utm_
medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery (accessed July 19, 2016).
3. Ibid., Table M-9, Funding of PBGC-Insured Plans (1980–2013) Multiemployer Program.
4. Ibid., Table S-44, Funding of PBGC-Insured Plans (1980-2013) Single-Employer Program.
5. Joe Luppino-Esposito, “Promises Made, Promises Broken 2014: Unfunded Liabilities Hit $4.7 trillion,” American Legislative Exchange Council,
November 12, 2014, https://www.alec.org/article/promises-made-promises-broken-2014-unfunded-liabilities-hit-4-7-trillion/
(accessed July 21, 2016).
6. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, “Reclaiming Abandoned Mine Lands: Title IV of the Surface Mining Control and
Reclamation Act,” May 21, 2015, http://www.osmre.gov/programs/AML.shtm (accessed July 25, 2016).
7. Mike Enzi, “Supporting Pensions with Taxpayer Dollars Is a Slippery Slope,” speech on the Senate floor, July 12, 2016,
http://www.enzi.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ContentRecord_id=9F7D8774-13DE-4869-B684-7786212FB111
(accessed July 21, 2016).
8. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, “The United States Department of the Interior Budget Justification and Performance
Information Fiscal Year 2016,” https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/budget/appropriations/2016/upload/FY2016_OSMRE_
Greenbook.pdf (accessed July 21, 2016).
9. The PBGC’s multiemployer program provides benefits based on a formula including earned benefits and years of service. This translates into
maximum benefits of: $4,290 per year for workers with 10 years of service; $8,580 for workers with 20 years of service; $12,870 for workers
with 30 years of service; and $17,160 for workers with 40 years of service. The levels are not indexed for inflation.
10. PBGC, 2015 Annual Report, http://www.pbgc.gov/documents/2015-annual-report.pdf (accessed July 21, 2016).
3
ISSUE BRIEF | NO. 4600
August 15, 2016 
and beyond as an increasing number of multiemployer
pension plans—including some very large
ones—become insolvent.
Under ordinary circumstances, when the UMWA
plan becomes insolvent sometime within the next
decade, the PBGC would begin making payments to
the plan to cover its insured benefits and expenses.11
If Congress intervenes by bailing out the UMWA
pension plan, its beneficiaries would receive 100 percent
of promised benefits, instead of the lower PBGC
guarantee. And, the UMWA would get off scot-free—
with taxpayers and other coal-mining companies
footing the bill for their unfunded promises.
Meanwhile, other multiemployer plans that
become insolvent and do not receive special-interest
bailouts would first receive cuts down to the PBGC’s
11. The UMWA estimates it will be insolvent in 2025, but more reasonable assumptions project an earlier insolvency.
IB 4600 heritage.org
SOURCES: Author’s calculations based on the UMWA’s pension benefits for a 62-year-old worker who retires in 2016 with 30 years of work
history. Data on UMWA’s pension eligibility are from UMWA Health and Retirement Funds, Pension Eligibility Requirements,
http://www.umwafunds.org/Pension-Survivor-Health/Pages/Eligibility-Requirements.aspx (accessed March 9, 2016). Data on pension benefit
cuts are based on PBGC’s guaranteed level and U.S. Government Accountability O•ce, “Private Pensions: Multiemployer Plans and PBGC Face
Urgent Challenges,” testimony before the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, Committee on Education and the
Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, March 5, 2013, http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/652687.pdf (accessed March 10, 2016).
Mine Worker Bailout Would Unfairly Preserve UMWA Pensions
While Other Pensions Face Massive Cuts
CHART 1
By bailing out the
insolvent UMWA
pension plan, the
full benefit would
remain intact at
$24,246 per year.
However, if another pension
plan that oers similar benefits
becomes insolvent, the PBGC
would take over payments and
benefits would be cut to a
maximum of $12,780 per year.
And if the PBGC itself becomes
insolvent, as is projected to occur
by 2025, pensions paid by the
PBGC would be cut by an
additional 90 percent or more,
leaving only $1,278 per year.
$1,278
$24,246 $24,246
$12,780
UMWA BAILOUT OTHER SIMILAR PENSION PLAN
4
ISSUE BRIEF | NO. 4600
August 15, 2016 
guaranteed level, and then, when the PBGC becomes
insolvent at its estimated date of 2025, benefits
would be cut even further, down to mere pennies on
the dollar in promised benefits.
Congress’s Priority: Reforming the PBGC
Congress has no role in fulfilling the unfunded
promises of private pension plans. It does have a role,
however, in providing private pension insurance
through the PBGC. While the PBGC is a government
entity, it is not taxpayer-financed. It operates with
the premiums that it collects from participating
employers and unions. To prevent taxpayers from
bailing out private pension promises, it must remain
self-financed.
The PBGC is supposed to protect pensioners
from a total loss of promised benefits if their company
or pension plan becomes bankrupt, but its current
financial situation offers little insurance. For
a whole host of reasons, the PBGC’s multiemployer
program is massively underfunded and is projected
to run dry in 2025. Without significant reforms, or
a taxpayer bailout, of the PBGC, its multiemployer
beneficiaries would quickly see their benefits cut by
90 percent or more, leaving those retirees with less
than $100 per month in pension benefits.
Instead of protecting the promises of private
union pension plans, Congress should focus on protecting
the promises it has made through its own
entity, the PBGC. This can be done by ending the
preferential treatment (including funding rules
and assumptions) of multiemployer pension plans;
granting greater authority as well as liability to
plan trustees to encourage proper funding; structuring
the PBGC like a private insurance company,
allowing it to set its own premiums and to charge
variable-rate premiums; allowing the PBGC to take
over failed multiemployer plans as it does failed single-
employer plans; and subjecting multiemployer
pension plans to the same rules as single-employer
pensions.12
—Rachel Greszler is Senior Policy Analyst in
Economics and Entitlements in the Center for Data
Analysis, of the Institute for Economic Freedom and
Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation.
12. Rachel Greszler, “Bankrupt Pensions and Insolvent Pension Insurance: The Case of Multiemployer Pensions and the PBGC’s Multiemployer
Program,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 3029, July 30, 2015, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/07/bankruptpensions-
and-insolvent-pension-insurance-the-case-of-multiemployer-pensions-and-the-pbgcs-multiemployer-program.
$52 billion:
Deficit
in 2015
2000 2005 2010 2015
IB 4600 heritage.org
SOURCE: Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, Table M–1,
“Net Financial Positions of PBGC’s (1980–2015)
Multiemployer Program,” http://www.pbgc.gov/documents/
2014-data-tables-final.pdf (accessed August 3, 2016).
NET FINANCIAL POSITION OF PBGC’S
MULTIEMPLOYER PROGRAM
The PBGC’s multiemployer
program
provides insurance to
private union pension
plans, but it faces
massive deficits and
will be unable to pay
insured benefits
without significant
reforms.
PBGC’s Multiemployer Program:
Massive and Growing Deficits
CHART 2
 ­ billion
€­ billion
‚­ billion
ƒ­ billion
­

August 11, 2016

Dick Morris’ bio of Hillary Clinton [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Bail-out, Climatology, Econonics, Education, Elections, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, gun control, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Iran, Islam, Law Enforcement, Military, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama Foreign Policy, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians, Putin, Racism, Religion, Treason, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 4:10 pm

Dick Morris is a nationally recognized political campaign adviser, analyst and author. He was the senior political adviser to Bill Clinton before and after his occupation of the White House. He was campaign manager of Clinton’s 1996 re-election, and the architect of his successful “triangulation” rhetorical ruse. Clinton’s communications director George Stephanopoulos said of Morris, “No single person had more power over [Bill Clinton].”

This week, in a message entitled “What Bill Left Out, Morris corrected the record regarding Clinton’s glowing remarks about Hillary Clinton, her personal attributes and professional achievements. Morris’s insights into the Clintons are priceless.

What follows is a transcript of Morris’s comments:

“Bill Clinton talked at length about Hillary’s idealistic work in college and law school, but he omits that she was defending the Black Panthers who killed security guards; they were on trial in New Haven. She monitored the trial while she was in law school to find evidence that could be grounds for reversal in the event they were convicted.

“That summer she went to work for the True-Haft (SP) law firm in CA, headed by True Haft who is the head of the CA Communist Party and that’s when she got involved with Saul Alinsky, who became something of a mentor for the rest of her life.

“Then Bill says that she went off to Massachusetts and he went to Arkansas, and eventually Hillary followed her heart to join him in Arkansas. He omits that she went to work for the Watergate Committee and was fired from that job for taking home evidence and hiding documents that they needed in the impeachment inquiry. Then she took the DC Bar exam and flunked it. She went to Arkansas because that is the only bar exam she could pass.

“He talked about how in the 1970’s she took all kinds of pro-bono cases to defend women and children. In her memoirs, she cites one which was a custody case and that’s it. In fact, in 1975 she represented a guy accused of raping a 14-year-old girl and got him off by claiming the girl had had fantasies of sex with an older man. In 1980 she gave an interview about it and she joked that she knew the guy was guilty but got him off anyway.

“Then Bill discusses Hillary’s legal career at the Rose Law firm. He doesn’t mention that she made partner when he was elected governor and was only hired when he got elected as attorney general.

“He makes as if it was a public service job — it wasn’t. Her main job was to get state business, and she got tens-of-millions of dollars of state business, then hid her participation and the fees by taking an extra share of non-state business to compensate for the fees on state business that she brought in. Her other job was to call the state banking commissioner any time one of her banks got into trouble to get them off.

“Bill speaks at length how Hillary was a mother, juggling career and family, taking Chelsea to soccer games and stuff — that’s nonsense. Hillary was a mother but Chelsea in the Arkansas governor’s mansion had a staff of nannies and agents to drive her around and people to be with her, and Hillary didn’t have to bother with any of that. All of that was paid for by the state.

“He says she became the warrior in chief over the family finances and that was true, and the result is she learned how to steal.

“She accepted a $100,000 bribe from the poultry industry in return for Bill going easy on regulating them, despite new standards. Jim Blair, the poultry lobbyist, gave her $1,000 to invest in the Futures Market and lined up seven to eight other investors and their winnings were all deposited into Hillary’s account. She made $100,000 in a year and she was out. That essentially was a bribe.

”[She did] a phony real-estate deal for Jim McDougal and the Madison Bank to deceive the federal regulators by pretending someone else was buying the property. She was called before a grand jury in 1995 about that but, conveniently, the billing records were lost, couldn’t be found and there wasn’t proof that she worked on it.

“Bill talks about her work on the health care task force but doesn’t say the reason it didn’t pass was the task force was discredited because the meetings were all held in secret. A federal judge forced them open and fined the task force several hundred thousand dollars because of their secrecy.

“He says that after the health care bill failed in 1994, Hillary went to work on adopting each piece of it piecemeal — mainly health insurance for children.

“That is completely the opposite of the truth. The fact is when that bill failed, I called Hillary and I suggested that she support a proposal by Republican Bob Dole that we cover children, and she said, ‘We can’t just cover one part of this. You have to change everything or change nothing.’ Then in 1997 when I repeated that advice to Bill Clinton, we worked together to pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program. I found a lot of the money for that in the tobacco settlement that my friend Dick Scruggs was negotiating.

“Then Bill extols her record in the U.S. Senate. In fact, she did practically nothing. There were seven or eight bills that she introduced that passed; almost all of which were symbolic — renaming a courthouse, congratulating a high school team on winning the championship. There was only one vaguely substantive bill, and that had a lot of co-sponsors of whom Hillary was just one.

“Then he goes to her record in the State Department and manages to tell that story without mentioning the word Benghazi, without mentioning her secret emails, without mentioning he was getting tens of millions — $220 million in speaking fees in return for favorable actions by the State Department.

“Also totally lacking in the speech was anything about the war on terror — terror is a word you don’t hear at the Democratic Convention.

“Bill says that Hillary passed tough sanctions on Iran for their nuclear program. The opposite is true.

“Every time a tough sanction bill was introduced by Senators Menendez or Kirk, Hillary would send Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman to Capital Hill to testify against it and urge it not to pass, and it was over Hillary’s objections that those sanctions were put into place.

”[Liberal columnist] Maureen Dowd called the speech by Bill Clinton “air brushed.”

“It was a hell of a lot more than that — it was fiction.

(Also see Morris’s comments after Clinton’s DNC acceptance speech. “Its strategy and message will be interdicted by reality at every turn. … She basically has no message. … Her entire campaign is, ‘I’m a woman and I am running against Donald Trump. … She began her speech by saying let’s compromise and work together. Is there any woman in the world less likely to compromise?”)

August 4, 2016

Muslim Refugee Resettlement in the U.S.A. – reference links at end

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Econonics, Elections, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Iran, Islam, Media Check, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism, Religion, Treason, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 6:46 pm

WHERE MUSLIM REFUGEES RESETTLED IN YOUR TOWN IN 2015 and they are all on Welfare!

STATE AND CITY REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT 2015
AK Anchorage 125
AL Mobile 125
AR Springdale 10
AZ Glendale 895
AZ Phoenix 1,459
AZ Tucson 935
CA Anaheim 175
CA Fullerton 10
CA Garden Grove 150
CA Glendale 1,420
CA Los Angeles 490
CA Los Gatos 144
CA Modesto 250
CA Oakland 615
CA Sacramento 1,276
CA San Bernardino 65
CA San Diego 3,103
CA San Francisco 5
CA San Jose 142
CA Turlock 120
CA Walnut Creek 90
CO Colorado Springs 138
CO Denver 1,690
CO Greeley 150
CT Bridgeport 100
CT Hartford 285
CT New Haven 205
DC Washington 15
DE Wilmington 5
FL Clearwater 200
FL Delray Beach 95
FL Doral 160
FL Jacksonville 895
FL Miami 1,056
FL Miami Springs 133
FL Naples 115
FL North Port 30
FL Orlando 360
FL Palm Springs 150
FL Pensacola 20
FL Plantation 75
FL Riviera Beach 50
FL Tallahassee 50
FL Tampa 660
GA Atlanta 2,100
GA Savannah 100
GA Stone Mountain 685
HI Honolulu 15
IA Cedar Rapids 55
IA Des Moines 585
ID Boise 720
ID Twin Falls 300
IL Aurora 190
IL Chicago 1,595
IL Moline 200
IL Rockford 300
IL Wheaton 2,660
IN Fort Wayne 200
IN Indianapolis 1,285
KS Garden City 80
KS Kansas City 200
KS Wichita 510
KY Bowling Green 310
KY Lexington 410
KY Louisville 990
KY Owensboro 135
LA Baton Rouge 125
LA Lafayette 30
LA Metairie 185
MA Boston 300
MA Framingham 8
MA Jamaica Plain 100
MA Lowell 275
MA South Boston 260
MA Springfield 230
MA Waltham 10
MA West Springfield 340
MA Worcester 443
MD Baltimore 775
MD GlenBurnie 150
MD Rockville 39
MD Silver Spring 845
ME Portland 350
MI Ann Arbor 80
MI Battle Creek 140
MI Clinton Township 650
MI Dearborn 640
MI Grand Rapids 740
MI Lansing 617
MI Troy 1,215
MN Minneapolis 730
MN Richfield 340
MN Rochester 130
MN Saint Paul 695
MN St. Cloud 215
MO Columbia 140
MO Kansas City 540
MO Saint Louis 725
MO Springfield 75
MS Biloxi 5
MS Jackson 20
NC Charlotte 655
NC Durham 380
NC Greensboro 385
NC High Point 405
NC New Bern 165
NC Raleigh 475
NC Wilmington 80
ND Bismarck 45
ND Fargo 270
ND Grand Forks 90
NE Lincoln 335
NE Omaha 990
NH Concord 245
NH Manchester 445
NJ Camden 100
NJ East Orange 6
NJ Elizabeth 300
NJ Jersey City 506
NM Albuquerque 220
NV Las Vegas 640
NY Albany 360
NY Amityville 20
NY Binghamton 40
NY Brooklyn 55
NY Buffalo 1,442
NY New York 240
NY Rochester 643
NY Syracuse 1,030
NY Utica 410
OH Akron 575
OH Cincinnati 140
OH Cleveland 510
OH Cleveland Heights 190
OH Columbus 1,300
OH Dayton 210
OH Toledo 40
OK Oklahoma City 170
OK Tulsa 395
OR Portland 995
PA Allentown 95
PA Erie 625
PA Harrisburg 200
PA Lancaster 480
PA Philadelphia 750
PA Pittsburgh 470
PA Roslyn 20
PA Scranton 150
PR San Juan 5
RI Providence 210
SC Columbia 160
SC Spartanburg 220
SD Huron 90
SD Sioux Falls 490
TN Chattanooga 85
TN Knoxville 190
TN Memphis 200
TN Nashville 1,225
TX Abilene 200
TX Amarillo 442
TX Austin 930
TX Corpus Christi 5
TX Dallas 1,765
TX El Paso 35
TX Fort Worth 1,503
TX Houston 2,605
TX San Antonio 750
UT Salt Lake City 1,126
VA Arlington 500
VA Charlottesville 250
VA Falls Church 450
VA Fredericksburg 120
VA Harrisonburg 140
VA Newport News 300
VA Richmond 243
VA Roanoke 177
VT Colchester 325
WA Kent 985
WA Richland 230
WA Seattle 714
WA Spokane 510
WA Tacoma 276
WA Vancouver 127
WI Green Bay 20
WI Madison 90
WI Milwaukee 890
WI Oshkosh 135
WI Sheboygan 35
WV Charleston 50
TOTALS 76,972

References:

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/11/20/8-facts-about-the-us-program-to-resettle-syrian-refugees

U.S. cities ‘secretly selected’ for importing Muslims


http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/01/syrian-refugees-resettled-36-states-catx-mi/
https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/

June 30, 2016

Freedom and Obligation, Clarence Thomas SCOTUS Associate Justice [nc]

Filed under: Econonics, Education, Elections, Historical context, Political Commentary, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , — justplainbill @ 4:39 pm

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Freedom and Obligation–2016 Commencement Address
June 2016 • Volume 45, Number 5/6 • Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas
Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court
________________________________________
Clarence Thomas is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Born in Pinpoint, Georgia, he is a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School. Prior to his nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991, he served as an assistant attorney general of Missouri, an attorney with the Monsanto Company, a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Danforth, assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, chairman of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission, and a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 2007, he published My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir.
________________________________________
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The following is adapted from a speech delivered on May 14, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s 164th Commencement ceremony.

President Arnn, members of the board of trustees, assembled faculty, families and friends, and, most important, members of the Hillsdale College Class of 2016, I am both honored and grateful to participate in these commencement exercises. It has been some years since my wife Virginia and I have been to Hillsdale together. Of course we have known Dr. and Mrs. Arnn for many, many years, and we have been quite close to Hillsdale throughout his tenure. We admire the work that is being done here to educate young men and women—one of whom, Hillsdale graduate David Morrell, a wonderful young man, served as one of my law clerks a few years back.

This has been a most difficult term at the Court. The difficulty is underscored by the sudden and tragic passing of my colleague and friend, Justice Antonin Scalia. I think it is fitting to say a few words about him. Many will focus on his intellect and his legal prowess. I do not demur on either count. But there is so much more than that. When I think of Justice Scalia, I think of the good man who I could instinctively trust during my first days on the Court. He was, in the tradition of the South of my youth, a man of his word, a man of character. Over the almost 25 years that we were together on the Court, I think we made it a better place for each other. I know that he did for me. He was kind to me when it mattered most. He is, and will be, sorely missed.

As the years since I attended college edge toward a half century, I feel a bit out of place talking with college students or recent graduates. So much has changed since I left college in 1971. Things that were considered firm have long since lost their vitality, and much that seemed inconceivable is now firmly or universally established. Hallmarks of my youth, such as patriotism and religion, seem more like outliers, if not afterthoughts. So in a sense, I feel woefully out of place speaking at commencement ceremonies. My words will perhaps seem somewhat vintage in character rather than current or up-to-date. In that context, I admit to being unapologetically Catholic, unapologetically patriotic, and unapologetically a constitutionalist.
In my youth, we had a small farm. I am convinced that the time I spent there had much to do with my firm resolve never to farm again. Work seemed to spring eternal, like the weeds that consumed so much of our time and efforts. One of the messages constantly conveyed in those days was our obligation to take care of the land and to use it to produce food for ourselves and for others. If there was to be independence, self-sufficiency, or freedom, then we first had to understand, accept, and discharge our responsibilities. The latter were the necessary (but not always sufficient) antecedents or precursors of the former. The only guarantee was that if you did not discharge your responsibilities, there could be no independence, no self-sufficiency, and no freedom.

In a broader context, we were obligated in our neighborhood to be good neighbors so that the neighborhood would thrive. Whether there was to be a clean, thriving neighborhood was directly connected to our efforts. So there was always, to our way of thinking, a connection between the things we valued most and our personal obligations or efforts. There could be no freedom without each of us discharging our responsibilities. When we heard the words duty, honor, and country, no more needed to be said. But that is a bygone era. Today, we rarely hear of our personal responsibilities in discussions of broad notions such as freedom or liberty. It is as though freedom and liberty exist wholly independent of anything we do, as if they are predestined.

Related to this, our era is one in which different treatment or different outcomes are inherently suspect. It is all too commonly thought that we all deserve the same reward or the same status, notwithstanding the differences in our efforts or in our abilities. This is why we hear so often about what is deserved or who is entitled. By this way of thinking, the student who treats spring break like a seven-day bacchanalia is entitled to the same success as the conscientious classmate who works and studies while he plays. And isn’t this same sense of entitlement often applied today to freedom?

At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked what the gathering had accomplished. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” Nearly a century later, in a two-minute speech at Gettysburg, President Lincoln spoke similarly. It is for the current generation, he said,

“to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
So many who have gone before us have done precisely that, dedicating their lives to preserving and enhancing our nation both in war and in peace, taking care that those who have given the last full measure of devotion have not done so in vain.”

Being at Hillsdale College, it is appropriate that we should reflect briefly on our ancestors’ understanding of what was to be earned and preserved. America’s Founders and many successive generations believed in natural rights. To establish a government based on the consent of the governed, as the Declaration of Independence makes clear, they gave up only that portion of their rights necessary to create a limited government of the kind needed to secure all of their rights. The Founders then structured that government so that it could not jeopardize the liberty that flowed from natural rights. Even though this liberty is inherent, it is not guaranteed. Indeed, the founding documents of our country are an assertion of this liberty against the King of England—arguably the most powerful man in the world at the time—at the risk of the Founders’ lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. Over the lifespan of our great country, many occasions have arisen that required this liberty, and the form of government that ensures it, to be defended if it was to survive.

At the risk of understating what is necessary to preserve liberty and our form of government, I think more and more that it depends on good citizens discharging their daily duties and obligations. Here I resist what seems to be the formulaic or standard fare at commencement exercises—a broad complaint about societal injustice and an exhortation to the young graduates to go out and solve the problem and change the world. Having been a young graduate myself, I think it is hard enough to solve your own problems, which can sometimes seem to defy solution. And in addressing your own obligations and responsibilities in the right way, you actually do an important part on behalf of liberty and free government.

Throughout my youth, even as the contradiction of segregation persisted, we revered the ideals of our great nation. We knew, of course, that our country was flawed, as are all human institutions. But we also knew that our best hope lay in the ideal of liberty. I watched with anguish as so many of the older people in my life groped and stumbled through the darkness of near or total illiteracy. Yet they desperately wanted to learn and gain knowledge, and they understood implicitly how important it was to enjoy the fullness of American citizenship. They had spent an aggregation of lifetimes standing on the edge of the dual citizenship that is at the heart of the 14th Amendment.

During the Second World War, they were willing to fight for the right to die on foreign soil to defend their country, even as their patriotic love went unreciprocated. They returned from that horrific war with dignity to face the indignity of discrimination. Yet the desire persisted to push our nation to live up to its ideals.

I often wondered why my grandparents remained such model citizens, even when our country’s failures were so obvious. In the arrogance of my early adult life, I challenged my grandfather and doubted America’s ideals. He bluntly asked: “So, where else would you live?” Though not a lettered man, he knew that our constitutional ideals remained our best hope, and that we should work to achieve them rather than undermine them. “Son,” he said, “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” That is, don’t discard what is precious along with what is tainted.

Today, when it seems that grievance rather than responsibility is the main means of elevation, my grandfather’s beliefs may sound odd or discordant. But he and others like him at the time resolved to conduct themselves in a way consistent with America’s ideals. They were law-abiding, hardworking, and disciplined. They discharged their responsibilities to their families and neighbors as best they could. They taught us that despite unfair treatment, we were to be good citizens and good people. If we were to have a functioning neighborhood, we first had to be good neighbors. If we were to have a good city, state, and country, we first had to be good citizens. The same went for our school and our church. We were to keep in mind the corporal works of mercy and the great commandment: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Being wronged by others did not justify reciprocal conduct. Right was right, and two wrongs did not make a right. What we wanted to do did not define what was right—nor, I might add, did our capacious litany of wants define liberty. Rather, what was right defined what we were required to do and what we were permitted to do. It defined our duties and our responsibilities. Whether those duties meant cutting our neighbor’s lawn, visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, or going off to war as my brother did, we were to discharge them honorably.

Shortly before his death in 1983, I sought my grandfather’s advice about how to weather the first wave of harsh criticism directed at me, which I admit had somewhat unnerved me. His re-sponse was simple: “Son, you have to stand up for what you believe in.” To him, that was my obligation, my duty. Perhaps it is at times like that—when you lack strength and courage—that the clarity of our obligation supplies both: duty, honor, country.
As I admitted at the outset, I am of a different time. I knew no one, for example, who was surprised at President Kennedy’s famous exhortation in his 1961 Inaugural Address: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” That sentiment was as common as saying the Pledge of Allegiance or singing the National Anthem, as pervasive as shopping at Army-Navy surplus stores. Today there is much more focus on our rights and on what we are owed, and much less on our obligations and duties—unless, of course, it is about our duty to submit to some new proposed policy.

My grandfather often reminded us that if we didn’t work, we didn’t eat, and that if we didn’t plant, we couldn’t harvest. There is always a relationship between responsibilities and benefits. In agrarian societies, that is more obvious. As society becomes more complex and specialized, it is more difficult to discern. But it is equally true. If you continue to run up charges on your credit card, at some point you reach your credit limit. If you continue to make withdrawals from your savings account, you eventually deplete your funds. Likewise, if we continue to consume the benefits of a free society without replenishing or nourishing that society, we will eventually deplete that as well. If we are content to let others do the work of replenishing and defending liberty while we consume the benefits, we will someday run out of other people’s willingness to sacrifice—or even out of courageous people willing to make the sacrifice.
But this is Hillsdale College, which is like a shining city on a hill. This College, in the words of your mission statement, “considers itself a trustee of a heritage finding its clearest expression in the American experiment of self-government under law.” The very existence of Hillsdale connotes independence, because Hillsdale, like America, was founded on the idea that liberty is an antecedent of government, not a benefit from government.

Let me offer you, this year’s graduates, a few brief suggestions about making your deposits in the account of liberty. Today is just the end of the beginning of your young lives, and the beginning, the commencement of the rest of your lives. There is much more to come, and it will not be with the guiding hands of your parents—indeed, they may someday need your hand to guide them. Some of you will most assuredly be called upon to do very hard things to preserve liberty. All of you will be called upon to provide a firm foundation of citizenship by carrying out your obligations in the way so many preceding generations have done. You are to be the example to others that those generations have been to us. And in being that example, what you do will matter far more than what you say.

As the years have moved swiftly by, I have often reflected on the important citizenship lessons of my life. For the most part, it was the unplanned array of small things. There was the kind gesture from a neighbor. There was my grandmother dividing our dinner because someone showed up unannounced. There was the stranger stopping to help us get our crops out of the field before a big storm. There were the nuns who believed in us and lived in our neighborhood. There was the librarian who brought books to Mass so that I would not be without reading on the farm. Small gestures such as these become large lessons about how to live our lives. We watched and learned what it means to be a good person, a good neighbor, a good citizen. Who will be watching you? And what will you be teaching them?

After this commencement ceremony ends, I implore you to take a few minutes to thank those who made it possible for you to come this far—your parents, your teachers, your pastor. These are the people who have shown you how to sacrifice for those you love, even when that sacrifice is not always appreciated. As you go through life, try to be a person whose actions teach others how to be better people and better citizens. Reach out to the shy person who is not so popular. Stand up for others when they’re being treated unfairly. Take the time to listen to the friend who’s having a difficult time. Do not hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket, especially in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness. Treat others the way you would like to be treated if you stood in their shoes.

These small lessons become the unplanned syllabus for learning citizenship, and your efforts to live them will help to form the fabric of a civil society and a free and prosperous nation where inherent equality and liberty are inviolable. You are men and women of Hillsdale College, a school that has stood fast on its principles and its traditions at great sacrifice. If you don’t lead by example, who will?

I have every faith that you will be a beacon of light for others to follow, like “a city on a hill [that] cannot be hidden.” May God bless each of you now and throughout your lives, and may God bless America.

June 17, 2016

Open Response to Secession Conditions query

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Econonics, Education, Elections, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Islam, Military, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Racism, Religion, self-defense, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 4:01 pm

[The initial question posed was, how soon do I think that the conditions for revolution/secession be met? I responded with mid-to-late 2018 that the conditions listed by Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence 1776” will be met. The problem of actual secession and the saving of America, depends on the following:]

I think that the conditions that Jefferson listed in the 1776 Declaration of Independence will be met that soon. Whether or not the Red States will do anything at that time, I doubt. Too many disengaged sheeple. Over 1/3 of the population is drinking koolaid and supporting the Obamaites and Clintonites. The rich, who started and supported the 1776 secession, have protected and insulated themselves from the federal government.

The NRA has less than 5 million members. That membership is less than the number of people who subscribe to Playboy magazine, who is about to stop having pictures of nude women in it as the photos are limiting its appeal. Counting the illegals, there are over 330,000,000 people in the U.S. Nobody knows how well armed the illegal’s gangs are, but every major city 6 pm news has a crime report that includes them – look how many deaths in black ‘hoods that go unsolved, in K.C. I think that it is over 87%.

For all the sale of firearms, I see no interest in secession, just self-defense and the beginnings of a reform movement, the Tea Party having been suppressed. Federal government, by virtue of technology, is able to locate and destroy the seeds of serious dissent, note Ruby Ridge in Waco TX and how astoundingly excessive the FBI reacted, and this during the Clinton Administration and good economic times.

Veterans with combat skills, ie The American Legion and the VFW, are in groups run by NCO’s, officers having no interest in us or our organizations where they aren’t worshipped by us, have been co-opted by the feds and congressmen promising, but certainly not delivering, VA benefits, healthcare, financial support &c. Notice how even the VA Home Loan program created the FHA, HARP, &c. Note the VA scandals and how they’ve grown since the first limitation of healthcare to Viet Nam Vets in the 1970’s by Carter and Carter’s blanket amnesty to draft dodgers, of whom one was Bill Clinton thereby erasing his felony and allowing him access to the Oval Office.

So, conditions listed by Jefferson should be met, regardless of who wins the 2016 election, in mid to late 2018. Secession will actually depend upon the collapse of the economy into a complete global depression, coupled to Jihadist terrorism. Secession will, in my opinion, be the least violent and bloody of the alternatives if it happens before the riots.

New Orleans, Baltimore & Ferguson (and look at the futbol hooliganism riots in the E.U. as to their respect for law and order and how poor their controls are – and they are exacerbated by the Muslim “immigrants”) are the indicators on how bloody the Black Sub-Culture will make things, the actions at Mizzou by the sexist & racist students and the Black Lives Matter reaction to the Orlando terrorist murders of LGBT, the unconstitutional importation of millions of Muslims, and the rich being completely insulated from it all by virtue of their private militias and gated communities – just look at how the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Serbia &c. have fallen into militia/gated anarchy – have created anarchy and economic chaos. Yellen continuing the no rate hike and jobs being continuing to be sent to China. Also, look at the riots around Trump Events, the attacks on Free Speech, and the attacks on Due Process especially as Due Process applies to the Second Amendment and firearms access.

Areas mentioned had/have survived because the U.S., the E.U., and the U.N., have sent trillions in aid to them. If the U.S. fails, and the E.U. will fail with the British Exit which is probable with next week’s vote, the global economy fails, and the entire current global support net fails. Look at some of the “News You’re Not Getting Elsewhere” posts to see how chaotic things are getting. What reason does Indonesia have to purchase Leopard MBT’s (Main Battle Tanks)? Whom are they going to use them against?

It will be bloody without secession. Secession, as written and posted on the blog, avoids the bloody revolution. Secession keeps all of our Christian-Protestant American values intact. It will force the Blue States to reform before the violence trigger is pulled, which in turn will force Europe to reform before it collapses completely, thus, Christian values will survive long enough to withstand the Muslim onslaught.

Otherwise, 5/6’s of the World’s population will be destroyed and/or enslaved. Mankind will fall into a Dark Ages from which it will not return. The probability of incurable diseases blossoming and destroying the remaining 1/6 is over 50% as shown by the presenting at Emergency Rooms in Europe of Muslims with TB, Syphillis, Gonorhea, polio, HIV/aids, &c. I posted a report by Britain’s National Health Service on Muslim presentiment and burden on the NHS.

If you’ve some idea of what to do other than scream at our elected elite to secede, I’m probably on board, so let me know.

I assume that YOU have a copy of the Declaration of Independence 1776, and can quickly read the conditions that Jefferson lists. And, can you really see the likes of Joe and Dennis actually coming out and facing the Federales? It’s you and me, the American Legion and the VFW, and maybe the NRA.

BTW I think that I included a copy of the 1860 Declaration of Independence in Albany Plan, if not, you should have gotten copies of Freehling’s “Secession” and “Nullification”. “Secession” not only has a copy of the 1860 but a collection of newspaper editorials similar to The Federalist Papers. Also, there may be a copy in “The South was Right” which I know that you have.

Also, get and read Thomas Sowell’s 1995 “The Vision of the Anointed”. He’s a brother Marine, Korea War Vet, and his viewpoint is similar to ours and worth reading for the info and for his conclusions and solutions. With the death of James Q. Wilson a few years ago, he’s the premier conservative philosopher alive.

[Checking in on Nov 17, 2020 – how prophetic was I?]

May 20, 2016

Income Distribution

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Business, Econonics, Elections, Global Intel, Political Commentary — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 8:27 pm

[I have been recommending books on various subjects for over 30 years, now. I do this because I often find myself in disagreement with those who think that they are entitled, or because as an attorney, I am advocating a position or cause for which I have been hired to argue. This blog has as its first posting, an essay on the climate change hoax. Elsewhere are two postings on petrochemicals primarily because over 95% if everything around us has or requires a distilled petrochemical in its making or as an integral component. Plastic, tar, asphalt, paint, electricity, aspirin, clothing, &c., all require some form of petrochemical as a component either directly or in its manufacturing process. Hillary, Barry, and Bernie notwithstanding, try living without it all.

There are several posts on economics. A point not made in them is that of John Maynard Keynes’ biography. Keynes’ data source is the XIXth Century. His basis does not include the common use of electricity and, in fact, predates The Great Depression and commonplace birth control. His theories have all been debunked by the likes of Hazlett, Hayek, Freidman, von Mises, et al.

There are several more original posts mixed in with those by others whom I think it worth your time to read and contemplate. The conclusions are mine, but the source material led me to those conclusions.

My point in this prologue, is that there is a post of a recommended reading list. I have not updated it since its posting, but it is still valid and from which most of my work originates. Leffler’s works on petrochemicals, Solomon’s on climate change, Hayek & von Mises on economics, Sun Tzu on war & business, Foote’s on The War of 1861, and so many others.

A book not on the list, but which I have been recommending for years, is Thomas Sowell’s, Ph. D., “The Vision of the Anointed; Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”. I have posted excerpts on the blog, and now choose to add another. Barry, Hillary, and Bernie at the top of the heap are screaming about income inequality and how unequal it is. I now accent Dr. Sowell’s opinion by quoting from his above noted work, pp 211-213.

I cannot strongly enough recommend his works.

Posted 20 May 2016

BTW, today’s TWSJ p 11 has an op-ed on minimum wage which falls right into this discussion.]

“INCOME DISTRIBUTION”

Despite a voluminous and fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that income is not distributed: It is earned. People paying each other for goods and services generate income. While many people’s entire income comes from a salary paid to them by a given employer, many others collect individual fees for everything from shoe shines to surgery, and it is the sum total of these innumerable fees which constitutes their income. Other income is distributed from a central point as social security checks, welfare payments, unemployment compensation, and the like. But that is not how most people get most income.

To say that “wealth is so unfairly distributed in America,” as Ronald Dworkin does,43 is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it.

If one believes that income and wealth should not originate as they do now, but instead should be distributed as largess from some central point, then that argument should be made openly, plainly, and honestly. But to talk as if we currently have a certain distribution result A which should be changed to distribution result B is to misstate the issue and disguise a radical institutional change as a simple adjustment of preferences. The word “distribution” can of course be used in more than one sense. In a purely statistical sense, we can speak of the “distribution” of heights in the population, without believing someone in Washington decides how tall we should all be and then mails out these heights to different individuals. What we cannot do, either logically or morally, is to shift back and forth between these two very different conceptions of distribution. Newspapers are distributed in one sense – they are sent out from a printing plant to scattered sites to be sold to readers – but heights are distributed only in the other sense.

Those who criticize the existing “distribution” of income in the United States are criticizing the statistical results of systemic processes. They are usually not even discussing the economic fate of actual flesh-and-blood human beings, for the economic positions of given individuals vary greatly within a relatively few years. What is really being said is that numbers don’t look right to the anointed – and that this is what matters, that all the myriad purposes of the millions of human beings who are transacting with one another in the marketplace must be subordinated to the goal of presenting a certain statistical plateau to anointed observers.

To question the “fairness” or other index of validity of the existing statistics growing out of voluntary economic transactions is to question whether those who spent their own money to buy what they wanted from other people have a right to do so. To say that a shoe shine boy earns “too little” or a surgeon “too much” is to say that third parties should have the right to preempt the decisions of those who have elected to spend their money on shoe shines or surgery. To say that “society” should decide how much it values various goods and services is to say that individual decisions on these matters should be superseded by collective decisions made by political surrogates. But to say this openly would require some persuasive reasons why collective decisions are better than individual decisions and why third parties are better judges than those who are making their own trade-offs at their own expense.

Again, no one would seriously entertain such an arrogant and presumptuous goal, if presented openly, plainly, and honestly. They may, however, be led in that direction if the anointed are able to slip undetected back and forth between one definition of “distribution” and another, as the exigencies of the argument require.

[“The Vision of the Anointed”, Sowell, Thomas Ph. D., © 1995 Basic Books ISBN-13: 978-0-465-08995-6 pp 211-213]

May 19, 2016

Nine Quotes from Ludwig von Mises [nc]

Filed under: Bail-out, Business, Econonics, Elections, Historical context, Political Commentary, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 6:27 pm

04/15/2016Tho Bishop

In honor of tax day, a look at the best quotes from Ludwig von Mises on taxation:

1. “Some experts have declared that it is necessary to tax the people until it hurts. I disagree with these sadists.”
Source: Defense, Controls, and Inflation

2. “If the present tax rates had been in effect from the beginning of our century, many who are millionaires today would live under more modest circumstances. But all those new branches of industry which supply the masses with articles unheard of before would operate, if at all, on a much smaller scale, and their products would be beyond the reach of the common man.”
Source: Planning for Freedom

3. “Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.
Source: Planning for Freedom

4. “Estate taxes of the height they have already attained for the upper brackets are no longer to be qualified as taxes. They are measures of expropriation.”
Source: Defense, Controls, and Inflation ​

5. “Progressive taxation of income and profits means that precisely those parts of the income which people would have saved and invested are taxed away.”
Source: Economic Policy

6. “The metamorphosis of taxes into weapons of destruction is the mark of present-day public finance.”
Source: Human Action

7. “Taxes are paid because the taxpayers are afraid of offering resistance to the tax gatherers. They know that any disobedience or resistance is hopeless. As long as this is the state of affairs, the government is able to collect the money that it wants to spend.”
Source: Human Action

8. “[T]he system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs.”
Source: Human Action

9. “Nothing is more calculated to make a demagogue popular than a constantly reiterated demand for heavy taxes on the rich. Capital levies and high income taxes on the larger incomes are extraordinarily popular with the masses, who do not have to pay them.”
Source: Human Action

May 16, 2016

Imprimis Apr 2016 V45#4 The Danger of “Black Lives Matter” [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, crime control, Econonics, Education, Elections, gun control, Historical context, Law Enforcement, Media Check, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians, US Constitution — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — justplainbill @ 6:49 pm

Imprimis
OVER 3,400,000 READERS MONTHLY
April 2016 • Volume 45, Number 4
A PUBLICATION OF HILLSDALE COLLEGE
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 27, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s
Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C.,
as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
For almost
two years, a protest movement known as “Black Lives Matter” has
convulsed the nation. Triggered by the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, in August 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement holds that racist police
officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today. This belief has triggered
riots, “die-ins,” the murder and attempted murder of police officers, a campaign to
eliminate traditional grand jury proceedings when police use lethal force, and a presi
–
dential task force on policing.
Even though the U.S. Justice Department has resoundingly disproven the lie that a
pacific Michael Brown was shot in cold blood while trying to surrender, Brown is still
The Danger of the “Black Lives
Matter” Movement
Heather Mac Donald
A u t h o r,
The War on Cops
HEATHER MAC DONALD
is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan
Institute and a contributing editor of
City Journal
. She earned a B.A.
from Yale University, an M.A. in English from Cambridge University,
and a J. D. from Stanford Law School. She writes for several newspapers
and journals, including
The Wall Street Journal
,
The New York Times
,
The New Criterion
, and
Public Interest
, and is the author of three books,
including
Are Cops Racist?
and
The War on Cops: How The New Attack
on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe
(for t hc om i ng Ju ne 2 016).
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HILLSDALE COLLEGE: PURSUING TRUTH • DEFENDING LIBERT Y SINCE 1844
venerated as a martyr. And now police offi
–
cers are backing off of proactive policing in
the face of the relentless venom directed at
them on the street and in the media. As a
result, violent crime is on the rise.
The need is urgent, therefore, to
examine the Black Lives Matter move
–
ment’s central thesis—that police pose
the greatest threat to young black men. I
propose two counter hypotheses: first,
that there is no government agency more
dedicated to the idea that black lives
matter than the police; and second, that
we have been talking obsessively about
alleged police racism over the last 20
years in order to avoid talking about a far
larger problem—black-on-black crime.
Let’s be clear at the outset: police
have an indefeasible obligation to treat
everyone with courtesy and respect, and
to act within the confines of the law. Too
often, officers develop a hardened, obnox
–
ious attitude. It is also true that being
stopped when you are innocent of any
wrongdoing is infuriating, humiliating,
and sometimes ter
–
rifying. And needless
to say, every unjusti
–
fied police shooting
of an unarmed civil
–
ian is a stomach-
churning tragedy.
Given the his
–
tory of racism in this
country and the com
–
plicity of the police
in that history, police
shootings of black
men are particularly
and understandably
fraught. That history
informs how many
people view the police.
But however intoler
–
able and inexcusable
every act of police
brutality is, and while
we need to make sure
that the police are
properly trained in
the Constitution and
in courtesy, there is a
larger reality behind
the issue of policing, crime, and race that
remains a taboo topic. The problem of
black-on-black crime is an uncomfortable
truth, but unless we acknowledge it, we
won’t get very far in understanding pat
–
terns of policing.
* * *
Every year, approximately 6,000
blacks are murdered. This is a number
greater than white and Hispanic homi
–
cide victims combined, even though
blacks are only 13 percent of the national
population. Blacks are killed at six times
the rate of whites and Hispanics com
–
bined. In Los Angeles, blacks between
the ages of 20 and 24 die at a rate 20 to 30
times the national mean. Who is killing
them? Not the police, and not white civil
–
ians, but other blacks. The astronomical
black death-by-homicide rate is a func
–
tion of the black crime rate. Black males
between the ages of 14 and 17 commit
homicide at ten times the rate of white
and Hispanic male
teens combined. Blacks
of all ages commit
homicide at eight times
the rate of whites and
Hispanics combined,
and at eleven times the
rate of whites alone.
The police could
end all lethal uses
of force tomorrow
and it would have at
most a trivial effect
on the black death-
by-homicide rate.
The nation’s police
killed 987 civilians
in 2015, according to
a database compiled
by
The Washington
Post
. Whites were 50
percent—or 493—of
those victims, and
blacks were 26 per
–
cent—or 258. Most of
those victims of police
shootings, white and
black, were armed or
− ́
Imprimis
(im-pri-mis),
[Latin]: in the f irst place
EDITOR
Douglas A. Jeffrey
DEPUTY EDITORS
Matthew D. Bell
Timothy W. Caspar
COPY EDITOR
Monica VanDerWeide
ART DIRECTOR
Arthur Donley
MARKETING DIRECTOR
William Gray
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Lucinda Grimm
CIRCULATION MANAGER
Wanda Oxenger
S TAFF A SSIS TANT S
Robin Curtis
Kim Ellsworth
Kathy Smith
Mary Jo Von Ewegen
Copyright © 2016 Hillsdale College
The opinions expressed in
Imprimis
are not
necessarily the views of Hillsdale College.
Permission to reprint in whole or in part is
hereby granted, provided the following credit
line is used: “Reprinted by permission from
Imprimis
, a publication of Hillsdale College.”
SUBSCRIPTION FREE UPON REQUEST.
ISSN 0277-8432
Imprimis
trademark registered in U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office #1563325.
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HILLSDALE COLLEGE: PURSUING TRUTH • DEFENDING LIBERT Y SINCE 1844
otherwise threatening the officer with
potentially lethal force.
The black violent crime rate would
actually predict that
more
than 26 per
–
cent of police victims would be black.
Officer use of force will occur where the
police interact most often with violent
criminals, armed suspects, and those
resisting arrest, and that is in black neigh
–
borhoods. In America’s 75 largest coun
–
ties in 2009, for example, blacks consti
–
tuted 62 percent of all robbery defendants,
57 percent of all murder defendants, 45
percent of all assault defendants—but
only 15 percent of the population.
Moreover, 40 percent of all cop kill
–
ers have been black over the last decade.
And a larger proportion of white and
Hispanic homicide deaths are a result
of police killings than black homicide
deaths—but don’t expect to hear that
from the media or from the political
enablers of the Black Lives Matter move
–
ment. Twelve percent of all white and
Hispanic homicide victims are killed
by police officers, compared to four
percent of all black homicide victims.
If we’re going to have a “Lives Matter”
anti-police movement, it would be
more appropriately named “White and
Hispanic Lives Matter.”
Standard anti-cop ideology, whether
emanating from the ACLU or the acad
–
emy, holds that law enforcement actions
are racist if they don’t mirror popula
–
tion data. New York City illustrates why
that expectation is so misguided. Blacks
make up 23 percent of New York City’s
population, but they commit 75 percent
of all shootings, 70 percent of all robber
–
ies, and 66 percent of all violent crime,
according to victims and witnesses. Add
Hispanic shootings and you account for
98 percent of all illegal gunfire in the
city. Whites are 33 percent of the city’s
population, but they commit fewer than
two percent of all shootings, four per
–
cent of all robberies, and five percent of
all violent crime. These disparities mean
that virtually every time the police
in New York are called out on a gun
run—meaning that someone has just
been shot—they are being summoned
to minority neighborhoods looking for
minority suspects.
Officers hope against hope that they
will receive descriptions of white shoot
–
ing suspects, but it almost never hap
–
pens. This incidence of crime means
that innocent black men have a much
higher chance than innocent white men
of being stopped by the police because
they match the description of a suspect.
This is not something the police choose.
It is a reality forced on them by the
facts of crime.
The geographic disparities are also
huge. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, the
per capita shooting rate is 81 times
higher than in nearby Bay Ridge,
Brooklyn—the first neighborhood pre
–
dominantly black, the second neighbor
–
hood predominantly white and Asian.
As a result, police presence and use of
proactive tactics are much higher in
Brownsville than in Bay Ridge. Every
time there is a shooting, the police will
f lood the area looking to make stops
in order to avert a retaliatory shooting.
They are in Brownsville not because of
racism, but because they want to provide
protection to its many law-abiding resi
–
dents who deserve safety.
* * *
Who are some of the victims of
elevated urban crime? On March 11,
2015, as protesters were once again
converging on the Ferguson police head
–
quarters demanding the resignation of
the entire department, a six-year-old
boy named Marcus Johnson was killed
a few miles away in a St. Louis park, the
victim of a drive-by shooting. No one
protested his killing. Al Sharpton did
not demand a federal investigation. Few
people outside of his immediate com
–
munity know his name.
Ten children under the age of ten
were killed in Baltimore last year. In
Cleveland, three children five and
younger were killed in September.
A seven-year-old boy was killed in
Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend
by a bullet intended for his father. In
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November, a nine-year-old in Chicago
was lured into an alley and killed by
his father’s gang enemies; the father
refused to cooperate with the police. In
August, a nine-year-old girl was doing
her homework on her mother’s bed in
Ferguson when a bullet fired into the
house killed her. In Cincinnati in July, a
four-year-old girl was shot in the head
and a six-year-old girl was left paralyzed
and partially blind from two separate
drive-by shootings. This mindless
violence seems almost to be regarded
as normal, given the lack of attention
it receives from the same people who
would be out in droves if any of these
had been police shootings. As horrific
as such stories are, crime rates were
much higher 20 years ago. In New York
City in 1990, for example, there were
2,245 homicides. In 2014 there were
333—a decrease of 85 percent. The drop
in New York’s crime rate is the steepest
in the nation, but crime has fallen at
a historic rate nationwide as well—by
about 40 percent—since the early 1990s.
The greatest beneficiaries of these
declining rates have been minorities.
Over 10,000 minority males alive today
in New York would be dead if the city’s
homicide rate had remained at its early
1990s level.
* * *
What is behind this historic crime
drop? A policing revolution that began
in New York and spread nationally, and
that is now being threatened. Starting
in 1994, the top brass of the NYPD
embraced the then-radical idea that the
police can actually prevent crime, not
just respond to it. They started gather
–
ing and analyzing crime data on a daily
and then hourly basis. They looked
for patterns, and strategized on tactics
to try to quell crime outbreaks as they
were emerging. Equally important, they
held commanders accountable for crime
in their jurisdictions. Department
leaders started meeting weekly with
precinct commanders to grill them on
crime patterns on their watch. These
weekly accountability sessions came to
be known as Compstat. They were
ruthless, high tension affairs. If a com
–
mander was not fully informed about
every local crime outbreak and ready
with a strategy to combat it, his career
was in jeopardy.
Compstat created a sense of urgency
about fighting crime that has never left
the NYPD. For decades, the rap against
the police was that they ignored crime
in minority neighborhoods. Compstat
keeps New York commanders focused
like a laser beam on where people are
being victimized most, and that is in
minority communities. Compstat spread
nationwide. Departments across the
country now send officers to emerging
crime hot spots to try to interrupt crimi
–
nal behavior before it happens.
In terms of economic stimulus alone,
no other government program has come
close to the success of data-driven polic
–
ing. In New York City, businesses that
had shunned previously drug-infested
areas now set up shop there, offering res
–
idents a choice in shopping and creating
a demand for workers. Senior citizens
felt safe to go to the store or to the post
office to pick up their Social Security
checks. Children could ride their bikes
on city sidewalks without their moth
–
ers worrying that they would be shot.
But the crime victories of the last two
decades, and the moral support on
which law and order depends, are now
in jeopardy thanks to the falsehoods of
the Black Lives Matter movement.
Police operating in inner-city neigh
–
borhoods now find themselves routinely
surrounded by cursing, jeering crowds
when they make a pedestrian stop or try
to arrest a suspect. Sometimes bottles
and rocks are thrown. Bystanders stick
cell phones in the officers’ faces, dar
–
ing them to proceed with their duties.
Officers are worried about becoming
the next racist cop of the week and pos
–
sibly losing their livelihood thanks to an
incomplete cell phone video that inevita
–
bly fails to show the antecedents to their
use of force. Officer use of force is never
pretty, but the public is clueless about
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APRIL 2016 • VOLUME 45, NUMBER 4
<
hillsdale.edu
6
HILLSDALE COLLEGE: PURSUING TRUTH • DEFENDING LIBERT Y SINCE 1844
how hard it is to subdue a suspect who is
determined to resist arrest.
As a result of the anti-cop campaign
of the last two years and the resulting
push-back in the streets, officers in
urban areas are cutting back on precisely
the kind of policing that led to the crime
decline of the 1990s and 2000s. Arrests
and summons are down, particularly
for low-level offenses. Police officers
continue to rush to 911 calls when there
is already a victim. But when it comes
to making discretionary stops—such as
getting out of their cars and question
–
ing people hanging out on drug corners
at 1:00 a.m.—many cops worry that
doing so could put their careers on the
line. Police officers are, after all, human.
When they are repeatedly called racist
for stopping and questioning suspicious
individuals in high-crime areas, they
will perform less of those stops. That is
not only understandable—in a sense, it
is how things
should
work. Policing is
political. If a powerful political block
has denied the legitimacy of assertive
policing, we will get less of it.
On the other hand, the people
demanding that the police back off are
by no means representative of the entire
black community. Go to any police-
neighborhood meeting in Harlem, the
South Bronx, or South Central Los
Angeles, and you will invariably hear
variants of the following: “We want the
dealers off the corner.” “You arrest them
and they’re back the next day.” “There
are kids hanging out on my stoop. Why
can’t you arrest them for loitering?”
“I smell weed in my hallway. Can’t you
do something?” I met an elderly cancer
amputee in the Mount Hope section of
the Bronx who was terrified to go to her
lobby mailbox because of the young
men trespassing there and selling drugs.
The only time she felt safe was when the
police were there. “Please, Jesus,” she said
to me, “send more police!” The irony is
that the police cannot respond to these
heartfelt requests for order without gen
–
erating the racially disproportionate sta
–
tistics that will be used against them in
an ACLU or Justice Department lawsuit.
* * *
Unfortunately, when officers back
off in high crime neighborhoods, crime
shoots through the roof. Our country is
in the midst of the first sustained violent
crime spike in two decades. Murders
rose nearly 17 percent in the nation’s 50
largest cities in 2015, and it was in cities
with large black populations where the
violence increased the most. Baltimore’s
per capita homicide rate last year was the
highest in its history. Milwaukee had its
deadliest year in a decade, with a 72 per
–
cent increase in homicides. Homicides in
Cleveland increased 90 percent over the
previous year. Murders rose 83 percent
in Nashville, 54 percent in Washington,
D.C., and 61 percent in Minneapolis. In
Chicago, where pedestrian stops are
down by 90 percent, shootings were up
80 percent through March 2016.
I first identified the increase in vio
–
lent crime in May 2015 and dubbed it
“the Ferguson effect.” My diagnosis set
off a firestorm of controversy on the
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quizzes, and discussion groups. Those who complete
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them successfully receive certificates of completion.
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