The Silence around Ferguson

The Silence around Ferguson 
Sometimes, it seems, black lives don’t matter. 

By Deroy Murdock

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Proteating the Ferguson grand jury decision in Washington, D.C. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

 

Deroy Murdock 

Millions of moms and dads will celebrate this Thanksgiving break with their kids. Alas, Michael Brown’s parents will mark this holiday without their late, world-famous son. That is a sad fact, whatever one thinks about the blazing controversy that has engulfed Ferguson, Mo.

Jermaine Jones’s family, too, will not share turkey and gravy with their son. On October 18, Jones, 29, stood with a few friends on a street in Berkeley, Mo., adjacent to Ferguson. Police say an unknown black male opened fire, killing Jones and wounding three other black men near him. (Strangely, Jones’s sister, Margaree Dixson, was shot fatally a half-mile away, just three hours earlier. In her case, too, police suspect yet another unidentified black man.)

“There’s too much violence going on,” Nicole Rice, Jones’s sister, toldKTVI. “I can’t sleep. I can’t think. I can’t work. I can’t do anything wondering if my son will be a victim to the streets.”

Why has Jones’s death not unleashed riots and looting? Simple: Jones was killed by a fellow black man. Therefore, his death and his loved ones’ agony generate silence.

As a St. Louis County grand jury ruled Monday, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, 28, lawfully shot Brown, 18, in self-defense last August 9. This decision has fueled widespread chaos, including arson in several cities and infernos in Ferguson that cremated 25 local businesses. The national outrage still is at full boil over this white cop shooting an unarmed black man who acted very aggressively after stealing cigars from a convenience store.

But one can hear birds chirp while listening for public outcry over the deaths of black citizens killed by black perpetrators. Somehow, these black lives don’t seem to matter.

Ferguson is within the St. Louis metropolitan area. The FBI’s latest homicide-ratedata ranked St. Louis as America’s fourth deadliest city. Its 38 killings per 100,000 residents in 2013 put it behind only Nos. 1 to 3, Detroit, New Orleans, and Newark.

Drawing on FBI figures and his own research, University of Missouri–St. Louis criminologist David A. Klinger counts 1,265 murders in his city from 2003 through 2012. Approximately 90 percent of those killed were black, reportsKlinger, a former LAPD officer. Among these 1,138 decedents, roughly 90 percent (1,025) were slain by other blacks. Klinger found 32 blacks killed by cops, with 22 of them shot dead by white officers. So, across 10 years, white cops killed a whopping 2 percent of St. Louis’s black homicide victims. Investigations indicated that all of these police killings were legally justified.​

“While I understand the people are concerned about the use of deadly force by the police, by far — about 50 to 1 — more blacks in St. Louis are killed by other blacks as compared to white police officers,” Klinger told KMOX-TV.

Meanwhile, 98 percent of black murders go virtually unremarked. Where are the angry crowds demanding justice for blacks such as these, who were wiped out in St. Louis by other blacks in recent memory?

• Willie Earl Reed, 54, faces first-degree murder charges for taking a baseball bat and beating to death his girlfriend, Delores Hundley, 64, on March 24.

• Dominic Arrington, 38, allegedly stabbed to death April Fields on January 28. The 25-year-old business student just had dropped her daughter Skylar, 3, at her day-care center. Arrington had been on parole since 2004 for the 1995 killing of his then-girlfriend’s son, also age 3.

• Carnez Winslett, 36, was gunned down outside his birthday party on September 7, 2013. Police say Darnell Hollings, 21, shot ten bullets at Winslett and his guests. Winslett was wounded mortally. Three other black men were struck, but survived. Hollings also is among four men charged with non-fatally striking hot-dog vendor Edward Newa in the skull with a ball-peen hammer that they just had shoplifted from a Home Depot that August 21.

“What about the poor black child who was killed by another black child?” former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani correctly asked on last Sunday’s Meet the Press. “Why aren’t you protesting that?”

Giuliani also told the Washington Post:

The danger to a black child in America is not a white police officer. That’s going to happen less than 1 percent of the time. The danger to a black child . . . is another black. . . . If my child were shot by a police officer, I would be very, very frustrated. I’d also be frustrated if my son were shot by a gangster in the street. But if the chances were — that my son would be shot by the gangster in the street — nine times out of ten, I’d spend an awful lot of time on the nine times out of ten.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports demonstrate that in 2013, 90 percent of black murder victims were killed by other blacks. Among whites, 83 percent of those snuffed out died at the hands of other whites. Only 8 percent of blacks who were killed that year were slain by whites. Black-on-white murders were just 14 percent of all white homicides last year.

Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn recently excoriated demonstrators who, predictably, rail against police shootings while ignoring black-on-black homicide. In a stirring statement to journalists, Flynn dramatically put all of this in perspective:

I was following developments with a 5-year-old little girl sitting on her dad’s lap who just got shot in the head by a drive-by shooting. And if some of the people here gave a good goddamn about the victimization of the people in this community by crime, I’d take some of their invective more seriously. . . . Now they know all about the last three people who’ve been killed by the Milwaukee Police Department over the course of the last several years. There’s not one of them that can name one of the last three homicide victims we’ve had in this city.​

Left-wing racial-grievance–mongers scream that bigoted white cops lie in wait around every corner, jonesing to blast black men into their graves. Yes, there are bad policemen, just as there are bad priests and bad teachers. However, the overwhelming majority of officers work tirelessly and thanklessly to shield law-abiding black Americans from their natural enemies: black murderers.

— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393611/silence-around-ferguson-deroy-murdock

Cracking Down on Maine’s Welfare Reform

Cracking Down on Maine’s Welfare Reform 
Governor LePage reins in entitlement abuse, and the Obama administration objects. 

By Jillian Kay Melchior

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Maine’s Republican governor won reelection largely on his welfare-reform agenda — and the federal government is not pleased.

Late last week, the Obama administration threatened to cut federal funding over one of Maine’s new anti-fraud measures, while the LePage administration began marketing its aggressive reform agenda to a national audience. Grab the popcorn.

Statewide reform in Maine was overdue; the state’s unemployment rate is a mere 5.6 percent, but one in five residents receives food-stamp benefits, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services reports. Meanwhile, fraud and abuse cost Maine an estimated $3.7 million every year.

With these sorts of statistics in mind, Governor Paul LePage and his gutsy DHHS commissioner Mary Mayhew have pursued provocative reforms.

Maine has already, among other efforts, doubled the number of fraud investigators; required drug tests for beneficiaries with drug-related felonies; tracked and blocked the use of cash benefits at casinos, liquor stores, and casinos; reinstated the work-requirement for long-term food-stamp collection; and put a five-year cap on cash benefits for able-bodied, non-elderly recipients.

To cut back on fraud and deter the trafficking of food-stamp and cash-assistance cards, Maine also launched a program in June to put photo IDs on all electric-benefits transfer (EBT) cards.

The federal government didn’t like that idea from the beginning. Even though New York and Massachusetts already require photo IDs on EBT cards, the Obama administration required Maine to submit extensive paperwork before doing the same. In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) askedMaine to delay its program, warning that the state was “at risk” of losing funds and facing litigation.

Maine pushed forward anyway, and today, more than 21,000 EBT holders have volunteered to participate in the photo-ID pilot program. So last week the federal government attacked again, sending a second strongly worded letter to the LePage administration.

According to the Obama administration’s latest screed, requiring photo IDs could have a “chilling effect” on enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and constitutes a possible civil-rights violation. The letter reiterated that the Obama administration may withdraw some federal funding for Maine, though it did not specify an amount.

Instead of backing down in the face of federal opposition, Mayhew presented a hefty, 15-item wish list for federal reform of the food-stamp program at a group meeting for her counterparts in other states on Friday, a day after the USDA’s warning letter.

SNAP is “a critical safety-net program, but it lacks accountability for outcomes and clearly is vulnerable to significant fraud, waste, and abuse,” Mayhew tells NRO. Her proposed federal-level changes include a ban on the use of food stamps for soda and candy, as well as several measures to expand the amount of transaction data available to state officials and to crack down on fraud and abuse.

Mayhew says her counterparts in several other states have already expressed “significant support, agreement that this is a program that has expanded beyond the core intent as a safety net or work-support program.” Food-stamp usage “has quadrupled in cost nationally since 2001; it has doubled in cost since 2008 nationally. There is significant interest among a number of my counterparts for access to the data around what is being purchased with food stamps, to analyze how much soda versus milk is being purchased. This just screams for increased transparency, for greater accountability.”

Mayhew has forwarded her 15-point suggestions for food-stamp reform to Maine’s congressional delegates, and she tells NRO she intends to follow up with them soon. Meanwhile, her DHHS is gearing up to propose further state-level changes.

As NRO has reported before, Maine’s welfare reforms have already shown great success. Usage of cash benefits has dropped by 54 percent since LePage took office, while food-stamp spending decreased by $5.7 million. The LePage administration’s reforms also have a strong job-training and job-placement component, making the state more economically competitive in the long term.

No wonder the Obama administration is peeved. Nationwide, it’s worked hard to expand the number of Americans on the public doles. The last thing it wants is a contagion of Maine’s smart welfare-reform policies. The latest round of federal opposition isn’t about Maine’s EBT requirements; it’s about containment. So expect a good tussle for months to come.

— Jillian Kay Melchior is a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and a Senior Fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393552/cracking-down-maines-welfare-reform-jillian-kay-melchio
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Ex-CBS reporter’s book reveals how liberal media protects Obama

By Kyle Smith

Sharyl Attkisson is an unreasonable woman. Important people have told her so.

When the longtime CBS reporter asked for details about reinforcements sent to the Benghazi compound during the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack, White House national security spokesman Tommy Vietor replied, “I give up, Sharyl . . . I’ll work with more reasonable folks that follow up, I guess.”

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Another White House flack, Eric Schultz, didn’t like being pressed for answers about the Fast and Furious scandal in which American agents directed guns into the arms of Mexican drug lords. “Goddammit, Sharyl!” he screamed at her. “The Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, The New York Times is reasonable. You’re the only one who’s not reasonable!”

Two of her former bosses, CBS Evening News executive producers Jim Murphy and Rick Kaplan, called her a “pit bull.”

That was when Sharyl was being nice.

Now that she’s no longer on the CBS payroll, this pit bull is off the leash and tearing flesh off the behinds of senior media and government officials. In her new memoir/exposé “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington” (Harper), Attkisson unloads on her colleagues in big-time TV news for their cowardice and cheerleading for the Obama administration while unmasking the corruption, misdirection and outright lying of today’s Washington political machine.

‘Not until the stock split’

Calling herself “politically agnostic,” Attkisson, a five-time Emmy winner, says she simply follows the story, and the money, wherever it leads her.

In nearly 20 years at CBS News, she has done many stories attacking Republicans and corporate America, and she points out that TV news, being reluctant to offend its advertisers, has become more and more skittish about, for instance, stories questioning pharmaceutical companies or car manufacturers.

Working on a piece that raised questions about the American Red Cross disaster response, she says a boss told her, “We must do nothing to upset our corporate partners . . . until the stock splits.” (Parent company Viacom and CBS split in 2006).

OFTEN [NETWORK EXECUTIVES] DREAM UP STORIES BEFOREHAND AND TURN THE REPORTERS INTO “CASTING AGENTS”

Meanwhile, she notes, “CBS This Morning” is airing blatant advertorials such as a three-minute segment pushing TGI Fridays’ all-you-can-eat appetizer promotion or four minutes plugging a Doritos taco shell sold at Taco Bell.

Reporters on the ground aren’t necessarily ideological, Attkisson says, but the major network news decisions get made by a handful of New York execs who read the same papers and think the same thoughts.

Often they dream up stories beforehand and turn the reporters into “casting agents,” told “we need to find someone who will say . . .” that a given policy is good or bad. “We’re asked to create a reality that fits their New York image of what they believe,” she writes.

Reporting on the many green-energy firms such as Solyndra that went belly-up after burning through hundreds of millions in Washington handouts, Attkisson ran into increasing difficulty getting her stories on the air. A colleague told her about the following exchange: “[The stories] are pretty significant,” said a news exec. “Maybe we should be airing some of them on the ‘Evening News?’ ” Replied the program’s chief Pat Shevlin, “What’s the matter, don’t you support green energy?”

Says Attkisson: That’s like saying you’re anti-medicine if you point out pharmaceutical company fraud.

A piece she did about how subsidies ended up at a Korean green-energy firm — your tax dollars sent to Korea! — at first had her bosses excited but then was kept off the air and buried on the CBS News Web site. Producer Laura Strickler told her Shevlin “hated the whole thing.”

‘Let’s not pile on’

Attkisson mischievously cites what she calls the “Substitution Game”: She likes to imagine how a story about today’s administration would have been handled if it made Republicans look bad.

In green energy, for instance: “Imagine a parallel scenario in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney personally appeared at groundbreakings for, and used billions of tax dollars to support, multiple giant corporate ventures whose investors were sometimes major campaign bundlers, only to have one (or two, or three) go bankrupt . . . when they knew in advance the companies’ credit ratings were junk.”

Attkisson continued her dogged reporting through the launch of ObamaCare: She’s the reporter who brought the public’s attention to the absurdly small number — six — who managed to sign up for it on day one.

ONE OF HER BOSSES HAD A RULE THAT CONSERVATIVE ANALYSTS MUST ALWAYS BE LABELED CONSERVATIVES, BUT LIBERAL ANALYSTS WERE SIMPLY “ANALYSTS.”

“Many in the media,” she writes, “are wrestling with their own souls: They know that ObamaCare is in serious trouble, but they’re conflicted about reporting that. Some worry that the news coverage will hurt a cause that they personally believe in. They’re all too eager to dismiss damaging documentary evidence while embracing, sometimes unquestioningly, the Obama administration’s ever-evolving and unproven explanations.”

One of her bosses had a rule that conservative analysts must always be labeled conservatives, but liberal analysts were simply “analysts.” “And if a conservative analyst’s opinion really rubbed the supervisor the wrong way,” says Attkisson, “she might rewrite the script to label him a ‘right-wing’ analyst.”

In mid-October 2012, with the presidential election coming up, Attkisson says CBS suddenly lost interest in airing her reporting on the Benghazi attacks. “The light switch turns off,” she writes. “Most of my Benghazi stories from that point on would be reported not on television, but on the Web.”

Two expressions that became especially popular with CBS News brass, she says, were “incremental” and “piling on.” These are code for “excuses for stories they really don’t want, even as we observe that developments on stories they like are aired in the tiniest of increments.”

Hey, kids, we found two more Americans who say they like their ObamaCare! Let’s do a lengthy segment.

Friends in high places

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David RhodesPhoto: WireImage

When the White House didn’t like her reporting, it would make clear where the real power lay. A flack would send a blistering e-mail to her boss, David Rhodes, CBS News’ president — and Rhodes’s brother Ben, a top national security advisor to President Obama.

The administration, with the full cooperation of the media, has successfully turned “Benghazi” into a word associated with nutters, like “Roswell” or “grassy knoll,” but Attkisson notes that “the truth is that most of the damaging information came from Obama administration insiders. From government documents. From sources who were outraged by their own government’s behavior and what they viewed as a coverup.”

Similarly, though the major media can’t mention the Fast and Furious scandal without a world-weary eyeroll, Attkisson points out that the story led to the resignation of a US attorney and the head of the ATF and led President Obama to invoke for the first time “executive privilege” to stanch the flow of damaging information.

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Barack Obama works on a speech with Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications.Photo: Pete Souza/White House

Attkisson, who received an Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow award for her trailblazing work on the story, says she made top CBS brass “incensed” when she appeared on Laura Ingraham’s radio show and mentioned that Obama administration officials called her up to literally scream at her while she was working the story.

One angry CBS exec called to tell Attkisson that Ingraham is “extremely, extremely far right” and that Attkisson shouldn’t appear on her show anymore. Attkisson was puzzled, noting that CBS reporters aren’t barred from appearing on lefty MSNBC shows.

She was turning up leads tying the Fast and Furious scandal (which involved so many guns that ATF officials initially worried that a firearm used in the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords might have been one of them) to an ever-expanding network of cases when she got an e-mail from Katie Couric asking if it was OK for Couric to interview Eric Holder, whom Couric knew socially, about the scandal. Sure, replied Attkisson.

No interview with Holder aired but “after that weekend e-mail exchange, nothing is the same at work,” Attkisson writes. “The Evening News” began killing her stories on Fast and Furious, with one producer telling Attkisson, “You’ve reported everything. There’s really nothing left to say.”

Readers are left to wonder whether Holder told Couric to stand down on the story.

No investigations

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New “CBS Evening News” host Scott PelleyPhoto: AP

Attkisson left CBS News in frustration earlier this year. In the book she cites the complete loss of interest in investigative stories at “CBS Evening News” under new host Scott Pelley and new executive producer Shevlin.

She notes that the program, which under previous hosts Dan Rather, Katie Couric and Bob Schieffer largely gave her free rein, became so hostile to real reporting that investigative journalist Armen Keteyian and his producer Keith Summa asked for their unit to be taken off the program’s budget (so they could pitch stories to other CBS News programs), then Summa left the network entirely.

When Attkisson had an exclusive, on-camera interview lined up with Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the YouTube filmmaker Hillary Clinton blamed for the Benghazi attacks, CBS News president Rhodes nixed the idea: “That’s kind of old news, isn’t it?” he said.

ATTKISSON IS A BORN WHISTLEBLOWER, BUT CBS LOST INTEREST IN THE NOISE SHE WAS MAKING.

Sensing the political waters had become too treacherous, Attkisson did what she thought was an easy sell on a school-lunch fraud story that “CBS This Morning” “enthusiastically accepted,” she says, and was racing to get on air, when suddenly “the light switch went off . . . we couldn’t figure out what they saw as a political angle to this story.”

The story had nothing to do with Michelle Obama, but Attkisson figures that the first lady’s association with school lunches, and/or her friendship with “CBS This Morning” host Gayle King, might have had something to do with execs now telling her the story “wasn’t interesting to their audience, after all.”

A story on waste at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, planned for the CBS Weekend News, was watered down and turned into a “bland non-story” before airing: An exec she doesn’t identify who was Shevlin’s “number two,” she says, “reacted as if the story had disparaged his best friend. As if his best friend were Mr. Federal Government. ‘Well, this is all the states’ fault!’ . . . he sputtered.”

Meanwhile, she says, though no one confronted her directly, a “whisper campaign” began; “If I offered a story on pretty much any legitimate controversy involving government, instead of being considered a good journalistic watchdog, I was anti-Obama.”

Yet it was Attkisson who broke the story that the Bush administration had once run a gun-walking program similar to Fast and Furious, called Wide Receiver. She did dozens of tough-minded stories on Bush’s FDA, the TARP program and contractors such as Halliburton. She once inspired a seven-minute segment on “The Rachel Maddow Show” with her reporting on the suspicious charity of a Republican congressman, Steve Buyer.

Attkisson is a born whistleblower, but CBS lost interest in the noise she was making.

‘They’ll sacrifice you’

Ignoring Attkisson proved damaging to CBS in other ways. When a senior producer she doesn’t identify came to her in 2004 bubbling about documents that supposedly showed then-President George W. Bush shirked his duties during the Vietnam War, she took one look at the documents and said, “They looked like they were typed by my daughter on a computer yesterday.”

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Former President George W. BushPhoto: EPA

Asked to do a followup story on the documents, she flatly refused, citing an ethics clause in her contract. “And if you make me, I’ll have to call my lawyer,” she said. “Nobody ever said another word” to her about reporting on the documents, which turned out to be unverifiable and probably fake.

After Pelley and Shevlin aired a report that wrongly tarnished reports by Attkisson (and Jonathan Karl of ABC News) on how the administration scrubbed its talking points of references to terrorism after Benghazi, and did so without mentioning that the author of some of the talking points, Ben Rhodes, was the brother of the president of CBS News, she says a colleague told her, “[CBS] is selling you down the river. They’ll gladly sacrifice your reputation to save their own. If you don’t stand up for yourself, nobody will.”

After reading the book, you won’t question whether CBS News or Attkisson is more trustworthy.

http://nypost.com/2014/10/25/former-cbs-reporter-explains-how-the-liberal-media-protects-obama/

A Moral, Not Racial, Divide over Ferguson

A Moral, Not Racial, Divide over Ferguson 

The issue is whether there is objective truth, or just relative judgments. 

By Dennis Prager

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Protesters carry an inverted American flag in Ferguson, Mo.

Dennis Prager 

As protests and riots ensue in Ferguson and elsewhere after a grand jury in Missouri decided not to indict the white officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, a black teenager, a little moral clarity is called for.

For decades now, we have been told that there is a black–white divide regarding how members of each race perceive racial matters in America. The problem with this belief that is that it renders moral judgment — of white police, of black crime and black incarceration rates, of white judges and jurors, and of black riots and protests — impossible.

It is, we are told over and over, all about “perceptions,” a “black-white divide” in the way each race perceives racial matters. This is how it works:

Many blacks see racism almost everywhere — especially in arrest, conviction, and incarceration rates, and in white police interactions with blacks. On the other hand, whites (specifically, whites who are not on the left) think that white racism has largely been conquered, and therefore blacks’ disproportionately high arrest and conviction rates are the result of black behavior – particularly the high out-of-wedlock birth rate that has deprived the great majority of black children of fathers – not white racism.

According to the “black–white divide” way of thinking, these are simply two conflicting perceptions.

It is difficult to overstate how damaging this is. It denies the very existence of the two pillars of civilization — objective truth and moral truth.

For every black and every white unwilling to condemn the protests over Michael Brown’s killing that took place before any relevant facts came out, their half-hearted condemnation of the riots notwithstanding, truth doesn’t matter. The protests, riots, and liberal condemnations of the white officer began when no one knew anything about the killing.

There is, then, some validity to this notion of blacks and whites’ having different perceptions. But when the truth is knowable, one of the “perceptions” has to be wrong. Two distinct ethnic or cultural groups may have different perceptions of musical beauty or of what foods they like. But this is not the case regarding truth, which is based on facts. In Ferguson, either the black (and left-wing whites’) “perception” is not truth-based or the other side’s “perception” isn’t.

Once the facts come out, we are no longer speaking of “perceptions.” We are speaking of truth and falsehood.

The other victim of this “black–white divide” explanation is moral truth.

If the truth here accords with what the police officer said, he did not commit an immoral act when he shot Michael Brown. On the other hand, if he shot the young man for no good reason, he committed an immoral act.

But according to the it’s-all-a-matter-of-perceptions view, there is no moral truth, only black perceptions and white perceptions.

This all accords with the Left’s views of truth and morality. Neither exists. Visit any university to confirm this.

The Left is philosophically deconstructionist. Shakespeare doesn’t say what he wrote; Shakespeare says what the reader perceives. The notion of “original intent” as applied to the Constitution is, to the Left, farcical. We cannot know the original intent. It’s all a matter of individual perception — or, more precisely, the perception of different socioeconomic classes, different genders, and different races.

And, of course, for the Left there is no moral truth. Morality is entirely subjective. “Good” and “evil” are individual or societal preferences. Nothing more, nothing less.

Like truth, morality is just a perception, one determined by an individual’s race, gender, and/or class. That is why, for the Left, no man can judge any abortion, no matter how late in pregnancy and no matter the reason — because men do not possess a uterus.

So who are you, white man, to condemn black protests? You have your perceptions and they have theirs. What you have to do is what the Los Angeles Times did during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, during which 53 people died as a result of black rioting, including 41 by shooting, four in fires, three by beating, and two in stabbings. The Times titled its special section each day of the riots “Understanding the Riots.”

So, with riots following the Ferguson’s grand-jury decision, we know how to behave: no judgment, just understanding. After all, there is no truth, there are only perceptions.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His most recent book is Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393433/moral-not-racial-divide-over-ferguson-dennis-prager

What an Intact Family Has to Do with the American Dream, in Six Charts

What an Intact Family Has to Do with the American Dream, in Six Charts

What's happening to the American family and why it matters

By W. Bradford Wilcox & Robert I. Lerman

The standard portrayals of economic life for ordinary Americans and their families paint a bleak picture of stagnancy, rising economic inequality, joblessness, and low levels of economic mobility. From President Barack Obama’s speech last year at the Center for American Progress to Fed chairman Janet Yellen’s address this month in Boston, we’re getting the picture that the American Dream looks to be in bad shape. These portrayals contain an important germ of truth — today’s economy isn’t doing ordinary Americans many favors — but what is largely missing from the public conversation about economics in America is an honest discussion of the family factor in all of this.
That’s unfortunate, because one reason — though, to be sure, not the only reason — that the American economic landscape looks bleaker today is that American families are not as strong and stable as they could be. Indeed, in a new report released this week from the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, we find that about one-third of recent increases in family-income inequality and male joblessness, and a significant share of median family-income stagnation, can be linked to the declining share of Americans who are getting and staying married.
Below are six charts that show what’s happening to the American family and why it matters for the health of the American Dream.
One: Fewer families are headed by married parents.
One big reason ordinary families are struggling is that fewer families are headed by married parents. Clearly, the share of married-parent families has fallen in recent years, from 78 percent in 1980 to 66 percent in 2012. That matters because married parents are more likely to pool their income, save more, and spend more on their children, compared with single parents. To make matters worse, this retreat from marriage is concentrated among Americans without college degrees. This means that poor and working-class children, adults, and families who are already more economically vulnerable to start with end up being made more vulnerable by the high levels of family instability and single parenthood in their own communities.

Two: Children raised in intact families are less likely to fall afoul of detours on the road to the American Dream.
Boys and girls raised in intact families are more likely to flourish in the labor force later in life. One reason? They are less likely to fall afoul of the detours on the road to the American Dream that can put teens and young adults on the wrong track. A nonmarital birth, for instance, puts a real economic strain on both women and men. That’s partly because such births can derail schooling and decrease adults’ future chances of getting and staying married. And a stable family protects them against these kinds of detours. The chart below shows that young men and young women from intact families are, respectively, 5 and 12 percent less likely to have a child before marriage, compared with their peers from single-parent families.

Three: Children raised in intact families are more likely to acquire the human capital they need to live the American Dream.
Children from intact families are less likely to drop out of high school. The “For Richer, For Poorer”​ study finds that young men raised in single-parent families are 15 percentage points less likely to get a high-school degree and that young women raised in single-parent families are 9 percentage points less likely to get a high-school degree, compared with their peers from intact families. Or to put this positively: Young men and women are more likely to acquire the education they need to compete in today’s global economy if they were raised in an intact home with both of their parents.
Having two parents in the picture typically increases the amount of time, attention, encouragement, and money that can be devoted to a child’s education. It also protects children from the household moves and emotional stress associated with family instability, both factors that seem to hurt children’s odds of educational success in high school and beyond.

Four: Young men and women raised in intact families work more hours.
It’s a simple idea: On average, the more hours you work, the more experience you gain in the labor force and the more money you make. What’s clear from the data is that young men and young women who are raised by their own biological or adoptive parents in an intact family work more hours as young adults aged 28 to 30. Specifically, young men and young women work, respectively, 156 and 179 more hours than their peers raised in single-parent families. And our analyses suggest that part of the reason is that these young adults have more education and fewer children born out of wedlock in their personal histories.

Five: Young men raised in intact families make more money.
Today, young men and women who are raised by their own biological or adoptive parents in an intact family make more money. Specifically, 28- to 30-year-old men make more than $6,500 more than peers who come from single-parent families but otherwise hail from largely similar backgrounds; their family income is also about $16,000 greater, on average.

Six: Young women raised in intact families make more money.
Likewise, young women who grow up in an intact family also make more money for themselves and enjoy more family income, compared with their peers who grew up in single-parent families but who were otherwise comparable to them in most respects. They make at least $4,700 more personally, and enjoy family incomes that are at least $12,000 greater, compared with their female peers from single-parent families. Note here that one reason that these young women and men enjoy higher family incomes is that they are more likely to be married compared with their peers from non-intact families.

The bottom line: Both young men and young women who grow up in an intact, two-parent family have a leg up in today’s competitive economy. By contrast, young adults from single-parent families are much more likely to be floundering in this economy. It’s for that reason, in part, that Americans of all stripes — be they conservative or liberal — concerned about the health of the American Dream should be concerned about the health of the American family.

— W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, directs the Home Economics Project, a joint undertaking of the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies. Robert I. Lerman, a professor of economics at American University, is an Institute fellow in labor and social policy at the Urban Institute. (The original figures referred to in this article are all available at this link.)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/391448/what-intact-family-has-do-american-dream-six-charts-w-bradford-wilcox-robert-i-lerman
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/391448/print

No Illegal Alien Left Behind

No Illegal Alien Left Behind

Obama’s executive action is sweeping, but Congress can regain some control over the process.

By Jessica Vaughan

It starts now. Immigration-enforcement officers around the country were ordered to open up their case files this weekend to begin identifying those illegal aliens in their custody who qualify to be exempt from deportation under President Obama’s executive action announced Thursday night. This action effectively covers all illegal aliens who arrived before January 1, 2014 and are not convicted of crimes that the administration considers to be serious. The immigration-enforcement agencies will begin releasing hundreds of these illegal aliens (the majority of whom are convicted criminals, according to ICE records) as early as next week.

That will be the first, and most expansive, phase of the president’s immigration-reform plan to go into effect. The other layers of the massive amnesty scheme, including the issuance of millions of new work permits and travel documents to certain broad and narrow categories of illegal aliens, will be implemented over the next several months, if Congress allows it.

What the president calls “immigration reform” can be more accurately described as the dismemberment of immigration law with the purpose of providing some degree of amnesty to nearly all of the estimated 11.5 million illegal aliens now living in the country, and negating any enforcement action that was taken against them in the past. The plan is articulated in a series of interlocking memoranda signed by Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson published after the president’s speech.

Here are the most significant elements of the plan:

Expansion of “prosecutorial discretion.” Immigration-enforcement officers, including the Border Patrol, ICE, and port-of-entry inspectors, have been instructed to refrain from arresting, questioning, detaining, or seeking to deport aliens unless they are terrorists, spies, gang members, or convicted felons, or have committed serious or repeated misdemeanors, or are “significant” visa over-stayers, arrived after January 1, 2014, or who have just been caught trying to enter illegally. Even if they qualify as an enforcement priority, if they have family members who have legal status, or if they are “ill” or have family members who are ill, or if they have “community ties” here, they can be let off.

The administration’s faux justification for repeatedly narrowing the criteria under which immigration officers are allowed to arrest illegal aliens is that they have limited resources for enforcement and that if they use them to deport non-criminal illegal aliens, ICE will be distracted from deporting those who are murderers, rapists, and drug dealers. The president says that he wants ICE to focus on “felons, not families.”

The reality is that stricter and stricter “prosecutorial discretion” has not led to smarter enforcement, just less enforcement, and to fewer criminals’ being removed, too. Total deportations by ICE have dropped from 410,000 in 2012 to 316,000 in 2014. Deportations of criminals, who are supposedly the focus, have dropped from 225,000 in 2012 to 178,000 in 2014. Moreover, about two-thirds of these deportations are aliens caught at the border. In 2014, ICE deported only about 100,000 aliens from the interior, a decline of about 60 percent since Obama took office.

Next year’s numbers are sure to dip further. The new policy says that anyone who was deported before 2014, or who skipped out on deportation proceedings in a prior year, will be allowed to stay, too; this executive order essentially invalidates any enforcement action taken before 2014.

The president said that the purpose of this narrowing of the criteria for deportation was to focus on criminals, but at the same time he issued an order to end Secure Communities — the successful fingerprint-based information-sharing system that notifies ICE when an illegal alien is booked into a jail. Now, with Secure Communities, ICE can work with jails when they have in custody an illegal alien whom ICE would like to deport. Under the new “improved” program, ICE will have to wait for the local sheriff to notify it when an alien is getting released from jail before it can take action. Sanctuary jurisdictions can refuse to notify ICE, and agents will have to track down criminal aliens in the community — a much more hazardous and costly process.

As many as 6 million illegal aliens could be off the hook (not including those potentially eligible for work permits, described below).

Work permits and waivers. Living up to the old saying that if you give some people an inch they’ll take a mile, the president announced plans to expand on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, in which more than 520,000 illegal aliens aged 30 or younger who claimed to have been brought here as children (the so-called “Dreamers”) were issued work permits and de facto legal status. Now he has promised to offer the same deal to “a broader class of children” — that is, to Dreamers who are now over the age of 33. It is estimated that this action will cover about 200,000 people. They can begin applying in three months, although they will be protected from deportation until then, and released if currently detained. The work permits and legal status will be valid for three years, and those issued in the earlier DACA program will be extended for another three years.

Even more significant, the president is offering three-year work permits and legalization to illegal aliens who are the parents of U.S. citizens or green-card holders and who claim to have been in the country for five years or more. The program is expected to cover another 3.7 million illegal aliens, who can begin applying in six months. Until then, they are off-limits for ICE; according to an ICE supervisor, “if an alien simply claims to have a [citizen] child, and wants to apply for deferred action, we are not to ask them for proof — accept their claim at face value, and release them to apply.”

Like the Dreamers, those legalized under this deferred-action program, which is absurdly called an immigrant “accountability” program, are held to a lower standard of eligibility than are immigrants who are admitted through the legal programs. They need not demonstrate financial independence or employability, and any prior incidents of identity fraud or isolated misdemeanors are excused, including illegal drug possession or drunk driving — all of which will disqualify most applicants for legal immigration. And, of course, like DACA, few will be found ineligible, and almost none of those who are refused will be deported.

But that’s not all. The president is negating a section of immigration law that penalizes some illegal aliens who are sponsored for green cards by forcing them to wait outside the country for as long as ten years. Two years ago he exempted relatives of U.S. citizens, and now he is exempting all illegal-alien green-card applicants with a bureaucratic sleight of hand known as the “provisional waiver program.” Career immigration officials have dubbed it the “Marriage Fraud Incentive Act,” because it removes one of the key deterrents to sham marriages for green cards.

Parole and “practical training.” The big-business interests that have funded much of the lobbying campaign for amnesty and immigration expansion would have been sorely disappointed if there were no executive actions to help them avoid hiring Americans. The president found something in his bag of tricks for them, too. Since 2007, foreign students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have been allowed to work in the United States for up to 29 months while enrolled in school or after graduating, under the pretense of “optional practical training.” There’s no real training required; it’s really just a cheap-labor work permit that is used by about 70,000 students each year. Without getting into details: The president ordered the immigration agencies to expand this dubiously beneficial program to more students in fields other than STEM and allow them to work for longer periods of time. Never mind the 8.5 unemployment rate and 17.5 under-employment rate for newly minted American college grads.

The president wants to add a new category of green card for “entrepreneurs” but lacks the constitutional authority to do that. Instead he announced that such individuals will be waved in as “parolees.” Parole is a catchall category that is supposed to be used for exceptionally compelling humanitarian cases, but under the Obama administration it has been used for illegal aliens with relatives in the military and for Central American families who came in the recent border surge. It is a form of legal status that offers a path to citizenship, which deferred action does not.

These edits leave no illegal alien without an opportunity to argue for permission to stay. Immigration officers and judges are encouraged to exercise discretion with illegal aliens who are not singled out for relief in the policies but are nevertheless not deemed “a threat to the integrity of the immigration system.” Isn’t every illegal alien by definition a threat to the integrity of the immigration system?

The president has gone very, very big on this plan, and if Congress allows it, there will be consequences for the communities that will have to absorb the costs. These will include huge new outlays for welfare benefits and social services for those who get deferred action. Media outlets have made a point to mention that they will not qualify for Obamacare-insurance subsidies, but they would get Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses, which are a gateway to every other taxpayer-funded benefit. Work permits and licenses are just the beginning; there will be pressure to allow them to travel abroad and to be joined by family members from overseas.

In the short run, Congress likely can regain some control over immigration by using its spending authority. In particular, it might try to regulate use of the fee revenues collected by USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service), the agency that processes work permits and other immigration benefits, with the goal of preventing that revenue, which comes from legal immigrants and their sponsors, from being used to carry out the president’s plan. That could thwart the work permits, though probably not the dismantling of enforcement.

Then, Congress can calmly begin the step-by-step process of passing constructive immigration-reform bills, starting with measures to shore up enforcement. That might also include less-irresponsible versions of some of the president’s executive-action agenda, including eventually amnesty for some of the illegal population — but that could be balanced by cutting out some existing green-card categories. GOP leaders cannot ignore the gauntlet that has been so flamboyantly thrown down, but the response should be purposeful.

— Jessica Vaughan is director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393366/no-illegal-alien-left-behind-jessica-vaughan