Friday, July 31, 2015

Jihad against U.S. Troops Is Not a ‘Circumstance’

By Michelle Malkin

Four U.S. Marines, barred from carrying weapons at naval training facilities despite explicit ISIS threats against our military, are dead in Tennessee. Another service member and a Chattanooga police officer survived gunshots after Thursday’s two-stage massacre allegedly at the hands of 24-year-old jihadist Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez.

Navy secretary Ray Mabus called the terrorist’s spree “insidious and unfathomable.” President Obama bemoaned the “heartbreaking circumstance” in which the murdered Marines found themselves.

“Unfathomable”? Not if you’ve been paying attention. Islam-inspired hate crimes against our troops have continued unabated since the Obama White House first dismissed the 2009 Fort Hood massacre as “workplace violence.”

Here’s what’s unfathomable: While the social-justice warriors in Washington bend over backward to appease CAIR and Muslim-civil-rights absolutists, Americans in uniform are dying on American soil at the hands of Allah’s homicidal avengers — but the commander-in-chief couldn’t even bother to deliver a live statement to the nation yesterday about the bloodshed.

The concerted attacks and plots against our troops in their recruitment centers and on their bases here at home are outrageous acts of war.

Instead, Obama issued another bland, bloodless pronouncement about the assassinations of our disarmed troops.

“Heartbreaking circumstance”? Lightning strikes are random events of unfortunate circumstance. The concerted attacks and plots against our troops in their recruitment centers and on their bases here at home are outrageous acts of war.

Have you forgotten?

In June 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad walked into an Arkansas Army recruiting center, murdered 24-year-old Private William Long and gravely wounded 18-year-old Private Quinton Ezeagwula. He had planned on killing many more in the name of Allah. While the White House and media decried the “climate of hate” fostered by Christians, they whitewashed Muhammad’s jihadi rage. Muhammad received a life sentence without parole for the act he himself described as a “jihadi attack on infidel forces.”

It should be noted that Muhammad converted to Islam at Tennessee State University in Nashville and then became further radicalized in Yemen before returning to the U.S.

“The U.S. has to pay for the rape, murder, bloodshed, blasphemy it has done and still doing to the Muslims and Islam,” Muhammad railed after carrying out his plot. “So consider this a small retaliation the best is to come Allah willing. This is not the first attack and won’t be the last.”

As I noted at the time, Obama could barely muster up a limp written statement expressing “sadness” over what he described as a “senseless act of violence” (instead of the intentional systematic act of Islamic terrorism that it was).

After the Little Rock ambush came the Baltimore military-recruitment-center bomb plot. Muslim convert Muhammad Hussain, 21, bragged on Facebook about his devotion to violent jihad. He “dialed a cellphone that he believed would ignite barrels of explosives packed into a sport utility vehicle,” the Baltimore Sun recounted. “The SUV had been parked by the Armed Forces recruiting station at a strip mall in Catonsville, a bedroom suburb west of Baltimore.” Hussain idolized Fort Hood jihadist Nidal Hasan and “thought about nothing but jihad.”

In June 2011, the feds charged Muslim jihadists Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh of conspiring to use machine guns and grenades to “kill officers and employees of the Department of Defense who worked at the MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Stations) located in the Federal Center South building in Seattle, Wash., and to kill other persons assisting such officers and employees in the performance of their duties.” They both pleaded guilty but remained unrepentant and defiant.

In 2012, Ethiopian-born jihadist Jonathan Melaku pleaded guilty to shooting at the Pentagon, Marine and Coast Guard recruiting offices, and the National Museum of the Marine Corps, as well as trying to desecrate graves at Arlington National Cemetery containing the remains of U.S. veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In April 2015, Mohammed Abdullah Hasan was arrested after the feds uncovered his ISIS-linked plot to kill American soldiers with a vehicle bomb at Fort Riley in Kansas.

Do U.S. military lives matter enough yet to do more than issue a canned, obligatory condolence to the families of those who serve?

ISIS hackers have explicitly targeted 100 U.S. service members whose personal details have been disseminated online. In May, the Pentagon raised the security threat level of military bases in the U.S. to “Force Protection Bravo” — the third-highest threat level on a five-tier scale used by the Department of Defense.

You wouldn’t know it from Obama’s languid response.

Can someone ask the commander-in-chief: Do U.S. military lives matter enough yet to do more than issue a canned, obligatory condolence to the families of those who serve? How many more lives must be lost before he is as roused about our troops under jihad siege as he is about Bill Cosby, the Confederate flag, Game of Thrones, or Caitlyn Jenner?

This is not a “circumstance.” This is war.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421308/marines-killed-in-tennessee-jihadist-act-of-war

Jeb’s Already Going Wobbly on Iran

By Christian Whiton

Congress will hold the first of several hearings on Obama’s Iran deal this Thursday, with some Democrats likely to join unified Republicans in opposing the disaster negotiated in Vienna. Getting the votes to send a disapproval to Obama’s desk should be doable. The two-thirds majority needed to override a certain Obama veto is harder to obtain, but not impossible.

GOP aspirants to the presidency have all expressed opposition to the deal. When he joined the race last Monday, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker promised to end the appeasement scheme with Tehran on “day one” of his administration if elected. (Full disclosure: I’ve endorsed Walker’s candidacy.) Other candidates have promised to kill the accommodation early in their tenure if elected, except for one: Jeb Bush.

Speaking on Friday in what was seen as a pointed jab at Walker specifically, Jeb vowed not to signal the end of a deal at the outset of his notional presidency. His excuse: the lack of a fully emplaced national-security team at that time, whose confirmation would take the better part of a year. In remarks similar to his scolding of the party on amnesty and Common Core, Jeb told a Nevada audience: “If you’re running for president, I think it’s important to be mature and thoughtful about this.”

Whether or not Congress stops Obama’s Iran deal, our next president ought to change our dealings with Tehran beginning with his inaugural address.

This was a very Bush statement: preemptive diffidence masquerading as maturity. Furthermore, it’s not just a bad political move that detracts from the current disapproval effort on Capitol Hill; it’s also bad policy.

Whether or not Congress stops Obama’s Iran deal, our next president, beginning with his inaugural address, ought to change our dealings with Tehran. Administrations of both parties have ignored Iranian conduct consistently since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran never paid much price for sins such as taking American diplomats hostage, bombing the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon, likely aiding the bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks for U.S. servicemen, and planning a mass-casualty political assassination in Washington, D.C., in 2011.

Another lapse was the decision of Jeb’s brother to downplay Tehran’s role in killing and maiming Americans in Iraq during the insurgency.

RELATED: Obama’s Nuclear Deal with Iran: Worse than We Could Have Imagined

Many of us at junior levels of the George W. Bush administration were appalled at what Tehran was getting away with doing to our servicemen. So too were many military officers, who at a minimum wanted the Iranian government called out for training and equipping insurgents. Better still would have been targeting the Iranian operatives who were inside Iraq.

President Bush largely rejected getting tough with Tehran, even after it was clear that it was responsible for hundreds of American deaths. Some of Bush’s senior advisers, much like Obama’s today, thought that pushing back on Iran was too provocative, failing to realize that weakness can be provocative, too.

In the current campaign, Jeb has said that he is his own man, conveying an unsubtle message that he won’t repeat his brother’s shortcomings. However, he has hired some of the same people who advised his brother poorly on Iran. Furthermore, his scolding of other Republicans on Iran sounds a lot like the Bushes of yesteryear.

RELATED: Iran Is Obama’s Vietnam

What could Scott Walker or another Republican do from the outset of his presidency? To put credence behind a demand that Iran cease its nuclear program, he could immediately reapply all of the congressionally imposed sanctions that Obama has eased. He could ban any bank worldwide that wishes to clear transactions in U.S. dollars from doing business with Iran. He could throw the full weight of the Trading With the Enemy Act against Iran, along with its legislative descendants, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Patriot Act.

These steps could be achieved by executive orders and findings that were prepared for Inauguration Day or shortly thereafter. Ronald Reagan’s inauguration serves as a precedent. He signed a federal hiring freeze moments after taking the oath of office and issued an executive order that deregulated energy markets within days, signaling that there was a new sheriff in town who was both bold and – to use Jeb’s term – mature.

Just as important would be moral clarity. Whereas Obama used his first inaugural address to romance our adversaries, promising to “outstretch our hand,” the next president could instead express support for the aspirations of young, modern Iranians who do not want Islamist tyranny in their country.

The president-elect could also use the 73 days between his election and inauguration to signal allies around the world that America’s approach to Iran would be changing. By leading from the front rather than from behind, we will find allies across the Middle East standing with us.

Even Jeb should realize that this is mature. However, it’s also bold, decisive, and unapologetically conservative — traits that have proved sparse in Bush DNA.

— Christian Whiton was a State Department senior adviser during the George W. Bush administration. He is the author of Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece has been updated since its initial posting.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/421368/print

DODD-FRANK’S NOT SO HAPPY ANNIVERSARY

DODD-FRANK’S NOT SO HAPPY ANNIVERSARY

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN DODD-FRANK, ELIZABETH WARREN

Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of Dodd-Frank. In honor of the occasion, Veronique de Rugy looks at some of the commentary documenting her contention that “the legislation has overwhelmed the regulatory system, stifled the financial industry, impaired economic growth, and done nothing to correct the pernicious effects of ‘too big to fail.’”

There is this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal column by Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee:

Dodd-Frank was supposedly aimed at Wall Street, but it hit Main Street hard. Community financial institutions, which make the bulk of small business loans, are overwhelmed by the law’s complexity. Government figures indicate that the country is losing on average one community bank or credit union a day.

Before Dodd-Frank, 75% of banks offered free checking. Two years after it passed, only 39% did so—a trend various scholars have attributed to Dodd-Frank’s “Durbin amendment,” which imposed price controls on the fee paid by retailers when consumers use a debit card.

Bank fees have also increased due to Dodd-Frank, leading to a rise of the unbanked and underbanked among low- and moderate-income Americans.

Has Dodd-Frank nevertheless made the financial system more secure? Many of the threats to financial stability identified in the latest report of Dodd-Frank’s Financial Stability Oversight Council are primarily the result of the law itself, along with other government policies.

And there’s a new report by John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which shows how Dodd-Frank has stifled competition among the banks. The “failure to approve new banks, for instance, means that those ‘too big to fail’ banks are now more entrenched than ever.”

Indeed, in the last five years regulators have approved only one new bank, as opposed to an average of 170 new banks per year before 2010. According to Berlau: “This lack of new bank competitors is one important reason why a large bank failure could severely curtail the supply of credit and availability of financial services. That in turn sets the stage for a continuing cycle of bailouts.”

Meanwhile the New York Times reports that “Fannie and Freddie are Back, Bigger and Badder Than Ever.” In their current incarnation as government controlled entities supported by a line of credit from the Treasury, we have what Jim Parrott, a senior adviser with the National Economic Council in the Obama administration calls “the worst of all worlds.” The system “attracts too little private capital, provides too little mortgage credit, and still poses too much risk to the taxpayer.”

With Dodd-Frank unable to remedy the problems it was designed to address, the door opens for leftists like Elizabeth Warren to push for more radical measures. The conservative message — that real competition is the answer to “too big to fail” — is unlikely to be heard, much less heeded.

The next five years will be very interesting.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/07/dodd-franks-not-so-happy-anniversary.php

Thursday, July 30, 2015

A GREEK FARCE EXPLAINED (DP: must read to get the lunacy/unreality of the Marxist left)

A GREEK FARCE EXPLAINED

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF

I haven’t written about the saga of the new Greek bailout, which occurred while I was on vacation. Steve discussed it here.

It was a strange saga. The leftist government rejected a bailout package, choosing instead to put the deal to a vote by the Greek people. Greece, its prime minister Alexis Tsipras, proclaimed, is the birthplace of democracy, so Greeks should decide democratically whether to accept the deal the EU proposed.

Tsipras recommended that the Greeks vote “no” on the EU’s package. They did so overwhelmingly.

But then, Tsipras agreed to a harsher deal than the one he and his people had rejected. There was no plebiscite this time in the cradle of democracy. Instead, Tsipras pushed the deal through the Greek parliament.

Tsipras apparently believed that if the Greeks voted against the EU’s deal, Europe would give it a better deal. But, as should have been obvious to him, the terms the EU was willing to offer were driven by harsh economic realities. The Greek vote couldn’t affect these realities. It was irrelevant.

Moreover, Tsipras’ behavior left a bad taste in the mouth of Europe’s power brokers. If anything, they were now more inclined to stick it to the prime minister and his Syriza Party government than to offer concessions.

Tsipras hoped that the resignation of his obnoxious finance minister would appease Angela Merkel and company. It did not, nor could it have been expected to.

How could Tsipras and his colleagues have been so naive? The answer, it seemed to me, is that they are infantile leftists blinded by their ideology.

This diagnosis is confirmed in a Washington Post story by Griff Witte, Michael Birnbaum, and Anthony Faiola. If anything, Greece’s leaders — “scruffy Marxists,” the Post calls them — were more infantile than I had supposed:

In frigid February, when negotiators sat down across from each other for the first time, the members of the Syriza squad, some of whom were still in their 20s, were abuzz with ideas about putting struggling workers ahead of corporate interests.

Their counterparts from European finance ministries and the International Monetary Fund wanted bloodless numbers. What were Syriza’s concrete proposals? And how would they affect Greece’s bottom line?

Sometimes they were scarcely speaking the same language, as worldviews clashed and tensions started to mount. Syriza’s top negotiators were fresh out of posts as Marxist-oriented economics professors. Their aides were PhD students, steeped in the heady discussions of the academy. The European side, meanwhile, was unaccustomed to hearing rhetoric that had died out of the political mainstream with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Greek negotiators didn’t know much about economics and apparently cared less:

Even words like “competition” — hardly controversial among the market-driven economic elite that Syriza sought to reshape — irked some of the Greek negotiators. . . .Syriza bosses saw the relentless focus on promoting growth as prizing profits over people.

They didn’t know much about history, either:

Greece’s strategy had been premised on the idea that it could peel away allies to advocate on its behalf against an austerity-minded European establishment dominated by Germany. But instead, some of the continent’s smallest nations became its fiercest critics.

Officials from Eastern European countries that suffered for decades under communism warned of the dangers of giving in to the left.

Syriza’s sense of entitlement astonished EU members:

[C]ountries wrestling with their own economic troubles marveled that a nation receiving so much support could be so seemingly oblivious to the impact of the bailouts beyond its own borders.

“People need to understand that a country like mine has contributions to Greece that are nearly 10 percent of our annual budget and 2.5 percent of our GDP,” said Stubb, the Finnish finance minister. “We’re not talking about small potatoes.”

Today’s scruffy Marxists are a spoiled lot.

Even in the aftermath of its negotiating debacle, the Greek left continues to miss the point. It sees the EU’s tough negotiating positions not in economic terms, as old-fashioned Marxists might tend to, but rather as an attempt to send a message to other European countries not to elect leftist governments.

There probably is something to this view, but in the main it wasn’t personal; it was just business. And if any message was being sent, it was probably a message to the Greek people to elect a government that isn’t “irked” by the concept of economic competition.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, we learned that virtually no one in authority believed the official hard left ideology of the state. The leadership was not delusional, which is probably why it managed to hold power for so long.

By contrast, today’s European left believes its own bullshit. As Greece found out the hard way, that’s a recipe for disaster.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/07/a-greek-farce-explained.php

Attention America’s Suburbs: You Have Just Been Annexed

By Stanley Kurtz

It’s difficult to say what’s more striking about President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation: its breathtaking radicalism, the refusal of the press to cover it, or its potential political ramifications. The danger AFFH poses to Democrats explains why the press barely mentions it. This lack of curiosity, in turn, explains why the revolutionary nature of the rule has not been properly understood. Ultimately, the regulation amounts to back-door annexation, a way of turning America’s suburbs into tributaries of nearby cities.

This has been Obama’s purpose from the start. In Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, I explain how a young Barack Obama turned against the suburbs and threw in his lot with a group of Alinsky-style community organizers who blamed suburban tax-flight for urban decay. Their bible was Cities Without Suburbs, by former Albuquerque mayor David Rusk. Rusk, who works closely with Obama’s Alinskyite mentors and now advises the Obama administration, initially called on cities to annex their surrounding suburbs. When it became clear that outright annexation was a political non-starter, Rusk and his followers settled on a series of measures designed to achieve de facto annexation over time.

The plan has three elements: 1) Inhibit suburban growth, and when possible encourage suburban re-migration to cities. This can be achieved, for example, through regional growth boundaries (as in Portland), or by relative neglect of highway-building and repair in favor of public transportation. 2) Force the urban poor into the suburbs through the imposition of low-income housing quotas. 3) Institute “regional tax-base sharing,” where a state forces upper-middle-class suburbs to transfer tax revenue to nearby cities and less-well-off inner-ring suburbs (as in Minneapolis/St. Paul).

If you press suburbanites into cities, transfer urbanites to the suburbs, and redistribute suburban tax money to cities, you have effectively abolished the suburbs. For all practical purposes, the suburbs would then be co-opted into a single metropolitan region. Advocates of these policy prescriptions call themselves “regionalists.”

AFFH goes a long way toward achieving the regionalist program of Obama and his organizing mentors. In significant measure, the rule amounts to a de facto regional annexation of America’s suburbs. To see why, let’s have a look at the rule.

AFFH obligates any local jurisdiction that receives HUD funding to conduct a detailed analysis of its housing occupancy by race, ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, and class (among other categories). Grantees must identify factors (such as zoning laws, public-housing admissions criteria, and “lack of regional collaboration”) that account for any imbalance in living patterns. Localities must also list “community assets” (such as quality schools, transportation hubs, parks, and jobs) and explain any disparities in access to such assets by race, ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, class, and more. Localities must then develop a plan to remedy these imbalances, subject to approval by HUD.

By itself, this amounts to an extraordinary takeover of America’s cities and towns by the federal government. There is more, however.

AFFH obligates grantees to conduct all of these analyses at both the local and regional levels. In other words, it’s not enough for, say, Philadelphia’s “Mainline” Montgomery County suburbs to analyze their own populations by race, ethnicity, and class to determine whether there are any imbalances in where groups live, or in access to schools, parks, transportation, and jobs. Those suburbs are also obligated to compare their own housing situations to the Greater Philadelphia region as a whole.

So if some Montgomery County’s suburbs are predominantly upper-middle-class, white, and zoned for single-family housing, while the Philadelphia region as a whole is dotted with concentrations of less-well-off African Americans, Hispanics, or Asians, those suburbs could be obligated to nullify their zoning ordinances and build high-density, low-income housing at their own expense. At that point, those suburbs would have to direct advertising to potential minority occupants in the Greater Philadelphia region. Essentially, this is what HUD has imposed on Westchester County, New York, the most famous dry-run for AFFH.

In other words, by obligating all localities receiving HUD funding to compare their demographics to the region as a whole, AFFH effectively nullifies municipal boundaries. Even with no allegation or evidence of intentional discrimination, the mere existence of a demographic imbalance in the region as a whole must be remedied by a given suburb. Suburbs will literally be forced to import population from elsewhere, at their own expense and in violation of their own laws. In effect, suburbs will have been annexed by a city-dominated region, their laws suspended and their tax money transferred to erstwhile non-residents. And to make sure the new high-density housing developments are close to “community assets” such as schools, transportation, parks, and jobs, bedroom suburbs will be forced to develop mini-downtowns. In effect, they will become more like the cities their residents chose to leave in the first place.

It’s easy to miss the de facto absorption of local governments into their surrounding regions by AFFH, because the rule disguises it. AFFH does contain a provision that allows individual jurisdictions to formally join a regional consortium. Yet the rule leaves it up to local authorities to decide whether to enter regional groupings — or at least the rule appears to make participation in regional decision-making voluntary. In truth, however, just by obligating grantees to compare their housing to the demographics of the greater metropolitan area, and remedy any disparities, HUD has effectively turned every suburban jurisdiction into a helpless satellite of its nearby city and region.

We can see this, because the final version of AFFH includes much more than just the provisions of the rule itself. The final text of the regulationincorporates summaries of the many public comments on the preliminary rule, along with replies to those comments by HUD. This amounts to a running dialogue between leftist housing activists trying to make the rule more controlling, local bureaucrats overwhelmed by paperwork, a public outraged by federal overreach, and HUD itself.

Read carefully, the section of the rule on “Regional Collaboration and Regional Analysis” (especially pages 188–203), reveals one of AFFH’s key secrets: It doesn’t really matter whether a local government decides to formally join a regional consortium or not. HUD can effectively draft any suburb into its surrounding region, just by forcing it to compare its demographics with the metropolitan area as a whole.

At one point (pages 189–191), for example, commenters directly note that the obligation to compare local and regional data, and remedy any disparities, amounts to forcing a jurisdiction to ignore its own boundaries. Without contradicting this assertion, HUD then insists that all jurisdictions will have to engage in exactly such regional analysis.

Comments from leftist housing activists repeatedly call on HUD to pressure local jurisdictions into regional planning consortia. At every point, however, HUD declines to demand that local governments formally join such regional collaborations. Yet each time the issue comes up, HUD assures the housing activists that just by compelling local jurisdictions to compare their demographics with the region as a whole, suburbs will effectively be forced to address demographic disparities at the total metropolitan level (e.g., page 196).

When housing activists worry that a suburb with few poor or minority residents will argue that it has no need to develop low-income housing, HUD makes it clear that the regulation as written already effectively forces all suburbs to accommodate the needs of non-residents (pages 198–199). Again, HUD stresses that the mere obligation to analyze, compare, and remedy demographic disparities at the local and regional levels amounts to a kind of compulsory regionalism.

HUD’s language is coy and careful. The Obama administration clearly wants to avoid alarming local governments, so it underplays the extent to which they have been effectively dissolved and regionalized by AFFH. At the same time, HUD wants to tip off its leftist allies that this is exactly what has happened.

At one level, then, the apparatus of formal and voluntary collaboration in a regional consortium is a bit of a ruse. AFFH amounts to an annexation of suburbs by cities, whether the suburbs like it or not. Yet the formal, regional groupings enabled by the rule are far from harmless.

Comments from housing advocates (pages 194–197), for example, chide HUD for failing to include a mention in AFFH of the hundreds of federally-funded regional plans already being developed by leftist activists across the country (the “Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant” program). These plans entail far more than imposing low-income housing quotas on the suburbs. They embody the regionalist program of densifying housing in suburb and city alike, and they structure transportation spending in such a way as to make suburban living far less convenient and workable. HUD replies that these plans can indeed be used by regional consortia to fulfill their obligations under AFFH.

So a city could formally join with some less-well-off inner-ring suburbs and present one of these comprehensive regionalist dream-plans as the product of its consortium. At that point, HUD could pressure reluctant upper-middle-class suburbs to embrace the entire plan on pain of losing their federal funds. In this way, AFFH could force the full menu of regionalist policies—not just low-income housing quotas—onto the suburbs.

There are plenty of ways in which HUD can pressure a suburb to bend to its will. The techniques go far beyond threats to withhold federal funds. The recent Supreme Court decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project has opened the door to “disparate impact” suits against suburbs by HUD and private groups alike. That is, any demographic imbalance, whether intentional or not, can be treated by the courts as de facto discrimination.

Just by completing the obligatory demographic analysis demanded by AFFH—with HUD-provided data, and structured according to HUD requirements—a suburb could be handing the government evidence to be used in such a lawsuit. Worse, AFFH demands that suburbs account for their demographic disparities, and forces them to choose from a menu of HUD-provided explanations. So if a suburb follows HUD’s lead and formally attributes demographic “imbalances” to its zoning laws, the federal government has what amounts to a signed confession to present in a disparate-impact suit seeking to nullify local zoning regulations. With a (forced) paper “confession” from nearly every suburb in the country in hand, HUD can use the threat of lawsuits to press reluctant municipalities to buy into a regional consortium’s every plan.

Regionalists consider the entire city-suburb system bigoted and illegitimate, so there are few local governments that HUD would not be able to slap with a disparate-impact suit on regionalist premises. It’s unlikely that any suburb has a perfect demographic and “asset” balance in every category. All HUD has to do is decide which suburban governments it wants to lean on. With every locality vulnerable to a suit, every locality can be made to play the regionalist game.

Leftist housing activists worry that AFFH never specifies the penalties a suburb will face for imbalances in its housing patterns. These activists just don’t get it. A thoughtful reading of AFFH, including its extraordinary “dialogue” section, makes it clear that HUD can go after any suburb, any time it wants to. The controlling consideration will be politics. HUD has got to boil the frog slowly enough to prevent him from jumping.

It will take time for the truth to emerge. Just by issuing AFFH, the Obama administration has effectively annexed America’s suburbs to its cities. The old American practice of local self-rule is gone. We’ve switched over to a federally controlled regionalist system. Now it’s strictly a question of how obvious Obama and the Democrats want to make this change — and when they intend to bring the hammer down. The only thing that can restore local control is joint action by a Republican president and a Republican congress to rescind AFFH and restrict the reach of disparate impact litigation. We’ll know after November 8, 2016.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/421389/attention-americas-suburbs-you-have-just-been-annexed-stanley-kurtz

The Scapegoat for Strife in the Black Community

By Thomas Sowell

Discussions of racial problems almost invariably bring out the cliché of “a legacy of slavery.” But anyone who is being serious, as distinguished from being political, would surely want to know if whatever he is talking about — whether fatherless children, crime, or whatever — is in fact a legacy of slavery or of some of the many other things that have been done in the century and a half since slavery ended.

Another cliché that has come into vogue is that slavery is “America‘s original sin.” The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catch phrase could stop thinking for 50 years. Catch phrases about slavery have stopped people from thinking for even longer than that.

Today the moral horror of slavery is so widely condemned that it is hard to realize that there were thousands of years when slavery was practiced around the world by people of virtually every race. Even the leading moral and religious thinkers in different societies accepted slavery as just a fact of life.

No one wanted to be a slave. But their rejection of slavery as a fate for themselves in no way meant that they were unwilling to enslave others. It was just not an issue — until the 18th century, and then it became an issue only in Western civilization.

Neither Africans, Asians, Polynesians, nor the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere saw anything wrong with slavery, even after small segments of British and American societies began to condemn slavery as morally wrong in the 18th century.

What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage. That was not yet a majority view among Americans in the18th century, but it was not even a serious minority view in non-Western societies at that time.

Then how did slavery end? We know how it ended in the United States — at a cost of one life lost in the Civil War for every six slaves freed. But that is not how it ended elsewhere.

What happened in the rest of the world was that all of Western civilization eventually turned against slavery in the 19th century. This meant the end of slavery in European empires around the world, usually over the bitter opposition of non-Western peoples. But the West happened to be militarily dominant at the time.

Turning back to the “legacy of slavery” as an explanation of social problems in black American communities today, anyone who was serious about the truth — as distinguished from talking points — would want to check out the facts.

Were children raised with only one parent as common at any time during the first 100 years after slavery as in the first 30 years after the great expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s?

As of 1960, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent, usually the mother. Thirty years later, two-thirds of black children were being raised without a father present.

What about ghetto riots, crimes in general and murder in particular? What about low levels of labor force participation and high levels of welfare dependency? None of those things was as bad in the first 100 years after slavery as they became in the wake of the policies and notions of the 1960s.

To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations, and policies of the 1960s.

It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward “social justice,” what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism.

The principal victims of these retrogressions are the decent, law-abiding members of black communities across the country who are prey to hoodlums and criminals.

Back in the 19th century Frederick Douglass saw the dangers from well-meaning whites. He said: “Everybody has asked the question, ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.” Amen.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420807/slavery-didnt-cause-todays-black-problems-welfare-did?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Jolt&utm_campaign=Best%20of%20Saturday%207%2F10

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Crappy Days Are Here Again

Myron Magnet
Crappy Days Are Here Again

It’s De Blasio Time, and madmen with machetes are on the loose.

Twenty-three prior arrests, including menacing someone with a machete five years ago, and this madman is still walking the streets? Seeing a passerby’s video of Sook Yeong Im, a pretty young Korean tourist, lying on the 40th Street sidewalk after crazy career criminal Frederick Young, 43, had twice slashed open her arm with his viciously honed weapon—exposing muscle fiber and sending blood spurting everywhere—brought back in an instant the knot of fear New Yorkers carried in their stomachs in the pre-Rudy Giuliani era, when out-of-control crime was killing not just one person every four hours, 365 days a year, but also was killing Gotham itself. That the assault occurred in Bryant Park at 11:30 on a sun-drenched early-summer morning, as the victim was looking for a seat after her yoga class, seemed to unravel just about every gain that the tireless efforts of thousands over 20 years had achieved to make New York once more the capital of the world.

Suddenly, it seems we’re back to Son of Sam or the Wild Man of West 96th Street.

Start with Bryant Park. Who that had not seen it a quarter-century ago would believe that this lush, cosmopolitan oasis behind Carrère and Hastings’ gleaming white marble New York Public Library, with throngs of tourists and businesspeople lunching at its smart cafés or on its freshly painted Parisian chairs, was once a no-go zone, with drug sellers openly plying their trade in broad daylight on the packed dust that had once been a lawn, and with muggers lurking in the bushes, ready to prey on any tourist too uninformed to keep out? Along with MTA, Transit Authority, and Transit Police heads Robert Kiley, David Gunn, and William Bratton’s clean-up of the subways, the city’s lifeblood, by washing off the omnipresent graffiti and chasing out the bums and pickpockets in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Dan Biederman’s Bryant Park Corporation’s astonishingtransformation of despoiled park into a gleaming commons at the very center of the capital of the Twentieth Century during the same period were the two pre-Giuliani signs that what human failing had spoiled, human effort could redeem. These were the first luminous demonstrations that New York did not have to die.

Behind both accomplishments was a theory, propounded by Manhattan Institute scholar George Kelling and political scientist James Q. Wilson. Dubbed Broken Windows, the theory held that, when city authorities allow public spaces to turn into theaters of disorder, dysfunction, and dirt—where dope sellers, graffiti vandals, and prostitutes of every description go about their business without interference, while bums and madmen panhandle aggressively, pee on the street, blast radios, jump turnstiles in the subway, and smear filth and litter everywhere—then honest citizens will stay away out of fear and disgust, and the evil-intentioned, seeing that nobody cares to protect public order, will feel emboldened to commit serious crimes, not just these so-called “victimless” crimes, whose real victim was the city itself. But clear out the rubbish, clean up the graffiti, spruce up the space, arrest the petty criminals, and get the madmen into medical care, and urban vitality will return. Meanwhile, serious crime will go down, because criminals will know that the authorities are watching them, that cops can stop and question them and search them for weapons on probable cause, and that lawbreaking will send them to jail. In Bryant Park and in the subways, the theory had its first real-world test. And Eureka! a modern miracle.

But what resistance the experiments had to overcome! The homeless, the mainstream media falsely told us for over a decade (there was then no Internet or Fox News to rebut them), were willing workers victimized by a heartless capitalist economy that sent their jobs overseas or replaced them with machines, forcing them out of the decent working- or lower-middle-class lives they had thought were secure. Or, if they were insane, why should they be forcibly medicated rather than left to follow their alternate lifestyle, as the cant of the time had it—harmlessly “idling,” in the asinine description of Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas—which in practice meant freezing to death on the streets, terrorized by the demonic voices in their heads, and driven with almost predictable regularity to stab someone in the park or subway, or push her in front of an onrushing train. And as for the bums and criminals, so many of them African-Americans: were they not forced to do what they did by 300 years of oppression, and, if society punished them for it, was it not “blaming the victim?”

Still, so obviously was the city dying under such enlightened tolerance that Gotham’s overwhelmingly Democratic voters elected tough ex-U.S. attorney Giuliani as mayor in 1993 to restore law and order—which he did with amazing success once he took over City Hall in 1994. He called Bratton back from Boston, where he had gone to be police chief in 1992, to institute Broken Windows policing in New York. Every kind of crime fell with amazing rapidity, and the city snapped back to life, once residents and tourists stopped being afraid to go out to restaurants and theaters, or just to walk the interesting and now safe streets, window shopping, people watching, enjoying the drama of urban life. Forced-treatment laws for the crazy helped many, but sadly many more ended up untreated in jail, which became the state’s de facto mental-health-care system. But in any event, they were no longer pushing people under subways or stabbing them with screwdrivers. And, short of jail, stop-and-frisk policies allowed police to take away any weapons they might be carrying, so they constituted less of a public threat.

Now Mayor Bill de Blasio has done away with much of that. Stop-and-frisks are down 95 percent from their 2011 high. Broken Windows policing is again under attack from enlightened opinion in the academy and mainstream media, which also has once again embraced what is now most emphatically the myth of omnipresent American racism. De Blasio himself leads the chorus in slurring the NYPD as racist oppressors, warning his biracial son not to give them any excuse to brutalize him. And cops are afraid to do their jobs, since they have no support from City Hall. So no wonder shootings are up for two years in a row—a first since the pre-Giuliani era—with four more just this afternoon. No wonder Gotham has had 19.5 percent more murders in the first five months of this year than in the corresponding period last year. And after vilification from City Hall and the mainstream media for recent Broken Windows arrests, and being ordered to cut way back on stop-and-frisks, no wonder cops didn’t want to put their careers on the line to mess with Frederick Young—an obviously crazy black man, muttering to himself and carrying something suspicious in a garbage bag. And you can expect more senseless, needless crimes like what happened to Sook Yeong Im, along with ever-growing fear in the streets, until de Blasio is out of City Hall.

Myron Magnet, City Journal’s editor-at-large and its editor from 1994 through 2006, is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His latest book is The Founders at Home.

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0624mm.html

Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database

By Paul Sperry

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A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

OBAMA IS PRESIDING OVER THE LARGEST CONSOLIDATION OF PERSONAL DATA IN US HISTORY.

Housing database

The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.

The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.

Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.

HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.

Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.

“By opening this data to everybody, everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”

Mortgage database

Meanwhile, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, headed by former Congressional Black Caucus leader Mel Watt, is building its own database for racially balancing home loans. The so-called National Mortgage Database Project will compile 16 years of lending data, broken down by race, and hold everything from individual credit scores and employment records.

Mortgage contracts won’t be the only financial records vacuumed up by the database. According to federal documents, the repository will include “all credit lines,” from credit cards to student loans to car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus. This is even more information than the IRS collects.

The FHFA will also pry into your personal assets and debts and whether you have any bankruptcies. The agency even wants to know the square footage and lot size of your home, as well as your interest rate.

FHFA will share the info with Obama’s brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which acts more like a civil-rights agency, aggressively investigating lenders for racial bias.

The FHFA has offered no clear explanation as to why the government wants to sweep up so much sensitive information on Americans, other than stating it’s for “research” and “policymaking.”

However, CFPB Director Richard Cordray was more forthcoming, explaining in a recent talk to the radical California-based Greenlining Institute: “We will be better able to identify possible discriminatory lending patterns.”

Credit database

CFPB is separately amassing a database to monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some 900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly 85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections.

Employment database

CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing expedition.

School database

Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted for reform.

Those that don’t comply will be punished. Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has led to violent disruptions in classrooms.

Obama’s educrats want to know how many blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement classes.

Schools that show blacks and Latinos under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the department’s Civil Rights Office.

Count on a flood of private lawsuits to piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist US school system.

Even if no one has complained about discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.

Such databases have never before existed. Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every aspect of society.

The first black president, quite brilliantly, has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data that will outlast his administration.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the mortgage bust.