No Way Out

In my last posting I discussed the war on whites being conducted by a certain segment of the black population. Today I present a very important piece by Juan Williams, a journalist who often annoys me with his left-wing views and excuses, but who sometimes speaks truth to power in surprising ways. Some may remember that he was fired by PBS for admitting that he felt frightened when he noticed Muslims getting on an airplane with him.

In my view, Williams’ essay, excerpted below, is another example of how America has been ruined by the welfare policies put in place by President Lyndon Johnson and his “Great Society”. Until we change these policies, our society will continue to disintegrate.  The work rules put in place during the Clinton Presidency may actually have worsened the situation.

Juan Williams: Race and the Gun Debate

The No. 1 cause of death for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34: being murdered with a gun.

By JUAN WILLIAMS March 26, 2013 Wall St Journal (Excerpt)

This week much of the talk about gun control concerns New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's $12 million ad campaign to put pressure on senators in key states to support legislation that he backs. Or the talk is about the National Rifle Association's pushback against the Bloomberg campaign. Then there was last week's mini-tempest over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's decision not to include Sen. Dianne Feinstein's assault-weapon ban in a comprehensive gun-control bill the Senate will take up next month.

One thing you don't hear much about in the discussions of guns: race.

That is an astonishing omission, because race ought to be an inescapable part of the debate. Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities. Murders with guns are the No. 1 cause of death for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34. But talking about race in the context of guns would also mean taking on a subject that can't be addressed by passing a law: the family-breakdown issues that lead too many minority children to find social status and power in guns.

The statistics are staggering. In 2009, for example, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 54% of all murders committed, overwhelmingly with guns, are murders of black people. Black people are about 13% of the population.

The Justice Department reports that between 1980 and 2008, "blacks were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and seven times more likely than whites to commit homicide."…

President Obama, a hero in black America as the first black president, has been remarkably quiet on this issue until recently. It was only in December, after the mass killing of mostly white school children in Newtown, Conn., by a white man, that the president took the political risk of backing new gun-control legislation.

Young blacks' violent deaths from handguns hadn't moved him to such action. The president spoke publicly about that matter only after the recent gun murder of a 15-year-old girl from his hometown of Chicago who had performed at his second inaugural. "Last year there were 443 murders with firearms in this city and 65 were people under 18," Mr. Obama said. "That's the equivalent of a Newtown every four months. This is not just a gun issue. It is also an issue of the communities that we are building."

In speaking about social breakdown in those minority communities, the president put the gun issue in the context of high rates of out-of-wedlock births that lead to high rates of childhood poverty. "I wish I had a father who was around and involved," the president said, in words that echoed loudly through black and Latino neighborhoods nationally because he revealed a pain so common, yet so rarely confessed, among young people of color.

 

The shame and silence is enforced by civil-rights leaders who speak in support of gun control but never about a dysfunctional gangster-rap culture that glorifies promiscuity, drug dealers and the power of the gun.

 

"Loving, supporting parents . . . [are] the single most important thing," the president told his audience of young, mostly minority children at Hyde Park Academy High School in Chicago. He made the case for parents as the key to giving children a sense of self-esteem beyond the barrel of a gun.

Almost 50 years ago, when the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, the national out-of-wedlock birthrate was 7%. Today it is over 40%. According to the CDC, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for white children was just 2% in the 1960s. Today it is 30%. Among black children, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has skyrocketed from 20% in the 1960s to a heartbreaking 72% today. The Hispanic out-of-wedlock rate, which has been measured for a much shorter period, was below 40% in 1990 and stands at more than 50% as of the 2010 census.

When President Obama tried to speak to this crippling dynamic in 2008, he was basically told to shut up by Rev. Jesse Jackson. The Chicago-based activist said: "Barack was talking down to black people," then he added a vulgar threat about what he wanted to do in response. The moment revealed the high cost of speaking honestly about social breakdown in black America.

I support gun control. But speaking honestly about the combustible mix of race and guns may be more important to stopping the slaughter in minority communities than any new gun-control laws.” Wall St Journal

Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill.

The Unspeakable Subject

I hate to be one to say it, but it becomes more and more obvious that there is an undeclared war going on in this country between lower-class blacks and all white people. Not only is there a report every week on Drudge of a black flash mob attacking whites, but the statistics are overwhelming:

• Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.

• Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

• Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

• Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

Source FBI through New Century Foundation

Now we have a report of an unspeakable crime committed in Georgia last week where two blacks (a teen and a pre-teen) shot and killed a white baby in a baby carriage as its mother was walking down a normally peaceful street.

This photo provided Friday, March 22, 2013 by Sherry West, of Brunswick, Ga., shows her son Antonio Santiago celebrating his first Christmas in December of 2012. Credit: AP

BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — Police arrested two teenagers Friday who are suspected in the shooting death of a 13-month-old baby in a stroller and wounding the baby’s mother during an attempted robbery.

Seventeen-year-old De’Marquis Elkins is charged as an adult with first-degree murder, along with a 14-year-old who was not identified because he is a juvenile, Police Chief Tobe Green said.

Police announced the arrest Friday afternoon after combing school records and canvassing neighborhoods searching for the pair. The chief said the motive of the “horrendous act” was still under investigation and the weapon had not been found.

The mother, Sherry West, wept Friday while she told The Associated Press that she pleaded with the gunman and a younger accomplice who approached her Thursday morning while she walked near their home in coastal Brunswick.

“He asked me for money and I said I didn’t have it,” she said. “When you have a baby, you spend all your money on babies. They’re expensive. And he kept asking and I just said ‘I don’t have it.’ And he said, ‘Do you want me to kill your baby?’ And I said, ‘No, don’t kill my baby!’”

West said the gunman fired four shots, the first into the ground. West didn’t see a shell casing ejected and she assumed the gun wasn’t real.

Picture De’Marquis Elkins

Notice that the original source, the Associated Press, did not identify the races of the shooters or the baby, continuing a conspiracy among the mainstream media to hide this situation wherever it occurs.

To make things worse, our President Obama had the nerve to make the following statement yesterday in Israel:

Obama links the struggles of blacks in America with Palestinian cause

Rick Moran March 22, 2013 American Thinker (Excerpt)

“President Obama has done this before - connected the struggle of African Americans to realize equality with the cause of the Palestinians. The metaphor is weak, even if you accept the legitimacy of Palestinian claims such as the right of return and borders.

But at bottom, it is an obscenity. Part of that cause that President Obama so blithely and ignorantly joins with civil rights is the undeniable fact that the Palestinians want to eliminate the Jewish state. Hence, he is linking the noble struggle for freedom for American blacks with genocide.

Politico:

On his stops in the Holy Land Thursday, President Barack Obama turned again and again to a subject not obviously connected to the current troubles in the mideast: the struggles of African Americans in the United States.

One of the parallels the president drew-comparing the plight of Palestinians to that of blacks in the U.S.-has drawn criticism in the past when he raised it in this region.

During a press conference with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama said young people he'd met on the trip made him think of his own children.

"Whenever I meet these young people, whether they're Palestinian or Israeli, I'm reminded of my own daughters, and I know what hopes and aspirations I have for them," Obama said at the Palestinian headquarters compound in Ramallah. "And those of us in the United States understand that change takes time but it is also possible, because there was a time when my daughters could not expect to have the same opportunities in their own country as somebody else's daughters."

Obama's comments-which invoked life under Jim Crow in the U.S. or perhaps even under slavery-seemed to give support to Palestinian narratives that describe Arabs and Palestinians as second-class citizens in Israel. That line of criticism deeply angers many Israelis. Some critics of Israel go so far as to use the word apartheid, a word that angers Israelis further.” American Thinker

As the American left tries to disarm Americans while it hides the truth about black violence against whites, knowledgeable people will not be fooled, nor leave themselves defenseless.

CEO Pay Curtailed

We have often pointed out the immorality and unfairness of CEO pay in the US that has grown recently from 40X average wages to 400X average wages. We considered using tax policy to even things out, even slightly, but our friend, Mason, suggested giving stockholders the right to veto such outrageous CEO contracts. The Swiss have now done this and led the way.

Swiss Back Strict Executive Pay Curbs

March 3, 2013 CNBC.com (excerpt)

“Swiss citizens voted on Sunday to impose some of the world's strictest controls on executive pay, forcing public companies to give shareholders a binding vote on compensation, result projections showed.

Claude Longchamp of pollsters Gfs.Bern told Swiss state television early returns in a referendum showed 68 percent backed allowing shareholders to veto executive pay proposals and a ban on big rewards for new and departing managers.

While anger at multi-million dollar payouts for executives has spread around the globe since the financial crisis, Swiss direct democracy — including four national referendums a year — means public outrage can be translated into action.

A few other countries, including the United States and Germany, have introduced advisory "say on pay" votes and Britain is also planning to give shareholders a binding vote on pay and "exit payments" at least every three years. Brussels agreed a cap on bankers' bonuses last week.

The clear majority in Switzerland was unusual given fierce opposition and intense campaigning by business lobby group Economiesuisse, which warned the proposals would damage the country's competitiveness and scare away international talent.

Support for the move was driven partly by big bonuses blamed for fuelling risky investments that nearly felled Swiss bank UBS, as well as outrage over a proposed $78 million payment to outgoing Novartis chairman Daniel Vasella.

"The clear support for the initiative reflects the understandable anger of the electorate at the self-serving mentality of certain managers," said a group representing most of the parties in parliament which opposed the plan. "With their misconduct, they have done the economy as a whole a disservice."

Thomas Minder, the businessman-turned-politician behind the campaign who says his proposals are aimed at ending a culture of short-termism and rewards for managers of badly-run companies, said intense corporate lobbying had backfired.

"This is a clear sign of the distance between the people and the political and business establishment," he said.

Despite threats from some executives, Switzerland is unlikely to see an exodus of big companies, drawn to the country by low taxes, stable politics and business-friendly laws.” CNBC

At the present time, in the US, stockholders can only "advise" their boards on CEO pay, even under the new Dodd-Frank law.  We need to follow the Swiss lead on this.

Excerpt From ThinkProgress.org

“Many of the same problems that led to Swiss frustration with CEO pay apply here in the U.S. For instance, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit walked off with millions of dollars after vaporizing most of his company’s value. Duke Energy paid its former CEO $44 million for working literally one day.

Skyrocketing executive pay (along with growing pay in the finance industry) is a huge component in America’s growing income inequality. In fact, “Executives, and workers in finance, accounted for 58 percent of the expansion of income for the top 1 percent and 67 percent of the increase in income for the top 0.1 percent from 1979 to 2005.” Special tax deductions for executive pay cost taxpayers billions of dollars per year.

In the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law, shareholders of U.S. corporations were also given new powers meant to rein in executive pay. However, Dodd-Frank only gives shareholders a non-binding vote, meaning that the corporation is able to essentially ignore it.

The corporate argument that huge executive pay packages are necessary to retain top talent has proven to be false. Yet the U.S. tax code preferences these pay packages, and there’s little shareholders (or anyone else) can do to stop them."  ThinkProgress.org

 

Fiddler on the Roof

In this wonderful play and movie, Jews living in a remote area of Czarist Russia start seeing their customs and traditions erode and disappear. It is a story of the ages.

Retired people my age are almost always bemoaning the changes in society. In the case of my generation, however, there may be something to it; we never worried about finding a good job or getting ahead. College costs were low and so was housing. People were civil, and only nasty people used vulgar language.

Since 1975, however, unknown to many of us, the buying power of the average wage has steadily declined, and the distribution of both income and wealth has become badly skewed so that the upper 20% earn most of the money and have accumulated most of the wealth. Earnings from investments far outperform earnings from salaries and wages. College costs also skyrocketed.

Left-click to enlarge

Middleclass and lower income Americans first responded to these trends by sending their wives to work, and also working longer hours and getting two jobs. When this didn’t work they began borrowing large sums on their credit cards and on their houses in order to try to maintain their standard of living. This all came tumbling down after the housing bubble crashed, and we continue to be in a terrible mess.

There have been many causes: globalization, the decline in private industry labor unions, the pressure on CEO’s for short-term results, federal government interference in education, the rise of the welfare state, the burst of inflation causing huge increases in the cost of imported oil, technology, unintended consequences of lowering taxes – especially on investment profits, the overturning of the Glass-Steagall Act, etc., etc., etc.

The housing crash opened a festering sore that the Republican Party has not adequately addressed, and some in the Party have not even seemed to notice. In my mind now, the only thing worse than the Republican Party is the Democratic Party whose entire program is aimed at symptoms, not causes.