RUTHFULLY YOURS

Historically, there were two ways to get rich: hard work and inheritance, apart from hitting the jackpot or robbing a bank of course. Now, in a world of ethically challenged public servants, there is another way – public service.

Inheritance, for the few, is still a powerful means. Four of the ten richest members of Congress have inherited wealth. In 2012, Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, called cybercrime the greatest transfer of wealth in history. That may be true, but in 2000 the Planned Giving Design Center (PGDC) estimated that between 1998 and 2052 $41 trillion will pass from one generation to the next – the greatest foreseeable transfer of wealth in the history of the world. Nevertheless, those funds will only go to a lucky few.

Most wealth in the U.S. has been self-made. Aspiration, inspiration and perspiration, with a dose of luck, have allowed millions of Americans to become wealthy, and a small number to become very rich. Rags to riches stories, like Horatio Alger and the Rollo Books, were once commonly read by young people, providing inspiration to succeed. For millions of immigrants, America represented the fulfillment of a dream. Unlike “the old country,” it made little difference where one was born, or what was one’s name; a desire to better one’s self through hard work was what mattered. Independence and self-reliance were valued qualities.

While money and politics have long been soul-mates, the relationship has only strengthened in recent years. Ironically, while we have become a nation that encourages dependency by providing more and more services, we have also become intrigued with wealth and with the things money can buy. We are fascinated by homes that cost over $100 million; the Wall Street Journal has a section on Thursday’s called, “Mansions.” The Financial Times has a weekly glossy magazine entitled, “How to Spend It.” A Norman Rockwell painting that graced a $0.15 copy of a 1951 edition of the “Saturday Evening Post” sold for $46 million late last year. Idiosyncrasies of the rich are regularly featured in glossy magazines, on TV and on the internet, allowing vicarious feelings of jealousy to gestate. We admire Pope Francis, but would prefer to live like New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan. It is unsurprising that in such a milieu, a $174,000 a year Congressman or a $400,000 a year President would feel he or she had been left behind.

A focus on materialism permeates a bloated government bureaucracy. In the past, there were workers who would willingly give up some income for security. Government jobs fit that request. Those jobs were less responsive to economic challenges and less subject to the whims of private sector owners or managers. In that prior time, reduced risk of job loss equated to less pay.

Some counties have dictators, tyrants and kings. America has victims in high office. Victims with vast powers and great wealth who despite all that are oppressed by the people they rule.

They are the oppressed oppressors.

Never has a ruling class been as oppressed as ours by an ignorant rabble that rudely abuses the army of benevolent public servants who see to their welfare in exchange for nothing except a feeling of moral satisfaction and a six-figure salary. Not to mention unlimited power.

“They talk about me like a dog,” Obama complained. “Is it a lack of respect for me?” he whined to the Secretary of Defense.

When Obama isn’t complaining, the media outlets of the ruling class do it for him. Every hour one of the greasy suckers on the tentacle of a massive media corporation with lavish skyscraper headquarters in four countries calls out the subliminal bigotry of the people who dare to criticize the man who controls every aspect of their lives.

The media has worked its iPads off alerting us to the perpetual victimization of the Obamas. From NBC to NPR, from CNN to CBS, from the New York Times to the Washington Post, the billion dollar corporations have spoken in one voice and they have said that criticizing the most powerful man in the world is racist. And they have told us that our ingratitude depresses him.

“The world seems to disappoint him,” David Remnick said. Remnick deftly balances the responsibilities of promoting Obama as editor of the New Yorker (Advance Publications – $6.56 billion) and promoting Obama as author of “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama” (Bertelsmann – $22 billion).

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/boko-haram-violence-explodes-the-west-struggles-to-understand?f=puball

(Washington, DC) Nigeria’s jihadist group Boko Haram was recently featured in several Washington, DC, briefings, including a presentation by a Nigerian teenager who was the lone survivor of a family massacred by Boko Haram. These briefings highlighted significant challenges in combating Boko Haram’s brutal terror campaign.

Fifteen-year old Deborah Peters appeared at a May 13 Hudson Institute panel to discuss a December 22, 2011, Boko Haram attack on her home near Chibok in Nigeria’s Borno state. Peters saw Boko Haram assailants, one of whom she knew, shoot her pastor father. Targeted after rebuilding his church which had been burnt down by Boko Haram the previous November, the pastor suffered martyrdom after refusing to recant his Christian faith. The terrorists then killed her brother as well, and left the young girl lying between the bodies.

The girl’s mother, described by Nigerian human rights activist Emmanuel Ogebe as a Muslim convert in “one of those strange love stories that doesn’t end very well,” was not in the house at the time. Nonetheless, she cannot return home as Boko Haram would kill her as an apostate. Another pastor who helped bring Deborah Peters to the United States was himself a victim of a May 2013 Boko Haram attack.

Boko Haram has perpetrated “massive genocides” of Christian Nigerians in Muslim-majority northern Nigeria in order to establish a Muslim rule, with Taliban-style stadium beheadings in the “old-fashioned way,” Ogebe noted. The terror group marked Christian dwellings for subsequent nocturnal attacks and had an “MO” of close range “shoot to kill” headshots. While sporadic killings of Christians are “normal in northern Nigeria,” such as when Muslims blame Christians for an eclipse, Boko Haram presents “persecution on steroids.” Boko Haram attacks, for example, have “virtually de-Christianized” Nigeria’s Yobe state, Ogebe wrote online, leaving hardly 80 pastors where once over 1,000 churches existed, a percentage loss greater “than the decimation of Christians in Iraq.”

Twice denied an American visa for insufficient family ties (“You can’t make this stuff up,” Ogebe observed), Deborah Peters had a low profile once in the United States. Ogebe and his colleagues “tactically decided not to put her in a public space” because “we could not sacrifice the mental health of this young child” suffering from trauma. International outcry over Boko Haram’s April 14 kidnapping of hundreds of mostly Christian girls, however, some of whom Peters had “literally…played with” moved her to “put a face to this travesty,” in Ogebe’s words.

The title of the May 23, 2014 “The Daily Mail” article sounded a clear warning:

“A chilling message from the cartels: Billboards with hanging mannequins warning cops to choose ‘silver over lead’ appear in Texas”

The sub-title of the article provides context for the title and the article:

Two billboards along highways in El Paso, Texas were vandalized and had mannequins hanging off of them

One reads ‘silver or lead’ in Spanish which is taken to mean that police and business owners can either take drug cartels’ bribes or die

Worries spreading that cartels that have ruled Mexican border towns with violence may be headed north

To provide a bit of background, many similar signs have, for years, been posted in Mexico warning the public and especially police, judges and prosecutors that they will either submit to bribery (silver) by the cartels or be shot dead (lead) by the cartels. In Mexico mutilated bodies of those who were brutally tortured, killed and dismembered by the cartels for non-compliance are often hung off of bridges or billboards.

In El Paso, next to one of the billboards, was a mannequin attired in a black suit hanging from a noose — chillingly similar to the way that actual bodies are often displayed south of the U.S./Mexican border.

The news report noted that there are concerns that the violence is heading north. Indeed, the violence has already headed north — although, thus far, not to the extent we have seen in Mexico. However, when talking about the violence “heading north” it may well be that for the Mexican cartels “north” may include states located far from the U.S./Mexican border such as New York.

On May 20, 2014 the New York City Council conducted a hearing focused on the skyrocketing increase of heroin inundating New York City.

CBS News reported on that hearing in an article: “Special Narcotics Prosecutor Addresses Heroin Epidemic At City Council Hearing.”

The radical Left in Israel has invented a new nonsense word to capture the essence of its agenda and ideology. The term is “Nakba Denial.” It is not accidental that it strongly resembles the term “Holocaust Denial,” for the radical anti-Israel leftists seek to create a clear moral parallel between the Holocaust and the “Nakba.” The term, Nakba, of course means catastrophe in Arabic and is tossed around by the radical Left to refer to the “catastrophe” of the creation of Israel and its victory over the genocidal Arab fascists who attempted to destroy Israel in 1948-9.

The Left insists that Nakba Denial proves that non-leftists are living in denial and are heartlessly indifferent to the “sufferings” of Arabs when they were on the losing side of their war of genocidal aggression against the Jews in 1948-49.

So having coined this new nonsense term and converted it into their banner, we thought we would suggest to the Non-Left a number of new terms that should be introduced into political discourse, terms to be used by those who are NOT seeking the extermination of Israel or a second Holocaust of Jews, to describe the real agenda of the enemies of Israel.

The first of these is Treason Denial. This is the term that must be applied to many of those who insist that the radical Left inside Israel is seeking human rights and peace. It is also the term that must be used to describe those who characterize picayune overseas-funded anti-Israel propaganda NGOs as “human rights groups” and “peace groups.”

Then we should also encourage the use of the term Leftwing Fascism Denial. It is the term that describes those who refuse to recognize that the radical Left in Israel (and elsewhere) is fundamentally opposed to freedom of speech for non-Leftists and completely opposed to democracy. It is also the term that should be applied to all those justifying the people who accuse all critics of the Radical Left of being “McCarthyists” and “fascists.”

The term Stalinism Denial should be applied to all those people who pretend that they are not aware of the fact that some of the most prominent members of the Tenured Left in Israel are lifelong hard-core Stalinists. A number of faculty members posting on the Israeli Social Sciences chat list are card-carrying members of the Israeli (Stalinist) Communist Party, but any attempts to mention this fact are censored by the administrators of that list.

Elliot Rodger is only the latest mass murderer whose creepy videos and massive manifesto will be pored over for clues to his state of mind. Rodger is in good company with killers like Osama bin Laden, Anders Behring Breivik and Christopher Dorner who exploited their murderous celebrity by running their mouths and fingers while unloading their deep thoughts on everything.

Osama bin Laden told everyone to read Jimmy Carter’s Palestine and Walt and Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby. Christopher Dorner regretted missing out on the next season of The Walking Dead. Breivik discussed his favorite video games and Elliot Rodger had to tell us about every movie he watched.

Mass murderers act like aspiring celebrities because that’s what they are. They want to be famous. They are compulsive narcissists who need everyone to pay attention to them.

Analyzing their manifestos for motive is a waste of time. Rodger, like Dorner, Breivik and Bin Laden, was obsessed with power fantasies. These men killed people to gain power over them and over the larger audience beyond their victims. They wanted to make the rest of the world see them the way that they saw themselves.

Their videos and manifestos were a studied pose like everything else about them.

A hundred years ago we would have called them evil. Today we pore over their writings trying to understand what made them snap. And when we do that, we make the mistake of assuming that their complaints made them kill, instead of being the excuse that allowed them to kill.

A million young men go around complaining about being alone. They don’t go on a killing spree. A million workers hate their job and their coworkers. They don’t kill them. Millions of ordinary people resent their spouses, their parents, their bosses, their neighbors and their garbage men.

In the midst of the Veteran’s Administration scandal, has America forgotten that the U.S. military has a very special advocate who has worked tirelessly to help military families? And what a bang up job that woman has done.

For years now, our very own First Lady has appeared on shows like Oprah and Nightline and broadcast her undying dedication to getting military families the multifaceted support they need – none of which she’s done, but that’s beside the point. One would think that after all the effort she’s invested, at some point the FLOTUS would have caught wind that military veterans were languishing for months on waiting lists at VA hospitals without proper care.

But she didn’t.

In 2011 Mrs. Obama and Dr. Jill Biden launched Joining Forces, which the first lady’s White House web page described as:

A nationwide initiative that mobilizes all sectors of society to give our service members and their families the opportunities and support they have earned, and to raise awareness of military families’ unique needs as pertains to employment, education and wellness.

That same year, a humble FLOTUS told Oprah Winfrey that she is moved by military families’ “willingness to sacrifice without complaint.”

Clearly, the qualities Shelley admired hadn’t inspired her quite enough to find out what those who served this nation REALLY need, because with a minimum of effort Mrs. Obama would have uncovered the injustices being inflicted upon brave veterans by the Veterans Administration.

What better venues than the talk show circuit for the commander-in-chief’s wife to share the plight of gravely ill ex-military waiting months for the VA to provide healthcare? Instead, clueless Michelle told Oprah that it’s hard to get the message of the military out because “they never ask for help.”

Charting liberal hypocrisy is now old hat. From academia to the Sierra Club, elite progressives expect to live lives that are quite different from what they envision for the less sophisticated. No one believes that Elizabeth Warren would wish affirmative action to work for everyone in the way that she herself subverted it. Nor would we expect Warren not to be in the 1 percent that she so scolds — any more than we would assume that Al Gore would not leave a carbon footprint as large as those of thousands of the less environmentally sensitive put together.

First lady Michelle Obama recently lamented that “many young people are going to schools with kids who look just like them.” And she added: “And too often those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color, which too often lag behind.” But that anguish should not mean that the Obamas have put or would put their children in the inner-city public schools the way President and Mrs. Carter did with Amy.

The message from Silicon Valley to Chevy Chase is that the public schools are being abandoned by the wealthy and that the new apartheid is a bad thing — and, by deploring both that fact and those who contribute to it, one exempts oneself from any worry about doing precisely what is being castigated.

It would be otherworldly to expect Paul Krugman, now studying marketplace inequality as a new professor at City University of New York, to not be making 75 times more than a part-time teacher of one class at CUNY — which is one class more than Professor Krugman will be teaching. We are not surprised that Joseph Stiglitz, world-famous economist and consultant on the sources of inequality, is an academic entrepreneur who has made a 1 percenter income by speaking at $40,000 a pop to wealthy groups, governments, and other concerned entities on growing inequality and why a few privileged insiders make more in an hour than the many make in a year

Europe’s sceptics are divided about their scepticism

It is only really in the UK, Denmark and the Czech Republic that euroscepticism reaches an existential, constitutional level. If we have made progress, it has merely shown how far there is to go.

We have all seen the results and the hyperbole: ‘Earthquake’, ‘Shock’, ‘Revolution’. None of us should be surprised at this: the last Euro-elections were in 2009, as Europeans were wondering how to deal with the new economics of recession.

This time, Europe has lived through depression, the near collapse of the euro, the deeply unpopular German-driven austerity and in many places social unrest.

The pollsters had also forecast it: the Electionista survey, out last week, predicted big eurosceptic gains in the four largest countries, with not much going on in Spain or Poland. It is worth looking at the four most populous nations because they paint a very confused picture.

Germany has 96 seats (out of 751in total) and the eurosceptic party Alternative for Germany (AfD) seems to have got around 7% of the vote, giving it only a modest representation. Mrs Merkel won comfortably.

In France the elections were won by Marine Le Pen’s Front National, which easily beat the centre-right UMP. The ruling socialists came a dismal third.

In the UK, Nigel Farage’s UKIP beat the opposition Labour, leaving the governing Conservatives in third place. A mirror image of France. Or is it?

And what to say about Italy, where I live? The Electionista forecast showed eurosceptic parties getting 26 out of Italy’s 73 seats, a slightly higher proportion than in the UK. But it lists the parties as the Northern League and Beppe Grillo’s 5-star movement.

Chris Christie rose to national prominence in 2010 in part on his reputation for taking on unpopular battles, entrenched interests, and vocal critics at town-hall meetings across his heavily Democratic state.

But the governor’s decision last Wednesday to renominate for tenure the state’s chief justice, Stuart Rabner, a Democrat, has led several conservatives to denounce him for backing down from a fight over judicial nominations and giving up on a campaign promise to reshape the state’s top court. Together with his deference to the New Jersey State Bar Association and his failure to push for tort reform in a notoriously litigious state, the controversy over the renomination opens up a gaping vulnerability in a potential 2016 nomination battle. The governor would face a field of candidates from more conservative states who have been able to tackle these issues with greater ease, and who have done so with great success.

The reappointment of Rabner, who cleared the way for the legalization of same-sex marriage in New Jersey, was to some conservatives a sign of flagrant disregard. The conservative activist L. Brent Bozell III, chairman of the political-action committee ForAmerica, accused Christie of “flip[ing] his middle finger at conservatives” and said the governor is assuming, erroneously, that conservatives will be willing to overlook the issue if he mounts a presidential bid in 2016. “He is divorced from reality,” Bozell said in a statement.

Christie also drew the ire of Daryn Iwicki, the director of Americans for Prosperity’s New Jersey branch, who called his move “disastrous news for taxpayers” and predicted it would have “untold consequences on the state for years to come.”

The Rabner reappointment was part of a compromise Christie reached with state-senate Democrats that put an end to a simmering war over judicial nominations. It allowed Christie to nominate a Republican judge, Lee Solomon, to a seven-year term on the court in exchange for Rabner’s renomination. Rabner, a friend of Christie who served as his deputy in the U.S. attorney’s office, has been chief justice since 2007. With tenure, he will remain on the bench until 2030.

On the campaign trail in 2007, Christie said none of the state’s supreme-court justices, including Rabner, had the traits he would look for in selecting a justice. “On the New Jersey Supreme Court right now? No,” he said in response to a question about whether any of the justices fit his criteria. “I want someone who is extraordinarily bright, and I want someone who will interpret laws and the Constitution, not legislate from the bench.”

Bill Palatucci, a senior adviser to Christie, cautions against a rush to judgment. He points out that Rabner, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic governor Jon Corzine, has had to recuse himself from a number of cases over the past seven years, and Palatucci says some conservatives are jumping to conclusions. “People should hold their views on the chief justice until we get a longer track record and until we see where he comes down on many issues,” he says.

The New Jersey Supreme Court, which since the late 1960s has amassed increasing powers, has long been the object of conservative ire. Conservative legal scholars say that the court, which is deeply involved in the state’s education and housing decisions, is the root of New Jersey’s fiscal problems. Steven Malanga of the free-market Manhattan Institute called it “the court that broke New Jersey”; others, like the conservative Federalist Society, have emphasized that remaking the court is a prerequisite for addressing the state’s nagging budgetary problems — including, right now, the $2.7 billion budget shortfall that is causing the governor major political headaches. They had high hopes that Christie would do so.

New Jersey has an idiosyncratic system for supreme-court appointments under which justices are appointed by the governor for an initial seven-year term and may then be reappointed for tenure. Governors have for decades operated under a gentlemen’s agreement to maintain a political balance on the seven-member court, ensuring that there are no more than four members of one political party.