Displaying posts published in

August 2016

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Your Tax Dollars Fund Palestinian Terror How do U.S. aid transfers square with laws against funding terrorism? Willful blindness helps.By David Feith

By on August 12th, 2016

With an indictment unsealed last week, Israeli investigators have sounded an alarm over the illicit use of global aid money to fund Palestinian terrorism. Prosecutors in the city of Beersheba allege that Mohammed El-Halabi, Gaza Strip director of the California-based charity World Vision, transferred tens of millions of dollars to Hamas to buy weapons and build underground attack tunnels. Although World Vision denies fault, the governments of Australia and Germany have halted donations pending investigations.

This revelation should spur a broader reassessment of American aid to the Palestinian government. For two decades the Palestinian government has used U.S. and other foreign taxpayers’ money to pay generous rewards to the families of terrorists. The deadlier the crime, the larger the prize, up to about $3,100 a month, or several times the average salary of a worker in Palestine’s non-terrorist economy.

Recall that 13-year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel was murdered in her bed by a knife-wielding Palestinian in June. She was a dual Israeli-American citizen, making her the 11th American killed by Palestinians since 2014. Other victims include 18-year-old Ezra Schwartz, a student from Sharon, Mass., and 28-year-old Taylor Force, a West Point graduate and two-tour U.S. Army veteran from Lubbock, Texas. The families of the killers now receive regular payments from Palestinian leaders—funded partly by U.S. taxpayers.

No U.S. official can plead ignorance. Palestinian law has sanctioned these payments since at least 2004, specifying how much money is earned depending on the circumstances of the attacker and the body count. A Palestinian from Israel with a wife and children who kills many people and dies in the act, or is captured and sentenced to more than 30 years in prison, earns the most. Single, childless attackers from the West Bank or Gaza earn less. The incentives are clear.

Palestinian leaders once tried to obscure their payments by characterizing them as “assistance” rather than “salaries.” They also shifted nominal responsibility from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which takes donations from foreign governments, to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which doesn’t. But this was a sham, as both bodies are run by Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party.

In 2014 Israel estimated the terror payments at $75 million, or a sum equal to 16% of all aid sent to Palestine from overseas. This year the figure is nearly $140 million, says Yigal Carmon of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

How do U.S. aid transfers square with laws against funding terrorism? Willful blindness helps. “I think that they plan to phase it out,” State Department official Anne Patterson said in 2014 after the meaningless PA-to-PLO two-step. This year’s State Department report on terrorism praised Palestinian leaders for “many improvements,” including making “terrorism financing a criminal offense.” It said nothing about official payments to terrorists. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

The Clinton Plan’s Growth Deficit Hillary’s agenda is long on economic platitudes. How is more money for roads—$50 billion a year—going to kick-start growth? By John H. Cochrane

By on August 12th, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s big speech on Thursday laying out her economic proposals included much of what you’d expect—calls for higher taxes on “Wall Street, corporations, and the superrich.” The centerpiece was her call for “the biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II.” Reading the speech, and detail on the campaign website, I’m not encouraged.

America’s foremost economic problem is sclerotic growth. If the economy continues to expand at only 1% to 2% a year, instead of the historical 3% to 4%, then current economic and political problems will become crises. Almost everything depends on growth: progress for the middle class, hope for the unfortunate, solvency for social programs, environmental protection, defense.

This is not a contentious or partisan statement. Larry Summers, Democratic economic adviser extraordinaire, wrote recently in the Washington Post that growth is “the single most important determinant of almost every aspect of economic performance,” and that trying to boost it “has been discredited in the minds of too many progressives.”

So, how does Mrs. Clinton diagnose and suggest to cure the country’s stagnation? Her central pro-growth proposal is “infrastructure” spending, $275 billion over five years, financed in part by some sharply higher taxes.

Sure, America’s roads and bridges could use patching. But how does this fix the growth problem? Nobody thinks that stagnant growth is centrally the fault of bad roads and bridges. No, the economic argument behind Mrs. Clinton’s proposal is simply the endless drumbeat of fiscal stimulus: Spend taxed or borrowed money on anything, and the “multiplier” will increase “demand.”

We’ve been at this since 2008. But the caution that stimulus should be “timely, targeted, and temporary” has now been forgotten. Japan’s massive “infrastructure” spending and weak growth to show for it are forgotten. And if U.S. growth hasn’t been kick-started by the trillions of stimulus so far—the government has accumulated $8 trillion of debt since the recession began—how will another $50 billion a year help?

Further, why are roads and bridges still a problem? President Obama has been after “infrastructure” stimulus since 2009. If you ask that question, and listen to answers, they are pretty clear. It’s nearly impossible to build infrastructure these days. Endless regulatory reviews and legal challenges bog down builders. The Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates prevailing wages, and other contracting restrictions balloon costs. Politicians and agencies pick terrible projects—high-speed trains to nowhere. Even those can’t get built. President Obama discovered how few projects are “shovel-ready.” Opposition to throwing money down a rathole is not pigheaded.

In return for more spending, Mrs. Clinton could have offered serious structural reforms: repeal of Davis-Bacon, time limits on environmental reviews, serious cost-benefit analysis, and so forth. Such a package would have been irresistible.

Instead her plan simply asserts that Mrs. Clinton will “break through Washington gridlock” and “cut red tape”—promises made and forgotten by every presidential candidate in living memory. If the Sierra Club sues to block her worthy commitment to “upgrade our dams and levees,” will she really short-circuit the legal process, and how?

The rest of Mrs. Clinton’s economic agenda is a thousand-course smorgasbord of government expansions, with the same deficiencies. A random sample: Higher taxes on capital gains and corporations. New taxes on financial transactions. A corporate exit tax. Paid leave. Free college. A higher minimum wage. More federal training programs. Tax credits for apprenticeships and profit-sharing programs. A “new markets” credit. Rural business investment cooperatives. The Paycheck Fairness Act. “Make it in America Partnerships.” And on and on.

Moreover, much of it is merely aspiration, without (yet) concrete action: “Restore collective bargaining rights.” “Strengthen overtime rules.” “Make quality affordable childcare a reality.” “Ensure that the jobs of the future in caregiving and services are good-paying jobs.” “Break down barriers to make affordable housing and homeownership possible for hard working families.” And on and on and on. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Putin’s August Surprise The Russian invents a pretext in Crimea to pull out of peace talks.

By on August 12th, 2016

Vladimir Putin is a master at pressing his geopolitical advantage when he senses complacency in the West. That’s the meaning of his latest tantrum over Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Moscow invaded and illegally annexed in 2014.

The Russian strongman on Wednesday accused Kiev of sending special forces to Crimea to destabilize the occupied Ukrainian territory ahead of Russian parliamentary elections next month. His spy agency, the FSB, said one of its men and a Russian regular had been killed in clashes with the Ukrainians over the weekend. The Kremlin also claims to have arrested several Ukrainian would-be infiltrators, including an intelligence officer.

The Russian leader then used the episode as an excuse to pull out of peace talks aimed at de-escalating the Russia-instigated conflict in eastern Ukraine. A fresh round had been proposed for the sidelines of next month’s G-20 meeting in China, but on Wednesday Mr. Putin declared such diplomacy “meaningless.”

Kiev denies the allegations, which bear the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, not least because there is no plausible evidence. A senior Western diplomat says Mr. Putin’s accusations represent an attempt at “sabotaging the diplomacy around Minsk,” the 2015 cease-fire accord that ended the worst of the fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Email Questions Haunt Hillary Clinton The controversy that Clinton hoped had died out when prosecutors closed their investigation looks likely to shadow her through Election Day By Peter Nicholas and Byron Tau

By on August 12th, 2016

The email controversy that Hillary Clinton hoped had died out when federal prosecutors closed their investigation last month now looks likely to shadow her campaign all the way through Election Day.

Rolling releases of emails from Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary of state, combined with her own failure to provide succinct, consistent answers on her email practices, have kept the issue simmering.

“Any time she talks about it or engages someone on the issue, it just keeps the story alive rather than letting it go away,” said Andrew Ricci, a former aide to two Democratic congressmen who is a vice president at the public relations and crisis communications firm Levick.

The drumbeat is undercutting Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy and hindering her efforts to seize fuller control of the presidential race by painting Republican rival Donald Trump as an unacceptable alternative.

Last October, 42% of people polled said her use of a private email system while secretary of state was an “important factor” in whether to vote for her, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed. A survey last month found that figure had jumped to 55%.

What’s more, half of voters surveyed said she lacked the right judgment to be president based on a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe that showed she was careless in handling sensitive government information, compared with one-third who said she does have the right judgment.

John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, said: “She’s said probably about a hundred times now, it [the private email server] was a mistake, wouldn’t do it again. She’s learned from it.”

However, Mr. Podesta conceded the issue has lingered. “It’s a problem that we’ve had to cope with, but I think it’s one we’ve tried to put behind us and people are going to have to weigh that against an opponent on the other side who remains kind of outrageous every day,” he said.
The campaign’s decision to eschew news conferences also limits Mrs. Clinton’s ability to put the issue to rest. The Democrat hasn’t held a full news conference since Dec. 4, 2015, although aides said she has taken more than 2,600 questions from reporters this year on a variety of subjects, many in one-on-one interviews with television anchors.

Mrs. Clinton did take questions from reporters after an appearance last week, and offered a new, and muddled, response to the email flap that stirred fresh headlines. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Fox and the Hens By Marilyn Penn

By on August 12th, 2016

True to its brand name, Fox News styles its women as vixens with furry false lashes, short pencil skirts and stratospheric shoes that might be dangerous if anyone had to actually walk in them. But seated so that their long legs show more thigh than one-time bathing suits, the women cross their legs and let the camera help their heels to send a loud, clear message of sexual availability. With the exception of Greta von Susteren, whose name alone sounds like an admonition to step back, the Foxy ladies exude sex appeal – Kimberly Guillfoyle, Megyn Kelly, the erstwhile Gretchen Carlson even had glamorous names to go with their form-fitting latex dresses, their sleeveless arms even in winter, their long wavy hair, their perfectly made-up faces no matter the time of day. Since all the Fox women are super-bright and ambitious, one can only question how they failed to get the message of the part they were designed to play. Were they so naive that they didn’t think their attractiveness was essential to their being hired? When they looked at their boss and heard his instructions as to their Stepford-similar make-up and get-ups, did it never cross their minds that this gig might come with the expectations of extra-curricular activity?

These are obvious rhetorical questions since I’ve already stated that the women are smart and ambitious. It doesn’t actually matter whether some of them participated willingly in office interludes or just titilating flirtations – the point is that they were working in a hot-house atmosphere whose message leaches off-screen into people’s bedroom fantasies. So where’s the big scandale? Aren’t these ladies all big girls who know how to deal? Did Roger Ailes really get canned because Gretchen Carlson accused him of having made some suggestive remarks to her – all of which were in the past tense? Doubtful. Was it Megyn Kelly’s supportive complaint that did him in?

Continue reading →