VIDEO: Pigs, Lipstick and Islam
The Islamic State is showing us Islam without makeup…a nightmare.
The First Amendment Could Break the Grip of Government Unions by Charles W. Baird
On January 11, 2016, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. It will be one of the Court’s most consequential cases this term. A decision in favor of Rebecca Friedrichs, a California public school teacher, could begin to undo the catastrophic damage caused by the widespread unionization of government employees in the 1960s and 1970s.
Municipal bankruptcies, state insolvencies, decaying public education, political corruption, and attacks on the freedom of speech and freedom of association of government employees are only the most visible wreckage of that disastrous mistake.
The question before the Court is whether forcing government employees to pay dues to a government employee union is a violation of the First Amendment.
In the Abood decision (1977), the Supreme Court sanctioned such coercion. Government workers could be forced to pay for the collective bargaining activities of the unions that represent them, but, the majority held, they could not be forced to pay that portion of dues unions use directly for political advocacy, as that would violate their right to free speech.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Lewis Powell warned the Court that there is no “basis … for distinguishing ‘collective bargaining activities’ from ‘political activities’ so far as the interests protected by the First Amendment are concerned. Collective bargaining in the public sector is ‘political’ in any meaningful sense of the word.”
In Abood, the majority disregarded Powell’s concern. But in Friedrichs, the Court will have to reconsider Powell’s insight that collective bargaining in the government sector is inherently political. The wages, salaries, and other conditions of government employment are political questions: they directly affect voters, taxpayers, and the actions of government agencies. Therefore, no employee should be forced to pay dues or fees for government sector collective bargaining.
If the Court finally agrees with Powell, no union will be able to force any government employee to pay union dues or fees for anything. This will shut down the vicious cycle whereby government unions collect forced tribute from government workers and then use it to help pro-union politicians obtain and maintain political power — who then empower and enrich the government employee unions.
The California Teachers Association (CTA) is panicked by the possibility of losing this case. It’s been showing this PowerPoint presentation throughout the state to try to prod its sympathizers to counterattack. It begs for ideas for “next steps and timelines necessary for CTA to respond to the impact of a negative rulings [sic].”
At the end of the presentation, the CTA finally does what it should have alwayshad to do: It considers how it might do a better job of convincing teachers that union membership is worthwhile. Forced dues and fees make it unnecessary for unions to justify themselves to their captive members.
The unions’ main argument in support of forced dues and fees is the chimerical “free rider” problem. They argue that, under the principle of “exclusive representation,” certified unions must represent all government employees, and if any of those workers did not pay dues and fees, they would receive the benefits of union representation for free. That would be unfair.
But this argument raises a more fundamental question: Why should government unions represent any workers who are not their voluntary members? Without exclusive representation, there could be no free riders. Without free riders, there is no case for compulsory union dues — political or otherwise.
Exclusive representation is not before the Court in this case, but if forced dues and fees in government employment are forbidden, exclusive representation itself may be challenged. After all, forcing anyone to accept the representation of an unwanted union as a condition of government employment seems clearly to violate that worker’s freedom of association. I look forward to such a case.
Charles Baird is a professor of economics emeritus at California State University at East Bay.
He specializes in the law and economics of labor relations, a subject on which he has published several articles in refereed journals and numerous shorter pieces with FEE.
Every Student Succeeds Act: Common Core by a New Name and on Steriods
A bill over a thousand pages long is drafted behind closed doors and given a nice-sounding name. The chair of the Senate committee, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, announces on November 18 that the conference report, which is finished, will not be available for reading until November 30. The House vote will be two, at most three, days later.
The vote takes place two days later, on December 2. The 247 House Republicans are divided, but most (all but 64) side with 100 percent of the 188 Democrats who vote for it.
On December 8, the Senate votes to advance the bill and it is passed the following day. Again, zero opposition from Democrats. Only 12 of the 54 Senate Republicans oppose the measure.
This is the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA) that reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), an arm of the War on Poverty that sends federal funds to low-income area schools.
ESSA is supported by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, and 37 liberal and far-left civil rights and education groups. It is supported by “the owners of the Common Core Standards” (National Governors Association and the Council of Chief School Officers), as Donna Garner notes. Lamar Alexander, a Common Core booster, joins with Democrat Patty Murray, expressing hope for more such “bipartisan” legislation.
The over 200 grassroots groups and experts who sent a detailed, open letter on October 13 to Congress opposing the Act valiantly continued the battle in the two days between the release of the conference report and the vote in the House. Volunteers divvy up the bill in an attempt to digest it in 48 hours. They continued to rally the troops after it went before the Senate, to no effect. It passed on December 9. The next morning Obama signed it. According to one activist, the hurry was manufactured to prod members to “vote blindly.” ESSA had been on “ice” for six months.
The American Principles Project announces their “disappointment” over passage. Emmet McGroarty chastises Republicans for failing to listen to “the more than 200 pro-Constitution, anti-Common Core grassroots groups that laid out in detail their objections . . . and practically begged their ‘conservative’ elected officials to pay attention.”
Dr. Karen Effrem, president of Education Liberty Watch, calls ESSA “a huge lump of educational coal.” Effrem, a pediatrician, sees in ESSA a solidification of the harmful age-inappropriate methods of Common Core. She thanks presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Rand Paul for their “steadfast opposition.”
Left-wing sites claim, “Christmas miracle sees end of Common Core.”
The Department of Education had prepared the groundwork for the hurried holiday-time vote with Obama’s own announcement in October, when he inveighed against “excessive testing”–as opt-outs spread like wildfire. He subtly blamed the unpopular testing on [George W. Bush’s] No Child Left Behind. New tests, we are told, will be “state driven and based on multiple measures.” Multiple measures include “non-cognitive skills,” attitudes and emotions.
The Department of Education announces that “The bipartisan bill to fix No Child Left Behind…incorporates many of the priorities the Obama administration put forward.”
It does. These are the same priorities undergirding Common Core. According to Jane Robbins, Senior Fellow at the American Principles Project, the rub is in the mandates, as she explained to Dr. Susan Berry at Breitbart. States must coordinate with eleven different federal statutes and submit their plans for approval by the feds.
Statutes include “the Soviet-style Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act that’s designed to connect the K-12 education system to government-controlled workforce-development, the Head Start act that centralizes preschool standards, the Education Sciences Reform Act (which seeks to boost data-collection on students)….” Standards must focus on “minimal workforce-development rather than academic knowledge” – just like Common Core! States will comply or lose their federal money.
The federal government will determine “college-and career-readiness,” thus continuing its power grab on campuses.
At the other end of the “cradle to career” spectrum is “mission creep” into preschool, as states participate in Race-to-the-Top-like competitive grants. The Act expands ESEA power by making Head Start pre-school a statute (instead of an appropriation), Dr. Susan Berry reports.
Promoters ignored the research that shows the ineffectiveness of Head Start. They ignored studies that indicate that pre-school programs often have a negative impact on students’ ability to concentrate in school.
Additional concerns listed at the Truth in American Education blog include the weakening of parental rights to opt children out of tests, removing checks on federal control, increasing overall federal spending through ESEA, and transferring federal dollars from the classroom to for-profit companies.
As consumers face skyrocketing health insurance premiums they realize that the “Affordable Care Act” is not what its name implies. Similarly, many supporters of the Every Student Succeeds Act will learn that rather than eliminating Common Core, ESSA implements Common Core on steroids.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research website.
Treachery! Intrigue! Common Core Skullduggery Exposed
Are you curious about how the crazy new convoluted Common Core math problems came about? Ever wonder why high school students are reading EPA standards in English class?
Want to read a book full of suspense about backroom deals, MOU’s (Memorandums of Understanding), CCSSO licensing agreements, NGA funding, and secret handshakes? That reveals who and what CCSSO, EASA, and AYP are? That gets down to the statistical trickery of surveys showing that teachers just love Common Core?
Then read Mercedes Schneider’s fascinating Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?
Schneider cuts through the eye-glazing jargon and reveals the players, their connections, and credentials (or more accurately lack thereof). She uses her advanced degrees in education and statistics to explicate the legalese and interpret the misleading numbers, and then put them into a gripping narrative. There is a plot line that goes from when Common Core was a twinkle in the eye to the monster we have today.
This dedicated high school English teacher also maintains an excellent blog in which she cuts through all the arcana. Her work is clearly a labor of love. I don’t know how she does it all.
In Common Core Dilemma, Schneider has done a superb job in telling the back story.
But I wish that she had left it at that because the introductory chapters present a distorted view of the history of education and might put off some readers.
In the first chapter Schneider challenges the 1966 Coleman Report’s recommendation that standardized tests be used as measurements of progress (full name, Equality of Educational Opportunity Study). She takes issue with the fact that “the researchers believed that ‘culture bound’ testing was justified because, in their view, particular attributes were necessary for students of color to have success.” E.D. Hirsch, in his 1987 bestseller,Cultural Literacy, argued the same point: historical and cultural knowledge (e.g., important dates, scientific facts, familiarity with literary classics) are essential to reading comprehension and academic achievement. For that he was vilified by progressives. Common Core (in spite of the similarity in name) deemphasizes cultural knowledge by dictating that short “texts” (or excerpts) be read “cold,” with no context provided by the teacher.
Schneider maintains that it was naïve “to believe that people of color in 1960s America would ‘get a good job and move up to a better one’” by demonstrating academic achievement.
No, it was not.
Schneider repeats the myth that has been accepted as holy writ in education schools: that racism and lack of cultural sensitivity are responsible for the achievement gap. This myth is promulgated by anti-American radicals who took over schools in the 1960s. Perpetuating such myths serves their larger revolutionary goals. Thomas Sowell, however, has aptly demonstrated that in the days of segregation, all-black schools sometimes outperformed their white socioeconomic counterparts.
That is because they used the tried-and-true methods of directed teaching, which the late Jeanne Chall demonstrated were especially helpful to students from low- and middle-income families. This is old-fashioned teaching, with the teacher as the authority and students required to demonstrate knowledge of a body of material.
Progressive teachers, however, have taken it upon themselves to indoctrinate students in social justice, while pretending students are “discovering” such lessons through project and group work.
The Obama administration’s policies in academic standards and school discipline, modeled on the theories of Obama education transition team leader and Common Core test developer, Linda Darling-Hammond, go counter to the methods that have worked. Clearly, there is a larger agenda. The fall-out includes loss of local control and teacher autonomy.
Schneider, unfortunately, seems to have accepted certain progressive premises. She questions the validity of committees on the basis of racial and gender make-up (if they are overwhelmingly white and male), but cites anti-testing activist William Schaefer of FAIR Test as an authority. This is surprising because Schaefer has no qualifications in the education field. His public relations company promotes a number of far-left causes, with the anti-testing campaign being just one.
Unfortunately, Schneider repeats what could be a line from Schaeffer’s anti-testing propaganda. She maintains that test administrators can be blind to “the manner in which their own perceptions of the world interfere with both test selection and the utility of test results.” Furthermore, “The ‘skills most important’ for Whites to be successful in a predominantly White society that is often openly hostile to the ‘success’ of its members of color differ from those that may be deemed ‘most important’ by the oppressed members.” Cringe.
Schneider relates how she learned from “students of color” that “academic achievement is frowned on as an attempt to ‘be White’ or is viewed as an affront to subgroup acceptance.” That is true, as Jason Riley points out, but it is a harmful attitude that is encouraged by lessons about endless oppression and cultural difference.
Unfortunately, education schools and teachers unions have made reform efforts necessary. At conferences I’ve heard teachers share strategies on avoiding state standards (pre-Common Core), so they could use the class to promote such lessons in grievance instead. Teachers unions have notoriously protected incompetent or negligent teachers.
There was an educational “crisis,” as well as a financial one, in 2008. The Obama administration, of course, did not let either “crisis go to waste,” dangling stimulus funds before governors as carrots for adopting Common Core.
Now let me get back to the other nine chapters—the vast bulk—that make it worth your while to read this book. Once Schneider dispenses with the bleeding heart excuses in the first two chapters, she exposes education exploiters who lie (Bill Gates), who violate their federal roles (Arne Duncan), and who negotiate deals to make U.S. education dependent on their demonstrably incompetent companies (Pearson chief financial officer Robin Freestone).
Teachers, rightfully, should be appalled at the imposition of standards that have not been piloted and that were written by unqualified “experts” from non-profits tied to companies standing to profit from Common Core. They should be outraged over having their job evaluations tied to how well students perform on ridiculous tests.
But they should also be putting their own house in order. Teachers should be asking themselves whether their union dues should be going overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party, which supports big government/progressive education programs like Common Core.
I hope Mercedes Schneider takes her passion, and her great analytical and writing skills, to tackle the more deep-rooted problems plaguing education.
But first, we have a task: to kill the Common Core beast. The big government/big money interests are banking on the fact that the “little people” can’t understand the contracts, the jargon, the backroom deals.
Mercedes Schneider demonstrates, to the contrary, that with her book, oh, yes, we can.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research website.
Ideas in Exile: The Bullies Win at Yale by Diana Furchtgott-Roth
The student speech bullies have won at Yale. Erika Christakis, Assistant Master of Yale’s Silliman College, who had the temerity to suggest that college students should choose their own Halloween costumes, has resigned from teaching. Her husband, sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, Master of Silliman College, will take a sabbatical next semester.
One of the bullies’ demands to Yale President Salovey was that the couple be dismissed, and a resignation and sabbatical are a close second.
As had been widely reported, Erika Christakis said,
Is there no room any more for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.
At issue are costumes such as wearing a sombrero, which might be offensive to Mexicans; wearing a feathered headdress, which might offend Native Americans, previously termed Red Indians; and wearing blackface to dress up as an African American.
Dr. Christakis’s comment is so obvious that it hardly needs to be said. Students who are admitted to Yale are some of the brightest in the country, and it should not be the role of the University to tell them how, or whether, to dress up at Halloween.
The speech bullies want mandatory diversity training, rules against hate speech, the dismissal of Nicholas and Erika Christakis, and the renaming of Calhoun College because its namesake, John Calhoun, defended slavery.
If America is to be whitewashed of the names of individuals from prior centuries who fall short of the political standards of the 21st century, we will be a nation not only without names but also without a past. The names of our states, our municipalities, and even our universities would disappear. Elihu Yale was a governor of the East India Company, which may have occasionally engaged in the slavery trade. It is easy to condemn the dead who cannot defend themselves. But if we curse the past, what fate awaits us from our progeny?
Not all Yale students agree with the tactics employed by the bullies. Freshman Connor Wood said,
The acceptance or rejection of coercive tactics is a choice that will literally decide the fate of our democracy. Our republic will not survive without a culture of robust public debate. And the far more immediate threat is to academia: how can we expect to learn when people are afraid to speak out?
The Committee for the Defense of Freedom at Yale has organized a petition in the form of a letter to President to express concern with the bullies’ demands. Over 800 members of the Yale community have signed. Zachary Young, a junior at Yale and one of the organizers of the petition, told me in an email, “We want to promote free speech and free minds at Yale, and don’t think the loudest voices should set the agenda.”
Nevertheless, it appears that the loudest voices are indeed influencing President Salovey. He has given in to protesters by announcing a new center for the study of race, ethnicity, and social identity; creating four new faculty positions to study “unrepresented and under-represented communities;” launching “a five-year series of conferences on issues of race, gender, inequality, and inclusion;” spending $50 million over the next five years to enhance faculty diversity; doubling the budgets of cultural centers (Western culture not included); and increasing financial aid for low-income students.
In addition, President Salovey volunteered, along with other members of the faculty and administration, to “receive training on recognizing and combating racism and other forms of discrimination.”
With an endowment of $24 billion, these expenses are a proverbial drop in the bucket for Yale. But it doesn’t mean that the administration should cave. Isaac Cohen, a Yale senior, wrote in the student newspaper,
Our administrators, who ought to act with prudence and foresight, appear helpless in the face of these indictments. Consider President Salovey’s email to the Yale community this week. Without any fight or pushback — indeed, with no thoughts as to burdens versus benefits — he capitulated in most respects to the demands of a small faction of theatrically aggrieved students.
Yale’s protests, and others around the country, including Claremont-McKenna, the University of Missouri, and Princeton, stem from the efforts of a small group of students to shield themselves from difficult situations. Students want to get rid of speech that might be offensive to someone that they term a “micro-aggressions.” This limits what can be said because everything can be interpreted as offensive if looked at in a particular context.
For instance, when I write (as I have done) that the wage gap between men and women is due to the sexes choosing different university majors, different hours of work, and different professions, this potentially represents a micro-aggression, even though it is true. Even the term “the sexes” is potentially offensive, because it implies two sexes, male and female, and leaves out gays, lesbians, and transgenders. The term “gender” is preferred to “sex.”
What about a discussion of the contribution of affirmative action to the alienation of some groups on campuses today? Under affirmative action, students are admitted who otherwise might not qualify. In Supreme Court hearings on Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia said, “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.”
The majority of students at Yale want an open discussion of all subjects, but the attack on the Christakises have frightened them into silence. Zach Young told me,
If the accusers’ intent was to enlighten and persuade, their result was to silence and instill fear. I worry that because of this backlash, fewer students or faculty — including people of color and those of liberal persuasions — will feel comfortable expressing views that dissent from the campus norms. Why risk getting so much hate, disgust, calls against your firing, just for the sake of expressing an opinion?
Why indeed? The answer is that arguing about opinions is the only way to get a real education. Let’s hope that another university stands up for freedom of speech and offers the Christakises teaching positions next semester.
This article first appeared at CapX.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, is director of Economics21 and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
King Canute vs. the Climate Planners by Jeffrey A. Tucker
“With a small hammer you can achieve great things.”
Oh really?
This claim comes from French foreign minister Laurent Fabius as he banged his gavel at the close of the Paris climate summit. To the cheers of bureaucrats and cronies the world over, Fabius announced the deal that the press has been crowing about for days, the one in which “humanity” has united to stop increases in global temperature through the transfer of trillions of dollars from the rich to the poor, combined with the eventual (coercive) elimination of fossil fuels.
And thus did he bang his gavel. To his way of thinking, and that of the thousands gathered, that’s all you have to do to control the global climate, cause the world to stop relying on fossil fuels, and dramatically change the structure of all global industry, and do so with absolute conviction that benefits will outweigh the costs.
One bang of a gavel to dismantle industrial civilization by force, replace it with a vague and imagined new way of doing things, and have taxpayers pay for it.
Markets Yawn
Interestingly, the news on the Paris agreement had no notable impact on global markets at all. No prices rose or fell, no stocks soared or collapsed, and no futures responded with confidence that governments would win this one. The climate deal didn’t even make the business pages.
Investors and speculators are perhaps acculturated to ignoring such grand pronouncements. “The Paris climate conference delivered more of the same — lots of promises and lots of issues still left unresolved,” the US Chamber of Commerce said in a statement. And maybe that’s the right way to think, given that the world is ever less controlled by pieces of paper issued by government.
Still, breathless journalists wrote about the “historic agreement” and government officials paraded around as planet savers. Meanwhile, the oil price continues to fall even as demand rises, and the Energy Information Administration announced the discovery of more reserves than anyone believed possible. As for alternatives to fossil fuels, they are coming about through private sector innovation, not through government programs, and successful only when adopted voluntarily by consumers.
It’s a heck of a time to announce a new global central plan affecting the way 7 billion people use energy for the next century. Anyone schooled in the liberal tradition, or even slightly familiar with Hayek’s warning against the pretensions of the “scientific” government elites, shakes his or her head in knowing despair.
The entire scene looks like the apotheosis of the planning mentally — complete with five-year plans to monitor how well governments are doing in controlling the climate for the whole world and do so in a way that affects temperature 10-100 years from now.
King Canute?
The scene prompted many commentators to compare these people celebrating in Paris to King Canute, who ruled Denmark, England, and Norway a millennium ago. According to popular legend, as a way of demonstrating his awesome power, he rolled his throne up to the sea and commanded it to stop rising.
It didn’t work. Still, the image appears in many works of art. Even Lego offers a King Canute scene from its historical set.
Historians have challenged the point of the story. The only account with have of this incident, if it occurred at all, is from Henry of Huntingdon. He reports that after the sea rose despite his command, the King declared: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”
He did and said this, say modern experts, to demonstrate to his courtiers and flatterers that he is not as wonderful and powerful as they were proclaiming him to be. Instead of subservience to his own person, he was urging all citizens to save their adoration for God.
His point was that power — even the absolute power of kings — has limits. During his rule, King Canute was enormously popular and evidently benefitted from the common tendency of people to credit authority for the achievements of the spontaneous evolution of the social order itself. His sea trick, if it happened at all, was designed to show people that he is not the man they thought he was.
The Pretensions of the Planners
Lacking a Canute to give us a wake-up call, we might revisit the extraordinary speech F.A. Hayek gave when he received his Nobel Prize. He was speaking before scientists of the world, having been awarded one of the most prestigious awards on the planet.
Rather than flattering the scientific establishment, particularly as it existed in economics, he went to the heart of what he considered the greatest intellectual danger that was arising at the time. He blew apart the planning mindset, the presumption that humankind can do anything if only the right people are given enough power and resources.
If the planning elite possessed omniscience of all facts, flawless understanding of cause and effect, perfect foresight to know all relevant changes that could affect the future, and the ability to control all variables, perhaps their pretensions would be justified.
But this is not the case. Hayek called the assumption the harshest possible word: “charlatanism.”
In the climate case, consider that we can’t know with certainty whether, to what extent, and how climate change (especially not 50-100 years from now) will affect life on earth. We don’t know the precise causal factors and their weight relative to the noise in our models, much less the kinds of coercive solutions to apply and whether they have been applied correctly and with what outcomes, much less the costs and benefits of attempting such a far-flung policy.
We can’t know any of that before or after such possible solutions have been applied. Science requires a process and unrelenting trial and error, learning and experimentation, the humility to admit error and the driving passion to discover truth.
In other words, science requires freedom, not central planning. The idea that any panel of global experts, working with appointed diplomats and bureaucrats, can have the requisite knowledge to make such grand and final decisions for the globe is outlandish and contrary to pretty much everything we know.
Throw the reality of politics into the mix and matters get worse. Fear over climate change (the ultimate market failure “problem”) is the last best hope for those who long to control the world by force. The entire nightmare scenario of rising tides and flooded cities — one that posits that our high standard of living is causing the world to heat up and burn — is just the latest excuse. That fact remains whether or not everything they claim is all true or all nonsense.
Pretensions Everywhere
Hayek explains further: “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”
Why? Because planning overrides the spontaneous discovery process that is an inherent part of the market structures.
We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based — a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed.
He went further. The planning fallacy doesn’t just affect economics. It is a tendency we see in all intellectual realms, including climatology and its use by governments to justify the desire to manage the world from on high.
Hayek’s conclusion is so epic that it deserves to be quoted in full.
If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.
He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.
There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success”, to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will.
The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
Or we could just quote King Canute after the tides failed to respect his edict: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name.”
Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.
Five Different Government Agencies Vetted San Bernardino Muslim Female Slaughterer
It just keeps getting worse. At first we were told that she had been vetted by two agencies. Apparently Obama Administration officials were hoping to cover up the magnitude of this failure. In any case, Tashfeen Malik stands as a witness to the impossibility of vetting for jihadis.
Tashfeen Malik
“U.S. missed ‘red flags’ with San Bernardino shooter,” CBS News, December 14, 2015:
As investigators focus on what or who motivated San Bernardino shooters Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, to open fire at the Inland Regional Center, a report about Malik’s comments on social media before she moved to the U.S. is raising questions about how thoroughly she was vetted.
Law enforcement sources confirmed to CBS News that Malik made radical postings on Facebook as far back as 2012 — the year before she married Farook and moved to the U.S., reports CBS News correspondent Carter Evans. According to a report in the New York Times, Malik spoke openly on social media about her support for violent jihad and said she wanted to be a part of it. But none of these postings were discovered when Malik applied for a U.S. K-1 fiancé visa.
“If you’re going to start doing a deeper dive into somebody and looking at their social media postings or other things, you really want to focus your effort on the high-risk traveler, the person that you’re really worried about being a threat to the United States,” said James Carafano, national security expert and vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. “The question is, how do you identify them?”
Malik was not identified as a threat despite being interviewed at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan and vetted by five different government agencies that checked her name and picture against a terror watch list and ran her fingerprints against two databases.…
RELATED VIDEO: Pamela Geller with Charles Payne on Fox Business on San Bernardino Catastrophic Intel Failure:
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100s of Muslim migrants had photos of executions and severed heads
You heartless Islamophobes can’t even let these poor people have some photos that obviously have great sentimental value for them?
“Hundreds of migrants arriving in Norway had mobile phones containing images of executions, severed heads and dead children, police reveal,” by Imogen Calderwood, Mailonline, December 14, 2015:
Hundreds of asylum-seekers entering Norway were discovered to have images of ‘executions’ and ‘severed heads’ on their mobile phones.
The revelation comes amid heightened fears that ISIS is exploiting the migrant crisis to smuggle fighters into Europe, following last month’s attacks in Paris.
Police admitted that the ‘explosion’ of refugees crossing into the country over the summer and in recent months meant that security checks were less thorough than required, and weren’t checking the background of those entering the country.
The Police Immigration Service (PU) in Norway has been forced to work overtime and under severe pressure due to the massive numbers of asylum-seekers hoping to take refuge in the country.
But after searching belongings and mobile phones belonging to refugees and migrants crossing the border, police discovered ‘hundreds’ of examples of ‘photos and videos of executions and brutal punishments, such as images of people holding up severed heads or hands’….
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An Economist’s 10 Objections to the Minimum Wage by Mark J. Perry
One of the biggest political issues right now nationwide, and one that will likely be an important issue in next year’s presidential election is the minimum wage.
Economists are generally in agreement that increases in the minimum wage, especially large increases to $15 an hour like in Seattle, will reduce employment opportunities for unskilled workers.
Despite the inevitable negative outcomes that will surely result from a $15 minimum wage — we’ve already seen negative effects in Seattle’s restaurant industry — politicians and unions seem intent on engaging in an activity that could be described as an “economic death wish.”
Proponents of a higher minimum wage point to the obvious and visible benefits to some workers — those who may find a job at the higher wage or keep their existing job and get a higher wage.
But that is only part of the story — there are many less obvious downsides to an artificially high minimum wages that take longer to recognize, and it’s those inevitable negative effects that lead economists to generally oppose minimum wage laws.
What are the specific objections of economists to the minimum wage and why do they generally favor market wages instead? Here are ten reasons in favor of market wages over a government-mandated minimum wage:
- Proposed minimum wages are almost always arbitrary and never based on sound economic analysis. Why $10.10 an hour and not $9.10? Why $15 an hour and not $16 an hour?
- A uniform federal minimum wage may be sub-optimal for many states, and uniform state minimum wages may be sub-optimal for many cities. A one-size-fits-all approach to the minimum wage is really a “one-size-fits-none.”
- Minimum wage laws require costly taxpayer-funded monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, whereas market wages don’t.
- Minimum wage laws discriminate against unskilled workers in favor of skilled workers, and the greatest amount of discrimination takes place against minority groups, like blacks.
- Adjustments to total compensation following minimum wage laws will disadvantage workers in the form of reduced hours, reduced fringe benefits, and reduced on-the-job training.
- Many unskilled workers will be unable to find work and will be denied valuable on-the-job training and the opportunity to acquire experience and skills.
- Minimum wage laws prevent mutually advantageous, voluntary labor agreements between employers and employees from taking place.
- To the extent that higher minimum wages result in lower firm profits and higher retail prices, that’s a form of legal plunder by workers from employers and consumers that is objectionable.
- Market-determined wages are efficient, whereas government-mandated wages create distortions in the labor markets that prevent labor markets from clearing.
- Like all government price controls, minimum wage laws are distortionary. If you trust government officials and politicians to legislate and enforce a minimum wage for unskilled workers, you should logically trust those same bureaucrats to set all prices, wages and interest rates in the economy. Realistically, if you agree that those economy-wide price controls would be undesirable, then you should also agree that the minimum wage law is also undesirable.
In summary, economists are not unconcerned about unskilled workers, we are actually very concerned about those workers. And it is because of that concern to maximize employment opportunities that economists oppose the minimum wage.
Simply put, we would rather see unskilled workers employed at a market wage — even if that wage is only $5, $6 an hour — that allows them to gain valuable work experience and on-the-job training, than to be unemployed at $0.00 an hour. And unfortunately, a $15 minimum wage maximizes the probability that an unskilled worker will be unemployed at $0.00 an hour instead of being gainfully employed.
This post first appeared at InsideSources. Reprinted with permission.
Mark J. Perry is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.
Why Is Liberty So Important? by Lawrence W. Reed
At this time of the year, all of us at the Foundation for Economic Education take special note of our many friends, both new and old. Though our work is vitally important, we never want to be so absorbed in it that we neglect the people like you who make it possible.
So allow me this moment to express a collective thanks from all of us at FEE to all of you who partner with us as trustees, donors, seminar attendees and alumni, faculty network members, readers of the Freeman and FEE.org, and ambassadors for liberty.
If you’ve never financially supported FEE in the past, I invite you to do so today.
If you’re a past supporter of FEE, I thank you for your generosity and invite you to consider renewing your support.
When you invest in FEE, you invest in life-changing events and publications that will pay dividends for decades.
FEE is focused on cultivating an understanding of the principles of freedom in the minds of young “newcomers” to liberty — particularly those of high school and college age.
Every time I hear a student exclaim “I never heard this before FEE told me about it!” I know we’ve made a difference for the rest of that person’s life.
Why is liberty so important?
- Liberty is precious, rare, never guaranteed, and always threatened. It can be lost in a single generation if it’s not advanced and defended.
- Liberty follows from human nature: We are unique individuals, not a blob or an army of robots to be programmed by those with power.
- To be fully human, all of us must be free to exercise our choices and govern our lives so long as we permit the same of others.
- Liberty works. Over and over again, it produces a degree of interpersonal cooperation, innovation, and wealth creation that allows human beings to flourish — nothing else even comes close.
- Liberty is the only social, political, or economic arrangement that requires that we live to high standards of conduct and character and rewards us when we do so. This is a crucial difference between liberty and the soul-crushing, paternalistic snares that are offered as alternatives.
- Life without liberty is unthinkable. Who wants to live at the end of another’s leash, fearing at every turn what those armed with force and power might do to us, even if they have good intentions?
We wouldn’t expect, even if it were possible, that everyone who supports us will agree with everything they ever see or hear from FEE. We have our own core beliefs, of course, but to a considerable degree we are a forum for differing views among those who broadly share an affinity for liberty.
We don’t take for granted that we’ll earn your support every day, every month or every year. We know we have to earn it all the time. So we are engaged in a non-stop, self-improvement program. We experiment and innovate. Seminar themes, technology, content, and speakers change and improve. We expand and grow what works and drop what doesn’t. We do it all in an effort to be the best-known, most effective “first encounter” for young people with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society.
I hope this cause in general — and our work at FEE, in particular — excites you as much as it does every member of the team we’ve assembled. We go to work every day with passion for what we do, and with appreciation for you who support us.
Thank you, too, for being an ambassador for liberty. Because of your sharing on social media and your own engagement with our content, FEE is reaching a wider audience than at any time in our 69-year history.
We are experiencing record levels of applications for our seminars. FEE voices are appearing in the international press. And FEE.org itself is being read by over 500,000 people per month (and rising fast!). This is a level of reach that would have delighted FEE’s founders, and the champions of freedom from time immemorial.
However, without the generosity of individuals like you, FEE would not be able to deliver life-changing moments for countless young people. We need your financial support to continue our work for liberty.
Whether you give a little or become a continuing benefactor in substantial amounts, we appreciate it deeply as a vote of confidence in FEE’s message, mission, and work.
Thank you for thinking of FEE in your year-end giving. And, thank you for all that you do to advance liberty in any way!
Best wishes to you and your families for this holiday season and for a blessed and prosperous New Year.
Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.
Some Recent Energy and Environmental News
The latest Energy and Environmental Newsletter, is now online.
Special Note 1: All U.S. citizens should take 1 minute to formally object to a proposed extension of the wind PTC. (Please pass this request onto your lists.)
[FYI, the “PTC Elimination Act” now has 50 cosponsors, 7 U.S. Senators Opposed to Extension of PTC, and Horse Trading in Congress: Lifting Oil Ban for Extending Wind PTC.]
Special Note 2: Since the dust is still settling, we’ll have a specialNewsletter edition just about the Paris talks later this week.
Some of the more interesting energy articles in this issue are:
UK’s energy ‘policy’ is an act of national suicide (similar for US, Canada, Australia, etc.)
New Video: Real World Experiences Living with Wind Turbines
Movie: Blue Beats Green
National Association of Scholars study about Fossil Fuel Divestment (esp note “recommendations” on page 3)
Learn what our opponents are saying:
Some Wind Energy Tactics to Win Over Local Community
Study: Waterfowl and Industrial Wind Turbines (p 115+)
Some of the more informative Global Warming articles in this issue are:
Nobel Laureate, PhD Physicist: video on Climate Change (exc)
What they Haven’t Told You About Climate Change: short video
Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming
The Ugly Face of Climate Cultists
U.S. Senate Hearings on Climate Change: Data or Dogma?
Archive: Global Warming is a Myth
Government report: Homosexual lifestyle is ‘extremely violent’
Michael F. Haverluck, reporter for OneNewsNow.com, writes on a new Center for Disease Control study:
After conducting an extensive study on homosexual behavior, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that those involved in such lifestyles experience a far greater amount of violence from one another than those in heterosexual relationships.
CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey is a first-of-its-kind study geared to determine the difference between the victimization of men and women by sexual orientation.
The results show that men and women involved in homosexual behavior undergo much higher rates of sexual violence than men and women who are heterosexual.
Surprising to many, homosexual women experience more violence than men. According to the study, a whopping 44 percent of lesbians were either raped, experienced physical abuse, and/or were stalked by their intimate partners during their lifetime. Even more shockingly, 61 percent of bisexual women endured such violence from their partners.
It is also reported that 37 percent of bisexual women indicated they were stalked, which is more than double the rate that heterosexual women experience from their male partners.
Furthermore, the CDC found that 37 percent of bisexual women were injured during the rape, physical violence, and/or stalking that they experienced at the hands of their sexual partners.
[Emphasis added]
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Almost Everything the Media Tells You About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Is Wrong
LGBT Activists Fight State Law That Protects Believers Against Gay Marriage
PARENTAL WARNING: Hulu Running Homosexual-themed Ad during Family/Kids Programming
New York: Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s Homosexual Sex Scandal
The good homosexual versus the bad homosexual — Assimilation versus Radicalization
New York: Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s Homosexual Sex Scandal
Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the American Cardinal prelate of the Catholic Church, appointed by Pope Benedict XVI, who serves as the tenth and current Archbishop of New York is involved in a homosexual sex scandal.
A scorned ex-girlfriend of Keith Crist (center) emailed details of his alleged kinky sex romps with the Rev. Peter Miqueli to Cardinal Dolan (left). Photo: David McGlynn; The Main Street Wire.
In a New York Post column titled “Emails to Dolan detail priest’s alleged ‘pee-drinking’ sex romps” Julia Marsh, Joe Tacopino and Laura Italiano report:
The scorned ex-girlfriend of an S&M “master” to a Catholic priest went right to the top and sent Timothy Cardinal Dolan e-mails that were hardly suitable for church — laying out details of the romps that were allegedly funded with cash skimmed from the poor box.
Tatyana Gudin shared with The Post her message to the cardinal that recounted how the Rev. Peter Miqueli allegedly wore a locked Lucite chastity belt along with a dog collar during pricey sessions with his bodybuilder lover.
She also claimed to the pope’s right-hand man in America that Miqueli had an interfaith fantasy of being humiliated in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in front of a “nice Jewish girl.”
Miqueli, meanwhile, remained a pastor of St. Frances de Chantal in the Throggs Neck neighborhood of The Bronx on Friday.
In March of 2014 Cardinal Dolan was ‘fully supportive’ of teaching that homosexual activity is immoral.
However, Cardinal Dolan has been criticized for embracing the homosexual lifestyle and allowing a homosexual float in the March 2015 Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New York.
Kirsten Andersen from LifeSiteNews.com reported:
New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan led Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Day parade on Tuesday as grand marshal, despite backlash from faithful Catholics unhappy with the organizers’ decision to allow an openly homosexual activist group to march in the event.
“I’m as radiant as the sun, so thanks be to God for the honor and the joy,” said Cardinal Dolan on Tuesday morning, as he led 250,000 marchers down Fifth Avenue – including a delegation from “Out @ NBC Universal,” a group of gay activists who work for NBC, the network that televises the parade.
Catholic commentator Michael Voris and his team from ChurchMilitant.TV were present at the parade and were able to question Dolan on his decision during a press scrum. “Your Eminence, do you have anything to say to the loyal Catholics who find what you’re doing here a great scandal to the faith?” Voris asked.
“No, come on in. We’d love to have you,” Dolan replied.
Perhaps Cardinal Dolan should ponder upon Galatians 6:7: Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.
Cardinal Dolan appears to want a politically correct Catholic Church in New York, he is today reaping what he sowed.
UPDATE: The Vortex in a video titled “Did the New York archdiocese buy Fr. Miqueli’s silence?” reports:
The case involves what we have been reporting on the past few days: that a lawsuit has been filed against Cdl. Timothy Dolan, the archdiocese, and a homosexual priest and his gay-for-pay male prostitute. The priest and prostitute are accused of ripping off over a million dollars from two New Yotk parishes and using it on their homosexual fantasy sex life. The archdiocese and Cdl. Dolan are accused of being negligent and non-responsive in addressing the continued concerns of parishioners. And ChurchMilitant.com has learned of one possible reason for the lack of concern and desire to keep the story under wraps by the archdiocese.
Keep in mind that the archdiocese has known about this for a very long while, but it was only after massive press coverage, including a series of reports from ChurchMilitant.com, that the archdiocese finally sprung into public action. Father Miqueli is no longer the pastor. A resignation statement purported to have been written by him was read before every Mass over the weekend, with archdiocesan spokesman Joe Zwilling lurking around at the back of the church.
So the question: What would be the case now had the lawsuit by parishioners and subsequent media reports these past few days not happened? Answer: likely nothing. How can we say that?
To watch the video and read the full text click here.
RELATED VIDEO:
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CDC report: Homosexual lifestyle extremely violent
Archbishop Cupich again insists people in homosexual unions can receive Communion
Catholic diocese ‘respects’ decision to host openly gay judge as St. Patrick’s Parade grand marshal
12 Reasons why this ‘I’m Christian and I LOVE the Qur’an’ sign is Dangerous
This photo was apparently taken at a recent demonstration in Washington, D.C.:
And there is so much in it for a Christian to love:
- Jesus is not the Son of God: “O People of the Scripture! Do not exaggerate in your religion nor utter aught concerning Allah save the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of Allah, and His word which He conveyed unto Mary, and a spirit from Him. So believe in Allah and His messengers, and say not “Three” – Cease! (it is) better for you! – Allah is only One Allah. Far is it removed from His Transcendent Majesty that He should have a son. His is all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth. And Allah is sufficient as Defender.” — Qur’an 4:171
- And: “It is not befitting to (the majesty of) Allah that He should beget a son. Glory be to Him! when He determines a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.” — Qur’an 19:35
- Jesus was not crucified: “And because of their saying: We slew the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, Allah’s messenger – they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them; and lo! those who disagree concerning it are in doubt thereof; they have no knowledge thereof save pursuit of a conjecture; they slew him not for certain.” — Qur’an 4:157
- Those who believe in the divinity of Christ are unbelievers: “They have certainly disbelieved who say that Allah is Christ, the son of Mary.” — Qur’an 5:17
- Belief in the Trinity is “excess”: “O People of the Scripture, do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allah except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, was but a messenger of Allah and His word which He directed to Mary and a soul from Him. So believe in Allah and His messengers. And do not say, ‘Three’; desist – it is better for you. Indeed, Allah is but one God. Exalted is He above having a son. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. And sufficient is Allah as Disposer of affairs.” — Qur’an 4:171
- Christians have forgotten part of the divine revelations they received: “From those, too, who call themselves Christians, We did take a covenant, but they forgot a good part of the message that was sent them: so we estranged them, with enmity and hatred between the one and the other, to the day of judgment. And soon will Allah show them what it is they have done.” — Qur’an 5:14
- Those who believe that Jesus is God’s Son are accursed: “The Jews call ‘Uzair a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah’s curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth! ” — Qur’an 9:30
- Christians who do not accepted Muhammad and the Qur’an are the most vile of created beings: “Nor did those who were given the Scripture become divided until after there had come to them clear evidence. And they were not commanded except to worship Allah, sincere to Him in religion, inclining to truth, and to establish prayer and to give zakah. And that is the correct religion. Indeed, they who disbelieved among the People of the Scripture and the polytheists will be in the fire of Hell, abiding eternally therein. Those are the most vile of created beings.” — Qur’an 98:6
- Muslims must fight against and subjugate Christians: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” — Qur’an 9:29
- “I’m a Christian and I LOVE Muslims”? Absolutely. Love for Muslims is one thing, however, and love for the Qur’an is another. It is strange for someone who professes to be a Christian, who presumably believes that Jesus is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, who was crucified and rose from the dead for the salvation of the human race, to profess love for a book that denies all that and says that those who believe it are accursed, vile beings who should be waged war against until they submit to the hegemony of a group that believes differently.
- What’s more, although very few Christians would dare say so publicly nowadays, to be a Christian at all assumes a denial that Muhammad is a prophet and the Qur’an a holy book, for they both affirm as matters of faith beliefs that Christians do not hold, and, as we have seen, deny many that Christians do hold.
- It may be that the carrier of this sign considers herself a Christian in the spirit of this passage: “Indeed, those who believed and those who were Jews or Christians or Sabeans — those who believed in Allah and the Last Day and did righteousness — will have their reward with their Lord, and no fear will there be concerning them, nor will they grieve.” — Qur’an 2:62
This appears at first glance to be a marvelously forward-thinking example of ecumenism: Qur’an commentator Muhammad Asad exults: “With a breadth of vision unparalleled in any other religious faith, the idea of ‘salvation’ is here made conditional upon three elements only: belief in God, belief in the Day of Judgment, and righteous action in life.” But he contradicts himself by adding “in this divine writ” after the words “those who have attained to faith” in his translation of verse 62 — that is, to be saved, one must believe in the Qur’an as well as the earlier revelations.
And indeed, Muslim commentators are not actually inclined to see this as an indication of divine pluralism, but only an affirmation that those Christians who become Muslims will be saved. The translators Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, as well as Asad, all feel it necessary to add parenthetical glosses that make the passage mean that Jews and Christians (as well as Sabians, whose identity is disputed) will enter Paradise only if they become Muslims. Qur’an.com adds “before Prophet Muhammad” in brackets after “Jews or Christians or Sabeans,” making it clear that those three could only be saved as such before the advent of Islam, but now they must convert to Islam to get to Paradise.
And according to Ibn Abbas, this verse was abrogated by Qur’an 3:85: “And whoever desires other than Islam as religion – never will it be accepted from him, and he, in the Hereafter, will be among the losers.” Sayyid Qutb opines that 2:62 applied only before Muhammad brought Islam to the world, a view supported by a saying of Muhammad recorded by Tabari, in which the Prophet of Islam says that Christians who died before his coming will be saved, but those who have heard of him and yet rejected his prophetic claim will not be.
It is unlikely, of course, that the person holding this sign has thought any of this through. She is just trying to be nice. And she is unlikely ever to stop and ponder the implications of the fact that no Muslim has been carrying around a sign saying, “I’m Muslim and I LOVE the Bible.”
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Cruz Says ‘If Obama Can Do It, So Can I’
WOW! This 2016 Presidential Campaign is beginning to look like a mystery novel and the person the people want to call their American “Hero” is beginning to look like a “master deceiver”.
If you aren’t willing to know the truth then don’t bother to read any further, but this country is in serious trouble. To find out one of the “darlings” of the 2016 election is a master deceiver leaving a trail behind him even before the primary is really scary stuff.
I have followed Cruz for some time and originally thought he was actually one of the good guys – that he could be a savior for America. He would ask the right questions and kind of talk like Trump is calling “a spade a spade”.
The first thing that caught my attention was Cruz’s wife Heidi when I was doing my research on the North American Union (NAU). Common sense tells me you do not spend 5 years working on a Council on Foreign Relations “Task Force” and not support what they are doing.
Ted Cruz would have you believe his wife’s only 5 year involvement with the Task Force resulted in a “Dissenting Comment”. I do have to challenge Mr. Cruz on that because first of all you do not spend 5 years working on a project for a one paragraph comment and even if that was all the space she was given in the report her words are damning. Although we don’t want government controlling all the financial happenings in this country – private sector is no better. On pages 33-34 her words contend economic investment must be led by the private sector rather than government:
I support the Task Force report and its recommendations aimed at building a safer and more prosperous North America. Economic prosperity and a world safe from terrorism and other security threats are no doubt inextricably linked. While governments play an invaluable role in both regards, we must emphasize the imperative that economic investment be led and perpetuated by the private sector. There is no force proven like the market for aligning incentives, sourcing capital, and producing results like financial markets and profit-making businesses. This is simply necessary to sustain a higher living standard for the poorest among us – truly the measure of our success. As such, investment funds and financing mechanisms should be deemed attractive instruments by those committing the capital and should only be developed in conjunction with market participants.
May I ask Ms. Cruz if this is the thoughts of Goldman Sachs or Lehman Bros? Now you can understand why Cruz made this statement that he: “remains open to a path to legal status for undocumented workers.”
Mr. Cruz needs to explain to the American people where he stands on the North American Union issue. Remember Mr. Cruz is a George W. Bush boy having obtained each of his Washington D.C. positions on the recommendations of Bush and it was on Bush’s recommendation the Texas Republican Party supported Cruz for his run to the U.S. Senate.
Being mentored by a Bush can have its consequences as it has with Jeb Bush being Marco Rubio’s mentor. Rubio in so many ways is a clone of Bush. Both Rubio and Cruz have learned well from the Bush’s on how to avoid answering questions and then of course you aren’t lying.
Second in a growing list of concerns is Cruz’s eligibility. There are many American Cruz supporters who are willing to overlook this fact or make large excuses for him, but facts and truth are facts and truth. Outside of the fact Ted Cruz currently is not a citizen of any country, what are his qualifications to be President of the United States?
Rafael Cruz moved his family to Texas in 1974. When he was a child, Ted Cruz’s mother told him that she would have to make an affirmative act to claim Canadian citizenship for him, so his family assumed that he did not hold Canadian citizenship. In August 2013, after the Dallas Morning News pointed out that Cruz had dual Canadian-American citizenship, he applied to formally renounce his Canadian citizenship and ceased being a citizen of Canada on May 14, 2014.
Cruz’s Harvard friends issued a strong legal consensus is that with even one American parent—a circumstance shared by Obama and Cruz—a child born anywhere qualifies as a “natural born American,” entitled to citizenship at birth and therefore eligible to serve as president.
There’s that he said, she said, come to the middle word “consensus” again. I wonder if Cruz and his lawyers learned that from Carly Fiorina.
Originally, when the calls were beginning for Cruz to consider running in 2016, that’s when he became very concerned about a fact that he knew, but had never disclosed to the public, including during his Senate campaign a year earlier. Ted Cruz was born a Canadian citizen at birth, and remained a legal citizen of Canada, all the way up until May 14, 2014.
In short, Sen. Ted Cruz was a legal citizen of Canada when he ran for and became a U.S. Senator, without ever having disclosed his Canadian citizenship to Texas voters, which under both Texas and U.S. Election law, is an act of fraud. Ted Cruz had committed election fraud by failing to disclose to Texas voters that he was a Canadian citizen in 2012.
No one can say for certain, but I think it is a very fair guess, that had Ted Cruz disclosed to Texas voters in 2012, that he had always been and remained at that time a legal citizen of Canada, his Republican opponent, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, would have won that race and become the next U.S. Senator from Texas.
Many in Florida know Rubio is a liar and a deceiver which is why he isn’t getting the support of Floridians. Cruz is proving to fall into the same basket. He should be treated no differently than we have treated Obama when it came to his eligibility. Cruz can put this whole thing to rest by showing America his Birth Certificate.
By having retained his Canadian citizenship until 2014 means that he “could” have voted in Canada and ran for the Canadian Parliament at the same time he was in the U.S. Senate. This eligibility issue is showing a lack of integrity on the part of Cruz.
It was during this time that Cruz stated “that both he and Barack Obama were ineligible for the Oval Office”. After the revelation of his Canadian birth certificate, Cruz and his friends moved into “damage control” mode alleging he was a “dual-citizen” which puts us back to the previous paragraph.
It was his friends and Fox News that tried to clear Cruz’s path to the WH claiming now he was a “natural born citizen” based on his renouncing his Canadian birth.
So, here we go again – a freshman Senator who is a Harvard Lawyer, with Harvard law friends and no U.S. documentation to prove that he is a U.S. citizen of any type. A man with known foreign origins, and the son of a Father, Rafael Cruz Sr. who was at no time in his life a legal citizen of the United States until 35 years after Ted’s birth in Canada, when he renounced his Canadian citizenship and naturalized to the United States in 2005.
The problem is obvious for Cruz; he cannot or will not provide or even discuss his eligibility.
Now we have another large issue coming to the surface and that is where Cruz’s money is coming from and more importantly what he is using it for. It should be of great concerns to Americans what secret “BIG” money is behind these PAC’s supporting the candidates. A candidate must owe them something as they do with their dealings with the lobbyists.
As of this past July, 2015, Robert Mercer had provided the major source of funding ($37 million raised) by a quartet of unlimited-money super PACs supporting Cruz’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. Cruz’s presidential campaign contracted with Cambridge Analytica to provide data services, and the company has had talks with at least one of those super PACs, according to sources.
Robert Mercer is the owner of Cambridge Analytica and the lead donor of the Cruz Campaign. Cambridge Analytica is connected to a British firm called the SCL Group which provides governments, political groups and companies around the world with services ranging from military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting.
The campaign “claims” most of these funds are coming from the “grassroots” energy, but it would appear that this is not the case. It’s not uncommon for political campaigns, parties and PACs to pay huge contracts for data and other services to companies affiliated with their consultants. But it’s less common for such contracts to go to firms affiliated with the donors funding the whole enterprise.
Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler said Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research and analytics, is using Cambridge Analytica to build models that identify and sort persuadable voters in early primary states by six key personality types, which will be used to target the campaign’s outreach.
This is beginning to sound more like a Political operation rather than a political campaign. This has been made possible partly by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which opened new avenues for unlimited political spending. This ruling opened unprecedented “cash cow” doors to secret funding of political campaigns. Americans knew this was going to end up being a dangerous decision, now it is beginning to become clear just who is operating campaigns and it’s not the people.
In case you are not aware the decision allows unions, corporations, and associations to spend unlimited amounts in elections provided that they don’t coordinate their efforts with a candidate themselves. This was one time Obama was right when he said this decision would “open the floodgates to special interests”, but you can rest assured he has made use of this decision himself. You see PAC – you are seeing big money!
Mercer is also a computer scientist and the co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund. Mercer and Cruz share a distrust of the IRS and Climate Change. They also share a view that leads to the White House in 2016. Mercer began his career at I.B.M. and made his fortune by using computer patterns to outsmart the stock markets. He has become the main donor in the Cruz campaigns 4 super PAC’s.
What is a hedge fund? It is a limited partnership of investors that uses high risk methods, such as investing with borrowed money, in hopes of realizing large capital gains. Those capital gains can come in many forms. Financial control of who is sitting in the White House is a very dangerous one for the American people.
The problem is with what Cruz is doing with his campaign money and using it to build data bases regarding American voters without their knowledge is no different than what the Federal government is doing.
Cruz’s campaigns investment in Cambridge Analytica — and their campaign’s embrace of their product — the Mercers also have become competitors in an increasingly cutthroat conservative political data race. Some of the right’s most influential and well-funded players — including the Koch brothers’ operation and the Republican National Committee — are jockeying for a market share and 2016 prospects in a political sub-industry expected to consume a huge portion of the billions spent in the campaign. The result of the competition could go a long way toward determining the winner of the White House and the Republican Party’s direction after the election.
It has been revealed the Cruz campaign has also linked with the Breitbart Group and Mark Zuckerberg Facebook Surveillance program to track, monitor and target YOU!
Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users also, harvesting largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals.
What does this show you about these individuals integrity, especially Cruz? Are you going to make more excuses for Cruz America?
In November it was revealed that Breitbart.com was data-mining for the Ted Cruz campaign. America, don’t you feel invaded? I mean their attitude is “what are they going to do about it?” Or Hillary’s “what difference does it make?”
Ted Cruz using the firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users Exclusive: Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid a little known UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters. That little known company is Cambridge Analytica.
Another thing that stands out in front is the $500,000 Ted Cruz’s PAC Keep the Promise I made to Carly Fiorina’s PAC Carly for America back when she was still in the 2nd strong debates. Now why would one presidential candidate give another presidential candidate “half a million dollars”?
Having received $10M from Toby Neugebauer, and energy investor; $11M from Robert Mercer; and $15M from the Texas Wilkes family to his various PAC’s, this isn’t a large amount of campaign funds to have when running for president.
Mercer has also donated $750,000K to Club for Growth in support of their $1M advertisement campaign against Donald Trump. Club for Growth spokesman Doug Sachtleben stated, “Trump is the worst kind of politician. He’ll say anything to get elected, and then he’ll do just the opposite when he’s in office.
But Mr. Sachtleben – all politicians do that, even the ones you are supporting that is why they are referred to as politicians.
This is why you are afraid of Trump because he really isn’t a politician and he doesn’t need the party support, or their money and he is “telling it like it is”.
It is certainly unheard of for one candidate to donate to another who when they are running against each other and Cruz has refused to answer the question which leave a great deal to the imagination.
Cruz has even had a sit down with Henry Kissinger (he was also part of the NAU Task Force). Now why would Cruz want guidance from someone America has come to know as a traitor as he is a New World Order man?
Oh, on the TPA/TPP deal – Cruz maybe supposedly only one of few that went into that locked room to read the TPA (maybe he took a nap) but first he was for it and then against it but in this video Cruz states “he is for “fast tracking” trade agreements and supports Obama doing same. Apparently Cruz doesn’t care about Americans having jobs or the country’s sovereignty.
Cruz has also stated he does not support the Common Core Standards, but I have to ask the question “why does he support government intervention in the education of our children at all”. He recently presented along with Mike Lee legislation that would have targeted Home Schoolers and linked them under “Private Schools” to be attached to the recently passed Communist ESEA. Once again, “non-educator” politicians trying to federally control another aspect of education.
The surest way to see another Democrat seize the Oval Office in 2016 is to run a blatantly unconstitutional candidate for the GOP.
Even Mr. Cruz has made the statement, “people run as who they are” and I would guess in the back of his mind he is referring to himself as well.
You would be wise to also read this article on Cruz “Ted Cruz, Henry Kissinger and the Globalists” by Kelleigh Nelson