Fraud, Waste and Abuse in the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program

/in , , , , /by

This is a press release from FAIR/IRLI in response to a request for public comment on the FY2017 Refugee Admissions Program. Comments closed at 5:00 p.m. on May 19th. (Hat tip: Joanne)

FAIR logo 2

(Washington, D.C.) – This week, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (“IRLI”) and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (“FAIR”) filed a public comment (attached here) with the Department of State (“DOS”) regarding its proposed 2017 Refugee Admission’s Program. In their comment, IRLI and FAIR raised three broad concerns regarding the Obama Administration’s current policies and practices:

  1. The DOS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) are not complying with statutory requirements.Under U.S. law, only a person who has been persecuted or has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” can be admitted to the U.S. as a refugee. This Administration appears to have unlawfully adopted the United Nation’s definition of refugee, which includes those fleeing from natural or economic disaster, civil strife, war, crime or other societal afflictions.
  2. DOS has not addressed the extensive fraud and abuse in the refugee application process. The problems with vetting applicants do not end at ensuring each applicant properly complies with the statutory requirements. Extensive fraud and abuse of the application process has been found, yet the Government does not properly address these findings. Such fraud and abuse will only become more prevalent as the President seeks to fulfill his 10,000-Syrian refugee quota by the end of the fiscal year.
  3. The American public is still not adequately protected under the current refugee screening process. The President’s refugee goals are not properly considering the severe national security concerns that face the country in light of the attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, where the female terrorist passed the Government’s security screening. While the President, Jeh Johnson, and DOS officials say that the security checks for refugees are rigorous, the screenings are not sufficient to protect American citizens. Other government officials who are deeply involved in screening refugees state that the current background investigation produces little, if any, information on those being screened.

Dale L. Wilcox, IRLI’s Executive Director commented, “The Obama Administration’s unilateral expansion of our democratically-enacted refugee laws will lead to increased fraud and greater chances for terrorist-activity as well as pressure on our state and federal welfare budgets, and on the social-cohesion of our communities.” Wilcox continued, “Not only is this Administration ignoring the laws which define who can come into our country as a refugee, it’s ignoring the immigration catastrophe in Europe that’s resulted from those governments being too open to manipulation from foreign migrants. The American people are tired of both the lawlessness and the extreme naiveté on the part of the political class when it comes to immigration policy.”

Go here to see all of our information (including copies of testimony) submitted for the FY2017 Presidential determination on the “size and scope” of the UN/US State Department Refugee Admissions Program. (LOL! They are pretending to care what you think even as Obama has already said he is going for 100,000 refugees for his last shot at changing America as he exits the White House!).

RELATED ARTICLES:

Lutheran refugee contractor in Lehigh Valley area of PA to close, running out of money

Is Tuberculosis a ticking time bomb in refugee/migrant flow to America?

What Marriage Was Like before Bureaucracy Marriage by Sarah Skwire

/in , , /by

Marriage is not what it once was.

FEE contributor Steve Horwitz’s new book, Hayek’s Modern Family, reminds us all that “the use of ‘traditional’ as an adjective for either marriage or the family more generally is … ahistorical.” Marriage and the family, he argues, have always been changing and evolving institutions, and we are mistaken when we take the practices of one period and valorize them, and them alone, as “traditional.”

What is true for the institutions of marriage and the family is also true for the institutions of betrothal and weddings. By now, we all surely know that traditions like the white wedding dress and the diamond engagement ring are late innovations. The white dress came about after Queen Victoria set the fashion when she married Prince Albert. And while rings had been a popular wedding token for a long time, the diamond engagement ring became all the rage only after a successful campaign by DeBeers in the 1930s. But it is not merely the decorative furbelows that are modern innovations. Nearly everything we think of as defining a betrothal and a wedding used to be up for debate.

I spent some time recently looking at and discussing Jan van Eyck’s famous painting The Arnolfini Portrait. The painting is probably most often called The Arnolfini Marriage Portrait, though scholars have debated for decades over whether it depicts a wedding, a betrothal, or some other legal ceremony. Others have felt it might simply be a portrait of a married couple, or even a memorial for a wife who died young. We’re not entirely sure.

But in the discussion I was involved in, we thought of the painting as a wedding portrait. Because of that, several of the folks involved were a little startled to see the woman looking decidedly pregnant. (In much the same way that we don’t really know the occasion for the portrait, we don’t really know that the woman is pregnant. The style of her dress may just make her appear to be. But to a modern eye, she looks at least seven months along.) Was van Eyck making a moral judgment on the sexual morality of this couple — depicting them as newly married, but with a pregnancy that far advanced? Or is her pregnancy an argument against the notion that this is a wedding portrait, since 15th century morality would not have allowed for premarital sex and pregnancy? What kind of wedding portrait was this, exactly?

I’ll leave the arguments about the accuracy of our thinking about The Arnolfini Portrait to the art historians. What I want to talk about is the accuracy of our thinking about what weddings used to look like.

As the historian Lawrence Stone points out in his book The Family, Sex, and Marriage,

Before 1754 there were still numerous ways of entering into [marriage]. For persons of property it involved a series of distinct steps. The first was a written legal contract between the parents concerning the financial arrangements. The second was the spousals (also called a contract), the formal exchange, usually before witnesses, of oral promises. The third step was the public proclamation of banns in church, three times, the purpose of which was to allow claims of pre-contract to be heard.… The fourth step was the wedding in church, in which mutual consent was publicly verified, and the union received the formal blessing of the Church. The fifth and final step was the sexual consummation.

While parts of the process Stone describes are a little antiquated, they don’t seem completely unfamiliar. And the whole thing sounds remarkably orderly — though it is worth noting that wealthier couples found ways to evade the more tedious parts of the process, such as the triple proclamation of banns, by buying a special license. But the apparent orderliness and familiarity of the process falls apart rapidly when we look just a little more closely.

Stone continues, “But it cannot be emphasized too strongly that according to ecclesiastical law the spousals was as legally binding a contract as the church wedding.… Any sort of exchange of promises before witnesses which was followed by cohabitation was regarded in law as a valid marriage.”

Marriage required no certification by the church or the state. Two individuals merely promised to marry one another in front of witnesses, and then lived together. That was sufficient. And sex and pregnancy in the months between the spousals and a church wedding, if one ever got around to having a church wedding, were routine and accepted.

This sounds like an ideal situation from a libertarian perspective. It’s certainly how I’d prefer that marriages take place. But things soon got even more complicated.

After the Reformation, the Catholic Church required the presence of a priest for a wedding to be valid. The Anglicans did not, though a church wedding came to be expected. However, lawyers still recognized the spousals as valid. And they distinguished between two kinds of spousals — one was not followed by consummation and could be broken. The other was followed by consummation and was binding for life.

Stone reminds us of a few other complexities.

The canons of 1604 stipulated that a church wedding must take place between the hours of 8 am and noon in the church at the place of residence of one of the pair, after the banns had been read for three weeks running. Marriages performed at night, in secular places like inns or private houses, or in towns or villages remote from the place of residence … were now declared illegal [but] they were nonetheless valid and binding for life. This was a paradox the laity found hard to understand.

It could be hard to tell, in other words, if you were married or not. It could be hard to tell, in other words, whether one was engaging in legal married sex or illicit and illegal fornication.

This problem is a key part of Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, which begins with the arrest of Claudio for fornication with Juliette. Claudio is shocked to be accused of the crime, because, as he says:

… she is fast my wife
Save that we do the denunciation lack
Of outward order.

But with the exacting Angelo now in charge of the city, the more rigorous definition of a legal marriage is being enforced, and Claudio is in trouble.

The attempt to codify and enforce a well-understood and long-standing traditional practice made that practice so complicated that it was incomprehensible and often made criminals out of well-intentioned and honest individuals. (Those who are thinking about the mess that is the discussion of bathroom laws in North Carolina may find that problem familiar.)

There’s little doubt now about who is married and who is not married. The United States has spent years in a painful debate over that question, but we finally do have legal clarity. But as two dear friends of mine head down the aisle this month and I listen to the complications and fees they are facing over the licensing of their marriage and their officiant, I do wonder if we’ve solved anything since the days of spousals contracted in front of witnesses or if we’ve just piled on unnecessary layers of legal complications, forms, and fees.

Sarah Skwire

Sarah Skwire is the poetry editor of the Freeman and a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis. She is a member of the FEE Faculty Network. Email

RELATED ARTICLE: How to Avoid an Illicit Marriage: Marriage Banns.

VIDEO: Venezuela’s Slow Motion Apocalypse by Mark J. Perry

/in , , , , , /by

Food, Medicine, Toilet Paper, and Electricity Are Vanishing…

Despite having more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, and in fact more proven oil reserves than any country in the world (8 times more than the US), oil-rich Venezuela’s economy is imploding and collapsing under the burden of socialism, and economic conditions there have deteriorated so dramatically that they probably now qualify as the “economic apocalypse” that some left-leaning economists were predicting just a few years ago would never happen in Venezuela. Some links and updates about Venezuela’s economic apocalypse appear below:

1. Here’s an overview from Investor’s Business Daily back in February, when Venezuela was still “on the brink” of economic collapse:

Like a skyscraper crane about to topple in high winds, Venezuela is teetering on the brink of a horrific economic collapse. It was brought on by one thing: socialism, taken to the hilt. Yet incredibly, neither Bernie Sanders nor his voters make this connection.

Today Venezuela, with the world’s largest oil reserves is, believe it or not, importing oil. It’s a perfect illustration of Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman’s well known saying that if the Sahara took up socialism, there would soon be a shortage of sand.

Socialism has also led to massive shortages of food, toilet paper, diapers and medicine, among many other things, all the result of state planning and currency controls and rampant inflation (see photo above of Venezuelans lining up for food).

After 18 years of socialist spending, inflation has hit 720%, the IMF says. And don’t forget that Venezuela also has the world’s highest crime rate, with Caracas rated the world’s most dangerous city by the Citizens’ Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice.

2. According to a news report from PanAm News: “Hungry Venezuelans Hunt Dogs, Cats, Pigeons as Food Runs Out: Economic Crisis and Food Shortages Lead to Looting and Hunting Stray Animals.”

3. BBC reports that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has threatened to seize factories that have stopped production and jail their owners. Atlas Shrugged playing out in real life. (HT: Hit Squad.)

4. From a Sunday New York Times article, “Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals“:

The economic crisis in Venezuela has exploded into a public health emergency, claiming the lives of untold numbers of Venezuelans. It is just part of a larger unraveling here that has become so severe it has prompted President Nicolás Maduro to impose a state of emergency and has raised fears of a government collapse.

Hospital wards have become crucibles where the forces tearing Venezuela apart have converged. Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left.

5. Bret Stephens describes socialism in his WSJ column today (emphasis mine):

Socialism is a mental poison that leads to human misery of the sort you see in the wrenching pictures [that appeared in the SundayNew York Times article above] of filthy operating rooms, broken incubators and desperate patients lying in pools of blood, dying for lack of such basics as antibiotics.

Democratic socialism — whether Chavez’s or Sanders’s — is legalized theft in the name of the people against the vilified few. It is a battle against income inequality by means of collective immiseration. It is the subjugation of private enterprise and personal autonomy to government power.

6. Here’s another part of the health care apocalypse in Venezuela, from an April article in Reason:

Over the past decade, an estimated 13,000 physicians fled the country in search of greener pastures. Cuba dispatched some of its own physicians to fill the gap, only to see them defect in turn. That’s no shock, considering that the physician father of a Venezuelan friend of mine has been reduced to accepting payment in cooking oil and other groceries.

7. As Bloomberg reported recently, Venezuela doesn’t even have enough money now to pay for the paper to print more money to keep up with its hyperinflation(which will reach 720% this year according to the IMF).

8. Looting of grocery stores has become increasingly common in Venezuela, as a result of the food shortages (watch video here).

9. In the CNN video below “Food, medicine scarce as Venezuela crisis deepens,” we learn that even though Venezuela is sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, it can’t stock the nation’s refrigerators and can’t provide the life-saving medicine that many Venezuelans need to survive.

10. Even the New York Times editorial board today blames socialism for Venezuela’s downward spiral and economic apocalypse:

This crisis has exposed the hollow promise of the socialist policies Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have peddled since the late 1990s. While many Venezuelans got a taste of prosperity in better housing, subsidized food and higher wages when oil prices were high — oil accounts for roughly 96 percent of Venezuela’s exports — the government failed to build anything resembling a sustainable economy. It also failed to save when money was flowing in, which would have softened the impact of the recession that began in 2014.

The New York Times also points out that Venezuela’s apocalyptic murder rate is now about 52.2 Venezuelans per day, or one murder about every 28 minutes.

Despite what maybe should have been an obvious outcome and end-game of the socialist policies of Chavez and Maduro, it’s interesting to look back at the cheer-leading being peddled by some on the left as recently as 2013 for Chavez and Venezuela’s socialism, here are two examples:

11. Writing in Salon in March 2013, David Sirota extolled “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle.”

12. In November 2013, left-leaning economist Mark Weisbrot scolded “Venezuela haters” by claiming that “this economy is not the Greece of Latin America,” and warning the haters (aka sensible adults) that “predicting a Venezuelan apocalypse won’t make it happen.”

Reprinted with permission from the American Enterprise Institute.

Mark J. PerryMark J. Perry

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.

A Congressional Guide to U.S. Refugee Resettlement

/in , , , , , /by

Someone asked me today where to find the number of refugees who were resettled in each state in the U.S. over the years and it reminded me that we have many many new readers every day who are just beginning to try to get a handle on how the UN/U.S. State Department Refugee Admissions Program works.

Annual Report to Congress

Very useful documents are the Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual Reports to Congress*** which are full of all sorts of data, not just the statistics on how many refugees were resettled in your state, but they include data on welfare use, employment, housing, and medical assistance, among other things.

They also include reports from the VOLAGs (the federal contractors) and discussions of special problems that some refugee populations encounter here. And, of course there is information about the myriad grants these contractors receive each year.

I can’t say it enough, but knowledge is power.  If you want to begin to understand what is happening in your towns and cities, start by looking at one of these documents.

Click here for a list of available reports.

By the way, the Refugee Act of 1980 specifies that this report should be completed and sent to Congress by the end of January following the close of the fiscal year.  Thus, the 2015 Annual Report should be available, but they are behind in producing it.

So what else is new! At one point a few years ago, they were three years behind!

For new readers we have a category entitled ‘where to find information,’ and you might want to have a look at it from time to time.

P.S.  I just spent a few minutes examining Table 1 (of the Appendix) in the FY2009 Annual Report where it cataloged how many refugees and from what countries were resettled in each state between 1983 and 2009. Wow! Amazing!

***This is not to be confused with another report to Congress that accompanies the President’s proposal for the upcoming fiscal year.  That report also has much useful data but is not as comprehensive as the reports found here.

RELATED ARTICLES:

These Palestinians are illegal alien criminals, not heroes for trekking across the world to get here

Guide to the George Soros Network

The Peace & Security Funders Group: Funding the War Against the War-On-Terror

Affordable multifamily housing loans need rethinking: The ‘Blight Preventer’ Loan

/in , , , , /by

Ten to twenty years after their original development many affordable multifamily properties face two common shortcomings: an inability to fulfill their long-term affordability commitments without additional public subsidies and insufficient funds for proper maintenance and avoidance of blight.  The propensity for blight, leaves public funders with bad choices: accept blight or throw good money after bad. Because most affordable multifamily housing is located in lower-income neighborhoods, current financing practices concentrate this blight risk in vulnerable neighborhoods.

Tom White and Charlie Wilkins, fellows at AEI’s International Center on Housing Risk, explain in how the new Blight Preventer Loan is specifically designed to address this problem:

…One part of the solution (for affordable multifamily) is to exchange the industry standard 30-40 year loan for a 15-20 year loan; using this approach, the property is free (or nearly free) of first mortgage debt at the time of the first capital needs shock (around year 15-20). If the property is then refinanced with another 15-20 year loan, it will again be free (or nearly free) of first mortgage debt at the time of the second capital needs shock (around year 30).

The second part of the solution is for public funders to require – at the time a property is proposed for financing or refinancing — a more careful analysis of long-term reserve adequacy, taking into account likely refinancing proceeds. This analysis may well lead to a requirement that the owner increase the initial reserve deposit and/or annual reserve deposit during initial underwriting, or to a requirement that the owner increase the annual reserve deposit after the property is leased-up and stabilized. The effect of such requirements is to keep needed cash in the property rather than allowing it to be distributed out to the owner…

Read about the Blight Preventer Loan in their full report.

RELATED LINKS

INFOGRAPHIC: Blight Preventer Loan

Moving toward a viable multifamily debt market with no ongoing federal guarantee

No federal guaranty for multifamily

Rudy Giuliani Heading Immigration Commission under Trump Administration?

/in , , , , , , /by

WASHINGTON, D.C. /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — In an interview on Fox News on Wednesday, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump floated the idea of creating a commission to conduct a top to bottom review of current immigration policy. After eight years in which U.S. immigration policy has been dictated by a small group of ethnic advocates and powerful business interests, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) welcomes the formation of a commission that considers the interests and ideas of the primary stakeholders in U.S. immigration policy: the American people.

“The public interest has been glaringly absent from the debate about immigration reform for far too long,” notedDan Stein, president of FAIR. “Under the Obama administration the interests of the American people in immigration policy were not just ignored; they were actively and aggressively undermined. If and when a commission is assembled, FAIR suggests participants include a broad spectrum of law enforcement officials including elected sheriffs, ICE and Border Patrol personnel and the organizations that represent them, Americans displaced by foreign guest workers and groups that advocate on their behalf. Lastly, a commission must include immigration reform groups like FAIR that lend decades of expertise advocating on behalf of the American people.”

FAIR believes that the starting point for any effort designed to reform our nation’s immigration policies must be to define a public interest objective for immigration in the 21st century. “For the past 50 years we have not defined what national interests we seek to advance through immigration. It is the only public policy that lacks a clear goal, which is why every attempt to reform immigration policy has failed. Until we define what our goals are, reform efforts will continue to be divisive exercises in futility,” said Stein.

FAIR also cautions that creating a commission to come up with policy objectives and other recommendations should not delay the next administration from rolling back the countless executive actions taken by the Obama administration to circumvent statutory limits on immigration, grant quasi-legal status to illegal aliens, and hamstring immigration law enforcement. There are countless things the next administration can do immediately to restore integrity and credibility to an immigration enforcement system that has been decimated by an administration that has put its political agenda ahead of its responsibilities to the American people and the Constitution.

FAIR logoABOUT THE FEDERATION FOR AMERICAN IMMIGRATION REFORM

FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of concerned individuals who believe that our immigration laws must be reformed to better serve the needs of current and future generations.

With a support base that includes nearly 50 private foundations and over 250,000 diverse members and activists, FAIR is free of party loyalties and special interest connections.

For more than 35 years, FAIR has been leading the call for immigration reform by offering and advocating solutions that help reduce the harmful impact of uncontrolled immigration on national security, jobs, education, health care, and our environment.

RELATED ARTICLE: Donald Trump: Rudy Giuliani for ‘radical Islam’ commission – CNNPolitics.com

It takes more than just a wall to stop this!

/in , , , , /by

A rarely talked about immigration problem is that of people who come legally yet don’t leave when their visas expire. How many are here in the country? No one can be sure but it is in the millions. Not only does the government not know how many overstays there are but what countries they even come from or whether the problem is getting worse.

It might be important to point out all 19 of the 9/11 terrorists had visas and 5 were expired. Since 9/11/2001 we have convicted 36 other terrorists who were here on expired visas. Out of all the millions of expired visa holders currently in the country any idea how many are terrorists?

It is assumed the majority of the people who came legally but did not leave when their visas expired came for employment. With no mandatory E-Verify system in place to identify ineligible people to work American jobs are taken by foreigners.

With no knowledge or control whether people were leaving when their visas were up after 9/11 Congress in 1996 authorized the establishment of an entry/exit system to be installed by September 1998. It only took opposition from the tourist industry to stop the legislation.

Congress in 2002 decided to try again to gain control of visitors coming and going so they mandated the implementation of a computerized matching entry/exit system to be implemented by 2005. You got it; in 2016, 11 years later, the system is still incomplete. Implementation is a necessity for our safety.

If Candidate Trump wins he can build a wall as high as he wants and man it with as many people as he cares to but it will have no effect on the visa overstay problem which numbers in the millions of illegal aliens.

For some reason Congress cannot fulfill a promise it made 30 years ago to President Reagan which was to set up a mandatory electronic system to verify job applicants were legally eligible to work. The Civilian Workforce Act by Lamar Smith, introduced years ago, is the latest attempt by Congress to enact E-Verify. The government tracking system gives the bill an 11% chance of passage even though it is flawed allowing illegal alien employers to keep current illegal workers without being verified.

If we want to protect American workers mandatory E-Verify is a necessity. Not only will it protect American workers but it will remove the job magnet for legal visa holders and illegal aliens to come. Think it will ever happen?

Personally, I feel like the frog in the pot being slowly cooked.

It Wasn’t Broke, so they Shouldn’t Have Fixed It

/in , , , /by

The United States of America used to be a nation where things got done.  No matter what the challenge, everything from natural disasters to overcoming negative civic and political issues, the normal inclination was to start over and get it right.  If something was working just fine, usually common sense dictated it was to be left alone, at least until a superior method of operation was developed.

Take the United States of America for example.  She was founded upon superior values and principles.  Some of which included the supreme right of sovereign individuals to live according to their own God or self-directed path.  For the first time in human history, the United states was comprised of a set of economic principles and personal liberties that obliterated the worldwide concepts of government domination, or an equally abusive caste system.  Those dominated by cradle to grave government or a monarchy simply existed from day to day and were under the strain of not having enough to eat. That was only one of many problems people suffered with no way out.

Venezuela is a nation that at one time was fairly prosperous and the citizenry usually had more than enough to eat.  But in more recent years, cruel communist dictators with no respect toward individual rights have enacted brutal economic, property, religious, healthcare, agricultural, education and media controls brought that onetime prosperous to a screeching halt.  In fact, Venezuela has not only been halted, but in actuality, she is hurtling backwards.  People have been rioting in the streets, seeking the last vestiges of food supplies to raid do to abusive government induced starvation.

Venezuela is a perfect text book case of what the United States should not be doing.

America the beautiful has been generally blessed with a system of market based economic principles that favored equal opportunity for those willing to work for it.  Unfortunately, in more recent decades, the already difficult job of creating opportunities and benefiting for your labor has been hampered by brutal government intrusions via regulations. So now they make it impossible for America to win on the world economic stage.

Either purposely or through sheer ignorance, America’s course of direction has steadily drifted from a free market economy based upon reward for effort, into punishment for trying.  At every turn, small business owners are treated by government like they are criminals for simply attempting to be successful.  Many local and state governments throughout the union are horrendously hard on small business owners.  They often enact unfairly high taxes or fees on everything from waste baskets, to needed equipment.

Even the big boys are being choked out of the American economy.  Eaton Corporation of Cleveland recently announced a world headquarters more to Ireland.  Carrier, the giant air conditioning manufacturer will soon leave business friendly Indiana and move to Mexico.  The reason being, the highest corporate tax rate on earth and regulations that are much to oppressive.

The government goal of forcing equal results through redistribution of wealth and artificial increases in the minimum wage will continue to cause reductions in the number of entry level jobs.  Unfortunately, those are most needed by both teenagers just starting out and lower skilled older adults.  These efforts to fix what was not broken help drastically affected America.  She evolved from being the world’s manufacturing floor and most innovative economy into an increasingly undesirable place to conduct business activities.

As a result of fixing what was not broken, America is now broken financially, morally, economically, militarily, educationally and racially.  She can only be truly repaired now, by a concerted effort reestablish the enormously successful principles the Founding Fathers enacted long ago. They include a firm recognition of the unalienable God given rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness and or Property.  There also has to be an immediate working plan to reduce the enormous economic and Constitution violating federal government.

For the good of the future of our republic and to truly fix America, now that she has been broken, the importance of real education must not be overlooked.  What is taught to one generation dictates what direction the nation takes in the next.  Our current broken state can be fixed with a genuine return to high quality education, critical thinking, and true American history.

Last but not least, America’s first president George Washington along with the majority of the Founding Fathers had an unyielding faith in the God who shed his grace upon the United States.  They left warnings of the negative consequences we are witnessing today, if our republic turned away from the ways of God.  However, I firmly believe that if America (We the People) wisely seeks God’s forgiveness and repent of her wayward ways, she will once again be the glorious shining city on a hill nation under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all.

RELATED ARTICLE: How Washington Politicians Wasted Billions Trying to ‘Invest in Our Future’

Well, Back to Smoking: FDA Bans 99 Percent of E-Cigarettes by Guy Bentley

/in , , , , /by

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published long-awaited rules Thursday that could ban 99 percent of e-cigarette products and wreck industry innovation for years to come.

Passed in 2009, the Tobacco Control Act says all e-cigarette products released after February 15, 2007, (predicate date) will have to go through the Pre-Market Tobacco Applications process (PMTA). FDA officials claim they cannot change the predicate date.

The PMTA is ruinously expensive and can cost millions of dollars per product and by the FDA’s own admission will take more than 1,700 hours for an applicant to complete.

Since almost all vapor products on the market were released after February 2007, hardly any will avoid a PMTA and almost no businesses, with the exception of big tobacco companies, will be able to bear the regulatory burden.

“The agency’s economic analysis of the rule predicts that the cost of such approvals will be so high that approximately 99 percent of products on the market will not even be put through the application process,” says the American Vaping Association (AVA).

The rules usher in a new era of federal regulation, with sales of vapor products to those under the age of 18 banned nationwide. Most states had already passed laws banning e-cigarette sales to minors.

“This final rule is a foundational step that enables the FDA to regulate products young people were using at alarming rates, like e-cigarettes, cigars and hookah tobacco, that had gone largely unregulated,” Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, said in a press release. The FDA will now set industry standards for manufacturing and labeling. The rules will take effect in 90 days.

But there is still hope for the industry yet after a House Appropriations committee passed an amendment April 19, which would alter the predicate date. The amendment is not yet law and will have to pass through the House of Representatives.

If the amendment fails however and the FDA regulations stand, the industry will have two years to comply with the PMTA.

“Despite an overabundance of distorted and misleading information propagated by some in the public health community, the science is clear – responsibly manufactured vapor products are not only a safer alternative to traditional combustible products, but also provide smokers with a viable path to reducing their tobacco consumption and quitting altogether,” said Tony Abboud, the Vapor Technology Association’s National Legislative Director.

“Today’s action by the FDA will do nothing to improve our nations’ public health objectives. To the contrary, today’s action will yank responsibly manufactured vapor products from the hands of adult smokers and replace them with the tobacco cigarettes they had been trying to give up.”

The VTA argue the FDA’s rules will kill almost a decade of innovation in the e-cigarette space and put thousands of small and mid-size businesses out of businesses to the benefit of major tobacco companies.

“If, in the name of public health, federal regulations inhibit much-needed innovation in the e-cigarette market, public health would actually suffer, as fewer adult smokers would be likely to switch from smoking,” said the National Center for Public Policy Research’s director of Risk Analysis, Jeff Stier.

“One only needs to look at the rapid innovation coming from the vaping industry to see how devastating this rule will be,” Jared Meyer, Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an emailed statement.

“While large tobacco companies will likely be able to absorb these costs, countless small manufacturers will be put out of business – leading to a less dynamic market. Without continued innovation, it will be harder from cigarette smokers to kick their deadly habit by taking up a much less harmful form of nicotine consumption,” Meyer added.

According to Wells Fargo, e-cigarette sales amounted to $3.5 billion in 2015. The case for wide-spread e-cigarette use was given a boost April 27 after the Royal College of Physicians published a 200-page report supporting the products as a smoking cessation method.

Reprinted with permission  from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Guy BentleyGuy Bentley

Guy Bentley is a reporter for the Daily Caller.

We Pay Millions to ‘Ghost Teachers’ Who Don’t Teach by Jason Bedrick

/in , , , /by

The Philadelphia school district is in a near-constant state of financial crisis. There are many factors contributing to this sorry state — particularly its governance structure — but it is compounded by fiscal mismanagement. One particularly egregious example is paying six-figure salaries to the tune of $1.5 million a year to “ghost teachers” that do not teach. Pennsylvania Watchdog explains:

As part of the contract with the School District of Philadelphia, the local teachers union is permitted to take up to 63 teachers out of the classroom to work full-time for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. The practice, known as “release time” or “official time,” allows public school teachers to leave the classroom and continue to earn a public salary, benefits, pension and seniority.

These so-called ghost teachers perform a variety of jobs for the PFT, serving as either information officers for other teachers or carrying out the union’s political agenda.

“Teachers should be paid to teach,” attorney Kara Sweigart, who is arguing ghost teacher lawsuits for the Fairness Center, a free legal service for employees who feel they’ve been wronged by their unions, told Watchdog.

“At a time when school districts are hurting financially, districts should be devoting every tax dollar to support students,” she said, “not to pay the salaries of employees of a private political organization.”

According to public salary data available through Philadelphia city agencies, the school district is paying 16 ghost teachers $1.5 million this year. All of them are making at least $81,000.

PFT Vice President Arlene Kempin, who has been on release time since 1983, is among the highest paid at $108,062. Union head Jerry Jordan, who has also been on release time for more than 30 years, is earning $81,245, according to district payroll logs. The 16 ghost teachers on the books this year are making an average salary of almost $98,000.

The “ghost teacher” phenomenon is far from unique to Philly or even the education sector. Such “release time” subsidies for ghost teachers, policemen, firefighters, and bureaucrats of all stripes are common features of public-sector union contracts nationwide. Last month, a Yankee Institute report found that Connecticut provided unions with $4.1 million to subsidize 121,000 hours union-related activities, “the equivalent of more than a year’s worth of work for 50 full-time employees.” Meanwhile, the Goldwater Institute in Arizona is in the midst of a lawsuit against the city of Phoenix for unconstitutionally providing millions of dollars in release-time subsidies.

According to the most recent report from the federal Office of Personnel Management, the federal government paid more than $157 million in 2012 for federal employees to work for their unions for a total of 3,439,449 hours. And those are just the direct costs.

In his book, Understanding the Teacher Union Contract: A Citizen’s Handbook, former teacher union negotiator Myron Lieberman explained how difficult it is to account for the full amount of subsidies that taxpayers provide to the unions:

Most school board members are not aware of the magnitude of these subsidies. In school district budgets, the subsidies are never grouped together under the heading “Subsidies to the Union.” Instead, the subsidies are included in school district budgets under a variety of headings that may or may not refer to the union…

School districts pay for these subsidies from a variety of line items in the district budget: payments to substitute teachers, teacher salaries, and pension contributions, among others.

In most situations, the union subsidy is lumped together with other expenses paid for under the same line item; for example, the costs of hiring substitutes for teachers who are on released time for union business may be included in a budget line for substitutes that also covers substitutes for other reasons, such as replacing teachers on sick leave, personal leave, maternity/paternity leave, and so on.

Taxpayer dollars allocated for education should be spent on items and activities that assist student learning, not to promote the interests of private organizations (especially when their interests often collide with the interests of students). Union work should be paid out of funds the unions collect through dues and donations, not funds expropriated from unwilling and unwitting taxpayers.

Cross-posted from Cato.org.

Jason Bedrick

Jason Bedrick

Jason Bedrick is a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

Revealed: Islamic State plot to bring terrorists to U.S. via Mexico

/in , , , , /by

Nothing to be concerned about. It’s so very hard to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico.

http://henrap/mrap/Print_SubjectPRCreate.cfm?EVENTNUMBER=

Guled Ali Omar

“ISIS suspect reveals plans to open up route from Syria to U.S. through Mexico,” Fox News Latino, April 22, 2016:

One of the American men accused in Minnesota of trying to join the Islamic State group wanted to open up routes from Syria to the U.S. through Mexico, prosecutors said.

Guled Ali Omar told the ISIS members about the route so that it could be used to send members to America to carry out terrorist attacks, prosecutors alleged in a document filed this week.

The document, filed Wednesday, is one of many filed in recent weeks as prosecutors and defense attorneys argue about which evidence should be allowed at the men’s trial, which starts May 9.

The men — Omar, 21; Hamza Naj Ahmed, 21; Mohamed Abdihamid Farah, 22; and Abdirahman Yasin Daud, 22 — have pleaded not guilty to multiple charges, including conspiracy to commit murder outside the U.S. Prosecutors have said they were part of a group of friends in Minnesota’s Somali community who held secret meetings and plotted to join the Islamic State group.

Five other men have pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy to support a foreign terrorist organization. A tenth man charged in the case is at-large, believed to be in Syria.

The government’s document was filed in response to a defense request that prosecutors be barred from introducing evidence about possible attacks in the U.S.

Last week, Daud’s attorney wrote that, absent any specific evidence that his client threatened the United States, any references to discussions about attacks would be prejudicial. To permit such references, as well as references to the Sept. 11 attacks or exhibits that show violent images of war crimes, “would cause the jurors to decide out of fear and contempt alone,” defense attorney Bruce Nestor wrote.

But prosecutors said audio recordings obtained during the investigation show the defendants spoke multiple times about the possibility of attacks in the U.S. Among them, Omar spoke of establishing a route for fighters, Farah spoke of killing an FBI agent and another man who pleaded guilty talked about shooting a homemade rocket at an airplane….

RELATED ARTICLES:

Yes, Terrorists Are Setting Their Sights on Our Southern Border

Two Muslims get life for Islamic State plots against soldiers, police, and civilians

Videos: Robert Spencer on “Islamophobia” and peaceful Islam — in Hungarian

The ‘Best Alternative’ to Tax Day

/in , , , /by

“Our tax policy should reflect our economic ambitions, not be a millstone around the neck of the American economy. Our tax code can and should leverage our entrepreneurial spirit and reward our hard work… thankfully we have a clear alternative — the FairTax. Let’s make April 15 just another beautiful spring day.” – Rep. Rob Woodall (GA-07)

This year taxpayers were provided an extra three days to file their income tax forms with the IRS.

But whether it’s the 15th or the 18th of April, the fact remains: The IRS is currently ‘in charge’ when it comes to taxes, not the average American.

The good news is, you and I both know it doesn’t have to be this way.

U.S. Representative Rob Woodall

This week, U.S. Representative Rob Woodall (GA-07) offered a great and timely reminder that the FAIRtax is the very ‘best alternative’ to Tax Day out there.

“Some have proposed plans to reduce the complexity of your tax return and shrink the reach of the IRS,” writes Woodall, House sponsor of the FairTax Act of 2015, for the Gwinnet Daily Post. “But at a time when America is wasting millions of hours and billions of dollars on compliance, and the IRS is more dangerous than it has ever been, nibbling around the edges of a failed system is not the answer. My plan is the FairTax, which would eliminate your tax return entirely, put the IRS out of business for good, and mark the largest transfer of power from Washington back to the American people in our history.”

Rep. Woodall also notes that the FAIRtax would allow the American worker to keep his or her entire paycheck for the first time since World War II, and pay taxes only on voluntary purchases at the check-out counter.

I urge you to read and share Rep. Woodall’s excellent case for the FAIRtax today, right here.

The movement to promote and pass the FAIRtax is truly exciting. Grassroots Americans in all fifty states are becoming members of the 1040 Club, showing their support for the FairTax in a very real way.

For what equates to a few cups of coffee, you can support our campaign to make the FairTax law in a very powerful way.

Please consider signing up for the 1040 Club today.

Grade Inflation Eats Away at the Meaning of College by George C. Leef

/in , , , /by

The Year Was 2081 and Everyone Was Finally Above Average.

Every so often, the issue of grade inflation makes the headlines, and we are reminded that grades are being debased continuously.

That happened in late March when the two academics who have most assiduously studied grade inflation — Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy — provided fresh evidence on their site GradeInflation.com that grade inflation continues.

The authors state, “After 30 years of making incremental changes (in grading), the amount of rise has become so large that what’s happening becomes clear: mediocre students are getting higher and higher grades.”

In their database of over 400 colleges and universities covering the whole range of our higher education system, from large and prestigious universities to small, non-selective colleges, the researchers found not one where grades had remained level over the last 50 years. The overall rise in grades nationally has brought about a tripling of the percentage of A grades, although some schools have been much more “generous” than others.

Or, to look at it the other way, some schools have been much better than others in maintaining academic standards. For instance, Miami of Ohio, the University of Missouri, and Brigham Young have had low grade inflation. Why that has been the case would be worth investigating.

In North Carolina, Duke leads in grade inflation, followed closely by UNC. Wake Forest is in the middle of the pack, while UNC-Asheville has had comparatively little.

But why have American colleges and universities allowed, or perhaps even encouraged grade inflation? Why, as professor Clarence Deitsch and Norman Van Cott put it in this Pope Center piece five years ago, do we have “too many rhinestones masquerading as diamonds?”

Part of the answer, wrote Deitsch and Van Cott, is the fact that money is at stake.  “Professors don’t have to be rocket scientists to figure out that low grades can delay student graduation, thereby undermining state funding and faculty salaries,” they observed.

It might surprise Americans who believe that non-profit entities like colleges are not motivated by money and would allow honest academic assessment to be affected by concerns over revenue maximization, but they do.

But it is not just money that explains grade inflation. At least as important and probably more so is the pressure on faculty members to keep students happy.

History professor Chuck Chalberg put his finger on the problem in this article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Chalberg writes about a friend of his who had completed her Ph.D. in psychology and was working as a teaching assistant to a professor and graded the papers submitted by the undergraduates “with what she thought was an appropriate level of rigor.” But it was not appropriate, she soon learned. The professor “revised nearly all of the grades upward so that were left no failures, few C’s, and mostly A’s and B’s.”

Had she underappreciated the real quality of the work of the students? No, but, Chalberg continues, “the students thought that they were really, really, smart, and would have been quite angry and thrown some major tantrums if they got what they actually deserved.”

Thus, giving out high but undeserved grades is a way of avoiding trouble. That trouble could come from students who have an elevated and unrealistic view of their abilities and will complain about any low grade to school officials.

It could also come from their parents, who have been known to helicopter in and gripe to the administrators that young Emma or Zachary just can’t have a C and if it isn’t changed immediately, there will be serious repercussions.

Another possibility is that faculty will give out inflated grades to avoid conflict with those school administrators.

Low grades affect student retention and at many colleges the most important thing is to keep students enrolled. Back in 2008, Norfolk State University biology professor Stephen Aird lost his job because the administration was upset with him for having the nerve to grade students according to their actual learning rather than giving out undeserved grades just to keep them content. (I wrote about that pathetic case here.)

Could it be that students are getting better and deserve the higher grades they’re receiving?

You’d get an argument if you ran that explanation by Professor Ron Srigley, who teaches at the University of Prince Edward Island. In this thoroughly iconoclastic essay published in March, he stated, “Over the past fourteen years of teaching, my students’ grade-point averages have steadily gone up while real student achievement has dropped. Papers I would have failed ten years ago on the grounds that they were unintelligible … I now routinely assign grades of C or higher.”

Professor Srigley points to one factor that many other professors have observed — students simply won’t read. They aren’t in the habit of reading (due to falling K-12 standards) and rarely do assigned readings in college. “They will tell you that they don’t read because they don’t have to. They can get an A without ever opening a book,” he writes.

We also have good evidence that on average, today’s college students spend much less time in studying in homework than students used to. In this 2010 study, Professor Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks found that college students today spend only about two thirds as much time as they did some fifty years ago. That’s hardly consistent with the notion that students today are really earning all those A grades.

On the whole, today’s students are receiving substantially higher grades for substantially lower academic gains than in the past.

Grade inflation is consistent with the customer friendly, “college experience” model that has mushroomed alongside the old, “you’ve come here to learn” college model. For students who merely want the degree to which many believe themselves entitled, rigorous grading is as unwelcome as cold showers and spartan meals would be at a luxury resort. Leaders at most colleges know that if they don’t satisfy their student-customers, they will find another school that will.

Exactly what is the problem, though?

Grade inflation could be seen as harmful to the downstream parties, the future employers of students who coast through college with high grades but little intellectual benefit. Doesn’t grade inflation trick them into over-estimating the capabilities of students?

That is a very minor concern. For one thing, it seems to be the case that employers don’t really pay much attention to college transcripts. In this NAS piece, Academically Adrift author Richard Arum writes, “Examining post-college transitions of recent graduates, Josipa Roksa and I have found that course transcripts are seldom considered by employers in the hiring process.”

That’s predictable. People in business have come to expect grade inflation just as they have come to expect monetary inflation. Naturally, they take measures to avoid bad hiring decisions just as they take measures to avoid bad investment decisions. They have better means of evaluating applicants than merely looking at GPAs.

Instead, the real harm of grade inflation is that it is a fraud on students who are misled into thinking that they are more competent than they really are.

It makes students believe they are good writers when in fact they are poor writers. It makes them believe they can comprehend books and documents when they can barely do so. It makes them think they can treat college as a Five Year Party or a Beer and Circus bacchanalia because they seem to be doing fine, when they’re actually wasting a lot of time and money.

Dishonest grading from professors is as bad as dishonest health reports from doctors who just want their patients to feel happy would be. The truth may be unpleasant, but it’s better to know it than to live in blissful ignorance.

This article was originally published by the Pope Center.

George C. LeefGeorge C. Leef

George Leef is the former book review editor of The Freeman. He is director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Dear Mrs. Clinton: ‘Our Guns Are None Of Your Business!’

/in , , , /by

BELLEVUE, Wash. /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Responding to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s assertion yesterday during a “gun violence forum” in Philadelphia that there are “too many guns” in America, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) is telling the former Secretary of State that “Our guns are none of your business.”

Quoted by WCBM, Clinton told her audience Wednesday, “When it comes to guns, we have just too many guns. On the streets, in our homes, in our neighborhoods. And, you know, there’s been a lot of talk in this campaign, in the primary campaign, about the power of certain interests in our country. And we do have a bunch of powerful interests, make no mistake about it. But there is no more powerful lobby than the gun lobby.”

Attacking gun owners and the firearms industry has become a cornerstone of Clinton’s campaign to win the Democratic nomination.

“Who put Hillary Clinton in charge of deciding how many firearms are too many,” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb questioned. “There’s no doubt she would like to be in charge of dictating how many guns someone can own, but the Constitution just might get in her way, not to mention tens of millions of American voters who don’t care for the demagoguery she represents. But, like the man she wants to succeed in the White House, it doesn’t appear that the Constitution or the Second Amendment rights of American citizens mean much to her.

“Clinton has made gun owners the collective bogeyman of her campaign rhetoric,” he continued. “For months she has been dragging the Second Amendment through the mud along her campaign trail. She has demonized the firearms industry, encouraged social bigotry against millions of honest American citizens and even said that she thinks the Supreme Court was wrong about the individual right to keep and bear arms.

“Hillary Clinton and her elitist friends have no business dictating to American citizens how many or what kinds of guns they can own, or how much red tape they have to wade through in order to exercise a constitutionally-protected civil right,” Gottlieb stated. “The irony is that every time she opens her mouth about guns, people open their wallets and buy more guns. She thinks there are too many guns, but the American public obviously thinks there are too many anti-gun politicians.”

ABOUT THE CITIZENS COMMITTEE FOR THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS

With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is one of the nation’s premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States. Learn more about CCRKBA by clicking here.

How to Ruin a Neighborhood by Sarah Skwire

/in , , , /by

skwire-2signsAnti-development and Classist Programs Come Cloaked in Homey Slogans.

“Distinctive Homes Available, Starting at $695,000”

“Homes, Not High-Rises”

Every day that I take my kids to school, I pass these two signs. My neighborhood is currently expanding, and some formerly vacant land across from the school building now has three well-designed and sumptuously outfitted single-family homes standing on it. Right across the street from two schools and a short bike ride away from a park, a Starbucks, and my favorite ice cream store, these homes are perfectly located for families.

About five blocks away, a new apartment building and parking garage are also under construction. The apartment building, which will have shops on the ground floor so that it fits in well with my mixed-use neighborhood, will be five stories tall and located near a busy and vibrant intersection — right by a CVS, a HopCat brewpub, and a bank. It’s walking distance from a great small music venue, several bars, a taco shop, Indian and Cuban food, a different Starbucks, and a tattoo parlor. It’s a great location for young singles or couples without kids.

And yet, as the signs in my neighborhood indicate, for a lot of my neighbors, the high-rise apartment building is a problem in a way that the new single-family homes are not.

My years living in an actual high-rise in Chicago mean that I snicker when a five-story building is referred to as a high-rise. No matter. The real concern here is that the combination of signs posted in my neighborhood highlights one of the constant challenges posed to the vibrant, mixed-use, city neighborhoods that urban activist Jane Jacobs valued so highly.

That challenge is us. That challenge is our own self-love and our own provincialism. We all think that our own ways of living, our own styles of home, and our own choices are the best ones for us. And we often (no matter how hard we try to avoid it) assume that they are also the best for everyone else.

I live in a small brick bungalow on the edge of a pricey neighborhood because I would rather have a “good enough” house in a safe neighborhood with great restaurants, parks, and schools my kids can walk to than have a much grander house in a neighborhood that doesn’t offer those things.

That’s my choice, and it reflects the way I’m living now.

But at various other points in my life, the homes that best suited my needs were a college dorm room, a room on the top floor of my coed fraternity’s house, a shared flat in Oxford, and yes, a tiny high-rise studio in Chicago.

Much as I loved those past homes, they would be inferior choices for me now that I have two kids and a steady paycheck. For me, right now, the single-family home I have is just right. And surely, for the three families who buy them, those new and distinctive $695,000 single-family homes will be just right.

That those homes are just right for some people does not mean they are just right for everyone. When people say, “homes, not high-rises,” they think they are saying, “Everyone should have a great house like I do! I can’t imagine living in an apartment!”

But they are really saying, “If you are not yet ready to afford a single-family home and all that comes with it, there is no place for you here.” They are really saying, “There’s a salary floor on living in this neighborhood and you — new graduate, or recently divorced dad, or newcomer to our city or country, or family who just wants a smaller space — you don’t cut it. Keep moving.”

It may be fine for neighborhoods to make that decision. But I think it’s important to acknowledge what’s really happening. Rather than allowing people to cloak their antidevelopment and classist programs in slogans that pretend to be concerned with cozy concepts like “home,” let’s not be shy about telling them exactly what they’re doing.

And let’s not lie to ourselves about what we’ll lose. The less mixed use my neighborhood sees, the less population density it has, the less variety of housing it offers, the less it will have of the things that make it a fun and funky neighborhood. If the rent gets too high for that amazing, cheap taco shop to turn a profit on its carnitas and carne asada, and if there’s not enough street traffic to bring customers into the Cuban sandwich place for a medianoche and a cortado, those places will disappear.

“Growth, not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay and help a thriving city remain successful and diverse,” writes economist Edward Glaeser in the Atlantic. “Height restrictions do increase light, and preservation does protect history, but we shouldn’t pretend that these benefits come without a cost.”

I’m not sure I’m willing to make the trade-off because some of my neighbors think that anything under 2,700 square feet can’t be a real home.

Sarah SkwireSarah Skwire

Sarah Skwire is the poetry editor of the Freeman and a senior fellow at Liberty Fund, Inc. She is a poet and author of the writing textbook Writing with a Thesis. She is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.