….and it puts you at risk because they are not being properly monitored!
Hot off the press this morning is this Washington Post storyabout a GAO report released today that is highly critical of HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement’s care of the ‘children’ who have been flooding our borders for many years now (the numbers are expected to rise, see here).
UAC ‘children’ in Texas in 2014.
No surprise for those of us who have been following the Refugee Program for years that the contractors hired to take care of the kids are doing a rotten job.
BTW, the UACs are NOT refugees even if Obama and the contractors want them to be. They want them to be designated as refugees so they can get in line for welfare goodies and apply to bring their families to America.
According to the WaPo story 125,000 ‘children’ have been distributed around the US since 2011.
I don’t know if any contractors are mentioned by name in the report, but we know that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops andLutheran Immigration and Refugees Services, both federal refugee contractors, receive millions of dollars to care for the ‘children.’ Also, we learned in 2014 that there were two other HUGE contractors: Southwest Key Programsand Baptist Child & Family Service.
Senator Grassley initially wanted answers from HHS here in 2014.
This is the Washington Post story this morning. I’ve just snipped a bit of it, but you should read it all.
The government agency tasked with placing thousands of Central American children into communities while they await immigration court decisions has no system for tracking the children, does not keep complete case files and has allowed contractors to operate with little oversight, according to a report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.
“Based on the findings in this report, it’s no wonder that we are hearing of children being mistreated or simply falling off the grid once they are turned over to sponsors,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “The Obama administration isn’t adequately monitoring the grantees or sponsors whom we are entrusting to provide basic care for unaccompanied children.”
[….]
The report also criticized the agency’s oversight of nonprofit groups that it pays to operate shelters for the children and locate sponsors.
[….]
Grassley sharply criticized the lack of follow-up for released children.
“Beyond the risks to the children created by these shortcomings, our communities are left to cope with the crime and violence from gang members and other delinquents who are not identified or tracked because of HHS’s haphazard and porous practices,” he said.
BTW, it is still a mystery about why the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (Eskinder Negash) resignedabruptly in December 2014. Rumors are flying that it had something to do with the UACs.
Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on this report. Go here for more information.
For more reading pleasure, all of our posts going back many years on the UACs are archived using the words‘unaccompanied minors.’
And you will see there (among those posts) that Europe is having the same problem with ‘unaccompanied children’ flooding the Continent. In their case, they are mostly from the Middle East and Africa. One of the children recently murdered a care giver in Sweden.
Precarity is a neoliberal term that was unfamiliar until I researched the theme of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference. It means precarious, hazardous, risky, and it focuses mainly on the supposed “evils” of capitalism. Although life’s uncertainties have existed since the beginning of time, these women had come together to discuss the insecurities of living, focusing on the drawbacks of being ill prepared for functioning in today’s workforce. Where previous generations sometimes stayed with a company from hiring to retiring, today’s employees change jobs frequently and must keep up with the ever-changing technology. Thus these women fear the difficulties that arise with a free society, changing economy, other unreliable coworkers, and all that free enterprise has to offer.
Risk is the very essence of freedom and of life, and yet this is their anxiety.
They spurn those gifts bestowed upon us by our Creator and cited in our Declaration of Independence – Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness, all of which involve risk. It is the freedom to pursue our own happiness along our chosen path that helps us to accept failures and overcome hindrances, and to continue chasing our personal dream. Instead these women are overwhelmed by responsibility, regarding the challenge as simply “misery” generated by capitalism, since they view that the sale of one’s abilities for profit may also result in failure and unemployment. Resistant to change and diversity, they yearn for their vision of a more secure and simpler life of the past, which, of course, is remembered without the discomforts, diseases, poverty and squalor.
Their dreams of the Utopian past erase the men’s long hours of hard labor, the women who were bound to a life of raising more children than they could manage, illnesses that have since been eradicated, few kitchen appliances to ease daily chores, and a labor force of children to help families make ends meet. Blaming capitalism for their current difficulties, the NWSA members want more entitlements and government intervention in exchange for the joys of innovation, growth, and the dignity of achievement. Taught by today’s academia to rely on their feelings and to redefine right and wrong, they wallow in comfortable discomfort and, significantly, decide to boycott Israel, her harvest, inventions and medical innovations. Could it be because Israelis treasure life and produce advantages and benefits not previously known, while the Palestinians desire to acquire Israel without the labor? Arab leaders allowed the barren, sparsely populated, impoverished land to become malaria-ridden over centuries before the Diaspora Jews returned to their historic homeland to cultivate the soil and recreate a flourishing democracy.
Precarity is the cost of living! It is the cost of charting one’s own course with all the possibilities of turning the unsure into opportunities. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that “all human beings are endowed with reason and conscience and shall act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,” but the new liberalism distorts the vision of brotherhood into a nightmare of sameness, none better or worse; the goal of certainty, no triumphs or failures; and a less educated population reduced by chaos, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia, and incurable diseases. And for political correctness, with their minds distorted and freedom of speech eradicated, these souls will no longer recognize friend from foe, good from evil, excellence from mediocrity, or even female from male.
Amazingly, although we know that eight-one percent of mosques in America advocate violence, and Germany appears to be losing its autonomy to the invaders, and Sweden is losing its heritage, and Belgium went on lock-down, and France is actively closing mosques and eliminating militant imams, the NWSA denounced Israel. Despite the legal documents to verify that Jews, not Arabs, hold rightful title to the land, and under whose direction diverse people within flourish, these women choose Islamo-fascism, where a clear majority of its people favor severe Sharia law and terrorism.
As technology (much of it from Israel) provides us with a front seat to the world, we have seen Muslims destroy 3,000 people in the World Trade Center; Muslims behead or burn Christians alive; Muslims turn their young children into knife-wielding murderers; Muslims kill groups of revelers in arenas and weddings and schoolchildren in classrooms and school buses; Muslims car-attack or knife Jewish pedestrians, but these women are boycotting Israel. Muslims are harming girls with Female Genital Mutilation, followed by enslaving, torturing, and imprisoning women in lifelong domestic/sexual servitude in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, but the NWSA women ignore where they could be truly useful. Islam is overtaking and creating havoc in Europe, and our national intelligence-gathering agencies (FBI and DHS) have long terror-watch lists of dangerous Islamic jihadists, but the NWSA is boycotting Israel.
What the NWSA should know is that the Jewish people have moral, historical, religious and legal claims to the disputed lands in Israel, yet Israel has been willing to forego some claims for the sake of peace. The State of Israel was built on land purchased by Jews, and Jews have been a presence in Jerusalem for 3,000 years, with a majority-Jewish population for more than 250 years. Israel already ceded land to the Palestinians, who, in turn, destroyed prospering businesses and use the land for launching rockets. In truth, the Arabs who took the name “Palestinians” are the occupiers.
Morally, Israelis are first responders who have helped numerous countries, from Albania to Turkey, after floods, fires, earthquakes, bombings, tropical storms, hurricanes and cyclones, providing emergency humanitarian and medical personnel and assistance. Israelis helped Boston after the Marathon Bombing and California with its fires and water shortages. America benefits from this valuable partnership, including intelligence; the UK benefits from Israeli technology in protection, jobs, medicines and more. Israel is a global leader in bio-technology and defense, agriculture, water innovation, medicine, book publishing, and more. Increasingly, Israeli entrepreneurs are attracting more foreign banks’ investments in their innovative technology.
IsraAid, which, in cooperation with Israeli NGOs FIRST and Operation Blessing-Israel, launched a social-worker training program in the new African state of South Sudan, one of the most undeveloped in the world. They are addressing the country’s violent misogynistic culture of rape and forced marriage. The women of NWSA could be involved, but do absolutely nothing.
How will these work-shy, incompetent women defend themselves when the soldiers of Allah fill our streets and execute their many forms of violent jihad on our citizens? Will they crumble into submission when the young Muslim males wreak havoc on the most vulnerable? Will they merely stand by and watch the migrants join forces with their brethren in the terror mosques to create battalions beyond the control of our diminished police and armed forces? These women are either terribly ignorant or filled with a fanatical evil – how else to explain this mindset?
Perhaps it is then that the National Women’s Studies Association will finally achieve its goal.
Their insecurities will be gone because their future will be spelled out to the letter. All the laws of Islam are clearly defined for women in the Qur’an. Independence and security will be as amputated as the limbs of Islam’s thieves. They will be guaranteed of being equal to all other women (devalued by men), and their tomorrow will be precisely as today – that is, of course, unless they are accused of some minor Mohammedan infraction. Then the morrow will not even come into question.
Final note: With all the ignorance shown by NWSA, they also appear to be unaware that Israel boycotts are Illegal. Under corporate law, an organization, including nonprofit, can do only what is permitted under the purposes specified in its charter. Boycott resolutions that are beyond the powers of an organization are void, and individuals can be sued and board members liable for damages.
If pop culture is a leading indicator of social change, one emerging TV genre should be applauded. It is a flood of reality shows that focus on the daily dynamics by which self-made people conduct business: Pawn Stars, Ice Road Truckers, American Pickers, Deadliest Catch, Hardcore Pawn, Yukon Gold, Storage Wars, and others.
I call it “reality capitalism,” and it is the polar opposite of crony capitalism.
They display people taking risks and prospering (or not) through hard work and good judgment. They embody the opposite of cronyism because government privilege is nowhere to be seen.
Some aspects of the programs feel contrived, but what matters is that small businessmen and working people are elevated to a status that used to be reserved for those featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
Fans tune in to see whether Mike and Frank (American Pickers) will find a “honey hole” as they travel America. Perhaps a barn in Rhode Island will contain a rare Harley or one of the old metal gasoline signs that sells in a flash in their Iowa shop. Viewers groan in amused exasperation as Rick (Pawn Stars) flaunts arcane facts about the antiques people bring in. The items and negotiation are fascinating, and the businessmen are thoroughly likable because of the honesty, humor, and respect with which they treat sellers.
The shows also explain the simple mechanisms of the free market. Mike and Frank discuss the end-price they will put on items and tell the seller why they need to buy at approximately 50% of that figure. The words “gas money” come up frequently. Rick’s favorite phrase is, “I’m taking all the risk.” Then he comments on overhead and how long an item might take up room in his store. In both programs, the buyer sometimes pays more than the asking price because he knows the true value of a good and does not want to cheat the seller. The fairness is not only a matter of ethics but also good business: it establishes trust.
The reality capitalism genre can be roughly broken into two categories: entrepreneurs who are business owners, and working people who struggle to prosper against the odds.
Yukon Gold features small mining crews who search for gold in the Yukon during its four-month window of opportunity. Machinery breaks, nature strikes, and crew members fight against their own discouragement. Ice Road Truckersfollows truck drivers who confront frozen lakes and treacherous situations as they haul loads across Arctic areas of Alaska and Canada. Both shows focus on why the people assume work in such terrible conditions: money. Most of them are after a better life for their families.
They are entrepreneurs who gamble with their own time, money, and energy to establish businesses through which everyone profits. They are people who overcome obstacles for a chance for their families to prosper. It is heartening to see society’s true heroes receive the acknowledgement they deserve.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/ice-road-truckers-history-channel-e1447750797825.jpg421640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-11-17 04:01:252015-11-17 04:08:48The Rise of ‘Reality Capitalism’ by Wendy McElroy
Study shows seismic shift in lending away from large banks to non-banks continued in February By Stephen D. Oliner, Edward J. Pinto and Brian C. Marein.
A new study released by the AEI International Center on Housing Risk found that the seismic shift in home purchase loan originations away from large banks to non-banks continued in February. Since November 2012, the large bank share has dropped from 61 percent to 33 percent (see the report below). The share shift was unabated in February as the large bank share dropped 1.2 percentage points from previous month. The dramatic decline in the large bank lending share has been met point-for-point by an increase in the non-bank share, which has risen from 24 percent to 51 percent. Large non-banks and other non-banks each have accounted for about half of the 27 point increase in share.
This shift is due to the fact that non-banks compared to large banks are more thinly capitalized and more lightly regulated, generally face less reputational and litigation risk, and tend to have a shorter term outlook. Additionally, their primary business is generally just mortgage banking as compared to the more diversified business lines of large banks. Therefore they have a more limited ability to stay on the sidelines.
Key Takeaways:
The dramatic decline in agency market share for large banks continued unabated in February, offset by an equally dramatic increase in the non-bank share.
Since November 2012, the large bank share has dropped from 61% to 33%, a move of 28 points, including a 1.2 point drop in February, a dramatic decline that has been met point-for-point by a 27 point increase in the non-bank share from 24% to 51%. Large non-banks and other non-banks have participated equally in the increase, accounting for 14 points and 13 points respectively.
Large banks have reduced the riskiness of their agency mortgage originations over the past few years. Non-banks, in contrast, have shifted toward riskier loans as they have increased their market share.
Loans originated through the retail channel are less risky than loans originated through the broker and correspondent channels. This is true both for large banks and for non-banks. But retail channel loans from non-banks are substantially riskier than such loans from large banks.
The bottom line is that large banks attempting to regain market share would have to move well out the risk curve.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/mortage-search-magnifying-glass-e1428407987895.jpg389640Edward Pintohttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngEdward Pinto2015-04-07 08:00:412015-04-07 08:11:06Study shows seismic shift in lending away from large banks to non-banks
