02/28/16

What if they just stop Watching?

By: Nancy Salvato

In the beginning, what excited people most about traveling to the new world was freedom to practice their religion without persecution or being treated differently for not adhering to a state mandated religion. As time passed, people were compelled by the idea that they could grab a piece of land and create their own wealth. These two ideas best characterize the American dream, the freedom to have a set of beliefs and not be compelled to follow the group and the freedom to build wealth from a wing and a prayer. Our governing system evolved from these two important rights.

Our country suffered 25,000 casualties, not to mention as many wounded in the revolution to gain our freedom from England. Once we had tasted freedom, it was hard to imagine allowing ourselves to be ruled by a king and a parliament determined to wield their authority over colonies that had been essentially governing themselves independently for years. To be told where goods could be sold and where they could trade, to be taxed indiscriminately, to be tried in courts without a jury of peers…these ideas were recognized as unjust and intolerable.

With freedom came wealth and power. This is because in our country there was no built in ruling class or proletariat class. In America, people were not seen as belonging to any particular class and it was a given that anyone could make it. Andrew Jackson was the first president who exemplified that idea, having beat enormous odds. He was not born of wealth and despite having lost both parents before he was fifteen, survived fighting (under age) in the American Revolution, being imprisoned, and smallpox. Yet he managed to become a school teacher, and later a lawyer, before running for and being elected to the highest office in the land.

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11/24/15

These Dead Shall Not Have Died In Vain

By Nancy Salvato

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. –Abraham Lincoln

Last evening, we shared a table with a young group of marines en route to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training in Maine. I woke up this morning feeling especially thankful to those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect our nation and yet I kept thinking about the Gettysburg Address. This is because I worry whether our soldiers (and their families) deployed after 9/11, many injured or in coffins, sacrificed in vain. Did the soldiers who liberated our country from England, as well die in vain? Did the 620,000 casualties of the Civil War die in vain?

At 10 years of age, I became aware of terrorism. I watched it play out during the television broadcast of the 1972 Olympics when a terrorist group, identifying itself as “Black September”, killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. Why were these athletes arbitrarily murdered on a world stage? I truly didn’t understand the catalyst until I was much older. Black September was a movement to avenge Palestinians’ losses in Jordan. This was one battle in a continuum of battles and part of a larger war.

Based out of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, the PLO and the PFLP had been fighting a “War of Attrition” against Israel, but were not necessarily supported by King Hussein in this quest to win back territory lost during the 6 Day War and their refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Jordan’s King tried to, “balance his interests in preserving a peace with Israel,” (Arab terrorists take Israeli hostages at the Olympics) by looking the other way, however, he eventually had to make a stand. The “Palestinians had run a state-within-a-state in Jordan headquartered in Amman. Their militias ruled the streets and imposed brutal and arbitrary discipline with impunity.” (Arab terrorists take Israeli hostages at the Olympics) Displeased with his stance, they were trying to assassinate him and control all of Jordon. King Hussein ended the Palestinians’ reign with a blood bath. It was only by instituting a blood bath that he made his Palestinian problem go away.

Arafat and the PLO went to Lebanon and created a similar state-within-a-state, destabilizing the Lebanese government. Eventually, the PLO was expelled from Lebanon following Israel’s 1982 invasion. Between Neville Chamberlain’s failed policy of appeasing the Nazi’s in WWII and these and many more displays of terror in the Middle East and throughout the world, we should know by now that remaining neutral and hoping others will take care of a problem are never options. One has to either eliminate the problem or make it clear not to mess with the giant. It was President Theodore Roosevelt, an environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who best understood how to maintain US sovereignty, summing it up with the words, “Walk softly and carry a big stick.” Since this country’s inception, our leaders have understood that to maintain a balance of power, nations like the United States must lead from a position of strength.

In high school, one of my history teacher’s was convinced we would see acts of terrorism played out on our soil, not unlike that which fomented in the Middle East all those years ago.. I was very distraught over that possibility. Though I learned to balance living my life with such existential threats, I never turned a blind eye to this reality. As predicted, in my lifetime, acts of terror have taken place on US soil, the largest being 9/11. Like it or not, we are being called upon to fight a non-conventional war against a group of people who do not believe we have a right to exist. There is no co-existence in their world view. It is our freedom and our lives that are at stake. Civilians are targets and the population needs to prepare for this reality. Our leaders need to admit this truth and take all precautions to maximize freedom and limit casualties.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful to have been born in the United States. I am thankful for the opportunities I’ve been given. And I am thankful to those who put themselves in harm’s way so that I can enjoy these blessings. I am thankful to those who I shared dinner with; en route to SERE during this holiday season. Please let their sacrifices not be in vain.

Nancy Salvato is the Director of Education and the Constitutional Literacy Program for Basics Project, a non-profit, non-partisan research and educational project whose mission is to re-introduce the American public to the basic elements of our constitutional heritage while providing non-partisan, fact-based information on relevant socio-political issues important to our country. She is a graduate of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Academy for Civics and Government. She is the author of “Keeping a Republic: An Argument for Sovereignty.” She also serves as a Senior Editor for NewMediaJourna.usl and a contributing writer to BigGovernment.com and FamilySecurityMatters.org.

07/21/15

Social Engineering Is a Lot Like Socialism

By: Nancy Salvato

Recently, two articles gave me pause. The first by Alana Semuels, “How Chicago is Trying to Integrate its Suburbs” caught my attention because I spent many formative years in Glenview, the suburb highlighted in the article. Reading about the new low income housing there, a collaboration between the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and Regional Housing Initiative (RHI), I recalled a conversation with a long term resident and respected member of the community (prior to the shut-down of the naval air base and subsequent redevelopment), one in which she explained that Glenview, a Chicago suburb, got around a previous Section 8 requirement by building low income senior housing. She had no qualms about the community’s position in this matter. Many middle class communities felt this way about Section 8 moving into their neighborhoods. In a SPOA article called The Great Housing Experiment That Failed, the author writes:

Starting back in 1977, families living in housing projects began to be relocated to middle-class suburban neighborhoods with good public schools. If these families could see a different way of life, the middle-class way of life, they could learn to live like the middle class – or so everyone thought…But then the crime rate started to go up in suburbia where they moved. As one former housing project tenant said: “You move from one place to another and you bring the element with you. You got some [people] trying to make it just like the projects.”

Landlords in more affluent suburbs did not want to rent to Section 8 tenants. Erin Eberlin writes in, “Disadvantages of Renting to Section 8 Tenants”

There is a stigma that Section 8 tenants are very destructive. There have been horror stories about floors being destroyed, cabinets being pulled off the walls, toilets being cracked, garbage and filth everywhere and many more people living in the unit than are listed on the lease… Tenants who do not collect rental assistance may be turned off by the fact that you allow Section 8 tenants in your property. They may believe that you are a “slumlord,” that the property will be dirty or that the tenants will be disrespectful and noisy.

In “Let’s End Housing Vouchers” Howard Husock provides insight into why Section 8 vouchers have failed in integrating classes of people.

Better neighborhoods are not better because of something in the water but because people have built and sustained them by their efforts, their values, and their commitments. Voucher appropriations are based not only on the mistaken belief that it is necessary to award, at public expense, a better home to all who can demonstrate “need,” but also that it is uplifting to do so, when in fact it is the effort to achieve the good home, rather than the good home in itself, that is the real engine of uplift.

What he is saying is that the effort and goal to achieve a better life for one self is a major factor in the ability to contribute to and better a community. Those residents who achieve the American dream by saving their hard earned money and purchasing and maintaining their homes in a neighborhood of their choosing understand the sacrifice involved in making that happen. They want a return on their investment. They have made a decision to become a part of something larger and want to belong.

Husock explains how the voucher program ends up segregating classes of people and “accelerate neighborhood decline.”

For properties in precariously respectable neighborhoods, the government-paid rent is more than the market rent. Reason: the Section 8 program allows voucher holders to pay up to the average rent in their entire metropolitan area, and landlords in working-class or lower-middle-class neighborhoods, where rents are below average, simply charge voucher holders exactly that average rent. Assured payment and a more-than-generous risk premium: no wonder some landlords in neighborhoods teetering on the brink of respectability gladly welcome voucher tenants over working-class families offering lower rents and so accelerate neighborhood decline. South Philadelphia state representative William Keller tells of local property owners who “couldn’t rent their place for $500, but they can get $900 from Section 8.” The result is a familiar government-subsidized racket: landlords who specialize in Section 8s—who advertise for them and know the bureaucratic rules about what it takes to get paid.

Homeowners pay more to live in affluent neighborhoods to ensure safety and opportunities for their families. Residents of these communities are expected to maintain their homes and want to participate in events sponsored by their communities. Shared values are what makes people come together as a community. Section 8 disrupts this.

In the Chicago suburb of Riverdale, here is how it went.

EMT crews respond to emergency calls to find callers, accustomed to city emergency rooms, simply saying they’re “feeling ill.” Riverdale’s Potter elementary school, once boasting a top academic reputation, now has the state’s highest student turnover. Student achievement has dropped—putting paid to the idea that shipping poor families to good schools in the suburbs will cause an education ethic to rub off. Instead, the concentration of disorganized families has undermined a once good school. School funds, says the mayor, must now be diverted to the legions of “special needs” students. Crime is up, too—”we have real legitimate gang issues now,” the mayor says—and the city has had to increase its police force by 35 percent, from 26 to 35. That’s pushing the tax rate up, which the mayor fears will discourage new home buyers, pushing the small city into a cycle of decline. A lack of local buying power—a function of the voucher program’s preference for very low-income renters—has already left storefronts abandoned on Riverdale’s main street.

It’s no wonder that higher socioeconomic neighborhoods fear Section 8. But it is not about race. As Husock points out, “Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson famously argued that class, not race, is the most powerful divide that separates Americans today.” So, why then does the current administration want to make socio-economic inequities about race?

In “Obama Collecting Personal Data for a Secret Race Data Base” Paul Sperry writes that the fed is collecting sensitive data on Americans by race… to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.”

In its justification for social and economic engineering, this administration is saying that inequities are a result of prejudice, not the values and work ethics displayed by different classes of people. Yet, social and economic engineering is a means to redistribute wealth, not integrate and diversify communities of people. Probably the biggest redistribution of wealth came during the mortgage crisis when thousands upon thousands of middle class people had to walk away from their homes, which were then repossessed by banks and re-purchased by the very rich or rented to Section 8 voucher holders, creating greater class divisions. In American Spectator’s, “The True Origin of this Economic Crisis,” this crisis came about in part because of a “1992 Boston Federal Reserve Bank study of discrimination in home mortgage lending,” which concluded,

While there was no overt discrimination in banks’ allocation of mortgage funds, loan officers gave whites preferential treatment. The methodology of the study has since been questioned, but at the time it was highly influential with regulators and members of the incoming Clinton administration; in 1993, bank regulators initiated a major effort to reform the CRA regulations.

Clearly, the Obama administration is pursuing a policy of social and economic engineering and saying it is about race.

Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.

In a Crain’s Chicago Business article, Why one suburban development soared, and the other staggered, Dennis Rodkin writes,

Because the Glen is a tax increment financing district, all property taxes go into the pot; after the TIF expires in 2018, tax collections will stream into the city’s general fund. Planners behind the Glen expect the previous 23 years will have generated $820 million, according to Messrs. Owen and Brady. That figure includes $250 million in land sales, $20 million in federal grants and $500 million in property and sales taxes, Mr. Owen says.

The Glen received $20 million in federal land grants. Therefore, Glenview is a federally funded city. Thus, it is susceptible to the Obama administration’s social and economic engineering plans.

It has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that money has allowed federal overreach to influence local and state decisions about schools, housing, churches, and other services that fall under the states’ purview in our federalist system of government. This division of power is failing. Strongholds put in place in our Constitution to prevent centralized government are surely toppling. Our Constitutional Republic, which generates great wealth and allows for social mobility is being replaced by social and economic engineering, i.e., socialism. I am moved to wonder how this will affect voter demographics.

06/12/15

Why Are TPA & TPP Being Referred to as Obamatrade?

By: Nancy Salvato

In an article by Connor Wolf called This Is The Difference Between TPP And TPA (Hint: They Are Not The Same Thing), he explains that these two bills are linked together because Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) is a means to fast track passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). I am confused by this line of reasoning because as a stand-alone bill, TPA is intended to provide transparency to all trade negotiations by soliciting public and congressional input throughout the process, however, TPP as a stand-alone bill, is a behemoth and most of the information to which the public has access has been leaked. Furthermore, it was negotiated behind closed doors. According to the verbiage of TPA, if TPP is not negotiated using TPA guidelines, the fast track option is negated. So why do news outlets and a wide range of legislators portray these two bills disingenuously? Bundling the TPA and TPP as one idea called Obamatrade is no different than bundling immigration reform and border security, which are two separate issues. One is about drug cartels and terrorism and the other is about how we manage people who want to immigrate to the United States.

Challenges TPA hopes to remedy throughout the negotiating process and in resulting trade agreements have parallels to challenges facing the US and its allies when agreeing to make war on the foreign stage. While one president may assure allies that US troops will assist in gaining and maintaining freedom, i.e., Iraq, a new administration or congress may change the terms, leaving a foreign country abandoned, with the understanding that the US cannot be relied upon to meet its agreed upon obligations. When negotiating foreign trade agreements, this same realization comes into play when negotiations that took place in good faith are undermined by a new administration or congress that change the terms. TPA hopes to create a set of consistent negotiating objectives when hammering out trade agreements, allowing agreements to transcend administrations and congresses.

The following excerpts from a letter written to President Obama from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R, AL) would alarm any person who understands the division of powers and checks and balances built into our rule of law. Posted in Exclusive–Sessions to Obama: Why Are You Keeping Obama Trade’s New Global Governance Secret? Sessions explains:

“Under fast-track, Congress transfers its authority to the executive and agrees to give up several of its most basic powers.”

“These concessions include: the power to write legislation, the power to amend legislation, the power to fully consider legislation on the floor, the power to keep debate open until Senate cloture is invoked, and the constitutional requirement that treaties receive a two-thirds vote.”

Understanding that Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Representative Paul Ryan have gotten behind TPA, it would be short sited and irresponsible not to probe further into why they aren’t exposing these violations of our rule of law.

According to The Hill’s Daniel Horowitz in TPA’s ‘Whoa, if true’ moment, Cruz and Ryan have explained, “most of the content of the bill is actually requirements on the executive branch to disclose information to Congress and consult with Congress on the negotiations.” Congress would be informed on the front end, as opposed to debating and making changes to what was already negotiated. This is important because as Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome and K. William Watson explain in Don’t Drink the Obamatrade Snake Oil:

Although trade agreements provide a mechanism for overcoming political opposition to free trade, they also create new political problems of their own, most of which stem from the inherent conflict in the U.S. Constitution between the power granted to Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations” (Article I, Section 8) and that granted to the president to negotiate treaties (Article II, Section 2) and otherwise act as the “face” of U.S. international relations. In short, the executive branch is authorized to negotiate trade agreements that escape much of the legislative sausage-making that goes in Washington, but, consistent with the Constitution, any such deals still require congressional approval—a process that could alter the agreement’s terms via congressional amendments intended to appease influential constituents. The possibility that, after years of negotiations, an unfettered Congress could add last-minute demands to an FTA (or eliminate its biggest benefits) discourages all but the most eager U.S. trading partners to sign on to any such deal.

TPA, also known as “fast track,” was designed to fix this problem. TPA is an arrangement between the U.S. executive and legislative branches, under which Congress agrees to hold a timely, up-or-down vote (i.e., no amendments) on future trade agreements in exchange for the president agreeing to follow certain negotiating objectives set by Congress and to consult with the legislative branch before, during, and after FTA negotiations. In essence, Congress agrees to streamline the approval process as long as the president negotiates agreements that it likes.

For a really good argument for fast tracking, watch the video that can be found here:

Here’s why the TPP is such a big deal 03:24

K. William Watson explains in What’s Really in the New Trade Promotion Authority Bill? TPA will actually bring more transparency to the negotiating process:

The current bill would require the administration to provide public summaries of its negotiating positions. This will give the public something concrete to debate without having to resort to conspiracy claims or wild theories. It will also help everyone see more clearly how negotiators intend to implement the negotiating objectives of TPA.

It will also require that every member of Congress has access to the full text of the negotiations from beginning to end.

If TPA actually does what it is intended, a bill like TPP could not possibly be held to an up or down vote because it would not have been negotiated using the processes as outlined. Or could it? This administration passed Obamacare, which is a tax; they wanted comprehensive immigration reform and secure borders yet they openly courted Latin American countries to bring their kids to the border; they said they’d be the most transparent administration but there has been a dramatic lack of transparency, one must pass the bill before knowing what’s in it.

Perhaps what it all boils down to is what Rick Helfenbein writes about in Trade promotion authority, a Washington drama:

There are other conservatives like Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) who remain adamantly opposed to giving the president (presumed) additional authority. Jones said of Obama and TPA: “Given his record, I am astonished that some of my colleagues are so eager to fork over even more of their constitutional authority to the [p]resident for him to abuse.”

While this article addresses the issue of TPA, it doesn’t begin to address the arguments against TPP, for example The Guardian’s C. Robert Gibson and Taylor Channing’s conclusion that, “Fast-tracking the TPP, meaning its passage through Congress without having its contents available for debate or amendments, was only possible after lots of corporate money exchanged hands with senators.” That is an article for another day.

Nancy Salvato directs the Constitutional Literacy Program for BasicsProject.org, a non-profit, non-partisan research and educational project whose mission is to re-introduce the American public to the basic elements of our constitutional heritage while providing non-partisan, fact-based information on relevant socio-political issues important to our country. She is a graduate of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Academy for Civics and Government. She is the author of “Keeping a Republic: An Argument for Sovereignty.” She also serves as a Senior Editor for NewMediaJournal.us and is a contributing writer to Constituting America. Her education career includes teaching students from pre-k to graduate school. She has also worked as an administrator in higher education. Her private sector efforts focus on the advancement of constitutional literacy.