Chris Christie's accomplishments
JOE FARAH SAYs :
I don't get it.
Some of the most notable conservative personalities in America are clamoring for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to jump into the GOP presidential contest as a kind of political savior.
For the life of me, I don't understand it.
Can I ask a simple question that I hope clarifies my total skepticism?
Like it or not, here it is: Exactly what has Chris Christie accomplished in New Jersey as governor that makes him such an ideal candidate for the presidency?
I welcome answers to this question. It is not rhetorical. I especially look forward to hearing from residents of New Jersey – conservatives who want the whole nation transformed the way their state has been transformed under the leadership of Chris Christie.
I don't live in New Jersey, but I was born there. I have family there, and I am a frequent visitor. I am acutely aware of the problems New Jersey faces and how those problems were created and exacerbated by largely one-party rule for decades. And, don't get me wrong, I'm gratified that a Republican came along and won the governorship.
By now, however, Chris Christie should have some kind of a track record of executive leadership that his supporters can point to in extolling his virtues as a presidential candidate. I haven't heard a single one.
Give me one – just one.
I don't see any.
Has New Jersey been transformed under his leadership? Is it now a great place to live and work and start a business? Is it on its way to becoming one? How? Why? What has Chris Christie actually done to make it so?
If you can't point to such accomplishments, and I don't think any conservative can, then what his supporters really like is Chris Christie's rhetoric. They like his ideas. They like his platform. They like what he stands for.
Among other problems with Chris Christie's ideas – and this should be a disqualifier for any Republican officeholder, let along presidential contender – is that he is an enthusiastic, ardent supporter of cap-and-trade, which turns the biggest political hoax of the 21st century, catastrophic, man-made climate change, into a wealth-transfer scheme and regulatory nightmare unlike anything previously known. Christie loves cap-and-trade – and has actually instituted it with other neighboring states in a scheme known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, using some of the proceeds to pay off New Jersey's deficits. He is also using state money to subsidize so-called "green" technology much the way Barack Obama has.His budget included new taxes, new fees, federal stimulus funds and none of the across-the-board tax cuts he promised. His budget is actually 6 percent bigger than his predecessor's, and the budget for the governor's office increased tenfold.
Despite his popular anti-union rhetoric, he has yet to eliminate even one state employee. New Jersey conservatives say his Cabinet is filled with the kind of progressives that would be equally comfortable in a Barack Obama Cabinet. He has refused to join other states in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare, but he accepts federal funds for the implementation of a program in New Jersey that will likely someday be called "Christie-care." He supports amnesty for illegal aliens, supports the construction of the Ground Zero mosque and favors strict gun control
So what is it that I'm supposed to like about this guy?
Why are so many conservative personalities – from Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter – drooling over the prospect of a Chris Christie presidential candidacy?
I just don't get it.
Maybe someone can enlighten me – preferably someone from New Jersey whose life has been improved in some way by his governance."
what has Chris Christie accomplished ??? Nothing !!! America DOes NOT NEED him as the next President. America NEEDs a candidate who IS truly conservative. The country needs to stifle the programs that have been started by Obama. The good ol' USA NEEDS someone who stands for small government and will do something about the ballooning size of the Obama administration. THIS NATION DON'T NEED what Christie stands for PERIOD.
He's just the next installment from the Republican elite. First it was Romney, but Bachmann upset that applecart. Then it was Perry; blown out of the water by Cain. They haven't figured out that the Tea Party people don't want the same old song and dance.He's a RINO and anyone who breaks bread (kisses ass) with the power elite will never be supported by the Tea party. So many Americans today still have the mentality of chosing the lesser of the two evils. Both parties are broken. The system is broken and NOBODY at the moment will get us back on track. A POX OPN BOTH PARTIES. People pray that the voters in both Parties would get sound, strong, people to step up and lead and bring us back to what the Constitution says and get rid of those who oppose it. Uphold the rule of law and arrest people in power who break the laws.
Romney Care, Obama Care, what's the difference ??? Chrissy Christie, Chrissy Matthews, what's the difference ??? Twiddle Dee, Twiddle Dum !!! Chris Christie is just another addition to the Rino Party that's the legacy of the failed Bush presidency. When you compromise with Demo Rats, you become a Demo Rat. GOP is good at talking a big game.
Although I want Obama to be retired yesterday and look at Republican alternatives, they are ALL CLOWNS !!!
What would a good conservative governor do ??? Lower taxes, balance the budget, create thousands of jobs, pass torte reform, deregulate, create a business friendly environment, oppose cap and trade, fight back against Washington's intrusion...has Christie done this ???
NO !!
The Powers To Be in the Republican party, the BIG donors, the critical supporters, the "elite" are so afraid of nominating a conservative. All of the phony campaign strategists who think they know best still believe a conservative candidate will allianate the independents. They are in fact so afraid of a conservative candidate they will do everything in their power to elect Mitt. Thier mind set is that the conservatives will vote Republican like sheeple, regardless of which Rino is nominated. Who in their right mind would have chosen McCain ??? The GOP is still in sad shape because they have no true direction. Christie is their perfect candidate because he is so middle of the road. The Tea Party must step up the pressure and not let the elite choose the candidate. America still needs a strong conservative to step out of the shadows and steal the show. It certainly ain't Christie !!!
Read my lips America - WE NEED A TRUE CONSERVATIVE IN 2012. Don't allow the liberal lunatics of the heathen media dictate the GOP nominee.
What is missed is that more and more I am beginning to see that the Republican party is the same party of the rich they have always been. The difference is that today the Dems/Libs are the "me too" party, seeing how much money and media coverage they can get by screwing the middle class and the workers of America so that the top 10% can make more money at everyone's expense.
When was the last time top Union leaders, the ones that are frequent guests in a Dem White House, held the Dems accountable for shipping their jobs overseas, in working conditions that would get a company shut down and their owners arrested had it happened here.
No government subsidy has ever led to a breakthrough in technology, or the reduction in costs, or any substantive improvement of anything. At best, government subsidy has provided a platform by which man was able to reach the moon, as a matter of scientific study, and to go into space for research purposes. It has done nothing by doing so, to improve our lives, nor to improve the production of anything of absolute need in our lives on earth. I'm glad it was done, as it shows what man can accomplish in peace when he chooses, however it is the best example of the only possible outcome of subsidies: perhaps great things undoable any other way, such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, but everything requiring a subsidy is by definition, not a step toward a more efficient idea, but only a means of funding something which no one would fund by private choice of their own money. No one who chooses government subsidy believes in true free market economics, because the two are antithetical completely. This Nation was the epitome of freedom, and since it ceased to operate as a true free market, it has only foundered and fallen. America must choose people who accomplish on their own, and completely eschew all who would subsidize anything at all, or all is lost all America ever was & stood for !!!
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Deliberate Impoverishment of the Western World
The "Power Elite" and the psychopathic, narcissistic Americans they represent and serve are trying to preserve the illusion of prosperity at all costs.
The elite would want to gradually move to a world economy with as few bumps in the road as possible. Once the leaders of the world's countries see the Benefits of becoming one of the elitists, they tend to become enthusiastic supporters of global corporatocracy. 20-30% unemployment rates breed unrest and uncertainty and possible disruption. Humans adapt very well to small changes over time and the Elite know this. Many in this present generation have no clue how things were in their grandparents generation.
U.S. poverty totals hit a 50-year high Census Bureau's grim statistics show recession's lingering effects, as young adults move back home and 1 million more Americans go without health insurance ... In a grim portrait of a nation in economic turmoil, the government reported that the number of people living in poverty last year surged to 46.2 million — the most in at least half a century — as 1 million more Americans went without health insurance and household incomes fell sharply. – Los Angeles Times
Dominant Social Theme: These things happen. No reason. Depressions spontaneously occur. They are "market mistakes."
Free-Market Analysis: We've spent considerable time in the past three years (the past decade, actually), analyzing how the powers-that-be have reorganized society, especially American society, in a way that relentlessly reduces prosperity. Figures released yesterday from the US Census provide a startling illustration of just how effective elites have been. (See excerpt above.)
Why would a handful of wealthy central banking families want to impoverish the US and render its citizens penniless? Our conclusion is simple: World government is on the way and the American culture is still resistant to the kind of hyper-regulatory corporatism that is necessary to support this kind of governance.
America (the West, generally) has apparently been under attack by an organized cabal of inter-generational banking families and corporate, business and military enablers for at least 200 years now, and perhaps 300 years. In the past 50 years, the pace has accelerated.
One by one, the UN, IMF, World Bank, BIS, ICC (international court), WHO and countless other globalist organizations have been put in place. The mainstream media treats this evolution as inevitable. It cannot be. Each evolution must be planned, funded and promoted. When it comes to politics of this sort, there are no coincidences, as FDR once observed.
We have taken to calling what has evolved "directed history" – in which events including wars are planned to ensure maximum destruction of the culture as it is in order to further militarize, globalize (and impoverish) what remains.
Because America was a "great exception" – founded as a republic with a culture that was relentlessly entrepreneurial and agricultural – America has been under sustained attack to ensure that its culture is Europeanized and recreated as what we call "regulatory democracy."
Regulatory democracy is one word for what has evolved. Corporatism is another. Fascism (of a sort) would be a third. No matter what word is used, the current Western model for nation states relies heavily on unelected bureaucrats, intelligence agencies and a military industrial complex that basically reports to the aforementioned elites and is not affected by voting or other democratic elements.
The modern nation state is funded by central banks, also seemingly controlled by these elite families, and the ultimate goal is formal global governance. Some question why a formal international government is necessary. The answer is that the elites like to work within a "lawful" environment of their own creation. The more that reality corresponds to their notions and plans, the easier it is to continually consolidate power.
Nothing else – no other sociopolitical model – seems to explain what has happened to America and Europe. The EU is a disaster and the euro has proven to be a currency that has brought ruin on the Southern crescent of that artificial entity. The one-size-fits all central banking policies of the union continue to collapse jobs and economies – something we've been forecasting for several years now.
European elites are on record as anticipating the disaster and welcoming it because it will allow for the creation a closer "political union." But in the Internet era, people are not so easily manipulated as they were in the 20th Century. The pushback to elite plans is extreme. The fate of the EU is by no means pre-determined. Events could easily spin out of control.
In the US, the great merger between Canada, Mexico and America has been all-but-abandoned – for the time being. However, one of the primary figures behind that putative merger is Texas governor Rick Perry who spent much time and political energy in the early 2000s trying create a "North American Union." In our view it is no accident that he is a front-runner for the presidency at this juncture.
The Rick Perry story is certainly illustrative of how the elites work. Perry actively supported a superhighway of some 20 lanes plus railroad tracks that was (and is) planned to bisect the US, running from Mexico to Canada. It would effectively turn the country into two separate halves, both of which would be economic backwaters, as trade and prosperity flowed between Canada and Mexico.
Perry also supported a kind of international health-care in which the US would subsidize medical treatments for Mexicans. He tried to portray this as a rare opportunity to address flaws in the health care system that a bi-national program would counteract. But in reality, it was more internationalism.
Perry was and is a globalist; he is likely a candidate of the elites and it is perhaps no coincidence that he is suddenly a leading GOP choice to run for president. Perry's globalist sympathies were so evident in Texas that he had to write a book renouncing them.
In his book, from what we can tell, he basically repurposes most if not all of libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul's message of small government and reliance on the private sector. Perry's statements were so extreme, however, that he has made himself a target on both sides of the aisle.
Perry is just one more unmoored and unprincipled politician, willing to undermine his country and its hundreds of millions for personal gain. (Some have compared him to a used car salesman and claimed in another, less corrupt era he would never have achieved his current position.) He has become a millionaire several times over during his political career, and no doubt millions more await him if he does by some chance become president.
Meanwhile, the larger American economy continues to suffer. Critics in the mainstream media will have plenty of explanations for how their country came to be in the shape that it is in. But from our humble perspective, there can only be one explanation; it's part of a larger plan, at least to some degree. Here's some more from the article, above:
The poverty rate for all Americans rose in 2010 for the third consecutive year, matching the 15.1% figure in 1993 and pushing many more young adults to double up or return to their parents' home to avoid joining the ranks of the poor. Taken together, the annual income and poverty snapshot released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau underscored how the recession is casting a long shadow well after its official end in June 2009 ...
The total number of Americans who fell below the official poverty line last year rose from 43.6 million in 2009. Of the 2.6-million increase, about two-thirds of the people said they did not work even one week last year. Those with jobs were much less likely to be poor, but the recession and weak recovery have wiped out income gains of prior years for a broad spectrum of workers and their families.
Inflation-adjusted median household income — the middle of the populace — fell 2.3% to $49,445 last year from a year ago and 7% from 2000. "It's a lost decade for the middle class," said Sheldon Danziger, a poverty expert at the University of Michigan. The number of poor children younger than 18 reached its highest level since 1962, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
This is an unmitigated disaster, and it is hitting young people the hardest. Overall, the number of 25- to 34-year-old men and women who were living with their parents last spring totaled 5.9 million, the article tells us, and this is a 25.5% increase since the recession began in 2007.
Of course, we note the words that are used in the article to describe the current conflagration, specifically the "R" word, recession. This is no recession, from what we can tell. Nor has there been a "weak recovery."
With 50 million or so Americans relying on food stamps and unemployment realistically hovering at least in the 20 percent area (we think its closer to 30 percent), one can use any words one wants to – even "banana" – but a depression is a depression.
The elites, of course, fear depression. While it is important to remove prosperity from people's lives in order to make them malleable, too much hardship can cause social chaos and the kind of pushback that puts "civilized" institutions at risk. During the Great Depression, the elites were most worried about armed insurrection in America and Europe, especially because there were so many young men with military experience as a result of World War One.
But depression is the logical outcome of the economic system now in place throughout the West. Driven by central bank fiat money divorced from underlying value, powered by taxes, visible and invisible, that take up to 50 percent of the average person's income, and rigorously controlled by a blizzard of incomprehensible and destructive regulations, the system in place now is Babylonian in its devious intricacy and seemingly beyond redemption.
Add in five or six regional wars in the Middle East and Africa (with more doubtless coming) and the general militarization of the population and the larger model of corporatism, and the results become clear. The economy of the West has been so distorted that price signals are simply not available. No one knows what to invest in because government subsidies, regulation and fiat money have made it impossible to tell a healthy enterprise from a fraudulent one.
There is an easy way out of the depression that is gradually lengthening over the West like a malevolent shadow. Return to free and unregulated markets, disband central banks and let money freely compete and circulate, especially gold and silver.
Stop distorting the economy with endless government fixes, phony wars and the saddlingof the larger culture with the inevitable failing prescriptions of "wise men." These are simple solutions. They have worked in the past and sooner or later they will work again. The elites, as powerful as they are, cannot forever hold back the logic of the larger market.
It is, in fact, inevitable in our view. In this era of the Internet Reformation, it is likely impossible for the elites to fully complete their globalist campaign. Too much is known about what's planned and as a result, the great families are turning more and more (ineffectively) to repression, wiretapping and violence to achieve their ends.
Conclusion: This is evidence of the weakness of their position and we have seen no evidence that their situation can much improve either in the long or short term. In the 21st Century we would tend to believe that people may not prove so malleable as the elite has hoped. The Internet Reformation proceeds apace, bringing to the West more and more that is unexpected and hard to control. Directed history is harder and harder to implement. "Things fall apart," novelist Chinua Achebe once observed. Not just in Africa.
The unprincepled government and corrupt courts of law are the enablers / enforcers of these subversions, to profit by conflict they themselves create and maintain.
Thus, the equality "debate" / nasty conflict is between: Equality in terms of measurable rights and responsibilities Versus Equality of results, independent of contribution to society or civilization, leading to dependency and servitude, adapting people to unproductivity collapsing civilization with a healthy "helping" commission to desitution until the power of the average folk to prosper is completely destroyed .
And foul concepts such as "right to work" absent property rights like an honest right to keep YOUR pay and not stolen by the state.
Not to mention "progressive" taxation, a divide and conquer tactic to splinter civilization into warring economic classes and force the productive to tolerate and support the unproductive whose "values" and antisocial behavior are completely destroying any viable possibility of peaceful social organization.
All because of linguistic games on the part of the legal "profession" which has completely decimated real knowledge regarding social / economic organization destroying our ability to intelligently exist or peacefully co-operate in civilization. Thus, we can't, don't and won't. I'm sure this foul "idea" came from the "Tower of Babel", of Biblical fame.
WAKE UP AMERICA !!
The elite would want to gradually move to a world economy with as few bumps in the road as possible. Once the leaders of the world's countries see the Benefits of becoming one of the elitists, they tend to become enthusiastic supporters of global corporatocracy. 20-30% unemployment rates breed unrest and uncertainty and possible disruption. Humans adapt very well to small changes over time and the Elite know this. Many in this present generation have no clue how things were in their grandparents generation.
U.S. poverty totals hit a 50-year high Census Bureau's grim statistics show recession's lingering effects, as young adults move back home and 1 million more Americans go without health insurance ... In a grim portrait of a nation in economic turmoil, the government reported that the number of people living in poverty last year surged to 46.2 million — the most in at least half a century — as 1 million more Americans went without health insurance and household incomes fell sharply. – Los Angeles Times
Dominant Social Theme: These things happen. No reason. Depressions spontaneously occur. They are "market mistakes."
Free-Market Analysis: We've spent considerable time in the past three years (the past decade, actually), analyzing how the powers-that-be have reorganized society, especially American society, in a way that relentlessly reduces prosperity. Figures released yesterday from the US Census provide a startling illustration of just how effective elites have been. (See excerpt above.)
Why would a handful of wealthy central banking families want to impoverish the US and render its citizens penniless? Our conclusion is simple: World government is on the way and the American culture is still resistant to the kind of hyper-regulatory corporatism that is necessary to support this kind of governance.
America (the West, generally) has apparently been under attack by an organized cabal of inter-generational banking families and corporate, business and military enablers for at least 200 years now, and perhaps 300 years. In the past 50 years, the pace has accelerated.
One by one, the UN, IMF, World Bank, BIS, ICC (international court), WHO and countless other globalist organizations have been put in place. The mainstream media treats this evolution as inevitable. It cannot be. Each evolution must be planned, funded and promoted. When it comes to politics of this sort, there are no coincidences, as FDR once observed.
We have taken to calling what has evolved "directed history" – in which events including wars are planned to ensure maximum destruction of the culture as it is in order to further militarize, globalize (and impoverish) what remains.
Because America was a "great exception" – founded as a republic with a culture that was relentlessly entrepreneurial and agricultural – America has been under sustained attack to ensure that its culture is Europeanized and recreated as what we call "regulatory democracy."
Regulatory democracy is one word for what has evolved. Corporatism is another. Fascism (of a sort) would be a third. No matter what word is used, the current Western model for nation states relies heavily on unelected bureaucrats, intelligence agencies and a military industrial complex that basically reports to the aforementioned elites and is not affected by voting or other democratic elements.
The modern nation state is funded by central banks, also seemingly controlled by these elite families, and the ultimate goal is formal global governance. Some question why a formal international government is necessary. The answer is that the elites like to work within a "lawful" environment of their own creation. The more that reality corresponds to their notions and plans, the easier it is to continually consolidate power.
Nothing else – no other sociopolitical model – seems to explain what has happened to America and Europe. The EU is a disaster and the euro has proven to be a currency that has brought ruin on the Southern crescent of that artificial entity. The one-size-fits all central banking policies of the union continue to collapse jobs and economies – something we've been forecasting for several years now.
European elites are on record as anticipating the disaster and welcoming it because it will allow for the creation a closer "political union." But in the Internet era, people are not so easily manipulated as they were in the 20th Century. The pushback to elite plans is extreme. The fate of the EU is by no means pre-determined. Events could easily spin out of control.
In the US, the great merger between Canada, Mexico and America has been all-but-abandoned – for the time being. However, one of the primary figures behind that putative merger is Texas governor Rick Perry who spent much time and political energy in the early 2000s trying create a "North American Union." In our view it is no accident that he is a front-runner for the presidency at this juncture.
The Rick Perry story is certainly illustrative of how the elites work. Perry actively supported a superhighway of some 20 lanes plus railroad tracks that was (and is) planned to bisect the US, running from Mexico to Canada. It would effectively turn the country into two separate halves, both of which would be economic backwaters, as trade and prosperity flowed between Canada and Mexico.
Perry also supported a kind of international health-care in which the US would subsidize medical treatments for Mexicans. He tried to portray this as a rare opportunity to address flaws in the health care system that a bi-national program would counteract. But in reality, it was more internationalism.
Perry was and is a globalist; he is likely a candidate of the elites and it is perhaps no coincidence that he is suddenly a leading GOP choice to run for president. Perry's globalist sympathies were so evident in Texas that he had to write a book renouncing them.
In his book, from what we can tell, he basically repurposes most if not all of libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul's message of small government and reliance on the private sector. Perry's statements were so extreme, however, that he has made himself a target on both sides of the aisle.
Perry is just one more unmoored and unprincipled politician, willing to undermine his country and its hundreds of millions for personal gain. (Some have compared him to a used car salesman and claimed in another, less corrupt era he would never have achieved his current position.) He has become a millionaire several times over during his political career, and no doubt millions more await him if he does by some chance become president.
Meanwhile, the larger American economy continues to suffer. Critics in the mainstream media will have plenty of explanations for how their country came to be in the shape that it is in. But from our humble perspective, there can only be one explanation; it's part of a larger plan, at least to some degree. Here's some more from the article, above:
The poverty rate for all Americans rose in 2010 for the third consecutive year, matching the 15.1% figure in 1993 and pushing many more young adults to double up or return to their parents' home to avoid joining the ranks of the poor. Taken together, the annual income and poverty snapshot released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau underscored how the recession is casting a long shadow well after its official end in June 2009 ...
The total number of Americans who fell below the official poverty line last year rose from 43.6 million in 2009. Of the 2.6-million increase, about two-thirds of the people said they did not work even one week last year. Those with jobs were much less likely to be poor, but the recession and weak recovery have wiped out income gains of prior years for a broad spectrum of workers and their families.
Inflation-adjusted median household income — the middle of the populace — fell 2.3% to $49,445 last year from a year ago and 7% from 2000. "It's a lost decade for the middle class," said Sheldon Danziger, a poverty expert at the University of Michigan. The number of poor children younger than 18 reached its highest level since 1962, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
This is an unmitigated disaster, and it is hitting young people the hardest. Overall, the number of 25- to 34-year-old men and women who were living with their parents last spring totaled 5.9 million, the article tells us, and this is a 25.5% increase since the recession began in 2007.
Of course, we note the words that are used in the article to describe the current conflagration, specifically the "R" word, recession. This is no recession, from what we can tell. Nor has there been a "weak recovery."
With 50 million or so Americans relying on food stamps and unemployment realistically hovering at least in the 20 percent area (we think its closer to 30 percent), one can use any words one wants to – even "banana" – but a depression is a depression.
The elites, of course, fear depression. While it is important to remove prosperity from people's lives in order to make them malleable, too much hardship can cause social chaos and the kind of pushback that puts "civilized" institutions at risk. During the Great Depression, the elites were most worried about armed insurrection in America and Europe, especially because there were so many young men with military experience as a result of World War One.
But depression is the logical outcome of the economic system now in place throughout the West. Driven by central bank fiat money divorced from underlying value, powered by taxes, visible and invisible, that take up to 50 percent of the average person's income, and rigorously controlled by a blizzard of incomprehensible and destructive regulations, the system in place now is Babylonian in its devious intricacy and seemingly beyond redemption.
Add in five or six regional wars in the Middle East and Africa (with more doubtless coming) and the general militarization of the population and the larger model of corporatism, and the results become clear. The economy of the West has been so distorted that price signals are simply not available. No one knows what to invest in because government subsidies, regulation and fiat money have made it impossible to tell a healthy enterprise from a fraudulent one.
There is an easy way out of the depression that is gradually lengthening over the West like a malevolent shadow. Return to free and unregulated markets, disband central banks and let money freely compete and circulate, especially gold and silver.
Stop distorting the economy with endless government fixes, phony wars and the saddlingof the larger culture with the inevitable failing prescriptions of "wise men." These are simple solutions. They have worked in the past and sooner or later they will work again. The elites, as powerful as they are, cannot forever hold back the logic of the larger market.
It is, in fact, inevitable in our view. In this era of the Internet Reformation, it is likely impossible for the elites to fully complete their globalist campaign. Too much is known about what's planned and as a result, the great families are turning more and more (ineffectively) to repression, wiretapping and violence to achieve their ends.
Conclusion: This is evidence of the weakness of their position and we have seen no evidence that their situation can much improve either in the long or short term. In the 21st Century we would tend to believe that people may not prove so malleable as the elite has hoped. The Internet Reformation proceeds apace, bringing to the West more and more that is unexpected and hard to control. Directed history is harder and harder to implement. "Things fall apart," novelist Chinua Achebe once observed. Not just in Africa.
The unprincepled government and corrupt courts of law are the enablers / enforcers of these subversions, to profit by conflict they themselves create and maintain.
Thus, the equality "debate" / nasty conflict is between: Equality in terms of measurable rights and responsibilities Versus Equality of results, independent of contribution to society or civilization, leading to dependency and servitude, adapting people to unproductivity collapsing civilization with a healthy "helping" commission to desitution until the power of the average folk to prosper is completely destroyed .
And foul concepts such as "right to work" absent property rights like an honest right to keep YOUR pay and not stolen by the state.
Not to mention "progressive" taxation, a divide and conquer tactic to splinter civilization into warring economic classes and force the productive to tolerate and support the unproductive whose "values" and antisocial behavior are completely destroying any viable possibility of peaceful social organization.
All because of linguistic games on the part of the legal "profession" which has completely decimated real knowledge regarding social / economic organization destroying our ability to intelligently exist or peacefully co-operate in civilization. Thus, we can't, don't and won't. I'm sure this foul "idea" came from the "Tower of Babel", of Biblical fame.
WAKE UP AMERICA !!
Friday, September 30, 2011
The Myth of American Freedom by Andrew P. Napolitano
The Myth of American Freedom by Andrew P. Napolitano
Here is Judge Napolitano's closing argument yesterday on his FreedomWatch.
Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Is freedom in America a myth or a reality? Tonight, what if we didn't live in a free country?
What if the Constitution were written not to limit government, but to expand it? What if the Constitution didn't fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, but betrayed it? What if the Constitution actually permitted the government to limit and constrict freedom? What if the Bill of Rights was just a paper promise, that the government could avoid whenever it claimed the need to do so? What if the same generation – in some cases the same people – that drafted the U.S. Constitution enacted laws that violated it? What if the merchants and bankers who financed the American Revolution bought their way into the new government and got it to enact laws that stifled their competition? What if the civil war that was fought in the name of freedom actually advanced the cause of tyranny?
What if the federal government were the product of 150 years of stealing power and liberty and property from the people and the states? What if our political elites spent the 20th century importing the socialist ideas of big government Statism from Europe? What if our political class was adopting the European political culture from which our founding fathers fought so hard to break free?
What if our political leaders no longer acknowledged that our rights come from our humanity, but insisted instead that they come from the government? What if you had to produce your papers to get out of or into our once-free country? What if you couldn't board a plane, a train, or a long-distance bus without providing documentation telling the government who you are and where you're going, without paying the government, and without risking sexual assault? What if your local police department could shoot down a plane? What if government agents could write their own search warrants, declare their own enemies, and seize whatever property they want? What if the feds could detain you indefinitely, with no visitors, no lawyer, no judge, and no jury? What if they could make you just disappear? What if the government broke its own laws in order to enforce them? What if the government broke down your front door in the middle of the night and shot your dog, and claimed it was a mistake?
What if you were required to purchase a product that you didn't need, didn't want, and couldn't afford, from a company you never heard of, just as a condition of living in the United States? What if the government told you what not to put in your body as well as what to put into it; and how much? What if the government claimed that since it will be paying your medical bills, it can tell you what to eat, when to sleep, and how to live? What if the government tried to cajole and coax and compel you into behaviors and attitudes it considered socially acceptable? What if the government spent your tax money to advertise to you how great the services are that it provides? What if the government kept promising to make you safe while it kept stripping you of your liberties and committing crimes in your name that made you a target of more violence?
What if you didn't have a right to every dollar you earned? What if the government decided how much of your earnings it will keep and how much it will permit you to have? What if the government took money from you and gave it away to its rich banking and corporate friends whose businesses were failing? What if the government thought it knew better than you did how to lead your life and had no problem telling you so? What if the government took the credit for every success your own human actions helped you achieve? What if the government told you that only it could build roads, run schools, keep you safe, and collect trash even though it's never been able to do so efficiently before? What if the government spent nearly twice as much as it took in? What if it couldn't pass a budget on a timely basis and funded itself just weeks at a time? And what if the government kept borrowing money against the wealth of future generations to pay for wasteful programs today?
What if you worked for the government and the government didn't work for you? What if freedom were a myth? What if we don't live in a free country? What do we do about it?
From New York, defending freedom; so-long America.
September 30, 2011
Here is Judge Napolitano's closing argument yesterday on his FreedomWatch.
Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Is freedom in America a myth or a reality? Tonight, what if we didn't live in a free country?
What if the Constitution were written not to limit government, but to expand it? What if the Constitution didn't fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, but betrayed it? What if the Constitution actually permitted the government to limit and constrict freedom? What if the Bill of Rights was just a paper promise, that the government could avoid whenever it claimed the need to do so? What if the same generation – in some cases the same people – that drafted the U.S. Constitution enacted laws that violated it? What if the merchants and bankers who financed the American Revolution bought their way into the new government and got it to enact laws that stifled their competition? What if the civil war that was fought in the name of freedom actually advanced the cause of tyranny?
What if the federal government were the product of 150 years of stealing power and liberty and property from the people and the states? What if our political elites spent the 20th century importing the socialist ideas of big government Statism from Europe? What if our political class was adopting the European political culture from which our founding fathers fought so hard to break free?
What if our political leaders no longer acknowledged that our rights come from our humanity, but insisted instead that they come from the government? What if you had to produce your papers to get out of or into our once-free country? What if you couldn't board a plane, a train, or a long-distance bus without providing documentation telling the government who you are and where you're going, without paying the government, and without risking sexual assault? What if your local police department could shoot down a plane? What if government agents could write their own search warrants, declare their own enemies, and seize whatever property they want? What if the feds could detain you indefinitely, with no visitors, no lawyer, no judge, and no jury? What if they could make you just disappear? What if the government broke its own laws in order to enforce them? What if the government broke down your front door in the middle of the night and shot your dog, and claimed it was a mistake?
What if you were required to purchase a product that you didn't need, didn't want, and couldn't afford, from a company you never heard of, just as a condition of living in the United States? What if the government told you what not to put in your body as well as what to put into it; and how much? What if the government claimed that since it will be paying your medical bills, it can tell you what to eat, when to sleep, and how to live? What if the government tried to cajole and coax and compel you into behaviors and attitudes it considered socially acceptable? What if the government spent your tax money to advertise to you how great the services are that it provides? What if the government kept promising to make you safe while it kept stripping you of your liberties and committing crimes in your name that made you a target of more violence?
What if you didn't have a right to every dollar you earned? What if the government decided how much of your earnings it will keep and how much it will permit you to have? What if the government took money from you and gave it away to its rich banking and corporate friends whose businesses were failing? What if the government thought it knew better than you did how to lead your life and had no problem telling you so? What if the government took the credit for every success your own human actions helped you achieve? What if the government told you that only it could build roads, run schools, keep you safe, and collect trash even though it's never been able to do so efficiently before? What if the government spent nearly twice as much as it took in? What if it couldn't pass a budget on a timely basis and funded itself just weeks at a time? And what if the government kept borrowing money against the wealth of future generations to pay for wasteful programs today?
What if you worked for the government and the government didn't work for you? What if freedom were a myth? What if we don't live in a free country? What do we do about it?
From New York, defending freedom; so-long America.
September 30, 2011
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
It's fun to smash things
It's fun to smash things By Theodore Dalrymple
And in Britain, there is little civilisation left to stop you
Only the wilfully blind could have been surprised by the scale or ferocity of the riots that have
engulfed Britain in the past week. Unfortunately, most of the country’s political and intellectual class have been wilfully blind for years, in a state of the most abject denial; a brief walk in any of our cities should have been enough to tell them all that they needed to know.
How anyone could have missed the aggressive malignity inscribed in the faces and manner of so many young men in Britain is a mystery to me. Perhaps, like Dr Watson, our political and intellectual class saw but did not observe; and they did not observe because they lacked the moral courage to attempt anything but appeasement.
The vulpine lope or swagger, the face that regards eye contact with a stranger as a challenge to be met, the adoption of fashions that are known to signify aggression and dangerousness, the grotesquely inflated self-esteem combined with a total incapacity for doing anything constructive: all could and should have sounded an alarm in our politicians. Not only is our population ageing, but a significant proportion of such young people as we have engendered are like this, which no doubt helps to explain why we have had to resort to the importation of foreign unskilled labour while maintaining high levels of domestic unemployment, especially among the young. It is as difficult to employ a hoodie as to hug him.
No one has paid serious attention to the mentality and culture of these young men (using the word culture in its broad, anthropological sense). The morality is that of Satan on his expulsion from heaven: evil, be thou my good. The aesthetics follow the morality. Ugliness, be thou my beauty.
The young men of whom I speak admire rather than abjure criminality. I first noticed this 20 years ago when young men came to me as patients who had tattooed on their cheek the blue spot that former inmates of borstals used as a sign of graduation, without their ever having been to borstal themselves. They not only wanted to appear tough, but were suffering from crime-envy. They wanted to be thought criminal: it was the new respectability. Sacha Baron Cohen turned gangsta-chic into a joke, a matter of idle curiosity, like watching an animal in a zoo, but it was not a joke to those who had to live with it; nor are our slums zoological gardens for our amusement and delectation, as we now see only too clearly.
Terms such as ‘unrest’ and ‘disaffection’, which trip so lightly off the tongue of those who do not want to face a far more disturbing reality, do not explain the behaviour of the rioters. It is obvious, for instance, that if there were any justice in the world — at least if justice is the right return for voluntary effort and conduct — the young rioters would be much worse off than they are. Their problem is not that they have been given too little, but that they have deserved nothing.
The riots are not a protest: the shooting of Mark Duggan — the full elucidation of which will no doubt take a long time and will remain forever the contested subject of paranoid rumour, whatever the eventual findings — was scarcely even a pretext. It is perfectly possible that the shooting will turn out to have been yet another example of the bullying incompetence of the police, but it goes without saying that, even so, young black men are much more likely to be shot by each other than by the police; there was once a never-to-be-forgotten scene in our intensive care unit when two young drug-dealers, who had shot each other without inflicting death, were on life-support machines opposite each other while under arrest, guarded from each other’s henchmen by the police. No riots of protest followed this glorious incident or many similar ones, some of which ended in death.
The evident glee of the rioters, celebrating and smiling triumphantly among the devastation they wrought, as if in victory, is testimony not to their outraged feelings, but to the strength of the destructive urge that lies within us all and has always to be kept under firm control. I remember as a child the sheer joy of smashing a radio on our lawn with a croquet mallet, a joy that was quite unrelated to any personal animus against the radio, which could not possibly have done me any harm. I loved the destruction for its own sake and wanted it to continue for as long as possible, smashing the parts into dust long after there was no possibility of repair, feeling that I was almost performing a duty in being so thorough in my annihilation of them. And the first riot, in Panama, that I ever attended — reporting on it for this magazine — taught me that rioting is fun, that the supposed reason for it is soon forgotten in the ecstatic pleasure of destruction. Talleyrand said that no one knew how sweet life could be who had not lived under the Ancien Régime; one might add that no one has known unalloyed joy who has not heard the tinkle of plate glass, or seen flames lick up a building, in the alleged furtherance of a cause. Incidentally, part of the sweetness of life under the Ancien Régime was the knowledge that it was far from sweet for everyone; and the imagined distress of the owners of the property that rioters destroy is part of the joy of rioting.
In Liberia during the civil war, I saw in Monrovia the meticulous dismantlement of every last vestige of civilisation. The hospitals, for example, had not been destroyed by bazookas or bombs in fighting, but by a kind of obsessive vandalism by the rebels who had swept through them. Every castor had been cut from every trolley; every item of equipment had been damaged irrecoverably. In the Centennial Hall, the principal ceremonial building in the country, where presidents were inaugurated, I saw the body of a Steinway grand piano resting on the ground, surrounded by its legs, which had been carefully and no doubt laboriously sawn off. The library of the university had been ransacked, not to steal the books (I doubt that the vandals were great readers), but for the sheer pleasure of assisting entropy in its great work of returning the world to chaos. Incidentally, it is not unknown for librarians in Britain to react against the orderliness of their institutions in a similar way; but one can easily imagine the joy, the uplifted hearts, of the vandals in Monrovia as they went about their painstaking destruction.
After relatively minor riots in England some ten or 12 years ago, I found myself on the radio with a junior minister who spoke of them as if they were a genuine form of protest or commentary upon the social situation of the rioters, a real attempt to bring about an improvement in their situation. The tragedy of these riots, she said, was that they destroyed property and amenities in the areas in which the rioters themselves lived. I asked her whether she thought it would be better if the rioters came to her area and destroyed property and amenities there. The fact that the rioters only made their own environment worse was quite beside the point. Bakunin might have been in error when he said that the destructive urge was also a creative one; but he would have been right if he had said that the urge was omnipresent in the human heart, and gave great joy when given way to.
The urge to cruelty is not much different in this respect. I doubt there are many people who have never in their lives experienced the pleasure of inflicting some kind of pain on others, physical or mental, from sheer malice and delight in doing so. It is an urge that we overcome first by effort and then by habit.
It is one of the tasks of civilisation to tame our inherent savagery. But who, contemplating contemporary British culture, would recognise in it any civilising influence, or rather fail to recognise its opposite? It is a constant call to and celebration of degradation, not only physical but spiritual and emotional. A culture in which Amy Winehouse, with her militant vulgarity and self-indulgent stupidity, combined with a very minor talent, could be so extravagantly admired and feted, is not one to put up strong barriers against our baser instincts, desires and urges. On the contrary, that culture has long been a celebration of those very urges. He who pays the savage never gets rid of the savagery; and this is only the beginning.
And in Britain, there is little civilisation left to stop you
Only the wilfully blind could have been surprised by the scale or ferocity of the riots that have
engulfed Britain in the past week. Unfortunately, most of the country’s political and intellectual class have been wilfully blind for years, in a state of the most abject denial; a brief walk in any of our cities should have been enough to tell them all that they needed to know.
How anyone could have missed the aggressive malignity inscribed in the faces and manner of so many young men in Britain is a mystery to me. Perhaps, like Dr Watson, our political and intellectual class saw but did not observe; and they did not observe because they lacked the moral courage to attempt anything but appeasement.
The vulpine lope or swagger, the face that regards eye contact with a stranger as a challenge to be met, the adoption of fashions that are known to signify aggression and dangerousness, the grotesquely inflated self-esteem combined with a total incapacity for doing anything constructive: all could and should have sounded an alarm in our politicians. Not only is our population ageing, but a significant proportion of such young people as we have engendered are like this, which no doubt helps to explain why we have had to resort to the importation of foreign unskilled labour while maintaining high levels of domestic unemployment, especially among the young. It is as difficult to employ a hoodie as to hug him.
No one has paid serious attention to the mentality and culture of these young men (using the word culture in its broad, anthropological sense). The morality is that of Satan on his expulsion from heaven: evil, be thou my good. The aesthetics follow the morality. Ugliness, be thou my beauty.
The young men of whom I speak admire rather than abjure criminality. I first noticed this 20 years ago when young men came to me as patients who had tattooed on their cheek the blue spot that former inmates of borstals used as a sign of graduation, without their ever having been to borstal themselves. They not only wanted to appear tough, but were suffering from crime-envy. They wanted to be thought criminal: it was the new respectability. Sacha Baron Cohen turned gangsta-chic into a joke, a matter of idle curiosity, like watching an animal in a zoo, but it was not a joke to those who had to live with it; nor are our slums zoological gardens for our amusement and delectation, as we now see only too clearly.
Terms such as ‘unrest’ and ‘disaffection’, which trip so lightly off the tongue of those who do not want to face a far more disturbing reality, do not explain the behaviour of the rioters. It is obvious, for instance, that if there were any justice in the world — at least if justice is the right return for voluntary effort and conduct — the young rioters would be much worse off than they are. Their problem is not that they have been given too little, but that they have deserved nothing.
The riots are not a protest: the shooting of Mark Duggan — the full elucidation of which will no doubt take a long time and will remain forever the contested subject of paranoid rumour, whatever the eventual findings — was scarcely even a pretext. It is perfectly possible that the shooting will turn out to have been yet another example of the bullying incompetence of the police, but it goes without saying that, even so, young black men are much more likely to be shot by each other than by the police; there was once a never-to-be-forgotten scene in our intensive care unit when two young drug-dealers, who had shot each other without inflicting death, were on life-support machines opposite each other while under arrest, guarded from each other’s henchmen by the police. No riots of protest followed this glorious incident or many similar ones, some of which ended in death.
The evident glee of the rioters, celebrating and smiling triumphantly among the devastation they wrought, as if in victory, is testimony not to their outraged feelings, but to the strength of the destructive urge that lies within us all and has always to be kept under firm control. I remember as a child the sheer joy of smashing a radio on our lawn with a croquet mallet, a joy that was quite unrelated to any personal animus against the radio, which could not possibly have done me any harm. I loved the destruction for its own sake and wanted it to continue for as long as possible, smashing the parts into dust long after there was no possibility of repair, feeling that I was almost performing a duty in being so thorough in my annihilation of them. And the first riot, in Panama, that I ever attended — reporting on it for this magazine — taught me that rioting is fun, that the supposed reason for it is soon forgotten in the ecstatic pleasure of destruction. Talleyrand said that no one knew how sweet life could be who had not lived under the Ancien Régime; one might add that no one has known unalloyed joy who has not heard the tinkle of plate glass, or seen flames lick up a building, in the alleged furtherance of a cause. Incidentally, part of the sweetness of life under the Ancien Régime was the knowledge that it was far from sweet for everyone; and the imagined distress of the owners of the property that rioters destroy is part of the joy of rioting.
In Liberia during the civil war, I saw in Monrovia the meticulous dismantlement of every last vestige of civilisation. The hospitals, for example, had not been destroyed by bazookas or bombs in fighting, but by a kind of obsessive vandalism by the rebels who had swept through them. Every castor had been cut from every trolley; every item of equipment had been damaged irrecoverably. In the Centennial Hall, the principal ceremonial building in the country, where presidents were inaugurated, I saw the body of a Steinway grand piano resting on the ground, surrounded by its legs, which had been carefully and no doubt laboriously sawn off. The library of the university had been ransacked, not to steal the books (I doubt that the vandals were great readers), but for the sheer pleasure of assisting entropy in its great work of returning the world to chaos. Incidentally, it is not unknown for librarians in Britain to react against the orderliness of their institutions in a similar way; but one can easily imagine the joy, the uplifted hearts, of the vandals in Monrovia as they went about their painstaking destruction.
After relatively minor riots in England some ten or 12 years ago, I found myself on the radio with a junior minister who spoke of them as if they were a genuine form of protest or commentary upon the social situation of the rioters, a real attempt to bring about an improvement in their situation. The tragedy of these riots, she said, was that they destroyed property and amenities in the areas in which the rioters themselves lived. I asked her whether she thought it would be better if the rioters came to her area and destroyed property and amenities there. The fact that the rioters only made their own environment worse was quite beside the point. Bakunin might have been in error when he said that the destructive urge was also a creative one; but he would have been right if he had said that the urge was omnipresent in the human heart, and gave great joy when given way to.
The urge to cruelty is not much different in this respect. I doubt there are many people who have never in their lives experienced the pleasure of inflicting some kind of pain on others, physical or mental, from sheer malice and delight in doing so. It is an urge that we overcome first by effort and then by habit.
It is one of the tasks of civilisation to tame our inherent savagery. But who, contemplating contemporary British culture, would recognise in it any civilising influence, or rather fail to recognise its opposite? It is a constant call to and celebration of degradation, not only physical but spiritual and emotional. A culture in which Amy Winehouse, with her militant vulgarity and self-indulgent stupidity, combined with a very minor talent, could be so extravagantly admired and feted, is not one to put up strong barriers against our baser instincts, desires and urges. On the contrary, that culture has long been a celebration of those very urges. He who pays the savage never gets rid of the savagery; and this is only the beginning.
Article | The Barbarians Inside Britain's Gates
Article | The Barbarians Inside Britain's Gates
All the young rioters will have had long experience with the justice system’s efforts to confer impunity upon law breakers.
The youth of Britain have long placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of venturing forth after dark than would peasants in Bram Stoker’s Transylvania. Indeed, well before the riots last week, respectable persons would not venture into the centers of most British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights, for fear—and in the certainty—of encountering drunken and aggressive youngsters. In Britain nowadays, the difference between ordinary social life and riot is only a matter of degree, not of type.
A short time ago, I gave a talk in a school in an exquisite market town, deep in the countryside. Came Friday night, however, and the inhabitants locked themselves into their houses against the invasion of the barbarians. In my own little market town of Bridgnorth, in Shropshire, where not long ago a man was nearly beaten to death 20 yards from my house, drunken young people often rampage down one of its lovely little streets, causing much damage and preventing sleep. No one, of course, dares ask them to stop. The Shropshire council has dealt with the problem by granting a license for a pub in the town to open until 4 a.m., as if what the town needed was the opportunity for yet more and later drunkenness.
If the authorities show neither the will nor the capacity to deal with such an easily solved problem—and willfully do all they can to worsen it—is it any wonder that they exhibit, in the face of more difficult problems, all the courage and determination of frightened rabbits?
The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.
“There are people here with nothing,” this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.
But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).
The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.
The icing on the cake, as it were, is that social charges on labor and the minimum wage are so high that no employer can possibly extract from the young unemployed Briton anything like the value of what it costs to employ him. And thus we have the paradox of high youth unemployment at the very same time that we suck in young workers from abroad.
The culture in which the young unemployed have immersed themselves is not one that is likely to promote virtues such as self-discipline, honesty and diligence. Four lines from the most famous lyric of the late and unlamentable Amy Winehouse should establish the point:
I didn’t get a lot in class
But I know it don’t come in a shot glass
They tried to make me go to rehab
But I said ’no, no, no’
This message is not quite the same as, for example, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.”
Furthermore, all the young rioters will have had long experience of the prodigious efforts of the British criminal justice system to confer impunity upon law breakers. First the police are far too busy with their paperwork to catch the criminals; but if by some chance—hardly more than one in 20—they do catch them, the courts oblige by inflicting ludicrously lenient sentences.
A single example will suffice, but one among many. A woman got into an argument with someone in a supermarket. She called her boyfriend, a violent habitual criminal, “to come and sort him out.” The boyfriend was already on bail on another charge and wore an electronic tag because of another conviction. (Incidentally, research shows that a third of all crimes in Scotland are committed by people on bail, and there is no reason England should be any different.)
The boyfriend arrived in the supermarket and struck a man a heavy blow to the head. He fell to the ground and died of his head injury. When told that he had got the “wrong” man, the assailant said he would have attacked the “right” one had he not been restrained. He was sentenced to serve not more than 30 months in prison. Since punishments must be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime, a sentence like this exerts tremendous downward pressure on sentences for lesser, but still serious, crimes.
So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of crime.
David Cameron is not the man for the job.
All the young rioters will have had long experience with the justice system’s efforts to confer impunity upon law breakers.
The youth of Britain have long placed a de facto curfew on the old, who in most places would no more think of venturing forth after dark than would peasants in Bram Stoker’s Transylvania. Indeed, well before the riots last week, respectable persons would not venture into the centers of most British cities or towns on Friday and Saturday nights, for fear—and in the certainty—of encountering drunken and aggressive youngsters. In Britain nowadays, the difference between ordinary social life and riot is only a matter of degree, not of type.
A short time ago, I gave a talk in a school in an exquisite market town, deep in the countryside. Came Friday night, however, and the inhabitants locked themselves into their houses against the invasion of the barbarians. In my own little market town of Bridgnorth, in Shropshire, where not long ago a man was nearly beaten to death 20 yards from my house, drunken young people often rampage down one of its lovely little streets, causing much damage and preventing sleep. No one, of course, dares ask them to stop. The Shropshire council has dealt with the problem by granting a license for a pub in the town to open until 4 a.m., as if what the town needed was the opportunity for yet more and later drunkenness.
If the authorities show neither the will nor the capacity to deal with such an easily solved problem—and willfully do all they can to worsen it—is it any wonder that they exhibit, in the face of more difficult problems, all the courage and determination of frightened rabbits?
The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.
“There are people here with nothing,” this rioter continued: nothing, that is, except an education that has cost $80,000, a roof over their head, clothes on their back and shoes on their feet, food in their stomachs, a cellphone, a flat-screen TV, a refrigerator, an electric stove, heating and lighting, hot and cold running water, a guaranteed income, free medical care, and all of the same for any of the children that they might care to propagate.
But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).
The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.
The icing on the cake, as it were, is that social charges on labor and the minimum wage are so high that no employer can possibly extract from the young unemployed Briton anything like the value of what it costs to employ him. And thus we have the paradox of high youth unemployment at the very same time that we suck in young workers from abroad.
The culture in which the young unemployed have immersed themselves is not one that is likely to promote virtues such as self-discipline, honesty and diligence. Four lines from the most famous lyric of the late and unlamentable Amy Winehouse should establish the point:
I didn’t get a lot in class
But I know it don’t come in a shot glass
They tried to make me go to rehab
But I said ’no, no, no’
This message is not quite the same as, for example, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.”
Furthermore, all the young rioters will have had long experience of the prodigious efforts of the British criminal justice system to confer impunity upon law breakers. First the police are far too busy with their paperwork to catch the criminals; but if by some chance—hardly more than one in 20—they do catch them, the courts oblige by inflicting ludicrously lenient sentences.
A single example will suffice, but one among many. A woman got into an argument with someone in a supermarket. She called her boyfriend, a violent habitual criminal, “to come and sort him out.” The boyfriend was already on bail on another charge and wore an electronic tag because of another conviction. (Incidentally, research shows that a third of all crimes in Scotland are committed by people on bail, and there is no reason England should be any different.)
The boyfriend arrived in the supermarket and struck a man a heavy blow to the head. He fell to the ground and died of his head injury. When told that he had got the “wrong” man, the assailant said he would have attacked the “right” one had he not been restrained. He was sentenced to serve not more than 30 months in prison. Since punishments must be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime, a sentence like this exerts tremendous downward pressure on sentences for lesser, but still serious, crimes.
So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of crime.
David Cameron is not the man for the job.
Social Degeneration by Thomas Sowell
Social Degeneration by Thomas Sowell
Someone at long last has had the courage to tell the plain, honest truth about race.
After mobs of young blacks rampaged through Philadelphia committing violence – as similar mobs have rampaged through Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee and other places – Philadelphia's black mayor, Michael A. Nutter, ordered a police crackdown and lashed out at the whole lifestyle of those who did such things.
"Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt," he said. "If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. He added: "You have damaged your own race."
While this might seem like it is just plain common sense, what Mayor Nutter said undermines a whole vision of the world that has brought fame, fortune and power to race hustlers in politics, the media and academia. Any racial disparities in hiring can only be due to racism and discrimination, according to the prevailing vision, which reaches from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Just to identify the rioters and looters as black is a radical departure, when mayors, police chiefs and the media in other cities report on these outbreaks of violence without mentioning the race of those who are doing these things. The Chicago Tribune even made excuses for failing to mention race when reporting on violent attacks by blacks on whites in Chicago.
Such excuses might make sense if the same politicians and media talking heads were not constantly mentioning race when denouncing the fact that a disproportionate number of young black men are being sent to prison.
The prevailing social dogma is that disparities in outcomes between races can only be due to disparities in how these races are treated. In other words, there cannot possibly be any differences in behavior.
But if black and white Americans had exactly the same behavior patterns, they would be the only two groups on this planet that are the same.
The Chinese minority in Malaysia has long been more successful and more prosperous than the Malay majority, just as the Indians in Fiji have long been more successful and more prosperous than the indigenous Fijians. At various places and times throughout history, the same could be said of the Armenians in Turkey, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Parsees in India, the Japanese in Brazil, and numerous others.
There are similar disparities within particular racial or ethnic groups. Even this late in history, I have had northern Italians explain to me why they are not like southern Italians. In Australia, Jewish leaders in both Sydney and Melbourne went to great lengths to tell me why and how the Jews are different in these two cities.
In the United States, despite the higher poverty level among blacks than among whites, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994. The disparities within the black community are huge, both in behavior and in outcomes.
Nevertheless, the dogma persists that differences between groups can only be due to the way others treat them or to differences in the way others perceive them in "stereotypes."
All around the country, people in politics and the media have been tip-toeing around the fact that violent attacks by blacks on whites in public places are racially motivated, even when the attackers themselves use anti-white invective and mock the victims they leave lying on the streets bleeding.
This is not something to ignore or excuse. It is something to be stopped. Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia seems to be the first to openly recognize this.
This needs to be done for the sake of both black and white Americans – and even for the sake of the hoodlums. They have set out on a path that leads only downward for themselves.
Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.
That includes a pattern of violent attacks on whites in public places in Chicago, Denver, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as blacks in schools beating up Asian classmates – for years – in New York and Philadelphia.
These attacks have been accompanied by explicitly racist statements by the attackers, so it is not a question of having to figure out what the motivation is. There has also been rioting and looting by these young hoodlums.
Yet blacks have no monopoly on these ugly and malicious episodes. Remarkably similar things are being done by lower-class whites in England. Anybody reading "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple will recognize the same barbaric and self-destructive patterns among people with the same attitudes, even though their skin color is different.
Anyone reading today's headline stories about young hoodlums turning the streets of London into scenes of shattered and burning chaos, complete with violence, will discover the down side of the brotherhood of man.
While the history and the races are different, what is the same in both countries are the social policies and social attitudes long promoted by the intelligentsia and welfare state politicians.
A recent study in England found 352,000 households in which nobody had ever worked. Moreover, two-thirds of the adults in those households said that they didn't want to work. As in America, such people feel both "entitled" and aggrieved.
In both countries, those who have achieved less have been taught by the educational system, by the media and by politicians on the left that they have a grievance against those who have achieved more. As in the United States, they feel a fierce sense of resentment against strangers who have done nothing to them, and lash out violently against those strangers.
During the riots, looting and violence in England, a young woman was quoted as saying that this showed "the rich" and the police that "we can do whatever we want." Among the things done during these riots was forcing apparently prosperous looking people to strip naked in the streets.
The need to bring people down in humiliation that marked the mass violence against the Armenians in Turkey nearly a century ago, and that later marked the Nazi persecutions of the Jews in Germany, is still alive and well in people who resent those who have achieved more than they have.
A milder but revealing episode in England some time back involved burglars who were not content to simply steal things but also vented their hostility by scrawling on the wall: "RICH BASTARDS."
In the United States, young black thugs attacked whites with baseball bats and took their belongings in Denver, while voicing their hatred of whites. But it is all a very similar attitude to what has been found in other countries and other times.
Today's politically correct intelligentsia will tell you that the reason for this alienation and lashing out is that there are great disparities and inequities that need to be addressed.
But such barbarism was not nearly as widespread two generations ago, in the middle of the 20th century. Were there no disparities or inequities then? Actually there were more.
What is different today is that there has been – for decades – a steady drumbeat of media and political hype about differences in income, education and other outcomes, blaming these differences on oppression against those with fewer achievements or lesser prosperity.
Moreover, there has been a growing tolerance of lawlessness and a growing intolerance toward the idea that people who are lagging need to take steps to raise themselves up, instead of trying to pull others down.
All this exalts those who talk such lofty talk. But others pay the price – and ultimately that includes even those who take the road toward barbarism.
The orgies of violent attacks against strangers on the streets – in both England and the United States – are not necessarily just passing episodes. They should be wake-up calls, warning of the continuing degeneration of Western society.
As British doctor and author Theodore Dalrymple said, long before these riots broke out, "the good are afraid of the bad and the bad are afraid of nothing."
Not only the trends over the years leading up to these riots but also the squeamish responses to them by officials – on both sides of the Atlantic – reveal the moral dry rot that has spread deep into Western societies.
Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.
In England, the government did not call out the troops to squash their riots at the outset. The net result was that young hoodlums got to rampage and loot for hours, while the police struggled to try to contain the violence. Hoodlums returned home with loot from stores with impunity, as well as bringing home with them a contempt for the law and for the rights of other people.
With all the damage that was done by these rioters, both to cities and to the whole fabric of British society, it is very unlikely that most of the people who were arrested will be sentenced to jail. Only 7 percent of people convicted of crime in England are actually put behind bars.
"Alternatives to incarceration" are in vogue among the politically correct elites in England, just as in the United States. But in Britain those elites have had much more clout for a much longer time. And they have done much more damage.
Nevertheless, our own politically correct elites are pointing us in the same direction. A headline in the New York Times shows the same politically correct mindset in the United States: "London Riots Put Spotlight on Troubled, Unemployed Youths in Britain." There is not a speck of evidence that the rioters and looters are troubled – unless you engage in circular reasoning and say that they must have been troubled to do the things they did.
In reality, like other rioters on both sides of the Atlantic they are often exultant in their violence and happy to be returning home with stolen designer clothes and upscale electronic devices.
In both England and in the United States, whole generations have been fed a steady diet of grievances and resentment against society, and especially against others who are more prosperous than they are. They get this in their schools, on television, on campuses and in the movies. Nothing is their own fault. It is all "society's" fault.
One of the young Britons interviewed in the New York Times reported that he had learned to read only three years ago. He is not unique. In Theodore Dalrymple's book, Life at the Bottom, he referred to many British youths who are unashamedly illiterate. The lyrics of a popular song in Britain said, "We don't need no education" and another song was titled "Poor, White and Stupid."
Dr. Dalrymple says, "I cannot recall meeting a sixteen-year-old white from the public housing estates that are near my hospital who could multiple nine by seven."
In the United States, the color may be different but the attitudes among the hoodlum element are very similar. In both countries, classmates who try to learn can find themselves targeted by bullies.
Here those who want to study in ghetto schools are often accused of "acting white." But whites in Britain show the same pattern. Some conscientious students are beaten up badly enough to end up at Dr. Dalrymple's hospital.
Our elites often advise us to learn from other countries. They usually mean that we should imitate other countries. But it may be far more important to learn from their mistakes – the biggest of which may be listening to fashionable nonsense from the smug intelligentsia.
These countries show us where that smug nonsense leads. It may be a sneak preview of our own future.
"Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
Someone at long last has had the courage to tell the plain, honest truth about race.
After mobs of young blacks rampaged through Philadelphia committing violence – as similar mobs have rampaged through Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee and other places – Philadelphia's black mayor, Michael A. Nutter, ordered a police crackdown and lashed out at the whole lifestyle of those who did such things.
"Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt," he said. "If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. He added: "You have damaged your own race."
While this might seem like it is just plain common sense, what Mayor Nutter said undermines a whole vision of the world that has brought fame, fortune and power to race hustlers in politics, the media and academia. Any racial disparities in hiring can only be due to racism and discrimination, according to the prevailing vision, which reaches from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Just to identify the rioters and looters as black is a radical departure, when mayors, police chiefs and the media in other cities report on these outbreaks of violence without mentioning the race of those who are doing these things. The Chicago Tribune even made excuses for failing to mention race when reporting on violent attacks by blacks on whites in Chicago.
Such excuses might make sense if the same politicians and media talking heads were not constantly mentioning race when denouncing the fact that a disproportionate number of young black men are being sent to prison.
The prevailing social dogma is that disparities in outcomes between races can only be due to disparities in how these races are treated. In other words, there cannot possibly be any differences in behavior.
But if black and white Americans had exactly the same behavior patterns, they would be the only two groups on this planet that are the same.
The Chinese minority in Malaysia has long been more successful and more prosperous than the Malay majority, just as the Indians in Fiji have long been more successful and more prosperous than the indigenous Fijians. At various places and times throughout history, the same could be said of the Armenians in Turkey, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Parsees in India, the Japanese in Brazil, and numerous others.
There are similar disparities within particular racial or ethnic groups. Even this late in history, I have had northern Italians explain to me why they are not like southern Italians. In Australia, Jewish leaders in both Sydney and Melbourne went to great lengths to tell me why and how the Jews are different in these two cities.
In the United States, despite the higher poverty level among blacks than among whites, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994. The disparities within the black community are huge, both in behavior and in outcomes.
Nevertheless, the dogma persists that differences between groups can only be due to the way others treat them or to differences in the way others perceive them in "stereotypes."
All around the country, people in politics and the media have been tip-toeing around the fact that violent attacks by blacks on whites in public places are racially motivated, even when the attackers themselves use anti-white invective and mock the victims they leave lying on the streets bleeding.
This is not something to ignore or excuse. It is something to be stopped. Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia seems to be the first to openly recognize this.
This needs to be done for the sake of both black and white Americans – and even for the sake of the hoodlums. They have set out on a path that leads only downward for themselves.
Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.
That includes a pattern of violent attacks on whites in public places in Chicago, Denver, New York, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Kansas City, as well as blacks in schools beating up Asian classmates – for years – in New York and Philadelphia.
These attacks have been accompanied by explicitly racist statements by the attackers, so it is not a question of having to figure out what the motivation is. There has also been rioting and looting by these young hoodlums.
Yet blacks have no monopoly on these ugly and malicious episodes. Remarkably similar things are being done by lower-class whites in England. Anybody reading "Life at the Bottom" by Theodore Dalrymple will recognize the same barbaric and self-destructive patterns among people with the same attitudes, even though their skin color is different.
Anyone reading today's headline stories about young hoodlums turning the streets of London into scenes of shattered and burning chaos, complete with violence, will discover the down side of the brotherhood of man.
While the history and the races are different, what is the same in both countries are the social policies and social attitudes long promoted by the intelligentsia and welfare state politicians.
A recent study in England found 352,000 households in which nobody had ever worked. Moreover, two-thirds of the adults in those households said that they didn't want to work. As in America, such people feel both "entitled" and aggrieved.
In both countries, those who have achieved less have been taught by the educational system, by the media and by politicians on the left that they have a grievance against those who have achieved more. As in the United States, they feel a fierce sense of resentment against strangers who have done nothing to them, and lash out violently against those strangers.
During the riots, looting and violence in England, a young woman was quoted as saying that this showed "the rich" and the police that "we can do whatever we want." Among the things done during these riots was forcing apparently prosperous looking people to strip naked in the streets.
The need to bring people down in humiliation that marked the mass violence against the Armenians in Turkey nearly a century ago, and that later marked the Nazi persecutions of the Jews in Germany, is still alive and well in people who resent those who have achieved more than they have.
A milder but revealing episode in England some time back involved burglars who were not content to simply steal things but also vented their hostility by scrawling on the wall: "RICH BASTARDS."
In the United States, young black thugs attacked whites with baseball bats and took their belongings in Denver, while voicing their hatred of whites. But it is all a very similar attitude to what has been found in other countries and other times.
Today's politically correct intelligentsia will tell you that the reason for this alienation and lashing out is that there are great disparities and inequities that need to be addressed.
But such barbarism was not nearly as widespread two generations ago, in the middle of the 20th century. Were there no disparities or inequities then? Actually there were more.
What is different today is that there has been – for decades – a steady drumbeat of media and political hype about differences in income, education and other outcomes, blaming these differences on oppression against those with fewer achievements or lesser prosperity.
Moreover, there has been a growing tolerance of lawlessness and a growing intolerance toward the idea that people who are lagging need to take steps to raise themselves up, instead of trying to pull others down.
All this exalts those who talk such lofty talk. But others pay the price – and ultimately that includes even those who take the road toward barbarism.
The orgies of violent attacks against strangers on the streets – in both England and the United States – are not necessarily just passing episodes. They should be wake-up calls, warning of the continuing degeneration of Western society.
As British doctor and author Theodore Dalrymple said, long before these riots broke out, "the good are afraid of the bad and the bad are afraid of nothing."
Not only the trends over the years leading up to these riots but also the squeamish responses to them by officials – on both sides of the Atlantic – reveal the moral dry rot that has spread deep into Western societies.
Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don't cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.
In England, the government did not call out the troops to squash their riots at the outset. The net result was that young hoodlums got to rampage and loot for hours, while the police struggled to try to contain the violence. Hoodlums returned home with loot from stores with impunity, as well as bringing home with them a contempt for the law and for the rights of other people.
With all the damage that was done by these rioters, both to cities and to the whole fabric of British society, it is very unlikely that most of the people who were arrested will be sentenced to jail. Only 7 percent of people convicted of crime in England are actually put behind bars.
"Alternatives to incarceration" are in vogue among the politically correct elites in England, just as in the United States. But in Britain those elites have had much more clout for a much longer time. And they have done much more damage.
Nevertheless, our own politically correct elites are pointing us in the same direction. A headline in the New York Times shows the same politically correct mindset in the United States: "London Riots Put Spotlight on Troubled, Unemployed Youths in Britain." There is not a speck of evidence that the rioters and looters are troubled – unless you engage in circular reasoning and say that they must have been troubled to do the things they did.
In reality, like other rioters on both sides of the Atlantic they are often exultant in their violence and happy to be returning home with stolen designer clothes and upscale electronic devices.
In both England and in the United States, whole generations have been fed a steady diet of grievances and resentment against society, and especially against others who are more prosperous than they are. They get this in their schools, on television, on campuses and in the movies. Nothing is their own fault. It is all "society's" fault.
One of the young Britons interviewed in the New York Times reported that he had learned to read only three years ago. He is not unique. In Theodore Dalrymple's book, Life at the Bottom, he referred to many British youths who are unashamedly illiterate. The lyrics of a popular song in Britain said, "We don't need no education" and another song was titled "Poor, White and Stupid."
Dr. Dalrymple says, "I cannot recall meeting a sixteen-year-old white from the public housing estates that are near my hospital who could multiple nine by seven."
In the United States, the color may be different but the attitudes among the hoodlum element are very similar. In both countries, classmates who try to learn can find themselves targeted by bullies.
Here those who want to study in ghetto schools are often accused of "acting white." But whites in Britain show the same pattern. Some conscientious students are beaten up badly enough to end up at Dr. Dalrymple's hospital.
Our elites often advise us to learn from other countries. They usually mean that we should imitate other countries. But it may be far more important to learn from their mistakes – the biggest of which may be listening to fashionable nonsense from the smug intelligentsia.
These countries show us where that smug nonsense leads. It may be a sneak preview of our own future.
"Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Foreclosure fraud investigators forced out at attorney general's office
Corruption? | Foreclosure Fraud Investigators Forced Out at Pam Bondi's Office
http://4closurefraud.org/
A lead foreclosure fraud investigator for the state said she and a colleague were forced to resign from the Florida attorney general's office, unexpectedly ending their nearly yearlong pursuit to hold law firms and banks accountable.
Former Assistant Attorney General Theresa Edwards and colleague June Clarkson had been investigating the state's so-called "foreclosure mills," uncovering evidence of legal malpractice that also implicated banks and loan servicers.
Despite positive performance evaluations, Edwards said the two were told during a meeting with their supervisor in late May to give up their jobs voluntarily or be let go. Edwards said no reason was given for the move.
"It all happened very abruptly," said Edwards, who had worked in the attorney general's office for about three years.
The foreclosure investigations were launched under former Attorney General Bill McCollum, but Edwards said she sensed changes were coming under Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
"I think they wanted to put people in there that were more in line with their thinking," Edwards said.
Bondi's press secretary said Tuesday that foreclosure investigations are still open and are being personally led or supervised by Division Director Richard Lawson.
"The division has made these investigations a top priority and will continue to actively pursue all of our investigations into foreclosure law firms," said Jennifer Krell Davis.
But Edwards said she was given no time to brief anyone on the investigations and that there were notes that had yet to be transcribed and filed.
Davis said she could not comment on personnel issues when asked about the nature of the resignations.
On May 20, Edwards said she and Clarkson were summoned together to a meeting at 3:30 p.m. and told by Robert Julian, then the South Florida bureau chief for the Economic Crimes Section of the attorney general's office, that they had the opportunity to resign or would be let go immediately. They turned in nearly identical resignation letters that day.
"We had absolutely no idea it was coming," said Edwards, who in an April 22 performance review she provided to The Palm Beach Post was praised by Julian.
"During this interim period, Ms. Edwards has, along with another attorney, achieved what is believed to be the first settlement in the United States relating to law firm foreclosure mills," the review says. "Her work has been instrumental in triggering a nationwide review of such practices."
The Fort Lauderdale-based Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson agreed to pay $2 million in March to settle the attorney general's investigation.
Clarkson, who is on vacation and could not be reached Tuesday, also received high marks from Julian on a performance evaluation in September, which was obtained through a public records request. She was given "above expectation" or "exceptional" rankings in 14 of 15 categories.
Edwards said Julian has since been placed in another position. A message left at his office Tuesday was not returned.
In sworn statements taken by Edwards and Clarkson as part of their investigation of the Law Offices of David J. Stern, former employees described conditions where signatures were regularly forged on foreclosure documents, paperwork was notarized by non-notaries, and flawed files were hidden from auditors of federal mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Fannie and Freddie subsequently fired Stern's Plantation-based firm, and would eventually stop sending business to two other South Florida firms facing state inquiry.
"I know those two ladies did a yeoman's job, and it perplexed me when they left the office," Josh Bleil, a partner in the Ticktin Law Group foreclosure defense firm, said about Edwards and Clarkson. "They were instrumental in creating the Power Point presentation that blew up everything."
Bleil is referring to a 98-page report titled "Unfair, Deceptive and Unconscionable Acts in Foreclosure Cases," which outlines instances of questionable signatures and notarizations, as well as foreclosures filed by entities that might not have had the legal ability to foreclose.
Julian notes in Edwards' April performance review that the foreclosure investigation has faced criticism.
His opponents said McCollum was politically motivated when he issued subpoenas to three law firms in August before the Republican primary. McCollum, who now works for the SNR Denton law firm in Washington, could not be reached Tuesday.
And the investigation has had setbacks. The Boca Raton-based firm Shapiro & Fishman won a ruling in the 4th District Court of Appeal in April to quash its subpoena. The state is not challenging the decision but Davis said the investigation remains ongoing.
In January, Bondi's office told lawmakers in a Senate Banking and Insurance Committee meeting that Florida's foreclosure process is in "total disarray" with a "morass" of fraudulent paperwork.
Committee member Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, criticized suggestions that banks should be pushed to employ foreclosure alternatives such as short sales. He also objected to the term "foreclosure mill" when referring to the state's large law firms that represent banks.
"Foreclosure mill could also be called very busy law firm because you provide excellent service to your clients," Negron said.
Edwards and Clarkson have opened their own foreclosure defense firm based in Hollywood and hope to help homeowners with the knowledge they gained in the attorney general's office.
"It's been a very unexpected change in circumstance," Edwards said.
http://4closurefraud.org/
A lead foreclosure fraud investigator for the state said she and a colleague were forced to resign from the Florida attorney general's office, unexpectedly ending their nearly yearlong pursuit to hold law firms and banks accountable.
Former Assistant Attorney General Theresa Edwards and colleague June Clarkson had been investigating the state's so-called "foreclosure mills," uncovering evidence of legal malpractice that also implicated banks and loan servicers.
Despite positive performance evaluations, Edwards said the two were told during a meeting with their supervisor in late May to give up their jobs voluntarily or be let go. Edwards said no reason was given for the move.
"It all happened very abruptly," said Edwards, who had worked in the attorney general's office for about three years.
The foreclosure investigations were launched under former Attorney General Bill McCollum, but Edwards said she sensed changes were coming under Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
"I think they wanted to put people in there that were more in line with their thinking," Edwards said.
Bondi's press secretary said Tuesday that foreclosure investigations are still open and are being personally led or supervised by Division Director Richard Lawson.
"The division has made these investigations a top priority and will continue to actively pursue all of our investigations into foreclosure law firms," said Jennifer Krell Davis.
But Edwards said she was given no time to brief anyone on the investigations and that there were notes that had yet to be transcribed and filed.
Davis said she could not comment on personnel issues when asked about the nature of the resignations.
On May 20, Edwards said she and Clarkson were summoned together to a meeting at 3:30 p.m. and told by Robert Julian, then the South Florida bureau chief for the Economic Crimes Section of the attorney general's office, that they had the opportunity to resign or would be let go immediately. They turned in nearly identical resignation letters that day.
"We had absolutely no idea it was coming," said Edwards, who in an April 22 performance review she provided to The Palm Beach Post was praised by Julian.
"During this interim period, Ms. Edwards has, along with another attorney, achieved what is believed to be the first settlement in the United States relating to law firm foreclosure mills," the review says. "Her work has been instrumental in triggering a nationwide review of such practices."
The Fort Lauderdale-based Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson agreed to pay $2 million in March to settle the attorney general's investigation.
Clarkson, who is on vacation and could not be reached Tuesday, also received high marks from Julian on a performance evaluation in September, which was obtained through a public records request. She was given "above expectation" or "exceptional" rankings in 14 of 15 categories.
Edwards said Julian has since been placed in another position. A message left at his office Tuesday was not returned.
In sworn statements taken by Edwards and Clarkson as part of their investigation of the Law Offices of David J. Stern, former employees described conditions where signatures were regularly forged on foreclosure documents, paperwork was notarized by non-notaries, and flawed files were hidden from auditors of federal mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Fannie and Freddie subsequently fired Stern's Plantation-based firm, and would eventually stop sending business to two other South Florida firms facing state inquiry.
"I know those two ladies did a yeoman's job, and it perplexed me when they left the office," Josh Bleil, a partner in the Ticktin Law Group foreclosure defense firm, said about Edwards and Clarkson. "They were instrumental in creating the Power Point presentation that blew up everything."
Bleil is referring to a 98-page report titled "Unfair, Deceptive and Unconscionable Acts in Foreclosure Cases," which outlines instances of questionable signatures and notarizations, as well as foreclosures filed by entities that might not have had the legal ability to foreclose.
Julian notes in Edwards' April performance review that the foreclosure investigation has faced criticism.
His opponents said McCollum was politically motivated when he issued subpoenas to three law firms in August before the Republican primary. McCollum, who now works for the SNR Denton law firm in Washington, could not be reached Tuesday.
And the investigation has had setbacks. The Boca Raton-based firm Shapiro & Fishman won a ruling in the 4th District Court of Appeal in April to quash its subpoena. The state is not challenging the decision but Davis said the investigation remains ongoing.
In January, Bondi's office told lawmakers in a Senate Banking and Insurance Committee meeting that Florida's foreclosure process is in "total disarray" with a "morass" of fraudulent paperwork.
Committee member Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, criticized suggestions that banks should be pushed to employ foreclosure alternatives such as short sales. He also objected to the term "foreclosure mill" when referring to the state's large law firms that represent banks.
"Foreclosure mill could also be called very busy law firm because you provide excellent service to your clients," Negron said.
Edwards and Clarkson have opened their own foreclosure defense firm based in Hollywood and hope to help homeowners with the knowledge they gained in the attorney general's office.
"It's been a very unexpected change in circumstance," Edwards said.
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