Monday, February 29, 2016

William J. Clinton: Executive Order 12852 - Presidents Council on Sustainable Development

William J. Clinton: Executive Order 12852 - Presidents Council on Sustainable Development

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 301 of title 3, United States Code, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Establishment. There is established the "President’s Council on Sustainable Development" ("Council"). The Council shall consist of not more than 25 members to be appointed by the President from the public and private sectors and who represent industrial, environmental, governmental, and not-for-profit organizations with experience relating to matters of sustainable development. The President shall designate from among the Council members such official or officials to be chairperson, chairpersons, vice-chairperson, or vice-chairpersons of the Council as he shall deem appropriate. The Council shall coordinate with and report to such officials of the executive branch as the President or the Director of the White House Office on Environmental Policy shall from time to time determine.

Sec. 2. Functions. (a) The Council shall advise the President on matters involving sustainable development. "Sustainable development" is broadly defined as economic growth that will benefit present and future generations without detrimentally affecting the resources or biological systems of the planet.

(b)
The Council shall develop and recommend to the President a national sustainable development action strategy that will foster economic vitality.
(c)
The chairperson or chairpersons may, from time to time, invite experts to submit information to the Council and may form subcommittees of the Council to review and report to the Council on the development of national and local sustainable development plans.
Sec. 3. Administration. (a) The heads of executive agencies shall, to the extent permitted by law, provide to the Council such information with respect to sustainable development as the Council requires to carry out its functions.
(b)
Members of the Council shall serve without compensation, but shall be allowed travel expenses, including per diem in lieu of subsistence, as authorized by law for persons serving intermittently in the Government service (5 U.S.C. 5701–5707).
(c)
The White House Office on Environmental Policy shall obtain funding for the Council from the Department of the Interior or such other sources (including other Federal agencies) as may lawfully contribute to such activities. The funding received shall provide for the administrative and financial support of the Council.
(d)
The Office of Administration in the Executive Office of the President shall, on a reimbursable basis, provide such administrative services for the Council as may be required.

Sec. 4. General. (a) I have determined that the Council shall be established in compliance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, as amended (5

U.S.C. App.). Notwithstanding any other Executive order, the functions of the President under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, as amended, except that of reporting to the Congress, which are applicable to the Council, shall be performed by the Office of Administration in the Executive Office

of the President in accord with the guidelines and procedures established by the Administrator of General Services.

(b)
The Council shall exist for a period of 2 years from the date of this order, unless the Council’s charter is subsequently extended.
(c)
Executive Order No. 12737, which established the President’s Commission on Environmental Quality, is revoked.

William J. Clinton
THE WHITE HOUSE,
June 29, 1993.



Citation: William J. Clinton: "Executive Order 12852 - Presidents Council on Sustainable Development," June 29, 1993. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=61547.


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Saturday, February 27, 2016

Muslim Ideolgy Painted With Tose Cokired Glasses As the Blood of Christians Runs Unabatted

From TIME.com comes the idiocy of complacency in the midst of the invasion of Islam. Haroon Moghul, the author of this insulting propaganda, is speaking at the Feb. 29 event “Muslim in America” with PEN America and the Greene Space at WNYC (Ayad Akhtar, Rozina Ali, and Haroon Moghul in Conversation)

(Haroon Moghul propaganda is exposed in this article in "Jihad Watch", a picture of how Islam is hijacking freedom in America. http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/05/dont-be-fooled-by-haroon-moghul)

Islamophobia Is Ruining America—But Not How You Think

Obama Mosque Visit

A few years ago, my uncle visited the U.S. for the first time. When I met him in Brooklyn, though, he was far from excited. Of all the things he could have started our conversation with, it was this: “Is the subway under construction?”

“Which station?” I wondered.

He paused. “…All of them?”

I burst out laughing, because I understood.

Each time I land at JFK, I am amazed. Shortly after you exit, the manicured lawns vanish, the smooth surfaces become potholed and cratered—New York begins. Heaven forbid you fly to LaGuardia, where there’s only a creaking bus service. It is almost impossible to go via mass transit between most of Brooklyn and Queens, which are over four million people. Many of the city’s rail tunnels still haven’t recovered from Hurricane Sandy, and nobody knows what’ll happen if there’s another big storm. The Second Avenue subway was conceived before we could conceive of a black President, and it’s still not done. This is America’s alpha city and, with London, one of the two most important. In the world. But New York isn’t an American outlier.

Your smartphone is more advanced than nearly every air-traffic control system. Our sewage pipes, bridges and highways are falling apart. The residents of Flint, Michigan, just found their water is the opposite of potable. We are still the world’s most powerful country, one of the most secure, and one of the most stable. But our country has been crumbling apart for years now, and we’ve done next to nothing about it.

You can blame Islamophobia for that.

Islamophobia is like racism not because Islam is a race, but because, for the Islamophobe, “Islam” plays the same role “race” did for racists. It’s all about broad, sweeping, malicious judgments. Has any other demographic had to suffer the indignity of being declared insufficiently loyal to be President, or hear proposals to be banned from the country? When Trump and Cruz argue over who will impose more war crimes, do you think they mean to waterboard Dylann Storm Roof, or kill his family members?

There are a lot of explanations for where this hateful language comes from; a report for the Center for American Progress, Fear, Inc., outlined the deliberate and calculated inflammation of anti-Muslim sentiment on the right. But Islamophobia was also the vehicle by which the Bush administration was able to sell its policies. Most Americans know very little about Islam. Most, as President Obama recently pointed out, don’t know a Muslim, or don’t know they know a Muslim. (Knowing a Muslim is the best inoculant against anti-Muslim bigotry.) Which is why the Bush administration could sell the Iraq war to a fearful and unknowing public.

So the Bush administration transformed a fringe terrorist movement with the support of the backwater Taliban into an existential threat to Western civilization, which, if true, demanded we respond accordingly. And that’s one of the major reasons why Americans could be persuaded to go to war with a country that didn’t attack us. So while I could tell you why anti-Muslim sentiment is bad for Muslims, maybe it’ll be more impactful if we consider why it’s bad for Americans generally.

The Iraq war, which was an easier sell given our tendency to conflate Arabs, Muslims and everything about the Middle East, cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers, and injured thousands more. By circumventing the U.N., we lost much of our moral capital, and created a precedent for aggression by regional powers worldwide. Hundreds of thousands Iraqis died, and many in the Muslim world still only see America through this lens. By focusing on Iraq, which rapidly spun out of control, we abandoned Afghanistan, where the Taliban are now resurgent there. If all this was not horrible enough, the Iraq war also led to the rise of ISIS, which has dragged us back in. Even if we wanted to walk away, we can’t; ISIS is far too dangerous for us to ignore.

Some three years ago, the Iraq war was estimated to have cost us $2 trillion dollars. Researchers have suggested that amount could rapidly increase over coming years, never mind the rise of ISIS and the deployment of American forces anew. As a comparison, free public college for all Americans would cost $70 billion a year. Not only is that much cheaper, but the latter is an investment that would pay dividends for years to come. The Iraq war didn’t make America safer and, if we’re really lucky, the war will be wound down and ISIS defeated and the region returns back to the status quo. And all the while, many other countries, like China, invested in their own economies. Even oil-rich Saudi Arabia has been making huge investments in energy, public transportation and green initiatives. You’d think, after a decade of this, that we would have caught on. Instead Islamophobia is still used to score cheap points, and avoid real problems.

Jeb Bush was one of the rare Republican candidates who wasn’t an anti-Muslim bigot, but he still described ISIS as an “existential threat.” Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, maybe, and in any case, Jeb’s out. But I hardly think Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi can destroy the world’s most powerful nation. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who tweeted that “Islam pure” (sic) leads to “mass murder,” has a position at Harvard—indicating that her insights are taken seriously. While Ali was warning of the non-existent threat of “Shari’ah” in Michigan, actual Michiganders were literally being poisoned by their water supply.

When we continue to conflate mainstream Islam with radicals, vastly exaggerating the threat we face, we make it harder to make good choices. All of the things our global peers are preparing for–climate change, for example—go by the wayside. While it might be important to tackle income inequality, crumbling infrastructure, student debt, childhood poverty, systemic and structural racism, the idea that our greatest threat is Islamic extremism, and that Muslims everywhere are all potential or possible terrorists, makes it harder to address these problems. Though Trump now questions the Iraq war, he continues to indulge in the kind of language that enabled the Iraq war.

Any real stocktaking would demand we do both.

To look at the damage Islamophobia does to all Americans, for years to come.

Had we been able to see the Muslim world as diverse and complicated, with nuances and differences, if we saw Muslims as human beings—and not as we do today, as “apes or worse”—do you think we would’ve invaded Baghdad? Hundreds of billions of dollars later, hundreds of thousands dead, a haven for one of the most brutal movements in modern history, there’s no end in sight, but Muslims here and abroad get blamed for the outcomes.

Moghul is speaking at the Feb. 29 event “Muslim in America” with PEN America and the Greene Space at WNYC.




Monday, February 22, 2016

Why Was The Electoral College Created? – Guest Essayist: Tara Ross

Why Was The Electoral College Created? – Guest Essayist: Tara Ross

The Electoral College may be one of America’s most misunderstood institutions.  How often do you hear a media outlet or school textbook gratuitously bash our presidential election system as “outdated” or “archaic”? It’s said to be a relic of the horse and buggy era—a process created by slaveholding Founders who didn’t trust the people to govern themselves.

Shouldn’t such a broken process go the way of the rotary telephone?

Actually, no. The “problem” with the Electoral College isn’t the institution itself. The problem is that the media’s approach, combined with spotty teaching in schools, has left the general electorate remarkably ill-informed about its presidential election process.

A little education reveals the truth: The Founders had principled reasons for creating the Electoral College. They didn’t create it just because the Internet hadn’t been invented yet! To the contrary, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were a remarkably well-educated lot. They were students of history who knew the works of such philosophers as John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu. Many were lawyers or ex-legislators.

In fact, when Thomas Jefferson read the names of the delegates to the Convention, he described them as “an assembly of demi-gods.”

These delegates were well-versed in the successes and failures of other political systems, and they wanted to avoid the mistakes that had been made in other countries. Moreover, they understood human nature. They knew that people are fallible and that power corrupts.

This eminently qualified group of men understood how hard it would be to protect freedom in the face of all these challenges. They were determined to make it happen anyway.

With that background in mind, perhaps the most important thing to understand about the Electoral College—and the Constitution in general—is that the Founders were not trying to create a PURE democracy. They wanted to be self-governing, of course. They had just fought an entire Revolution in part because they had no representation in Parliament. The principles of self-governance were very important to them. On the other hand, they knew that, as a matter of history, pure democracies have a tendency to implode.

Our second President, John Adams, once observed that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” A signatory to the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, stated, “A simple democracy . . . is one of the greatest of evils.” Another signer, John Witherspoon, agreed: “Pure democracy cannot subsist long, nor be carried far into the department of state—it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.”

In short, mob rule can be very dangerous.

Think about it. In a pure democracy, 51% of the people can rule the other 49% all the time, without question. Imagine what a mob mentality can do in the wake of an event such as 9-11. In fear or anger or immediate emotion, a bare majority could enact any law it wanted to, regardless of its impact on the other 49%.  Even very sizable minorities can be tyrannized in such a system. Religious freedoms and civil liberties can easily be infringed.

The Founders wanted to avoid that situation at all costs.

What, then, were they to do? How could they create a Constitution that allowed the people to be self-governing, even as they erected hurdles to stop (or at least slow down) irrational, bare majorities? How could minority political interests, especially the small states, be protected from the tyranny of the majority?

In other words, what constitutional provisions would allow majorities to rule, but would also require them to take the needs of the minority into account?

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention solved the problem by creating a Constitution that combines democracy (self-governance) with federalism (states’ rights) and republicanism (deliberation and compromise). This is why we have a Senate (one state, one vote) and a House (one person, one vote). It is why our government is divided into three co-equal branches: executive, legislative and judicial. It is why we have supermajority requirements to do things like amend the Constitution. It is why we have presidential vetoes.

And it is why we have an Electoral College.

When the checks and balances in our Constitution are respected, they enable us to accomplish the near-impossible: be self-governing, even as we avoid mob rule and majority tyranny.

Tomorrow’s post will discuss the logistics of the Electoral College. As implemented, is the system still serving the purposes that it was created to serve?

Tara Ross is the author of Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College. More information about Tara can be found at www.taraross.com or on FacebookInstagram, or Twitter.



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Wednesday, February 17, 2016

The lies of Lynchburg

The lies of Lynchburg

How U.S. evolutionists taught the Nazis.

by Carl Wieland

Article from:
Creation
19(4):22-23
September 1997
Francis Galton

Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton inspired the sterilisation program that took place in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The chilling revelations of a recent [1993] television documentary1 expose the disturbing consequences of evolutionary ways of thinking. Beginning in the 1920s, many thousands of people in the United States were sterilised against their will and without their consent, to prevent ‘undesirable breeding’. Over 8,000 of these procedures took place at a major centre to which such ‘undesirables’ were sent, in Lynchburg, Virginia. 

The victims included some with various degrees of mental retardation; many were simply there because they had been abandoned as a result of broken homes or had suffered some other social misfortune. Some had been honours students at school. They were lied to routinely, being told that it was something ‘for their own good’ or ‘for their health’. Those older ones who discovered the purpose behind the operations realised that they would not be able to leave the institution unless they underwent the procedure. 

The documentary stated that the entire effort was based upon the notion of eugenics. The eugenics movement was started by Sir Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin), who wanted to encourage ‘survival of the fittest’ within human society. The ‘humane’ way to do this was by compulsory sterilisation of those deemed ‘unfit’. The idea seduced ‘social reformers from the right and the left’—among them George Bernard Shaw, and Winston Churchill. 

The Lynchburg doctor who was responsible for most of the sterilisations in his own town was convinced that what he was doing was for the ‘scientific good’ of society. As a dedicated Darwinian, notions of absolute right and wrong were old-fashioned obstacles to the greater good of the ‘herd’. Needing a legal cover for his actions in the face of the human rights meant to be guaranteed in the (creation-based) U.S. Constitution, he became enamoured with model legislation prepared by a leading U.S. evolutionary biologist, Dr Harry Laughlin. 

Laughlin’s law called for compulsory sterilization of not only the ‘feeble-minded’, but also the blind, drug addicts, sufferers from TB and syphilis, epileptics,2 paupers, the deaf and the homeless. Since these people were, it was claimed, obviously the victims of ‘bad genes’, the law was overtly aimed at maintaining the ‘racial purity of the white race’ by preventing the further ‘breeding’ of those whose offspring would ‘drag down’ this race. 

What was needed was a test case, a ‘patsy’ to ensure that the law would not be declared unconstitutional. In a blatant set-up which made the ACLU’s manipulation3 of the famous Scopes trial look positively mild, a young lady was chosen who had been targeted for sterilization because there had allegedly been ‘three generations of feeble-mindedness’ in her family. Her lawyer challenged the Laughlin law all the way to the Supreme Court. However, far from being her champion, he was in reality one of those heavily involved in the formulation of these eugenics policies! 

Unfortunately also for the young lady, the presiding judge of the Supreme Court hearing this case in 1924 was Oliver Wendell Holmes4, an influential Darwinist5 who laid the legislative foundation for many of the advances of secular humanism in the United States. Not surprisingly, Holmes declared the law constitutional. It was acceptable for the state to compel the sterilization of those who were deemed ‘socially inadequate’. The forced sterilization of this innocent victim went ahead; subsequent investigation has revealed that the entire story of the ‘feeble-minded generations’ in her family was a fabrication. 

After the Supreme Court decision, eugenics became a major plank of social policy in many American states. 

As soon as Hitler (who campaigned on a platform of naked evolutionism—the survival of the fittest race) came to power in 1933, eugenics laws became one of his first acts. Not only was the Nazi program of forced sterilisation for the ‘unfit’ lauded in the U.S.—it was actually modelled after the law framed by Laughlin, who was awarded an honorary doctorate by Hitler’s government. As the Nazis moved on to the euthanasia-murder of entire wards full of mental patients, ‘scientific’ admiration for their ‘racial hygiene’ policies was unabated. One U.S. evolutionist actually stated, ‘The Germans are beating us at our own game’.1

Once it was seen as ‘moral’ to take active steps to ‘purify the German race’, it was just a short, logical step from there to the even greater horrors of the Holocaust.6 

After World War II, the horrified reactions of a stunned U.S. public to the unimaginable atrocities done in the name of evolutionary ‘racial hygiene’ forced eugenics practices to go underground. The names of the practice changed, but it continued, right down past 1970. All in all, a grand total of some 70,000 people suffered involuntary sterilization. 

It was the efforts of a Jenny Crockett, then with the ACLU (which, ironically, has a track record of mostly siding with evolutionary thinking) which brought this scandal to light, in the face of government attempts to keep the lid on. Eventually, a mumbled apology and some offer of ‘mental health counselling’ was all that was available for these many people whose lives had been destroyed by the assumptions of evolutionism. 

The church overall must bear its share of the responsibility for being so ‘bluffed’ by the ‘scientific’ claims of evolutionists (which have since changed, and will keep on changing) that it failed to take a strong stand on the true history of man and the world. Instead, as now, it by and large preferred to either ignore the issue or maintain an uneasy compromise—or worse.7 The Lord Jesus said to believers: ‘Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid’ (Matthew 5:13 ff). 

We cannot just blame ‘society’ for the evils which flow naturally from the false root of evolutionism if we are unprepared to be salt and light, and to take a stand for biblical reality. 

References and notes

  1. The Lynchburg Story, produced by Bruce Eadie, made by Worldview Pictures in association with Discovery Networks and Channel Four, 1993. This story is based on information contained therein. Return to text.
  2. Ironically, Laughlin in later life developed epilepsy himself, and was shunned by his evolutionary eugenicist colleagues as part of the very so-called ‘white trash’ he was trying to stop from breeding. Return to text.
  3. The ACLU = the American Civil Liberties Union, usually a champion of left-wing, pro-humanist causes. In the famous Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1925, it deliberately sought to challenge a Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution by finding someone who would (falsely) confess to teaching it, relying on the ensuing publicity to win public sympathy for the evolutionary cause. See David MentonInherit the Wind: An Historical AnalysisCreation 19(1):35–38, December 1996. Return to text.
  4. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), a distinguished U.S. Supreme Court justice who approved compulsory sterilization. His evolution-based humanistic beliefs left an indelible stamp on America’s laws, contributing greatly to today’s relentless secularization. Return to text.
  5. Law professor Phillip Johnson calls Holmes a ‘convinced Darwinist who profoundly understood the philosophical implications of Darwinism’ and who therefore ‘found it difficult to take morality seriously.’ Johnson documents how this influential jurist urged future lawyers to ‘put aside all notions of morality and approach law as … basically the science of state coercion.’ Reason in the Balance, InterVarsity Press, pp. 139–143, 1995. Return to text.
  6. It is now almost common knowledge among WWII historians that the machinery of mass extermination later used in concentration camps, including the notorious Zyklon-B gas, was actually developed by respected members of the German medical/psychiatric/biological establishment for such ‘eugenic’ purposes. Return to text.
  7. Even the renowned defender of inerrancy, the late B.B. Warfield, was at the same time a supporter of Darwinian evolution. Return to text.

Related Articles

Further Reading



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Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Video: A PROGRESSIVE'S GUIDE TO POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

A PROGRESSIVE'S GUIDE TO POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Is there a point where the "P.C. Police" are satisfied? Are there ever "enough" rules governing the jokes we tell, the mascots of sports teams, or the symbols on city seals? Or should we want a society as non-offensive as the American college campus? George Will, Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, imagines what an idyllic politically correct universe would look like.



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Monday, February 15, 2016

Gary, Indiana: Stagnant Hope (VIDEO)

Gary, Indiana: Stagnant Hope


Published on May 2, 2014
Find the film on Facebook and IMDB:
https://www.facebook.com/StagnantHope
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2643980
Chapters:
0:01 - Introduction
1:50 - The City of the Century
21:10 - The Station
24:35 - The City's Church
31:52 - The Place to Be
36:08 - The Palace
46:59 - Schooled Pt. 1
51:29 - Schooled Pt. 2
58:00 - Visions
1:05:06 - Visions: Urban Farm
1:08:32 - Visions: Gary's Time
1:19:32 - Visions: "A New Day"
1:26:31 - Conclusion
1:34:17 - Credits
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    • News & Politics
  • License

    • Standard YouTube License

Gary, Indiana: Exploring America's Ghost Town (VIDEO)

Gary, Indiana: Exploring America's Ghost Town


Uploaded on Jul 29, 2011
RT's Anastasia Churkina travels to Gary, Indiana -- America's ghost town, one of the most dangerous places in the country that used to boom with industry and is now an urban desert.
  • Category

    • News & Politics
  • License

    • Standard YouTube License

Gary, Indiana: The Racial History and the Need for Restrictive Covenants

The Racial History of Gary, Indiana, and the Need for Restrictive Covenants

It’s a city time forgot; it’s a history lesson that we purposefully skip over; it’s yet another reminder that “Manifest Destruction” (the Great Migration of Blacks from South) was the most devastating event in American history.

Gary, Indiana.

In S. Paul O’Hara’s Gary, the Most American of All American Cities we are introduced to a city whose collapse mirrors that of Detroit (described in vivid detail in Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America’s Black Metropolis): with a population that nearly 100 percent white in 1920, Gary saw a migration of 15,000 Black migrants between 1920 and 1930. At 18 percent of the population of Gary in 1930, another 20,000 Black people would join them by 1940–lured by work in the steel mills.

Through high fecundity rates (maintaining close racial solidarity), the percentage of Blacks would slowly begin to overwhelm the white population; by 1967, Black people would be able to elect Richard Gordon Hatcher as one of the first Black mayors of a major city in the nation.

Time magazine would report the election of Hatcher was a victory, not because of race, but due to a desire to reform the political process. Nevertheless, the magazine would report:

“Shouting, dancing Negroes weaved wildly through the six downtown blocks of Gary, Indiana.”

Today, Gary, Indiana is 84 percent BlackUSA Today called it a “ghost-town” in a 2011 article [Gary, Ind., struggles with population loss, by Judy Keen, 5-19-2011]:

The 2010 Census crystallized Gary’s decline: The population, which peaked at 178,320 in 1960, is now 80,294. From 2000 through last year’s count, Gary lost 22% of its residents. The city’s unemployment rate in February was 9.8%.

Gary — like Detroit, which lost 25% of its people in the past decade — faces tough questions: What is the best way to shrink a city? How can city government provide adequate services as its tax base contracts? How can new employers and residents be wooed to a place known more for blight than for opportunity?

The city has cut many services and decided last month to close its main library, which opened in 1964. A state board raised property tax caps this month and set Gary’s tax levy at $40.8 million. If the caps had not been increased, Gary would have been allowed to collect only $30 million. It was the third and final time the city can seek such relief.

A plague of vacancies

Gary was founded in 1906 by U.S. Steel, which still employs 4,727 here. Last year, the company announced a $220 million modernization of the Gary plant.

The city’s decline began in the 1960s as overseas steel production squeezed U.S. makers and accelerated in the 1970s as “white flight” prompted the rapid growth of surrounding cities. More than 80% of Gary’s residents are black.

Wait a second: why can’t the 84 percent Black population sustain the wealth that white people left behind? Why can’t they keep alive the businesses? Why can’t they keep alive the high property valuations? How come the migration of Black people to Gary brought high levels of crime and violence that caused white people to flee the city? Why can’t the majority Black population ignite that entrepreneurial spirit, innovate, attract outside investments, and diversify the economy (as happened in Pittsburgh — another city built on steel)?

The answer is self-explanatory: because the population is less than 10 percent white and 84 percent Black.

Because Black people (outside of state and federal welfare, handouts, subsidies, and grants) have no purchasing power, the city needed an emergency infusion of cash in 2009 from the Obama stimulus fund. In all, Gary received $266 million in stimulus funds [Gary, Indiana: Unbroken spirit amid the ruins of the 20th Century, BBC, by Paul Mason, 10-12-2010]:

I’d been to Gary, Indiana before. In April 2009, when the Obama fiscal stimulus had just begun, the city’s mayor had told me that all the city needed was $400m of stimulus money in order to “fly like an eagle and make our country proud”.

To put this in context you have to know that Gary, home to what is still US Steel Corp’s biggest plant, is suffering from one of the most advanced cases of urban blight in the developed world. Its city centre is near-deserted by day. The texture of the urban landscape is cracked stone, grass, crumbled brick and buddleia.

Gary is one third poor, 84% African American, and has seen its population halve over the past three decades. If crime, as the official figures suggest, has recently dropped off then – say the critics – that is because population flight from the city is bigger than the census figures show.

Gary in the end got $266m of stimulus money and has, according to the federal “recipient reported data” created a grand total of 327 jobs. That’s $800,000 per job.
I went back determined to find out how the stimulus dollars had been spent; to get beyond the ideology and recriminations and see why President Barack Obama’s stimulus has failed to turn the country around.

Brink of bankruptcy?

So what’s the story with Gary and the stimulus? The mayor believes the city is “last in line” when it comes to federal money – because the money is dispensed via the state of Indiana, which is Republican controlled. Mayor Rudy Clay tells me:
“I guess they thought, well, Gary voted in large numbers for the president, enabling him to take the state of Indiana, so he will look after them.”

But it is more complex – Gary’s public finances are a mess. It owes tens of millions of dollars to other entities. Its great get-out-of-jail card – tax revenue from casinos – turned out to be a busted flush. Its convention centre is dark most of the time. The one-time Sheraton Hotel, right next to the City Hall, is derelict.

With no ability to raise a local income tax it is reliant on property tax. But the State of Indiana passed laws capping tax raising powers, so by 2012 Gary’s tax income from property will halve.

At that point, according to the fiscal monitor appointed by the city, it will lack the revenue to fund even its police, fire and ambulance services. The monitor calls for much of the rest of Gary’s services to be privatised – but as city officials point out, once privatised they cannot enforce job guarantees that allow the city to employ local people. Says the monitor, bluntly:

“The city will simply have to give up some long-standing – and often important – services that are the responsibility of other governments, even when it is likely that those governments will not provide the same level of service.”

This is the cost of “Manifest Destruction.” Gary isn’t suffering from Urban Blight–that’s just a symptom of the real problem. It’s not suffering from crime, high foreclosure rates, bad schools, or lack of outside capital investment in the infrastructure (and potentially investors who would open up businesses that could provide some semblance of a commercial tax-base); it’s suffering from the unmentionable legacy of the migration of Black people and the overwhelming of a once prosperous white city.

Earlier this year Karen Wilson-Freeman became the first Black female mayor of Gary. Her goal? Increase the efficiency of the almost entirely Black-run government, which calls “small victories” fixing potholes, repairing sidewalks, and not dropping the calls the 84 percent Black constituents who call to complain about the poor city services [Meet Indiana’s First African-American Female Mayor, The Atlantic, 12-29-2011]:

While U.S. Steel still employs 6,000, that’s a far cry from the 50,000 people who once worked there, and the loss of those jobs is reflected in the boarded up homes and empty streets that spread across town.

At its peak in the 1950s, Gary’s population topped 200,000, only to plunge in subsequent decades to about 80,000 in 2010.

Freeman-Wilson says she wants to heal the sometimes tense relationship between employer and town. “Certainly, they have a responsibility to our city, but we have a responsibility to be a good partner,” she says.

To hold up its end, willing to start with “small victories,” like better lighting, pothole free streets and repaired sidewalks.

But beyond that, Freeman-Wilson speaks of making Gary a cleaner city, not only in appearance, but also in the way it deals with residents, who frequently complain they cannot reach anyone at city hall.

“You should be able to get through without being transferred five times,” Freeman-Wilson says.

The decline of Gary correlates to the rise of its Black population and the decline of the overall white percentage of its population (remember, roughly 100 percent white in 1920).

Indeed, where the white people went once they escaped Gary, prosperity flourished. Thriving business and commercial districts, safe streets, outside investments, and good schools were just an outgrowth of this migration [ Hurt feelings continue over Northwest Indiana town’s creation [Merrillville, Ind. experiencing now a little of what Gary did 40 years ago, WBEZ 91.5, 8-31-2012]:

U.S. 30 and Interstate 65 in Northwest Indiana is among the busiest retail corridors in Indiana. For a long time, this area, much of it in the Town of Merrillville, was the envy of Northwest Indiana, but none more so than for folks living in Gary. To Steel City residents, the establishment of Merrillville a little more than 40 years ago was seen as a racist slap in the face allowed by Indiana state lawmakers.

But today, if you need to buy a new car, or celebrate a birthday or buy that special gift or see a concert by a top-notch artist, if you live anywhere in Northwest Indiana chances are you’re doing it in Merrillville.

“Merrillville is the Main Street of Northwest Indiana,” said Rich James, a retired political columnist from Northwest Indiana.

While shops dominate the Merrillville landscape now, James remembers it wasn’t always like that.

“Fourty-one years ago, Merrillville was pretty much a cow pasture,” James said. “It had a name, it wasn’t incorporated.”

But what the area did have was plenty of open land; land to build homes and businesses on. This area became pretty attractive just as the City of Gary began its steep decline as steel jobs began to dry up in the once-thriving community of 175,000 residents.

But loss of jobs wasn’t the only issue facing Gary.

In the mid-1960s, blacks increased in number in what was then a very ethnic-white Gary.

Confined to living in one section of city for decades, blacks pushed for the right to live anywhere they chose, including in affluent white sections.

Richard Gordon Hatcher became Gary’s first black mayor in 1968. In the years up to his election, Hatcher pushed for an open housing law. It wasn’t easy.

“Every time it came up for a vote the council chambers would be packed with screaming and yelling. I liken them to the Tea Partiers today,” Hatcher told WBEZ. “They were yelling and all kinds of racial slurs and they would intimidate. I introduced that bill at least six times. It was defeated five times.”

White families from an increasing black Gary left in droves once Merrillville became a town. The hurt from that time still exists today even as Merrillville’s demographics have shifted.

But it won’t last, with the Black Undertow escaping their city of Gary and migrating to wherever white people go. Merrillville is now 40 percent Black:

Merrillville incorporated as a town in 1971, developing at a rapid pace with not only new residents, but retail development over the next decade.

As life breathed into Merrillville, in Gary, it was just the opposite.

Residents fled and Gary’s once thriving downtown – devastated.

Carolyn E. Mosby remembers growing up in a rapidly deteriorating Gary and couldn’t understand why it was happening.

“When you see these boarded up buildings on Broadway or you see these vacant homes, a lot of the people who chose to leave, a lot of the people who chose to leave didn’t decide to sell their businesses or sell their homes, they just boarded them up and left,” Mosby said.

By the 1980s, Mosby was a teenager who often found herself not shopping at the Merrillville area’s new mall or other stores – pretty much at the insistence of her late mother, Carolyn B. Mosby, a longtime state legislator from Gary.

“She was very involved in the community as well and this was something that was very near and dear to her was to really support those people that chose to stay in Gary, the businesses and the folks who didn’t abandoned their home and moved to Merrillville,” Mosby said.

Just last year, Merrillville celebrated 40 years as a town.

This town of 35,000 residents is no longer lily white.

In fact, it’s now more than 40 percent African American, with many continuing to move because its school district is considered better than Gary’s.

No town in America is safe from the Black Undertow. Gary was overwhelmed, to the point where without the infusion of $200+ million of stimulus funds in 2009 it would have ceased to be a city. This is the legacy of the Black Migration from the South, an event that has led to the ruin of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and decentralized the Black dysfunction that was once reserved solely for slave-holding states.

But it was in reading S. Paul O’Hara’s book that the realization that the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer U.S. Supreme Court ruling (outlawing restrictive covenants) was the nail in the coffin for the long-term prospects of America became crystallized. On p. 138 of Gary, the Most American of All American Cities we learn that the election of Gary’s first Black mayor signaled the coming of disaster for the white residents of the city:

Fear of a city run by a black mayor led many white residents to move away. “For Sale” signs popped up as residents feared declining property values. A rash of white flight of both capital and population occured. “I been here all my life,” reported one white resident to Harper’s.

I got me a house I paid $35,000  for, but I’m leavin’ it…. It’s not that I hate the colored or anything, but I’m dumpin’ it all. Who the hell wants to live this way, I ask you. Bein’ scared somebody’ll hit you on the head all the time, you can’t go out of the house after dark. You work all your life for something, and then they start movin’ in, and suddenly you don’t have anything – it’s not yours anymore. First person that makes me any kind of half-ass offer on that house now, it’s his, and I’m gone. With once exception – I’m not sellin’ to no goddam colored. I’d put a torch to it first.

The prospect of sharing a neighborhood, especially for a city built upon an image of strict separation, was seen as undermining the very thing people had worked for in the mills. “Mr. Hatcher, We are a big group of women, who would like to know a few answer,” stated one letter to the new mayor:

We have nothing against the colored people but we would not like to have them live next door to us. Yet it seems that the colored people are always pushing… Please can you explain to us why black people want to be near us when we don’t want them deep from our hearts & never will?

Questions that will never, ever be answered. Instead, billions upon billions of stimulus must be spent to try and “save” cities like Detroit and Gary–the reason being that “Manifest Destruction” destroyed the social capital, community, and infrastructure that white people had created before their arrival.

Without restrictive covenants, the future of all American cities resembles that of Gary, Indiana.

It is, after all, the most American of All America Cities: In Black-Run America (BRA) that is.

And like that fistful of sand from the Rod Stewart song, civilization in Gary has slipped through the hands of the Black people who inherited the city after whites left.



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Saturday, February 13, 2016

US Dept of Education urges schools to teach Islam to ‘create anti-bias learning environment’

US Dept of Education urges schools to teach Islam to ‘create anti-bias learning environment’

February 12, 2016

By Victor Skinner 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As parents across the country storm school board meetings over a perceived overemphasis on Islam in the curriculum, bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. are suggesting ways teachers can focus more on the religion.

A recent blog posted to Home Room, “The official blog of the U.S. Department of Education,” points out that terrorist attacks in Paris and California sparked anti-Muslim incidents in schools and other places.

Muslim students, and those perceived to be Muslim, could be bullied, and the government wants teachers to know how to “create an anti-bias learning environment” by focusing specifically on those students and their faith.

“This means incorporating the experiences, perspective and words of Muslim people into the curriculum through social studies and current events instruction, children’s literature, in order to learn about different cultures,” the blog reads.

“When you teach about world religions, be sure to include Islam. … It’s also important to be aware that some Muslim students may feel relieved and comfortable discussing these issues in class and others may feel nervous, scared or angry to be talking about a topic so close to home.”

The education experts – authors Jinnie Spiegler, director of curriculum with the Anti-Defamation League, and Sarah Sisaye of the Education Department’s Office of Safe and Healthy Students – suggest that teachers pick controversial current events “ripe with examples of bias and injustice” to highlight anti-Muslim discrimination, and to “discuss what actions (students) could take to make a difference.”

Teachers should also take it upon themselves to spread awareness about “Muslim cultural traditions” by encouraging events like Hijab days, when female students wear the Islamic religious scarf donned by their Muslim classmates. The education experts provided a link to a YouTube video of an event at Vernon Hills High School in December as an example.

Meanwhile, in places like Tennessee, state officials are reviewing curriculum early amid a barrage of complaints about questionable lessons on Islam in middle school history courses. Parents have highlighted lessons that required students to read, write and recite the Islamic conversion prayer; and pointed out the disproportionate amount of time students spend studying Islam versus other religions.

Parents have also questioned the accuracy of texts that suggest Christians and Muslims worship the same God and that Islam is a “religion of peace,” EAGnews reports.

“A lot of the things we hear about Muhammad and a lot of the warfare that was waged is very much sugar coated,” Williamson County School Board member Susan Curlee said at a December town hall.

“My concern is, are we going to be asking students on a test to potentially compromise their faith for the sake of a grade?” she questioned.

Also in December, parents in Greenville, Virginia raised objections to a world geography lesson at Riverheads High School that tasked students with copying the Islamic conversion prayer in Arabic, by hand. The intent, according to the lesson, is to “give you an idea of the artistic complexity of calligraphy,” The Shilling Show reports.

The lesson doesn’t appear to explain what the shahada or “Islamic statement of faith” is exactly – “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah” – but it does discuss the inspiring beauty of the Koran.

“Since Islam forbids idolatry, mosques are decorated with calligraphy rather than with pictures of humans or animal figures,” the lesson explains. “Verses of the Koran, drawn in flowing Arabic, are bordered by complex geometrical and floral designs. Often colorful, the walls and domes of mosques are inspiring works in themselves.”

And it’s those types of lessons that are sparking a backlash from parents across the country, from lawsuits in Maryland to proposed legislation in Tennessee, centered on what many view as Muslim “indoctrination” through curriculum.

A bias toward Islam is one of the reasons Tyler County Board of Education President Bonnie Henthorn decided to homeschool her children, rather than allow them continue in public schools, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reports.

And while the Education Department blog stresses the importance of creating classrooms that are “free from discrimination and harassment based on protected traits – including religion,” it offers no suggestions for teachers struggling to explain to parents why government approved texts and associated lessons focus more on Islam than other religions.



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