Thanks to Sandra Sauer-Bernard of Virginia for sharing. This is a real eye-opening account of how refugee resettlement is changing one small town in New York State. Nancy
thermidormag.com/my-hometown-is-gone/
My Home Town Is Gone by Loretta Brady
Hi! This is a blog post I threw together in response to the recent increase in refugee numbers by Trump’s State Department, in order to convey what it is like living in an Islamizing area. I gave a talk at a luncheon a few months ago that was basically relating my story of how my hometown has been Islamized by refugee resettlement. So it makes sense to do a blog post.
I’m from the Utica, NY area. Utica is the city nicknamed by the UN “the city that loves refugees!” Soon every American city will be a city that loves refugees! Get ready! So I would like to tell you what it is like living in an area where the major city is about 25% (or more) refugee, mainly Muslim
I was born in Utica, a “faded industrial town” along the Mohawk River/Erie Canal corridor, and lived there until I was 8-years-old when my family moved to a nearby small college town. I loved living in Utica because there were lots of families on my block, big Catholic families with lots of kids. You could yard-hop, checking out who was available for play. You could bike around the neighborhood. There were block parties in the summer. My grandmother lived up the street. Life was good.
My father and his father were born and lived in Utica, NY. My father was a judge in Utica, like his father before him. The Catholic school my father attended is now a community center for refugees. After I moved back to the Utica area as an adult I used to recite “Full fathom five” to the children as we drove by my father’s former Catholic school. (Nothing of him that doth fade,/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange.)
When I had my first child I was living in New York City. Her father and I divorced when she was a baby, and when she was two-years-old, I beat a hasty retreat back home to Upstate NY. There I met my husband. We got married, we had babies (in that order, ahem), and we settled down outside of Utica.
When I moved back home one of the first things I noticed was that an old Methodist church was being converted into a bright shiny white new mosque. The local paper touted this as immense progress and featured a local woman who had attended the church as a child and was positively brimming with joy it was being turned into a mosque. If that is the general sentiment, then it’s odd that my county went for Trump, right? There are at least two mosques in the city now. They just built another.
Where do I start? Utica had always been “the city that loves refugees” but under Obama things accelerated. Muslim immigrants were suddenly in these local bureaucratic positions where they had power over you. This, in what is probably one of the most corrupt states in the union, where the power of the state is everything.
The social worker at my daughter’s school was a Muslim immigrant. I looked for her profile on the school website, I googled her, I could not find information on her background, resume, qualifications, or educational attainments.
Trump was 100% right (not just 97%) to show real leadership and walk away from Paris
President Trump has rejected and exited the Paris climate treaty – walked America away from the Mad Hatter tea party that was the entire multi-decade, often hysterical and always computer model-driven UN climate process. My article this week explains why this bold move was the 100% right, ethical, moral and scientific thing to do: for the economic security of American workers and families … and the betterment of all mankind.
Guest essay by Paul Driessen
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and other states that generate electricity with our abundant coal and natural gas pay 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. California, Connecticut, New York and other states that impose wind, solar and anti-fossil fuel mandates pay 15 to 18 cents. Families in closely allied ultra-green Euro countries pay an average of 26 US cents per kWh, but 36 cents in Germany, 37 cents in Denmark.
EU manufacturers are already warning that these prices could send companies, factories, jobs and CO2 emissions to China and other non-Euro countries. EU electricity prices have skyrocketed 55% since 2005; 40% of UK households are cutting back on food and other essentials, to pay for electricity; a tenth of all EU families now live in green energy poverty. Elderly people are dying because they can’t afford heat!
The Paris treaty would have done the same to the United States, and worse.
April 13, 2017 6:56 p.m. ET
The greatest mystery in Washington involves not Russian spies or wiretaps but Richard Cordray’s continued employment as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In the face of President Trump’s mandate for change, Mr. Cordray continues the Obama administration’s regulatory crusade against lenders, blocking access to the credit that supports so many small businesses and so much consumer spending.
Why would a president who made a TV show out of firing underlings now suffer a subordinate who refuses to get with the pro-growth agenda he campaigned on? If reports from the West Wing are to be believed, Mr. Trump’s unusual timidity is the result of overcautious legal and political advice.
Mr. Cordray is insulated from presidential control by a New Deal-era innovation: a statutory clause that allows the president to fire an independent agency head only “for cause,” meaning “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In October a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down that restriction as an infringement of the president’s constitutional authority to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
thehill.com/regulation/administration/312229-trumps-team-draws-target-on-federal-regulations
thehill.com/regulation/administration/312229-trumps-team-draws-target-on-federal-regulations
President-elect Donald Trump is stocking his administration with businessmen and regulatory reformers who are intent on cutting through what they see as red tape from Washington.
Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor, will oversee the Trump administration’s regulatory reform efforts. He will be joined by several other Wall Street investors and corporate executives who have first-hand experience dealing with government rules.
Here are six figures in the Trump administration poised to have an outsized role in scaling back regulations.
Regulatory adviser Carl Icahn
Trump created a new position in the White House for the billionaire investor to serve as a “special adviser on regulatory issues,” where he will seek to trim back rules that businesses consider unnecessary and burdensome.
www.dailywire.com/news/9503/6-insane-things-hillary-said-last-nights-debate-ben-shapiro#modal
6 INSANE Things Hillary Said In Last Night’s Debate
AP Photo/John Locher
BY: BEN SHAPIRO SEPTEMBER 27, 2016
Thanks to all of the pyrotechnics at the first presidential debate on Monday night – and thanks to Donald Trump’s Chernobyl-style meltdown over his IRS records, his business history, his Iraq war position, and the like – it was easy to overlook the insane proposals put forward by Hillary Clinton.
We shouldn’t.
Video: Fmr. Bush official Carlos Gutierrez endorses Clinton
Hillary openly advocated some of the most radical propositions in American history. Here are six of them.
1. “Profit-Sharing.” Clinton advocated making “the economy fairer.” In promoting that stupid notion – stupid, because mutually consensual exchange is by nature “fair” from any objective point of view – she pushed raising the national minimum wage (throwing thousands out of work) and “equal pay for women’s work” (read: unequal pay for the same work for men). But her truly insane line came next: “I also want to see more companies do profit-sharing. If you help create the profits, you should be able to share in them, not just the executives at the top.” Now, many companies already have so-called “profit sharing” – employees who own stock benefits. On a broad level, all companies have “profit sharing” – you have continued employment because your company earns a profit. You don’t have a share of every dollar of profit earned because you don’t get dinged for every loss. But Hillary seems to be advocating for a full-scale governmental intervention into every business in America – letting the feds decide how much employees should make in every industry. This is, as Dennis Prager pointed out today, economic fascism.
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March 17, 2016
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Hillary Clinton Flunks Economics
She says we’re better off with Democrats in the White House. Is that so?
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/IKON IMAGESThere can be no doubt now: The U.S. economy is struggling, inequality is on the rise and too many Americans feel uncertain about their future.On the campaign trail, I have met many of these men and women, who sit at the kitchen table each week, straining to stretch their dollars from shrinking paychecks. Families who can’t save for retirement with near-zero interest rates. Young parents who are being crushed by their student debt. Shop owners who can’t get a loan because their community bank went out of business.We’ve had more than six years to watch the left’s prescriptions in action and the verdict is in: They don’t work. Under President Obama, the economy has been hobbled. The 73,000-page tax code is too complex to navigate without an army of accountants. The administration has added $7 trillion in new federal debt, and has doubled down on environmental regulations that crush business owners and farmers while raising energy prices.And yet Hillary Clinton said on Oct. 13 in the first Democratic presidential debate, “The economy does better when you have a Democrat in the White House,” and she offers variations on that line when campaigning.Whose economy is she talking about? The middle class has shrunk under the Obama administration. According to government figures and industry analyses, median-income households have lost nearly $1,300 after inflation, while the prices of food, health care and college tuition have risen almost twice as fast as inflation.Those struggling to find work are increasingly out of luck: Labor-force participation for working-age Americans has fallen to 62.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a level last seen in the Jimmy Carter-era recession. Millions have given up looking for work, and millions have fallen into poverty as a result.
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: And yet, one can only marvel at the struggle over this program. If an agency as questionable as Ex-Im can be eliminated only by a herculean effort, what hope is there of doing away with corporate tax preferences, domestic profits held overseas, onerous regulations that benefit large businesses, farm subsidies, affordable housing payola, rampant overpayments in Medicare, and the like? None of these subsidies will go quietly. All are deeply entrenched in our political economy, not because they are good for the nation, but because the interest groups that benefit from them are the most heavily invested in the political process.
Ex-Im, in other words, is just the weakest link in the regime of interest-group liberalism that has slowly come to dominate Washington. For generations the government has been picking winners and losers in the private sector under the guise of national development. Those who have been winning will not gladly give up their spoils. They will do all they can to keep their benefits flowing, and the fight over Ex-Im shows that they can do quite a bit.
Conservative reformers who have been fighting the Export-Import Bank should be applauded, but this is not a game of dominoes. If Ex-Im falls, farm subsidies will persist. So will corporate welfare in the tax code. So will our absurd housing policies, which somehow withstood an economic calamity they had helped cause.
Politically speaking, the only hope is to get the public involved in the fight against the inappropriate alliance between business and government. Few voters are aware of Washington’s tangled web of crony-capitalism, and this allows it to become entrenched. Thus, Republicans talk a good game about smaller government in their districts, then go to Washington and vote for programs like the farm bill. The folks back home are unaware that this is even under discussion. Interest groups with much at stake win, thanks to public ignorance and apathy.
Conservatives have been disappointed with the track record of Republicans in Congress since their 2010 takeover of the House. There have been a few bright spots—the cuts in domestic discretionary spending brought about by the sequester, for instance—but from Obamacare to Iran to taxes to financial services regulation, President Obama and the left seem to retain the upper hand. Yet there is one issue percolating in Congress that could provide a rare victory. Conservatives are working hard to take down the Export-Import Bank, and they might succeed.
The Export-Import Bank is a New Deal-era relic whose purpose is to facilitate American trade. According to William Becker and William McClenahan, authors of a major study of Ex-Im, the bank has been an “entrepreneurial” institution that has evolved over the years to retain the favor of the nation’s foreign policy establishment and top economic policymakers. Today, its main role is to provide credit to foreign purchasers of American manufactured goods, especially heavy equipment and airplanes. Last year it authorized about $21 billion in government-backed loans. Few of these loans go bad, so Ex-Im has little budgetary impact, but then its critics don’t base their opposition on grounds of budget busting.
So what is their complaint? First, the bank is grossly inefficient. To support American businesses, Ex-Im extends credit to foreign governments and enterprises. Surely there is a less roundabout way to promote domestic business than to subsidize foreign business! The Ex-Im Bank’s defenders retort that foreign governments already do precisely this, so Uncle Sam must respond in kind to protect American jobs. Even if this is true (and many experts raise doubts), it does not justify wasteful inefficiency. While some exporters might be hurt if the Ex-Im Bank were decommissioned, its credit could be redirected in ways that bring more bang for the buck. (more…)
