Last Friday a crane collapsed in lower Manhattan, killing a man named David Wichs. The next day the papers told the story of his life: a Jewish immigrant from Czechoslovakia; a math whiz with a degree from Harvard; a thoughtful neighbor and husband; “the nicest, most trustworthy person that I have known,” according to his boss, Mark Gorton, of Tower Research Capital. Mr. Wichs was just 38 when he died.
They’re the most demonized people in America.
This wasn’t the first time Mr. Sanders has accused Wall Street of fraud, and it surely won’t be the last. No political or social penalties attach, in today’s America, to the wholesale indictment of this entire industry and the people who work in it. Had another presidential candidate made a similarly damning remark about some other profession—public-school teachers, say, or oil-rig workers—there would have been the usual outcry about false stereotypes, the decline of civility and so on. When Bernie says it about Wall Street there’s a collective shrug, if not nodding agreement.
Some six million people work in financial services in America, according to Commerce Department figures. Take only the securities and investment end of the business, and you’re still talking about 900,000 people, a population that considerably exceeds Vermont’s 626,000. Is Mr. Sanders suggesting that some large proportion of those 900,000 is in on the fraud; that every man among them is a Madoff—including David Wichs? And if they are the criminals he alleges, does he mean to put a few thousand of them behind bars?
Those are questions that ought to be put to Mr. Sanders, and ones his supporters might also want to ask themselves. The strength of the Sanders candidacy is said to lie in the purity of his idealism, especially in contrast to the morally flexible and ideologically ambidextrous candidacy of Mrs. Clinton.
But the reason Mr. Sanders is drawing his big crowds is neither his fanatical sincerity nor his avuncular charm. It’s that he’s preaching class hatred to people besotted by the politics of envy. Barack Obama, running for president eight years ago, famously suggested to Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher that “when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.”
Mr. Sanders dispenses with the niceties. “I do not have millionaire or billionaire friends,” he boasts, as if there’s an income ceiling on virtue. That’s telling the 10,100,000 American households with a net worth of at least $1 million (excluding the value of their homes) to buzz off.
It is also telling any intellectually sentient voter that the drift of the modern Democratic Party runs in the same illiberal direction as the Trumpian right, only with a different set of targets. Mr. Sanders thinks Wall Street’s guilt is proved by its capitulation to the demands of a government that could barely prove a single case of banker fraud in court.
That’s something Mr. Sanders will never understand, being the sort of man whose notion of wisdom is to hold fast to the angry convictions of his adolescence. That may be why he connects with so many younger voters. But it’s also why his moral judgments are so sweeping and juvenile. Wall Street remains one of America’s crowning glories. To insinuate that the people who make it work are swindlers is no less a slur than to tag immigrants as criminals and moochers.
There is a short answer to the question: a lot richer than he admits. And the longer answer is even more interesting. Writing at Doug Ross’s Director Blue, Cliff Kincaid explains:
... [former publisher of Campaigns & Elections Magazine James] O’Brien has analyzed the financial status of Sanders and his wife, including their financial disclosure report, and has concluded they have a net worth in the range of $1.2 to $1.5 million, not the $700,000 or less that is usually reported by the media. (snip)
… his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, left her position as president of Burlington College under controversial circumstances and is now being accused of federal bank fraud. She left her position at the college and was given a severance package known as a “golden parachute” that also benefited Senator Sanders’ personal wealth.
Hmmm: The old “cut the wife big checks from nonprofits” gambit has a long history among Democrats. But Jane Sanders really should have asked Michelle Obama for advice, because Jane’s $200K is chump change compared to the yearly payout Shelly got from the University of Chicago Hospital for keeping a lid on protests when it dumped nonpaying patients on other health care facilities. Of course, there are far more opportunities for this sort of enrichment in Chicago than in Burlington. And face it: Burlington College was in tough financial shape at the time, with nothing like the resources of the U of C.
... as noted by Bruce Parker, a Vermont reporter for Watchdog.org—Senator Sanders should be asked to explain how his opposition to severance packages for corporation executives squares with his wife getting a cushy severance of $200,000.
Then there is a little smoke on Ms. Sanders’s banking:
Brady C. Toensing, a partner with the law firm of diGenova & Toensing, has filed a legal complaint with federal authorities requesting an investigation into apparent federal bank fraud committed by Ms. Sanders. His complaint was sent to Eric S. Miller, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Vermont, and Fred W. Gibson, Jr., Acting Inspector General with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Sanders is hiding some of his assets (legally):
O’Brien says that Sanders’ financial disclosure forms are incomplete. “For someone who doesn’t care about money, he goes a long way to cover up his true net worth,” he says. “Bernie does not disclose the value of real estate holdings. He can. He is not required to, but he could if he chose. It is known that he and/or his wife own at least two homes—one with rental income in Vermont and one near Capitol Hill where the median home value is $722,000.”
I have nothing against people buying houses and accumulating a net worth. But if Sanders’s wife executed a hypocritical severance package of the sort Bernie denounces, that is outright hypocrisy. And if he and his wife have accumulated a net worth that makes them millionaires, it sounds bad to his student loan-indebted followers. A million bucks ain’t what it used to be, but Sanders supporters don’t realize that.
2b)
Toxic Words
By Thomas Sowell
During this election year, we are destined to hear many words that are toxic in the way they misrepresent reality and substitute fantasies that can win votes.
One of these words is "entitlement." To hear some politicians tell it, we are all entitled to all sorts of things, ranging from "affordable housing" to "a living wage."
But the reality is that the human race is not entitled to anything, not even the food we need to stay alive. If we don't produce food, we are just going to starve. If we don't build housing, then we are not going to have housing, "affordable" or otherwise.
Particular individuals or groups can be given many things, to which politicians say they are "entitled," only if other people are forced by the government to provide those things to people who don't need to lift a finger to earn them. All the fancy talk about "entitlement" means simply forcing some people to work to produce things for other people, who have no obligation to work.
It gets worse. If we are all "entitled" to things, irrespective of whether we produce anything ourselves, then the question becomes: Why are some people getting so much more than others?
People who are producing nothing can feel a sense of grievance against those who are producing much, and being rewarded for it, if our basis for receiving economic benefits is supposed to be what we are all "entitled" to, rather than what we have worked to earn.
One of the most misleading uses of the notion of entitlement is to say that people who paid into Social Security for years are now entitled to the pensions they receive.
Really? It so happens that I have put money into the same bank account for more than 20 years. But if I were to write a check for a million dollars today, it would bounce! The question is not how long you have been putting money in, but how much money you put in.
If what you have been putting into Social Security over the years is enough to pay you a $1,500 a month pension, but you were promised a $3,000 a month pension, how much are you entitled to? On what basis?
Social Security was created back in the 1930s, during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of the shrewdest politicians who ever sat in the White House.
President Roosevelt understood that, if you could convince people that they were entitled to a pension under Social Security, it could become politically impossible to ever put an end to that system.
The pensions promised exceeded what could actually be paid from the money that was put in by the recipients. But the first generation to enter Social Security would have their pensions paid by money received from the second generation, as well as its own money. The second generation would be paid with money that included what was paid in by the third generation, and so on.
This is the principle behind a "pyramid" scheme, in which the first investors can get a big return on their money by simply paying them money received from subsequent investors. But it is only a matter of time before reality catches up with us, since the pyramid scheme is not actually investing any money or saving any money.
That is why a private insurance company that sold annuities based on a pyramid scheme would be prosecuted for fraud, and its officials put in prison. But you can't put Congress in prison, even when that is what it deserves.
With the money running out in the so-called trust fund for Social Security, reality is beginning to break through the fantasies, and is closing in on us.
No one wants to pull the rug out from under people already retired and dependent on Social Security, or on people nearing retirement age, and expecting a pension that is just not going to be there.
We can be both realistic enough, and decent enough, to rescue older people who have been victimized by political fantasies. We can pay higher taxes temporarily to rescue them. But, there is no reason to bankrupt the country by keeping the fraud going forever.
Younger people can be allowed to opt out and arrange their own pension plans in the private sector, where the kind of irresponsible pyramid schemes that politicians set up are illegal.
But we don't need to ruin the whole economy, in order to preserve the illusions created by toxic words like "entitlement."
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3) Assessing Obama's Mosque Speech on Islam
by Daniel Pipes
Special to IPT News
Wishing to address growing anti-Islamic sentiments among the American public, Barack Obama ventured on Feb. 3 to the Islamic Society of Baltimore (sadly, a mosque with unsavory Islamist associations) to talk about Islam and Muslims. The 5,000-word speech contains much of interest. Here's an in-depth assessment of its key points:
OBAMA: a lot of Americans have never visited a mosque. To the folks watching this today who haven't — think of your own church, or synagogue, or temple, and a mosque like this will be very familiar. This is where families come to worship and express their love for God and each other. There's a school where teachers open young minds. Kids play baseball and football and basketball — boys and girls — I hear they're pretty good. Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts meet, recite the Pledge of Allegiance here.
as Muslim Americans, you [worry that] your entire community so often is targeted or blamed for the violent acts of the very few.
Obama makes Muslims sound like innocent bystanders when there's a perfectly reasonable fear of them due to (1) so much violence emanating from this 1 percent of the U.S. population and (2) non-violent Muslims showing sympathy for the violent ones.
The Muslim American community remains relatively small—several million people in this country.
recently, we've heard inexcusable political rhetoric against Muslim Americans that has no place in our country.
A veiled critique of Donald Trump that Trump
deserves.
No surprise, then, that threats and harassment of Muslim Americans have surged.
That's ridiculous. In so far as there have a surge of threats and harassment – and this is open to doubt given the
disreputable nature of the reporting – this is due to Muslim violence. Reasonably, non-Muslims worry that a co-worker will behead them or attack them at a party, that they'll be bombed attending a sporting event, or rammed into by planes when working at their offices. To blame non-Muslims for this commonsensical, life-preserving fear is to confuse symptom with cause.
For more than a thousand years, people have been drawn to Islam's message of peace.
Some converts, to be sure, have been attracted to the peaceable side of Islam but many others have seen it as a militant force and converting as joining a winning team. Look at the Western converts who have gone to ISIS as one subset of these. Again, Obama just focuses on the cheery dimension and ignores the unpleasant one.
the very word itself, Islam, comes from salam — peace.
How can a person in a position of responsibility say something so patently wrong? Islam means
submission, and does not derive from
peace. As I
explained in 2005, "There is no connection in meaning between
salām and
islām, peace and submission. These are two distinct words with unrelated meetings." Shame on Obama.
For Christians like myself ...
Standing in a mosque, Obama presumably feels a need to remind his audience that he's not a Muslim. He would be more convincing if he could get his autobiography straight. For example, he sometimes declares he has "
always been a Christian" and at other times that he "
didn't become a Christian" until after college. It would also help if he could date this important milestone rather than offer, in the view of
Jason Kissner, an associate professor of criminology at California State University, Fresno, "two completely contradictory accounts" regarding its time frame.
Muslim Americans keep us safe. They're our police and our firefighters. They're in homeland security, in our intelligence community. They serve honorably in our armed forces.
it is undeniable that a small fraction of Muslims propagate a perverted interpretation of Islam.
Here we go again, Imam Obama declaiming on what the proper and the perverted interpretation of Islam are. He's done this before, as have many
other non-Muslim leaders, including prior U.S. presidents. It's silly and embarrassing.
right now, there is a organized extremist element that draws selectively from Islamic texts, twists them in an attempt to justify their killing and their terror.
It would be more accurate to replace this with "right now, there is a organized extremist element that draws on medieval Islamic texts and interprets them in medieval ways to justify their killing and their terror."
Part of what's happened in the Middle East and North Africa and other places where we see sectarian violence is religion being a tool for another agenda — for power, for control.
This is typical left-wing materialism, which sees religion as a vehicle for something else, usually connected with economic benefit. No, the Islamists are true believers who engage in violence to pursue their vision, not for power as an end in itself, as Obama insists.
Thomas Jefferson's opponents tried to stir things up by suggesting he was a Muslim – so I was not the first. No, it's true, it's true. Look it up. I'm in good company.
I did look it up – in
Jefferson's Religion, a 2007 book by Stephen J. Vicchio, and found no evidence that Jefferson was called a Muslim. His opponents called him names such as "French infidel," "confirmed infidel," "howling atheist," and "fanatic," but never "Mahometan."
just as faith leaders, including Muslims, must speak out when Christians are persecuted around the world – or when anti-Semitism is on the rise – because the fact is, is that there are Christians who are targeted now in the Middle East, despite having been there for centuries, and there are Jews who've lived in places like France for centuries who now feel obliged to leave because they feel themselves under assault — sometimes by Muslims.
It's not a complete or coherent sentence but it does correctly demand that Muslims speak out against religious persecution and it does note that Jews in Europe are "sometimes" (really, nearly always) attacked by Muslims. It's a relief to see the dark side peek through for an instant.
the suggestion is somehow that if I would simply say, these are all "Islamic terrorists," then we would actually have solved the problem by now, apparently. (Laughter.)
This is a cheap laugh line. No one thinks the problem of Islamist violence would be solved by Obama using the right wording; many, including me, however, say that he can't properly address the problem unless he accurately identifies it.
Groups like ISIL are desperate for legitimacy. They try to portray themselves as religious leaders and holy warriors who speak for Islam. I refuse to give them legitimacy.
In fact, ISIL (or ISIS, Islamic State, Daesh) could not care less what Obama or other non-Muslims think of it. It cares only about the views of Sunni Muslims. So, Obama can deny it legitimacy all he wants; ISIS won't notice or care.
the notion that America is at war with Islam ignores the fact that the world's religions are a part of who we are. We can't be at war with any other religion because the world's religions are a part of the very fabric of the United States, our national character.
By this infantile logic, Hitler could not have been at war with Judaism because Jews were part of the very fabric of Germany.
the best way for us to fight terrorism is to deny these organizations legitimacy and to show that here in the United States of America, we do not suppress Islam; we celebrate and lift up the success of Muslim Americans.
No, the best way to fight Muslim violence is by (1) getting out of the way of law enforcement and others on the front line and (2) helping anti-Islamist Muslims find their voice.
we can't suggest that Islam itself is at the root of the problem. That betrays our values. It alienates Muslim Americans. It's hurtful to those kids who are trying to go to school and are members of the Boy Scouts, and are thinking about joining our military.
This nicely summarizes the
Establishment mentality that one must not publicly connect Islam to violence; just whisper this behind closed doors.
Muslims around the world have a responsibility to reject extremist ideologies that are trying to penetrate within Muslim communities. Here at this mosque, and across our country and around the world, Muslim leaders are roundly and repeatedly and consistently condemning terrorism.
The equation of "reject[ing] extremist ideologies" and "condemning terrorism" reveals Obama's facile understanding of the Islamist challenge, reducing it merely to wanton political violence. Stop that violence and the problem is solved. Hardly; for lawful Islamism poses a deeper threat than some bomb-totting fanatics.
this is not a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam. This is a struggle between the peace-loving, overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world and a radical, tiny minority. And ultimately, I'm confident that the overwhelming majority will win that battle. Muslims will decide the future of your faith. And I'm confident in the direction that it will go.
I would phrase it quite differently but I endorse these sentiments.
If you're ever wondering whether you fit in here, let me say it as clearly as I can, as President of the United States: You fit in here – right here. You're right where you belong. You're part of America, too. You're not Muslim or American. You're Muslim and American.
I endorse this as well.
We are blessed to live in a nation where even if we sometimes stumble, even if we sometimes fall short, we never stop striving for our ideals. We keep moving closer to that more perfect union. We're a country where, if you work hard and if you play by the rules, you can ultimately make it, no matter who you are or how you pray. It may not always start off even in the race, but here, more than any place else, there's the opportunity to run that race. ...
After more than 200 years, our blended heritage, the patchwork quilt which is America, that is not a weakness, that is one of our greatest strengths. It's what makes us a beacon to the world.
These are unusually patriotic and warm words for the United States from a leftist who rarely has much good to say about his own country. Good to hear them.
In all, this speech gets much more wrong than it gets right, from factual mistakes to evasions to distortions. It does get a few points right, especially toward the end, but as a whole, it's a typically shoddy Obama production.
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