Bloodthirsty Liberal

They may be small, shriveled fruit—but we can just juice ‘em:

Hispanics now make up the largest group of children living in poverty, the first time in U.S. history that poor white kids have been outnumbered by poor children of another race or ethnicity, according to a new study.

In a report released Wednesday, the Pew Hispanic Center said that 6.1 million Hispanic children are poor, compared with 5 million non-Hispanic white children and 4.4 million black children. Pew said Hispanic poverty numbers have soared because of the impact of the recession on the growing number of Latinos.

Growing number, huh? I guess they’re taking welfare Americans won’t take.

If I were a liberal, I’d say since they’d be in poverty somewhere, might as well be here!

Mark Steyn makes a great point, comparing the closing of the British newspaper to the non-closing of the Atlanta School System and the FBI

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, The Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, “respectable” newspaper, has been hammering The News Of The World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees’ penchant for “hacking” the phones of Royals and celebrities – Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn’t as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set either to 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.

But last Monday, it emerged that The News Of The World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voice mails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir announced the entire newspaper would be closed down. The whole thing. Gone.
Article Tab: Protesters cry out as they demonstrate against the News of the World newspaper outside News International’s headquarters in London, Friday, July 8, 2011. News of the World is accused of hacking into the mobile phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians. News International announced Thursday that the papers is to cease publication with this Sunday’s issue to be the last.
Protesters cry out as they demonstrate against the News of the World newspaper outside News International’s headquarters in London, Friday, July 8, 2011. News of the World is accused of hacking into the mobile phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians. News International announced Thursday that the papers is to cease publication with this Sunday’s issue to be the last.

The News Of The World wasn’t any old fish-wrap. Founded in 1843, it was by the mid-20th century the most-read newspaper in the English-speaking world, selling nine million copies a week. Even in today’s emaciated market, every week more than 2.6 million Britons bought “The News Of The Screws” (as it was affectionately known). Last Sunday, it was the biggest-selling newspaper in the United Kingdom and Europe. This Sunday, it’s history. To put it in American terms, consider those George Soros-funded websites claiming they pressured Fox into “firing” Glenn Beck. This is the equivalent of pressuring Mr. Murdoch into closing down the entire Fox News network.

As readers know, I applaud the Murdoch decision to close this rag and only wish that the NY Times would have been as honorable regarding its non-coverage of the holocaust and the famine in Russia. The world would be a much better place if there were actual professional journalistic standards and if they were enforced.

But I digress. What happens when governments lie, cheat and steal?

But you can’t help but notice that this supposed public shaming is awfully selective. In the week of the News Of The World revelations, it was reported that the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the Superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers – whoops, pardon me, “educators,” and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for “No Child Left Behind” federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let’s face it, it’s easier than teaching, right?

The APS Human Resources honcho Millicent Few had an early report into test-tampering illegally destroyed. So APS not only got the federal gravy but was also held up to the nation at large as a heartwarming, inspirational example of how large urban school districts can reform themselves and improve educational opportunities for their children.

And its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.

In reality, Beverly Hall’s Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students to improve its employees’ cozy sinecures.

The whole rotten stinking school system is systemically corrupt from the superintendent down. But what are the chances of APS being closed down? How many of those fraudulent non-teachers will waft on within the system until their lucrative retirements?

Absent a Great Flood (like in New Orleans or even earlier if you read the bible), the chances of closing the Atlanta School system are approximately zero. Zed if you’re Canadian.

But Aggie, that’s only one example. Does Steyn have anything else?

Or consider “Operation Fast and Furious,” about which nothing is happening terribly fast and over which Americans should be furious.

The official explanation is that the federal government used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels. As I said, that’s the official explanation: As soon as your head stops spinning, we’ll resume the narrative. Supposedly, United States taxpayers were picking up the tab for Mexican drug lords’ weaponry in order that the ATF could identify high-up gun-traffickers. But, as it turns out, these high-up gun-traffickers were already known to other agencies – FBI, DEA and other big-spending acronyms in the great fetid ooze of federal alphabet soup in which this republic is drowning. And, indeed, some of those high-ups are said to have been paid informants for those various federal agencies. So, in case you’re wondering why Obama’s second annual Recovery Summer is a wee bit sluggish at your end, relax: Stimulus dollars went to fund one federal agency to buy guns for the paid informants of another federal agency to funnel to foreign criminals in order that the first federal agency might identify the paid informants of the second federal agency.

Meanwhile, what did the drug cartels, the recipients of the guns, do with them? Well, they used them to kill at least one member of a third federal agency: Brian Terry of the United States Border Patrol. If that doesn’t bother you, well, they also killed not insignificant numbers of Mexican civilians.

If, by this stage, you’re wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners – that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control.

We’re not talking about hacking a schoolgirl’s cellphone here. Real people are dead. Yet nobody’s going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war. And while Eric Holder, the buccaneering attorney general at the center of this wilderness of mirrors, doesn’t yet have as many Distinguished Public Servant of the Year awards as Beverly Hall, judging from his cheerfully upfront obstruction of the congressional investigation, he’s not planning on going anywhere soon.

He goes on to talk about pitchforks, but in America today, only liberals such as our very cool President are allowed to use metaphors like “guns to our heads” or “mob with pitchforks”, so I’ll leave it to your imagination. Or you can just click on the link.

- Aggie

Taliban terrorists kills 80 on military base.

They are upset about bin Laden’s death. We blame the Pakistani military for enabling his stay in Pakistan, and they apparently blame the military for outing him.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility Friday for suicide attacks on a military training facility in the nation’s northwest, saying they were in retaliation for the killing of terror leader Osama bin Laden.

The twin suicide bombings killed at least 80 people, nearly all of them military recruits who had just completed their training, said Bashir Ahmad Bilour, a senior provincial minister. About 140 others were injured.

“Pakistani and the U.S. forces should be ready for more attacks,” said Ihsan Ullah Ihsan, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, who accused the Pakistani military of telling the United States where bin Laden was.

“Osama was our great leader and the killers of Osama will have to pay its price,” he said.

Meanwhile, bin Laden’s wives are (surprise!) hostile:

Three of Osama bin Laden’s widows have been interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers under the supervision of Pakistani’s intelligence service, according to sources in both governments.

The women — who were all interviewed together this week — were “hostile” toward the Americans, according to a senior Pakistani government official with direct knowledge of the post-bin Laden investigation and two senior U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The eldest of the three widows spoke for the group.

Members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence were in the room along with the U.S. intelligence officers, the officials said. The Americans had wanted to question the women separately to figure out inconsistencies in their stories.

Let’s all take a moment this morning to thank our Creator. We were not born in Pakistan, and what a gift that is. If we are female, we need to spend a bit longer thanking the Lord that we were not born female in Pakistan.

Time for one more? Let’s blame America for terrorism!!!

As the death of Osama bin Laden reverberates around the world, the root causes of extremism are apparently largely being ignored.

But the goals that need to be achieved in Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to turn people away from the lure of al Qaeda extremism will take time.

“The U.S. presence is acting as a rallying cry for these people,” said political analyst Aasiya Riaz. “You’ll talk to many people who say things will not change in the region until the United States picks up and leaves.”

Riaz, a member of the Pakistan Institute for Political Development and Transparency — an Islamabad-based think tank — said violent jihad has also been injected into this region’s culture and is viewed as an effective strategy against oppression.

Ironically, it was the U.S. that paid for and supported extremist militants during the 1980s Afghan jihad against the Soviet invasion.

The U.S. now rejects those extremists, but many suspect Pakistan’s spy agencies still maintain links to Islamist militants and plan to use those links to hold sway in Afghanistan once U.S. troops pull out.

Pakistan denies this, but skeptics say Islamabad’s deeds do not match its words.

Tahira Abdullah, a human rights activist in Islamabad, said extremist ideology in Pakistan and Afghanistan is made possible by the crushing poverty, and governments which have failed to provide the most basic human needs, like shelter, security and a basic education.

“It’s the lack of democracy,” Abdullah said. “It’s the lack of development. It’s the lack of opportunities.”

Studies by the United Nations’ aid agencies show nearly half of the adult population in Pakistan is illiterate and earns less than $2 a day.

…
Terrorism experts and sociologists have long rejected poverty and bad governance as the sole prerequisites to religious extremism.

They cite countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Bangladesh as examples of developing Muslim countries that are not facing widespread religious extremism.

So what makes Pakistan and Afghanistan different?

Analysts say in Pakistan and Afghanistan there is also the powerful perception that the U.S. is waging war with Islam. The perception is intensified by almost 10 years of U.S.-led military occupation in Afghanistan, where thousands of civilians — who had little to do with al Qaeda or the Taliban — have been killed.

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

- Aggie

And if u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb:

Nearly half of all adults in Detroit lack basic reading, writing and other skills needed to obtain good jobs but not enough services are being provided to address the crisis, a study warns.

The report, commissioned by the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund, found that the current literacy programs and services are not meeting residents’ needs.

In a city with an unemployment rate of 20.1%, 47% of adult residents — or more than 200,000 people — are estimated to be illiterate.

…

“We are not making headway,” said Karen Tyler-Ruiz, director of the Workforce Fund. “We are actually stagnant.”

She warned that if nothing is done, “we will continue to further isolate the population of Detroit from economic opportunity.”

Karen, sweetie, Detoit’s unemployment rate is over 20%! It can’t get more isolated from economic opportunity. The “strait” is already an “island”.

In fact, I wonder if illiteracy hasn’t stayed flat in real terms—the literate have followed the signs out of town. As we covered here a few weeks ago, Detroit’s population is now barely over 700,000, from a peak of 1,850,000 in 1950. One suggestion to its cure its urban blight is to return some of the built up land to agriculture.

Reprimitivizaton as progress: it’s a catchy slogan.

Let’s let our hair down: Detroit is over 80% black. When we talk of unemployed Detoiters, of illiterate Detroiters, of Detoiters living below the poverty level (as 36.4% did in 2009—and half of those live below half of the poverty level), we’re talking overwhelmingly about black people. Before reader Robert left us in a huff, he could find the silver lining to any story about the failure of liberal politics and welfare for black people. Racial genocide by abortion in New York City was, to him, the heroic decision by black women to govern their own bodies based on economic necessity.

But I think even Robert would be stumped by this. Since Coleman Young took office in 1974, Detroit has been governed exclusively by black mayors. Democratic black mayors. It’s current one, Dave Bing, was a successful businessman before moving to Detroit to run—oh yeah, he’s a Hall of Famer in the NBA, too, as the Portland Trailblazers of my youth learned to their regret.

Bing seems to be a decent man, certainly an accomplished man, but what do you do with 60 years of decline, 50% illiteracy, and almost 40% poverty? I mean, are Republicans so bad? Has the party of Robert Byrd served you so well? (Call it Conservatism if you can’t stand to say Republican.) Speaking as an outsider, I don’t appreciate having to fix what I didn’t break, especially when I’m not allowed to fix what’s really broken.

In an otherwise merely brilliant piece on the national debt, Mark Steyn wrote this staggering paragraph:

While Jonah Goldberg was asking why have a debt limit at all, Michael Kinsley took it to the next stage: “If the national debt doesn’t matter, why have taxes at all?” Particularly when you no longer have to “print” money, you can just quantitatively ease yourself into it. Once we raise the old debt ceiling, we’ll be pretty much at the point where the U.S. government is spending $4 trillion but only taking in $2 trillion: For every dollar we raise in taxes, we spend two. No surprise there: The “poorest” half of the population pay no federal income tax. They’re not exactly poor as the term would be understood in almost any other country, but in federal-revenue terms they’re dependents, so in order to fund government services for the wealthiest “poor” people on the planet we borrow money from a nation of subsistence peasants where pigs are such prized possessions they sleep in the house.

So much in there! To start with, the point can’t be made often enough: half the people in this country pay no federal income tax. Yet, as Steyn also notes, they’re not exactly poor, as we understand the word.

The most recent data I could find in a cursory search notes:

Various government reports contain the following facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau:

Nearly 40 percent of all poor households actu ally own their own homes. On average, this is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.

Eighty-four percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

Nearly two-thirds of the poor have cable or satellite TV.

Only 6 percent of poor households are over crowded; two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

The typical poor American has as much or more living space than the average individual living in most European countries. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

Ninety-eight percent of poor households have a color television; two-thirds own two or more color televisions.

Eighty-two percent own microwave ovens; 67 percent have a DVD player; 73 percent have a VCR; 47 percent have a computer.

The average intake of protein, vitamins, and minerals by poor children is indistinguishable from that of children in the upper middle class. Poor boys today at ages 18 and 19 are actually taller and heavier than middle-class boys of similar age were in the late 1950s. They are a full inch taller and ten pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy during World War II.

To be sure, there are poor people—the “truly needy” as Reagan called them. I don’t see them here. What we appear to have is a significant percentage of American people who own their own homes, drive two cars, watch cable TV (with the AC on), while munching a healthy snack. And pay no tax.

God bless ‘em.

But they’re not poor; not as Steyn describes the peasant Chinese (“subsistence peasants where pigs are such prized possessions they sleep in the house”). Yet we borrow from these peasants so that our own pigs can sleep in the house.

How did we get here?

Conventional accounts of Poverty not only exaggerate hardship, they also underestimate government spending on the poor. In 2008, federal and state governments spent $714 billion (or 5 percent of the total economy) on means-tested welfare aid, providing cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. (This sum does not include Social Security or Medicare.) If converted into cash, this aid would be nearly four times the amount needed to eliminate Poverty in the U.S. by raising the incomes of all poor households above the federal Poverty levels.

How can the government spend so much and still have such high levels of apparent Poverty? The answer is that, in measuring Poverty and inequality, Census ignores almost the entire welfare state. Census deems a household poor if its income falls below federally specified levels. But in its regular measurements, Census counts only around 4 percent of total welfare spending as “income.” Because of this, government spending on the poor can expand almost infinitely without having any detectable impact on official Poverty or inequality.

So far, the argument has just been about numbers, about defining what real poverty is—and isn’t. The next argument is over the social and moral issues that lead to poverty (real and imagined). That’s in this piece, too.

Welfare programs for the truly needy are often called a safety net. But you know what happens when too many people climb into a safety net? They sink so deep that the edges close in around them, and when the supports snaps under their weight they are caught, tangled limbs and all. I think that metaphor is more apt than ever.

This is the difference between absence of money and spiritual poverty.

Warning: The link goes to the NY Times and you only get 20 free visits per month.

The poorest place in the United States is not a dusty Texas border town, a hollow in Appalachia, a remote Indian reservation or a blighted urban neighborhood. It has no slums or homeless people. No one who lives there is shabbily dressed or has to go hungry. Crime is virtually nonexistent.

And, yet, officially, at least, none of the nation’s 3,700 villages, towns or cities with more than 10,000 people has a higher proportion of its population living in poverty than Kiryas Joel, N.Y., a community of mostly garden apartments and town houses 50 miles northwest of New York City in suburban Orange County.

Have you heard of this town? It is an very orthodox Jewish community in NY.

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.

About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.

Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.

Women marry young, remain in the village to raise their families and, according to religious strictures, do not use birth control. As a result, the median age (under 12) is the lowest in the country and the household size (nearly six) is the highest. Mothers rarely work outside the home while their children are young.

Most residents, raised as Yiddish speakers, do not speak much English. And most men devote themselves to Torah and Talmud studies rather than academic training — only 39 percent of the residents are high school graduates, and less than 5 percent have a bachelor’s degree. Several hundred adults study full time at religious institutions.

The concentration of poverty in Kiryas Joel, (pronounced KIR-yas Jo-EL) is not a deliberate strategy by the leaders of the Satmar sect, said Joel Oberlander, 30, a title examiner who lives in Williamsburg. “It puts a great strain on their resources,” he said. “They would love to see the better earners of the community relocate as well to balance the situation, but why would they?”

Still, the Census Bureau’s latest poverty estimates, based on the 2005-9 American Community Survey released last year, do not take into account the community’s tradition of philanthropy and no-interest loans. Moreover, some families may be eligible for public benefits because they earn low salaries from the religious congregations and other nonprofit groups that run businesses and religious schools. Nearly half of the village’s residents with jobs work for the public or parochial schools.

“If people want to work in a religious setting and make less than they would earn at B & H, that’s a choice people make,” said Gedalye Szegedin, the village administrator, referring to the giant photo and video retail store in Manhattan whose owner and many of whose employees are members of the Satmar sect.

“I don’t want to be judgmental,” Mr. Szegedin added. “I wouldn’t call it a poor community. I would say some are deprived. I would call it a community with a lot of income-related challenges.”

And it goes on. Whether one agrees with the lifestyle or not, they prove that low income levels do not have to mean crime, drugs, abuse. Perhaps our problems have more to do with the dissolution of the traditional family in certain high crime areas than with the poverty?

The NY Times does a casual investigation into the idea that the Jews are scamming the system somehow, that they are not so poor. (They often do this sort of investigative reporting about poor Black and Hispanic areas, don’t they? The kind where they claim that the residents are faking poverty and stealing from the state and federal governments?)

But it sounds like the community provides a lot of charity for their own citizens.

Joel Steinberg, who lives in the village with his family and works as a comptroller for a real estate firm, said that before Passover, “the No. 1 project in the community was raising funds for food.”

Mr. Steinberg recalled encountering a neighbor soliciting help door-to-door last fall: “He had received two shut-off notices from his utility company, he’s behind with tuition and that his food stamps gets used up before the end of the month. He’s paying too much for transportation to his job, and he had had an unexpected expense that forced him into debt.”

Still, the NY Times is quite skeptical.

Mr. Szegedin, the village administrator, said critics tended to forget that state taxpayers were generally spared because thousands of village children are enrolled in religious schools. Nearby, the Monroe-Woodbury school district, with roughly the same school-age population, spends about $150 million annually, about one-third of which comes from the state. (Albany provides about $5 million of Kiryas Joel’s $16 million public school budget.)
“You also have no drug-treatment programs, no juvenile delinquency program, we’re not clogging the court system with criminal cases, you’re not running programs for AIDS or teen pregnancy,” he said. “I haven’t run the numbers, but I think it’s a wash.”

I certainly will be interested to see what kind of scamming they turn up in impoverished African and Latino neighborhoods.

Other interesting facts about the Satmar Hasidic Community

Satmar (or Satmar Hasidism or Satmarer Hasidism) (?????? ??????) is a Hasidic movement comprising mostly Hungarian[1] and Romanian Hasidic Jewish Holocaust survivors and their descendants. It was founded and led by the late Hungarian-born[2] Grand Rebbe Yoel Teitelbaum[1] (1887-1979), who was the rabbi of Szatmárnémeti, Hungary (currently Satu Mare, Romania).[1] The town’s name in German is Satmar. The name Satmar was also used by the Yiddish-speaking population, Yiddish being then the common language of the local Jews. Members of the movement are usually referred to as Satmar Hasidim or Satmarer Hasidim.

They are descendants of the tiny number of very religious Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust. Many of our readers have negative feelings about large, low-income families. I am very glad that they are rebuilding their community.

- Aggie

Show of hands, please: anyone care about African hunger? One… two… okay a couple of you.

Then I’ll just share this with you:

The 2010 Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that eight out of the nine countries where hunger is increasing are from Sub-Saharan Africa.

Produced by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide, the annual index is calculated for 122 developing and transition countries.

This year’s study shows that twenty-nine of them, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, have levels of hunger described as “extremely alarming” or “alarming”.

The study shows that the Democratic Republic of Congo had the biggest increase in hunger levels which rose there by 65%, while Ethiopia, Ghana and Mozambique have all shown an improvement over the last ten years.

Some countries achieved significant absolute progress in improving their GHI. Between the 1990 GHI and the 2010 GHI, Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Vietnam saw the largest improvements.

So on BBC Africa HYS we’re asking why is Africa still hungry?

Sorry I didn’t tell you about it earlier. Maybe some of you have some good ideas. Me, I don’t really know, but I’d say a good start would be to stop everything we and they are doing now. Everything. It’s clearly not working.

Oh sure, maybe a few people would starve to death while we try to figure out a better approach, but that would be different how?

What if we—and I’m just talking out my backside here—gave American aid only to countries that met the basics of democratic institutions and civil liberties? What if we required the rule of law, transparency, and free market reforms?

I know we’d save a bundle, because practically no country in Africa or Asia (or other starving continents, if there are any) has any intention of meeting those alien, colonialist, imperialist criteria. But if any of them did, do you doubt that they’d be economic dynamos, able to feed—not to mention, clothe, house, and defend—themselves? I don’t. It’s not that hard. Not that hard to predict, that is—there’s ample evidence all around—but evidently a devil to put into practice.

But I would imagine there’s nothing harder than starving to death. So, they might want to give it a chance. There’s my suggestion, BBC.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.

Oh well…

Long-time readers will recognize the sarcasm with which I approach this story of famine and grinding poverty. But they will be wrong: I really don’t care.

UN food agencies said yesterday that 166 million people in 22 countries suffer chronic hunger or difficulty finding enough to eat as a result of what they called protracted food crises.

Wars, natural disasters, and poor government institutions have contributed to a continuous state of undernourishment in the 22 nations, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan, the Food and Agriculture Operation and the World Food Program said in a report.

A country that reports a food crisis for at least eight years and receives more than 10 percent of its foreign assistance as humanitarian relief is considered to be in a protracted food crisis, the two agencies said — offering the first definition of the term in hopes of improving aid response to these nations.

…

Countries in protracted crisis require targeted assistance, with the focus not only on emergency relief but also on longer-term tools, such as providing school meals or implementing food-for-work programs, the report said.

Food for work? What a radical concept! But it could spread, leading next to shelter for work, medicine for work, car for work, flat-screen TV for work, Doritos for work, and all other manner of necessities and luxuries in exchange for productivity. And what kind of world would that be?

But just read this sentence again:

A country that reports a food crisis for at least eight years and receives more than 10 percent of its foreign assistance as humanitarian relief is considered to be in a protracted food crisis, the two agencies said — offering the first definition of the term in hopes of improving aid response to these nations.

If a country can prove itself a basket case for eight years, unable to feed its people and dependent on foreign charity, it qualifies for more charity. In other words, when presented with a failed model, double down. It is so typical of the liberal mind. If we only spent another million/billion/trillion/bajillion (Aggie’s word from yesterday), peace would rule, hunger would end, and Obama would reign forever and ever.

It’s just weird that such a world has never come to pass.

In another forum, we begin to find a hint about why:

Mr. Derbyshire — Regarding your post on NRO Tuesday afternoon, I can attest to the validity of the contention that well-meaning aid organizations often exacerbate the problem which they are supposedly there to alleviate.

In January of 1994 I was deployed to Mogadishu, Somalia with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, partly in response to the “Blackhawk Down” incident.

As part of our preparation we were given extensive intelligence briefings on the history and culture of Somalia. A little acknowledged fact is that there was no famine in Somalia prior to the U.N.’s arrival. To be sure, there were localized food shortages and hunger, but no widespread famine.

The famine began when the U.N. arrived and began giving away food. With free food available, farmers cold not sell their crops and so they stopped farming; the U.N. became the major source of food.

Once U.N. aid convoys were the only viable source of food, it was easy for the warlords to seize the unarmed convoys and food warehouses and monopolize the food supply. Presto, instant famine.

So ended my belief that the U.N. was anything more than a third-rate debating society. Incidentally, the northern half of the country was generally stable (and, I believe, remains so). They sought to break away from the south and form their own nation but were prevented by the U.N. They remain shackled to the the dysfunctional south to this day.

Good line about the UN being nothing more than a third-rate debating society. I’ll have to steal it some day—when I’m feeling charitable.

Another comment:

Mr. Derbyshire — I can speak with some authority regarding the motivations of those in the “helping professions” generally, having spent well over two decades working for non-profits, mainly government funded. I was politically perhaps a tad right of center at the start. I am now firmly well right of same.

If there was one characteristic of my colleagues that was consistent, and that I found ever more dismaying it was precisely that they needed our clients, likely more than our clients ever needed them. I watched in chagrin as, on those occasions that our work actually began to make a dent in the problems we were funded to ameliorate, they found a new population of clients who needed them, or alternatively advanced solutions that guaranteed failure to keep the clients dependent.

Again, I don’t care. The world has never been wealthier, yet never have more people been hungry. The stupider among us would decry the inequality of capitalism, but the real reason is that those perennially starved nations—Haiti, Sudan, Somalia—are addicted to a failed model of “humanitarian aid”. As so often, you get what you pay for.

War and natural disasters can knock a country off its rails for a while, but if it encourages a free market (through the rule of law, as well as through economic reforms), it will be restored. See Japan and Germany after war; USA for resilience after hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, wild fires, etc.

Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but sometimes starvation is a choice. Fine, don’t eat. See if I care.

I think I understand why American educational standards have been slipping for decades now. If we were any smarter, we might be able to figure out that we’ve been had:

1-in-7 Americans are now considered to be in poverty, according to a report from the AP, based on upcoming census figures.

2009, Obama’s first year in office, saw a record jump in the poverty level from 13.2% to 15%. The poverty level is defined as living at $22,025 or below for a family of four.

Also under Obama, Child poverty has jumped from 19% to 20% and among the 18-64 demographic, the level jumped from 11.7% to 12.4%.

The problem for Obama is that the best argument he can make regarding the economy is that things might have been worse had he not done what he did. The reality though is that things are actually bad, as these numbers show.

Yeah, but kids don’t vote, so screw ‘em.

From another account:

Blacks and Latinos were disproportionately hit, based on their higher rates of unemployment.

And blacks will vote for Obama by nine-to-one, much to their shame and remorse, so no damage there. Maybe Latinos will figure it out—no imbéciles they—but I’m not confident of that, either.

But in Obama’s first year of office, with historically profligate spending coursing through the national corpuscles, we all look like a Save the Children ad.

Tell your children to ignore their teachers and read BTL. Not for me or for you—for them.