China must pay for its mass murder

China must pay for its mass murder by fueling America’s fentanyl overdose epidemic

William Barr, New York Post 

A report from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party revealed that China has been directly fueling the US fentanyl crisis.

The mass importation of Chinese fentanyl is slaughtering Americans at an annual rate equal to that of our bloodiest year in World War II.

China is actively encouraging and facilitating this campaign of mass murder — as the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party revealed Tuesday in a bombshell bipartisan report.

It is a euphemism to call the mass distribution of fentanyl “drug trafficking.”

Fentanyl is a deadly poison. The tiniest amount is lethal.

It is typically distributed in disguised form so people who take it think they’re taking prescription drugs, such as Percocet, Xanax or Adderall.

Even when a drug is taken as an opioid, its victims have no idea it contains a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl.

Trafficking fentanyl is outright murder.

It is like shooting randomly into a crowd.

Those who ply and enable this trade know with moral certainty they are killing people on a mass scale.

The scale of carnage is intolerable and getting worse.

Drug overdose deaths stand at 112,000 a year and continue to climb — the vast majority attributable to fentanyl.

And this is not the only damage done.

A congressional report found the opioid crisis, largely fentanyl-fueled, cost America nearly $1.5 trillion in 2020 — 7% of gross domestic product.

The United States has long known China is the source of the fentanyl slaughtering Americans.

It produces 97% of the illicit fentanyl precursors essential to making it.

There’s no practical alternative source for the volume of precursors necessary.

Simply put, without China’s production and export of fentanyl and fentanyl precursors, there would be no fentanyl crisis.

But there has been a question about the government’s and party’s precise role.

Has this been an illicit business carried on by Chinese organized crime and corrupt businessmen, with the government simply reluctant to help stop what it sees as primarily an American problem?

Or is this effectively an intentional program to wreak havoc in the United States, given impetus, support and encouragement by China and the CCP?

Thanks to the select committee’s trailblazing work, we have a much clearer picture.

Its meticulous report presents detailed and convincing evidence that Beijing and the CCP are not just bystanders — they are the prime movers behind fentanyl’s mass importation into America.

Committee investigators found a hidden Chinese-government website that offers complete tax rebates incentivizing the export of all fentanyl analogues and precursors, as well as other synthetic narcotics — drugs illegal in China and America and without any legitimate purpose.

These rebates allow Chinese drug companies to effectively operate tax free when they make and export fentanyl precursors.

What conceivable basis could there be for the Chinese government to incentivize the production and export of these illegal drugs, knowing they are bound for the United States, where they will kill more than 200 Americans a day?

The committee also learned Beijing provides grants and awards to companies engaging in open and notorious synthetic-narcotics manufacturing and drug-trafficking.

And it discovered the government has ownership stakes in certain Chinese chemical companies exporting significant amounts of illicit fentanyl products, as well as publicly traded Chinese companies that openly and notoriously host on their websites illicit drugs for sale to Americans.

Tellingly, in contrast to China’s aggressive prosecution of domestic drug-traffickers — Chinese media regularly cover executions of such traffickers — the committee found no sign it’s pursued cases involving illegal export of narcotics.

This, despite Western law enforcement supplying compelling evidence of violations and despite China’s notorious system of intense social surveillance and control.

Beijing’s role in producing and exporting illicit drugs dovetails with the emergence of Chinese organized crime as the principal financiers and money-launderers for the drug cartels.

The CCP has been tightening its alliance with Chinese organized crime to gain influence outside China, and US law enforcement investigating Chinese money-laundering have found evidence indicating some schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Communist Party elite, per the committee report.

Some may find it hard to believe a modern state would be so complicit in the campaign of mass murder against another country’s citizens.

But the committee’s work provides powerful evidence it is.

As we try to defend our country against the deadly drug onslaught — not just fentanyl but now new generations of hideous Chinese drugs like nitazenesand xylazine (“tranqs”) — we must understand what we’re dealing with.

The Chinese have not been acting in good faith.

The idea they’re willing to cooperate with us in combating drug-trafficking is delusional.

China is one of the most pervasive police states on the planet.

It has the capacity to shut down the production and export of illicit narcotics.

But Beijing will not move to do so unless it understands there will be severe economic consequences — including sanctions — if it continues its complicity in the mass poisoning of American citizens.

William Barr is a Hudson Institute distinguished fellow and author of the memoir “One Damn Thing After Another.” He served as US attorney general, 1991-93 and 2019-20. 

California can’t account for $24B spent on homeless

 

Go Steve... 

California GOP leaders call for accountability after state can’t account for $24B spent on homeless crisis

The state auditor found that despite roughly $24 billion spent on homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, the problem didn’t improve in many cities

Bradford Betz, Fox News

California GOP leaders are calling for more accountability after an audit released earlier this week indicated that the state spent around $24 billion to tackle the homeless crisis over the past five years but did not consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money did anything to actually improve the problem. 

The state auditor’s report found that despite roughly $24 billion spent on homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, the problem didn’t improve in many cities, according to the state auditor’s report.

Among other things, the report found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH), which is responsible for coordinating agencies and allocating resources for the homelessness programs, stopped tracking whether the programs were working in 2021. 

It also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs due to the lack of a consistent method, the audit found. 

California Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher laid the blame squarely on the Newsom administration. 

"This is standard Gavin Newsom – make a splashy announcement, waste a bunch of taxpayer money, and completely fail to deliver," Gallagher said in a statement to Fox News Digital. 

"Californians are tired of the homeless crisis, and they’re even more tired of Gavin’s excuses. We need results – period, full stop." 

Republican state Sen. Roger Niello has called the audit "troubling" but told Fox News Digital he "wasn't terribly surprised. 

"The one issue I had with the audit was that the focus was mostly on housing and shelter issues, which is certainly important, but really very little about actual results, getting people out of homelessness, not just into shelter," he said. "That's sort of half the job, maybe not even quite half the job. And, so that was a little bit of a disappointment." 

Democratic state Sen. Dave Cortese, who requested the audit last year after touring a large homeless encampment in San Jose, said the audit "highlights the need for improved data and greater transparency at both the state and local levels." 

"Unfortunately, there is a balkanized approach to data collection and outcomes, with no centralized system for tracking our investments," he said. "This audit underscores the urgent need to establish best practices and create a blueprint for how the State of California and our cities can address our most visible challenge." 

Former MLB All-Star Steve Garvey, who is running against Rep. Adam Schiff in California’s U.S. Senate race as a Republican, said it would take "real political courage to make necessary changes." 

"Since day one, I’ve advocated for a federal audit of California’s homelessness crisis," he said. "I’m glad that the state has done this, but now we need real political courage to make necessary changes. Our unhoused people and our taxpayers deserve real results, not more failed policies." 

Despite the audit’s findings, Cal ICH said it has made improvements in data collection after AB 977 took effect on January 1, 2023. The law requires that grantees of state-funded homelessness programs to enter specific data elements related to individuals and families into their local Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). 

Still, Cal ICH is shifting blame to local governments, saying these municipalities must be held more accountable as they are the ones "primarily responsible for implementing these programs and collecting data on outcomes that the state can use to evaluate program effectiveness." 

"The Council continues to improve its ability to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent judiciously and effectively, including by providing technical support to local jurisdictions to help align data standards and reporting," Cal ICH said. 

Why Are They Destroying Us?

 

Why Are They Destroying Us?

Victor Davis Hanson,X @VDHanson

If someone wished to destroy America, could he do anything more catastrophic than what we currently see and hear each day? What would an existential enemy do that we have not already done to ourselves?

Here are eleven now familiar steps to civilizational destruction:

1) Wipe out a 2,000 mile border. Allow 10-million foreign nationals to enter unlawfully. Have no audit of any; nullify all federal immigration laws. Let toxic drugs in that kill 100,000 Americans a year. Give free support for those millions who broke the law. Smear any objectors as racists and xenophobes.

2) Run up $35 trillion in national debt. Keep adding $1 trillion to it each 100 days. Defame anyone wishing to cut wild spending as cruel and inhumane.

3). Appease or subsidize enemies like Iran and China. Demonize allies like Israel. Allow terrorists to attack Americans without response. See Islam as either similar or superior to Christianity. Make amends to leftist governments for supposedly past toxic American international behavior. Follow the lead of international agencies like the UN, ICC, and WHO to atone forpast American neocolonial and imperialist behavior. Recede to second-tier international status, befitting American decline.

4) In a multiracial democracy, redefine identity only as one’s tribal affiliation. Ensure each identity group rivals the other for victimhood and the state spoils it confers. Redefine all political issues by race and sex oppressors and oppressed. Destroy all meritocratic standards of admission, retention, promotion, and commendation.

5) Redefine violent crime as understandable, cry-of-the-heart expressions of social justice. Ensure no bail and same-day release for arrested, repeat violent felons. Empathize with the violent killer and rapist; ignore their victims, especially if slain police-officers

6). Emasculate the military by using non-meritocratic standards of race, gender, and sexual orientation to determine promotion and commendation. Deliberately smear as racists and insurrectionists the largest demographic in the military who in recent wars died at twice their numbers in the population—so that they leave or never join the military. Encourage retired high officers to slander their Commander-in-Chief. Cut the defense budget. Stop producing sufficient weapons, but leave billions of dollars’ worth of arms to terrorists.

7) Reinvent the justice system to indict, bankrupt, convict, jail and eliminate political opponents. Use ballot removal, impeachment, civil suits, and state and federal indictments rather than elections to defeat an opponent. Mob the homes of non-compliant Supreme Court Justices, attack them personally by name.

8) Encourage the fusion of the bureaucratic state with the electric media to form a powerful force for political audit, surveillance, censorship, and coercion. Marry the FBI to Silicon Valley and hire its contractors to warp the news and hound supposed enemies of the people.

9.) Make war on affordable gasoline and natural gas. Substitute inefficient, unreliable, and expensive wind and solar power, even as energy prices bankrupt the middle class.

10.) Marry late, but preferably not at all. Consider males toxic, especially boys. Have no children, or as few as possible. Otherwise, assure children they are entitled, and must be sheltered.  Raise them to have grievances against past generations and current norms.

11.) Turn world-class universities into indoctrination centers. Suspend the Bill of Rights on campuses. Train youth to graduate despising their own culture and civilization. Recruit foreign students from hostile nations to subsidize campus commissarbloat. Replace the curriculum with therapeutic propaganda. Ban the SAT/ACT and do not evaluate high school GPAs. Ensure merit does not select the student body. Charge tuition higher than the rate of inflation. Bill the government when students default on their loans.

So why are those controlling Biden using him to advance much of such a destructive agenda that would end America as we know it?

1) They are delusional and think their socialist and globalist agendas are working and will save us.

2) They are raging nihilists who do not like the U.S. and deliberately want it destroyed as a service to the world. A ruined U.S. is preferable to a strong America.

3) They are Jacobin revolutionaries who are intentionally erasing the old United States as a prerequisite for creating an entirely new America that will arise from the ashes with no trace or even memory of its past.

4) They have no agenda. They are aimless fools, and utter incompetents. These bunglers just wing it day-to-day, in response to what their radical media, academic, and political masters dictate is necessary for them to retain power. They have no idea of the damage they are doing.

5. A bit of 1-3, but probably not 4.

The Cut Flowers Civilization

 

The Cut Flowers Civilization

Ben Shapiro, Jewish World Review 

This week, famed atheist Richard Dawkins explained that he was a "cultural Christian." Praising his civilization, Dawkins stated, "I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian. I'm not a believer. But there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. And so you know I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense." Dawkins went on to praise Christianity as a "fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not."

Dawkins' case for Christianity — a case made on the basis of utility — is nothing new. It was made long ago by acidic critic of the church Voltaire, who famously averred, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." But the problem with the utilitarian case for religious belief is that it doesn't animate religious believers. It is simply impossible to build a civilization on the basis of Judeo-Christian foundations while making the active case as to why those foundations ought to be dissolved.

In fact, Western civilization has doomed itself so long as it fails to reconnect to its religious roots. Philosopher Will Herberg wrote, "The moral principles of Western civilization are, in fact, all derived from the tradition rooted in Scripture and have vital meaning only in the context of that tradition. ... Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice and personal dignity — the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality."

We are a cut flowers civilization.

And eventually, cut flowers die.

That has never been more obvious than this week, when the Biden administration decided to honor the newly invented Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. Gender ideology is a symptom of our society's reversion to gnostic paganism, in which unseen, chaotic forces buffet us about, and in which nature is directly opposed to the freedom of our disembodied essences. It is no wonder that gender ideology is opposed by every mainstream traditional religion.

Yet claiming that this magical holiday could not be moved, the White House issued a variety of statements in celebration of radical gender ideology, including the deeply insulting statement from the president of the United States citing the book of Genesis to the effect that transgender people are "made in the image of God" — ignoring the last half of the Biblical verse, which reads, "male and female he made them." What better time than Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar, to pay homage to an entirely new religion?

Richard Dawkins is obviously correct that a civilization rooted in church is better than a civilization rooted in an alternative set of values. But in reality, the churches cannot be empty; they must be full. The cathedrals that mean Britain to Dawkins must ring with the sounds of hymns in order to maintain their holiness and their importance; otherwise, they are merely beautiful examples of old architecture, remnants of a dead civilization preserved in stone.

But our civilization must live. And that means more than cultural Christianity. It means reengaging with the source of our values — the Scriptures that educated our fathers and grandfathers.

Deception, Treachery and Buffoonery

Biden's Easter = Bunnies and Rainbows

 ‘I Didn’t Do That’: Biden Responds to Criticism for Proclaiming Easter Sunday Transgender Visibility Day

The president’s proclamation has sparked an uproar among Republicans and conservatives.

Emel Akan, The Epoch Times 

WASHINGTON—President Joe Biden on April 1 pushed back against criticism of his proclamation on the weekend in support of transgender people, which coincided with Easter.

Treachery

“I didn’t do that,” President Biden said in response to a question from the press about his issuing the proclamation.

When asked about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) criticism of the proclamation, the president replied that “he’s thoroughly uninformed.”

The president’s responses came during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll he hosted along with First Lady Jill Biden on the South Lawn.

President Biden declared March 31, which fell on Easter Sunday, as “Transgender Day of Visibility,” sparking an uproar among Republicans and conservatives.

Mr. Johnson called it “outrageous,” while former President Donald Trump’s campaign demanded that President Biden apologize to millions of Christians in the United States.

“The Biden White House has betrayed the central tenet of Easter—which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” Mr. Johnson wrote on March 30 on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Banning sacred truth and tradition—while at the same time proclaiming Easter Sunday as ‘Transgender Day’—is outrageous and abhorrent. The American people are taking note.”

President Biden said in the March 29 proclamation that his administration wanted to send a message that transgender people are part of American society.

“NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility,” the president’s proclamation reads.

President Biden highlighted the appointment of transgender individuals in leadership positions within his administration, as well as the lifting of the ban that previously prevented them from openly serving in the military.

He also touted his administration’s efforts to make public services more accessible for transgender Americans, including making official documents such as passports more “inclusive” by including an X as the gender marker.

Karoline Leavitt, President Trump’s national press secretary, described the proclamation as “the Biden administration’s years-long assault on the Christian faith.”

“We call on Joe Biden’s failing campaign and White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only—the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” Ms. Leavitt said in a March 30 statement.

Deception

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre slammed the criticisms, calling them “dishonest” and “hateful.”

“On March 31, Transgender Day of Visibility is marked. And as we know—for folks who understand the calendar and how it works—Easter falls on different Sundays every year. And this year, it happened to coincide with Transgender Visibility Day. And so that is the simple fact,” she said.

“As a Christian who celebrates Easter with family, President Biden stands for bringing people together and upholding the dignity and freedoms of every American.

“President Biden will never abuse his faith for political purposes or for profit.”

President Biden delivered brief remarks on April 1, welcoming guests to the South Lawn for the annual Easter Egg Roll. The tradition began in 1878, when President Rutherford B. Hayes invited children to the White House for Easter and egg rolling on the lawn.

“You know, it began in 1878 because they wanted to have an Easter egg roll on the park grounds, but they weren’t allowed to do it. So, the president then said, ‘Let’s have it on the White House lawn.’ They couldn’t stop that. It’s been going on since then,” President Biden said in his remarks.

“Easter reminds us of the power of hope and renewal, sacrifice and resurrection, but mainly love and grace toward one another.”

Emel Akan is a senior White House correspondent for The Epoch Times, where she covers the Biden administration. Prior to this role, she covered the economic policies of the Trump administration. Previously, she worked in the financial sector as an investment banker at JPMorgan. She graduated with a master’s degree in business administration from Georgetown University.

“The Hard To Employ”: Do People Ever Change?

 

“The Hard To Employ”: Do People Ever Change?

Michael Bernick, Forbes 

Do people ever change?

It’s a question professionals in the job training field have been asking over the past five decades, especially in regards to the unemployed workers referred to in the 1970s as the “hard-to-employ”. It’s a question that is being asked today, in Congressional discussions over the reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), and direction of America’s job training system.

In 1979, when I started in job training, the “hard-to-employ” was the term then used by practitioners and employment researchers to describe a set of groups identified with the rising government benefit rolls and crime: welfare recipients, ex-offenders, out of school unemployed youth, and ex-addicts. Within these groups, some workers lacked vocational skills or basic literacy skills that made job placement difficult. Mainly, though, these workers were defined at the time by behaviors: inability to get to work regularly and on time, inability to manage issues in their personal lives that got in the way of the job, inability to follow work protocols. The term became a shorthand for the individuals who, in the words of a blue ribbon committee on the hard-to-employ in 1980, “have become a considerable burden to themselves and the public.”

Integrating these workers into jobs is one of the main goals of the WIOA reauthorization. But how to do so? Much of the WIOA discussion is focusing on longer term training and certifications for these workers prior to job placement. Yet in terms of fostering behaviors for job success, a different approach offers greater promise: direct job placement with high-touch supports, and subsequent skills upgrading. Workers are encouraged to build a track record in entry level jobs, and employers encouraged and incentivized to invest in these workers, with skills upgrading and advancement opportunities. Let’s briefly explain.

Behavioral change that enables individuals who have not had success in jobs to find such success is a complex, multifaceted process. Such behavioral change most often comes from influences outside of government training programs.

This behavioral change can come from the influence of a new mentor/teacher/friend, or an effective mental health/substance abuse intervention. It can come through joining a religious or spiritual movement.

Beyond these influences, often it comes through the process of aging and greater maturity.

A few weeks ago walking in San Francisco’s Union Square, I ran into a participant in the job training program, the San Francisco Renaissance Center, that I was part of in the 1980s. After not holding a steady job in his twenties, he has been employed steadily for the past thirty years in building set up and security positions with the San Francisco Convention Center and Union Square Business District. What brought change in his work behavior was neither the Renaissance Center nor any other training program. His work behavior changed as he aged and matured. So too other Renaissance Center participants settled into jobs on their own as they aged into their thirties and beyond.

A well-structured job training program, though, can be an influence for behavioral change and hastening integration into a more steady job world. Experience suggests that the WIOA authorization focus on the following three strategies:

1. The power of job placement and the “work first” approach:

One of the most important insights on behavioral change has come from Peter Cove, who in 1984, with his wife Dr. Lee Bowes, founded America Works. Inspired by President Johnson’s call to end poverty, Cove in 1965 had dropped out of graduate school and taken a job with the War on Poverty oversight agency in New York. Within a few years, though, he began to lose faith in the welfare and social service approaches and the flow of money without any accountability.

Cove turned to the job training field and went to work in the early 1970s at the Manhattan office of Wildcat Services Corporation. He would later recall, “At Wildcat we showed that the best way to get clients off welfare was to get them paid work immediately, rather than enroll them in training and education programs. I saw with my own eyes the value of work—any kind of paid work—in reducing welfare dependency and attacking poverty. I learned that if we helped welfare clients get jobs, even entry level jobs, they would then attend to their other needs. By contrast if the government gave them money and other benefits they were likely to remain dependent.”

Cove and his wife Dr. Lee Bowes launched America Works with their own funds, and built on the Wildcat results. They emphasized a “work first” behavioral approach: once people are placed in jobs they often find ways on their own to address other “static” or challenges in their lives. “When some mothers on welfare came to us they often explained that they could not work because they had no day care. We would send them on a job interview, and when the company wanted to hire them, miraculously they found a grandmother or daycare center.”

America Works has grown to a nationwide organization, serving 20,000 clients annually. It accompanies job placements with a range of counseling and case management supports for retention. It encourages skills upgrading and skills certifications for advancement. But its theory of behavioral change is centered on the power of the job placement.

Though America Works is among the largest of the “work first” workforce intermediaries, it is by no means the only one. The strategy is increasingly being adopted by other intermediaries, sometimes with variations through the growing apprenticeship movement and creative uses of transitional jobs.

2. The craft of the job counselor and the high-touch needed:

I’ve written from time to time about job counselors who are true craft persons in their roles in assisting the hard-to-employ, including Amy Ruddell, a job counselor in Sacramento, who works in job placement for the homeless. She has been in the field for 34 years, and developed strong ties with local employers, and a willingness and ability to sell her clients to employers. She also has the effective mix of empathy, enthusiasm, and straight talk, to be the cheerleader and coach that her clients need for their transitions into jobs.

When I wrote about Amy in early 2022, she had just completed a project cycle of 30 homeless participants, among whom 19 had been placed in entry level jobs. Since then, Amy has continued to regularly send participant updates. Today around a third of the participants placed in 2022 are back to being unemployed. The others, though, are still employed—though several have changed employers one or two times.

Amy provides the high-touch supports required for placement and re-placement. She checks in regularly with the participant and employer, and seeks to resolve job issues that arise. If there is no resolution, she will assist the participant in finding another job. She is not a nine-to-five counselor, and she does not give up easily on her clients.

The high-touch strategy is also finding greater adoption in the workforce field, as represented by MDRC’s Individual Placement and Support model and its growing Center for Applied Behavioral Science.

3. Advancement from entry level jobs:

In the 1970s and 1980s, the welfare rights groups would argue that welfare recipients and other workers on government benefits should not be expected to take low-wage, entry-level jobs. They were entitled to “quality jobs”. The result in most cases was that the workers obtained no jobs at all.

One of the first principles of job placement is that it is always easier to get a job if you have a job. Also, it is easier to navigate the job world and advance into a better position if you have a job, even an entry level job. The next job training system should encourage workers, with limited job backgrounds, to build a record in an entry level job, and seek out opportunities to advance. It should find ways to encourage and assist employers to provide such opportunities and invest in their entry level workers who perform well. In the post-pandemic economy, employers are finding just how hard it is to find committed employees in entry level positions.

Recent research by Burning Glass Institute points to the advancement opportunities increasingly available for entry level workers at America’s major companies. One challenge for the job training system going forward is how to expand these opportunities in mid-size and smaller firms.

Still, How Little We Know of Behavioral Change and Fitting Into the Job World

Our understanding of behavioral change is still primitive, in regards to the job world, as in other areas of life. Throughout the past five decades, job training practitioners and researchers have looked to the ascendant behavioral sciences for answers on integrating the “hard to employ” into jobs, but the answers have been scarce. If anything, during this same time, the neurosciences have been showing how much of behavior is linked to brain structure, and not easily subject to the mainstream behavioral interventions.

But these past five decades have also shown the power of getting and holding a job in stimulating behavioral change—at least for a portion of the “hard to employ”. This power should be at the center of WIOA reauthorization.

Michael Bernick I served as California Employment Development Department director, and today am Counsel with the international law firm of Duane Morris LLP, a Milken Institute Fellow and Fellow with Burning Glass Institute, and research director with the California Workforce  Association. My newest book is The Autism Full Employment Act (2021).2093

With Guardians Like These

 

A big part of the problems we face...

With Guardians Like These

Chuck Schumer’s recent comments about Israel exhibit arrogance and ignorance.

Joel Zinberg, City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-problem-with-schumers-israel-speech

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has long claimed to be a shomer—Hebrew for guardian or watchman—of Israel and the Jewish people. But his speech last Thursday on the Senate floor, in which he called for new elections in Israel, more readily brings two Yiddish words to mind.

The first word is chutzpah, which connotes arrogance-laced presumption. That perfectly describes Schumer instructing Israel—the only democracy in the entire Middle East—to jettison its elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold new elections, or else. Schumer threatened: “[i]f Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down . . . then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy.” That is election interference, plain and simple.

The Israeli people are quite capable of deciding when to hold elections and whom to elect, notwithstanding Schumer’s insinuation to the contrary. No foreign politician—even, or especially, one who prefaces his remarks with “as a Jew” and “a life-long supporter of Israel”—has any business interfering with an ally’s democratic processes. Critics might point to Netanyahu’s 2015 address to Congress opposing the proposed Iran nuclear deal. Democrats were livid at the time. But Netanyahu was arguing against a specific agreement that many Americans, and most Israelis, believed posed an existential threat to Israel and the world. He was not advocating for President Obama’s ouster.

Schumer claimed Netanyahu is “allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” But does anyone doubt Schumer is ditching Israel to save Joe Biden by placating his party’s radical left? Unsurprisingly, Biden praised the speech.

The second word is sechel—common sense or wisdom—something Schumer’s speech clearly lacked. The Senate majority leader claimed that the Israeli people are being “stifled by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” But the only people stuck in the past are those, like Schumer and the foreign policy establishment, who persist in wanting to impose a two-state solution that Palestinians have never favored and that Israelis, brutalized by decades of intifadas and terrorism culminating in October 7, have given up on.

Schumer identified the four obstacles to peace as Hamas and “the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways,” Netanyahu, right-wing Israelis, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. This ignores how Palestinians over the years have rejected multiple opportunities to form their own state. Indeed, polling just prior to October 7 found that nearly three quarters of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution. Reuters reports that 72 percent of Palestinians “support and tolerate” Hamas, believing that its October 7 attack was “correct.”

If Israel ends its war to eradicate Hamas, as Schumer urges, the country would be rewarding the atrocities of October 7. Hamas, the Palestinians who support them, and their useful idiot supporters in the West who chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be free,” all want a land that, to use the Nazi term, is Judenfrei—cleansed of Jews. Hamas has pledged to repeat the horrors of October 7 and kill as many Jews as possible. If Hamas is not destroyed, peace of any kind will be impossible.

Instead of coercing Israel, Schumer should pressure the international community to withdraw support from the aged and corrupt Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas—now in the 18th year of his four-year term and disliked by 90 percent of Palestinians. Moving on from Hamas and Abbas is the only way moderate Palestinians might come forward as partners for peace. Israelis will reckon with Netanyahu and his failure to protect their country at a time of their choosing. Meantime, the self-styled shomer should bite his tongue.

Joel Zinberg M.D., J.D.  Dr. Zinberg was senior economist and general counsel at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, 2017-2019.