In a speech on Monday at Lehman College in the Bronx, President Obama blasted the media for focusing on “looters and rioters” in the recent race riots in Baltimore and Ferguson before it, and said that they should instead be focusing on “those who are trying to solve the complex problems plaguing America’s cities.”
What are those problems? Well, chief among them might be that hordes of black mobs regularly erupt in frenzies of thievery, arson, and violence in a pack-mentality response to perceived injustices and without knowledge or consideration of facts. But that’s just the symptom, the president suggests, of the “root causes of the tension in urban areas.”
We should take a moment to remind the president that thievery, arson, and violence are serious crimes, not a logical result of social “tension” in a civilized society. And his expecting the media to do something other than steadily report a mass crime wave is made all the more disgusting by his attempt to divert blame for the criminals’ actions by wheeling out all the usual villains as responsible for their behavior.
It’s not the “looters and rioters” destroying businesses that we should be focusing on, or the violent reprisals against police officers and the white people being targeted, or the communities where innocent people live in fear of racial powder kegs exploding. No, what we should be considering is how we can improve the lives of “blacks and Latinos” who suffer a deficit of opportunity and are “trapped in failing schools.” More investment in these communities is what is needed. That’s the theme -- the same unending, one-note dirge we should be accustomed to hearing by now.
And it’s a theme being cultivated in some pretty sinister ways. One way is the nonsensical yet often parroted suggestion that teens in Baltimore are worse off than teens in Nigerian slums. To actually believe this takes an otherworldly ignorance, and that this even needs to be refuted is sad beyond measure. But in another way, it serves as an argument against Barack Obama’s call for increased subsidization of urban communities.
First of all, the study claiming Nigerian levels of poverty focuses on “low-income residents near the Johns Hopkins medical campus,” most of whom happen to be black. But to only consider levels of income and suggest that this equates to a standard of living among “low-income” demographics in other countries is disingenuous in the extreme. The black teen in Baltimore and his or her parent (given the lack of two parent households in such communities, the singular is appropriate) are undoubtedly recipients of subsidized benefits, both federal and local, which elevate their standard of living, via food stamps, public housing, and welfare and disability payments that are neither reportable as income nor taxable, far beyond what their meager incomes provide. This is not something that Nigerian families enjoy to nearly any such extent.
It is no wonder that such considerations are not addressed in the study, or if they are, they appear to have been lost in translation from the study’s details to accepted talking points and conclusions. The real focus appears to be on teens’ “poor perceptions of their physical environments, their sense of social cohesion, and their sense of safety within their neighborhoods.” In a Washington Post report by Kristin Mmari, Robert W. Blum, and Beth Marshall, it is suggested that the youth feel this way due to “economic discrimination.” The report continues:
It’s important to provide the social support that can end the cycle of hopelessness. Simply living in a wealthy country doesn’t give young people the opportunity they need to feel optimistic about their futures. If we want to end the perpetual uprisings in our urban communities, we must stop turning a blind eye to the injustice right in front of us.
With this last statement, I can agree. But it’s important that we identify the nature of the injustice, and do more than simply regurgitate talking points about the benefits of a redistributive welfare state.
Again, the facts in this study inherently disavow the very conclusion that its orchestrators have drawn. The conclusion appears to be aligned with the president’s assessment -- that a lack of social and financial investment is the basis for “economic discrimination” that causes cultural, moral, and social decay among urban youth. How does one reconcile that assumption with the fact that children in other nations, with far less social and economic support from their governments, actually suffer less from cultural, moral, and social decay than the youth of Baltimore, who have been the subjects of Democrat social engineering and wealth redistribution experiments since the 1960s?
It can be expected that Baltimore having been under uninterrupted Democrat control since 1967 will not stop Barack Obama and the bleating sheep like Baltimore’s current mayor (who suggests that the wealth just hasn’t been spread around properly yet) from demanding that more and more government redistribution. They will continue doing the only thing they know how: peddling grievance fallacies to vilify opposition and expand government authority on the grounds of the necessity of government benevolence. And toward those ends, they’ll continue condemning police officers (without proof of their guilt) and stoking racial tensions wherever possible because it provides them political currency to do so. They will continue blaming some underlying societal antipathy toward black people and the racism of Republicans for not buying into the redistribution schemes. And as the president continues these indictments against his enemies, he will feign a devotion to help cure the cultural, moral, and social decay among urban youth by carrying forward and expanding upon the very policies that have left them thus crippled.
The indictment of the welfare state is long overdue, and it’s high time we force its engineers and defenders to take the stand to account for their crimes.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/baltimore_indicts_the_welfare_state.html#ixzz3ZVANbXsb
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BALTIMORE IS A DEMOCRAT PROBLEM, NOT AMERICA’S PROBLEM
Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem. Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor.
In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have been only two Republican governors of the State of Maryland.
Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat.
Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor Room-To-Destroy.
You can call the arson and looting and violence we are seeing on our television screens, rioting. That’s one way to describe the chaos. Another way to describe it is Democrat infighting. This is blue-on-blue violence. The thugs using the suspicious death of Freddie Gray (at the hands of a Democrat-led police department) to justify the looting that updates their home entertainment systems, are Democrats protesting Democrat leaders and Democrat policies in a Democrat-run city.
Poverty has nothing to do with it. This madness and chaos and anarchy is a Democrat-driven culture that starts at the top with a racially-divisive White House heartbreakingly effective at ginning up hate and violence.
Where I currently reside here in Watauga County, North Carolina, the poverty level is 31.3%. Median income is only $34,293. In both of those areas we are much worse off than Baltimore, that has a poverty rate of only 23.8% and a median income of $41,385.
Despite all that, we don’t riot here in Watauga County. Thankfully, we have not been poisoned by the same left-wing culture that is rotting Baltimore, and so many other cities like it, from the inside out. We get along remarkably well. We are neighbors. We are people who help out one another. We take pride in our community, and are grateful for what we do have. We are far from perfect, but we work out our many differences in civilized ways. Solutions are our goal, not cronyism, narcissistic victimhood, and the blaming of others.
One attitude we don’t have here is the soul-killing belief that somebody owes us something, which, of course, is a recipe for discontent. Because if you’re not getting what’s owed to you, how can you be anything but angry?
Democrats and their never-ending grievance campaigns; their never-ending propaganda that government largess is the answer; their never-ending caves to corrupt unions; their never-ending warehousing of innocent children in failed public schools — that’s a Democrat problem, not America’s problem.
I might believe Baltimore was an American problem if the city was interested in new ideas and a new direction under new leaders. But we all know that will never happen. After Democrat policies result in despair and anarchy, Democrats always demand more of the same, only bigger.
And the media goes right along.
And things only get worse.
I wish you all the luck in the world Baltimore. And I truly wish you had the courage to change. If you ever do, send up a flare. Until then, there is nothing anyone can do for you. You are victims of your own choices, and no one can make choices for you but you.
As far as the good people of Baltimore trapped by the terrible voting of your fellow citizens, I suggest you buy more guns until you can move to a city not run by those who see rioting as part of the Master Plan.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/28/baltimore-is-a-democrat-problem-not-americas-problem/
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2013/07/22/detroit-a-microcosm-of-democrat-failure/
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