Camden, New Jersey: One Of Hundreds Of U.S. Cities That Are Turning Into Rotting, Decaying Hellholes

All over America, formerly prosperous communities are being transformed into crime-infested wastelands of poverty and despair.  Of course the most famous example of this is Detroit.  At one time, Detroit was the greatest manufacturing city that the world had ever seen and it had the highest per capita income in the entire country.  But now it has become a rotting, decaying hellhole that the rest of the planet laughs at.  And of course Detroit is far from alone.  There are hundreds of other U.S. cities that are suffering a similar fate.  In this article, the focus is going to be on Camden, New Jersey, but the truth is that there are lots of other “Detroits” and “Camdens” all over the nation.  Jobs and businesses are leaving our cities at a staggering rate, and what is being left behind is poverty, crime and extreme desperation.

Earlier this month, Rolling Stone published an article that took a hard look at the nightmare conditions that exist in Camden.  A city that once made Campbell’s soup and some of this nation’s most famous warships is now a national disgrace.  The following are six of the best quotes out of that article…

-“In September, its last supermarket closed, and the city has been declared a “food desert” by the USDA. The place is literally dying, its population having plummeted from above 120,000 in the Fifties to less than 80,000 today.”

-“Their home is a city with thousands of abandoned houses but no money to demolish them, leaving whole blocks full of Ninth Ward-style wreckage to gather waste and rats.”

-“With legal business mostly gone, illegal business took hold. Those hundreds of industries have been replaced by about 175 open-air drug markets, through which some quarter of a billion dollars in dope moves every year.”

-“On January 18th, 2011, the city laid off 168 of its 368 police officers, kicking off a dramatic, years-long, cops-versus-locals, house-to-house battle over a few square miles of North American territory that should have been national news, but has not been, likely because it took place in an isolated black and Hispanic ghost town.”

-“After the 2011 layoffs, police went into almost total retreat. Drug dealers cheerfully gave interviews to local reporters while slinging in broad daylight.”

-“The carnage left Camden’s crime rate on par with places like Haiti after its 2010 earthquake, and with other infamous Third World hot spots, as police officials later noticed to their dismay when they studied U.N. statistics.”

You can read the rest of the article right here.  But as bad as things have become in Camden, this should not be a surprise to most of you.  The reality is that this kind of rot and decay is happening in communities all over the United States.

Over in Detroit, crime has gotten so bad that even the police are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk“.  When you call the police in Detroit it takes them an average of 58 minutes to respond, and more than 90 percent of the crimes committed in the city end up as unsolved mysteries.

At this point, 60 percent of all children in Detroit are living in poverty, and there are approximately 78,000 abandoned homes in the city.

For much more on all this, check out the statistics in this article, and you can find some great photos of the “ruins of Detroit” right here.

So why is all of this happening?

Well, there are lots of factors involved of course, but the biggest one is the lack of good jobs in these cities.

At one time, Detroit had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the entire nation.  But now those days are long gone.

And what is happening to Detroit is precisely what is happening to America as a whole.  Our good jobs are disappearing and the middle class is being systematically destroyed.

In order to have a middle class, you have got to have middle class jobs.

There is no way around that.

And right now, hordes of young people are graduating from college and discovering that the middle class jobs that they were promised simply are not there.

CNN recently profiled a 37-year-old college graduate named Bobby Bingham.  Because he cannot find a good job, he is forced to work four low paying jobs…

Bobby Bingham works four jobs in Kansas City, Missouri, yet he has very little to show for it.

Bingham is 37 years old and has a college degree, but like many Americans, is stuck working many hours in low wage, part-time jobs.

Each week, he works a total of about 60 hours in his jobs as a massage therapist, a waiter at a Mexican restaurant, a delivery man for sandwich chain Jimmy John’s and a receptionist at his massage school.

Bingham makes approximately $400 a week, which works out to about $20,000 a year.  He has come to the conclusion that he may never be able to make enough to support a family…

“I’ve come to the point in my life where I wonder if I can ever support a family,” he said. “I have no idea how that’s ever going to logically happen.”

That deeply saddened my heart when I read that.  Here is a young man that wants to get married, have a family and do all the right things, but the economy is so bad that he fears that this may never be possible for him.

As I have written about previously, the economic downturn that we are experiencing right now has hit men particularly hard.  The number of men in their prime working years that do not make enough money to support a family is rising with each passing year, and this is causing massive problems in this country.

And when our politicians proclaim that all we need is “more education”, I feel like vomiting.  The U.S. population as a whole has more “education” today than it ever has had before.

If you think that “more education” is the answer, then check out the following excerpt from a recent interview with a law school graduate that is making about $40,000 a year and that has about $200,000 in law school debt…

Yes, it’s extremely hard to get by. I can’t afford rent or a car and can barely afford food. Anything extra like enjoying myself with friends, going to a movie, traveling, etc. — that’s all out the window for the foreseeable future and possibly for the rest of my life thanks to law school. I live with my parents. I don’t have a car. I don’t go out to socialize. I don’t date. I don’t buy new clothes. I don’t buy electronics. I don’t buy much of anything. I spend my free time working other jobs to put more money toward my debt. I do contract work for other lawyers, but the pay is very low and payment is sporadic.

Why did this happen to him?  Well, the truth is that there are way, way too many law school graduates.  There are not nearly enough good jobs for all of them.  In fact, this particular law school graduate deeply regrets ever going to law school and considers it “an extraordinary waste of money”…

I consider law school a waste of my life and an extraordinary waste of money. I feel like I was duped and tricked. At the end of the day, it’s my own fault for being a sucker and I learned an extremely hard lesson. Because I went to law school, I don’t see myself having a family, earning a comfortable wage, or having an enjoyable lifestyle.

But at least he has a job.  There are millions of college graduates that do not.  And there are hundreds of thousands of other college graduates that are currently working as waiters and waitresses.  Large numbers are also working temp jobs or standing behind registers in retail stores.

Over the past decade, tens of thousands of businesses and millions of good jobs have left this country.  The quality of the jobs that remain continues to decline at a frightening pace, and most of the new jobs that are being “created” these days are part-time jobs.

But you won’t hear the mainstream media or our most prominent politicians talk about these things much.  You won’t hear them talk about the fact that median household income in the United States has fallen for five years in a row or about the fact that the rate of homeownership in the United States has fallen for eight years in a row.

The middle class is dying.

Wake up America.

And even as millions of our jobs have been shipped to the other side of the planet, some of the most prominent “American companies” have been bought up by foreigners.  The following list comes from a recent Economy In Crisis article…

—–

Here are some of America’s most famous brands currently held in foreign hands:

Budweiser, now owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev N.V., which is based in Leuven, Belgium
Alka-Seltzer, now owned by German company Bayer Schering Pharma AG
Ben & Jerrys, now owned by British-Dutch Unilever
AMC theaters, now owned by the Chinese
7-Eleven, now owned by the Japanese company, Seven & I Holdings
Woman’s Day Magazine, now owned by the French company,  Hachette Filipacchi Médias, S.A
Purina, now owned by the Swiss company, Nestle
Gerber, now owned by the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Novartis
Firestone, now owned by the Japanese Bridgestone Corporation
Citgo, now owned by the government of Venezuela
French’s Mustard, now owned by Reckitt Benckiser, a British conglomerate
Frigidaire, now owned by Sweden’s AB Electrolux
The Plaza Hotel in New York City, now owned by Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva’s El-Ad Group
Trader Joes, now owned by German billionaires Karl and Theo Albrecht
Dial soap, now owned by Henkel KGaA, based in Dusseldorf, Germany
Sunglass Hut, now owned by Italian eyewear seller Luxottica Group
—–

Are you starting to get the picture?

Our economic infrastructure is being absolutely gutted and more than 46 million Americans are now living in poverty.

And if you are waiting for the jokers in Washington D.C. to fix things, you are going to be waiting for a very, very long time.

Over the past several years, both the Democrats and the Republicans have proven again and again that they are basically completely and totally useless.  In fact, just about everything that they try to do actually makes our problems even worse.

In just a few days, Barack Obama leaves for a 17 day holiday vacation in Hawaii.  Many have criticized him and the members of Congress for taking so much time off, but perhaps that is the best thing that they can do at this point.  As long as they are away from Washington D.C., at least they won’t be making things even worse for all the rest of us.

Real Estate: You Can Buy A House For One Dollar Or Less In Economically Depressed Cities All Over America

You Can Buy A House For One Dollar Or Less In Economically Depressed Cities All Over America

Would you like to buy a house for one dollar?  If someone came up to you on the street and asked you that question, you would probably respond by saying that it sounds too good to be true.  But this is actually happening in economically-depressed cities all over America.  Of course there are a number of reasons why you might want to think twice before buying any of these homes, and I will get into those reasons in just a little bit.  First, however, it is worth noting that many of the cities where these “free houses” are available were once some of the most prosperous cities in the entire country.  In fact, the city of Detroit once had the highest per capita income in the entire nation.  But as millions of good jobs have been shipped overseas, these once prosperous communities have degenerated into rotting, decaying hellholes.  Now homes that once housed thriving middle class families cannot even be given away.  This is happening all over America, and what we are witnessing right now is only just the beginning.

The photo that I have posted below was sent to me by a reader just the other day.  It is a photo of a house in Yakima, Washington that is apparently being given away for free.  At one time it was probably quite a lovely home, but now nobody seems to want it…

This piqued my curiosity, so I started doing some research and I discovered that homes all over the nation are being sold off for a dollar or less.  The following are just a few examples…

-Buffalo, New York: “The Urban Homestead Program that is offered by the City of Buffalo enables qualified buyers to purchase a home that has been deemed ‘homestead eligible’ for $1.00 and there are plenty of properties left. There are three main requirements when purchasing a homestead property; the owner must fix all code violations within 18 months, have immediate access to at least $5000, and live there for at least three years. You also have to cover the closing costs of the purchase.”

-Gary, Indiana: “Officials say that a third of the houses in Gary are unoccupied, hollowed dwellings spread across a city that, like other former industrial powerhouses, has lost more than half its population in the last half-century.

While some of those homes will be demolished, Gary is exploring a more affordable way to lift its haggard tax base and reduce the excess of empty structures: sell them for $1.”

-South Bend, Indiana: “How could you refuse this offer? The city of South Bend, Indiana wants to give this handsome circa-1851 Italianate farmhouse away to anyone willing to properly restore it. Aside from the boarded up windows (the boards are painted to look like real windows), the place is in pretty good shape, with a completely restored exterior, new roof, and all new HVAC, plumbing and electrical systems. All you’ll need to do is restore the gutted (but clean as can be) interior.”

-Detroit, Michigan: “Now that the motor city has effectively run out of gas and declared bankruptcy, some rather eye-popping deals are presenting themselves to first time home buyers who appreciate the challenge of a fixer-upper.

Hundreds of Detroit homes currently listed on Zillow have asking prices below $5,000, with at least one seller so desperate as to offer his house for just $1, ABC Newsreported.”

—–

And guess who is selling more “one dollar homes” than anyone else?

If you guessed “the federal government” you would be correct.

Right now, the federal government is selling foreclosed homes to low income families all over the country for just one dollar…

HUD’s Dollar Homes initiative helps local governments to foster housing opportunities for low to moderate income families and address specific community needs by offering them the opportunity to purchase qualified HUD-owned homes for $1 each.

Dollar Homes are single-family homes that are acquired by the Federal Housing Administration (which is part of HUD) as a result of foreclosure actions. Single-family properties are made available through the program whenever FHA is unable to sell the homes for six months.

By selling vacant homes for $1 after six months on the market, HUD makes it possible for communities to fix up the homes and put them to good use at a considerable savings.

Before you get too excited, there are a whole bunch of reasons why you wouldn’t want to actually buy any of these one dollar homes.

First of all, most of them have been totally trashed.  Just to get them up to livable condition would take thousands of dollars in most cases.  Many of them are full of asbestos, and severe wiring and plumbing issues are quite common.

Secondly, you assume all of the liability for a home when you buy it.  So if a homeless person stumbles in and injures himself, you could be liable for his injuries.

Thirdly, many of these homes are in very high crime neighborhoods.  In some of these areas, people will literally rip up and carry away anything that is not bolted down.

Fourthly, property taxes are very high in many of these cities.  Local governments are desperate to get people into these homes so that they can get the taxes flowing again.  In many cases, what you would pay in taxes for a year is more than the true value of the home itself.

So, like I said, these homes are not the “great deal” that they may appear to be at first glance.

But that is not really the issue.

The real question is this: What is causing our communities to decay so dramatically?

And of course a big part of the answer is that the middle class in America is dying.

According to Time Magazine, one new report has discovered that nearly half the country is constantly living in a state of “persistent economic insecurity”…

But as evidenced by a report out Thursday from the Corporation for Enterprise Development, nearly half of Americans are living in a state of “persistent economic insecurity,” that makes it “difficult to look beyond immediate needs and plan for a more secure future.”

That same report also found that 56 percent of all Americans now have “subprime credit”.

We are a nation that is losing our independence and sinking into poverty.

Right now, 49.2 percent of all Americans are receiving benefits from at least one government program, and the U.S. government has spent an astounding 3.7 trillion dollars on welfare programs over the past five years.

Millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas, the control freak bureaucrats that are running things are absolutely killing “the little guy”, and poverty in the United Statesis exploding at a frightening pace.

Things are “changing” in this country, and not for the better.

One way that the death of the middle class is manifesting itself is in the death of shopping malls all over America.  The following is an excerpt from a recent Business Insider article…

All across America, once-vibrant shopping malls are boarded up and decaying.

Traffic-driving anchors like Sears and JCPenney are shutting down stores, and mall owners are having a hard time finding retailers large enough to replace them. With a fresh wave of closures on the horizon, the problem is set to accelerate, according to retail and real estate analysts.

According to that same article, one prominent retail analyst believes that we could see up to 50 percent of the shopping malls in America close within 20 years…

Within 15 to 20 years, retail consultant Howard Davidowitz expects as many as half of America’s shopping malls to fail. He predicts that only upscale shopping centers with anchors like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus will survive.

And did you catch that last part?  Only the shopping malls in wealthy areas will survive because the wealthy will be the only ones with enough money to support them.

For much more on this phenomenon, please see my previous article entitled “What Recovery? Sears And J.C. Penney Are DYING“.

At this point, things have already gotten so bad that now even Wal-Mart is having trouble.  In fact, Wal-Mart is blaming the recent slowdown in sales on cuts to the federal food stamp program…

Wal-Mart announced today that cuts in a federal food stamp program as well as record cold temperatures hurt its fourth quarter profits.

After previously reporting “relatively flat” sales for the quarter, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. now says that sales for its namesake store and its Sam’s Club locations would be “slightly negative” for the November-January quarter, according to Agence France-Presse.

Wal-Mart’s Chief Financial Officer, Charles Holley, blamed the revised forecast on deeper-than-expected cuts to the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the extreme cold weather occurring in the past month.

This is how far the middle class in America has fallen.  So many people are now on food stamps that even a slight reduction in benefits has a huge impact on the largest retailer in the entire country.

And actually, many rural communities could end up losing their Wal-Mart stores in the years ahead as the economy continues to deteriorate.  In a recent CNBC article entitled “Time to close Wal-Mart stores? Analysts think so“, it was suggested that Wal-Mart should close about 100 “underperforming” supercenters in rural locations around the nation.

We are rapidly becoming “two Americas”.  In the “good America”, the wealthy will still have plenty of retail stores to choose from within easy driving distance from their million dollar homes.

In the “bad America”, which will include most of us, our shopping malls will be closing down and the rotting, decaying homes of our neighbors will be sold off for next to nothing.

So which America do you live in?  Please feel free to share what is going on in your neck of the woods by posting a comment below…

Will Detroit Be The First Major Chinese City In The United States?

We have been made in the image and likeness of ‪#‎WhiteSupremacy‬; so much so, that its hard to teach us to unite and love our own. If the Black man does not care enough about his own to secure himself a future that his own Black woman and children can enjoy in peace and harmony, he will have no other choice but to watch what rightfully belongs to him become a desolate wasteland -- bought up, used, and sold to the highest bidder. How can we have one of the richest continents in the world, and not be invested in it's future success, Africa included? What kind of people grip the Bible/Qur'an harder than they'll grip the lands that bore them? None can call themselves leaders if they're allowing European and Asian domination to strip their ancestral lands of valuable resources and in the same breath not have clean water for their own citizens? We have become a waste of ‪#‎Melanin‬.


Is Detroit destined to become a Chinese city?  Chinese homebuyers and Chinese businesses are starting to flood into the Motor City, and the governor of Michigan is greatly encouraging this.  In fact, he has formally asked the Obama administration for 50,000 special federal immigration visas to encourage even more immigration from China and elsewhere.  So will Detroit be the first major city in the United States to be dominated by China?  It could happen.  Once upon a time, Detroit was the greatest manufacturing city in the history of the world and it had the highest per capita income in the entire country.  But now it is a rotting, decaying, bankrupt hellhole that is in desperate need of a savior, and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appears to be fully convinced that China can be that savior.

To Snyder, encouraging foreigners to invest money and buy up properties won’t cost the state government much, but it could potentially have great benefits…

Under a plan to be unveiled Thursday, Gov. Rick Snyder will request 50,000 special federal immigration visas over the next five years to attract foreign professionals who are willing to work and live in the city.

Mr. Snyder, in an interview Wednesday, said that “this is one way for the federal government to step up to provide significant value without cost that could have a huge impact on the city’s future.”

At a news conference announcing his plan, Snyder was not shy about declaring his intentions…

“Let’s send a message to the entire world: Detroit, Michigan, is open to the world.“

In other words, Snyder wants China to save Detroit since nobody in this country is going to.

Snyder has also taken a couple of additional steps to encourage immigration and foreign investment, including opening up something called “an Office for New Americans”…

Opening an Office for New Americans to attract and help immigrants better adjust to life in Michigan, and designating the state as an Employer Based or EB-5 center to expedite visas and permits for immigrants who want to open business in the state with investments of at least $500,000 and 10 employees.

In essence, Snyder has done just about everything except roll out the welcome mat for the Chinese.

But this is nothing new for Governor Snyder.  In fact, he has been making overtures to China for years…

Snyder, who was a businessman before starting his political career, believes that automobiles can no longer change the fate of Detroit. He said that he has learned from the history of the United States that what has made the nation great is immigrants.

In the early 1990s, Snyder went to China to develop the automobile market. After he was elected as the governor of Michigan, he made at least one trip to China every year, with the aim of recruiting talent.

He hopes that well-educated Chinese people can revitalize the Motor City in the new era. And as he desired, after Detroit announced its bankruptcy in 2013, the Chinese began to take the dying city by storm.

Rich Chinese men see Detroit as a rare opportunity for investment outside their home country.

In 2013, without any field investigation, Dongdu International Group of Shanghai — whose assets total 5 billion yuan (US$800 million) — spent US$13.6 million to buy the David Stott building and the Detroit Free Press building at auctions in September.

And when we talk about the Chinese domination of Detroit, this is not something that is just future tense.  This is something that is already happening right now.  For example, the following is an excerpt from a CNBC article that discussed how Chinese companies are already aggressively “putting down roots in Detroit”…

Dozens of companies from China are putting down roots in Detroit, part of the country’s steady push into the American auto industry.

Chinese-owned companies are investing in American businesses and new vehicle technology, selling everything from seat belts to shock absorbers in retail stores, and hiring experienced engineers and designers in an effort to soak up the talent and expertise of domestic automakers and their suppliers.



The transformation that has taken place in that region of the country is absolutely remarkable.

48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in the state of Michigan were lost between December 2000 and December 2010.  Our trade deficit with China was largely responsible for that.

And now we are relying on China to come in and salvage the ruins of our gutted economic infrastructure.

Not only that, but the Chinese are also eagerly buying up homes at extremely depressed prices all over Detroit.

According to CNN, Detroit is already number four on the list of the top 10 destinations for Chinese homebuyers.  In many cases, Chinese buyers are scooping up properties without even looking at them first.  Just check out what one Detroit real estate broker told Quartz last July…

“I have people calling and saying, ‘I’m serious—I wanna buy 100, 200 properties,’” she tells Quartz, noting that one of her colleagues recently sold 30 properties to a Chinese buyer. “They say ‘We don’t need to see them. Just pick the good ones.’”

And they aren’t just interested in Detroit.  As I have written about previously, one Chinese company known as “Sino-Michigan Properties LLC” actually had plans to buy 200 acres of land near the little town of Milan, Michigan and turn it into a “China City” with artificial lakes, a Chinese cultural center and hundreds of housing units for Chinese citizens.  For much more on how Chinese buyers are gobbling up real estate all over the nation, please see my previous article entitled “The Chinese Are Acquiring Large Chunks Of Land In Communities All Over America“.

All of this is just another indication of how rapidly the global economic landscape is changing.

Since the late 19th Century, the United States has been the most dominant economic power in the world.

But now that reign is ending.

Just recently, a new study released by the World Bank indicated that China is now the largest economy in the world in terms of purchasing power…

A report out of the World Bank shows rapidly expanding China is poised to overtake the once invincible United States as the world’s largest economy by the end of 2014.

The International Comparison Program looks at exchange rates to reveal purchasing power of different currencies and found that yuan in China will soon pack more punch than the mighty dollar.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials bashed the report as flawed, likely for fear of losing its status as a developing nation and the pollution-spewing perks that come with it.

And a couple of years ago China passed the United States and become the leader in global trade.

As the Chinese economy continues to rise and the U.S. economy continues to decline, the shift in global power is going to become even more dramatic.

Yes, let us hope for the best for our failing economy, but you also might want to teach your kids to speak Chinese just in case.

Tags: China, Chinese, Chinese Businesses, Chinese Homebuyers, Detroit, Immigration, Michael T. Snyder, Michigan, United States | Category: Asia, Commentary | 192 comments - ()

Black on Black: 8 Arguments Used to Blame Black People for Their Own Oppression — and How to Counteract Them

Black people are too intent on holding on to wrongdoings from the past. Therefore, they keep blaming someone else for their problems.

The list of wrongs done to Black people throughout their history in the U.S. that are still resonating in their lives today is extensive and extremely disturbing. As a result of hundreds of years of subjugation in an oppressive, racist system, Black households have one-tenth the wealth of white households in this country. While the Civil Rights Era enabled African-Americans to make great advances in the past 40 years — achieving high school, college and post-graduate degrees at accelerating rates — the disparities are still enormous and will take many generations to overcome without direct intervention. And by the way, the leveling of the playing field helps white people by enabling previously disadvantaged citizens to contribute to the nation’s economy to the full extent of their potential.

If Blacks weren't committing so much crime, they wouldn't get so much attention from police.

The common impulse of whites has always been to blame Blacks for pathologies that whites played a central role in creating. Criminologist Charles Silberman wrote in 1978 that “it would be hard to imagine an environment better calculated to evoke violence than the one in which black Americans have lived.” Pretending Black crime is a Black-created problem is like pretending New Orleans never got hit by a hurricane. Since the epidemic of unarmed Blacks being killed by police comes not when Black crime is high but when it is at its lowest level in generations, this argument that police are in Black communities because of the prevalence of crime appears not to be substantiated by the facts. Homicides committed by African-Americans declined by half between 1991 and 2008. Since the early 1990s, arrests of Black juveniles have plunged by more than half. In New York City, where Eric Garner was killed by police, the rate of homicides by Blacks is down by 80 percent. In Chicago, where most murders are committed by African-Americans, the number last year was the lowest since 1965 — and this year’s could be lower yet. And yet Blacks continue to be killed by police. Exploding crime in the Black community doesn't appear to be the impetus.

Most of the nation’s criminals are Black.

The vast majority of Black people are not criminals. In any given year, less than 5 percent of African-Americans are involved in violent crime as perpetrators or victims. The fact that Blacks make up a large share of the violent criminal population gives many whites the impression that violent criminals make up a large share of the Black population. They don’t.


Why don’t more Blacks living in bad neighborhoods learn to behave like sober middle-class suburbanites? 
One reason is the shortage of stable families, steady incomes, good schools and safe streets. If you grow up with those advantages, it’s relatively easy to do the right thing. If you don’t, it’s a lot harder. People trapped in a poor and dangerous slum can’t depend on the authorities to keep them safe. They face serious threats every time they leave home. But a young Black man who packs or uses a weapon to protect himself against gangs is committing a crime. Even motivated, well-intended kids can wind up in jail — something that happens all the time. Crime and poverty create a vicious cycle: A child raised in a chaotic environment is much less likely to learn the habits that foster success. Black children afflicted with these disadvantages often take the wrong path as teens or adults — and then white people act like the racist configurations of American society bear no responsibility. And when they turn out badly, people like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani act as though whites bear no responsibility.

Young Black males are at greater risk for harm from their peers than from the police or white civilians.
There’s a lot we don’t know about how many people have actually been killed at police hands in the United States, thanks to woefully inadequate transparency and federal record-keeping. But there’s one thing we do know: Among those we know were shot by police, Black teens were 21 times more likely to be shot dead than their white counterparts. A report by ProPublica revealed that the 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that Blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police. If whites were killed at the same ratio, there would have been another 185 white deaths during that three-year period, just in that narrow age range. In fact, Black people are much more likely to get killed in general, and not just by other Black people. One would think that African-Americans being at far higher risk for being killed in general would lead law enforcement to take pains to protect them fully and completely — not use this as a lame and non-factual excuse to justify having police do the killing instead of someone else.

Black people just want to live off the government instead of working.

The largest group of food-stamp recipients is white; 45 percent of all beneficiaries are children; and most people eligible for Medicaid are families with children in which at least one person in the household has a job. Despite ample and objective statistics showing that most welfare recipients are white families with children, the stereotype of the welfare queen persists. As for food stamps, whites made up 48 percent of recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2012, while Blacks were 26 percent of recipients and Hispanics were 21 percent. ”You’re talking about the working poor, and it’s a pretty sympathetic group,” said Tom Perriello of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “They’re not welfare queens driving Cadillacs.  These are people trying to pay the bills and keep the lights on.” The connection of Black people to these entitlement programs by white elites has been an insidious and cynical way of building opposition to them among poor whites — the group who actually benefits from them more than any other group.

Black people aren't interested in education.

Newly freed slaves were responsible for the creation of their own public education system in the South — a system that substantially influenced the separate public education system that developed for whites. In Georgia, when schools for freed people opened in early 1865, they were crowded to overflowing. Within a year of Black freedom, at least 8,000 former enslaved people were attending schools in Georgia; eight years later, Black schools struggled to contain nearly 20,000 students. This faith in education as a path out of poverty has not waned much over the years for Black people, though a lack of adequate funding by government for the schools of the poor has worked to sap the zeal for education in many Black communities. But for the most part, the lack of educational achievement of many Black children follows from the extraordinary rates at which their fathers are arrested and incarcerated, which means these men can contribute little or nothing to save their children from lives spent in poverty.

Black people don’t support their own.

Black history is replete with examples of the myriad ways that Black people have supported each other over time, such as the cooperative economic model that allowed places like “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to thrive in the early 1900s — before it was burned down by angry whites in 1921. In Durham, North Carolina, Blacks came together to support each other in business to such a degree that their business district was also nicknamed “Black Wall Street.” In fact, in her book, “Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice,” author Jessica Gordon Nembhard, political economist and professor of community justice and social economic development at John Jay College in New York City, showed that Black history in the U.S. is filled with examples of Blacks supporting each other, such as the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union, which existed from 1886 to 1891 to aid Black farmers with challenges such as mortgage payments and marketing. At its height, it had more than 1 million members and branches/cooperative stores in the ports of Norfolk, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; Mobile, Alabama; New Orleans and Houston. In recent years, as the middle- and upper-income Blacks have dispersed, leading to the creation of many largely poor Black neighborhoods, the myth has taken hold that Blacks deny each other much-needed support. In many ways, it is a consequence of economic progress, where some Blacks no longer feel the same powerful pull of racial solidarity. But as the recent #BlackLivesMatter protests have demonstrated, Blacks are still bound to be there for each other when fighting outside foes.

Message from Khaliea Cherise to Females

 FOR ALL YOU UNGRATEFUL SPITEFUL IGNORANT BITCHES WHO HAD/HAVE A GOOD MAN BUT DOGGED HIM OUT...this vids for you.#GetItTogether #SorryNotSorry #RealWomenVsBitches #YeahIsaidIt#ExcuseTheAppearance #CanYouLoveAbrokenMan #LateNightRants #GoodNight

Post by Khaliea Cherise.

Why Saying I Look “Mixed” Isn’t A Compliment

Why Saying I Look “Mixed” Isn’t A Compliment

by Shayla Pierce

I was a bartender for six years. This basically means I spent over half a decade blocking corny pick up lines one double shot of Hennessy at a time. And then there’s the fact that I’ve had breasts since I was 11. So I say all this to say, like most women, I’ve been hit on a lot.

And I’m quite confident that from the mundane, to the crude, to the flat-out weird, I’ve heard it all. But there’s one line that I’ve always found particularly interesting: You’re so pretty. You look mixed.What do you think?

But that’s just generally speaking . Usually “mixed” is specified by a race, ethnicity, or geographic location: “You look part Indian (Or Puerto Rican. Or Brazilian. Or Polynesian if the suitor is especially creative).”What do you think?

Now, if I wasn’t so cynical, I might actually believe that these “observations” are a testament to my racial ambiguity; a characteristic of my face I have failed to observe despite possessing it for nearly thirty years.What do you think?

But they’re not because there is nothing “mixed” about me. My mother is from Boston, and my daddy is from Jersey and they’re both as black as asphalt. (Well, not literally, but I you know what I’m saying). And me? I’m from West Philly which is about as exotic as a six-pack of Old English.What do you think?

So if I’m not mixed and I don’t look mixed, what would be a man’s motivation for telling me so? Well, I have my suspicions. Personally, I think they think they’re giving me a compliment.What do you think?

I can tell by the way they say it. “You look mixed.” It’s the same smarmy inflection with which they deliver such classics like, “Let me take you shopping”; as if they’ve successfully implemented the line that will render you completely unable to resist them and couldn’t be more impressed with themselves. Then they smirk, bask in victory, and wait patiently for the panties to melt right off your body.What do you think?

But this assumption is not with bias. I’ve asked other Black women, of all shades, shapes, and sizes, if they’ve heard this line a time or two. This “you look exotic” phenomenon isn’t just a cluster of isolated incidents reserved only for yours truly. Apparently, this a thing now.
But what’s the big deal right? Why would I interpret being called exotic looking to be a bad thing? Multiracial women are stunning. Shouldn’t I be flattered?What do you think?

In a word? No.What do you think?

Because, yes, multiracial, biracial, Hispanic, and Asian women are in arguably gorgeous. But so are Black women. Regular old Black women just like Beyoncé, and Janet, and Tyra and innumerable other African-American women who, for generations, have been revered as the most beautiful in the world.What do you think?

So do we really have to be “mixed” to be beautiful? Should another race, ethnicity, or nationality be a requirement for attractiveness?What do you think?

I don’t think so. That’s why I don’t blush or give a coy giggle when I man tries to tell me I look something that I’m not.What do you think?

Because when a man tells a Black woman that she looks mixed as a form of endearment, he’s insinuating that her beauty comes from the (allegedly) non Black part of her. All they’re effectively saying is: You’re too beautiful to just be Black.What do you think?

Oh, but I am. I’m beautiful just like my beautiful Black mother, just like her mother and her mother’s mother. We’re generations of women born right here in the US of A, from North Carolina to Massachusetts by way of the motherland. Brown skin, nappy hair, cornbread and gravy gorgeous.What do you think?

We aren’t beautiful in spite of our Blackness, we are beautiful because of it. So don’t dare try to give the credit to anything else.

Anti-Muslim Media Factory

Charlie and the Anti-Muslim Media Factory

PARIS – It is facile to frame the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo as an attack on freedom of expression. Are we supposed to be surprised that a global terror organization known for its brutal disregard for human rights and humane values would attack a media outlet that has specialized in provoking it?
Just as much of the social media in the Arab/Muslim world has made anti-Semitic rants routine, there is a global industry of outlets dedicated to all things anti-Muslim. In any given week, French, European, (and increasingly Indian) journalists, bloggers, tweeters, and others regularly express all sorts of things that are offensive or provocative to Muslims – or at least the most devout and fanatical among them.

There are literally hundreds of websites, radio programs, and TV networks that specialize in anti-Muslim and anti-Islam propaganda. The Twitter hashtag #killallMoslems has been around since 2011. While this abundance of offensiveness may comfort those concerned about freedom of expression, it does not give me any comfort as a European Muslim.
Europe’s suspicion of Islam is not new, of course, and one could say that the feeling is mutual. But the level of anti-Muslim provocation has become unprecedented recently. In Germany, the so-called Pegida movement now holds weekly anti-Muslim marches in several cities (though, in fairness, even bigger rallies, and almost all of Germany’s political elite, have opposed the Pegida marchers).
Last year, the mayor of Sargé-lès-le Mans, a French town of 3,500 people with 180 Muslim students, sought to impose pork meat on all schools. A couple of years earlier, then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy joined in a campaign to ban halal meat branding, which became an election issue. The Swiss, meanwhile, have banned minarets. The list goes on.
Minorities are easy targets everywhere (certainly, Christians and Jews do not have an easy time nowadays in Muslim-majority countries). And, given the fear campaign propagated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates, on the one hand, and right-wing racists, on the other, many people are unaware that Muslims are actually a very small minority in all European (and Western) countries. That is why Charlie Hebdo’s mockery of the sacred beliefs of minorities (Jews, Muslims, and gays alike) is not an act of bravery. Most people abstain from such provocations not because they are cowards, but because they believe, quite reasonably, that such behavior serves no good or useful purpose.
European Muslims are no less peaceful than their non-Muslim neighbors. Almost all terrorist acts carried out by Muslims in Europe and other countries have been the work of affiliates of one umbrella organization – Al Qaeda. Though this organization’s far-reaching influence is worrisome, it is also comforting to know how limited violent ideology is among Muslims, particularly in the West. Indeed, there are no real homegrown Islamist terrorist organizations of any significance in Europe. Radicalized European Muslims must look elsewhere.
To be sure, Muslim-majority countries are not known for their affection for free speech. But, in the wake of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, it is worth noting that, apart from war-torn Iraq and Syria, more journalists are killed each year in the largely Catholic Philippines than in any Muslim-majority country.
Unfortunately, as the horrific murder of 77 people by Anders Breivik in my adopted country of Norway has shown us, it only takes one organization or one individual to commit an atrocity, whatever a society’s level of education and living standards. Yet, while lone wolves like Breivik are hard to detect, active members of terror organizations are much easier to detect and monitor.
This is where the attacks in Paris become more troublesome. Here was a case of a catastrophic intelligence and security failure that allowed a group of four who were known to the police to be members of a globally active terrorist organization to operate with relative ease in the French capital. Why were they on the loose? Why were they not monitored and stopped earlier? How many more such people, known to the police, are out there?
This is the discussion that is needed. Focusing the debate solely on Islam and Muslims and the prospect of religious reform, integration, and co-existence is a way to camouflage failure. Muslims are already very much part of every sphere of European life, including the security apparatus and the army. European Muslims are integrated in their societies as professionals, athletes, academics, and civic leaders.
If we European Muslims are expected to identify with our citizenships and other secular identities, then our fellow Europeans should not categorize us by our religious identity. No one should presume that European Muslims must apologize or explain the actions of a terrorist organization with a cult-like religious ideology, just as no one expected Norwegians to apologize for Breivik. Al Qaeda and its affiliates have been known to attract disenchanted individuals from among Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans alike.
If we close our eyes, we can think that the Paris attacks exposed a contradiction between Islam and freedom of expression – and between Muslims and Europeans. If we open them and start looking at cause and effect, we can avoid the abyss to which such willful blindness beckons us. The Paris attacks targeted innocent people everywhere, and the public deserves answers from those whose job it is to prevent such incidents from happening.

Today’s key fact: you are probably wrong about almost everything

Most people around the world are pretty bad when it comes to knowing the numbers behind the news. But how issues such as immigration are perceived can shape political opinion and promote misconceptions
Quiz: how well do you know the UK?
Comment: Britons aren’t uniquely ignorant, most countries have got their facts wrong

 Many people do not know the real statistics behind the news, an Ipsos Mori report shows

Britons overstate the proportion of Muslims in their country by a factor of four, according to a new survey by Ipsos Mori that reveals public understanding of the numbers behind the daily news in 14 countries.

People from the UK also think immigrants make up twice the proportion of the population as is really the case – and that many more people are unemployed than actually are.

Such misconceptions are typical around the world, but they can have a significant impact as politicians aim to focus on voter perceptions, not on the actual data.

Bobby Duffy, managing director of the Ipsos Mori social research institute, said:

These misperceptions present clear issues for informed public debate and policymaking. For example, public priorities may well be different if we had a clearer view of the scale of immigration and the real incidence of teenage mothers.

The actual percentage of Muslims in the UK is 5%, but those surveyed by Ipsos Mori said they thought it was 21%.


Britons meanwhile underestimate the proportion of Christians, believing it is 39% when the correct figure is 59%.

People in the US similarly overestimate the proportion of Muslims in the population, thinking it is 15% when it is actually 1%. They believe 56% are Christian when the true figure identifying themselves as such is 78%.


On immigration, British people think on average that immigrants make up 24.4% of the population when it is actually about 13%, according to the 2011 census.

According to Ipsos Mori’s political monitor from September, 30% of British voters identified asylum and immigration as one of the issues that would be very important to them come next May’s elections. This puts immigration, alongside the economy and the NHS, at the top of voters’ concerns. The 14 countries surveyed all overestimated immigration to a certain degree.


If anything the overall data shows the UK in a comparatively favourable light. Britain is the fifth least ignorant nation out of the 14 surveyed, and Britons showed more self-knowledge than Australians, Belgians, Canadians and French people.

Italians were the most ignorant among those polled, while Swedes were the best informed. It is probably not a coincidence that trust in politics – by one measure at least, voter turnout – is high and stable in Sweden, and falling in Italy.


The majority of the countries Ipsos Mori surveyed also got it wrong on issues such as unemployment (usually overestimated), voter turnout (usually underestimated) and murder rates (a mix).



Britons believe 24% of people are unemployed, an estimate over three times higher than the actual rate.

The Black Family

A rescue plan for the black family

Far from addressing the marriage problem, the federal government exacerbated it.

BY PAUL PETERSON  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, January 19, 2015, 4:15 AM


As we celebrate the anniversary of Martin Luther King's birth, we should ask why so many of the problems against which he struggled — segregation, poverty, persistent racial gaps in education and income — remain so much a part of American life.

Few remember that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned of this possibility. His report “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” released 50 years ago, lamented the rising tide of single parenthood in the black community.

In its introduction, Moynihan warned that black families would not see improved fortunes for generations “unless a new and special effort is made.”

Unfortunately, the federal government, far from addressing the marriage problem, exacerbated it. The percentage of African-American children living in single-parent families climbed from less than 30% in 1965 to 50% in 2013. The percentage of white and Hispanic children in single-parent households has also risen sharply.

Growth in single parenthood has many causes including female entry into the labor force, changing social norms and male unemployment. But a close look at when the problem intensified — and when it attenuated — suggests that the main culprit may well be the government.

The steepest upward jump in single parenthood took place in the late 1960s and early 70s. And since the mid-1990s, the percentage of children living in single-parent families has stabilized — especially within the African-American community, where the percentage has in fact declined somewhat from its 1990 high.

Why? Prior to 1965, the welfare state for families with children was largely limited to a meager, restrictive program distributed by state and local governments.

That changed with the arrival of the Great Society. A host of novel programs, and revisions in older ones, provided a range of new resources and services.

Courts ordered a liberalization of state regulations governing aid to dependent children. A new Medicaid program covered most medical costs. Basic sustenance for the disabled was institutionalized through Supplemental Security Insurance and Social Security reforms.

A generous, broadly defined food stamp program replaced a more restrictive distribution of commodities.

Designs of some programs actively discouraged marriage. Welfare assistance went to mothers — so long as no male was in the household. Once a family income crossed a specific threshold, access to most resources disappeared.

These incentives encouraged childbirth even when the prospects of marriage were minimal. In many urban neighborhoods, pregnancies were seen by future mothers as opportunities to begin life anew.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan 

While some economists and policy analysts of the day welcomed government’s readiness to help families, others feared the “poverty trap.” It was said that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000 a year to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs.

As a proposed solution, economist Milton Friedman proposed the Negative Income tax (NIT). Instead of welfare benefits, he urged government payments to supplement the earnings of those who worked. Those payments would slowly phase out as earned income increased.

An idea closely resembling it, the Earned Income Tax Credit, was created. Although at first it was too small to have much effect, by 1994 maximum annual benefits for two-child families neared $4,000.

By 2005, economists concluded that, at a cost of $34 billion annually, it had lifted “more children out of poverty than any other government program.”

The EITC worked in tandem with Clinton-era welfare reforms, which required single parents to enter a training program or the workforce if aid were to continue.

In sum, the steep rise in single-parent families coincides with the creation of the modern welfare state. Later changes in welfare policy finally reduced the size of the poverty trap, though they have certainly not eliminated the marriage penalty.

Going forward, we do not need to eliminate Great Society programs, but we do need to finish redesigning them. The EITC needs to be remodeled so that its incentives positively impact married families, not just single parents. Furthermore, tax credits could be given for welfare benefits lost upon marriage.

We also need to create new job opportunities for young workers with limited job skills. To give employers incentives to hire young, less-skilled employees, minimum wage and other restrictive labor laws need to be modified.

And we need to facilitate student choice and access to a broad range of high schools, vocational programs, training programs and other institutions that support young people during the key years of transition from school to work.

King’s struggle is still with us, and the Moynihan report remains as pertinent today as when it was written 50 years ago.