The Tip Of The Iceberg Of The Coming Retirement Crisis That Will Shake America To The Core

TEC ^ | 07/25/2013 | Michael Snyder

Posted on Thursday, July 25, 2013 2:14:41 PM by SeekAndFind

The pension nightmare that is at the heart of the horrific financial crisis in Detroit is just the tip of the iceberg of the coming retirement crisis that will shake America to the core. Right now, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are hitting the age of 65 every single day, and this will continue to happen every single day until the year 2030. As a society, we have made trillions of dollars of financial promises to these Baby Boomers, and there is no way that we are going to be able to keep those promises. The money simply is not there. Yes, I suppose that we could eventually see a "super devaluation" of the U.S. dollar and keep our promises to the Baby Boomers using currency that is not worth much more than Monopoly money, but as it stands right now we simply do not have the resources to do what we said that we were going to do. The number of senior citizens in the United States is projected to more than double by the middle of the century, and it would have been nearly impossible to support them all even if we weren't in the midst of a long-term economic decline. Tens of millions of Americans that are eagerly looking forward to retirement are going to be in for a very rude awakening in the years ahead. There is going to be a lot of heartache and a lot of broken promises.

What is going on in Detroit right now is a perfect example of what will soon be happening all over the nation. Many city workers stuck with their jobs for decades because of the promise of a nice pension at the end of the rainbow. But now those promises are going up in smoke. There has even been talk that retirees will only end up getting about 10 cents for every dollar that they were promised.

Needless to say, many pensioners are extremely angry that the promises that were made to them are not going to be kept. The following is from a recent article in the New York Times...

Many retirees see the plan to cut their pensions as a betrayal, saying that they kept their end of a deal but that the city is now reneging. Retired city workers, police officers and 911 operators said in interviews that the promise of reliable retirement income had helped draw them to work for the City of Detroit in the first place, even if they sometimes had to accept smaller salaries or work nights or weekends.

“Does Detroit have a problem?” asked William Shine, 76, a retired police sergeant. “Absolutely. Did I create it? I don’t think so. They made me some promises, and I made them some promises. I kept my promises. They’re not going to keep theirs.”

But Detroit is far from an isolated case. As Detroit Mayor Dave Bing said the other day, many other cities are heading down the exact same path...

"We may be one of the first. We are the largest. But we absolutely will not be the last."

Yes, Detroit's financial problems are immense. But other major U.S. cities are facing unfunded pension liabilities that are even worse.

For example, here are the unfunded pension liabilities for four financially-troubled large U.S. cities...

Detroit: $3.5 billion

Baltimore: $680 million

Los Angeles: $9.4 billion

Chicago: $19 billion

When you break it down on a per citizen basis, Detroit is actually in better shape than the others...

Detroit: $7,145

Baltimore: $7,247

Los Angeles: $8,437

Chicago: $13,355

And many state governments are in similar shape. Right now, the state of Illinois has unfunded pension liabilities that total approximately $100 billion.

There are some financial "journalists" out there that are attempting to downplay this problem, but sticking our heads in the sand is not going to make any of this go away.

According to Northwestern University Professor John Rauh, the total amount of unfunded pension and healthcare obligations for retirees that state and local governments across the United States have accumulated is 4.4 trillion dollars.

So where are they going to get that money?

They are going to raise your taxes of course.

Just check out what is happening right now in Scranton, Pennsylvania...

Scranton taxpayers could face a 117 percent increase in taxes next year as the city's finances continue to spiral out of control.

A new analysis by the Pennsylvania Economy League projects an $18 million deficit for 2014, an amount so massive it outpaces the approximate $17 million the struggling city collects annually

A 117 percent tax increase?

What would Dwight Schrute think of that?

Perhaps you are reading this and you are assuming that your retirement is secure because you work in the private sector.

Well, just remember what happened to your 401k during the financial crisis of 2008. During the next major stock market crash, your 401k will likely get absolutely shredded. Many Americans will probably see the value of their 401k accounts go down by 50 percent or more.

And if you have stashed your retirement funds with the wrong firm, you could end up losing everything. Just ask anyone that had their nest eggs invested with MF Global.

But of course most Americans are woefully behind on saving for retirement anyway. A study conducted by Boston College's Center for Retirement Research found that American workers are $6.6 trillion short of what they need to retire comfortably.

That certainly isn't good news.

On top of everything else, the federal government has been recklessly irresponsible as far as planning for the retirement of the Baby Boomers is concerned.

As I noted yesterday, the U.S. government is facing a total of 222 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. Social Security and Medicare make up the bulk of that.

At this point, the number of Americans on Medicare is projected to grow from a little bit more than 50 million today to 73.2 million in 2025.

The number of Americans collecting Social Security benefits is projected to grow from about 56 million today to 91 million in 2035.

How is a society with a steadily declining economy going to care for them all adequately?

Yes, we truly are careening toward disaster.

If you are not convinced yet, here are some more numbers. The following stats are from one of my previous articles entitled "Do You Want To Scare A Baby Boomer?"...

1. Right now, there are somewhere around 40 million senior citizens in the United States. By 2050 that number is projected to skyrocket to 89 million.

2. According to one recent poll, 25 percent of all Americans in the 46 to 64-year-old age bracket have no retirement savings at all.

3. 26 percent of all Americans in the 46 to 64-year-old age bracket have no personal savings whatsoever.

4. One survey that covered all American workers found that 46 percent of them have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.

5. According to a survey conducted by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, "60 percent of American workers said the total value of their savings and investments is less than $25,000".

6. A Pew Research survey found that half of all Baby Boomers say that their household financial situations have deteriorated over the past year.

7. 67 percent of all American workers believe that they "are a little or a lot behind schedule on saving for retirement".

8. Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.

9. More elderly Americans than ever are finding that they must continue working once they reach their retirement years. Between 1985 and 2010, the percentage of Americans in the 65 to 69-year-old age bracket that were still working increased from 18 percent to 32 percent.

10. Back in 1991, half of all American workers planned to retire before they reached the age of 65. Today, that number has declined to 23 percent.

11. According to one recent survey, 70 percent of all American workers expect to continue working once they are "retired".

12. According to a poll conducted by AARP, 40 percent of all Baby Boomers plan to work "until they drop".

13. A poll conducted by CESI Debt Solutions found that 56 percent of American retirees still had outstanding debts when they retired.

14. Elderly Americans tend to carry much higher balances on their credit cards than younger Americans do. The following is from a recent CNBC article...

New research from the AARP also shows that those ages 50 and over are carrying higher balances on their credit cards -- $8,278 in 2012 compared to $6,258 for the under-50 population.

15. A study by a law professor at the University of Michigan found that Americans that are 55 years of age or older now account for 20 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States. Back in 2001, they only accounted for 12 percent of all bankruptcies.

16. Between 1991 and 2007 the number of Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 that filed for bankruptcy rose by a staggering 178 percent.

17. What is causing most of these bankruptcies among the elderly? The number one cause is medical bills. According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually did have health insurance.

18. In 1945, there were 42 workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits. Today, that number has fallen to 2.5 workers, and if you eliminate all government workers, that leaves only 1.6 private sector workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits.

19. Millions of elderly Americans these days are finding it very difficult to survive on just a Social Security check. The truth is that most Social Security checks simply are not that large. The following comes directly from the Social Security Administration website...

The average monthly Social Security benefit for a retired worker was about $1,230 at the beginning of 2012. This amount changes monthly based upon the total amount of all benefits paid and the total number of people receiving benefits.

You can view the rest of the statistics right here.

Sadly, most Americans are not aware of these things.

The mainstream media keeps most of the population entertained with distractions. This week it is the birth of the royal baby, and next week it will be something else.

Meanwhile, our problems just continue to get worse and worse.

There is no way in the world that we are going to be able to keep all of the financial promises that we have made to the Baby Boomers. A lot of them are going to end up bitterly disappointed.

All of this could have been avoided if we would have planned ahead as a society.

But that did not happen, and now we are all going to pay the price for it.

Trayvon And The Big Lie

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Posted on July 21, 2013 by Bryce Buchanan

It’s almost overwhelming, the multitude of absurd race-agitating actions and words coming from those who refuse to accept the facts and law as to the Zimmerman trial.

–  William Jacobsen, Professor of law, Cornell  –

Something evil is happening in our country right now.  We have seen it before.  In fact we have seen it many times, but this time the orchestration of evil is especially obvious.

The Racial Grievance Industry is in the business of keeping hate alive.  In their quest to foster racial animosity, race hustlers pick cases to publicize to ”prove” that whites are forever racist.  This evil enterprise gives them undeserved power, prestige and money.  It creates a solid, angry block of voters who do not understand that their “leaders” may be the most destructive force in their culture.

Martin Luther King dreamed about a day when people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.  Most of us share that dream.  The race hustlers have the opposite dream.  For them, skin color, racial identity, is everything.  And they will not tolerate any judgments about character.

If you look closely at the genesis of the Trayvon Martin story you can see the race hustlers at work.  This was a well organized public relations campaign planned by professionals.   The primary actors had profited from creating racial grievances in the past and knew just what buttons needed to be pushed to create hate. It was an election year and this activity is called “motivating the base”, or, more accurately, “motivating the base instincts”.

Our Department of Justice played a key role in the beginning by helping in the organization of a completely fake “student protest group” called the “Dream Defenders”.  The organizers were not students, but instead were paid activists with ties to ACORN and Occupy. You can see a video and more documentation on this hate group here.  The Department of Justice was helping a bogus group create racial animosity.  The group marched on the Sanford Police Department and succeeded in getting the police chief fired.

This was just the beginning of the Department of Justice’s many injustices in this case.  A team of FBI agents was sent to interview the people who knew George Zimmerman best.  They wanted to prove that he was a racist.  They found the opposite.  They found a man who tutored black children for free, who went to bat for a homeless black man who had been assaulted, whose black friends said he was not in any way a racist.  As with other parts of this case, the facts are being completely ignored.  The fictional story still takes precedence.

After the verdict, the Department of Justice sunk even lower by opening a hot line to solicit dirt on the man who had just been found not guilty in a court of law. If they can keep the hate alive, they are certainly going to do it.

This is a sick enterprise on two levels.  For George Zimmerman, he is the victim of a political persecution based on a collection of lies which are still being promoted at the highest levels.  Like the man who made the Muhammad movie, Zimmerman is the recipient of a government organized hate campaign.  Rewards have been offered for Zimmerman’s murder and the Department of Justice shockingly does nothing about it except fan the flames.

At a higher level, our country suffers incalculable damage from the never-ending efforts to create racial animosity.  The race hustlers teach each new generation of black Americans the following destructive lesson:  You are perpetual victims with no chance of success and all of your problems are someone else’s fault. Few things harm black people more than this lesson from their “leaders”.  These old leaders need to be rejected and replaced with new leaders who have a positive vision of personal achievement and personal responsibility.

The entire scam that is being used in the Martin/Zimmerman case follows a pattern that is common to other government deceptions. It’s time to unmask the technic.  The scam has 3 parts.

1. The Big Lie; Setting the Fire -  A racist white man in Sanford chased down and shot a little black boy, demonstrating what a racist country this is. The Benghazi attack was caused by a video.  Sarah Palin was responsible for the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords.  Etc.. These are fact-free assertions.

2. Fanning the Flames – The lie is widely publicized by those who share the political goals of the liar.  We see an explosion of supportive stories.  For example, leftist lackeys like NBC are happy to edit tape to support the deception. Those being lied about assume an unjustified defensive position.

3. Moral Posturing by the Arsonists – Those who set the fires now pose as the firemen.  There they are, speaking from on high, lecturing about the danger of these fires and calling on us to do some soul searching about our evil ways.  Obama and Hillary perform this part of the scam quite well.  It’s contemptible behavior.

Andrew McCarthy understands how the scam is orchestrated at the top and he exposes it brilliantly in “The Obama Administration’s Race-baiting Campaign”.  Do take the time to read his excellent column.

In the Zimmerman case, you will not understand the enormity of the lies being sold to the public unless you understand the facts of the case.  It’s a tragic case but not a complicated case.  We know that Trayvon chose to confront Zimmerman, because he had walked home and then walked back to the area of the assault.  It seems clear that he threw the first punch (and apparently all the punches) as he straddled ”the creepy-ass cracka” on the ground.  Trayvon had no signs on his body that Zimmerman had hit him.   Trial witness Rachel Jeantel agrees that Trayvon threw the first punch but says that Zimmerman should have known that Trayvon was just going to administer a little “whoop-ass” and should have known that Trayvon wasn’t going to kill him.

If some strong young man was pounding your head into the concrete, “MMA style”, you may not understand that it was ‘just a little whoop-ass’.  And if the young man beating you said, ”You gonna die tonight” that may raise your fear level a bit.  Trayvon was not unarmed.  He had two arms with fists attached.

The lesson from the Trayvon/Zimmerman encounter is this.  Not every whoop-ass ends the way you had imagined.  This one ended very badly.

Can you extrapolate from this event that white people in America are racist and are responsible for this assault?  No logical person could infer that.  But here are some people who can.

Chris Matthews: “Can I just take a second to apologize on behalf of all white people?”

Jesse Jackson is calling for a boycott of Florida which he calls “an apartheid state”.  He says, “It’s time to call on the United Nations Human Rights Commission for an in-depth investigation of whether the U.S. is upholding its obligations under international human rights laws and treaties.”

Al Sharpton organized angry divisive rallies across the country.  Speaking apparently of white people in general, Sharpton told a Baptist Church audience, “…They saw a young man that was vulnerable and killed him….  we have no rights.”

AP reporter Cristina Silva:  “So we can all kill teenagers now?”

Nicki Minaj: ” We just paid to see a murderer walk free after killing an innocent unarmed little boy”

Richard Dreyfuss: “It’s 2013 and an American jury just acquitted a man who admitted to stalking and killing an unarmed child.”

This is all a diversionary tactic to keep you from looking at the real problems.  Let’s look at what they want you not to see.  The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that approximately 8 to 9 thousand African Americans are murdered in the U.S. every year. That’s more than the total number of servicemen killed in Iraq plus Afghanistan.  93% of these murders are committed by blacks, mostly young black men.

Some of these victims were unarmed.  Some were young.  Some were named Trayvon.  Some looked like they could have been Obama’s son.  Obama could have gone on TV and said, “They could have been me 35 years ago”, but he didn’t.  No marches were organized in their honor because no racial animosity could be generated that way.  Individual murders matter only to the extent that they suit the truly sinister goals of the Racial Grievance Industry.

Using government crime statistics, Pat Buchanan reported:

“An analysis of ‘single offender victimization figures’ from the FBI for 2007 finds blacks committed 433,934 crimes against whites, eight times the 55,685 whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black on white — with 14,000 assaults on white women by African Americans in 2007. Not one case of a white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study.”

Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse.

If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

The problem is actually worse than the statistics indicate and the Trayvon Martin case is a good illustration.  The Miami Dade school District has it’s own police force.  Police Chief Charles Hurley, in collusion with school district leadership, launched a plan to lie about crime statistics in the school district.  The plan was specifically aimed at under-reporting the crimes of young black males.  When Trayvon Martin was caught with stolen jewelry and a burglary tool, the crime was not reported and no attempt was made to see if the jewelry matched a reported robbery.  It was all hidden.

Another race based fraud was recently uncovered at Winston-Salem State University.  Administrators routinely and fraudulently raised the grades of African-American students.  The plan was exposed by a few honest faculty members.

Don’t you think it is time that we stopped this nonsense and faced problems honestly?

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE WHITE IN AMERICA

boblonsberry.com ^ | 07/22/13 | Bob Lonsberry

Posted on Monday, July 22, 2013 9:08:33 AM by shortstop

The president told us on Friday what it’s like to be black in America.

A couple of days before that, his attorney general said that America needs to be honest about race. Since then, any number of prominent black people have said we need to have a national discussion about race.

So let’s.

Let’s have a discussion about race.

Not a one-sided harangue, but a two-way discussion. Let’s move beyond the politically correct “Whites are racists, blacks are victims” and actually talk things out.

You do that by hearing both sides.

Toward that end, in the spirit of the president’s remarks, I’d like to discuss what it’s like to be a white man in America. And I’d like to be held to the same standard as the president. His remarks were personal impressions based on generalizations, traditions, culture and folklore.

He was called brave.

I’ll be called racist.That’s because our system is based on a double standard. Black criticisms of white society are insightful; white criticisms of black society are bigotry.

White people know that if they say anything that doesn’t exactly toe the line of political correctness, they run the risk of losing their jobs and their public reputations. We live in a society where the accusation of racism is evidence enough; to be accused is to be guilty.

That’s what we white people think.

We also think that we pay the bills. We think that we disproportionately pay the taxes and that black people disproportionately collect the welfare. We feel like we are being ripped off and that this uneven shouldering of the burden will eventually bankrupt and kill our country.

I work in a building that houses a Social Security office. One elevator serves that office specifically. It is stunning to note the demographic difference between the elevators. Overwhelmingly, white people go up one set of elevators to work, and black people go up the other set of elevators to apply for SSI.

Young, healthy people.

All day long.

The culture of many white Americans is one of hard work and self-reliance. Our heritage teaches us that work is ennobling, and our religion teaches us that by the sweat of our brow we should eat our bread.

And we feel like we are being robbed by a socially dysfunctional urban black America where out-of-wedlock birth, educational failure, criminal conduct and other irresponsibility perversely entitle people to money we earned to support our families.We believe that races are equal, but cultures are not, and that a woefully failed black urban culture is cancerously destroying lives and communities. And we feel like we have to both foot the bill to support it and fight it, and watch out for spillover that might threaten us.

White people also believe black America has a predatory crime problem that creates a real danger for all of us.

We believe that because it happens to be an undeniable truth. Blacks are disproportionately involved in crime, and while some blacks believe that’s because of a racist criminal justice system, most whites believe it’s because blacks are more likely to commit crime.

We all pretend not to notice the race of the mug shots on the evening news, but we’re only pretending. We notice, and we don’t forget. We don’t believe the criminal justice system is victimizing inmates, we believe the criminal justice system is protecting us from inmates. We believe people in prison deserve to be there – they did the crime, they do the time.

Black violence – much of it directed against other blacks – has over the years since 9-11 racked up a higher body count than the war on terrorism.

White people think that is a big deal.

If black people are complaining about Stand Your Ground laws of self-defense, white people are saying that you don’t have to worry about it if you don’t attack anybody. The cry against Stand Your Ground is a cry in defense of people who are violently assaulting other people. Black people are disproportionately injured in all types of self-defense situations because black people are disproportionately involved in attacking other people, and pushing those people into self-defense. That’s not a problem with the law, that’s a problem with people’s conduct.

White people also believe that we are disadvantaged in the workplace. We believe that quotas and diversity programs discriminate against us in hiring and promotion. This is truest in the government and corporate workplaces.

It’s true for the white male hoping to get hired on the police or fire department, and it’s true for the mid-career white person passed over for less-qualified minority employees.

Many white people are bothered by the social conduct of some black people. Often there is a loud, obnoxious and profane behavior, and a crude sexual harassment of women in public settings.

Black apologists often speak of “culture” and of the need for whites to understand and respect black culture. The president on Friday said we needed sensitivity training. Many whites would like that to be a two-way street. We’d like a little courtesy extended to our sensitivities, too.

White people believe that black people have a chip on their shoulder about race. And a persecution complex. And an inability sometimes to talk or think about anything else.

We also think that black people get pulled over by the police for the same reasons anyone does – for breaking the traffic law – and that the cry of racism anytime anyone has contact with the police is a bunch of crud.

These are some of the things white people think.

Of course, my account is just as full of generalizations as the president’s. He made assumptions about the thinking of the very diverse group of Americans who happen to be black, and he made assumptions about the thinking of the very diverse group of Americans who happen to be white. I have done the same. He was undoubtedly part right and part wrong. I am also undoubtedly part right and part wrong.

Do you think some of my observations were hurtful and overbroad? What of the president’s implicit assertions that white women on elevators are racists, and that cops on patrol are racists, and that store employees are racists? Are his claims different or more justified?

The president, to the extent that he understands the subject, told us what it’s like to be a black man in America.

But what he had was not a conversation, it was a condemnation. And two can play that game.

With all this clamoring in recent days for a conversation, it is understood that what activists and politicians really want is one more denunciation of white America. The conversation is about how racist America is and how unfair it is to blacks.

And that’s simply not true.

And if this is truly a conversation, then I am free to say that.

But I’m not.

And that’s what it means to be white in America.

MUST WATCH – Bill Whittle: The wretched lynching of George Zimmerman (The Right Scoop)

 

Posted by The Right Scoop on July 20th, 2013 in Politics | 224 Comments

Bill Whittle’s latest Afterburner is off the hook, the best one I’ve seen in a long time. He totally nails it as he tells the truth about Trayvon Martin and what he calls the ‘wretched lynching’ of George Zimmerman.

It’s fantastic and a must watch:

The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin

Political Realities ^ | 07/15/13 | Charles M. Phipps

Posted on Monday, July 15, 2013 4:16:05 PM by LD Jackson

As of this writing, since January 1, 2013, there have been 157 homicides of blacks in Chicago. The causes of death were 12 by stabbing and 145 by gunshot. Sixteen of them were under 18 years of age. Without looking them up, can you name even one of the victims? Just one? Unless you're from Chicago or related to someone involved in the case, I'll bet you can't.

Have you heard about Darryl Green? He was a 17-year-old in Chicago whose decomposed body was found in an abandoned building. He'd been shot to death. It's suspected he was murdered because he refused to join a gang. Have you heard Darryl Green mentioned on MSNBC? CNN? Even Fox? By Obama? Anyone in Hollywood?

In the 513 days between Trayvon Martin's death and the verdict in George Zimmerman's trial there were 11,106 blacks murdered by other blacks. Again, can you name even one of the victims? So why then, does everyone in the country who doesn't live in a cave know the name Trayvon Martin?

This case provided opportunities for many different groups. For racist hate groups like the New Black Panthers it offered an opportunity to stir up anger and pass the collection hat while emotions ran high. For racist talking heads like Al Sharpton it offered an opportunity to stir up anger and get better ratings. And for politicians like Barack Obama it offered an opportunity to stir up anger and racial division in the country, which serves them politically. Obama famously said, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." Why wouldn't he look like one of the other blacks who have been murdered? Why Trayvon?

It's been well documented on many websites that the Department of Justice sent staff members to Florida to help organize and participate in protests against Zimmerman. For what purpose? And why do it on the sly? Is there any other homicide in the nation for which the DOJ has paid staff members to go and protest? None that we know about. So why this one? Why have the New Black Panthers done nothing to prevent blacks from killing other blacks? Why has Al Sharpton not done a show about black-on-black murder in Chicago?

The answer to all these questions is that it serves the administration and those on the left to provoke racial animosity and anger. It further drives minorities away from the big-bad-white-male-dominated Republican Party and allows the leaders on the left to express feigned outrage which draws in those who have been stirred up emotionally. The fact that Obama has put out a statement on this case after the verdict is further proof he is stoking this fire. Has there been another local murder case anywhere in the nation that has been commented on by a President? Please comment below if there is because I can't think of one. Even in his short statement he uses the death of Trayvon Martin as a case for gun control. Blatant political opportunism. Why has Obama not commented on even one of the 157 black homicides in his hometown, Chicago? Because they cannot be used politically.

The truth is that all these groups, talking heads and politicians could not care less about Trayvon Martin or his death. To them he is nothing but a means to an end and the fact that he was dead made him an even better one. His dead body was ripe for being exploited. These people care nothing for blacks who get killed. If they did they would be speaking about and trying to do something about the 11,106 who have been murdered since Trayvon Martin died. But they haven't and they won't, so don't tell me that they do care about Trayvon. His is but one death in a sea of black deaths. The hand that killed him being half-white, justifiable or not, is what makes this one death an opportunity for them and they have done their best to exploit it to the fullest.

The media, the racist groups, the leftist politicians... They have all profited from Trayvon. Over a year ago I wrote a post about all the people who have profited from Trayvon's death. They are all still profiting from his death and they will do their best to make it continue.

When hate groups, media and politicians use the death of a young black man to manipulate part of the population, that tells me they have no respect at all for that segment of the populace. Completely ignoring all the black deaths that happen in this country and then seizing upon one that can serve their own selfish purposes is proof they care nothing about blacks in this country. The blacks and leftists in this country are being fooled if they think these people care about them. They don't. They care only for themselves and their own selfish gains.

Ask any of these people who Arrell Monegan is. Who Julius Campbell is. Who Cornelius German is. Who Patrick Sykes is. They won't know. They have nothing to gain by knowing.

27 Facts That Prove That The Family In America Is In The Worst Shape Ever (Zerohedge)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/11/2013 19:41 -0400

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

The family is one of the fundamental building blocks of society.  If you do not have strong families, you are not going to have a strong society.  Unfortunately, the state of the family in America continues to deteriorate.  The marriage rate has fallen to an all-time low, we lead the world in divorce, and about a third of all children live in a home without a father. 

Our young people have been taught that getting married and having a family is not a priority, and many of those that would like to get married and have children are not able to get the kinds of jobs that they need to support a family.  The statistics that you are about to see should absolutely shock you. 

American families have never been this weak, and this is an incredibly troubling sign for the future of our nation.  What will future generations of Americans be like if they do not have stable homes to grow up in?  Will they be even more messed up than we are right now?  That is a frightening thought. 

The following are 27 facts that prove that the family in America is in the worst shape ever...

#1 The marriage rate in the United States has fallen to an all-time low.  Right now it is sitting at a yearly rate of 6.8 marriages per 1000 people.

#2 Today, an all-time low 44.2 percent of Americans in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket are married.

#3 According to the Pew Research Center, only 51 percent of all adults in the United States are currently married.  Back in 1960, 72 percent of all adults in the United States were married.

#4 Back in 1950, 78 percent of all households in the United States contained a married couple.  Today, that number has declined to 48 percent.

#5 100 years ago, 4.52 were living in the average U.S. household, but now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59 people.

#6 The United States has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet.

#7 In the United States today, more than half of all couples "move in together" before they get married.

#8 The divorce rate for couples that live together first is significantly higher than for those that do not.

#9 For women under the age of 30 in the United States, more than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock.

#10 In 1970, the average woman had her first child when she was 21.4 years old.  Now the average woman has her first child when she is 25.6 years old.

#11 According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 69.3 births per 1,000 women in the 15 to 44 year old age bracket in 2007. Now the rate has fallen to 63.2 births per 1,000 women.

#12 The birth rate for American women in the 20 to 24 year old age bracket has fallen to 85.3 births per 1,000 women.  That is a new all-time record low.

#13 The United States has the highest divorce rate in the entire world.

#14 At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father.

#15 Without a father around, many single mothers in this country are really struggling to survive.  Sadly, approximately 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States are on food stamps.

#16 It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point before they reach the age of 18.

#17 Today, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless.  This is the first time that has ever happened in our history.

#18 The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the entire world.  In fact, the United States has a teen pregnancy rate that is more than twice as high as Canada, more than three times as high as France and more than seven times as high as Japan.

#19 In the United States today, approximately 47 percent of all high school students have had sex.

#20 Approximately one out of every four teen girls in the United States has at least one sexually transmitted disease.

#21 According to one survey, 24 percent of all U.S. teens that have at least one sexually transmitted disease say that they still have unprotected sex.

#22 Instead of being raised by parents, an increasing number of children in America are being raised by movies, television and video games.  For example, the average young American will spend 10,000 hours playing video games before the age of 21.

#23 Americans are tied with the British for the highest average number of hours spent watching television each week.

#24 There are more than 3 million reports of child abuse in the United States every single year.

#25 The United States actually has the highest child abuse death rate in the developed world.

#26 Approximately 20 percent of all child sexual abuse victims in the United States are under the age of 8.

#27 It is estimated that one out of every four girls will be sexually abused before they become adults.

Unfortunately, this is a problem that is not going to be fixed overnight.  Getting the "right politicians" into office will not solve our problems and neither will spending a bunch of money.

The change that we need is a change of the heart.  We need to change how we treat one another and we need to get our priorities straight.

Our families are really messed up, and this is hurting our kids the most.  There is no way that this country is going to have any hope for a bright future unless our families start getting stronger.

Or could it be possible that I am overreacting?

What do you think?

How Democrats Exploit Minorities (American Thinker)

 

By Michael Bargo Jr.

Democrats have portrayed themselves as the only political party that cares for the needs of minorities, that somehow they are uniquely qualified to help them. But a state senator from Louisiana, Elbert Guillory, recently left the Democratic Party and became a Republican, citing the recent policies of Democrats.

A close look at how the poor fare under Democratic Party control reveals that the Party has not only done very little to improve the long-term economic conditions of minorities but that its policies have a history of destroying the black family and the social conditions under which they live, as long noted by authors and economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams.

The American city that has been most completely controlled by Democrats is Chicago. It is a case study of the effects of Democratic policies upon minorities. In a matter of just a few decades Chicago went from being a city that provided great opportunities for blacks to being the most racially segregated and oppressive city in America.

From its very beginning Chicago provided opportunity for blacks. The first non-native American settler in the area was a Haitian black named DuSable. Chicago never had slavery. It had an early abolitionist movement and showcased Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves, in debates with Stephen Douglas. The most prominent black magazines, Ebony and Jet, were founded in Chicago. They celebrated black culture and fashion. Oprah Winfrey became a billionaire anchoring her TV show in the City of Chicago.

When blacks first moved to Chicago during WW I in the great migration north they wore black armbands in memory of Lincoln and voted for Republicans, the party of Lincoln. But soon the black attitude toward Republicans changed. By 1920 thousands of blacks worked in Chicago in city and county jobs. But when Anton Cermak was elected mayor, he fired all the blacks and rehired only black Democrats. Black residents were funneled by the Chicago Democratic machine into highly segregated black-only neighborhoods. This segregation and racism has lasted one hundred years and persists to this day.

The Chicago Democratic Machine institutionalized housing segregation more than any American city. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted that Chicago's housing segregation was the major cause of poverty among blacks. Mayor Daley I doubled the number of residents in low-income housing from 1960 to 1970 at a time when the population fell by eight percent. Those high-rise buildings allowed Democratic precinct captains to intimidate black voters into voting for Democrats by threatening to take away their apartments. The era of high-rise low-income buildings, portrayed in the TV comedy show Good Times, only ended when a courageous black woman named Dorothy Gautreaux sued the Chicago Housing Authority for racial discrimination. Since then the high-rise buildings have been gradually torn down and blacks are moving to suburbs or out of Illinois entirely.

This segregation was practiced in all major northern cities run by Democrats including Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Boston, D.C., New York, Cleveland, Detroit and many others. While pursuing his civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, Dr. King marched in Chicago and was stunned by the racial hatred he experienced there. In a city that never hosted slavery, Dr. King said "I think people in Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate."

The 2000 Census found that for Chicago to be integrated 90% of the blacks would have to move. And remarkably, of the 10 poorest census tracts in the entire United States, nine of them were located in Chicago's black Congressional Districts of black Congressmen Bobby Rush and Jesse Jackson Jr. When Jesse Jackson Jr. resigned his Congressional seat, Democrats said that he must be replaced by another black. This could serve no other purpose than to preserve Democratic power and maintain the segregationist status quo.

Nothing has improved for black residents in these segregated areas even with the assistance of black politicians of their own race, who campaign that they will improve things. The Chicago Public School system is so bad that it has one of the shortest school days of any major city. This holds back the poor of all ethnic groups from excelling in academics and moving out of the City.

Racial segregation is a very effective means of exploiting the poor, since it keeps them from obtaining good paying jobs, deprives them of any benefit from public education (which is very expensive), and ensures that lack of opportunity forces young black men into lives of gang membership and crime. Today one of every nine black men in their twenties is in prison. This does not mean that one in every nine has ever been in prison, but that they are in prison all at once. All of these failures are great spiritual and emotional tragedies for the black families involved.

Black families did not suffer these high rates of single motherhood and crime until they were encouraged to go north into cities controlled by Democrats. It is a very tragic episode in the history of blacks in the United States. Fortunately blacks are realizing that it is the segregated urban environment that is the root cause of all these problems and many are leaving the North.

Anyone who firmly rejects this conclusion -- that blacks have fared far worse under Democratic rule -- needs to consider the corollary: imagine that Chicago and all other northern cities with black ghettoes had been run by Republicans and that blacks suffered the same high rates of unemployment, single motherhood, poverty and crime that they do today. Then imagine that these cities were taken over by Democratic politicians, and these social indicators were reversed: that the high school dropout rate greatly improved, that only 20% of blacks were born to single mothers instead of the 70% we see today, and that the murder rates in black areas greatly declined. Only then would it be reasonable to conclude that Democrats helped the black community.

It is true that blacks have been oppressed by whites in America. But it is more accurate to say that blacks have suffered under white Democrats in America. These thoughts led Louisiana state senator Guillory to quit the Democratic Party and become a Republican.

And while Barack Obama ran on the optimistic slogans of "yes we can!" and "hope and change" during his first term black unemployment and food stamp use rose to all-time highs. The Democratic Party continues to enjoy the support of black voters and this support is only possible because Democrats are never held accountable for the oppressive social conditions, poverty, and high unemployment suffered by blacks under their rule.

Protectors of the Poor? A look at the Left’s counterproductive anti-poverty policies.

National Review ^ | 07/03/2013 | Thomas Sowell

Posted on Wednesday, July 03, 2013 10:40:35 AM by SeekAndFind

The political left has long claimed the role of protector of “the poor.” It is one of their central moral claims to political power. But how valid is this claim?

Leaders of the Left in many countries have promoted policies that enable the poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that raises a fundamental question: Just who are “the poor”?

If you use a bureaucratic definition of poverty as including all individuals or families below some arbitrary income level set by the government, then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about “the poor” that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those statistics have much of a relationship to reality?

“Poverty” once had some concrete meaning — not enough food to eat or not enough clothing or shelter to protect you from the elements, for example. Today it means whatever the government bureaucrats, who set up the statistical criteria, choose to make it mean. And they have every incentive to define poverty in a way that includes enough people to justify welfare-state spending.

Most Americans with incomes below the official poverty level have air conditioning and television and own a motor vehicle; and, far from being hungry, are more likely than other Americans to be overweight. But an arbitrary definition of words and numbers gives them access to the taxpayers’ money. This kind of “poverty” can easily become a way of life, not only for today’s “poor,” but for their children and grandchildren.

Even when they have the potential to become productive members of society, the loss of welfare-state benefits if they try to do so is an implicit “tax” on what they would earn that often exceeds the explicit tax on a millionaire.

If increasing your income by $10,000 would cause you to lose $15,000 in government benefits, would you do it?

In short, the political left’s welfare state makes poverty more comfortable, while penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty. Unless we believe that some people are predestined to be poor, the Left’s agenda is a disservice to them, as well as to society. The vast amounts of money wasted are by no means the worst of it.

If our goal is for people to get out of poverty, there are plenty of heartening examples of individuals and groups who have done that, in countries around the world.

Millions of “overseas Chinese” emigrated from China destitute and often illiterate in centuries past. Whether they settled in Southeast Asian countries or in the United States, they began at the bottom, taking hard, dirty, and sometimes dangerous jobs.

Even though the overseas Chinese were usually paid little, they saved out of that little, and many eventually opened tiny businesses. By working long hours and living frugally, they were able to turn tiny businesses into larger and more prosperous businesses. Then they saw to it that their children got the education that they themselves often lacked.

By 1994, the 57 million overseas Chinese had created as much wealth as the one billion people living in China.

Variations on this social pattern can be found in the histories of Jewish, Armenian, Lebanese, and other emigrants who settled in many countries around the world — initially poor, but rising over the generations to prosperity. Seldom did they rely on government, and they usually avoided politics on their way up.

Such groups concentrated on developing what economists call “human capital” — their skills, talents, knowledge, and self-discipline. Their success has usually been based on that one four-letter word that the Left seldom uses in polite society: “work.”

There are individuals in virtually every group who follow similar patterns to rise from poverty to prosperity. But how many such individuals there are in different groups makes a big difference for the prosperity or poverty of the groups as a whole.

The agenda of the Left — promoting envy and a sense of grievance, while making loud demands for “rights” to what other people have produced — is a pattern that has been widespread in countries around the world.

This agenda has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty. But it has lifted the Left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while they promote policies with socially counterproductive results.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.