The True Black Tragedy: Illegitimacy Rate of Nearly 75%

 

By Walter E. Williams | May 19, 2015 | 6:50 AM EDT

(AP Photo)

Hustlers and people with little understanding want us to believe that today's black problems are the continuing result of a legacy of slavery, poverty and racial discrimination. The fact is that most of the social pathology seen in poor black neighborhoods is entirely new in black history. Let's look at some of it.
Today the overwhelming majority of black children are raised in single female-headed families. As early as the 1880s, three-quarters of black families were two-parent. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black families were two-parent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father.
Today's black illegitimacy rate of nearly 75 percent is also entirely new. In 1940, black illegitimacy stood at 14 percent. It had risen to 25 percent by 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" and was widely condemned as a racist. By 1980, the black illegitimacy rate had more than doubled, to 56 percent, and it has been growing since. Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.
Much of today's pathology seen among many blacks is an outgrowth of the welfare state that has made self-destructive behavior less costly for the individual. Having children without the benefit of marriage is less burdensome if the mother receives housing subsidies, welfare payments and food stamps. Plus, the social stigma associated with unwed motherhood has vanished. Female-headed households, whether black or white, are a ticket for dependency and all of its associated problems. Ignored in all discussions is the fact that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994.
Black youth unemployment in some cities is over 50 percent. But high black youth unemployment is also new. In 1948, the unemployment rate for black teens was slightly less than that of their white counterparts — 9.4 percent compared with 10.2.
During that same period, black youths were either just as active in the labor force or more so than white youths. Since the 1960s, both the labor force participation rate and the employment rate of black youths have fallen to what they are today. Why? Are employers more racially discriminatory today than yesteryear? Were black youths of yesteryear more skilled than whites of yesteryear? The answer to both questions is a big fat no.
The minimum wage law and other labor regulations have cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Put yourself in the place of an employer, and ask: If I must pay $7.25 an hour — plus mandated fringes, such as Social Security and workers' compensation — would it pay me to hire a worker who is so unfortunate as to possess skills that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value per hour? Most employers view that as a losing economic proposition. Thus, the minimum wage law discriminates against the employment of low-skilled workers, who are most often youths — particularly black youths.
The little bit of money a teenager can earn through after-school, weekend and summer employment is not nearly so important as the other things he gains from early work experiences. He acquires skills and develops good work habits, such as being prompt, following orders and respecting supervisors. In addition, there are the self-respect and pride that a youngster gains from being financially semi-independent. All of these gains from early work experiences are important for any teen but are even more important for black teens. If black teens are going to learn anything that will make them a more valuable employee in the future, they aren't going to learn it from their rotten schools, their dysfunctional families or their crime-ridden neighborhoods. They must learn it on the job.
The bulk of today's problems for many blacks are a result of politicians and civil rights organizations using government in the name of helping blacks when in fact they are serving the purposes of powerful interest groups.

Follow

Walter E. Williams

Bio | Archive

More from Walter E. Williams

NOAA Caught Rewriting US Temperature History (Again) from Powerlineblog.com

Posted on May 5, 2015 by John Hinderaker in Climate

 

We have written a number of times about how government agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration here in the U.S., have systematically adjusted temperature history to make the past look colder. They apparently do this, usually surreptitiously and without explanation, in order to stoke global warming hysteria. See, for example, He Who Controls the Present Controls the Past and Inside the Global Warming Scandal.

Now Mike Brakey, an engineering physicist and heat transfer specialist, has caught NOAA revising historic temperature data for Maine–as always, to make the past look cooler and the present warmer by comparison:

Over the last months I have discovered that between 2013 and 2015 some government bureaucrats have rewritten Maine climate history… (and New England’s and of the U.S.). This statement is not based on my opinion, but on facts drawn from NOAA 2013 climate data vs. NOAA 2015 climate data after they re-wrote it.

We need only compare the data. They cooked their own books (see numbers below).

Click to enlarge:

This graph presents the data visually. The black line shows average annual temperatures for Maine from 1895 to the present as they were recorded at the time, and as NOAA published them in 2013. Thermometers have recorded no net warming since 1895. The blue line represents NOAA rewritten history as it appears in 2015. Note how NOAA reduces earlier temperatures more than recent ones to give the graph a plausibly warming trend. The green line shows average annual temperatures for a single location, Lewiston-Auburn, showing a steep decline since 2000. Click to enlarge:

NOAA has made similar adjustments to past temperatures around the United States. Brakey writes:

It appears NOAA panicked and did a massive rewrite of Maine temperature history (they used the same algorithm for U.S. in general). The new official temperatures from Maine between 1895 and present were LOWERED by an accumulated 151.2°F between 1895 and 2012.

In my opinion, this is out-and-out fraud. Why did they corrupt national climate data? Global warming is a $27 billion business on an annual basis in the U.S alone.

Now NOAA data revised in 2015 indicate that 1904, 1919 and 1925 in Maine were much colder than anything we experience today. (See the scorecard above comparing the NOAA data that are 18 months apart). Note how for 1913 the NOAA lowered the annual temperature a whole 4°F!

For the balance of the years, as they get closer to the present, the NOAA tweaks less and less. They have corrupted Maine climate data between 1895 and present by a whopping accumulated 151.2°F.

David Archibald writes:

Their cooling of the past to keep the global warming meme alive reminds me of the old Soviet joke – the future is known, it is the past that keeps changing.

Would someone please try to explain why this isn’t the biggest scandal in the history of science?

Race, Politics and Lies (Creators.com)

Thomas Sowell

 

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina.
Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?
When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of "us against them" that was more popular.
That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general or a "legacy of slavery" in particular. Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence.
The "legacy of slavery" argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.
Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.
You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.
We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.
Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, DOWN — during the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.
Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read "Life at the Bottom," by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.
You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.
Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.
One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CREATORS.COM

Republicans and Race: A Reality Check (The American Spectator)

The Right Prescription

The GOP is, and always has been, the party of African-American progress.

By David Catron – 5.4.15

• SmallerLarger
• Print Article

image: http://cdn.spectator.org/styles/article_page/s3/1024px-The_Hermitage_by_Jim_Bowen.jpg?itok=r-rl4GnT

Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, near Nashville (Jim Bowen/Creative Commons)

4Share 12Tweet 0Share 3Email

Last week, even as Baltimore was burning, our “post-partisan” President used the tragedy as an excuse for a political cheap shot. Suggesting that the riots were caused by a paucity of inner city investment, he averred that his agenda “would make a difference right now,” but that he was being thwarted by parsimonious Republicans in Congress. Obama’s claim, which combined a characteristic lie about his own agenda with the insinuation that the GOP is the party of racism, was despicable. But it does offer an opportunity to compare the record of Obama's party on race to that of the Republicans.

Let’s begin at the beginning: The first Democrat president was Andrew Jackson, who was not merely pro-slavery. He personally owned 150 African-American slaves who worked his thousand-acre cotton plantation. The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln. In addition to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he persuaded Congress to pass the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the U.S. Sadly, Lincoln didn’t live to see the amendment become part of the Constitution because he was murdered by a Democrat before it was ratified by the requisite number of states.

After the failure of their attempt to preserve slavery by seceding from the Union, the Democrats who had led the Confederacy embarked on a campaign of domestic terror to oppose African-American aspirations to equality. This is confirmed by leftist historian Eric Foner, who debunks a considerable amount of Democrat revisionism in A Short History of Reconstruction. For example, despite attempts by modern Democrats to associate the Republican Party with the KKK, Foner’s book contains this inconvenient fact: “The Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.”

While the KKK shot Republicans and lynched former slaves in the defeated Confederate states, Democrats in Washington, including many from the North, worked diligently to derail any GOP legislation confirming African-Americans as free citizens. Not least among them was Democrat President Andrew Johnson. As Foner recently wrote in the New York Times, Johnson clashed repeatedly with the GOP-controlled Congress: “Over Johnson’s veto, Congress enacted… the Civil Rights Act of 1866, still on the books today. It affirmed the citizenship of everyone born in the United States, regardless of race.”

The GOP won similar battles over the Democrats with the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, which guaranteed African-Americans equal protection under the law and the right to vote. Although it has long since been forgotten, these and other achievements earned Republicans the electoral support of most African-American voters for the next 75 years. Nonetheless, the Democrats maintained control of politics in what they called “the solid south,” where they created a malignant morass of legal obstacles that prevented African-Americans from enjoying the rights of full citizenship for another century.

These legal obstacles were, of course, collectively known as “Jim Crow.” And many prominent Democrats whose reputations have since been whitewashed supported them. Included among these was that icon of progressivism, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was an unabashed racist who reintroduced segregation to the federal civil service when he took office. And, when a group of African-American professionals came to the White House to protest this outrage, Wilson threw them out after pompously declaring: “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

Wilson believed this bilge not merely because of his general predilection toward racism, but also because it bore the imprimatur of the Supreme Court, which had legitimized the “separate but equal” doctrine in its notorious Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. This disgraceful ruling was eventually overturned by a later Supreme Court led by a conservative Republican named Earl Warren. Chief Justice Warren, a former Governor of California who had been appointed by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in October of 1953, presided over the Court’s unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

This ruling earned Warren the lasting enmity of most Democrats, and set off a two-decade legal war between diehard segregationists and the U.S. Department of Justice. Among these diehard Democrats was future president Jimmy Carter, whose opposition to school integration is well-documented. Another unrepentant opponent of racial integration was the Arkansas Democrat, J. William Fulbright, a signatory to the infamous Southern Manifesto. Yet, when Fulbright died, he was eulogized as “a man who changed our country and our world for the better” by his best-known protégé, President Bill Clinton.

And no discussion of Democrat opposition to African-American aspirations can omit mention of the marathon Senate filibuster, led by Fulbright and former KKK official Robert Byrd, to prevent passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It lasted for 60 Senate working days and seemed likely to succeed until Republican Everett Dirksen convinced 27 GOP senators to join a bipartisan vote for cloture. The Act banned employment discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin—and it was pulled across the finish line by Republicans over the objections of the nation’s most powerful Democrats.

At this point in any comparison of the two parties, Democrats usually try to prevent further embarrassing revelations by claiming that such contrasts are unfair because the two parties have somehow reversed their positions, leaving Democrats in possession of the moral high ground on race. According to this tale, all the racist Democrats defected to the GOP during the late 1960s. This is revisionist nonsense. In reality, virtually all of them remained Democrats, including those named above and other racist luminaries such as Russell Long, John Stennis, Herman Talmadge, Richard Russell, and Al Gore, Sr.

After these people failed to halt progress, the Democrats hit on the idea of herding African-Americans onto a new type of plantation called the “Great Society.” On this kinder, gentler plantation, African-Americans are encouraged to become dependent on federal largesse. As “unhyphenated American” Lloyd Marcus writes, “Addicting people to cradle to grave welfare is evil, robbing folks of pursuing their God given gifts and potential.” The liberals who run this plantation, Marcus continues, “hope to get as many folks as possible… hooked on welfare to keep the masses voting Democrat.”

The two-word answer that all Democrats and liberals use to defend their long and tawdry legacy of racism is, predictably, “Barack Obama.” Marcus responds to that as follows: “Democrats have played blacks for over 50 years. Obama is simply their latest front man, brilliantly covered in a black skin disguise.” And Baltimore? “The recent Baltimore riots perfectly illustrate my point. Rioters expressed anger over high black unemployment, poor schools, and poverty.” All of these social ills have become measurably worse since Obama took office, of course, and African-Americans have suffered the most.

Yet the President would have us believe that the evil Republicans are the problem. He claims to have a program to cure the disease that afflicts Baltimore and other major cities but says, “I’m under no illusion that under this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities.” But dumping more taxpayer money into demonstrably ineffective welfare programs isn’t going to work. A brief review of GOP and Democrat history on race suggests that the best hope for African-Americans in those cities is to dump the Dems and put Republicans in charge of their local governments.

Read more at http://spectator.org/articles/62592/republicans-and-race-reality-check

16 Signs That The Economy Has Stalled Out And The Next Economic Downturn Is Here (Zerohedge.com)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/01/2015 08:00 -0400

• Bank of New York
• Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Federal Reserve
• Federal Reserve Bank
• Federal Reserve Bank of New York
• fixed
• Foreclosures
• Gross Domestic Product
• Housing Market
• John Williams
• Reality
• Recession
• recovery
• Student Loans
• Trade Deficit

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

If U.S. economic growth falls any lower, we are officially going to be in recession territory. On Wednesday, we learned that U.S. GDP grew at a 0.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2015.  That was much lower than all of the “experts” were projecting.  And of course there are all sorts of questions whether the GDP numbers the government feeds us are legitimate anyway.  According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were used they would show that U.S. GDP growth has been continuously negative since 2005.  But even if we consider the number that the government has given us to be the “real” number, it still shows that the U.S. economy has stalled out.  It is almost as if we have hit a “turning point”, and there are many out there (including myself) that believe that the next major economic downturn is dead ahead.  As you will see in this article, a whole bunch of things are happening right now that we would expect to see if a recession was beginning. The following are 16 signs that the economy has stalled out and the next economic downturn is here…

#1 We just learned that U.S. GDP grew at an anemic 0.2 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2015…

The gross domestic product grew between January and March at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent, the U.S. Commerce Department said, adding to the picture of an economy braking sharply after accelerating for much of last year. The pace fell well shy of the 1 percent mark anticipated by analysts and marked the weakest quarter in a year.

#2 If you strip a very unusual inventory buildup out of the GDP number, U.S. GDP would have actually fallen at a -2.5 percent annual rate during the first quarter…

The only good news: the massive inventory build, the largest since 2010, boosted GDP by nearly 3.0%. Without this epic stockpiling of non-farm inventory which will have to be liquidated at some point (and at a very low price) Q1 GDP would have been -2.5%.

#3 Our trade deficit with the rest of the planet is absolutely killing our economic growth.  According to the Reality Chek Blog, U.S. economic growth would have been a total of 8 percent higher since the end of the last recession if we actually had balanced trade with other nations…

As of the new first quarter figures, the worsening of the trade deficit has reduced the cumulative real growth of the U.S. economy by 7.99 percent since the current recovery began in the second quarter of 2009.

#4 According to numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in one out of every five American families nobody has a job.  So how in the world can the “unemployment rate” be sitting at “5.5 percent” when everyone is unemployed in 20 percent of all families in the United States?  It doesn’t make any sense.

#5 The rate of homeownership in the United States has just hit a brand new 25 year low.  How can anyone claim that the middle class is “healthy” when the percentage of Americans that own a home is the lowest that it has been in more than two decades?

#6 Back in 2013, 31 percent of all Americans said that they did not anticipate buying a home “for the foreseeable future”.  Just two years later, that number has risen to 41 percent.

#7 The student loan bubble is clearly bursting.  According to Bloomberg, only 37 percent of all student loan borrowers are actually up to date on their payments and reducing their balances…

With borrowers increasingly struggling to repay their student loans, Moody’s Investors Service is warning it may take investors longer than promised to get their money back. The credit grader said this month it may lower rankings on $3 billion of top-rated debt as investors face the threat of slowing principal payments or even receiving no interest.

The concern underscores the fallout from a record $1.2 trillion in U.S. student loans that’s spreading to everything from the housing market and consumer spending to taxpayers. As a sluggish economic recovery forces borrowers to miss payments or tap relief programs, only 37 percent are current and reducing their balances, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York presentation this month.

#8 Procter & Gamble has announced that it will be cutting up to 6,000 more jobs from their payroll.  Why would they be doing this if the economy is “getting better”?

#9 McDonald’s plans to permanently shut down 700 “poorly performing” restaurants over the course of 2015.  Why would they be doing this if the economy is “getting better”?

#10 It is being projected that half of all fracking companies in the United States will be either “dead or sold” by the end of 2015.

#11 Retail sales in the U.S. have not dropped this rapidly since the last recession.

#12 Wholesale sales in the U.S. have not dropped this rapidly since the last recession.

#13 Factory orders in the U.S. have not dropped this rapidly since the last recession.

#14 Credit requests are being declined at a rate that we haven’t seen since the last recession.

#15 U.S. export growth has gone negative for the first time since the last recession.

#16 As the U.S. economy begins to head into another downturn, most Americans are completely unprepared for it.  In fact, one recent survey discovered that 62 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.

Don’t let this next recession take you by surprise.

Back in 2008 and 2009, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs or businesses because of the sharp economic downturn.  Because most of them were living paycheck to paycheck, all of a sudden a whole lot of Americans could not make their mortgage payments and foreclosures surged to unprecedented heights.  Millions of families that thought they were operating on a solid foundation saw their middle class lifestyles evaporate in just a matter of a few months.

That is why it is so vital to prepare yourself financially, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually for the great storm that is coming ahead of time.  Over the past couple of years, I have been working on a new book entitled “Get Prepared Now” which talks about how to make these preparations.  On Wednesday, it was finally released to the public.  I hope that you will check it out.

The past few years have been a period of relative stability for the U.S. economy.  A lot of people have been lulled into a false sense of security during that time.  These people have become convinced that our problems have been fixed.  But they haven’t been fixed at all.  In fact, our problems are far, far worse than they were just prior to the last financial crisis.

When the next great financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a spike in the suicide rate just like we did during the last one.  Millions will be blindsided by what is coming and will give in to depression and despair.  But that doesn’t have to happen to you.  It is empowering to know what is coming and to understand why it is coming.  It is empowering to get prepared in advance for turbulent times.  It is empowering to have a plan for the years ahead.

Even though I write about all of the horrible things that are coming to this country every day, I live my life with no fear, and that is what I want for all of you as well.

Do you want to know who will be giving in to fear and panic when things start to go really crazy?

It will be the people that had no idea what was coming and made no preparations whatsoever.

Yes, the times ahead are going to be extremely challenging, but they can also be the best times of your life.

It is all going to come down to how you respond to a world that is going completely insane.

The choice is up to you.