Is This Our New America?

Golden Eagle with Chopped Wing
Photo: Wikipedia commons

The young woman was shopping on the 75 percent off rack of children’s clothes. Our eyes met and she smiled; in these hard times we must shop wisely to make money stretch further, she said. I remember those years in the mid-twenties, with two babies, a mom to support, and at least three part-time jobs. I never complained, blamed rich people, rioted to burn down other people’s hard work, or demanded that they turn their accumulated wealth over to me. It was a time when law and order mattered. Effort and hard work eventually paid off when I made a huge and lengthy investment in human capital – my education.

Today the only luxury the young woman allowed herself was a first baby’s Christmas ornament for her newborn. One of the only two Caucasian associates in this department store, she earns a living standing eight hours a day, waiting on demanding and often rude customers who hail from two hundred plus different countries. It is always a United Nation’s zoo, a cacophony of nationalities and people who do not have much love for America, they just enjoy its opportunities and the new found Shangri La of better treatment than poor Americans and vets get.

She has to meet impossible sales numbers set by corporate management from another planet who do not care that the economy is bad, the result of eight years of destructive Democrat Marxist activism that weakened the economy and doubled the indebtedness for generations to come. People do not have a lot of disposable income, unemployment is high, and many save money by staying home and ordering online.

Few customers want to fight the crowds and the rude salespeople who are mostly Middle Eastern and treat shoppers with contempt and rudeness just like they did in their own countries. Who wants to be friendly in a country they resent with passion? They are not even nice to the few Americans who have to work with them; they treat them like pariahs and threaten them with bodily harm if they say or do anything that might offend their Muslim sensibilities. They scream racism and bigotry for every little thing to their bosses who always take sides with the Muslims for fear that they might be considered Islamophobes. Shopping in northern Virginia is an unpleasant experience that many try to avoid.

Most of the heavily made-up Middle Eastern associates are uneducated and have no skills, they cannot possibly work anywhere else except sell merchandise in stores. There are some who do wear hijabs and some burkas. It was an interesting experience one day to go to a local computer store and to be met by an IT associate wearing a complete black tent with slits for eyes. To say that it was uncomfortable being helped by this person is an understatement. How can you relax when you cannot really see who you are talking to? I’ve seen some driving on the busy and dangerous roads of northern Virginia. I wondered if their driver’s licenses concealed their identities as well. It was an eerie experience as if I’ve been transported back in time into the seventh century slave bazaars.

I don’t know about you but I like to have a temporary friendly relationship with the person helping me spend money and, if you are rude and I can’t see you, I have to move on to shop somewhere else. But there are not many "someplace elses" left that are different from this experience.

We are fast becoming strangers in our own country, being pushed aside by a theocracy that is alien to our nation. It has not caught up yet in other parts of America but it is moving fast in that direction. If the stunt the Starbucks CEO pulled the other day, saying that he will hire 10,000 refugees from Syria instead of Americans out of work, is any indication of what is to come in the near future, our services work force will be fast replaced by laborers from unskilled nations.

There is a growing workforce in the restaurant business and landscaping, mostly people coming from south of the border, hard and conscientious workers. But they have a large family at home that takes full advantage of the generous welfare benefits in this country. This south of the border workforce has replaced high school and college students who used to work part-time to supplement their income while in school.

Collegiate Americans, lovers of activism, Bolshevism, communism, and ardent Islamophiles seem to have found a niche in the paid-protest and paid-rioters business. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), well-funded by billionaire elites, who know that global communism is best for us, remunerate these masked, black-clad agitators really well. Anti-Americanism, raised to a fever and violent pitch, has become quite lucrative. They seem to be untouched by law and order so the mayhem and destruction continues.

We are told non-stop by the main stream media that these refugees do the jobs Americans don’t want to do. Is that really true? Illegals work for lower wages, often under the table, so their employment depresses wages in general.

In between rioting, looting, burning, and physically beating people who disagree with them, Lefties keep screaming, “that’s not who we are as a nation, we are a nation of immigrants.” Yes, we are a nation of legal immigrants who assimilated into our culture, and we helped build it but we have reached our point of immigration saturation before we turn into the failed multicultural Europe that is being destroyed by the flotsam and jetsam of the welfare dependent third world.

Immigrants refuse to assimilate, we are told by the fanatical “experts” of the left, because it is “fascistic” to expect them to assimilate their “superior” and primitive culture into such an “awfully intolerant” country that took them in and supported them financially without any questions asked.

If liberals were not so “open-minded” that their brains fell out long time ago, they could perhaps answer the logical question, if we are such a racist, bigoted and intolerant place to live, why come here in the first place, why not stay in the country that is so much better than ours?

Spare us the indignity of having to support you and your extended families while you threaten us with lawsuits because we don’t accept Sharia Law over our Constitution. We are rolling out the red carpet for refugees while many of our veterans are sleeping in the streets. Is this our new America?

The Three Americas of Your Dreams

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

Michael Savage made an interesting and profound statement on his radio show that struck a chord with me because I believe it to be true, based on my past experience with socialism and communism, my present knowledge of crony capitalism, and my research.

“We have three Americas – the America that was, the America that is, and the America that will be.”

The Facebook generation never experienced the America that was; they never knew the correct history of the exceptional America of the past, they only learned Howard Zinn’s revisionist history. They just benefitted from its greatness and its accomplishments.  Their teachers have been telling them for decades that America was evil, racist, imperialist, and they need to be ashamed of being American, they must seek retribution for all the past wrongs at the hands of the bad white man who must have had invented “white privilege.”

Everything they enjoy, use and benefit from today, they owe in great part to the discovery, inventiveness, and entrepreneurship of the white men they hate so much. That is not to say that people of other cultures and nationalities have not contributed greatly to this country with their hard work. But not many invented things that make our lives so much better and easier today. Look how many white European men have received science Nobel prizes for their inventions and discoveries.

America that was is the exceptional America that so generously gave aid and knowledge to other countries in need, that built a successful nation that knew and was proud of its history, had a moral compass, was honorable, had stable families, and kept God at its core. America that was achieved unsurpassed greatness and, in that process, improved the lives of billions around the world, freeing an entire continent from the oppressing German National Socialists (Nazis).

America that is now is ashamed of its history, of what made it great, and people are afraid to express their feelings of pride because it is shameful and derisive to be patriotic; people are demoralized, have lost their decency, more than half of the country is on welfare or unemployed.

People who are in school know very little and are unabashedly unashamed that they know so very little. When asked simple questions that most foreigners can answer with ease, young Americans walk away with pride and a smile when they show their stupidity and ignorance, unable to recognize national landmarks, their own geography, famous Americans, their own history, and many rudiments of basic elementary education. But they can immediately recognize and worship pop-culture trash icons and recite sports statistics and worthless trivia.

Noah Webster was right when he said,

"Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty, and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor."    

Unfortunately, most Americans with a college diploma would definitely be unable to pass a high school literacy exam from the turn of the 20^th century, that is how dumbed down the American education has become by teaching to a test and lazily using calculators instead of their brains.

America that will be is yet to be decided. The electorate has two choices, go with one of the two communist candidates on the left, turning completely left to socialism and eventually communism or maintain the mixed economy of the middle with government socialism and crony capitalism.

It appears that the tendency goes toward socialism. Decades of brainwashing in schools, Hollywood, and the main stream media are finally paying off, politicians have enough domestic low information voters and imported illegal aliens to bring about their sought after utopian paradise in the vein of Venezuela and Cuba.

No matter what happens to the country, politicians will be part of the ruling elite while the useful idiots, including the media, academia, and all the fringe lunatics on the left will become part of the equally poor and miserable proletariat with implausible rights and demands that cannot be fulfilled in the real world of work. And they will have to labor when other people’s money will be gone and the middle class will become part of the dustbin of history, a blip on the radar of a formerly successful and abundant life which they squandered away by allowing their children to be brainwashed in schools.

Schools are not the only ones responsible for the creation of this entitlement mentality, an incurable societal cancer. The entitlement mentality started with the divorced single mom with children taken care of by the government largesse, a government that purposefully became daddy.

The entitlement mentality was exacerbated by two-income parents, who could not spend enough time with their children. To make up for this obvious breakdown and assuage guilt, parents started buying their children “stuff” which they did not need, thus creating an entitled future society of narcissistic people who felt that everything was owed to them free on a golden platter just  because they existed.

And old communist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton told them that it was their “right” to have health care, free education, free housing, free prenatal and postnatal care, free vacations, all at the expense of society, no personal responsibility whatsoever. It worked really well in the Fabian socialist nations of Western Europe - they are all bankrupt, financially and morally, fighting off too late or not at all the Islamist invasion and the failed multicultural “diversity” with their ill-placed tolerance.

America that will be, with a socialist and communist utopian agenda, will be muddled by disaster after disaster exacerbated by the already doubled national debt, now sitting at $19 trillion and rising, over $120 trillion with unfunded liabilities such as the Social Security Ponzi scheme, Medicare and Medicaid. This unpayable national debt cannot possibly be reversed no matter who the president is.

How do you undo the open borders policy and all the illegal aliens that have been flooding the U.S.? We’ve been told for ten years that we have 11 million “undocumented Americans,” who, by simple mathematics should have grown to 30 million by now, a sizable non-information Democrat illegal voting bloc, deceptively named “undocumented workers” to cover the fact that they are foreign nationals who broke our laws to come in, but are now demanding and receiving more rights than Americans have, in exchange for their illegal vote across the country.

They are changing the demographic face of America on a large scale plan and forcing bi-lingualism on us. They are already burdening the welfare system, schools, child care, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and the earned income tax credit system. How do you stop Muslim invasion? In the name of tolerance and their bogus contribution to America, they are allowed to change our laws, to introduce Sharia Law, proselytizing for Islam in schools across the country with the help of Common Core, in hopes of eventually taking over by sheer fertility, 8.1 children per family.

How do you undo Obamacare, the deliberate destruction of one of the world’s best healthcare systems in order to install government provided insurance? The socialist healthcare system for veterans did not work very well and thousands have died and are still dying daily, waiting to be seen and to be treated properly.

How do you overcome the weakened military? How do you overcome the Islamization of America? How do you overcome the destruction wrought in education by Common Core Sub-standards and by the State Department of Education? How do you overcome the destruction of the fossil fuel industry at the expense of building the Green, pie-in-the-sky, renewable energy of solar and wind? How do you overcome the debauchery and the loss of morality? How do you overcome the loss of faith? How do you overcome the infiltration at all levels of government of anti-Americans, communists, and Islamists who do not have America’s best interest at heart?

How are you going to reverse decades of indoctrination of our children into good socialists? How do you reverse the climate change industry? How do you overcome all the race-baiting, bigotry, hate speech, and white privilege rhetoric coming from the militant and violent left who has plenty of money to stage riots and destructive demonstration by young people addled by drug use? How do you reverse United Nation’s Agenda 21? How do you reverse all the spying on citizens? How do you protect American citizens who can be killed without due process?

The country has gone too far over the cliff. America that will be will not be recognized by baby boomers and legal aliens who immigrated to America for the opportunity of a better life, not for welfare benefits.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2016

 

The Chronically Homeless in America

Photo: Wikipedia Commons

The mark of a civilized society is how well the most helpless are treated --animals, children, the elderly, and those who are homeless. There is always room for improvement. We are plenty generous with people from other countries, but we miss the mark when it comes to helping our own chronic homeless, the veterans, babies in the womb, the elderly, and others who cannot protect themselves.

It is in plain view that we have failed the homeless. We all pass by people who look healthy, able-bodied, and well-fed, asking for help on a street corner, professional panhandlers who have a nice car and a home to go to – they make a living panhandling.  But then there are those sleeping in the streets, in the cold, in the rain, too dirty and too exhausted to beg; they’ve become so invisible and ignored, nobody speaks to them anymore.

How did they get this way? Homeless people live in unimaginable places. How can a society as rich as ours allow this to happen? Why do we care about the downtrodden of the world but not our own citizens?

The Department of Housing and Human Development (HUD) told us in 2014 that there were 84,000 chronically homeless, down from 120,000 in 2007 thanks to a 2002 program aimed at ending chronic homelessness in ten years. As any government program, the goal failed and the program was extended through 2017. HUD used the Homeless Assistance Grants, the Veterans Affairs Supported Housing Program and other demonstration programs to achieve this goal.

The government had decided to end chronic homelessness because it cost the taxpayers too much money to care for individuals who “use many expensive services often paid through public sources, including emergency room visits, inpatient hospitalizations, and law enforcement and jail time.” Citing the fact that putting the homeless in shelters is also costly, bureaucrats admit that there are also ethical reasons to help our fellow man and end chronic homelessness.

The previous model did not work so a new strategy was deployed – “allowing chronically homeless individuals to move into permanent supportive housing without preconditions. Permanent supportive housing (PSH) is not time-limited and makes services available to residents.” http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44302.pdf

One such PSH is Housing First, supported by both HUD and the Department of Veteran Affairs, chosen because the homeless people can select the type and “intensity of services and does not require abstinence or medication compliance.”

PSH increases days spent in housing and reduces days spent homeless. “The outcomes in other areas are not as clear.” In other words, they either don’t know or are not saying if costs are reduced in use and service, if substance use and abuse are diminished, and if mental health improvements are present.

Medicaid funds are used for housing-related services; lobbyists and housing advocates prefer that states use “their own shares of Medicaid funds to finance permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless individuals” since funding through HUD programs is limited for new units. Another source of funding could be Pay for Success Initiatives; private investment in PSH would be paid back if “certain outcomes are attained.”

The term “chronic homelessness” has been used in research since the 1980s, referring to people who have spent more than a year in the streets while suffering from one or two disabling conditions, substance abuse and/or mental illness.

Randall Kuhn and Dennis Culhane categorized homelessness in three groups of people:

-          Transitional (short periods of time in shelters who do not return)

-          Episodic (more frequent users of shelters, not exceeding a few months)

-          Chronic (stay in shelters for long periods of time)*

According to Libby Perl and Erin Bagalman, the federal standards to be deemed chronically homeless are as follows:

-          Individuals and families can be chronically homeless even though in the Hearth Act only unaccompanied individuals were included in the definition

-          One unaccompanied individual or adult head of household must have a disabling condition such as “substance use disorder, serious mental illness, developmental disability, post-traumatic stress disorder, cognitive impairments resulting from a brain injury, or chronic physical illness or disability, including the co-occurrence or two or more of those conditions”

-          Duration requirement (continuously homeless for a year or more or at least four occasions in the past three years)

-          Where someone sleeps (a place that is not meant for human habitation such as a park, street, abandoned building, sewer, emergency shelter, or safe haven)**

In 2015 HUD reported the total number of homeless individuals to be 564,708. Mental illness and substance use disorders (drugs and alcohol) seemed to be prevalent among the homeless.

The permanent supportive housing (PSH) is not time-limited and services are available to residents. HUD provides much of the funding and thus requires certain criteria such as basing it in a community, not an institution; time of stay cannot be limited; residents can have a renewable lease; and helping residents with disability to live independently.

PSH may rent units in a condominium or apartment complex; subsidies are provided through housing vouchers; single-site multi-family rental property with affordable housing designation; residents pay 30% of their income towards rent and the rest is subsidized. Such units exist around the D.C. area. Some of the units are reported by the other residents as sources of bed bugs infestation and other pests.

Not all PSH providers require their residents in permanent housing to “abstain from drugs and alcohol” in order to remain eligible for housing. Housing First, developed in New York in 1990s under the name Pathways to Housing, does not require residents to abstain from drugs and alcohol or to take their meds, but services are available 24 hours a day to help them if they ask – nurses, caseworkers, and psychiatrists.

Prince William County in Virginia is considering placing its 409 homeless people in 8X12 tiny prototype homes at a cost of $3,000 per unit.  Woodbridge HUGS, a non-profit formed last year to “assist the county’s homeless population” and to provide the homeless with essential goods and housing, said through its representative, “We found what we want as our prototype… we want to put in a composting toilet, a skylight, a generator, a door that locks, [and] windows for cross-ventilation.” http://whatsupwoodbridge.com/2016/01/15/tiny-houses-homeless-prince-william/

I cannot imagine what these tiny slum units would do to the surrounding landscape and the property values of the adjacent properties. Is this the best way to help the homeless in one of the richest counties in the nation?

Instead of sheltering the homeless in proper and stable housing, why are we moving them essentially into shanty areas? Why must we relegate the homeless, the unemployed, and the poor to ePodments, to tiny homes, to mini-homes, to dwellings made of junkyard scrap and other cheap materials, to dwellings the size of closets?

Are we doing this because the economy is in such dire-straights thanks to this administration’s disastrous economic policies? Or is there another reprehensible Agenda and plan in place to crowd people into stack-and-pack tiny apartments and temporary units the size of a dog house in order to return the suburbia to its original wilderness?

In spite of HUD Homeless Assistance Grants, as a primary tool of the federal government of funding housing for homeless people, HUD-VA Supported Housing program, which was started in 1992, and other social programs, homelessness is far from being addressed properly and will continue to exist.

 

____________________________

*Randall Kuhn and Dennis P. Culhane, “Applying Cluster Analysis to Test a Typology of Homelessness by Pattern of Shelter Utilization: Results from the Analysis of Administrative Data,” American Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 26, no. 2 (April 1998), pp. 207-232.

**CRS Report 44302, December 8, 2015, pp. 3-4.