Free Republic

"Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group ... death rates in this group have been rising, not falling." The big new killers of middle-aged white folks? Alcoholic liver disease, overdoses of heroin and opioids, and suicides. So wrote Gina Kolata in The New York Times of a stunning study by the husband-wife team of Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case. Deaton could cite but one parallel to this social disaster: "Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this." Middle-aged whites are four times as...

Writing in Forbes last year, Steve Moore, a Catholic, asked: “What is the theological case for telling those in the poorest villages of the planet where people still live at subsistence levels, that they have a moral obligation to save the planet by staying poor and using less fossil fuels, less energy and electricity?” Three months later, Vatican Radio ran the telltale headline: “Pope: Christians Should Kneel Before the Poor.” The article cited Pope Francis’ assertion that “poverty is the great teaching” Jesus gave us, and that “the poor are not a burden but a resource.” He capped his homily...

Life isn’t much fun these days in the world’s socialist paradise. If you had to choose a country you didn’t want to live in, Venezuela would be near the top of the list. Corrupt, dysfunctional, bankrupt, crime-ridden, drug-infested, short of practically every basic commodity, it can’t keep the lights on, keep the government running or brew its own beer. Last weekend six army officers were arrested for stealing goats from a farm because they were hungry. Venezuela has become the basket case of the western hemisphere, a case study on how not to run a country and a living example...

How The Liberal Welfare State Destroyed Black America What Democrat voters and political leaders refuse to believe. May 5, 2016 John Perazzo    When President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 launched the so-called War on Poverty, which enacted an unprecedented amount of antipoverty legislation and added many new layers to the American welfare state, he explained that his objective was to reduce dependency, “break the cycle of poverty,” and make “taxpayers out of tax eaters.” Johnson further claimed that his programs would bring to an end the “conditions that breed despair and violence,” those being “ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough...

This is an interesting ruling, especially the justification used by the Italian high court to throw out the conviction of a homeless man who stole about $7 worth of food from a grocery store. BBC: Judges overturned a theft conviction against Roman Ostriakov after he stole cheese and sausages worth €4.07 (£3; $4.50) from a supermarket. Mr Ostriakov, a homeless man of Ukrainian background, had taken the food "in the face of the immediate and essential need for nourishment", the court of cassation decided. Therefore it was not a crime, it said. A fellow customer informed the store's security...

BALTIMORE — Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders used a campaign stop Saturday in this economically challenged city to decry the difference between the life expectancies of the nation’s rich and poor, declaring that “poverty is a death sentence.” “If you are born in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhood, your life expectancy is almost 20 years shorter than if you’re born in its wealthiest neighborhood,” the senator from Vermont said, adding that “15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have lower life expectancies than North Korea. Two of them have a higher infant mortality rate than Palestine's West Bank.” Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, promised an...

Religion does not necessarily play a role in radicalization of Muslims, Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday night, citing political repression and denial of rights as relevant factors, along with the lure of “regular meals [and] companionship.” In a speech at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, Kerry acknowledged that “you don’t have to be poor or repressed or receive special training” to become a recruit of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL/DAESH). “You don’t even have to be religious,” he added, citing as an example a reported case of two young...

Breitbart) – Veteran pollster Pat Caddell warns that Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement during his tenure in Congress could cost him both his approval rating as governor and the critical state primary. “I believe — I haven’t gone back and looked — but I think he was in Congress in ’93 and if so, I’d bet you he voted for NAFTA. How much do you want to bet? Somebody ought to look that one up. That’s the real point this morning that could change the election in Ohio,” he told Breitbart News executive...

Economic inequality continues to be a persistent theme in both national and state politics and is a hot topic of academic studies. As the 2016 presidential campaign moves into the primary season, crusaders against economic inequality will likely grow even more vocal, with presidential candidates making it a key part of their platforms. While a lot of this discussion will happen at the national level, Michigan policymakers will undoubtedly use this popular issue to push their preferred policy recommendations, such as boosting the minimum wage, hiking income taxes, increasing aid to public universities and many others. When economic inequality is...

Bernie Sanders, the Senator representing the socialist paradise of Vermont, has apparently never seen a poor white person. This is understandable since about 1% of the state's population is black. But Sanders considers himself an expert on the racial divide in poverty. And at last night's debate with Hillary Clinton, the Senator expounded on his theories of race and poverty. Daily Caller: During the CNN Democratic debate Thursday night Sen. Bernie Sanders claimed that if someone was white they don’t know what it’s like to be poor or live in a ghetto. “When you’re white you don’t know what...

The best that can be said about Sunday night’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is that it was more decorous than the Republican one the previous Thursday. Nothing about anatomy came up. However, things said during the debate were actually more frightening. An example occurred when Bernie Sanders, the venerable socialist from Vermont, said, "When you are white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, you don’t know what it’s like to be poor.”

It seems the line from Sunday night's debate causing the biggest amount of buzz on social media came from Bernie Sanders when talking about race in America. After Hillary Clinton said that she, as a white person, has "never had the experience" of so many African-Americans in regard to discrimination, Sanders tried to amplify the point: • "When you are white, you don't know what it's like to be living in a ghetto, you don't know what it's like to be poor, you don't know what it's like to be hassled when you are walking down a street or dragged...

ROMANIA: Overturning the disaster of socialism is a daily battle. Socialism will eventually die with the older people who grew up under the mentality of socialist dependency To say that poverty induced by socialist dictatorships is hard to shake would be an understatement. Ask Cubans and now Venezuelans what is like to live in workers’ paradise that Fidel forced upon his people while he stashed away billions he has stolen with his cronies. The socialist dictator Hugo Chavez left behind billions in personal bank accounts while Venezuelans struggle to survive under his socialist successor Maduro, who mismanaged the economy just...

Poverty and energy poverty go hand in hand. It is estimated that three billion people [1] still rely on solid fuel (firewood, cornstalks, etc.) for cooking, which, according to the World Health Organization, causes four million deaths per year from the indoor air pollution. But instead of promoting electricity generation that would take the pollution out of the house altogether, there is a push by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves [2] to merely reduce the amount of solid fuel burned inside theses poor houses. Their goal is to replace 100 million stoves that burn "firewood; agricultural waste, including corn...

Craig Johnson | Virginia Free CitizenLast Monday, my good friend, Don Blake, asked me to participate in a local television interview with him about a racial video, entitled “Structural Discrimination,” which upset his granddaughter and other students at Glen Allen High School. Having handled hot topics in talk radio for years, I was happy to oblige, and you can view it here: NBC12 - WWBT - Richmond, VA News On Your Side After providing additional commentary on Fox News, (see clip http://video.foxnews.com/v/4752034287001), the story gained national attention, and the video is now a worldwide viral sensation, which has been discussed...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8dzkygDKDU http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article45444474.html http://www.kake.com/home/headlines/Derby-store-shooting-321395561.html Julie Dombo - James Michael Phillips http://i.imgur.com/5vCo32L.png Sadly, I believe a seriously emotionally damaged James Michael Phillips is a victim of America's expanding and shameful *National Epidemic of Child Abuse and Neglect,* aka *Poverty*, that for decades has deprived untold numbers of emotionally abused and neglected young developing children from experiencing and enjoying a safe, fairly happy American kid childhood. Depraved acts of violence as well as other 'people and community' harming anti-social behaviors often occur when emotionally or physically abused and neglected developing young children mature into depressed, frustrated, sometimes suicidal *(NY Times May 18, 2015...

Black History Month should be a time of celebration of achievements and honest reflection on the impediments to freedom for all. Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer is one of many who broke through the generational shackles of poverty to live a life devoted to helping free others from the same bondage. Hamer was born into poverty in 1917 (the youngest of 20 children), which according to Planned Parenthood's philosophy, was a circumstance worthy of eliminating her. Since the age of 6, she worked in the cotton fields with her sharecropping family and was forced to leave school at the...

Black poverty is fundamentally distinct from white poverty--and so cannot be addressed without grappling with racism. There have been a number of useful entries in the weeks since Senator Bernie Sanders declared himself against reparations. Perhaps the most clarifying comes from Cedric Johnson in a piece entitled, "An Open Letter To Ta-Nehisi Coates And The Liberals Who Love Him." Johnson's essay offers those of us interested in the problem of white supremacy and the question of economic class the chance to tease out how, and where, these two problems intersect. In Johnson's rendition, racism, in and of itself, holds limited...

The Trump phenomenon is driven in large part by working-class voters under economic strain. Republicans are increasingly talking about antipoverty programs as a way to help lift some up. Well before Donald Trump ever became a political phenomenon, Rep. Paul Ryan told his fellow Republicans that poverty should be a Republican issue. Now, the Trump rebellion is beginning to make his case for him. The overarching message of the Trump campaign isn't directed at the usual targets of federal poverty programs, such as isolated pockets of extreme poverty in Appalachia or the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. It targets people...

A prominent African American pastor in Chicago issued a strong cry against abortion in the bitter cold on Sunday during the March for Life Chicago. As the temperature neared zero degrees, the Rev. Corey Brooks, pastor of the New Beginnings Church of Chicago on the South Side, urged more than 5,000 pro-lifers in attendance to take a stand against abortion, especially in the black community. He pointed out that abortion kills more black Americans than any other cause. The Chicago Sun-Times reports more about Brooks’ remarks: “No longer will we stand on the sideline and let these abortions happen in...