Kate’s Law Blocked by Senate Democrats

Unfortunately Senator Toomey’s sanctuary city bill (S.3100) failed to receive the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture and move forward with debate. From 2015:

The Stop Sanctuary Policies Act, a Republican-backed bill that would withhold some federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities,” failed to reach the 60 votes necessary to advance beyond a test vote.

“Sanctuary cities,” like Philadelphia, ignore “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) requests to detain any undocumented immigrant arrested by local law enforcement, claiming the aggressive use of detainers prevents immigrants from reporting crimes to police.

Such policies came under scrutiny in July, when an undocumented immigrant and convicted felon allegedly murdered a woman in San Francisco. Congressional Republicans rallied around the case, passing a similar bill in the House of Representatives, while President Barack Obama vowed to veto such legislation. More here.

Senate Dems block sanctuary city, ‘Kate’s Law’ bills

WashingtonExaminer: Senate lawmakers on Wednesday blocked legislation aimed at stopping violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants.

The “Stop Dangerous Sanctuary Cities Act” would revoke federal grants provided to so-called sanctuary cities that refuse to comply with Homeland Security requests to detain illegal immigrants. The bill is meant to put pressure on those cities to cooperate with the federal government on these issues.

The bill is one of the legislative reactions to the death of Kate Steinle, who was killed on a San Francisco pier by an illegal immigrant. After her death, city officials defended their decision not to cooperate with federal authorities on deporting illegal immigrants.

While Republicans say those sorts of incidents show the government needs to put more pressure on sanctuary cities to follow federal guidance, Democrats disagree, and they helped scuttle the bill in the Senate. Republicans needed 60 votes to let the bill advance in a 53-44 vote.

Democrats have said the bill is anti-immigrant and would hurt local communities. Civil rights groups have lobbied Democrats to oppose the bills, arguing they would damage the ability of police to build trust with immigrant communities.

Democrats also blocked a second related bill, the “Stop Illegal Reentry Act,” which would require mandatory minimum sentences standards for those who have been deported and then come back into the United States illegally and are convicted of an aggravated felony.

The bill is named after Steinle, and was introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

“Congress must prevent cities from harboring illegal aliens, and it must hold this administration accountable for its failure, if not its outright refusal, to enforce federal immigration laws and ensure the safety and security of the American people,” Cruz said.

But Democrats disagreed, and again shut down the bill in a procedural vote that failed to get 60 votes, 55-42.

*****

In part from USAToday: Republicans said they were trying to save lives, invoking the one-year anniversary of the shooting of 32-year-old Kate Steinle, who was killed as she walked along a San Francisco pier with her father in July 2015. Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, has been charged with Steinle’s murder.

The case sparked national outrage when it was revealed that Sanchez had been deported five times for multiple felonies and was released from a San Francisco County Jail without being turned over to federal immigration authorities.

“The shooter should never have been on the pier that day,” Toomey said.

San Francisco and more than 300 other cities, counties and states have policies against keeping undocumented immigrants in custody for federal agents unless agents have a court order or warrant. Police in cities with large immigrant populations say they cannot convince residents to trust them if police are viewed as immigration agents who will help deport them if they come forward to report crimes.

Toomey’s bill would have barred local governments with sanctuary policies from receiving community development block grants, which are used to create jobs, provide housing to low-income and moderate-income families, and help communities recover from natural disasters.

“Senator Toomey’s bill…aims to prevent more families from experiencing the heartache that Kate Steinle’s family has been forced to endure,” said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Republicans have been candid about the need for Toomey to have a vote on his “message amendment” to help his re-election campaign.

“So this is a political tactic,” Durbin said. “Senator Toomey’s bill will not pass, but it gives him something to talk about when he goes home and something perhaps to give a speech about at the Republican (National) Convention.” More from USAToday

 

Univ. of Phoenix, Obama’s Post Presidency Career?

Okay, let the investigations begin…..the collusion, the government subsidies and partners….hummm

Bid to buy for-profit college by former Obama insiders raises questions

‘There is at least a taste of unseemliness involved in this,’ a former top education official said.

Barack Obama and Marty Nesbitt
Longtime Obama friend Marty Nesbitt’s private equity firm Vistria Group has mounted a charm offensive on Capitol Hill to talk up the proposed sale of the for-profit University of Phoenix. | Getty

Politico: As the Obama administration cracks down on for-profit colleges, three former officials working on behalf of an investment firm run by President Barack Obama’s best friend have staged a behind-the-scenes campaign to get the Education Department to green-light a purchase of the biggest for-profit of them all — the University of Phoenix.

The investors include a private equity firm founded and run by longtime Obama friend Marty Nesbitt and former Deputy Education Secretary Tony Miller. The firm, Chicago-based Vistria Group, has mounted a charm offensive on Capitol Hill to talk up the proposed sale of the troubled for-profit education giant, which receives more than $2 billion a year in taxpayer money but is under investigation by three state attorneys general and the FTC.

What stands out about the proposed deal is that several key players are either close to top administration officials, including the president himself, or are former administration insiders — especially Miller, who was part of the effort to more tightly regulate for-profit colleges at the very agency now charged with approving the ownership change. For-profit college officials have likened those rules to a war on the industry, and blame the administration for contributing to their declining enrollments and share prices.

The proposed sale carries high stakes for taxpayers, students and investors: The University of Phoenix’s financial stability may depend on the $1.1 billion acquisition. If the company were to fail, more than 160,000 students could be displaced and the government would be on the hook for hundreds of millions in student loans.

But the investors’ effort to seek Education Department approval of the school’s ownership change also raises questions about potential conflicts of interest.

“There is at least a taste of unseemliness involved in this,” said Mark Schneider, a former top education official under President George W. Bush. “They regulate it. They drive the price down. …They are buying it for pennies on the dollar.”

Vistria Group said it isn’t seeking special treatment. “We expect the Department to evaluate this proposed transaction on the merits,” the company said in a statement.

Vistria is part of a consortium of investors involved in the proposed acquisition, which has already won over shareholders of the school’s parent company, Apollo Education Group. But now the investors need the Education Department and the school’s accreditors to sign off on the ownership change to keep the federal money flowing — most of it in the form of student loans and Pell Grants.

Related reading: Apollo Education

Related reading: Vistria Money

With those decisions looming, Miller and at least one other former Obama insider have met with staff to Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), looking to reassure some of the loudest critics of for-profit colleges in the president’s own party, several Senate aides confirmed to POLITICO. Those lawmakers have pushed Obama’s Education Department to be even tougher on for-profit colleges.

Miller has also met with staff members working for other committee members, including Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), and Bob Casey (D-Pa.), as well as with Sen. Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Senate education committee. Nesbitt was not part of those Capitol Hill meetings, according to the aides.

The investors’ pitch is that they will turn around the beleaguered education company company and boost student outcomes. In announcing the sale, Miller said in a statement that the investors are committed to running the University of Phoenix “in a manner consistent with the highest ethical standards.”

But the specter of former insiders pushing the sale of a company in an industry that has long been in the administration’s crosshairs is not lost on critics. For seven years, the Obama administration has waged a crackdown on poor quality and predatory practices at many for-profit colleges, with the president himself excoriating some schools for “making out like a bandit” with federal money, but saddling students with big debts and leaving them unprepared for good jobs. He did not name the schools.

“It’s ironic that a former senior official at the Department of Education — an agency that has intentionally targeted and sought to dismantle the for-profit college industry — would now take the reins at the country’s largest for-profit college,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican who leads the House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s higher education subcommittee.

“Mr. Miller will soon learn firsthand how the harmful regulations he helped develop will limit the choices of students and create burdensome red tape for his institution,” she added.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — a longtime defender of the University of Phoenix — told POLITICO he blames the administration’s hard-charging regulatory approach for helping to drive down the company’s stock price and contributing to its decision to sell.

“I know it was the attacks that drove the stock price down,” McCain said. “It’s very clear.”

The sale price, which shareholders approved last month after initially balking at a lower price, is considered a bargain by some industry observers. The day Obama was sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2009, the company’s stock closed at $86.54 per share. Today, it’s trading at around $9, although a recovering economy, unfavorable media coverage and the for-profit industry’s general slump have also contributed to that drop.

Some Senate Democrats said they are also uneasy with the investors’ plan to take the university private, which means it would no longer have to publicly disclose information such as executive compensation, lawsuits or when it’s a target of investigations. Those details are useful to prospective students, they say, at a time when the school faces inquiries from both state and federal authorities.

“Essentially, a company that receives more than $2 billion annually from federal taxpayers — nearly 80 percent of its revenue — is going dark, and it’s happening at a time when the University of Phoenix has come under increased scrutiny from state and federal regulators,” Durbin wrote in a March letter to the Education Department.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said the university’s “questionable track record is already a point of concern, and there are many questions as to whether the sale of its parent company is in the best interests of both students and taxpayers.”

Who’s who

Several players in the deal have close ties to the Obama administration they’re now attempting to influence.

160628_tony_miller_ap_1160.jpg
Former Deputy Education Secretary Tony Miller was part of the effort to more tightly regulate for-profit colleges at the very agency now charged with approving the ownership change. | AP Photo

 

 

First among them is Miller— the former No. 2 in Obama’s Education Department until he left in 2013 and who is now a partner and chief operating officer of Vistria Group. He would become chairman of the university’s parent company if the sale goes through.

Miller, who spent more than four years as a top Education Department official, represented the administration during nearly a dozen meetings with for-profit education companies — including the very company his firm is now seeking to buy, department records show. The meetings centered on controversial “gainful employment” proposals to cut off financial aid from programs where students leave with high debt and poor job prospects.

Other players in the Capitol Hill effort include Jonathan Samuels, who was responsible for pushing Obama’s agenda through Congress during his nearly six years working in legislative affairs at the White House. Samuels, who now works for Vistria Group, has joined Miller in at least some of his meetings on the Hill, according to a Senate aide. Vistria has also enlisted former White House Deputy Communications Director Amy Brundage, who is working at the Washington public affairs firm SKDKnickerbocker.

“The irony is not lost on us,” said one Republican congressional aide, who asked for anonymity to speak freely. “It’s quite rich, when you have former Obama administration officials who used to denigrate for-profit education now profiting off it.”

Nesbitt, meanwhile, is a co-founder and co-CEO of Vistria Group and widely considered the president’s closest friend. He is Obama’s frequent golf and basketball partner, while his wife, Anita Blanchard, is an obstetrician who delivered Malia and Sasha Obama. Nesbitt acted as treasurer for both of the president’s campaigns and heads the Obama Foundation, which is planning his presidential library.

Nesbitt is also a former business associate of Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker; he set up Vistria Group in 2013, more than a year after the sale of The Parking Spot, an airport parking company he started with Pritzker’s backing. One of Vistria’s investors has been a charitable foundation called The Pritzker Traubert Foundation, started by Pritzker, federal tax records show. Pritzker resigned from her position at the foundation when she became a cabinet member in 2013. A Commerce Department official said she has not been involved with discussions about the University of Phoenix sale.

Nesbitt, Miller, Samuels and Brundage all declined to comment to POLITICO about the nature of Vistria’s meetings with lawmakers or whether they had reached out to Education Department officials to discuss the potential sale. At the request of the company’s public relations firm, reporters submitted written questions about the meetings, allegations of possible conflicts of interest and how the company plans to turn around the University of Phoenix. Vistria responded with a four-sentence statement.

“We believe that the University of Phoenix, with our support, is poised to be a leader serving the adult learner, by graduating students with the knowledge and skills that employers value, at a cost to the student that ensures a compelling return on her or his educational investment,” the statement said.

“We believe that high-quality outcomes, whether from nonprofit or for-profit institutions, is what is needed in the sector and what matters most. We expect the Department to evaluate this proposed transaction on the merits. The parties have engaged in the formal acquisition review process through regular order.”

The Education Department also declined to answer POLITICO’s questions about whether Nesbitt, Miller or Samuels had discussed the proposed sale with department officials. It refused to provide a copy of the paperwork the investors submitted to kick off the regulatory approval process.

Vistria is one of three investment groups involved in the deal — the others are Wall Street giant Apollo Global Management (no connection to Apollo Education) and Najafi Companies. A spokeswoman for a firm representing Apollo Education declined to say how much each investor had agreed to contribute. But in addition to capital, Vistria brings Obama administration connections that could help pave the way for a smooth approval process and working relationship with government regulators afterward.

It’s quite common for for-profit education companies to hire people who were former regulators, accreditors, politicians or established higher education officials, said Kevin Kinser, an education professor at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied for-profit colleges.

Kinser said it gives the schools a “sense of legitimacy” and understanding of how systems work “for them to do what they need to do.”

Durbin, a reliable Obama ally in the Senate, said he’s not close enough to Nesbitt to know why he got involved with the acquisition.

“He’s an investor, and I’ll just say he thinks this is a good investment,” Durbin said. “I hope that Marty will bring to this endeavor a sense of reform and will create a new for-profit school that truly does serve its students.”

The holding company set up by the investors to buy the University of Phoenix has also paid $80,000 to lobbyists. The lobbying team includes Marc Lampkin — a longtime counsel to former House Speaker John Boehner — at the high-powered D.C. firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

Trace Urdan, a for-profit college analyst who heard Miller describe Vistria’s plans at a recent conference, said Miller appeared “quite earnest.” Miller emphasized that the prospective owners plan to use data to monitor student performance and to make improvements, Urdan said.

“He thinks the size of the university is a real strength to be exploited and the implication is there is a lot of data, so you can analyze the data and figure out what works and doesn’t work,” Urdan said.

The potential sale offers a potential lifeline for the university. But there’s pressure to get the government’s approval quickly since the parent company has warned in regulatory filings that if the sale isn’t completed by October, its worsening financials might sink the deal. Either way, the company says that a further decline in its stock price could lead to regulatory problems that “severely stress” its liquidity.

If the company were to fail, either before or after the proposed sale, current students would be entitled to have their loans forgiven. Taxpayers have already spent more than $90 million on student loan forgiveness resulting from last year’s collapse of the Corinthian Colleges chain.

The Phoenix juggernaut

Founded in 1976, with a class of just eight students, the University of Phoenix became a pioneer in the burgeoning field of career education for adults ― providing flexibility for busy working adults looking for vocational education, especially after the advent of online programs in the late 1980s.

But as the school grew larger, hitting more than half a million students in 2010, critics say it lost its way in terms of the quality of its programs, high costs and aggressive recruiting tactics.

In recent years, scrutiny from state and federal authorities, a flurry of negative media stories and an improving economy combined to send enrollment plunging by more than two-thirds. In April, the university announced it would lay off 470 employees, or nearly 8 percent of its workforce.

The university currently faces investigation by the attorneys general of California, Massachusetts and Florida, according to regulatory filings. Its parent company disclosed last year that the FTC had requested information on a “broad spectrum” of its business practices, including “marketing, recruiting, enrollment, financial aid, tuition and fees, academic programs, academic advising, student retention, billing and debt collection, complaints, accreditation, training, military recruitment, and other compliance matters.”

Early in the Obama administration, in 2009, the Justice Department announced the University of Phoenix had agreed to pay $78.5 million to settle allegations the school had been fraudulently collecting taxpayer money. Two former recruiters had alleged the school created fake employee personnel files to hide the fact it was illegally giving recruiters gifts and free trips based on the number of students they brought in. The university did not acknowledge any wrongdoing in the settlement.

Last fall, the Pentagon took the unusual step of temporarily prohibiting the University of Phoenix from recruiting on military bases. The alleged violations included the misuse of military seals and trademarks, and conducting activities on military bases without proper permission. The ban was reversed three months later.

Many of the university’s students struggle with debt: Data released by the Obama administration’s College Scorecard last year shows that a majority of students who took out federal loans to attend the University of Phoenix did not end up making even a dollar’s worth of progress in paying down their debt after five years ― a sign their debts may not be manageable.

Yet the school continues to be popular, especially with veterans. Last year, about 45,000 GI Bill recipients enrolled at the University of Phoenix, at a cost of $290 million to taxpayers.

The university’s parent company is also seeing big international growth: Its global division serves more than 150,000 learners worldwide, with online and campus-based programs in countries such as Australia, India, Mexico and Chile, according to a company filing. While the international schools are a small share of total revenue, the footprint of its global division has been expanding.

‘Black box’ approval process

The process by which the Education Department will make a decision on the ownership change — and who will make that decision — has been shrouded in secrecy, say some for-profit college critics.

Bob Shireman, a former Obama Education Department official who was one of the architects of the for-profit college crackdown, called the approval process for college ownership changes a “black box.”

While the White House keeps logs to document who comes and goes to speak to executive branch officials, no one knows who is lobbying the Education Department on the sale, said Ben Miller, a former Obama Education Department staffer who is now senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress.

Asked about its decision-making process, a department official said the approval of the ownership change will be handled by the Office of Federal Student Aid, the department’s business operations arm, “in consultation with a variety of other offices,” which they declined to name.

“As we have said in the past, what’s good for students is at the heart of our review of this sale,” Dorie Nolt, the department’s press secretary, said in a statement. “We will work with Apollo to ensure that the new owner is focused on improving student outcomes.”

Shireman and Ben Miller say they want the department to use its leverage to impose conditions on the approval of the ownership change, such as requiring the university to rely less heavily on federal Pell Grants and other taxpayer programs, and to seek out more students who are willing or able to pay out of pocket.

Even if those conditions happen, Durbin said he’s skeptical the investors can pull off a turnaround, which he said previous owners failed to accomplish.

“I have met with the Apollo [Education Group] people over the years,” Durbin said. “Every meeting was preceded by ‘we’re different,’ and then it would turn out … they weren’t so different.”

Miller insists this ownership team will turn things around. In a letter to The Wall Street Journal in February, he said his company is committed to making the University of Phoenix “the most trusted provider of career-relevant higher education for working adults in the country.”

The new owners will prevail on the merits, he said.

“Success in today’s environment,” he wrote, “isn’t predicated on special treatment from regulators or legislators.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amb. Samantha Power on Refugees, She’s NUTS

There is SO much wrong in what she wrote here. If there was ANY foreign policy with regard to fighting wars and hostilities to swift victory, none of this would come to be. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power is delivering history, guilt and culpability of failure. Furthermore, she is demanding more money and wait for it…..Obama has his moment scheduled at the UN….this is not going to end well and will be yet another hit to our sovereignty.

 

This is an outrage, what say you?

Related reading: John Kerry Sells a Borderless World in a Graduation Address

What is especially interesting is as noted by Ambassador Power, these people want to go home.

 

Remarks on “The Global Refugee Crisis: Overcoming Fears and Spurring Action,” at the U.S. Institute of Peace

Ambassador Samantha Power
U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
U.S. Mission to the United Nations
Washington, DC
June 29, 2016
****

AS DELIVERED

Thank you, Nancy, for that generous introduction, and more importantly, for your leadership on this and other critical issues, both when you were inside the government and now in this incredibly important role you’re in at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Let me begin with a fact with which you are all familiar: We are in the midst of the greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War. Just like the people at the heart of it, this crisis crosses borders, oceans, and continents. And because it is global in scale, anything less than a global response will fall short of addressing it. Yet rather than spur a united front, a united effort, the challenge of mass displacement has divided the international community – and even individual nations – leaving the lion’s share of the response to a small number of countries, stretching our humanitarian system to its breaking point, and putting millions of people in dire situations at even greater risk.

Today I will make the case for why we must do better. I will first describe the gap between the unprecedented scale of the crisis and the growing shortfalls in the international response. I will then take on some of the most common concerns one hears when it comes to admitting refugees, showing that, while there are, of course, genuine risks, these are often distorted; the actual threats can be mitigated. Our current approach of leaving a small number of nations to bear most of the costs, by contrast, carries hidden dangers, risking the lives of countless refugees, while also weakening our partners and strengthening violent extremists and organized crime. A global response is urgently needed, and the United States must help lead it.

At the end of 2015, more than 65 million people were displaced worldwide, over half of them children. That is the highest number on record since the UN’s Refugee Agency started collecting statistics. To help put that number in perspective, that’s the equivalent of one in every five Americans being displaced. Some 34,000 people will be displaced today alone. Think about that. Thirty-four thousand.

Many rightly point to the role that the turmoil in Syria has played in this crisis. Roughly half of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million has been uprooted since the conflict began in 2011 – some six-and-half million within Syria’s borders, and five million to other countries. But the conflict in Syria is far from the only driver of this problem. The wars forcing people from their homes are multiplying – with at least 15 conflicts erupting or reigniting since 2010. And conflicts are lasting longer, meaning people have to wait longer before it is safe to return home. Roughly one in three refugees today is caught in what is called a “protracted refugee situation.” In 1993, the typical protracted refugee situation lasted nine years; today, the median duration is 26 years and counting.

People do not become refugees by choice, obviously; they flee because their lives are at risk – just as we would do if we found ourselves in such a situation. And most want to go home. So we recognize that the most effective way to curb the mass displacement of people is by addressing the conflicts, violence, and repression that they have fled in the first place, and that continues to make it unsafe for them to return home. Consider a survey of Syrian refugees carried out early this year in Gaziantep, along Turkey’s southern border. It found that 95 percent of the Syrians polled said that they would return home if the fighting stopped. In May, a study of Nigerian refugees in Cameroon – most of whom had fled Boko Haram – found that more than three in four wanted to return home. I met with refugees in both of these places, and when I posed the question of who wanted to go home to groups of refugees, all hands shot up in the air. Many of you have had similar experiences.

Even as we recognize the need to work toward the solutions that will reduce the drivers of mass displacement, we also have to meet the vital needs of refugees in real time. And on that front we in the international community are coming up far short. For one, we are seeing record shortfalls in providing essential humanitarian assistance. In 2015, the UN requested approximately $20 billion to provide life-saving aid, only $11 billion of which was funded. This year, the $21 billion that the UN is seeking is less than one-quarter funded.

Often we find ourselves using bureaucratese – the language of “shortfalls,” and “masses” of refugee “caseloads” – sterile language that makes it easy to lose sight of the human consequences of our collective action challenge. So we must constantly remind ourselves that these gaps mean more people are left without a roof or tarp to sleep under; more families are unable to afford gas to keep warm in sub-zero temperatures; more kids are forced to drink water that makes them sick – poor parents have to watch that happen. Last year, the World Food Program had to cut back significantly rations to some 1.6 million Syrian refugees, and half a million refugees from Somalia and South Sudan in Kenya. In Jordan, in July 2015, approximately 250,000 Syrian refugees received news – often on their phone – that the UN aid they were receiving would be halved to the equivalent of 50 cents’ worth of aid a day. In Iraq, the shortfall forced the World Health Organization to shutter 184 health clinics in areas with high levels of displacement, resulting in three million people losing access to basic health care. The WHO’s director for emergency assistance described the impact as follows: “There will be no access for trauma like shrapnel wounds, no access for children’s health or reproductive health…A generation of children will be unvaccinated,” he said. Imagine, for just one minute, being the official forced to decide whose rudimentary health care to cut off. Imagine being the patient or the parent who receives the news that the aid you’ve been receiving – which is already insufficient to feed your kids or to deal with health ailments – will be cut in half.

Not only are countries giving far too little support to meet refugees’ critical needs, few countries – and in particular, few wealthy countries – are stepping up to resettle more refugees. As a result, a hugely disproportionate share of refugees are being housed by a small group of developing countries. At the end of 2015, 10 countries – with an average GDP per capita of around $3,700 – were hosting some 45 percent of the world’s refugees. The United States’ GDP per capita, by comparison, is approximately $54,600. Add in the dramatic cuts in humanitarian assistance, and you start to get a sense of the direness of the situation.

To be fair, it can take time for governments to lay the groundwork for admitting more refugees. We are dealing with this challenge right now in the United States, as we make the adjustments necessary to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees this year, out of a total of 85,000 refugees, a goal we, of course, intend to meet. Yet even as a country with experience admitting and resettling more than three million refugees in the last four decades, it has not been easy.

But the work required to scale up admissions is not what is preventing many countries from taking in more refugees. Instead, even as the crisis continues to grow, many countries are making no effort at all to do their fair share. Worse, some countries are actually cutting back on the number of admitted refugees, or they’ve said that they won’t take any refugees at all. Other governments have taken measures that cut against the core principles of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, such as offering financial rewards for asylum seekers who withdraw their applications and return home, or confiscating the cash and valuables of those seeking refuge to offset the costs of hosting them. Meanwhile, with multiple countries – including our own – certain states, cities, and even towns have said that they don’t want to take refugees admitted by their respective national governments.

Now, why are so many countries resisting taking in more refugees? Let me speak to the two concerns that we hear the most often.

The first is, of course, security. Now, it is reasonable to have concern that violent extremist groups might take advantage of the massive movement of migrants and refugees to try to sneak terrorists into countries that they want to attack. In Germany, for example, suspected terrorists have been arrested in recent months who entered the country traveling amidst groups of refugees. We must constantly evaluate whether the procedures that we and our partners have put in place can effectively identify terrorists posing as refugees, as our nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies are doing.

At the same time, as with any threat, it is important that our policy response be commensurate with the risk. The comprehensive, rigorous review process implemented by the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program both protects our security and lives up to our long-standing commitment to give sanctuary to people whose lives are at risk. The program screens refugee applicants against multiple U.S. government databases – including the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security – which incorporate information provided by partners all around the world. Refugees are interviewed, often several times, before ever being allowed to travel to the United States; and refugees from Syria are subjected to a thorough, additional layer of review. We do not rush; in all, the process usually takes more than a year. If your aim is to attack the United States, it is hard to imagine a more difficult way of trying to get here than by posing as a refugee.

While no system is foolproof, our record to date speaks to the system’s efficacy. Of the approximately 800,000 refugees who have been admitted to the United States since September 11, not one has carried out an act of domestic terrorism. Zero. But that has not made us complacent; we are constantly assessing new threats, and we spare no effort to make the program stronger.

Being able to measure accurately the relative gravity of threats and where they come from is critical to making smart policy and is critical to keeping the American people safe. That is why the efforts to halt our refugee program in the aftermath of the horrific attacks in Paris, and more recently in Orlando, were so misguided.

It is appropriate, and indeed, essential, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks to ask whether and how our policies should be changed to keep our citizens safe. What is not appropriate – what is, in fact, counterproductive – is using inaccurate characterizations of threats to justify shifts in policy, such as failing to see the difference between a homegrown terrorist and a refugee; or drawing misguided and discriminatory conclusions about entire groups of people based on the countries from which their families immigrated or the faith that they observe. Ignorance and prejudice make for bad advisors.

Yet that is what is driving the ill-informed and biased reactions we have seen to these and other attacks from some in our country. After the Paris attack, 31 U.S. governors and their states did not want to host any Syrian refugees, and several officials filed lawsuits aimed at blocking the federal government from resettling Syrians in their states. In the aftermath of Orlando, House Republicans announced that they will put forward legislation to ban all refugees from our country. That is not all. As you know, some are calling for even broader bans, such as banning immigrants based on their religion, or suspending immigration from parts of the world with a history of terrorism.

Now, I take this personally. I’m an immigrant to this country. My mother brought me and my brother to the United States from Dublin in 1979. It was a time when Ireland was still being roiled by violence related to The Troubles. And that violence included attacks that killed civilians – some of which were carried out in the city where I lived. So it’s not lost on me that were such a prejudiced and indiscriminate policy to have been applied when I was growing up – a policy that judges people collectively on the circumstances of their birth, rather than individually on the quality of their character – my family and millions of other Irish immigrants would never have been allowed to come to this country. That I, an Irish immigrant, now get to sit every day in front of a placard that says the United States of America, and to serve in the President’s Cabinet, is just a reflection of what makes this country so exceptional. And it sends the world a powerful message about the inclusive society that we believe in. Why on Earth would we want to give that up?

If the first concern one hears around admitting refugees is the security risk, the second is economic. People fear that refugees will place an additional burden on states at a time of shrinking budgets and a contracting global economy. The concerns tend to coalesce around two arguments in some tension with one another: either refugees will deplete government resources through a costly resettlement process, and through requiring public support for years; or they will find work quickly, taking jobs away from native-born citizens and driving down wages.

It is true that resettling refugees requires a substantial investment up front. Sufficient resources must be dedicated to ensuring that asylum seekers are properly vetted. And people who are admitted need support as they settle into a new, unfamiliar country and become self-sufficient – from finding places to live and work, to learning a new language. If we want to keep our citizens safe and give the refugees we take in a shot at becoming self-reliant, these up-front costs are unavoidable.

You might be surprised, though, to learn how little refugees actually receive from the U.S. government. Resettlement agencies are given a one-time amount to cover initial housing, food, and other essential expenses of $2,025 for each refugee. And while refugees can apply for additional federal assistance, such as funding for job training or special medical assistance – no supplementary support is guaranteed – and most lasts a maximum of eight months. Now imagine trying to survive on that amount in a new and unfamiliar place, with no job, no support system, and often without the ability to speak English. Refugees are also responsible for repaying the cost of their plane tickets to the U.S. within three and a half years.

Even in the short term, much of the assistance that goes toward supporting refugees ends up going back into our local economies, from the supermarkets where they buy groceries, to the apartments they rent. And a number of studies have found that refugees’ short-term impact on their host countries’ labor markets tends to be small, and is often positive, raising the wages of people in communities where they settle. And it is important to see these initial costs of taking in refugees for what they are: an investment in our shared future. You hear often about individual refugees who have made profound contributions to our nation – people like George Soros, Sergei Brin, and one of my predecessors as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the great Madeleine Albright. There is no question that America would be a lesser country today without these individuals. Yet it is not only extraordinary individuals like these, but entire refugee communities who have made a lasting contribution to American prosperity.

Take the example of Vietnamese-Americans. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, America resettled more than 175,000 Vietnamese refugees in just two years. In 1979, a second wave of hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese refugees began arriving. Initially, politicians from both parties warned of the dire economic impact that the Vietnamese refugees would have on the communities where they were settled, and they asked that they be sent elsewhere. The Democratic governor of California at the time proposed adding a provision to legislation on assisting refugees that would guarantee jobs for Americans first, saying, “We can’t be looking 5,000 miles away and at the same time neglecting people who live here.” Seattle’s city council voted seven to one against a resolution welcoming them. Small towns where Vietnamese refugees were to be resettled, such as Niceville, Florida – [laughter] yes, Niceville – circulated petitions demanding they be sent elsewhere. A barber in Niceville told a reporter, “I don’t see why I ought to work and pay taxes for those folks who wouldn’t work over there.” The fears and reservations expressed in Niceville were hardly isolated; a 1979 poll found that 57 percent of Americans opposed taking in Vietnamese refugees.

And yet look at the 1.9 million Vietnamese-Americans living in our country today, many of whom either came to this country as refugees, or whose parents were refugees. They have a higher median household income than the national average, higher participation in the labor force, and lower unemployment. More, on average, attend college. Now this is not a success that has come at the expense of other Americans in a zero-sum economy; rather, the growth spurred by their success has benefitted both native born citizens and refugees, and repaid the costs of resettlement many, many times over.

Oftentimes, domestic debates about whether to do more for refugees are focused entirely on the question of what we risk by taking more people in. Is it safe? Will it help or hurt economically? These are important concerns to address, and I have tried to do so.

But there’s another question – often overlooked – which is particularly relevant today: What do we risk by not doing more to help refugees? That’s the question I would like to turn to now. And the answer is that, in the current crisis, not doing more puts global stability and our nation’s security at heightened risk. While we often overstate the security threats and economic costs of resettling more refugees, we routinely understate the likely consequences of failing to muster the global response that is needed.

For one, failing to mobilize a more robust and equitable global response will increase the pressure on the small group of countries already shouldering a disproportionate share of the crisis’ costs, possibly leading to greater instability. The influx of refugees to these countries has overwhelmed public services and institutions that were often stretched to begin with. Look at Lebanon, which has taken in a million Syrian refugees, and where one in five people is now a Syrian refugee. To give you a sense of scale, that would be the equivalent, in our country – which of course is much wealthier and has a much more developed infrastructure – of taking in 64 million refugees. There are more Syrian refugee children of school age in Lebanon – approximately 360,000 in all – than there are Lebanese children in public school. Roughly half of the Syrian refugee kids in Lebanon are out of school.

In the face of such demands, and absent greater help from the international community, it is not hard to see how the mounting pressure on these frontline countries could stoke sectarian tensions, fuel popular resentment of refugees, and even lead to the collapse of governments. It’s also not hard to imagine how, in such circumstances, some of these countries might decide they cannot take in any more refugees and seal off their borders altogether.

Failing to mount a more effective international response will also strengthen the hand of organized crime and terrorist groups that pose a threat to our security and prosperity. If people fleeing wars, mass atrocities, and repression cannot find a safe, legal, and orderly way to get to places where they and their loved ones will be safe, and where they can fulfill their basic needs, they will seek another way to get to places of refuge. We’ve seen it. They will always find smugglers who promise to take them – for a price. INTERPOL estimates that, in 2015, organized crime networks made between five and six billion dollars smuggling people to the European Union alone. These criminal networks have little concern for the lives of the people they transport – as they have demonstrated by abandoning their boats at sea, sometimes with hundreds of passengers locked in holds that they cannot escape – and whose members routinely rape, beat, and sell into slavery the people that they are paid to transport.

Of course, it is not only refugees who are threatened by these criminal networks. The same routes and transports used to smuggle people across oceans and borders are also used to move illicit arms, drugs, and victims of human trafficking. And the corruption that these groups fuel harms governments and citizens worldwide. The more refugees that are driven into the hands of these criminal networks, the stronger we make them.

Violent extremist groups like ISIL, al-Qa’ida, and Boko Haram also stand to benefit if we fail to respond adequately to the refugee crisis. A central part of the narrative of these groups is that the West is at war with Islam. So when we turn away the very people who are fleeing the atrocities and repression of these groups; and when we cast all displaced Muslims – regardless of whether they were uprooted by violent extremists, repressive governments, or natural disasters – as suspected terrorists; we play into that narrative. To violent extremists, simply belonging to a group is proof of guilt, and can be punishable by death – whether that group is defined by religion or ethnicity, by profession or sexual orientation. When we blame all Muslims, all Syrians, or all members of any other group because of the actions of individuals, when we fall into the trap of asserting collective guilt, we empower the narrow-minded ideology that we are trying to defeat.

On the contrary, when we and the parts of the Muslim world where people are suffering or have sought refuge, when we open our communities and our hearts to the people displaced by the atrocities committed by groups like ISIL, and repressive regimes like Assad’s, we puncture the myth that the extremists paint of us. We show that our conflict is not with Islam, but with those who kill and enslave people simply for what they believe, where they are born, or who they love.

Now, I have spoken to how many of the concerns that people have about admitting more refugees are overblown, driven more by fear than by fact. And I’ve highlighted the risk we run if countries continue to shirk doing their fair share in addressing this crisis. So what can we do to try to fix this problem? For starters, countries must dramatically increase their humanitarian aid to close the growing gap between what governments and agencies are providing and what refugees need to survive. And we need countries to increase the number of refugees they are resettling so that the burden does not fall so heavily on a small number of frontline states.

Now, some have argued that, because it’s more cost effective for wealthy countries like ours to provide humanitarian support for refugees in countries of first asylum, we should channel all the resources we allocate to this crisis into helping frontline states. Why take an additional 10,000 Syrian refugees in the U.S., some argue, when the resources that we would spend vetting and resettling these individuals could support 10 or even a hundred times as many refugees in places like Lebanon or Kenya?

Of course, we cannot resettle all 21 million refugees in the world, or even a majority of them. Nor do we need to. Many refugees are able to find sufficient opportunities to live with independence and dignity in the countries where they are given first refuge. And most prefer to stay close to the places to which they hope to return.

But there are some individuals and families who cannot stay in the countries where they have arrived first – because they are not safe there, because they have special vulnerabilities, or because their basic needs just are not being met. The UN estimates that around 1.2 million people fall into this category worldwide, and need to be resettled to other countries. The problem is the international community only resettled around 107,000 individuals last year – less than one-tenth of those who UNHCR judges need to be moved to a new host country. We need to bridge that gap.

By providing more opportunities for resettlement, we give experts the chance to review applicants through orderly, deliberate processes, rather than the large-scale, irregular flows that Europe faced last year, which brought more than a million people to Germany alone. These unstructured marches make it more difficult for countries to subject those who arrive to thorough and rigorous screening. And by practicing what we preach through resettling refugees, we stand a better chance of persuading others to do the same. How can we ask governments and citizens in other countries to take in refugees if we are not prepared to do the same in our own communities? How can we convince others that fear can be overcome and risk can be mitigated if we ourselves are ruled by fear?

In recognition of the urgent need for all countries to do more, President Obama is convening a refugee summit in September at the UN General Assembly. The purpose of this summit is to rally countries around three major lines of effort. First, we’re asking governments to make a deeper commitment to funding UN and humanitarian organizations and appeals, increasing overall contributions by at least 30 percent. Second, we’re asking governments to commit to welcoming more refugees into their countries, with the goal of doubling the number of refugee admission slots worldwide. Third, we are asking frontline countries – who already are hosting considerable numbers of refugees with awe-inspiring generosity – to do even more, allowing the refugees they host greater opportunities to become more self-reliant. Our aim is to put at least a million more refugee children in school, and grant a million more refugees access to legal work.

We recognize that the United States can and must do more as well. We are the leading donor of humanitarian aid, contributing more than $5.1 billion for the Syrian conflict alone, and we will continue to provide robust support. And not only are we scaling up our resettlement efforts to admit 15,000 additional refugees this year, but we will scale up by 15,000 more next year, to admit 100,000 refugees overall. That’s a 40 percent increase in just two years – while maintaining our extremely rigorous security standards.

The summit is by no means a panacea; even if we hit every target, our response will still not match the scale of the crisis. But it would represent a step – an important step toward broadening the pool of countries that are part of the solution. We also recognize that governments cannot solve this problem alone. We need businesses, big and small, to do much more too; which is why tomorrow, the White House is launching a private sector call to action, which will rally companies to do their part, from providing jobs to donating services to refugees. We need a humanitarian system that is more efficient and better at anticipating and preventing the crises that force people from their homes – which many countries committed to build at the recent World Humanitarian Summit. We need more civic institutions to help empower refugees, such as the growing number of American universities that are providing scholarships to refugees who were forced to abandon their studies – a cause that I urge the college students and faculty in the audience to take up. We need faith-based and civic institutions to adopt this cause as their own, as Pope Francis has done by constantly showing people the human face of this crisis, even welcoming refugees into his own home; and as the Southern Baptist Leadership Convention recently did, by adopting a resolution urging its members to “welcome and adopt refugees into their churches and homes.” Only when all these efforts come together will we have a chance of rising to the challenge that we face.

Let me conclude. In a letter dated May 16, 1939, a British citizen named Nicholas Winton wrote to then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Esteemed Sir,” the letter began, “Perhaps people in America do not realize how little is being and has been done for refugee children in Czechoslovakia.” Winton went on to describe how a small organization that he had started had identified more than 5,000 refugee children in Czechoslovakia, most of them Jews who had fled Nazi Germany who desperately needed to be evacuated. He wrote, “There are thousands of children, some homeless and starving, mostly without nationality, but they all have one thing in common: there is no future if they are forced to remain where they are. Their parents are forbidden to work and the children are forbidden schooling, and part from the physical discomforts, the moral degradation is immeasurable.” Winton closed his letter with a direct request: “Is it possible for anything to be done to help us with this problem in America? It is hard to state our case forcibly in a letter, but we trust to your imagination to realize how desperately urgent the situation is.”

Winton’s letter reached the White House, which promptly referred the matter to the State Department. And the State Department, in turn, sent the letter to the U.S. Ambassador in London, with instructions to inform Winton that “the United States government is unable, in the absence of specific legislation, to permit immigration in excess of that provided by existing immigration laws.”

Now Winton was undaunted, because he was undauntable. In the coming months, he bribed officials, forged documents, arranged secret transport through hostile territory, and persuaded families in the United Kingdom to take in foster children – anything to get those children out. Ultimately, he helped 669 children escape in less than a year. Almost all 669 kids were orphaned by the end of the war, their parents killed in the concentration camps.

“Perhaps people in America do not realize how little is being and has been done for refugee children.” That was how Winton had opened his letter. Yet the unfortunate reality is that even those who were aware of the refugees’ plight were reluctant to take them in. In January 1939, a few months after Kristallnacht, “the night of the broken glass,” unleashed a savage wave of violence targeting Jewish homes, synagogues, and businesses, a Gallup poll asked Americans whether 10,000 Jewish refugee children from Germany should be taken into the United States. Sixty-one percent of Americans said no.

And this isn’t an isolated case. Unfortunately, it was not only refugees fleeing the Nazis and Vietnam who the majority of Americans opposed admitting. In 1958, as Hungarians faced a vicious crackdown from the Soviet Union, Americans were asked whether they supported a plan to admit 65,000 refugees. Fifty-five percent said no. In 1980, as tens of thousands of Cubans – Cuban refugees – took to boats to flee repression, 71 percent of Americans opposed admitting them. The list goes on. In nearly every instance, the majority of Americans have opposed taking in large numbers of refugees when asked in the abstract.

Listening to the rhetoric that is out there today, it can feel at times as though the same is true today. But look around the country – look deeply – and you will find so many people who not only support admitting more refugees, but who themselves are making tremendous efforts to welcome them. People like the owners of Wankel’s Hardware Store in New York, where I live, which for decades has been employing recently resettled refugees, including 15 of their 20 current employees. Wankel’s keeps a map on the wall of the store with pins marking the 36 countries from which their refugee employees have come. Many Americans are doing their part and wish to find a way to do more. When visiting the International Rescue Committee resettlement office – just a 10-minute walk from the UN – recently, I noticed that many of their individual offices seemed to be overflowing with boxes. When I asked whether the folks who worked at IRC were moving in or moving out of the space, I was told that after some U.S. politicians threatened to curb the flow of refugees, the IRC had received a huge, unprecedented surge in donations. And they simply had no other space to store all the clothes, toys, and home furnishings that had come flooding in, just from ordinary people. A similar outpouring occurred inside the U.S. government. When we announced our goal to admit an additional 15,000 refugees this year, many U.S. national security professionals volunteered to take extra trainings and work extra hours in their already long days to help us meet that goal.

These examples abound. The small Vermont town of Rutland has committed to taking in 100 Syrian refugees. The mayor, whose grandfather came to the U.S. after fleeing war in his native Greece, said of the decision, “As much as I want to say it’s for compassionate reasons, I realize that there is not a vibrant, growing, successful community in the country right now that is not embracing new Americans.” Local schools are preparing to support kids who cannot support English, and local businesses in Rutland have said that they will look to hire refugees. One of them is a regional medical center, whose director is the grandson of refugees from Nazi Germany. “I know there is a good-heartedness to this city,” he said. “If you come here and want to make the community better, Rutlanders will welcome you with open arms.” A poll some of you have seen that was released this month by the Brookings Institution suggests that most Americans feel the same way. Asked if they would support the U.S. taking in refugees from the Middle East after they were screened for security risks, 59 percent of Americans said yes. Yes.

Nicholas Winton passed away last June, at the age of 106. At the time, the 669 children he saved had some 6,000 descendants. Six thousand people who otherwise would not have enriched our world, but mostly for the efforts of one single individual. Imagine, for just a moment, what would have happened if the United States, or any other country, had shared his sense of urgency in that instance, or in so many others. Imagine what we could do if we were to bring a similar urgency, a similar stubbornness, a similar resilience to the crisis today.

If we are proudest of the Wintons in our history – as I think we all are – we know what must be done. So that when his question comes to us – “Is it possible for anything to be done to help us with this problem?” – our answer must be yes, there is so much we can do. So much more we can do.

Thank you.

Kerry Sells Graduates on a Borderless World

Kerry advised graduates that a border wall would not deny entry to terrorists.

“Many of you were in elementary school when you learned the toughest lesson of all on 9/11,” he said, according to The Washington Examiner. “There are no walls big enough to stop people from anywhere, tens of thousands of miles away, who are determined to take their own lives while they target others.” More from DailyCaller.

Do you ever wonder what the grand plans and objectives are of the elites that run U.S. policy? Do you wonder who they tell their stories to and who accepts them as tenets of facts to mobilize future voters? The college campuses are the leftist and statists fusion centers where the incubation of progressivism begins by professors and gets validated by the likes of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and the rest.

The president of Northeastern University is Joseph Auon, Lebanese born and a student of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky is the author of: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media   Sigh….

Read the Kerry graduation speech for yourself. It is a presentation on how policy, money, aid and objectives are sold globally since the students already have bought in.

Read John Kerry’s Northeastern University Commencement Address

“You are Donald Trump’s worst nightmare”

Secretary of State John Kerry gestures while giving the keynote address during Northeastern University's commencement ceremonies in Boston, Friday, May 6, 2016. Kerry told the graduating class that their diversity makes them "Donald Trump's worst nightmare." (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

 

Time: Secretary of State John Kerry gave the commencement address at Northeastern University on Friday, describing the graduating class—which he said is the most diverse in the university’s history—as “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare.”

Later in his speech, Kerry appeared to reference Trump’s promise to build a wall along the Mexican border and his “make America great again” campaign slogan.

“I think that everything that we’ve lived and learned tells us that we will never come out on top if we accept advice from soundbite salesmen and carnival barkers who pretend the most powerful country on Earth can remain great by looking inward and hiding behind walls at a time that technology has made that impossible to do and unwise to even attempt,” Kerry said. “The future demands from us something more than a nostalgia for some rose-tinted version of a past that did not really exist in any case.”

SECRETARY KERRY: President Aoun, thank you for your very generous introduction and thank you for the invitation to be here on this very, very special day. Jim Bean, Henry Nasella, members of the board, faculty, parents, friends, and especially the brilliant and charismatic class of 2016. (Applause.)

The Garden is about as good as it gets for a commencement. All you have to do is just look up there at the banners heralding the Boston Bruins’ Stanley Cup championship in 2011. (Applause.) I know some of you come from somewhere else, but you’re here. (Laughter.) The 17th Celtics championship banner thanks to the second coming of the “Big Three.” (Applause.) And with my chauvinism of 28 years representing the state in the Senate, I’ll tell you this is a living reminder that Boston is the number-one sports town anywhere. (Applause.) Now, at the moment, for the Red Sox “anywhere” just happens to be first place, while the Yankees are in last. (Applause.) So don’t let anyone tell you that our country is not moving in the right direction. (Laughter.)

Now, graduating class, I got to tell you, you really do look spectacular. I want you to – I mean, just look around you. Classmates of every race, religion, gender, shape, size – 85 countries represented and dozens of languages spoken. You are the most diverse class in Northeastern’s history – in other words, you are Donald Trump’s worst nightmare. (Applause.) Now, you may not know it, but there is at least one thing that truly unites you: You’re all going to be in really big trouble if you forget that Sunday is Mother’s Day. (Laughter.)

Now, to the parents who are here – moms and dads – if you feel anything like I did when my daughters graduated, your emotions have to be mixed – a little bit sad, a little bit relieved – (laughter) – incredibly proud, and absolutely blown away by how short the interval is between diapers and diplomas. (Laughter.)

Now, speaking of blown away, I want to congratulate you guys for just getting here in time for this ceremony. (Laughter.) I’m told you had to report at 8:00 a.m.

AUDIENCE: (Inaudible.)

SECRETARY KERRY: Well – (laughter) – I mean, I got to tell you, that’s either crazy early or crazy late depending on whether you actually went to bed. (Laughter.) But why would the last night be different from the rest of your college career, right?

Now, I’ve given a few commencement speeches before, and the biggest challenge is always to follow everything that’s come before you, particularly the student speakers. And I want to thank Annika and Ben, and I want to thank (inaudible) and Distilled Harmony for making my job a lot tougher today. (Applause.) Thank you.

I really want you to know that I accept this honor with great humility, and particularly because Northeastern was kind enough to bestow an honorary degree on my daughter Vanessa last year, who was involved in a global health program which you recognized. I come here absolutely promising not to sugarcoat reality because that is the last thing that you need. No one here needs to be told that life can be a struggle, whether it’s over grades or affording tuition or something more complicated – friends, family,  illness, or the death of a loved one. No words of mine can change those realities, and no lecture can lessen the loss.

And as we were reminded earlier, you are still mourning the tragic loss of Victoria McGrath and Priscilla Perez Torres. Even before, on Patriot’s Day 2013, when Victoria was among those hurt by a terrorist’s bomb, this community felt the weight of a wounded world. So this morning, we grieve and we celebrate all at the same time. And in a way, there is no better shorthand description of life itself. And no better two-word summary of this gathering, I think, today than, “Northeastern strong, Huskies strong.”

Now, I have learned – (applause) – I have learned that resilience is really just the beginning of what Northeastern is all about. Service is at the heart of this institution. So it’s no surprise that Northeastern’s effort to keep faith with those who keep America safe is actually unparalleled. We can be proud that Northeastern graduates veterans at a rate 30 percent above the national average. (Applause.) And to soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, from one veteran to so many others, I am proud to say that the class of 2016 is the rule, not the exception. Thank you, Northeastern, and thanks to all of you who have worn or wear our nation’s uniform. (Applause.)

Now, I am honored this morning to address a university family that thankfully is unafraid, utterly unafraid to look beyond our borders and into the future. And it’s also almost cliche to say that you have global vision, but Northeastern really does, and it’s different. President Aoun tests the limits – your bold commitment to experiential learning, your leadership on the environment, the opportunities for international study, a new campus in Silicon Valley, and cutting-edge research in things like high-rate nano-manufacturing. And class of 2016, believe me, if you are mastering a technology that your parents can’t even pronounce, you are doing something right. (Laughter and applause.)

And just think, after today you’re going to have a leg up on Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. You’ll actually have a college degree. (Laughter.) In fact, Northeastern’s example should speak to every one of us about the massive transformation that is taking place around the world. Northeastern’s gone global. Our leading corporations are going global. Health and medicine and film are going global. And you don’t have to be great at math to understand that our economy can’t grow if we don’t sell things to the 95 percent of the world’s customers who live in other countries. You don’t have to be a doctor to understand that we can’t be healthy if we can’t fight things like Ebola and Zika that may originate overseas but makes us just as sick as the people they first hurt far, far from our shores. And many of you were in elementary school when you learned the toughest lesson of all on 9/11. There are no walls big enough to stop people from anywhere, tens of thousand miles away, who are determined to take their own lives while they target others. Not in a clash of civilizations, but in an assault, a raw assault on civilization itself.

So I think that everything that we’ve lived and learned tells us that we will never come out on top if we accept advice from soundbite salesmen and carnival barkers who pretend the most powerful country on Earth can remain great by looking inward and hiding behind walls at a time that technology has made that impossible to do and unwise to even attempt. The future demands from us – (applause) – the future demands from us something more than a nostalgia for some rose-tinted version of a past that did not really exist in any case. And I think that everyone here, especially the class of 2016, understands that viscerally, internally, intellectually. You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world. You heard President Aoun talk in his description about the view from space. You’re about to embark on careers that will take many of you to companies not yet founded, using devices not yet developed, based on ideas not yet conceived. That is how fast things are moving. And that doesn’t mean you have to succumb to science fiction; you’re not going to all be replaced by robots, because the economy of tomorrow will have enormous space for those with the energy, the training, and the courage to compete.

And Northeastern has made sure that you have that and more, because this university is blessed with a global vision and so are you its graduates now. Believe me, that is critical, because you’re entering a world where thinking globally is absolutely essential to seizing opportunities and confronting the challenges that we face.

When I was younger, we had more than our share of national traumas, including a long and bloody war in Southeast Asia. But it was also a time when the dividing line between ideologies was simpler, when the primary forces shaping our world were governments of recognized states.

Today, we face a world that is much more complicated, less hierarchical, where non-state actors play a central role; where disturbing images and outright lies can circle the globe in an instant; where dangers like climate change, terrorism, and disease do not respect borders or any of the norms of behavior; and where tribal and sectarian hatreds are as prominent as they have been in centuries. Now, for some people, that is all they need simply to climb under the sheets, close their eyes, and wish the world away. And shockingly, we even see this attitude from some who think they ought to be entrusted with the job of managing international affairs.

It seems obvious that understanding to – the need to engage with the greater world, with the wider world should be a threshold requirement for those in high office. And yet the specter of isolationism once again hovers over our nation. I thought we had learned the lessons from the 20th century when an isolationist foreign policy and a protectionist tariff policy contributed to two global wars and the Great Depression.

Well, the desire to turn inward and to shut out the world may be especially seductive in an era as complicated as this. But it is not a responsible choice for the most prosperous and powerful nation on the planet – which happens to also be the leader of the free world. (Applause.)

Now, as Secretary of State, let me assure you: when you consider the range of challenges that the world is struggling with, most countries don’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence; they worry about what would happen in our absence.

So we cannot be seduced. For us, the lessons of history are clear.

We don’t see an excuse for inaction. We see a mandate to lead. Because the greatest challenges that our world confronts are best addressed – and  in some cases can only be addressed – by good and capable people working in common cause with citizens of other nations.

You often hear politicians talking about American exceptionalism, and indeed, this nation is exceptional. But remember, please, we’re not exceptional because we say we are and keep repeating it; we’re exceptional because we do exceptional things.

In other words, greatness isn’t about bragging. It’s about doing. It’s about never being satisfied. It’s about testing the limits of what we can achieve together – of what America and its partners can accomplish in the world. And that is exactly what we are trying to do with the United States already now, today, more deeply engaged on more important issues, in more parts of the globe, than ever before in our history. And we are profoundly conscious of the gravity of the challenges. In the words of the Haitian proverb, there are mountains beyond the mountains.

One of those mountains is the effort to safeguard future generations from the harmful effects of climate change. I am proud to say that the United States is leading the way together with many other nations, and last month, with my granddaughter on my lap, I formally committed the United States to set an example for the 196 nations that have pledged to curb greenhouse gas emissions and make progress towards a low carbon energy future. (Applause.)

I want you to think about that, because with just a few exceptions – including, I am sad to say, an embarrassing coterie of naysayers and science-deniers here in the United States – the whole world has now, in Paris and in New York, for the first time accepted the need for a revolution in how we produce and use energy.

Ladies and gentlemen, last March was the hottest March in recorded history; last year, the hottest year in recorded history; the last 10 years, the hottest decade in recorded history; the one before that, the third hottest. The facts are simply staggering. And yet, despite all the science, one of my former colleagues thought it would be persuasive to walk onto the floor of the Senate with a snowball in his hand and point to it as evidence that climate change is a hoax. Well, I hate to tell him it proves something, that’s for sure, but not what he intended. (Applause.)

At the same time, just in the past four years, a record $230 billion was spent in the United States of America in response to extreme weather events. Just the other day in Houston they had 17 inches of rain in 24 hours. That is the entire amount of rain – more than – than they had last year in the entire summer. But just imagine if we had put even a small fraction of that 230 billion into efforts to prevent or at least prepare for the worst impacts of climate change.

And there’s one more thing to remember. Don’t believe the doubters who claim that we have to make a choice between protecting the environment or growing the economy. That’s a lie. There are millions of jobs to be created, businesses to be built, fortunes to be made in tapping the potential of renewable energy, and I hope that many of you will share in that future. (Applause.)

 

In Paris last December, we took an unprecedented step with our first ever international agreement to combat climate change. It is literally, though – I mean, it isn’t the solution in itself because it’s not going to guarantee we hold the Earth’s temperature to a warning of 2 degrees centigrade. But what it does is it sends a massive signal to the marketplace for private entrepreneurs, for scientists, for creative minds to go to work to find the alternative, for the next Elon Musk, for the next Steve Jobs, whoever it is that’s going to produce the battery storage or the ability for us to solve this problem. Paris is the beginning of what we have to do to meet this challenge.

And in the years ahead, we will need an all-out global commitment to clean air, clean harbors, clean coasts, renewable energy, and the preservation of our endangered ocean and marine resources. And I say to you today with certainty, this is one of the great challenges of our time.

 

And hand-in-hand with this challenge is another mountain to scale – the effort to eliminate poverty from the world. Now, your instant reaction may be to say wow, that’s just too big, that’s not possible. But the truth is it’s not only possible, we’re making enormous progress in trying to achieve it right now.

Today, extreme poverty worldwide has fallen below 10 percent for the first time in history. The revolution that is taking place on a global basis has brought hundreds of millions of people in India, hundreds of millions of people in China into the middle class. And while that’s welcome news, we’re not satisfied because 700 million people still have to survive on less than what it costs for us to grab a couple of Dunkin Donuts a day, because the gap – the gap that was referred to earlier between rich and poor – remains far too wide.

So at the UN last fall, the world came together and agreed to move forward on an agenda that not only will reduce poverty further but will ensure that every boy and girl can attend school, that every mother gets the health care that needs to survive, and that every available resource is used to win the fight against epidemic diseases. After all, my friends, we defied predictions by stopping Ebola. Remember? Experts said that a million people would be dead by Christmas of 2014 without action. Well, we took action. President Obama had the foresight to send 3,000 troops to West Africa to build capacity, to provide care and aid, and to stem the spread of the epidemic. And now, thanks to unprecedented global response – global response, not one country, not turning inwards and avoiding responsibility but accepting responsibility – today the most affected countries are virtually Ebola-free. (Applause.)

There is absolutely no reason – (applause) – there is absolutely no reason to believe that we can’t do the same for malaria and the same for the Zika virus. Right now, if we uphold and continue our commitments to critical global health programs in Africa, we can see the birth of the first AIDS-free generation – an extraordinary accomplishment. (Applause.)

And yet another mountain that we have to climb, which stands in the way of the calm that we want in our lives and the stability that we need to achieve many of the things we want to achieve, is the scourge of violent extremism that threatens communities around the world. And there can be no peace without eliminating this scourge.

I mentioned Victoria McGrath earlier, who was injured in the Boston Marathon attack. So Boston and Northeastern need no lessons in how important it is to win the battle against terrorists. I want you to know, without exaggeration, we will win it and we are even winning it now. In Syria and Iraq, we have degraded the leadership of the terrorist group known as ISIL or Daesh, and we and our partners have liberated a third of the land that it once occupied, and we are continuing to move. They have not taken one piece of territory and held it since May of last year, but we’re not going to be successful in the long run – (applause) – we’re not going to be successful in the long run if the world continues to turn away from other kinds of problems and allows the production of terrorists at such an alarming rate. And that is why it is critical that we expand our commitment to taking on violent extremism at the roots.

We know that there are millions of young people across the globe with no jobs, no opportunity, but they have smartphones in their hands. They can see what the rest of the world has. And in the seeing of that, they also see and know what they don’t have. I want you to know that the fruit vendor who ignited the Arab Spring in Tunisia – he wasn’t religiously motivated. There was no religion at all in what he did. He was tired of being slapped around by a corrupt policeman who wanted a bribe, and he was so frustrated by his inability to sell his own fruit where he wanted that he self-immolated. And that ignited a revolution that saw a dictator of 30 years driven out of the country. That’s what ignited Tahrir Square. There was no religion in Tahrir Square in terms of what motivated it. It was young people like you who wanted an opportunity like you have here, but they wanted it in their home and for their country. We need these young  people to know that their countries and their communities will not be abandoned to the clutches of terrorists and extremists.

Experts tell us that a 50 percent reduction in youth unemployment could lift the global living standards by 6 percent or more. So our mission – your mission – is to create jobs not just in a few places but in many places. And that’s going to require the deep involvement jointly of the private sector, civil society, academic institutions, international organizations, and governments everywhere, and still there will be no guarantees. And let me make it clear: Doing this is not about charity. It’s not about giving something for nothing. It’s about building our own security and preventing the conflicts of the future that may inevitably see us having to become involved.

There used to be a famous song during World War I, “Over There,” sang about the distant shores where our soldiers traveled to fight. But in our time, in your time, there is no “over there;” in a digital, well-traveled world – in a global marketplace – those distant shores are practically always right at our doorstep.

So all of us need to do much more to build relationships with partners overseas, to deliver assistance to families and communities abroad, to promote stability worldwide. And we need to do this not because it is morally right, which it is; not just because it’s in keeping with our national ethos, which is also true; but because our own security and prosperity demand it.

My friends, we are blessed to live in a country with a $17 trillion economy, and yet we spend just one penny on every dollar of our federal budget on all of our foreign aid.

The fact is there is much more that we can do and must do to encourage and reward innovation, to diversify economies, to improve governance, to stop corruption, to ensure the education of young people and that it actually teaches young people what they need to know and keeps them from being radicalized.

Now, there is much more that we can invest and many more projects for my generation and yours to take on as you take on your careers in the days ahead.

Now, I ask you just for a moment to think about the careers of the three distinguished Americans who preceded me in receiving honorary degrees from this university today. Over a period of decades, Susan Hockfield dedicated her vision and her talent to the fight against brain cancer. Through a combination of genius and high purpose, Tom McCarthy has reached the pinnacle of his art, the storytelling. Charlie Bolden has been an aviator, an astronaut, a military commander, the administrator of NASA, and above all, an inspiring leader of women and men.

None of them would be here today if they were easily satisfied – and the accomplishments, which earned their degrees, came about because they dared to always explore the outermost limits of what they could do.

Thinking especially of Charlie, and my own Dad – who flew in the Army Air Corps in the year prior to Pearl Harbor – I want to tell you in closing about a group of people who called – who were called on years ago to test themselves under the most extreme conditions.

The setting was Asia; the time a few months after the start of World War II. Enemy planes dominated the traditional air routes. So to get supplies from India to friendly forces in China, American aviators had to fly hundreds of miles over some of the world’s highest mountains, including the towering Himalayas. They called it “flying the hump,” and nothing similar had ever been attempted.

The airplanes they flew came straight from the factory and were untested. The pilots were given no charts, so they drew their own. They were asked to fly higher than any aviator had flown; higher than they had been trained to fly; and they did so over the globe’s most forbidding terrain. Amid clouds or in darkness, a hidden peak or a crag could appear at any moment and bring them down. And yet, each night, plane after plane flew off into the unknown because, had they not, allied forces would have stood no chance.

Eventually, the Pentagon sent an officer to observe and talk to the pilots, deciding in each case whether the strain had become too much and the aviator should be sent home. Now, the officer reported back that some of the flyers were mentally drained after the first trip; others began to crack in a couple of weeks or months. Only a few were able to go on and on, much longer than their buddies. In four years, more than a thousand pilots were lost,  but together, these courageous airmen – none of them famous or with big reputations – they kept the supply lines open and they helped to win the war.

Now, some of these pilots were better able than others to persevere, but here’s the point: none failed, because all went as far as their own capabilities allowed; each pushed – like a dedicated marathoner has to push – to plumb those final reserves of strength and find the spark of greatness within them.

That is the most that anyone could have asked of them. It’s what history demands from the United States of America. And it’s what the future asks of you.

You graduate today with an increasing reservoir of knowledge and skills – but how you use those gifts, how far you push yourselves, whether you give your own capabilities a full chance – that’s not just  about education; that’s a question of character, and a question that only you can answer.

When Robert Kennedy was running for president in 1968, he raised with students at the University of Kansas some basic questions about dignity and purpose.

He pointed out that what we now call our GDP was measured, among other things, in items like the size of our military, the capacity of our jails, the production of our weapons, and the pollution emanating from our factories. It was not, he lamented, measured in the things that mattered most in our daily lives.

Kennedy said, “The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom or our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

My friends, we are under no illusions about the gigantic challenges before us. But we should remember that, compared to any earlier generation, we have tremendous advantages. A child today is more likely than ever before to be born healthy, more likely to be adequately fed, more likely to get the necessary vaccinations, more likely to attend school, more likely to live a long life.

Individuals and companies around the world thrive on new technologies that have made possible incredible breakthroughs in communications, education, health care, economic growth. And the number of democracies has doubled while the number of nuclear weapons has fallen by two-thirds in just the last 30 years.

And all of this isn’t because of any one country or because of what governments do alone. It’s what happens when people have faith in their own values, in their own skills; when they respect the rights and dignity of each other; and when they believe in the possibility of progress no matter how many setbacks may stand in their way.

That is not a complicated formula. But it gives me a powerful sense of confidence in what together we can achieve now and in what you can achieve in the years and the decades ahead. Because meeting those challenges, pursuing arenas that excite your passions, completing the mission to teach and serve and heal and give back – that is what makes life worthwhile.

And I encourage you to search for the greatness within while you push for the outermost horizons. And remember always as you do this what Nelson Mandela said: “All the hardest jobs seem impossible until they are done.”

Congratulations again to all of you, and thank you for letting me share this day with you. (Applause.)

 

 

Uni. N. Carolina is a Broken Institution

UNC claims Christmas vacations, golf outings are microaggressions

  

CampusReform: To help staff members avoid microaggressions, the University of North Carolina advises gender-neutral dress codes and avoiding phrases like “husband/boyfriend.”

The guidelines, which were posted to UNC’s Employee Forum website Thursday, also warn against such potentially offensive behaviors as complimenting a woman’s shoes, asking people to “stand and be recognized,” and even scheduling vacations around religious observances.

“I don’t know any LGBTQ people.”

The school categorized microaggressions based on “social identity group,” with separate sections for race, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, ability, national origin, and class.

The document asserts, for instance, that “referring to ‘husband/boyfriend’ of women, ‘wife/girlfriend’ of men who are coworkers instead of partner/spouse … sets the expectation that people do not identify as LGBTQ until they say otherwise or disclose their sexual orientation.”

Similarly, saying “I don’t know any LGBTQ people” implies that “you have to openly declare your gender identity and sexual orientation for me to care about LGBTQ issues.”

Moreover, the guide adds that “addressing trans people with incorrect gender pronouns, calling them by former names, inquiring about their ‘real’ identity, asking them to explain their gender identity, and denying or failing to acknowledge their pronouns, name, or identity” suggests to the recipient that “as a trans person, you are inferior to and less authentic than cisgender (non-trans) people.”

Even a simple compliment like “I love your shoes,” at least when addressed to a woman in leadership during a Q&A after a speech, really means “I notice how you look and dress more than I value your intellectual contributions. How you look is really important.”

The post also addresses microaggressions against individuals with physical and mental disabilities, warning against phrases that trivialize such conditions.

“Please stand and be recognized,” the school explains, “assumes that everyone is able in this way and ignores the diversity of ability in the space,” while using expressions such as “I’m totally OCD about my files” and “I get ADHD sometimes” “minimizes the experiences of people who live with mental health issues.”

According to UNC, “having an office dress code that applies to men and women differently assumes that your staff fits into one of two gender categories; can also be a violation of anti-discrimination policies.”

For the same reason, the guide adds, “only having ‘man’/’woman’ or ‘male’/‘female’ as options for gender on forms” constitutes a microaggression because it means that one “must fit in the gender binary and select among these predefined categories.”

Suggesting that the staff play golf at a retreat is also a microaggression, UNC contends, since it “assumes employees have the financial resources/exposure to a fairly (expensive and inaccessible) [sic] sport.”

Race and national origin are apparently fraught topics, as well, leading UNC to recommend that individuals neither ask too many questions about those topics nor remain ignorant about them.

“When I look at you, I don’t see color” is a microaggression, for instance, because it constitutes “minimizing/denying a person of color’s racial/ethnic experiences,” as is asking to touch a black person’s hair, because it implies that they are foreign and exotic.

“How did you get here?” constitutes a national origin microaggression because it acknowledges that some “immigrants get to this country illegally,” while asking “Where are you from?” implies that “you are not American and do not belong to this community.”

Meanwhile, telling a foreign-born person that “you speak English really well!” suggests that “if you are born anywhere ‘foreign,’ you cannot speak English well,” and thus is also a microaggression.

Regarding religion, the guide avers that telling someone that “you don’t look Jewish/Native/Muslim” implies that “there is an expected look/attire and you must fit into that norm.”

UNC also states that academic calendars planned around significant religious holidays “further centers the Christian faith and minimizes non-Christian spiritual rituals and observances.”

In a section suggesting strategies for self-correction, the guide encourages staff members who “tend to say ‘you guys’ in mixed company” to “become more inclusive with your language and social media posts,” as well as to “reflect on ways you can increase your cultural intelligence on issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion.”

The list was made by Sharbari Dey, assistant director for education and special initiatives at UNC’s Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, and Kristia Prince, coordinator for leadership development in the school’s Housing and Residential Education department.

For further reading, the post recommends reading 35 Dumb Things Well-Intended People Say by Dr. Maura Cullen to learn more about microaggressions.

***** More from Daily Caller, Related reading:

Several public colleges and universities have published similar guides to microagressions in recent years. (RELATED: Public University’s Bias-Free Language Guide Calls The Word ‘American’ ‘PROBLEMATIC’)

UNC Chapel Hill is home to a “cultural competency workshop” which instructs that white people are privileged because they can buy Band-Aids “in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match” their vaguely beige-hued skin. At least some students have apparently been required to participate in the workshop. (RELATED: University Of North Carolina Diversity Workshop Brands Beige Band-Aids As ‘White Privilege’