How many times lately have you heard someone say—we don’t want to become Greece? View this Wall Street Journal photo essay and weep for a once great nation. And, tell me, what is a common theme running through this series of devastating photos? The end of Greece, and indeed all of Europe, is near. Hat tip: Paul.
Category: Europe
Face it! We are already Europe!
Editor’s note: This is cross-posted from Potomac Tea Party Report.
Your tax dollars!
How many times lately have you heard someone say, “We are becoming like Europe (meaning broke)!” Or, “we will soon be Greece.”* Writer Mona Charen says we are already there, but can’t admit it.
From Townhall (hat tip: Paul):
Following the fiscal cliff melodrama, Senator Richard Shelby appeared on television to declare that we are becoming European. “We’re always wanting to spend and promise and spend and borrow but not cut. We’ve got to get real about this. We’re headed down the road that Europe’s already on.”
There’s no “heading” about it. We’re there. Prof. John J. DiIulio, writing in “National Affairs”, outlined the true size of American government. When state and local government expenditures are added to federal outlays, government spending as a share of GDP easily competes with European nations. In fact, per-capita government spending in the U.S. is higher than in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and our debt to GDP ratio is higher than most European states.
The Obama administration has set records for deficit spending in peacetime, but there is no question that the growth of government at all levels has been a decades-long process. In 1960, total government spending (local, state and federal) amounted to 27 percent of GDP. In 2010, it was about 42 percent. State spending has been almost as irrepressible as federal, leaving only nine states that can now boast AAA credit ratings. Many states are facing crises over unfunded pension liabilities that have the capacity to engender strikes and social unrest in the not too distant future.
We lie to ourselves about the size of government spending and hide the fact that we spend through NON-PROFIT organizations that couldn’t survive without the constant infusion of taxpayer dollars—LIKE CATHOLIC CHARITIES for example!
The difference between Americans and Europeans is that we aren’t honest about our appetite for big government. We hide it through a variety of proxies, private contractors, and public/private partnerships.
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Most non-profits receive few government subsidies. But the largest ones with the biggest budgets are heavily government-dependent. One-third of all non-profit dollars come from government. Catholic Charities USA, for example, a marquee “private-sector” charity, received two-thirds of its funding in 2009 from Uncle Sam.
What galls me so much about the taxpayer cash flowing to groups like Catholic Charities (a supposed non-profit AND a government contractor) is that they use that money to import more immigrants (refugee resettlement) and also lobby on issues as diverse as amnesty, global warming and gay marriage. Then they have the audacity to scream about their religious rights when it comes to the government telling them what to do. You take Caesar’s money and you deserve to be under Caesar’s thumb!
We are Socialists now!
Americans prefer small government to big government — in the abstract. But 60 million receive Medicaid benefits, 54 million collect Social Security, 48 million participate with Medicare, 45 million receive Food Stamps, 7 million are in prison, jail, or on parole/probation, more than a million have de facto government jobs working for defense contractors, nearly a million children participate in Head Start and about 40 percent of K-12 students receive free or reduced price meals. There’s some overlap in those categories, but it still adds up.
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We are, in short, a socialist-style society just like Europe.
Related? Here is a scary story I came across the other day. Germany, the country that imported tens of thousands of Turkish Muslim workers in a ridiculous scheme to bring young workers into Germany to pay into their social welfare programs, are now shipping their elderly Germans out to Eastern European countries and Asia where it’s cheaper to house the elderly pensioners in need of nursing home care.
* On Greece, readers here know that Greece is SERIOUSLY closing its borders to try to stem the tide of economic migrants many believe are helping sink that country.
Greece sealing its borders; dramatic decrease in ‘asylum seekers’ results
Operation Xenious Zeus began in August and shows it can be done!
Greece, the European country whose name we invoke when we worry about financial chaos coming to America has one up on us with its newest strategy to seriously close the border. Most Greeks blame the flow of illegal impoverished migrants into Greece in the last ten years as the source of much of its financial ruin.
But, check this out! Some sections of the Greek border are now sealed!
From EU Observer:
Orestiadas, Greece – A chief of police in a border town in northeastern Greece says irregular migrants are no longer crossing into the country from its land border with Turkey.
Barbed-wire fences, landmines, thermal night vision cameras and regular patrols are among the tools used to stop a phenomenon the Greek state considers a national security threat.
Some 55,000 people were detected attempting to wade across the Evros River into Greece from Turkey in the region in 2011.
The figures have now dropped to near zero, says Pashalis Syritoudis, director of police in the run-down Greek border village of Orestiadas.
“In July 2012 we had 6,500 illegal migrants who passed the border. In August, we had only 1,800. In September, only 71 illegal immigrants, in October only 26 and now there are none,” he told EUobserver on 22 November.
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He says the trend stopped since Greece launched Operation Xenious Zeus in early August.
Migrants are now targeting the more treacherous sea crossings near Lesvos, Sumos, Symi and the Farmkonis islands instead.
“We have given a very clear message to the facilitators [migrant smugglers] and their source countries in North Africa and other countries that Evros is no longer an easy passage to enter Europe,” Syritoudis noted.
There is more, read it all.
We have reported on struggling Greece, here, many times over the last few years.
Here is an idea!
Remember those Libyans who came to Texas recently to see how we seal our borders? They should be going to Orestiadas, Greece to see how successful professionals get it done!
Watching the collapse of Europe: Italian asylum problems a harbinger of what is to come?
So what the hell is Italy supposed to do? Here is an article from the hoiyty-toiyty at the New York Times chastising the Italian government for how it is handling the huge populations of immigrants flowing toward Europe. Italy, and to a lesser extent Malta, are the first bits of land illegal aliens reach as they in ever-increasing numbers run from Africa and the glorious Arab Spring on-going there. Here is just one of our recent posts on the topic.
According to this story in the NYT, Italy allows too many asylum seekers to stay and then doesn’t take care of them. With the European economy teetering, how the heck can they take care of all these destitute people (America pay attention!)? And, if they said they were going to deport more, the international ‘humanitarians’ would scream bloody murder over that! It is a no-win situation for Italy. The NYT calls it a “paradox:”
ROME — The abandoned university building on the outskirts of Rome, colloquially known as Salaam Palace, was once a sparsely populated makeshift shelter where new arrivals from Africa — fleeing war, persecution and economic turmoil — squatted to create their own refuge.
Over the years, scattered mattresses were joined by sloppily plastered plywood walls, slapdash doors and scavenged furniture. Today, an irregular warren of tiny rooms includes a small restaurant and a common room. On a recent cold afternoon, a hammer clinked as a bathroom was added to a one-room apartment where an oven door had been left open for heat.
More than 800 refugees now inhabit Salaam Palace, and its dilapidation and seeming permanence have become a vivid reminder of what its residents and others say is Italy’s failure to assist and integrate those who have qualified for asylum under its laws.
Salaam Palace and an expanding population in shantytowns elsewhere are the result of what refugee agencies say is an Italian paradox surrounding asylum seekers.
“Italy is quite good when in the asylum procedure, recognizing 40 percent, even up to 50 percent of applicants in some years,” said Laura Boldrini, the spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy. “What is critical is what comes after.”
She and others involved in aiding refugees say that neglect and absence of resources add unnecessary hardship to already tattered lives and are creating a potential tinderbox for social unrest.
One of the reasons the European Union came to be was so that all of the countries would share in trying to solve problems that in this case only stem from the geographic location of Italy. But, Italians now see that they are, for the most part, alone in coping with the migrant problems from Africa.
Because of its geography, Italy is more exposed to migration from Africa, and it has called on other European Union countries to help bear the burden. Even so, the country has lagged in its own response, refugee agencies say.
“It has never invested in a system that’s structural,” said Ms. Boldrini, of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “Every year is treated as if it’s any emergency.”
Under European Union rules, asylum seekers must stay in the country in which they entered Europe, and can be sent back if they go elsewhere. Many residents of Salaam Palace say they sought something better, in France, Britain or Germany, but found themselves back in Rome.
So, when are we in the US going to start taking Italy’s illegal aliens as we do Malta’s? Our lengthy ‘Malta’ archive is here.
Time to read The Camp of the Saints? Change the locale to Italy rather than France, and the origin of the onslaught Africa rather than India.
Here is what one reviewer at Amazon says about the nearly 40-year-old DARK novel:
This book is so politically incorrect that I admire Amazon.com for actually carrying it. Written in the early 1970s, this book looks beyond the cold war to a North-South confrontation in which European civilization is unilaterally morally disarmed. The thesis is simple: suppose a million starving people from the Ganges actually took Western rhetoric of compassion, explotiation, etc., to heart, and comandeered, en masse, shipping, with the intention of moving to the shores of France? (Raspail, of course, is French.) Would anyone stop them? The imagery employed is interesting. The title comes from Revelation, Chapter 20, and refers to the forces of evil laying seige to the camp of the saints, here meant to be the nations of the West…..
In London white Brits are now a minority
The Muslim population has doubled in a decade.
Douglas Murray at the Gatestone Institute has posted a very important article for me to leave you with on Christmas Eve (emphasis mine):
The national census for England and Wales has come out, and, as usual, this once-a-decade event has had all of its most significant points overlooked.
By any measure, what it reveals is a country undergoing seismic change. Over the course of a decade up to four million more people have entered the country to live. In the capital, London, people identifying themselves as “white British” have for the first time become a minority. Perhaps most strikingly, the national Muslim population has doubled.
This last fact is perhaps one of the least considered of the census so far. Doubled? Surely not. This has to be the claim of Mark Steyn or some other demographics-obsessed nut. Well no, it isn’t, and it is now official: between 2001 and 2011 the Muslim population of the UK rose from 1.5 million to 2.7 million. Otherwise put, that is an increase from 3 percent to 4.8 percent of the overall population.
If in 2001 the British Prime Minister had said to the British public that over the next decade he intended to double the number of Muslims in the country, he would most likely never have been returned to office. But of course he did not say that, any more than any of his successors or predecessors did.
For the last decade, every major politician has lied about this issue. While talking tough, about putting a cap on immigrant numbers, pushing people to assimilate and much else besides, they have done nearly nothing.
The most wonderful result imaginable!
They have created a society where many people can speak about each other but many cannot actually speak to each other. And all the while politicians and pundits are busy trying to pretend that this is all the most wonderful result imaginable.
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On the BBC’s Newsnight I sat alongside two very nice, wealthy, successful immigrants who explained how positive the census results were for Britain, showing a “diverse” and “multicultural” society. I was the only one of the four panelists to point out that this wave of immigration might have any negative effects. And the only one to point out that the strange thing about a “multicultural” society of this kind is that it can celebrate every imaginable culture other than the one which allows all these cultures to co-exist alongside each other. In other words, it is the center which is the only thing not being celebrated, and the center that is being consciously eroded. Worst of all is that this happened in defiance of the repeatedly expressed views – as tested time and again in nationwide polls – of the general public.
We still have time in America, but not much, to see what is happening in Europe and stop the erosion of our ideals, our culture, our way of life. Do not fear the words—racist, bigoted—name-calling is how they silence you!
There are those who wanted this change to happen, and there are those who did not. The former now occasionally notice that their plan has caused troubles of which they were barely aware when they set out. The latter are reviled as backwards, racist, bigoted and out-of-touch with their new country. In reality they are simply people who once had a country and have seen it changed irrevocably, and simply hold on to a feeling of sadness that nobody thought about where this would take us, or whether we the people should ever be listened to in the little matter of our own future.
I feel a nag coming on! While you are taking a holiday break or for a New Year’s resolution:
Go to Amazon now!
Purchase and read Sam Solomon and E. AL Maqdisi’s, little book entitled, “Modern Day Trojan Horse—the Islamic Doctrine of Immigration.” You will learn how Muhammad’s doctrine of immigration is a stealth jihad that requires cunning (lying) and violence as he modeled it on his successful conquest of Mecca in 630. A worldwide caliphate is the ultimate goal.