$6.2 Million to Train Poor Minorities For “Green Jobs”

Judicial Watch

The federal agency that’s spending a fortune to bring “environmental justice” to poor and minority communities around the U.S. has just dropped an additional $6.2 million to train low-income residents for “green jobs” in one city alone…

The latest allocation of $6.2 million will go to 21 “community groups” that will “recruit, train and place unemployed, predominately low-income residents in polluted areas” in Atlanta. Uncle Sam’s investment will “create good, green jobs that protect the health of local families and residents and prepare communities for continued economic growth,” according to Obama’s EPA chief, Lisa Jackson.

Program participants will master valuable skills such as “environmental site sampling” and “green building techniques” as well as “construction and demolition debris recycling” and “energy auditing and weatherization.” Graduates will use their skills to improve the environment and people’s health while supporting economic development in their communities, according to the EPA. Ideal candidates are “hard to place residents that live in the disadvantaged communities that will benefit the most through these projects.”

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Surviving Demographic Winter: How Faith, Family, and Fertility Can Prevent a Muslim Europe

The following is the text of a speech given by Don Feder at the Moscow Demographic Summit on June 29, 2011. The ravages of Communism leave Russia and the former Warsaw Pact nations facing an impending demographic destruction. The destruction of traditional Western culture means America and Western Europe are headed for the same fate, which will be less a death than a transformation through disinheritance. In this speech, Feder analyzes the source of the problem, laying it squarely at the door of the progressives and revolutionary liberals. But more importantly he shows the way forward from our hedonistic drift into extinction. We ignore his warning, and his solution, at our peril– BJ, Ed.

by Don Feder, GrassTopsUSA.com

Imagine that you’re walking in the forest. There’s a layer of fresh snow on the ground. Suddenly you realize that you’re lost. You’re cold. You’re tired. You’re hungry. If that weren’t enough, there are wolves howling in the distance. This is beginning to sound like a Russian novel.

What do you do? The easiest course is to retrace your footsteps – to return the way you came. So it is with demographic winter. To get out of the cold, bleak, barren landscape where we find ourselves, we need to retrace our steps – in other words, to reject the ideas and reverse the trends that got us into this mess.

Worldwide, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the number of children the average woman will have during her lifetime – fell from 5.0 in the mid-1960s to 2.7 today, a decline of almost 50 percent. We’re told that 59 countries, with 44 percent of the world’s population, now have below-replacement birthrates – in some cases, well-below replacement. The rest are heading in the same direction.

Such dramatic changes don’t happen in isolation but are the result of powerful forces long at work. We live in a manifestly anti-marriage, anti-child, anti-procreation culture. But these are symptoms. As any pathologist will tell you, the disease precedes the symptoms.

While abortion, contraception, divorce, unmarried couples living together, children born out-of-wedlock, the culturally instilled desire for small families, and the relentless drive to normalize homosexuality all have an impact – in some cases a pronounced impact – on declining birthrates, they are results not causes.

However, they are connected.

In the United States, the deconstruction of Judeo-Christian civilization has preceded in stages – from the introduction of oral contraceptives in 1960, to taking prayer out of our public schools in 1963, to the legalization of abortion in 1973, to no-fault divorce in the early 1970s, to the rise of cohabitation, illegitimacy, and single-parent families, to the institution of so-called same-sex marriage in the past decade. In many ways, it’s a logical progression from one devastating assault on society’s moral foundation to the next. One overthrown norm is used as a staging area to attack the next.

The Sexual Revolution of the ’60s triumphed in the decades that followed, when sex was severed from marriage and morality.

Now, for the first time in history, just under half of the world’s population uses some form of contraception. Break the word into its component parts: contraception – against conception – that which prevents life from happening. And this we are supposed to celebrate as liberating, part of the great march of human progress.

Worldwide, there are approximately 115,000 abortions a day, or 42 million a year. That’s roughly twice the number of military deaths in World War II – the bloodiest conflict in human history – except, instead of a country’s soldiers killed in battle, these are casualties a nation inflicts on itself, on its own people.

From a population perspective, we’re not just losing 42 million people annually to abortion, but also their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and distant descendants, down through the ages. The loss is incalculable. We are, quite literally, aborting our future.

Families are having fewer and fewer children. The culture presents children as inconvenient at best – an impediment to the good life (as the Italians say, “la dolce vita”). If you must have children, have one, two at the very most, society seems to say. Large families are viewed as freakish, the result of ignorance or religious fundamentalism.

All of these trends flow naturally from societal acceptance of certain fundamental or axiomatic concepts – first by elites and then by the masses – ideas relentlessly promoted by the news media, cinema, celebrities, politicians and even music.

The disease can be traced back to the French Revolution, the 18th century source of everything wretched and evil that has happened since.

Read the rest of Don Feder’s pronostic and insightful speech here.

Video: The Illegal Immigrant Population Explosion

Obama Admin Dresses Down the Vatican Over Abortion

Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com

The contrast between the priorities of the developed and developing world was as clear as night and day.

“It is detrimental to not have adequate family planning resources,” a visibly upset US delegate told the room. “Why is there a resistance to acknowledging access to family planning as a necessity?”

The soft-spoken delegate from the small island nation of St. Lucia replied, “How do we get our fertility rate to rise? We were told we needed to reduce our fertility rate –now we have an aging population.”

Both voices spoke out during a UN panel hosted last week by the Holy See, Honduras, and Malta called “Secure Human Development: Marriage, Family, Community.” Laurie Shestack-Phipps, a US representative to the UN, castigated the Holy See and other organizers for not being “comprehensive” in their approach to the panel, specifically mentioning family planning and abortion. She complained further about high fertility rates in the poor countries of Africa.

Shestack-Phipps said, “How can you say that you value family, community, and marriage, but not bring into the picture that both men and women have a right to a healthy life, to be able to avoid unsafe abortion, and have access to the highest attainable standard of reproductive health, and to decide how many children they should have?”

The exchange between Shestack and of St. Lucia points up an irony at the UN. One the one side are rich countries demanding poor countries reduce their fertility rates and the poor countries saying they need higher fertility rates for not just development but survival. Almost half the countries in the world are facing what has come to be known as demographic winter, where fertility rates have fallen so dramatically that populations are rapidly aging.

The US delegate’s castigation on family planning, which ignored the demographic realities and actual desires of developing countries, is a microcosm of the current UN debates on population and development. The documents that guide this year’s Commission on Population and Development admit that most nations have achieved low fertility, yet the UN continues to ask donor nations for more and more money for family planning services and for what the UN euphemistically calls commodities: condoms, pills, and injectibles that prevent pregnancy.

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