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Ohio Colleges Partner with Hamas-Founded CAIR

Posted on May 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

By Patrick Poole

A group of six Ohio colleges in the Cleveland area are working together to help provide “new perspectives” about the Middle East and to confront “misinformation” about the region and about Islam specifically. However, the group has chosen a curious partner to represent the American Muslim community: the Muslim Brotherhood-founded and terror-supporting Hamas front group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

On Tuesday, the Northeast Ohio Consortium for Middle East Studies (NOCMES) will be hosting Naif al-Mutawa at the City Club of Cleveland for a talk on “Art, Narrative and Muslim Identity.” Later that evening he will appear at Baldwin Wallace College. Al-Mutawa is the CEO of the company that has produced the first series of comic books with Muslim superheroes. The colleges sponsoring NOCMES include Oberlin College, Cleveland State University, John Carroll University, Kent State University, Baldwin-Wallace College, Case Western Reserve University, and Hathaway Brown (an all-girls K-12 private school).

The Tuesday talk is part of NOCMES’ “New Perspectives on Muslim and Middle East Societies” program funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which is funded partially by U.S. taxpayers through the State Department and the National Science Foundation. SSRC’s “Islamic Traditions and Muslim Societies in World Contexts” has awarded a grant to NOCMES funded by the Carnegie Corporation.

A video promoting the NOCMES “New Perspectives” project features Neda Zawahri, associate professor of political science at Cleveland State University. She states:

So when people first meet people from the Middle East they’re first afraid because, is this person going to be a terrorist or an Islamic fundamentalist? But to actually learn that they’re human beings just like them.

It is indeed curious that a video intended to promote a program intended to confront “misinformation” about Muslims and the Middle East would promote such a bigoted and misinformed view about Americans and Westerners in general. (Lest I be accused of taking Zawahri out of context, that statement is the only quote by her that the video itself provides.)

The NOCMES video also features Julia Shearson, identified as executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Ohio chapter. In 2008, Shearson was the most vocal defender of the gender policies at Harvard University which banned men from campus gymnasiums so that Muslim women would not need to have contact with them. Shearson defended the policy during appearances on CNN, Fox News, and other media outlets.

That is not the only connection between NOCMES and CAIR-Ohio. In fact, a flyer for Tuesday’s event at the City Club of Cleveland posted on the NOCMES website identifies CAIR-Ohio as one of NOCMES’ partners.

CAIR’s sordid history of terror support has been noted by Department of Justice prosecutors, who claimed the following during one federal case:

From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists.

According to the court testimony of FBI agent Lara Burns in the successful Holy Land Foundation prosecution (the largest terrorism financing trial in American history), the organization was a front for the terrorist group Hamas and was founded in 1994 by Hamas members specifically to support the terrorist group. CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator during that trial. The federal judge who tried the case, Jorge Solis, wrote an opinion unsealed in November 2010 stating:

The four pieces of evidence the government relies on, as discussed below, do create at least a prima facie case as to CAIR’s involvement in a conspiracy to support Hamas.

Judge Solis explored that evidence at length in his decision, ruling against CAIR in their bid to be removed from the trial’s list of unindicted co-conspirators. For this reason, the FBI severed all ties with CAIR in January 2009. In March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller reaffirmed this policy to the House Judiciary Committee, explaining:

We have no formal relationship with CAIR because of concerns with regard to their national leadership.

The CAIR-Ohio chapter that NOCMES has partnered with is among the most radical CAIR chapters in the country, with a long list of troubling episodes:

In 1999, CAIR-Ohio rushed to the aid of Muhammad Al-Qudhaieen and Hamdan Al-Shalawi, the two men who the 9/11 Commission and the FBI identified as the 9/11 “dry run” hijackers. CAIR-Ohio president Ahmad Al-Akhras even made statements to Egyptian media attacking the airline for removing the men from the plane at the request of the pilot after they had repeatedly tried to enter the cockpit, claiming the men were being profiled.

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Posted in education, Ohio, politics, religion

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Creating Jobs Through Small Businesses

Posted on May 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

By Congressman Steve Austria

If we want to get serious about our nation’s unemployment crisis, we must provide certainty in the marketplace and look at how to help our job creators, and small business owners. One economic booster to get people back to work is through small business growth as these small businesses and farms help create about seven of every ten new jobs in America. To jump start our economy and get Americans back to work, Washington must also do its job by stopping all the wasteful borrowing and out-of-control spending; reducing taxes; removing the Washington red tape and the burdensome regulations; put an energy policy in place that has less reliance on overseas foreign oil; and finally addressing the government health care reform issue by focusing on lowering the cost of healthcare for hard-working families and small businesses.

A 2010 study by the Small Business Administration found that small businesses were disproportionately affected by federal regulations with an annual regulatory cost per employee that is 36 percent higher than the costs facing large firms. Additionally, whether a small business pays taxes at the corporate or individual level, it can face up to a 35 percent federal tax rate. Recently, I supported legislation that Congress passed, which will enable small businesses with fewer than 500 employees to use extra capital to invest, grow, and create more jobs through a 20 percent tax deduction.

During a time when job growth has stunted we cannot allow for the federal government to raise taxes on our job creators and impose unnecessary regulations – all which stifles job growth. It is our small businesses that are the backbone of our economy.

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Charges Dismissed Against Street Preacher Cited with Disorderly Conduct for Preaching in Public Near Princeton University’s Eating Clubs

Posted on May 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

The Rutherford Institute has secured a First Amendment victory for a Christian street preacher who was charged with disorderly conduct and accused of engaging in “tumultuous” behavior for preaching in public near Princeton University’s historic eating clubs. Appearing before the Princeton Borough Municipal Court in defense of street preacher Michael Stockwell, Institute attorneys pointed out that Stockwell’s purely religious message, his preaching on a public right-of-way in Princeton, N.J., near the historic University eating clubs, and his use of a small amplifier to make himself heard over the street noise did not constitute tumultuous behavior and were protected by the First Amendment. Stockwell was found not guilty.

“The First Amendment does not permit free speech to be conditioned upon how others feel about the message,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute. “As former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black recognized, ‘The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.’”

On Saturday, October 8, 2011, a small group of Christian street preachers including Michael Stockwell attempted to speak about their religious beliefs with passersby near the historic eating clubs near Princeton University. Prior to engaging in this free speech activity, Stockwell reviewed the local noise ordinance and contacted the local police to make sure that he could use a small amplifier to make himself heard over the street noise. Stockwell was assured that there would be no problem with his use of a small amplifier, provided he was not blocking the sidewalk. However, when the street preachers began preaching with the amplifier in a public right-of-way on Prospect Avenue, police ordered them to turn the device off because the police department had received a complaint about their preaching. Although Stockwell explained that he had already cleared the use of the amplifier with the department, he complied with the police’s order. The street preachers then resumed preaching, without the aid of an amplifier to make themselves heard over the noise of the eating clubs, only to be approached by another police officer, who allegedly claimed that they were “scaring” people with their message and ordered the preachers to vacate the public right-of-way. When the street preachers refused to stop preaching, the police issued Stockwell a citation for his prior use of amplification—a charge that was later modified to Disorderly Conduct, which applies to “violent or tumultuous” behavior.

In coming to Stockwell’s defense, attorneys with The Rutherford Institute entered a not guilty plea in the Princeton Borough Municipal Court. During the trial, Institute attorneys asked that the disorderly conduct charge be dismissed on the grounds that Stockwell’s religious message was protected by the First Amendment. Moreover, Institute attorneys took issue with Stockwell being cited for disorderly conduct on the basis of the content of his speech, “tumultuous” or not. Stockwell was found not guilty and the charges against him dismissed. Affiliate attorney F. Michael Daily, Jr. assisted The Rutherford Institute in its defense of Stockwell.

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Billionaire’s Wife Attacks Catholic Teaching on Birth Control

Posted on April 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

By Timothy Herrmann

NEW YORK – C-FAM) Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a Catholic, is telling governments to dismiss the controversial link between contraception and population control and explicitly rejects Catholic social teaching along the way. Her rhetoric is part of her multi-billion dollar foundation’s new “NoControversy” campaign to reinforce universal access to birth control as a priority in the developing world.

Speaking at a TedxChange conference in Berlin, Germany, Gates argued that contraception has been mistakenly associated with population control, abortion, forced sterilization, and mortal sin and insisted they are “side issues” that “have attached themselves to the core idea that men and women should be able to decide when to have a child.”

Yet even Gates herself admitted that for years population control and contraception have become synonymous in the developing world, with countries like India “adopt[ing] unfortunate incentives [and] coercive methods as part of their family planning programs” in the 1960s and indigenous women in Peru being “anesthetized and sterilized without their knowledge” as recently as the 1990s.

Though these coercive practices may have fallen out of favor, it may be far harder for organizations like the Gates Foundation to separate their own promotion of contraception entirely from population control.

In their Annual Letter for 2012, the Gates Foundation draws a direct connection between “unsustainable” population growth and poverty and posits contraception as an essential tool to ensuring that “populations in countries like Nigeria will grow significantly less than projected.” Even recent history shows that governments that make fertility reduction a priority can easily slip into coercive modes such as what Gates recognized happened in Peru not long ago. The US government has said that even goals and timetables for contraceptive use are inherently coercive.

Gates was particularly critical of the Catholic Church. She singled out Catholic social teaching as an obstacle to access to contraception throughout the world, stating that “as a practicing Catholic,” and “in the tradition of the great Catholic scholars,” it is “important to question received teachings,” in particular “the one saying that birth control is a sin.”

Along with the Gates Foundation, organizations like UNFPA blame religious beliefs and contraception’s association with population control for creating a situation in which over 215 million women in the developing world experience what they call an “unmet need” for contraception. They define “unmet need” as “women and men who say they want no more children or want to delay their next birth by more than two years, but are not practicing contraception.”

However, claiming that women who do not want children immediately and who report not using contraception as in “need” of contraception is misleading, as was shown in a landmark study by economist Lant H. Pritchet, currently professor of the Practice of International Development at Harvard.

The study finds that access to contraception has little effect on fertility and that women will have the number of children they choose whether they have access to contraception or not. The study also explains that factors such as dislike for the side effects of contraception and religious objections are just as important as the cost and availability of contraception.

Timothy Herrmann is Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute’s (C-FAM)representative to the United Nations. His article first appeared in Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-FAM, a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (http://www.c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.

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The Ohio Economy in March, A Report by Buckeye Institute

Posted on April 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

Buckeye Institute’s “Ohio By The Numbers” March report compares Ohio to other states in overall private sector job growth over several distinct time spans. The goal is to illustrate Ohio’s overall economic trajectory over the past 22 years while capturing its specific performance during both boom and bust cycles as well as its current recovery.

The periods analyzed are: from 1990 until the present day, from peak employment in 2000 through the present day and from the beginning of the current decade to the present day.

Ohio lost 8,300 private sector jobs in March and fell to 23rd nationally in terms of private sector job growth since January 2010, growing at a 3.4 percent rate (top ranked North Dakota grew 15.8 percent over the same time span). Meanwhile, Ohio continued to rank 47th for private sector job growth since January of 1990, growing at 5.9 percent (top ranked Nevada grew 82.9 percent over the same time span).

Assuming the “Best Case Recovery” scenario of a private sector growth rate similar to the 1990s boom, Ohio will not recover to peak employment of 4.85 million, which was reached in March 2000, until at least March 2017. It is more likely that peak employment will not return until the early 2020s.

As for individual industry sectors, only Professional and Business Services and Education and Health Services have more people employed in them than in either 1990 or 2000.

Additionally, the report shows that Forced Union states (which includes Ohio and most of its neighbors with the recent exception of Indiana which became a worker freedom state in February) had a private sector growth rate far below Worker Freedom states. Since 1990, Worker Freedom states’ private sector jobs grew at a 36 percent rate vs. only 13 percent for Forced Union states. Even during the decade from 2000-2010, which included the tech bubble burst of 2000 and the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009, Worker Freedom states gained jobs for a minimal growth of around 0.1 percent while Forced Union states lost 5 percent. Since 2010, Worker Freedom states also outperformed Forced Union states, growing at a 4.1 percent rate vs. only 3.4 percent.

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Posted in economy, Ohio

LGBT Lawyers Sue Pastor for “Crime Against Humanity”

Posted on April 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

By Wendy Wright

(NEW YORK – C-FAM) A law firm known for publicity-seeking tactics is suing an American minister in U.S. Federal Court because he criticized homosexuality in Uganda.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) says pastor and attorney Scott Lively committed “persecution,” a “crime against humanity” as defined in the Rome Statutes of the International Criminal Court.

CRR filed the case in the U.S. on behalf of a Ugandan advocacy group called Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) and are using the Alien Tort Claims Act, an old and very controversial U.S. statute that allows foreigners to sue in U.S. court for violations of international law committed outside the U.S.

SMUG charges that Lively “worked extensively with key anti-gay political and religious leaders in Uganda with the overall purpose and objective of depriving LGBTI persons of their fundamental rights” by defeating anti-discrimination legislation on sexual orientation and gender identity, and introducing a bill heightening penalties against homosexuality.

CRR spokesman Pamela Spees told the New York Times, “This is not just based on his speech. It’s based on his conduct.” The lawsuit claims that Lively “traveled to Uganda twice,” “spoke at a ‘Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda,’” “held an all-day pastors’ conference allowing only invited media or guests,” “addressed students at Nkumbe University on the ‘Dangers of the Culture of Porn,’” “led a service at the Ugandan Christian University,” “met with the Kampala City Council” and other activities the group considers objectionable and legally actionable.

SMUG claims their members have suffered “severe deprivations” of “freedom of expression, association, assembly and the press; . . . to be free from attacks upon one’s honor and reputation,” and fears harassment, arbitrary arrest and physical harm, including death.

The complaint begins with the bombshell claim that the bludgeoning murder of SMUG member David Kato was somehow connected to Lively’s work in Uganda. Not mentioned is that a man Kato bailed out of jail confessed to killing him for making unwanted sexual demands. He’s been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Ugandan legislators introduced a bill criminalizing the promotion of homosexuality. It included the death penalty for a person with AIDS engaging in homosexual sex with a minor or disabled person, or if the perpetrator is a “serial offender.” The bill has not passed.

Lively was disappointed the legislation “is so harsh.” He advocates for remedies focused on rehabilitation, not punishment.

Lively called the accusations against him “absurd.” “Implying that my speech and writings about homosexuality overpowered the intelligence and independence of the entire government and population of Uganda, bending them to my supposedly nefarious will is a breathtakingly insulting and racist premise.”

CRR describes itself as “committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.” CRR was co-founded by William Kunstler, a self-described “radical lawyer” famous for representing sometimes violent political and social activists. The law firm uses the courts to advance the activists’ work. Its strategy is “Success without victory,” that is, choosing cases not to win but to generate media or bolster the activists.

[Blogger note: Such a case might set a precedent for foreign people’s whose constitutional rights has been undermined or destroyed by the conduct of NGOs and groups like CRR who use the foreign courts for nullify legislation of their approval.]

Wendy Wright is interim executive director of the Catholic Familiy and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM). Her article first appeared in Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-FAM, a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (http://www.c-fam.org/). This article appears with permission.

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Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA)

Posted on April 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

Civil liberties organizations launched a week of Internet-wide protests today against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA), the controversial cybersecurity legislation that would negate existing privacy laws and allow companies to share user data with the government without a court order.

The coalition is urging the public to take part in a Twitter protest directed at their lawmakers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created an interactive tool for people to find their representatives and their Twitter handles, and to share how CISPA’s privacy invasions would affect their day-to-day lives.

“CISPA would allow ISPs, social networking sites, and anyone else handling Internet communications to monitor users and pass information to the government without any judicial oversight,” said EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman. “The language of this bill is dangerously vague, so that personal online activity – from the mundane to the intimate – could be implicated.”

The campaign will use the hashtags #CongressTMI and #CISPA. In addition to the Twitter protest, organizations are planning letters of opposition and publishing articles outlining the civil liberties implications of the bill.

“Some people believe that we have to sacrifice civil liberties in order to shore up cybersecurity, but that’s misunderstanding both issues,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. “Giving companies carte blanche to bypass federal law does not make us safer – it puts us at more risk.”

CISPA is sponsored by Representatives Mike Rogers (R-MI) and C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D-MD). Stop Cyber Spying Week participants are calling on Congress to reject legislation that sacrifices civil liberties in the name of security, and specifically to reject any legislation that:

* Uses dangerously vague language to define the breadth of data that can be shared with the government.
* Hands the reins of America’s cybersecurity defenses to the NSA, an agency with no transparency and little accountability.
* Allows data shared with the government to be used for purposes unrelated to cybersecurity.

Participating groups include Access Now, American Civil Liberties Union, American Library Association, Avaaz, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, Center for Democracy and Technology, The Constitution Project, Demand Progress, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, OpenMedia.ca, Open the Government, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Reporters Without Borders, Reverse Robo Call, Sunlight Foundation, Techdirt, and TechFreedom.

To take action against CISPA: http://cyberspying.eff.org/

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Reflection of a Pregnant Pro-Lifer

Posted on April 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

The above title originates from an article posted on the Canadian Centre For Bio-Ethical Reform. It is the personal story of an pro-life advocate about see her pre-born child in her own womb. As she reflects about this life-changing moment, Ruth Shaw realized two important things: (1) The use of pictures and photographs by pro-life advocates is the best evidence that a fetus is not a blob but a unique person in development, and (2) it is this reason why women contemplating abortion will not likely have an ultrasound.

The following is a excerpt of her story.

As many people know, the work that I do with CCBR is often considered to be controversial because of our constant use of imagery, both of fetal development and abortion. We have often been accused of making women feel guilty about their abortions and have been encouraged to use slogans instead of pictures as though there is no greater merit to using the latter.

As someone who has been using CCBR’s methods for a few years, I first became convicted of their effectiveness while doing pro-life activism on campus. But, once again, the overall effectiveness of imagery was clarified for me when I saw photos of our baby up close.

I now more fully understand why ultrasound technicians are less likely to show abortion-minded women ultrasound imagery before their abortion. There is no way that a woman could in good conscience choose to kill her child after seeing his/her spine, legs, head, eyes, and mouth and after each body part is described to her in detail. There is no way she could justifiably continue to say that her child is just a blob, or a cancerous growth, or simply an extension of herself. Ultrasound imagery shatters the pro-choice perspective of pre-born children into a million pieces.

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Vandalizing Religious Life Display, A Course Credit At WKU

Posted on April 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

As reported by Students for Life, on the morning of April 20, campus police at Western Kentucky University (WKU) refused to stop vandals from draping condoms on the top of small crosses in the campus stadium – these crosses, all 3,700 of them, symbolize how many unborn children die through abortion each day in the US and were installed by the Hilltoppers for Life group on campus.

The Hilltoppers for Life group members, who had been keeping an eye on their display through the night in reaction to similar acts of vandalism to pro-life displays at other campuses including nearby Northern Kentucky University, asked the art students to stop and then called campus police. The students refused and the campus police just stood by and watched. The police claimed that they, “couldn’t do anything because the condoms aren’t actually vandalization,” even though the crosses are the property of Hilltoppers for Life and they have the administration’s permission for their display.

Student president of Hilloppers for Life group said “the vandals argued they were doing this for an art project for school, as an approved assignment, which makes me wonder…how does the university have the right to approve assignments that vandalize and desecrate the property and displays of other people?”

The Students for Life report made an imporant point: “Claiming vandalism as art is disingenuous and disturbing at best. The desecration of the crosses at WKU is sacrilegious, offensive, and borders on a hate crime. While we have seen vandalism before at other campuses across the nation, it is not uncommon for students to face opposition of this nature but usually the campus police do help out and stop the vandalism rather than hide behind some ‘artistic expression’ excuse.”

The underlying problem is that the art student who did it is “still getting course credit for her project,” according to the Hilltopper’s president. In other words, the art professor has made art vandalism an approved political expression of pro-choice activism. The underlying problem is culture of liberal professors and possibly the administration in which true freedom of expression is eroding to the point of non-existence.

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What if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Were Eliminated?

Posted on April 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

By Mike Brownfield

For the past several years, it’s not been an uncommon sight in Anytown, USA, to drive down the street and see home after home for sale after going through foreclosure. They are the still-lingering hangover from the housing crash that began in 2007. Though the true cause of what burst America’s housing bubble is still debated, two of the culprits — housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are still going strong even though both essentially failed in 2008 and are under government control. Economists and politicians alike are now pondering whether we need Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at all and what would happen if they were eliminated altogether.

For several years prior to 2007, home prices went through the roof, but then they crashed through the basement. Since then, more than 2.3 million homeowners have faced foreclosure — an 81 percent increase over 2007. This all, of course, contributed to the Great Recession we’re still rebuilding from today. “Easy credit” is pointed to as the corrosive acid that ate away at the housing market’s foundation, and federal government-sponsored mortgage finance giants — the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) — were there to supply it and help other lenders to do so.

Consistent with policies dating back to the Carter and Clinton Administrations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made it easier for low and moderate income Americans to obtain mortgages and purchase homes. In a new paper from The Heritage Foundation, A Housing Market Without Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Effect on Home Prices, Nahid Anaraki reports that this “fueled an excessive expansion of credit in the housing sector, shifted the demand for real estate to the right, and caused home prices to overshoot their underlying market equilibriums.” In other words, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s intervention in the housing market helped to fuel the boom-to-bust housing bubble by subsidizing interest rates and enabling reduced down payment requirements on single-family homes, thus unnaturally boosting demand and causing prices to go up.

The trouble with all this, Heritage reports, is that though Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have made it easier for a family to buy a home, in the long run their actions have a detrimental effect on the economy, as America has witnessed.

So what would happen if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were phased out? Would the absence of their ability to offer lower interest loans and smaller down payments impact the cost of homes in America? Anaraki’s analysis shows that it would not. In fact, interest rates and changes in down payment requirements have little influence on housing prices. Instead, fundamentals–such as household assets, personal income, the S&P Index, and the effective tax rate–play substantial roles in shaping home prices. As such, she advises, it’s time for Washington to get out of the business altogether:

The federal government should avoid offering any subsidy in the form of lower interest rates or lower down payments because it adversely affects both the housing market and the economy over the long term. Although such a policy may boost the demand side in the short term, it risks inflating another housing bubble in the medium or long term.

Eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in fact, will help more Americans afford homeownership. Since these institutions increase demand — thereby increasing home prices — it becomes increasingly difficult for lower-income Americans to afford to purchase homes without subsidized interest rates. If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are eliminated, interest rates may slightly go up initially, but Anaraki finds that “higher interest rates will lead to lower median home prices, which in turn will increase the ability of low-income groups to purchase a house.” What’s more, competition among housing lenders would increase, leading to lower interest rates in the medium to long term.

Owning your own home is the American Dream, but suffering a foreclosure and winding up on the streets is the American Nightmare. In pursuit of encouraging the former, the federal government helped produce the latter. Government intervention by way of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have given more Americans the keys to their own homes, but they bought homes they could not afford and in a marketplace that could not be sustained. As Heritage showed in an earlier paper, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can be phased out without disrupting the housing recovery. A better way forward is to phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and let the home market find a healthy and sustainable equilibrium.

Mike Brownfield is Assistant Director of Strategic Communications at The Heritage Foundation. He serves as editor of The Foundry, Heritage’s public policy news blog, as well as the “Morning Bell,” one of Washington’s most widely read and influential e-newsletters. This article was originally published in the “Morning Bell” newsletter on April 20, 2012.

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