November 1, 2015 Steve Sailer: Hungarian PM Viktor Orban Accuses George Soros of Stoking Camp of the Saints; Soros Confirms Orban Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Steve Sailer: Hungarian PM Viktor Orban Accuses George Soros of Stoking Camp of the Saints; Soros Confirms Orban

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

It’s nice to see Hungary standing up for itself against this horde of Muslim refugees. It seems like Eastern Europeans have a clearer sense of their national interests than does Germany.

Steve Sailer writes:

From Bloomberg Business:

Orban Accuses Soros of Stoking Refugee Wave to Weaken Europe
Andras Gergely
October 30, 2015 — 12:59 AM PDT
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused billionaire investor George Soros of being a prominent member of a circle of “activists” trying to undermine European nations by supporting refugees heading to the continent from the Middle East and beyond.
“His name is perhaps the strongest example of those who support anything that weakens nation states, they support everything that changes the traditional European lifestyle,” Orban said in an interview on public radio Kossuth. “These activists who support immigrants inadvertently become part of this international human-smuggling network.” …
Soros said in an e-mailed statement that a six-point plan published by his foundation helps “uphold European values” while Orban’s actions “undermine those values.”
“His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle,” he said in the statement. “Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national border as the obstacle.”

In other words, Soros is agreeing with Orban.

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* I don’t believe there is a conspiracy in the usual sense of the word, but Soros and many of his ilk hold views that are hostile to the idea of a blood-and-soil nation state. Offhand, I would guess that the cabal includes Gates, Buffett, Slim, Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Bush family, et al.

They don’t have to conspire in the usual sense, i.e. holding discussions in secret, plotting, planning, etc. etc. They all hold the same beliefs, and they are doing nothing to hide their intentions.

* If that were true, you’d think all their work would go into breaking Japan and Israel. If they’re going by power of the practicioners of blood and soil nationalism, and their degree of blood and soilyness, I mean. If they just want to rack up wins they should start with Liberia, maybe swing by Rwanda.

But, oddly enough, they seem really interested in Europe instead.

* The people-smuggling gangsters are only bit players in the plan drawn up and orchestrated by the likes of Soros and Merkel.

* George Soros is a devotee of Karl Popper, the theorist of the Open Society. TS Eliot criticized Popper for divorcing philosophy from moral imagination and thus severing culture from its religious roots. TS Eliot advocated the recovery of Christian community. There are no Christian thinkers in the West today who criticize the dangers of a liberal democracy and the open society.

* Then there’s the juggernauts of China and India, with their lack of diversity, obviously racist regimes, entrenched cultures of xenophobia, walls against brown people, etc.

* Does Soros ever say anything anywhere about what’s best for European people? Or does he just talk about obstacles and objectives?

* I remember writing to David Limbaugh, in response to a column of his 15 years ago, asking what was wrong with his brother that he did not talk more about immigration. Back then, Rush was still interested, at least somewhat in mainstream respectability.

Then three things happened:

– He got fired from ESPN in 2003 for making the entirely unremarkable comment that the mainstream media was desirous of seeing black NFL quarterbacks do well,

– His subsequent detainment at a general aviation airport upon his return from the Dominican Republic on trumped up drug charges (i.e. prescription ED meds)

– And finally the NFL owners denying his application to be a minority (5-10%) owner of the St. Louis Rams.

I am sure those 3 events caused him to realize that he was never going to be admitted to “the club,” despite his $500M net worth. If that’s what pushed him our direction, all I can say is “welcome Rush.”

* Rush has had ample time to publicly raise many of the issues that other lesser known conservatives who work mainly in print (e.g. Brimelow on immigration or the late Sam Francis on traditional conservatism) have consistently been making. There’s even a strong chance that he’s not entirely familiar with John Derbyshire, this blog, and others. If Pat Buchanan’s name comes up, its more of a disdain along lines of “Oh, yes, Pat. Didn’t he run for something about 20yrs ago….and lose?” In other words, Rush measures success by one thing, and that’s the bottom line.

Forget even thinking he’ll admit that he’s familiar with Jared Taylor’s writings. That last name would definitely take a courageous stance in this day and age to cop to and this man isn’t about to put himself out there for anything that might make him lose any more sponsors.

Rush’s original two conservative heroes by his own admission: Bill Buckley and George Will and both men to a certain extent supported open borders. Not exactly principled paragons of conservatism whether at the time or now.

And that’s the thing. Over the last few decades, the words “patriotic immigration” just don’t come up when you say the name Limbaugh, whereas mistakes in personal life and wanting to become an NFL owner/ESPN co-host do. Pretty much tells you all about him. He sold out years ago.

* Soros, like many old Jews of his generation, is obsessed with saving “retroactively” East European Jewry. National borders were one of the main causes of millions being trapped under genocidal regimes. Of course he wants to soften and open up nationalist, fascist regimes like Mr Orban’s. It is being done on the open, and Orban and Soros acknowledge it. No conspiracy. The use of “inadvertently” by Orban reveals that he is not a conspiracy idiot, but a honest leader doing what he thinks is the best for his people. We should respect Orban and Soros.

* I wonder which “European values” Orban is undermining? Orban’s popularity ratings are skyrocketing, while Merkel’s are tanking. Austria and Poland just moved emphatically to the right, while the nationalist party in Sweden, which has seen its support double in elections every four years for the last two decades, has already seen its support double in the one year since the 2014 elections. I guess “European values” don’t include ideas like, oh, doing what your citizens want you to do.

That, to me, has been one of the more remarkable facts of the migrant crisis. Because it’s affecting numerous countries rather than just one, we get to see how both citizens and the international press treat the way different politicians are reacting. The press and various NGOs continually talk about the obligation of democratically-elected leaders to ignore both the rule of law and the will of their voters. Democracy and rule of law no exist when either manages to serve conservative, national interests.

* We should most definitely not respect Soros or his position. He needs to be thought of as what he is, someone who has self-selected himself to be an enemy of the traditional West and traditional Western nation states.

He may be smart, but he’s not smart enough to have any idea of what a mess he’s unleashing. He’s like someone who spits in the salad and then loudly tells everyone about it. If he thinks this is smart, he might be one of those people as clueless as Merkle about estimating human behaviour.

* Whether or not you think Soros’ plans are part of some Jewish plot against white policies. His policies are objectively bad for real Jews. He covertly supported the anti Israeli Jewish group J Street. Supporting open borders in Europe with the onslaught of young Muslim men will cause Hitler’s dream to come true. Europe will be judenrein in less than 2 generations.

* Soros cleverly claims to be taking the side of people (refugees) vs. abstraction (nation-states).

The answer is that

1) Protection of ‘the refugee’ does not necessitate their mass migration to countries thousands of kilometers away from their homelands (via safe polities).

2) That far from protecting refugees, encourage exoduses inevitably leads to more deaths and more exploitation and

3) That people (citizens of nation-states) want to be protected themselves. That is, the nation-state provides protection, the ‘Open Society Foundation’ not so much.

Posted in Christianity, Europe, George Soros, Hungary | Comments Off

Hispanic-White Test Score Gap on 2015 NAEP

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* Average Hispanic performance is just mediocre. Not terrible … just *consistently* mediocre.

There are only a few things of note:
– Florida Hispanics–as expected–are of a slightly different cut and do a bit better.
– New York, despite having more black Hispanics gets bog standard performance.
– The generally high-performing (white) states really do *not* have any capability to move Hispanic scores up. Even Massachusetts Hispanics are just average. The average across a bunch of states with decent white scores–Connecticut, Washington, Colorado, Minnesota–pretty much the Hispanic average.

To me, the lone data point with a real “message” is California–it has the worst Hispanic scores, tied only by Alabama. Enough below the average i’d guess there’s statistical significance.

My take home from that is the more Hispanics you take in, the more they live in a Hispanicized world, in Hispanic cities, with Hispanic norms, Hispanic teachers, administrators, public officials … the more mediocre the Hispanic performance. Essentially it degrades toward their performance in Latin America … because they are now living in a Latin America.

It’s essentially the problem with the Raj Chetty’s bogus “solution” (integration with whites). With fewer and fewer whites around, you simple don’t have enough whites to provide minority “uplift”.

If you want the quality and amenities of a white country … you sorta need white people around to deliver them!

* Despite the billions of tax dollars thrown at this intractable problem, the stats reveal that you cannot educate those who cannot be educated. Now the region formerly known as southern California has been transformed into Mexifornia. In fifty more years no one will believe that this was once the driver of the aerospace and defense industries. But you’ll be able to get a killer taco de lengue on every rincon del calle.

Posted in America, Latino | Comments Off

Bridge Of Spies

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Armond Whites writes: The dark, creepy murk of Steven Spielberg’s 2011 Lincoln also seeps into his new film, Bridge of Spies, an account of the 1957 exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union of captured espionage agents, the Russian Colonel Rudolph Abel and the American pilot Gary Francis Powers. This gloom can be attributed to Spielberg’s suggestion, in both films, of American political anxiety. After the ebullient history of Amistad, he has gone to the shadowy partisan chicanery behind Lincoln’s 14th Amendment to the Constitution and now to this consideration of the United States’ lack of innocence in global matters. Scenes of Abel’s and Powers’s secretive missions, and eventual imprisonment, juxtapose how our government and military matched Russia’s unprincipled subterfuge.

In Lincoln the weird darkness passed for cynical realism, but in Bridge of Spies it conveys disillusionment. When attorney James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) defends Abel before the Supreme Court, the imagery is overcast, somber; when Powers is detained by a Russian court, sunlight shines through the casements. Seem anti-American? In visual terms, Bridge of Spies is an ACLU movie. Through Donovan’s difficult maneuvers (against public disapproval and family discouragement), Spielberg pursues the sanctity of civil-liberties issues. Donovan, an insurance lawyer who served at the Nuremberg trials, must fight Cold War paranoia — presented as an eternal threat to America democracy.

Good guy Donovan (his stern face features Hanks’s twinkling eyes) represents a common man nobly acting against judicial and CIA expediencies; he defends the principles within the Constitution, referred to as “the Rule Book.” Robert De Niro’s overlooked The Good Shepherd (2007) was a more complex history of the social ideas at stake in CIA operations, but Bridge of Spies shows simplistic sentimentality when Donovan exclaims, “American justice is on trial! We’re in a battle for civilization!” Those are Tony Kushnerisms, hangovers from his over-rhetorical Lincoln script, which encouraged an unfortunate sanctimony in Spielberg’s newly politicized vision. After Kushner, the lights have dimmed in Spielberg’s worldview, making Bridge of Spies a glum experience.

Posted in Hollywood | Comments Off

20 signs of a broken film culture

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Armand White writes:

Since 2004, the year that film culture split along moral and artistic lines, political and class biases have been exhibited in films that became more and more partisan. This rift was furthered by a compromised media, where critics praised movies that exhibited cynicism along with political bias.

Not just entertainment, the 20 films listed here effectively destroyed art, social unity, and spiritual confidence. They constitute a corrupt, carelessly politicized canon.

1) Good Night and Good Luck (2005) — George Clooney, president of the corrupt canon, directed and acted in a dishonest fantasy biopic of TV-news icon Edward R. Murrow to revive blacklist lore as part of a liberal agenda.

2) The Dark Knight (2008) used the Batman myth to undermine heroism, overturn social mores, and embrace anarchy.

3) Ocean’s Twelve (2004) — Steven Soderbergh salutes land of the greedy and home of the depraved in a reboot franchise sequel, scoffing at the post-War conviction of Sinatra’s Rat Pack original.

4) 12 Years a Slave (2013) distorted the history of slavery while encouraging and continuing Hollywood’s malign neglect of slavery’s contemporary impact.

5) Wall-E (2008) — Nihilism made cute for children of all ages who know nothing about cultural history or how to sustain it.

6) Manderlay (2005) — Lars Von Trier’s Dogville sequel sold American self-hatred back to us, and critics fawned.

7) United 93 (2006) reduced the pain and tragedy of 9/11 to the inanity of a disaster movie.

8) Frost/Nixon (2008) — Political vengeance disguised as a dual biopic that prized showbiz egotism over conflicted public service.

9) Knocked Up (2007) — Judd Apatow’s comedy of bad manners attacked maturity and propriety.

10) The Social Network (2010) — David Fincher’s new Horatio Alger tale glorified technocrat Mark Zuckerberg with chic, digital-era arrogance.

11) Precious (2009) coincided with Obama’s first year in office to revive racial condescension with the audacity of nope.

Posted in Hollywood | Comments Off

The Master Race

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

* It seems like most Australians take Melbourne Cup day off, slackers! East Asians are only 10% of Australia’s population but it seems like they do 50% of the work. My mate down under says bring in another 10% and they can do 100% of the work and keep the whites around for comfort.

* Virtually every important American realist opposed the Vietnam and Iraq 2003 war while almost all important liberal thinkers supported the 2003 Iraq invasion. The Democrats often opposed the 1990 Gulf War, and afterward they feared the political repercussions, so they supported the 2003 Iraq War (out of fear of political repercussions).

* A pathetic girlfriend of a few years back said to me, “You love me because I’m pathetic.” Ouch. She was right. I have this urge to rescue or to be rescued, symptoms of the same emptiness.

* The Jewish way to get wasted is to do mitzvos (transcend the self).

* Uncover to discover to recover.

* Compared to American girls, Israeli girls seem much more fit and better with guns.

Posted in Australia, Personal | Comments Off

Christopher Noxon: A Hollywood husband converts

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Danielle Berrin writes about Jenji Kohan’s husband:

Noxon’s childhood was mostly devoid of religion. He described his father as having some Quaker stock, though he identifies as Canadian and atheist. His mother, on the other hand, he described as “Buddhist and a lesbian and a feminist.” She came out when he was 10, and Noxon said the experience of growing up in an estrogen-fueled environment softened him. “I’m a huge girly man,” he said. “I wish I had more of that agro-male testosterone that needs to be curbed.”

Posted in Conversion, Hollywood | Comments Off

America & Europe Should Learn From Israel On How To Handle Infiltrators

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

From the New York Times:

Israel’s policy toward African asylum seekers is to pressure them to self-deport or, as the former interior minister Eli Yishai put it, to “make their lives miserable” until they give up and let the government deport them. About 60,000 African asylum seekers have entered Israel since 2005, most of them Muslims from the Darfur region of Sudan, and Orthodox Christians from Eritrea; today that number is closer to 45,000.
The government and some media call them “infiltrators,” a word that for most Israelis evokes Palestinians illegally crossing into Israel to launch attacks, painting them as a threat. A law passed in 2013 requires male African asylum seekers already in Israel to be detained automatically and indefinitely in the open detention center, Holot, in the Negev desert. Detainees are allowed to wander the desert between three obligatory check-ins every day, and they must also remain in Holot overnight. If they miss a check-in, they can be transferred to the nearby prison. Their only alternative is to accept a sum of $3,500 to return to their country of origin, or a third country, usually Uganda or Rwanda, often without proper documentation to stay…
As the continuing refugee crisis in Europe demonstrates, Israel is not alone in trying to deter refugees. But according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, it has the distinction of having one of the lowest asylum acceptance rates in the Western world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once warned that the arrival of African people poses a demographic risk to Israel: “If we don’t stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state.”

Posted in Immigration, Israel | Comments Off

Are China And The U.S.A. Long-Term Enemies?

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

I think John J. Mearsheimer is the most important political scientist of the past forty years.

John Derbyshire writes: After taping this weekend’s Radio Derb, with its segments about U.S.-China tensions and geostrategy, I was browsing through my blog roll when I came across this at Steve Hsu’s site.

The whole thing is over an hour and a half long, but well worth the time if you’re interested in the topic.

On the realist side, arguing that big nations will always seek supremacy and the U.S.A. will (and should) always act to prevent the rise of peer competitors, are Peter Brookes and John Mearsheimer. For the other side, arguing that a Metternichian (and Derbyshirean) balance of power is possible and should be sought, are Robert Daly and Kevin Rudd.

The Metternichians won on a TKO by the usual method of debate scoring, but Brookes and Mearsheimer made some powerful arguments that, I must admit, gave me pause.

Mearsheimer was particularly effective with both sabre and foil. This, for example, at 1h30m34s into the show.

They [i.e. Daly and Rudd] have a theory, and it revolves around agency, or diplomacy. They believe that the competition can be managed; and that’s very different from the way I think about the issue.
But I want to ask you this: When you look at American diplomacy over the past twenty years, does that give you confidence… [laughter]… seriously, does that give you confidence that American leaders can manage this relationship over the next thirty or forty years? [more laughter]
You know about Afghanistan; you know about Iraq; you know about Libya; you know about Ukraine; seems to me the United States has the Midas Touch in reverse.

I still prefer the Metternichian solution, but are our politicians smart enough to get us to it? Hmmm.

Posted in America, China | Comments Off

Take This Racists!

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

Hah! Take this, racists: the top three runners among the men in today’s NY City Marathon were a Mexican, a Chinese person, and an Italian. Among the women, the top three were an Arab, a Jew, and a Samoan.

Just kidding! East Africans took all three top spots in both categories.

Chaim Amalek: “The race ends right in my amazingly white neighborhood, the Upper West Side, where I get a close look at who the non-elite runners are. Almost entirely white. When will the NY Times report on the racist policies and customs that are keeping African Americans away from such events? The race ends right in my amazingly white neighborhood, the Upper West Side, where I get a close look at who the non-elite runners are. Almost entirely white. When will the NY Times report on the racist policies and customs that are keeping African Americans away from such events? Lamarck and Lysenko taught us all the genetics any right-thinking person needs to know.”

Miriam: “Wasn’t it an Israeli official who commented on all the Ethiopians that were brought into Israel ‘now we can win some medals in running.'”

By contrast, all of the finalists since 1984 in the Olympic men’s 100 meter dash have been of West African descent.

Posted in Race | Comments Off

ProPublica: How N.Y.’s Biggest For-Profit Nursing Home Group Flourishes Despite a Record of Patient Harm

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Luke Ford

It seems every time I check the news, some Jew in the nursing home business is getting attacked by government regulators and/or the media.

Why won’t the goyim leave us alone?

Chaim Amalek: “When my time comes I hope I will have the money to give to some torah yidden to take good care of me.”

The more successful you are, the more of a target you become.

Why do so many Torah Jews own/run nursing homes? I suppose that an education in Torah Judaism makes you more adept at navigating a legal system, such as the bureaucracy around senior care.

Not every Jew is smart enough to run a bank.

David Shirel with Shmuel Sackett, Ben Landa and Teddy Pollak

From ProPublica Oct. 27, 2015:

The state’s “character-and-competence” reviews are supposed to weed out operators with histories of violations and fines— but regulators don’t always act on the full story.
The nursing home is one of several in a group of for-profit homes affiliated with SentosaCare, LLC, that have a record of repeat fines, violations and complaints for deficient care in recent years.
Despite that record, SentosaCare founder Benjamin Landa, partner Bent Philipson and family members have been able to expand their nursing home ownerships in New York, easily clearing regulatory reviews meant to be a check on repeat offenders. SentosaCare is now the state’s largest nursing home network, with at least 25 facilities and nearly 5,400 beds.
That unhindered expansion highlights the continued weakness of nursing home oversight in New York, an investigation by ProPublica found, and exposes gaps in the state’s system for vetting parties who apply to buy shares in homes.
State law requires a “character-and-competence” review of buyers before a change in ownership can go through. To pass muster, other health care facilities associated with the buyers must have a record of high-quality care.
The decision maker in these deals is the state’s Public Health and Health Planning Council, a body of appointed officials, many from inside the health care industry. The council has substantial leverage to press nursing home applicants to improve quality, but an examination of dozens of transactions in recent years show that power is seldom used.
Moreover, records show that the council hasn’t always had complete information about all the violations and fines at nursing homes owned by or affiliated with applicants it reviewed. That’s because the Department of Health, which prepares character-and-competence recommendations for the council, doesn’t report them all.

Newsday Jan. 5, 2008:

By Michael Amon and Ridgely Ochs
Sept. 23, 2007 p.A4 to A8
Faced with a crisis over complaints about its treatment of Filipino nurses, Long Island nursing home group SentosaCare turned for help last year to a friendly politician it had supported in the past — Sen. Charles Schumer.
The Democratic senator then wrote four letters over the course of two months to Philippine government officials, including President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. They asked the officials to meet with SentosaCare’s executives or to “consider reviewing” the Woodmere company’s case after the country suspended the company’s affiliated recruitment operation. Macapagal-Arroyo’s former chief of staff said the Schumer letters were unprecedented.
Shortly after two Schumer letters sent the same day, the Philippine government lifted the suspension. SentosaCare’s Filipino recruitment pipeline was back in business. Over the next two months, a national campaign fund headed by Schumer received nearly $75,000 from investors, attorneys and vendors for SentosaCare-affiliated nursing homes.
The involvement of New York’s senior senator triggered a storm of controversy 8,500 miles away in the Philippines that also has reached Long Island. Amid the dispute, Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota agreed to meet in private with SentosaCare’s principals and their lawyer. They asked him to investigate the 10 nurses at a Smithtown nursing home who were among 26 who prompted the uproar when they resigned abruptly from SentosaCare facilities in New York City and Long Island.
An investigation followed immediately, and 10 months later the Smithtown nurses were charged for endangering patients when they quit without notice. The indictment is apparently the first of its kind in the state.

Joseph Berger writes for the New York Times Jan. 27, 2008:

THEY are recruited in their homeland with perks like free airfare. Some have been offered thousands of dollars in bonuses to relocate. And in the process, they have become a mainstay of the New York area’s hospitals and nursing homes.
They are nurses from the Philippines, and they are highly prized here because they speak English, are trained in American-caliber medicine and enjoy a reputation for tender care — the legacy of a society in which families tend to their own sick and aging relatives.
“We’re honest, industrious and don’t complain a lot,” explained Elmer Jacinto, 32, a registered nurse.
His voice, however, carried a palpable note of sarcasm. He and nine other Filipino nurses on Long Island did complain, and now they find themselves caught in what he called “a nightmare” — a disturbing new chapter in the upbeat story of one of this nation’s most successful immigrations.
The 10 nurses are under indictment in Suffolk County on charges of endangering the welfare of five chronically ill children and one terminally ill man. They are accused of walking off their jobs at the Avalon Gardens Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Smithtown in April 2006 without providing sufficient notice for the nursing home to replace them on coming shifts.
Although their resignations were prompted by a seemingly commonplace dispute with their employers over what the nurses say were broken promises and shabby working conditions involving a total of 26 Filipino nurses and a physical therapist, the 10 defendants could each be sentenced to a year in jail and lose their nursing licenses….
The case has drawn wide attention and outrage in the Philippines, where legislators have held hearings into how the nurses were treated by the company that recruited them. Filipinos there and in the United States have rallied to support the nurses, joined by the American Nurses Association, which has said in a statement that “the real patient endangerment lies in the deplorable conditions that led the nurses to leave.”
The pushback has even taken on a political tinge. Commentators in both countries, citing an investigation by Newsday, have questioned whether favoritism was shown the nursing home owners because of their political influence and campaign contributions, and because of letters written to the Philippine president and other officials by Senator Charles E. Schumer. The senator and the owners have denied exerting any unusual pressure.
But what no one denies is that the case is a startling anomaly in what has been a remarkably successful migration of people seeking to work in a single occupation. More than half of American nurses trained abroad are from the Philippines, and they alleviate a perennial shortage of nurses in this country.
Of the New York area’s 215,000 Filipinos, 3 out of 10 work as nurses or other health-care practitioners, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Susan Weber-Stoger, a Queens College demographer. Many of the rest are their spouses, children or aging parents. That migration explains the large colonies of Filipinos in places like Jersey City and Bergenfield, N.J., a middle-class suburb, where Robert C. Rivas, mayor from 1999 to 2003, claimed to be the only Filipino mayor in the Northeast.
The indicted nurses pose a strange counterpoint to that success: the image of highly educated legal immigrants complaining about being exploited as green, overly trusting newcomers….
MR. Jacinto, a soft-spoken native of a small Philippines island, saw medicine as his ticket out of poverty. He not only received a nursing degree, but also graduated from medical school in the Philippines in 2004 with stellar board scores.
Deciding to leave one’s homeland is always wrenching, but American salaries were a large incentive. “You can earn here $3,000 a month in America while a doctor in the Philippines earns $400 a month and a nurse $200,” Mr. Jacinto said.
He came to New York in November 2005 with 21 other nurses who had been recruited by a Filipino agency that works mainly for SentosaCare, a network of 16 nursing homes with headquarters in Woodmere, N.Y., and operated by Benjamin Landa of Brooklyn and Bent Philipson of Monsey, N.Y. Mr. Landa owns eight other homes independently, and together with SentosaCare, the network of 24 homes has more than 5,000 patients and 5,000 employees. The 22 nurses who came over here in November 2005 say they were promised they would earn the same pay as American nurses and would quickly receive green cards giving them the status of permanent residents.
But Mr. Jacinto says he soon got some surprises: for two months, he was paid as a clerk, at a salary far below that of a nurse. It took more than half a year to get the green card. And he was not assigned to the SentosaCare-affiliated home in Queens that had sponsored his entry, but to Avalon, 40 miles east.
For weeks, he said, he slept on a couch in a frigid living room of a nurses’ staff house in Smithtown where the only toilet was frequently clogged. When he finally received nurses’ pay, he said, it was $24 an hour instead of the $34 that federal law requires immigrant nurses be paid to prevent undercutting of American workers’ salaries. He did not receive the same health insurance and workers’ compensation benefits as other nurses, he said, and was not paid for sick days or holidays.
Ms. Anilao said Avalon employed so few aides on the night shift that she regularly had to change soiled diapers and sheets and cart them away. The nurses complained that raises they were promised were wiped out by a reduction in work hours from 37.5 per week to 35.
Howard Fensterman, SentosaCare’s lawyer, denied that the nurses were mistreated or shortchanged, and rejected complaints that staffing was inadequate. SentosaCare, he said, had successfully employed 350 nurses from the Philippines over the years and had never experienced a wave of resignations.
The nurses say that when their complaints went unaddressed, they turned to the Philippines consulate in New York, which put them in touch with an immigration lawyer, Felix Vinluan. Mr. Vinluan concluded that their contract had been breached and on April 6, 2006, he filed a discrimination complaint with immigration officials in Washington. He also advised the nurses that one option was to resign.

From Newsday 2009:

BY MICHAEL AMON AND RIDGELY OCHS
Sept. 23, 2007 p. A7
Benjamin Landa and Bent Philipson have built the largest nursing home network in the state with good timing, smart business moves and the right contacts.
In 1987, Landa bought his first nursing home – a facility in Far Rockaway – from his late father’s estate. A few years later, as he acquired more nursing homes, he started raising money for political candidates from both major parties. By 1994, he was a top fundraiser for future Gov. George Pataki said Jeffrey Weisenfeld, a former Pataki aide.
Then in 1996, Pataki named Landa to the Public Health Council, a state board with broad powers to approve health care facility projects, including nursing homes. That year, Landa teamed up with Philipson, who was a supervisor in one of his nursing homes.
During Landa’s eight-year tenure on the council, Landa,Philipson or their wives secured the purchase of 20 nursing homes and became the state’s leading players in the nursing home industry. They now run 25 facilities.
“Their approach is new,” said Neil Heyman, president of the Southern New York Association, a trade group of 64 nursing homes. He added that nursing homes in New York historically had been family run businesses. “They are part of a general trend toward giving nursing home organizations corporate names and structures.”
SentosaCare does not own or run the facilities, which have about 80 investors with Landa, Philipson or their spouses as the common denominator. Rather, the company centralizes administrative functions and provides a brand-name marketing tool.
Their strategy is the only way to, in effect, form a nursing home chain in New York state, said health care experts. Legislation passed after Medicaid fraud and patient abuse scandals in the 1970s required all nursing home investors to be vetted by the state. The laws essentially banned publicly-traded nursing home chains because of the impossibility of vetting thousands of investors behind publicly traded companies.
As the group grew, many nursing home owners said Landa’s council position and friendship with Pataki helped his projects.

Posted in Jews, Nursing Homes | Comments Off