THE ILLUMINATI CODE

Hillary’s rumored running mate, Housing Secretary Julian Castro, is cooking up a scheme to reallocate funding for Section 8 housing to punish suburbs for being too white and too wealthy.

The scheme involves super-sizing vouchers to help urban poor afford higher rents in pricey areas, such as Westchester County, while assigning them government real estate agents called “mobility counselors” to secure housing in the exurbs.

Castro plans to launch the Section 8 reboot this fall, even though a similar program tested a few years ago in Dallas has been blamed for shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods.

It’s all part of a grand scheme to forcibly desegregate inner cities and integrate the outer suburbs.

Anticipating NIMBY resistance, Castro last month threatened to sue suburban landlords for discrimination if they refuse even Section 8 tenants with criminal records. And last year, he implemented a powerful new regulation — “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” — that pressures all suburban counties taking federal grant money to change local zoning laws to build more low-income housing (landlords of such properties are required to accept Section 8 vouchers).

Castro is expected to finalize the new regulation, known as “Small-Area Fair Market Rents” (SAFMR), this October, in the last days of the Obama presidency.

It will set voucher rent limits by ZIP code rather than metro area, the current formula, which makes payments relatively small. For example, the fair market rent for a one-bedroom in New York City is about $1,250, which wouldn’t cover rentals in leafy areas of Westchester County, such as Mamaroneck, where Castro and his social engineers seek to aggressively resettle Section 8 tenants.

[The Section 8 reboot] is all part of a grand scheme to forcibly desegregate inner cities and integrate the outer suburbs.

In expensive ZIP codes, Castro’s plan — which requires no congressional approval — would more than double the standard subsidy, while also covering utilities. At the same time, he intends to reduce subsidies for those who choose to stay in housing in poor urban areas, such as Brooklyn. So Section 8 tenants won’t just be pulled to the suburbs, they’ll be pushed there.

“We want to use our housing-choice vouchers to ensure that we don’t have a concentration of poverty and the aggregation of racial minorities in one part of town, the poor part of town,” the HUD chief said recently, adding that he’s trying to undo the “result of discriminatory policies and practices in the past, and sometimes even now.”

A draft of the new HUD rule anticipates more than 350,000 Section 8 voucher holders will initially be resettled under the SAFMR program. Under Obama, the total number of voucher households has grown to more than 2.2 million.

The document argues that larger vouchers will allow poor urban families to “move into areas that potentially have better access to jobs, transportation, services and educational opportunities.” In other words, offering them more money to move to more expensive neighborhoods will improve their situation.

But HUD’s own studies show the theory doesn’t match reality.

President Bill Clinton in 1994Photo: Getty Images

President Bill Clinton started a similar program in 1994 called “Moving to Opportunity Initiative,” which moved thousands of mostly African-American families from government projects to higher-quality homes in safer and less racially segregated neighborhoods in several counties across the country.

The 15-year experiment bombed.

A 2011 study sponsored by HUD found that adults using more generous Section 8 vouchers did not get better jobs or get off welfare. In fact, more went on food stamps. And their children did not do better in their new schools.

Worse, crime simply followed them to their safer neighborhoods, ruining the quality of life for existing residents.

“Males … were arrested more often than those in the control group, primarily for property crimes,” the study found.

Dubuque, Iowa, for example, received an influx of voucher holders from projects in Chicago — and it’s had a problem with crime ever since. A recent study linked Dubuque’s crime wave directly to Section 8 housing.

Of course, even when reality mugs leftists, they never scrap their social theories. They just double down.

The problem, they rationalized, was that the relocation wasn’t aggressive enough. They concluded they could get the desired results if they placed urban poor in even more affluent areas.

HUD recently tested this new theory in Dallas with disastrous results.

Starting in 2012, the agency sweetened Section 8 voucher payments, and pointed inner-city recipients to the far-flung counties surrounding Dallas. As government-subsidized rentals spread in all areas of the Metroplex (163 ZIP codes vs. 129 ZIP codes), so did crime.

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development used Dallas as a test — and the city is now experiencing much more violence.Photo: Getty Images

Now Dallas has one of the highest murder rates in the nation, and recently had to call in state troopers to help police control it. For the first time, violent crime has shifted to the tony bedroom communities north of the city. Three suburbs that have seen the most Section 8 transfers — Frisco, Plano and McKinney — have suffered unprecedented spikes in rapes, assaults and break-ins, including home invasions.

Although HUD’s “demonstration project” may have improved the lives of some who moved, it’s ended up harming the lives of many of their new neighbors. And now Castro wants to roll it out nationwide. Soon he will give Section 8 recipients money to afford rent wherever they choose — and if they don’t want to move, he’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse.

Ironically, Hillary’s own hometown of Chappaqua is fighting Section 8 housing because of links to drugs and crime and other problems.

This is a big policy shift that will have broad implications, affecting everything from crime to property values. And it could even impact the presidential election, especially if Castro joins Hillary on the Democratic ticket.

Paul Sperry is author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the racial politics behind the home mortgage crisis.

August 26, 2015 is the 95th anniversary of women’s suffrage –the largest expansion of democracy on any single day in our nation’s history. American Jews, deeply committed to our rights as citizens, played an active role in the suffrage fight; an important part of our history that deserves be to be better known.

Have you heard of Maud Nathan? Daughter of a prominent NY Sephardic family, Maud Nathan, was a leader in Progressive Era reforms. As president of the NY Consumer League, she led efforts to improve working conditions for workingwomen in stores and factories. As an officer in the Equal Suffrage League of New York, she spoke for suffrage in New York and around the country. Fluent in French and German, she was a featured speaker in all three languages, and an officer at international suffrage conferences.

“When I hear a woman talk so well in the public interest,” President Woodrow Wilson said after meeting with Maud Nathan, “it almost makes me believe in woman suffrage.” (He eventually got on board.) Former President Theodore Roosevelt was already on board in 1912, when he asked Nathan to chair the Suffrage Committee of the National Progressive Party. Thereafter, he referred to her as his “boss” on this issue –a title he conferred on very few!

Rose Schneiderman, another suffrage leader, had a very different life experience, one more like that of most American Jews. Her family came to the United States from Poland in 1890 and settled on the Lower East Side. Rose went to work at thirteen. Beginning with organizing women in the factories where she worked, she became one of the founders of the Women’s Trade Union League. She came to public attention at the memorial for victims of the Triangle Fire. “I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies,” The New York Times quotes Rose Schneiderman “ if I came here to talk good fellowship.”

Women who work need the vote, Rose said on another occasion “ not for pin money, but to live.” She helped found the Wage Earners League for Women Suffrage, explaining that workingwomen needed the vote to win better wages and safer working conditions. The League had a Yiddish press section; their efforts, and others, played an important role in New York’s 19i7 successful suffrage referendum: 78 of the 100 pro-suffrage districts were considered “heavily Jewish.”

Rabbi Steven S. Wise, of the Free Synagogue in New York, brought his pro-suffrage convictions with him when he moved from Oregon in 1907, where suffrage had already been on the ballot in state referenda. . A respected religious voice was particular important to suffragists, who were regularly denounced for undermining traditional values (which might sound familiar.) Steven Wise was not the only Reform Rabbi to speak up for suffrage – the Central Conference of American Rabbis voted for it in 1917 – but he was among the most active, and the best known. .

Rabbi Wise was one of the founders of the Men’s League for Suffrage, and a much-requested speaker at suffrage meetings in New York and around the country. “We believe in women suffrage because we believe in the fundamental rightness of democracy, “ he said. Wise’s pro-suffrage essay “Woman and Democracy”, published in 1915, was so popular that he recorded it three years later, a recording still available on the web. “The vote of women will not be better than the vote of men” he concluded:” but better than the vote of men will be the vote of men and women together.”

The honor role of Jews who led the fight for women’s right to vote is longer than I can fit here: Carolyn Katzenstein, Pennsylvania; Jennie Loitman Barron, Massachusetts; Hannah Marks Solomon and her

daughter Selina , California; Sarah Platt Decker, Colorado; Gertrude Weil, North Carolina; Felice Cohn, the first female assistant attorney general in Nevada, who wrote the state’s suffrage bill , and led the lobbying to get it passed.

Their names may have slipped from view, but these women and men set a powerful example. At a time when Jews’ right to be full Americans was still a question of some debate, they spoke out for the principles on which America was founded. Facing angry opposition and mean spirited ridicule, they reached across class and economic lines to make democracy stronger.

Like the young Jewish volunteers of the civil rights movement, who organized in support of the Voting Rights Act, another essential step in building democracy, our suffrage forebears left us a precious heritage, as Americans and as Jews. We can honor it today by celebrating their history; remembering equality on August 26; and safeguarding everyone’s right to vote!