The Borg of Uncle Sam...

I grew up in the shadow of World War II. It had been over for almost 30 years by the time I started school, but nonetheless WW II was probably the most talked about subject in my history classes throughout. But the funny thing is, as close as it was, it seemed like it was ancient history.  It was finished. The evil Nazis were vanquished and the world had moved on. America and her allies had won and there were new enemies to slay.

While too young to understand Vietnam when it was raging, by high school I had a better grasp of world events and we were living on Guantanamo Bay, down in Cuba.  Although today it’s more well known for its prison facilities, at the time it was a U.S. Navy training / support station and the enemy was the Soviets and Fidel Castro. 

In the late 80’s after college, I was stationed with the Army in West Germany and our biggest alerts were usually related to the East Germans and they killed an American officer while I was there.  I don’t remember all the details but the Americans said he was on an approved inspection mission and the East Germans said he was spying.

Throughout these decades, I always knew that America was on the right side of history.  It was not that I’d been brainwashed, but it always seemed to me that an objective analysis of the circumstances, from WW II to Korea to Vietnam to the Cold War, America was the good guy, trying to do what’s right.  It’s a funny thing about the “good guy” framework, however, that everybody, even the guys who we know are the bad guys, think they’re the good guys!

Nor is it that I never questioned anything.  In college (of course) I had professors who said the US was the bad guy in Vietnam and that the Soviets only built missiles to defend themselves against the imperialist Americans. I disagreed but my words fell on deaf ears.    

So now we are here 35 years since the collapse of our last superpower enemy and a quarter century from 9/11, and I’m starting to wonder if America’s still the good guy. 

Some time ago it dawned on me that for most of my life I had given the government the benefit of the doubt.  Indeed, while imperfect and often inefficient and ineffective on a wide variety of policies, my default position for most of my life had been that the government was, at the end of the day, working for the American people.

Today, sadly, my default position is literally the opposite. 

In college I read Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lindon Johnson and according to it LBJ was a deeply egotistical, power hungry son of a bitch who would sell his mother to get power. While I think that’s clearly true, it seems that once in office he was genuinely interested in helping people and solving America’s problems. While he was a feckless buffoon as it relates to Vietnam, in domestic matters he wanted to help solve long standing problems, and that intention is not diminished by the fact that his programs were stunning failures.

That’s the way it is sometimes, people in government make mistakes. We all know that. But what has happened over the last two decades is a much different animal. Beginning with Barack Obama using the IRS to shut down Tea Party groups and right up until the moment someone in the White House used Joe Biden’s autopen to give pardons to half the Democrat Party and their swamp comrades, the American government has transformed from a virtuous, if frequently stumbling, vehicle for safely navigating the country through the chaos of life into an autonomous borg that largely operates without effective constraint and almost solely for the purpose of perpetuating itself. 

Biologists frequently say that the fundamental nature of life is to propagate the species, and that seems to be the path the borg of American government has taken. In the 21^st century we’ve seen an amalgamation of the Democrat party and the bureaucratic state, with a bastardization of both.  Maybe no better example exists than the Department of Education.  The education of children is easily one of the most important things a society can do to help perpetuate its culture and civilization, and the DOE spends $280 billion a year on it. Sadly, of that number, less than $70 billion actually goes to educating children.  The rest goes to bureaucracy, consultants, NGOs and ultimately, back into the pockets of Democrat politicians. This would be a crime even if schools were properly educating children, but they’re not.  Across the country you have failing schools where kids can’t do simple math, easily the most basic skill one should take from school. But you know what they are learning?  How to be LGBT.

This, like so much of the rest of government is far beyond incompetence. It’s criminal. It’s ceased to be a vehicle for ensuring the freedom of American citizens and promoting the interests of the United States.  It’s literally become the opposite. From funding prosecutors who release violent criminals into American communities and funding leftist thefts of elections while quashing of free speech internationally, to funding the invasion of our country and undermining the Bill of Rights, the American government has become the enemy within. 

If nothing else, Donald Trump and DOGE should be applauded for exposing what so many of us felt for so long but could never quite put our fingers on. 

Somewhat like learning that there is no Santa Claus, in the back of my mind I’m a bit wistful for that feeling of inner peace I had when I used to think of the country and the government as a single inherently good entity. While I think the former still is good, the latter, not so much, and I was late to the party in internalizing the idea of a difference between the two. For me Uncle Sam was America and the government combined.  Sadly, the Democrats weren’t under that illusion, and their recognizing the dichotomy long ago gave them decades to brainwash their constituents and hide the inner workings of their machine in plain site, behind countless official looking government seals and compassionate sounding NGOs.

Despite what the Democrat / bureaucrat borg has wrought, I firmly believe America remains a great, if imperfect nation and I remain convinced that taken as a whole throughout most of her 250 years, the county and the government have been mostly on the right side of history.  To the degree that that’s no longer true for the government, I’m glad we’re at a point where much of its malfeasance and malevolence is being exposed. It will take a long time and a lot of courage on the part of Republican politicians to fix this situation, but at least it’s being exposed before it’s too late. We’ll see in the next two years if the GOP has the courage necessary to actually set a course for bringing government back under the control of the citizens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee & Thomas Massie have their work cut out for themselves… Hopefully they’ll get some help along the way. 

The Government is NOT Your Friend, Regardless of What They Tell You...

 Ronald Reagan once said:  "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." He was right, the government’s not your friend and it most certainly isn’t here to help you. 

The dirty little secret about government is that its purpose is not really to make the lives of citizens better, but rather, to accumulate power at the expense of citizens.  Not sure about that? Ask yourself, how many government agencies have put themselves out of a job because they succeeded? There’re a few who technology left behind, like the Steamboat Inspection Service, others that served their purpose like the Defense Homes Corporation, while others were merged into other agencies like the General Land Office, subsumed into the Department of Interior.  In our history there have been less than 100 federal agencies that have actually been shuttered, and most of those existed in the early 20^th century to deal with the Depression or the two world wars. 

According to the Federal Register there are 457 different agencies of the federal government.  That’s 457 agencies covering virtually every aspect of American’s lives, most of which are staffed by unelected bureaucrats, all of whom spend your money and many of whom write regulations that carry the force of law enforced by the police power of government. This includes everything from the State Department to the Geographic Names Board to the International Broadcasting Board to the ATF.  And that 457 is misleading.  While it includes a dozen organizations tied to Defense, there are dozens more agencies that come under it that are not listed in the Federal Register such as the DoD Education Activity or the Office of Naval Research.  Wikipedia lists a more realistic, but still lacking 1,500.   

The American government has become a leviathan.  It’s everywhere, involved in virtually every aspect of American’s lives, and it’s perpetual, regardless of its record of dismal failure.  Two examples: 

1) The War on Poverty, AKA the Great Society.  Brainchild of LBJ, the Great Society programs were created to address poverty in America.  They included things like food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, Headstart and others. 

When the Great Society programs were passed in 1964 the poverty rate was 15%, dropping to 13.9% the next year. By 1969 the rate was 9.7%. Exactly 50 years later, in 2019 the rate was 8.7%. That means that as a result of fighting the War on Poverty for half a century, after spending over $30 trillion, the poverty rate dropped by a rounding error, by literally 1%! 

Yet somehow the War on Poverty goes on, with more programs, more money, more regulations and of course, more employees.  Indeed, DHHS, which manages many of the programs, has a staff of 80,000 and an annual budget of over $1 trillion.

2) Public education.  American public education is really just a jobs program and revenue generating program for unions. William McGurn over at the WSJ looks at the performance of schools in the largest school districts.  The level of failure is extraordinary.  For example, in 2019 Atlanta public schools spent $17,112 per student and the result of all of that spending was that only 10% of students were proficient in math and 15% in reading.  So for all of that expenditure, fully 90% failed basic math proficiency and 85% reading.  And this dynamic has been going on for decades across the country.  New York City spends $28,004 per student and 75% of them lack proficiency in math and 81% in reading, while Boston spends $25,653 and has similar marks with 88% failing math and 85% reading. 

On average the US spends approximately $14,000 per student in education, (Elem – HS) more than any nation in the world other than Luxemburg. And what do we get for that extraordinary spending?  Not much.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2018 American students ranked 15^th in the world for reading literacy, 18^th in science and 37^th in math!  Of all of the things that drive a society to prosperity, particularly in the technologically advanced world we live in today, education is easily one of the most important, and on that score government has failed miserably, spectacularly and perpetually. 

If the actual goal was to educate students, government would give that money to parents in the form of vouchers to kickstart a private / charter school revolution.  Sure, there’d be failures, but it’s hard to imagine how they could fail more spectacularly than the current systems are. But that’s not the goal…

The government spends $30 trillion over half a century and reduces poverty by 1%.  The government spends more on education than virtually every nation on the planet yet 85% of the students in its biggest (and most minority filled) school districts fail basic reading and math, the building blocks for success in our dynamic society.  And we’re supposed to believe government works for us?

American governments spend more money on education and social programs than anything else, more than the GDP of most countries. Yet they fail, year after year, decade after decade, but the funds keep growing, regardless of their catastrophically abysmal track record. And that tells you everything you need to know about the nature of governments. Their goal isn’t to solve problems. They’re not here to make life better for citizens. Their goal is not to protect the lives and liberties of citizens. No, government is the borg. Its raison d'etre is simple: Grow revenue and increase power for themselves and unions. Proof?  Despite the fact that the United States has 3,143 counties in 50 states spread out over 3,796,742 square miles, nine of the twenty richest counties are in a circle less than 100 miles across with Washington DC at its center.  And what is the industry that drives that wealth?  Finance? No. Entertainment?  No.  Steel or autos or high tech?  No. One thing:  Government power.

Accumulating power is the fundamental nature of government, and our Founding Fathers understood that, which is why they gave us the Bill of Rights and particularly the 9^th and 10^th Amendments. For the first 150 years of our nation those guardrails stood relatively firm, but today they are simply gone.  Sadly, America has become so detached from our Constitution that 90% of what our government does is unconstitutional.

Unlike in economics where the solution to driving prosperity is baking more pies, government is a zero sum game. They win you lose. The more power the government takes, the more influence it exerts, the less freedom citizens have and less control they have over their lives. At some point the expanse of government will spark a civil war between those who remember freedom and value prosperity facing off against those who seek to shelter themselves from cradle to grave under the blanket of government security, support themselves via government benefits that someone else pays for and use the police power of government to control what others think and do. What that civil war will look like is anybody’s guess, but like most civil wars it will not be pretty, and whatever emerges from the ashes will be a shadow of the greatness that once was America.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Part I

We are watching the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse attempt to destroy the United States and everything it stands for. Never in American history has such a cabal of cultural and political players banded together with the specific purpose of undermining not only the serving president of the United States but the very fabric of the country itself.

The idea of American Exceptionalism has been with this country since its founding. The American Constitution was the first constitution in history where the government was granted limited power and was explicitly barred from infringing on specific rights of citizens and the governed. From the beginning the premise and reality of limited government and individual rights such as free speech, exercise of religion and private property created a virtual – albeit imperfect – Eden of creativity and experimentation that changed the face of the world.

Whether it was Cyrus McCormick inventing the mechanical reaper, JD Rockefeller driving the petroleum industry, Bill Gates putting a computer on every desk or Steve Jobs essentially creating the mobile revolution, the United States has done more to bring prosperity to the world than any nation in human history. And it’s not even close. Add such government led endeavors such as winning World Wars I & II and the Cold War, putting a man on the moon, inventing the Internet and mapping the human genome and it’s clear that the United States is the most consequential nation that has ever existed on the planet Earth.

None of this suggests the United States is or has been perfect. It’s not today and it never was… but as Winston Churchill once noted “…it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” We’re of course not a democracy, but in this case his words apply to our republic.

Any objective analysis of human history will clearly demonstrate that, while no doubt standing on the shoulders of giants, the United States has led a march that has done more good for more people than any nation in history.  From more prosperity, more freedom and more opportunity to less poverty, less war and and more democracy, life on earth today is spectacularly better for a higher percentage of the world's population than has ever been, and much - but not all - of that was driven by the United States, both as a nation as as a result of the efforts of individual Americans or those working together in one corporate form or another. 

Image:  www.deviantart.com/packwood

But in 2018 none of that is relevant. What is relevant is that America (i.e. conservatives or Republicans) is racist. America is sexist. America is homophobic. America hates Muslims.

Of course none of those things are true of the United States. While a small minority of individual Americans may carry one or more of those characteristics, America as a nation does not.  (Even the very left leaning Southern Poverty Law Center says there are only between 5,000 and 8,000 KKK members in the United States today.  That's out of a population of 320 million, or .000003%.  Compare that to the 3-6 million KKK members the United States had in the 1920s.  That was out of a population of 115 million, or fully 5%.  An equivalent number today would be 16 million klan members... vs. the reality of 5-8,000.) 

America as a nation is none of those things.  On the contrary. Minorities of every sort have more opportunity to succeed in the United States than in any nation on earth. As an example, the average income for black American households in 2016 was approximately $38,500 in 2106. That is over 7 times the $5,300 of Botswana, the highest average HH income on the continent of Africa. At the same time it’s almost 60% higher than the Bahamas’$24,603 the highest HH income of any majority black country in the world. Similarly, gays in the United States are largely able to live their lives as they choose without fear of being jailed, thrown off buildings or executed as they might be in many countries.  Women attend college at higher rates than men and half of the Fortune 500 was founded by immigrants or their children.

None of this means that there is no hate in the United States or that minorities do not encounter challenges. There is hate, but there is hate everywhere on every continent and in every nation where humans live. There always has been and always will be, at least until we’re replaced by machines without hearts and brains. But that fact does nothing to alter the reality that the United States offers more people more freedom and more opportunity for success than any place on the planet ever has. And that is fundamentally because of our Constitution based limited government, our free markets and, frankly, the American spirit that drove the country to simultaneously take on and defeat the Nazis and the Japanese at a time in history where it looked as if they would take over the world.

All of that is imperiled today by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who are together seeking to destroy everything that made America great in the first place. These Horsemen are: 1) Hollywood and the Mainstream Media 2) Social Media 3) Unions and the Education Industrial Complex 4) The very real Deep State.

Ice Rinks, Schools and Gangs: Liberals don't really want to fix problems...

As Donald Trump seeks to throw a wrench in the works of how government works... or more often, doesn't, we should be prepared to listen to Democrats and liberals wail at every move.  Just look at the cries that welcomed the nomination of a climate change skeptic to run the borg known as the EPA.  Remember, Trump's the guy who, after NYC wasted $13 million over two years failing to renovate Wollman Rink, went in and accomplished the task in 4 months for $2.25 million...

The reality is, Democrats and liberals rarely want government to actually improve things or solve problems... Sure, they say they say they want to improve schools, create more jobs, and reduce crime, but, they don’t really. And how do we know this? Because of the policies they advocate.

One place where this is obvious is in education. Liberals constantly advocate for an increase in education budgets, but there is a zero correlation between that spending and better performance. The United States spends more per pupil on education than any country in the developed world other than Switzerland, yet somehow American students rank in the twenties or thirties when compared to that same group.

And this is not new… Between 1970 and 2006 the per student cost of a K-12 education in the United States tripled while test scores remained flat. For the left, improving education means spending more money, not improving the actual education of students. That increase of money involves not only teacher’s and teacher salaries as they would have us think, but more ominously, administrators and non classroom personnel.  Between 1950 and 2009 the number of students in the United States increased by 96% and the number of teachers increased by 386% while the number of administrators increased by 702%! And there’s more! In 21 states across the country, there are actually more non-classroom personnel in schools than there are teachers! In Texas, over the last 20 years while the student population grew by 37% the non-classroom staff grew four times as fast, surging by 172%.

All of this increase in spending and personnel might be reasonable if students were learning more and scoring better on tests, but they're not, particularly in the biggest urban school districts where most of the money is spent. And of course it’s the big cities where liberals have a virtual stranglehold on education… But then calls for education spending isn’t about education, it’s about government jobs, union dues, and ultimately Democrat campaign contributions.

Another example of liberals not really being interested in the welfare of the people they claim to support can be seen in California where immigration advocates are seeking to have the state destroy CalGang, a database compiled over years that contains the names and information on 150,000 suspected gang members across the state - or at least put it in some inaccessible lockbox.

Why would liberals want this database destroyed? So that Donald Trump can’t access it. Still, why?Because a state auditor observed last year that approximately 13% of the database represented names that were “inappropriately included”. That includes names that should never have been added in the first place, names that should have been taken off for being “inaccurate”, or youths whose parents were not properly notified prior to their being added. In addition the database might be sexist and racist because it’s 93% male and disproportionately minority as 64.9% of its database is Hispanic and 20.5% black.

Activists don’t want Donald Trump to be able to access the information so that hen't can fulfill his campaign promise of deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes.

Now think about that… this database of gang members, which even by the auditor’s account, is at least 87% accurate, should be “blocked from federal access” because of the possibility someone wrongly included might get deported. Nevermind that being a suspected gang member isn’t sufficient to get someone thrown out of the country. They still need to be here illegally. Nevermind that police agencies across the state are constantly reviewing the database and removing names that are not supposed to be there or no longer supposed to be included. In liberalese, if it’s not 100% perfect then it can’t be used... and even if it were, we can imagine they'd find another rationale for blocking access.

So in a world where gangs are responsible for 80% of all crime and 50% of violent crime, liberals want to mask the membership in gangs of approximately 150,000 Californians so that a president who promised to deport criminal illegal aliens can’t do so because of the possibility that 20,000 of those names maybe shouldn't have been included.  Of course that makes sense in a state where there were 1,861 murders last year... and probably half of those were committed by gangs and gang members.

So here’s the thing… rather than concern themselves with the families of the approximately 1,000 people murdered by gang members in California in 2015, liberal activists would prefer to keep the imperfect database out of the hands of Donald Trump because of the slight chance he might deport someone whose inclusion in the database was possibly erroneous! Liberals would rather protect illegal alien criminals than protect the victims of their crime... most of whom are the same Hispanics they are seeking to "protect" in the first place!  But there's not nearly as much fundraising to be had from advocating for murder victims' families as there is for leading demonstrations against government "injustice" against innocent undocumented workers who went through hell to come to America so they could make a better life for themselves only to be unjustly threatened with deportation by a racist president.  

As the next four years unfold and liberals seek to thwart Donald Trump -  the hero of Wollman Rink - at every juncture, keep in mind that their goal is never really achieving the outcomes they claim to advocate, whether it’s better education, lowering crime or virtually anything else. If it was they would abandon liberal sophistry and start advocating policies that actually work. But as those rarely increase their power, their bank accounts and ultimately their control, so don’t count on it.

Donald Trump: Barack Obama Part Deux?

Two of the most dysfunctional areas of the American economy are healthcare and education, not coincidentally, two of the areas of the economy that the government has the most control and influence.

In healthcare, while there is ostensibly some private elements to it, the reality is that government regulations control almost every aspect of it. From the HIPAA forms about sharing your information you sign at the doctor’s office to what services insurance must cover to how much doctors can charge – or more accurately, get reimbursed for – Medicare patients. As much as one might want to point the finger at Obamacare, the reality is, healthcare was a mess long before Barry gave us the disaster that fittingly bears his name.

Much of that dysfunction stems from the fact that in healthcare there is little correlation between what people pay and the services they get. Why? The main reason is because insurance covers almost all of the cost for healthcare, and most Americans get their insurance through their employer, tax free. And why is that? Why isn’t health insurance like car insurance or homeowner’s insurance? Because of the government, of course. It largely started during WWII when wages and price controls were implemented and in 1943 the IRS made health insurance a tax free benefit to employees… and thus employers could offer insurance benefits to attract employees when they had little control over what they could pay. After the war Congress codified the There are other reasons of course, including government regulations that prohibit insurance companies from offering insurance across state lines, a broken tort system, and the general dysfunction in the Medicaid and Medicare programs.

In education the story is a bit different. Government directly controls in excess of 90% of the education spending in the country. Although most of the dollars are spent at the state and local level, the federal government has been seizing more and more control for the last 40 years, particularly after the establishment of the US Department of Education under Jimmy Carter. Add to that the fact that the Democrat party is almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the teacher’s unions and you understand that most large cities, school systems are not about education, but rather they are a jobs program for Democrat politicians and union donors. And the result is an education system that is more expensive than virtually any in the world on a per capita basis, but one that produces students who trail much of the developed world in testing and keeps the most challenged students in the worst performing schools.

The bottom line is that government does very little well, whether it’s education, healthcare or and we’ve come to see, choosing business outcomes. Just look back at Barack Obama’s green energy boondoggles, from Solyndra to Fisker… they are big versions of the failures states and local governments have been making for decades with their various sports stadium financing failures. Government deciding how businesses should be run and getting choosing winners and losers in business is just as much of a failure of what they’ve done with education and healthcare.

But change is in the air. We have a businessman who will be running the country, who will fix things, starting with business… Um… not so much.

Donald Trump, already known as a fan of big government and eminent domain has, even before he’s been sworn in, taken steps to show that we may be looking at four more years of the same thing… only with different oxen being slayed or spared the ax. Rather than talking about making America a place where companies want to invest, hire and operate, rather than talking about America being a place that all companies can make a profit, Donald Trump has been threatening companies who might have the audacity to try and escape America’s confiscatory tax rates by moving jobs overseas. Indeed last week he “saved 1,000 jobs” by meeting with Carrier and… giving them tax breaks from the state that other businesses can’t get!

So here we have a new president who uses the bully pulpit to threaten companies who don’t do what he wants and he uses tax breaks to get others to do so. That sounds very much like Barack Obama eight years ago… and we know how that turned out with lots of debt, failures and a GDP that has averaged under 2%. With Trump, rather than targeting coal and energy companies the bullseye will be on companies who want to make money for shareholders by escaping an uncompetitive business environment in the heavily regulated United States.

Of course Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet. Maybe this was just a one off with Trump trying to fulfill a very specific campaign pledge. But then again, maybe not. Either way, it doesn’t say much for Donald Trump’s appreciation for free markets or limited government.

Twilight Zone Zombie Education Apocalypse: Detroit Government Schools Fail 95% of the Time...

Sometimes in life there are things that are so obvious that when others don’t see it you’re left scratching your head wondering if you are living in a Twilight Zone episode. Such was the case when I read a headline last week: Detroit Public Schools: 93% Not Proficient in Reading; 96% Not Proficient in Math.

Somehow the Detroit government schools, despite spending $1.2 billion a year – equating to $18,000 per year per student – were able to succeed in teaching reading only 7% of the time and math only 4% of the time. That is a failure rate of 93% and 96%. That reminded me of something I read a few years ago stating that 47% of Detroit’s population was illiterate. Now that statistic makes perfect sense.

How is it remotely possible that so much failure could continue year after year, decade after decade? (Could it be zombies?) Frankly, it forces one to ask a fundamental question… Most certainly a society needs an educated workforce in order to prosper, particularly in a world of rapidly increasing technology, but must government be the one in charge of the education?  And for black and Hispanic parents, the children of whom are largely the ones being steamrolled by the failing government schools, it makes you wonder why they keep pulling the lever for the Democrats who have been destroying education for 50 years.  And that doesn't even include the damage being done by Common Core!

Given that the Detroit government schools succeed less than 5% of the time, what might happen if… rather than spending $18,000 per student to support an administration heavy bureaucracy (15,000 staff vs. 3,300 teachers) the city simply gave parents a check of $18,000 per student? Then let the parents spend the money however they want and let Darwin’s law decide the rest. It would be virtually impossible for even the most incompetent  parents left to their own devices to fail as badly as the Detroit government schools have.

Or perhaps the city could simply sell the entire school system, much like cities across the country have sold contracts to provide other public services, everything from parking meters to trash collection to water to the issuance of business licenses. Even the most inept businessman would likely succeed more often than 5% of the time. And there are for profit and non profit school operators across the country, from Kipp Academy to Harlem Academy to a plethora of online operators. Whether private or charter or Catholic, virtually every alternative to traditional public schools outperforms those government schools operating in their same communities.

And it’s not like wholesale change hasn’t ever happened. After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans a decade ago the city handed over management of 80% of the schools to charters, and not so surprisingly student test scores doubled.

But of course none of that will likely ever happen, because there are too many union jobs to protect and too many government regulators seeking to keep their power. Any parent, any businessman, any non government organization would be loathe to continue to fund a program that fails 95% of the time, but unions and government apparatchiks don’t actually care about educating children. In the Twilight Zone Zombie Education Apocalypse the machine must keep churning, regardless of the cost or consequence.  There are simply too many union jobs and too much government power at stake to risk losing them just so kids can learn to read and write and have a chance to go on to achieve success in life.  Pffffttt.

Keep that in mind the next time you hear union brownshirts clamoring for more government money “For the children”.

Could Obamacare be the Coup de grâce for Battered Liberal Syndrome?

Years ago I was talking to an uncle who happens to be a martial arts expert. He told me a story about being in a bar when a man started beating the heck out of his girlfriend. My uncle being my uncle, he intervened and separated the two. As he’s standing there confronting the abuser, he was attacked from behind by the girlfriend…

You hear about things like this all the time, a version of what is called “Abused Woman Syndrome” where a woman is abused by a man but continues to stay with him, and as in the story above, often defend him. Often the woman’s friends and family try and convince her that he’s bad for her, but while she admits he has his flaws, she loves him and she knows things are going to get better. Conservatives in America today find themselves in a situation similar to the one my uncle did, but the difference is, it’s not battered women that we face, but rather it’s battered liberals, and the abusers are the politicians in the Democrat Party. And while the liberals continue to stay in and empower the relationship, it’s everyone in the country who gets abused.

The Democrats have been abusing the American people for decades, and we have the scars to prove it:

Education in the United States is a train wreck. We spend more than any country on the planet on education and yet we trail most of the developed world in math, science and reading scores. Not only are students not learning the basics, but more importantly they are not learning to compete in, survive in and thrive in the real, competitive world.

Prosperity and economic growth are being strangled. In the 1950’s when the Federal Register (list of federal regulations) averaged less than 10,000 pages a year the American economy grew at an average annual rate of 4.6% a year (after inflation) – at which rate it would take you 15 years to double your income. Over the last decade when the Federal Register has weighed in at 78,000 pages a year, GDP growth has shrunk to 1.5% annually – at which rate it would take you 48 years to double your income. That means that the GDP growth – read prosperity – has declined by 65% as the Federal Register has grown by 800%.

The number of people on welfare is greater than the number of working people. The workforce is at its lowest level in three decades and those among the Democrat base (women, minorities and youth) are the most adversely affected by all of these issues.

On these and a myriad of other issues the Democrats have been abusing the American people (and in particular their own base) for decades. Nonetheless, when faced with the evidence of the Democrats abuse in the form of failed policies, they always have an excuse. Republicans want to cut education or kill Grandma or destroy the environment or let companies abuse their employees, etc. etc.. And of course the Republicans hate women, workers, blacks, immigrants and basically everyone who’s not rich and white.

And now we have what is potentially the most important event ever in the sordid history of the Battered Liberal Syndrome: Obamacare. Not only was it proffered on a false premise in the first place, it has been nothing but lies since: “If you like your plan you can keep it.” “Premium reductions will save you $2,500 per year” And the lies keep coming: “It’s the fault of the insurance companies”, “You’ll come to appreciate the better plan”, and of course the obligatory “We had no idea any of these problems would crop up.”

For so many years Democrats lied about practically everything as the failures of their policies came home to roost. Because of charlatans like Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, and Barack Obama they could deflect blame to others for their failures and come out unscathed. But with Obamacare they are facing a different scenario all together. They own it lock, stock and barrel.

They passed the legislation on their own. They wrote the regulations. They built the website. Obama wrote the exemptions. They managed the entire process from A to Z, and they lied about every piece of it all along the way, and none more so than Barack Obama himself. As such, as the entire thing melts down there is no way for them to deflect the blame. Conservatives and many Republicans have been saying for three years that Obamacare was going to be an abject failure, it was going to cost jobs, it was going to drive up healthcare costs and it was going to expose citizens to chaos as government sought to control healthcare. All of those things have come true, and more is on the way.

The failure of Obamacare doesn’t just expose the failure of one program, but rather the failure of the Democrat philosophy in general that all things can be made right and good by simply writing a piece of legislation, throwing money at a problem or by putting the government in control. The failure of Obamacare is just a most explicit version of the policies that have brought us failing schools, the mortgage collapse, green energy sinkholes and countless other failures. The difference is, the only fingerprints on this debacle are Democratic and for the first time in history their failure is being seen as theirs alone. This is partially due to the fact that even the complicit mainstream media can’t cover up a disaster of this magnitude as Americans are seeing their plans cancelled, premiums and deductibles rise, all while choices and jobs evaporate.

Is it possible that Obamacare could be the Coup de grâce for Battered Liberal Syndrome? Perhaps this train wreck will be the incident that finally begins to shake battered liberals out of their blind devotion to the Democrat Party and liberalism. Maybe they will finally step back and look at the bigger picture and recognize that it’s results that count, not soft Democrat whispers of how it’s really someone else’s fault, how they’re just trying to make things better or fair and that they really care. You have to think that after years of battery at some point soft whispers and “good intentions” no longer matter and results finally do. At that point perhaps discussion will turn to the damage that invariably occurs when government seeks to control everything. Maybe 2013 is that point. Perhaps Obamacare is the catalyst… If so there might end up being a silver lining after all.

The Teacher's Unions are more dangerous to America than Al Qaeda

I’ve just returned from watching the movie Waiting for Superman. (The title refers to waiting for the Man of Steel to come to the rescue…) My first reaction was to think back on my post from last month about the voters of DC throwing out Adrian Fenty, and with him Michelle Rhee, his Schools Chancellor.

My second reaction was remembering something that I’ve heard Neal Boortz say on numerous occasions: “Teacher’s unions are a bigger threat to the United States than Al Qaeda.” Throw in the public sector unions and he’s right. Al Qaeda has the potential to kill thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people at a time. The teacher’s unions destroy the lives of millions of students every year, and they’ve been doing it for decades. Not only do they destroy the lives of millions of young people, they bring chaos, tragedy and despair to the millions of families of those young people, their communities and the country as a whole. From young men in prison to teenage pregnancies, the data’s not hard to find.

This should not be taken as a screed against teachers. Just the opposite. Many teachers are saints. They have passion for teaching. They spend long hours wrestling with a variety of challenges, many of which have little to do with their classrooms. They seek to inspire kids to become successful adults and attempt to equip them to do so. Unfortunately however the good teachers are locked into an inflexible quagmire of a system where good teachers are beaten into submission and simply become cogs in a machine that passes kids along from grade to grade to grade, regardless of their abilities or success, until they choose to simply to take their talents elsewhere. This same system confers its job for life protection on all teachers, both good and bad and provides students and parents with little control or say over their education. Across the country, from LA to New York it is almost impossible to fire teachers for almost anything, from being incompetent to inappropriate behavior. Indeed, New York City alone spends in excess of $100 Million a year paying teachers their full salaries to spend seven hours to not teach, often spending that time playing poker in the so called “"rubber rooms”.

One of the most staggering statistics in the movie was about firings of teachers relative to those in other professions. 1 in 57 doctors lose their ability to inflict themselves on patients. 1 in 97 lawyers are disbarred or otherwise bared from menacing society with their law degrees. The comparable number for teachers? 1 in 2,500! As the movie was done by Davis Guggenheim, the guy behind “An Inconvenient Truth” I want to be a little skeptical of his numbers so lets assume he’s off a little. Even if he were off by 80% that would still mean that 1 in 500 teachers is stopped from ruining the education (and often the life prospects) of a child. I’ll admit that many teachers are good, but even at the 1 in 500 number, that means that only .2% (That’s point two percent, not two percent!) of teachers lose their jobs. Using the movie’s numbers it’s .0004%. What other kind of job has that kind of security, regardless of the employee’s competence, work ethic or success? To paraphrase Joe Pesci from My Cousin Vinnie, “Do the laws of random distribution about the skill or the lack thereof for human beings stop at the schoolhouse door, where somehow only .2% of teachers turn out to be bad?” Somehow I don’t think so.

Add to the teacher’s unions two other elements of the education system: an incompetent federal bureaucracy that uses its purse strings to manipulate the entire system and bloated state and local bureaucracies staffed by public sector union employees and you have a recipe for the disaster that we find ourselves with.

Education in America is quickly becoming our Achilles heel. By not producing graduates who are able to read and write, who have the skills to earn jobs at companies Google or Microsoft, who are prepared to deal with the 21st century world, we are creating a true underclass that is far more problematic than the one Ken Auletta wrote about 30 years ago. The fact that the 21st century is developing far more rapidly than the last should be of no surprise to anyone. All one needs to do is look at the numbers: It took Radio 38 years to reach 50 million users. It took Television 13 years. It took the Internet 4 years. It took Facebook less than a year. It’s into that dynamic universe we are walking with a population of students and young adults who are simply not equipped to compete, thrive or survive. That’s not a mistake the Chinese the Indians are making.



If the United States is going to remain a viable Republic with a free citizenry and an economy that provides more than the basics of food and water, it will require more than platitudes about “supporting education” and “the children are our future”. It will require a real revolution in how schools are run and funded. That revolution begins by:

1. Throwing the Democrats out of office – they are recipients of over 90% of union money in federal and local elections and frequently the party in charge of the local bureaucracies who signed those malignant union contracts in the first place.

2. Offering school vouchers – those vouchers are the equivalent of Kryptonite to dysfunctional schools. By giving parents the ability to vote with their feet they become the Supermen of our story and can finally stop waiting for a costumed hero to come along and save the day.

The revolution starts next Tuesday... Hang on!

Post-racial America? Not so much for DC voters...

With the election of Barack Obama as President the United States was supposed to be transitioning to the post racial America. Unfortunately for the children attending the public schools of the District of Columbia, someone forgot to tell their parents.

Earlier this month the voters of the nation’s capital threw out Adrian Fenty, perhaps the best mayor they have ever had. Why? Because of soaring crime rates, plummeting school test scores or a surging unemployment rate? No. Rather, Adrian Fenty, a black mayor, was fired from his job because he hired the best people possible for the jobs in his administration and many of them happened not to be black.

Like presidents, mayors are political animals. While the stakes they deal with may not be as global in scale the President’s, for their constituents, a mayor’s decisions are often more tangible and immediate. Presidents deal with federal tax policy, national defense and state dinners. Their actions affect 300 million Americans and billions more around the world. A mayor on the other hand deals with neighborhood crime, Rotary Club meetings and the local zoning disputes. Presidents rarely have to respond to anything immediately while a mayor’s immediate response or lack thereof (either good or bad) is usually chronicled in the local paper or leads the local news.

Because the mayor is so critical to the lives of the people in the community it is that much more perplexing that the people of Washington decided to vote according to race rather than success. Breaking with the past, Adrian Fenty decided that his measure of performance would be one thing: success.

And succeed he did. Washington DC has historically had some of the worst schools in the country despite spending more per pupil than most jurisdictions – this year they will spend almost $30,000 per pupil. During the 2002-2003 school year the city’s graduation rate was an abysmal 58%. Last year, after 4 years of Adrian Fenty the rate was 72% and heading higher. Not only are graduation rates increasing but test scores as well.

Rather than be hailed by the black citizens of Washington, who make up 57% of the city’s population and 82% of the student body, Fenty was shown the door to the tune of 80% of the voters. This is particularly disturbing because as the single biggest beneficiaries of an improving school system, blacks were benefiting the most from Fenty’s leadership. Whites on the other hand, who make up 35% of the city’s population but only 7% of the student body, gave him much support, well in excess of 80%.

This is not a liberal or conservative issue. Washington DC is a city full of liberals where Barack Obama received 92% of the vote while John McCain received just 7%. No, at the end of the day the Washington DC mayor’s race was about race rather than success, education, crime or otherwise.

Much of the black population in the city was angry that Fenty threw out the color bar when he decided to populate his cabinet. In choosing to fill his cabinet he chose the people who he thought could best serve the citizens of the District of Columbia. His resulting cabinet included 5 whites, 3 Asians, 1 Hispanic and 1 black. That was a problem for many in the city – particularly those in Ward 8, who are currently represented by convicted ex-mayor Marion Barry. The criticism started early in Fenty’s administration and to his credit he did not cave. He was called arrogant, uncommunicative and was frequently accused of turning his back on black Washingtonians.

For the most part Fenty brushed off such objections believing that voters would instead look at the tangible benefits he was bringing to the city and its citizens. At the end of the day, Fenty did what mayors are supposed to do... tackle crime, improve schools and generally try and create an environment for success for the city’s citizens and his single biggest impact was felt in schools. They were where he shined. Fenty brought in Michelle Rhee as Schools Chancellor and she immediately went to work. She closed underperforming schools, she fired 241 teachers for poor performance and she forced the corrupt Washington’s Teachers Union to accept weaker tenure rules and even allow some performance based flexibility in compensation. Her results speak for themselves and Adrian Fenty believed, for him.

Not so much. Despite his success, 80% of the black population of DC decided Fenty had to go for the crime of being post racial. Inexplicably, rather than focus on what was actually making their lives better, from better educated children to safer streets, black voters in Washington DC decided to focus on the pigment in the cabinet. Unfortunately it’s likely to be their children who suffer as the unions and the old guard seek to roll back many of the advances that Fenty and Rhee put in place.