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.

Maybe it’s time to drop the picket signs and pick up a copy of The Road to Serfdom

It was with great interest that I watched Facebook catch fire with support of the calls for picketing and sick-outs at Wal-Mart stores across the country on Black Friday. From what I could tell, most of those supporting the calls were liberals who attacked the company with claims that it doesn’t pay “a living wage”, “exploits” its workers, or owes its workers health care. I even saw one fantastical claim that a majority of Wal-Mart employees are on food stamps. The suggestion was that Wal-Mart should be forced (via government itself or indirectly via unions) to change completely how it deals with its employees in terms of salary and benefits.

To set the record straight, according to Business Insider, Wal-Mart pays its workers an average of $11.75 per hour, just slightly below retail’s national average of $12.04 and well above the federal minimum wage of $7.25. The company itself states that the average non-manager employee earns between $10 & $12 per hour.

Those wages are at least sufficient to make Wal-Mart the largest employer in the country, with a current headcount of over 1.4 million employees. And no one forced those employees to take those jobs. One of the beauties of freedom is that employees are free to work at Wal-Mart or they can take their labor and sell it to someone else… or better yet, they could start their own businesses.

I couldn’t help but think back to the nonsensical Occupy Wall Street protests of a year ago. Many of the participants were carrying around signs decrying Wall Street for its profit mongering and the harm big businesses were inflicting on small businesses and the little guy. Of course their solution of choice was more regulation. Naturally.

Both of these instances reveal more about the protesters than it does about the companies being pilloried. The very regulations they seek are one of the reasons big businesses are so successful verses small businesses in the first place.

It’s a simple example of liberals either not knowing or ignoring basic economics. Take economies of scale. One of its benefits is that you can spread fixed costs out over a larger volume. It works for rent as well as for regulations. Let’s imagine there are two widget stores operating next to one another with identical rents of $10,000 per month. With everything else being equal, the store selling 2,000 widgets a month can build a $5 cost per widget into his prices, whereas the store selling only 1,000 widgets per month has to build in a rent cost of $10 per widget. As such, the store selling more widgets will likely be more profitable, successful and eventually may be able to buy out the second widget store and start its journey to becoming a hated big business.

The same holds true for regulations. Frequently large businesses not only influence regulations to their benefit, but they can also absorb the costs of such regulations far more easily than can their smaller brethren, even if they were unable to influence their writing. Take the tax code for example. At 75,000 pages, a five billion dollar company can easily afford to hire a phalanx of lawyers to find ways to reduce its taxes or lobby for changes. Such luxuries are rarely feasible for small businesses.

According to the Small Business Administration, big businesses with more than 500 employees pay about $7,755 per employee to comply with federal rules each year, while small businesses with fewer than 20 employees pay $10,585 per employee. That is almost 50% more that small businesses have to pay per employee than do large businesses. All because of regulation.

This push for regulation is simply another example of the left using the cover of populism to disguise its real agenda: more government control over business. Whether using the fig leaf of environmentalism to further the nonsensical, inflation causing ethanol mandates or the lie of “the rich don’t pay their fair share” to push for higher taxes, the left rarely lets facts get in the way of their pursuit of a socialist, statist agenda.

Which brings us back to the Wal-Mart protests of Black Friday. The real goal of liberals is not to improve the lot of Wal-Mart employees, it’s control of the company via unions and their government enablers. In doing so they would be able to use government regulations to not only take money out of the pockets of Wal-Mart workers, but more ominously, they could harness the power of the NLRB to impose a wide range of costs, controls and dictates on the company.

To put a cherry on top, take Wal-Mart’s misguided and calculating support of Obamacare – calculating that it would impose greater costs on its small competitors – that has now resulted in the company itself dropping healthcare coverage for many employees while drastically raising the premium costs for others. By pushing such utopian, economically illiterate regulations as Obamacare, the Community Reinvestment Act, ethanol mandates and higher taxes for the rich, liberals not only fail in their stated objectives, but they also invite a wide range of unintended consequences, none of which ever seem to be good. Maybe it’s time to drop the picket signs and pick up a copy of The Road to Serfdom.

Arrogance Incarnate - Obama and his union friends...

Life not fair. Nor for that matter is it unfair. It simply is. It’s not fair or unfair that the lion feasts on the slowest zebra or that the penguin who leaps into the ocean at just the wrong moment becomes dinner for an Orca. Life is life… fair doesn’t come into play.

Fair is a fundamentally human concept that is defined by a lack of preference or favoritism and or injustice.

Despite its subjective nature, fairness is a word that the left loves to bring to what should be an objective realm, politics. It’s not fair that CEOs earn millions of dollars when their employees are earning minimum wage. It’s not fair that the acceptance rates into Stanford or Ivy League universities differ between blacks, whites and Asians. It’s not fair that the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population yet uses almost a quarter of the world’s energy. It’s not fair that someone was born on the wrong side of the Rio and someone is trying to send them back home.

Unfortunately, life is not fair and neither wishing nor government can make it so. That of course does not mean that liberals do not try to use the government for exactly that purpose. From affirmative action to welfare to social security to government set-asides to progressive tax rates to suits against voter ID laws, liberals seek to use the coercive nature of government to create a world where everyone (read every outcome) is the same.

One of the many problems with the left’s pursuit of fairness through government is the idea of who gets to decide what is fair, and on what basis. Back in the early 1990’s much was made of the fact that blacks were getting rejected for mortgages more often than whites. Not only did the story become front page news, but it led regulators to make changes in banking rules which in turn produced the economic collapse of 2007/08. Not surprisingly, not only did it turn out that the story in itself was false, but the ensuing legislation had the effect of actually harming the black homeowners it was seeking to give a “fair chance”. (Thomas Sowell does a tremendous job of rebuffing the idea that blacks were receiving unfair treatment in the first place.)

Another example of the left seeking to use government to impose fairness is welfare. In an effort to provide a basic level of income for the poor and downtrodden, the federal government has spent trillions of dollars over the last 40 years. True to form, rather than obviating poverty those fairness based programs have instead created a perpetual underclass and alienated tens of millions of Americans from the fundamental notion of working to support themselves and their families and becoming contributing members of society.

As bad as these examples are, one could argue that they are merely the wrongheaded actions of useful idiots who have no understanding of basic economics. It’s another thing all together for politicians to conspire with groups in the name of “fairness” to impose regulations on the entire country and then to turn around and exempt the groups with whom they were conspiring from the very regulations they’d just passed.

Such is the situation with the single most controversial and intrusive piece of legislation of our lifetimes: ObamaCare. In January HHS released the list of the latest 729 organizations to receive waivers from the onerous requirements of ObamaCare. Those 729 organizations represented a total of 2,189,636 employees. A quick look at the largest of those organizations exposes the hypocrisy and arrogance of the Obama administration. Of the 100 largest organizations – by covered employees – being granted a waiver, 57 of them are unions, representing 836,278 employees, or fully 40% of the total. What makes this hypocrisy so pernicious is that unions were the single biggest supporters of ObamaCare in the first place.

Citizens expect their politicians will pass laws every now and then that benefit this or that constituent or funnel funding to their home district for a bridge or a community center. While offensive, such pork barrel efforts are largely innocuous to the general public as they typically impact only a small number of people and do so in a positive light – if of course you don’t count all of the taxpayers who had to actually pay for that pork.

ObamaCare and the unions are doing something all together different. Not only is it what most people would call unfair – although few on the left are suggesting that of course – but more consequentially, it is blatant deception of the American people. Essentially what we had was an administration conspiring with some of its favored groups to vociferously advance the notion that ObamaCare was an absolute necessity for the country and that it would benefit everyone. Then, as soon as the law is passed, it begins exempting the very groups that helped force the legislation down our throats in the first place… or giving them money to defray its costs. (The administration just announced that it has spent $1.7 billion on helping 1,500 organizations deal with ObamaCare’s consequences… Once again the same story: A quick look at the top 40 organizations given money reveals that 15 of them are unions who cashed checks for $573 million, or about one third of the total.)

However one defines good government, and whatever one’s expectations as to the proper role of government, by any objective standard, this is not it. When an administration becomes sufficiently arrogant that it feels it can blatantly lie with impunity about its signature legislation knowing that its detractors are watching it like a hawk, one has to wonder what it’s doing behind the scenes with the tens of thousands of other regulations and Executive Orders that neither the citizens nor the press have the time or bandwidth to scrutinize. Now that doesn't seem fair to anyone...

Scott Walker channels JFK... except for that 10988 deal

We are at the beginning of the most consequential domestic conflict the United States has fought since the Civil War. Like the battle between the Blue and Grey, this one is for the continued existence of the country. Today’s weapon of choice might be the legislative pen and the protest sign and there may not be blood flowing in the streets, but make no mistake, the stakes are exactly the same: The survival of the nation as we know it. If that sounds like hyperbole, think about the German inflation of the 1920’s or Zimbabwe today. At some point taxpayers will have nothing left to give, the Chinese will stop buying our debt (or worse...) and our creditors will begin calling in loans that Uncle Sam is unable to pay. We might survive, but America would be a decidedly different nation.

While Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was the speech that defined that war, another president’s words define this one. “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.” Today, one does not need to look far beyond Wisconsin to recognize that the party of JFK has long abandoned his challenge.

The fight that is going on in Wisconsin right now, the fight that took place in California six years ago, and the fights that are on the horizon in places like New Jersey, Ohio and Michigan are at the front lines in the coming war. The lines in this conflict are crystal clear: On the one side you have the Democrat Party, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Unionistas (a great word taken from Rush) and on the other side you have a GOP being dragged, kicking and screaming, into becoming an advocate for fiscal responsibility by the Tea Party movement.

Six years ago Arnold Schwarzenegger went through the much of what Scott Walker is experiencing today. Faced with perhaps the most left leaning legislature and population in the country, the Governator eventually took down his reform shingle and became just another GOP speed bump on California’s march to economic suicide.

To understand what is at stake in Wisconsin and the rest of the country, at both the state and federal level, one need think about one name: Bernie Madoff.

Bernie Madoff spent a quarter of a century wooing investors into his Ponzi scheme. As dupes were encouraged to “invest” and others were smiling all the way to the bank, the Keystone Kops at the SEC never recognized the problem. Everything was sugarplums and cherries until the day the fraud was exposed – by Madoff’s sons, not by the government.

Over the same quarter century the exact scenario has played itself out in statehouses across the county with governors and legislators playing the role of Bernie Madoff. In this case however the taxpayers were the dupes and the public sector unions the ones cashing the checks. Now that the schemes have been exposed for exactly what they are, the unions want to keep cashing the checks, regardless of whether or not there’s actually money available to cover them.

Where Kennedy challenged citizens to recognize that the role of government was not to be a trough from which pigs feed, today’s Democratic Party is willing to bankrupt states and the federal government for the enrichment of the public sector unions. Rather than recognizing the challenge at hand, the Democrats have instead chosen to seek to play on the public sympathies by suggesting that they are merely seeking to protect vulnerable worker rights.

In an interesting contrast to the pollyannaish voters of California who believe they can continue their spending binge even as employers flee the state, Wisconsin voters, when facing similar dire circumstances, decided instead to put a stake in the heart of the Democrat machine and handed the GOP the House, the Senate and the Governor’s mansion. Now that the elected officials are seeking to do exactly what the voters sent them to Madison to do, the Democrat / Unionista parasites have cried foul and are seeking to bring the state to its knees.

They should not be surprised when they discover that their clarion call inspires few followers beyond their own cabal, and in fact results in a strengthening of the GOP. In a state with 7.7% unemployment – up from 4.3% two years ago – a sea of red ink and an economic competiveness ranking of 40 out of the 50 states, Wisconsinites are not particularly sympathetic to state workers who earn 33% more than private sector workers, have extraordinarily generous health and retirement benefits, and all of that while enjoying almost iron clad job security.

The battle going on in Madison is nothing less than the battle for the future of America. Scott Walker is leading the charge with guys like Chris Christie and John Kasich at his side. Americans of all stripes – with the obvious exception of Democrat Unionistas & Californians – seem to finally be waking up to the fact that public sector unions are nothing but a cancer on the body politic. (JFK doesn’t escape unscathed in this disaster as he unleashed public sector unions on the federal government in 1962 with Presidential Order 10988.)

Like any cancer patient, if the country wants to survive the cancer will have to be cut out or somehow rendered benign. Ronald Reagan understood that and it seems that Scott Walker does as well. Hopefully Madison will be the first in a line of battles that culminates at the ballot box in 2012. If enough battles are won America may yet avoid a Madoff like meltdown.

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.