If you want to understand mankind's inhumanity to womankind then I suggest you click on this site.
I am surprised feminists are not outraged but perhaps they are too busy trying to break glass ceilings.
http://backup.laflammenet.com/tcp.ppsDowd. (See 2 below.)
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Liberals/progressives throw brickbats at Breitbart but can't fire him. (See 3 below.)
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Tom Sowell would like liberal/progressives to learn from history but he might as well talk to the wall because they know it all - just ask them. (See 4 below.)
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This writer has a solution to the problem of America's poor workers - move to Europe.
Then they can either do like the Puerto Ricans once did when they flew to New York - go immediately on welfare or get a lower wage job.
Another solution for those who don't want to move to Europe: they can leave their unions, move South and seek a job. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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As things fall in place and come the way of Republicans and Tea Party candidates will they be smart enough to grasp the reins of a growth agenda and ride a horse bereft of the burdensome saddle of big government? (See 6 below.)
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Michael Gerson has a novel idea on how we can resolve the Afghan War - win and then negotiate.
The problem with this brilliant idea is that there is no will to win, no real plan to win nor do we have the money to win.
In fact the world and U.N no longer tolerate winning because winning entails doing things the world and U.N no longer have the stomach for - otherwise the Palestinian-Israeli problem could have been solved decades ago.
I have said time and again your adversary is more amenable to a solution when he is looking up at you because you have beat him to his knees. That is what winning is all about. Being in a position to impose on your adversary that which is best for all but they are unable to grasp the logic.
The world and the U.N. believe you should pull your adversary's chestnuts out of the fire and pacify him with largess. (See 7 and 7a below.)
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Black parents owe Michelle Rhee a debt of gratitude not the other Michelle. (See 8 below.)
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Dick
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1)Poll: A few cracks in Obama's Hispanic support
By LIZ SIDOTI
President Barack Obama's once solid support among Hispanics is showing a few cracks, a troubling sign for Democrats desperate to get this critical constituency excited about helping the party hold onto Congress this fall.
Hispanics still overwhelmingly favor the Democratic Party over the GOP, and a majority still think Obama is doing a good job, according to an Associated Press-Univision poll of more than 1,500 Hispanics.
But the survey, also sponsored by The Nielsen Company and Stanford University, shows Obama gets only lukewarm ratings on issues important to Hispanics — and that could bode poorly for the president and his party.
For a group that supported Obama so heavily in 2008 and in his first year in office, only 43 percent of Hispanics surveyed said Obama is adequately addressing their needs, with the economy a major concern. Another 32 percent were on the fence, while 21 percent said he'd done a poor job.
That's somewhat understandable, given that far more Hispanics have faced job losses and financial stress than the U.S. population in general.
An unfulfilled promise to overhaul the nation's patchwork immigration system, which Hispanics overwhelmingly want to see fixed, also may be to blame. That's despite the fact that Obama is challenging an Arizona law that requires police, while enforcing other laws, to question a person's immigration status if officers have a reasonable suspicion he or she is in the country illegally.
Still, 57 percent of Hispanics approve of the president's overall job performance compared with 44 percent among the general population in the latest AP national polling.
"It's been tough, but I think he's been doing a fair job," says Tony Marte, 33, a physical education teacher in Miami who is a Nicaraguan native. He voted for Obama in 2008 and, so far, likes how Obama has handled the economy.
But Marte's not satisfied with Obama's> work on immigration reform. "Nothing has been done," he says, adding that between now and 2012, Obama should "be looking out for the groups that put him up there. The Latinos. The minorities." He says he'll probably back Obama again but "we'll see."
The political power of Hispanics now and in the future cannot be overstated. They are the nation's fastest-growing minority group and the government projects they will account for 30 percent of the population by 2050, doubling in size from today.
Democrats long have had an advantage among Hispanics and maintained it even as George W. Bush chipped away at that support. Obama erased the GOP inroads during his 2008 campaign, winning 67 percent of their vote to 31 percent for Republican nominee John McCain. And Hispanics consistently gave Obama exceptionally strong marks in his first year as president.
With the first midterm congressional elections of Obama's presidency in three months, the poll shows a whopping 50 percent of Hispanics citizens call themselves Democrats, while just 15 percent say they are Republicans.
Among Hispanics, 42 percent rate the economy and the recession as the country's biggest problem; unemployment and a lack of jobs come in at 23 percent.
Ascencion Menjivar, a Honduran native who is a cook in Washington, isn't sold on the administration's approach to creating jobs and is waiting for a solution to get the economy back on track. "I think it'll be a long process," says Menjivar, 30. Still, he says Obama — "a genius" — eventually will make it happen.
Patricia Hernandez Blanco of Miami, 38, is less confident that recovery is under way. "I'm not sure it's improving," she says. Even so, this Cuban who voted for McCain says she would now cast a ballot for Obama.
Re-electing Obama would be "really stupid," counters Carlos Toledo of Puerto Rico, an independent voter, clothing store manager and self-defense instructor in Washington. Toledo, 35, disagrees with Obama's economic policies and says he worries about joblessness as budgets are cut and money is spent on wars despite the country's debt.
Behind economic woes, immigration comes in second in importance.
Since the controversy over the Arizona law erupted in April, Hispanics who mostly speak English at home gave Obama higher marks on his handling of their top issues than did Hispanics who primarily speak Spanish and who tend to be more recent immigrants or non-citizens.
Analysts say it's possible that the more English-dominant Hispanics rallied around the president following the enactment of the Arizona law and his challenge to it; some 40 percent of them approved of his performance on their key issues before Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law in April, but the figure rose to 52 percent in the weeks after.
The poll also showed that two years after witnessing Hillary Rodham Clinton's White House bid, Hispanics are twice as likely to expect to see a woman than a fellow Hispanic become president.
Some 59 percent said it is likely that a woman will be elected president sometime in the next two decades, while just 29 percent thought it likely that a Hispanic will be elected president over that period. And, 34 percent of non-citizen Hispanics thought the country is likely to have a Hispanic president, compared with 27 percent of citizens.
A significant percentage of Latinos — 41 percent — said they are more likely to vote for a candidate who is Hispanic.
The AP-Univision Poll was conducted from March 11 to June 3 by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Using a sample of Hispanic households provided by The Nielsen Company, 1,521 Hispanics were interviewed in English and Spanish, mostly by mail but also by telephone and the Internet. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Stanford University's participation in the study was made possible by a grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
1a)Obama and the Fake Tag
By Kevin Jackson
The election of Obama reminds me of years ago, when I bought a fake Tag Heuer watch while visiting Manhattan. Normally I walk right by street vendors, but this watch caught my eye. It was sleek and clean, and some described it as gorgeous. Only true Tag aficionados could tell that the watch was a fake.
The thing that impressed me about my fake Tag was that it had the "weight" of a real Tag. It didn't feel like the lightweight replicas I had seen in Mexico, China, and Africa. And the best part? My fake Tag cost me $7!
My fake Tag was made of a high-gloss "white gold" electroplate -- okay, stainless steel -- with a sea-blue oyster shell face. It had a curved glass bezel, not plastic. The contrast between the high-gloss steel and the face gave my fake Tag a regal appearance.
My fake Tag had all the real Tag markings on the back, though I certainly wasn't given papers to authenticate my fake Tag. However, if I had asked, the salesperson might have produced them.
I wore the watch everywhere and received numerous compliments, and I was so confident about my fake Tag that occasionally, I would allow questioners to inspect it firsthand. I was proud of my fake Tag. People would see my fake Tag and say things like, "I didn't know Tag made anything except diving watches. That is an exquisite Tag! Where did you get it?"
"Oh this thing..." I would deflect to keep from outright lying.
"Diving!" I thought. I didn't dare get my fake Tag near anything moist, for that would mean certain death. In rainstorms, I took off my fake Tag, placing it in the driest available pocket. If I were in a high humidity climate, I kept fake Tag near a de-moisturizer packet, again in my pocket. I treated fake Tag better than I did my real Tag, which was a true Tag diving watch.
One day a few months after acquiring my fake Tag, I found it lying on my nightstand, lifeless.
"Not for long," I panicked aloud.
I rerouted a few errands that day so I could visit a watch repair kiosk at the mall, hoping to have them breathe life back into fake Tag. I had gotten accustomed to the look of fake Tag on my wrist. Without it, I felt naked.
I approached my fake Tag's potential life-giver with mixed emotions. Would fake Tag be good enough to fool a watch expert? Would the sales clerk unknowingly compliment me as others had on my fake Tag? Or would he "out" me as a pretentious sellout for having purchased what I knew was not the real thing?
I laid my fake Tag on the g-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">countertop, and the young salesperson said, "Wow, nice Tag! You're gonna want a Tag battery for this."
I said, "Well how much is a Tag battery?"
The salesman said, "Twenty-four dollars. But you wouldn't want to skimp on a Tag by getting a Chinese battery, or you could ruin the inner workings."
Now I had a dilemma.
"Just out of curiosity, how much is the Chinese battery for a Tag?" I inquired.
The salesperson said, "Three dollars. But again, you could ruin a Tag if you...because Chinese batteries are...blah blah blah."
I didn't even hear the rest of his education on fine watches and cheap batteries. Circling through my mind was the fact that I had a $7 watch that I wanted people to believe was a $2,500 watch and the idea of putting a battery in it that was costing me more three times more than the cost of fake watch!
Liberal America in electing Obama bought a fake Tag. And the batteries have run down in less than a year. Obama may still look good, but he's draining his political juice.
The Liberals feel trapped, because they simply can't admit that they have bought a fake Tag, and maintenance of their fake costs more than the fake himself!
As for that battery salesman, I suspect he knew my Tag was a fake. Why not take advantage of somebody who was a poser? I was ripe for the picking.
The moral to the story: Don't settle for the fake, as it will cost you three times more in the end.
That's my rant!
Kevin Jackson is author of The BIG Black Lie and The Black Sphere blog.
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2) Obama's White House Is 'Too White'?
By -spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Rosslyn Smith
According to Maureen Dowd, Barack Obama's latest problem may be because he isn't black enough:
The Obama White House is too white.
It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.
But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand "the slave thing," as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.
-spelling-error">Dowd continues:
The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn't bother to Google, they weren't familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn't return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong.
Dowd then collects quotes from several aging veterans of the 1960s civil rights era -- John Lewis, James Clyburn, Eleanor Holmes Norton -- as well as unnamed sources. Here is one of the anonymous quotes: "Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?"
Outside of wondering when the Irish-American Dowd became the arbiter of the authentically black in American politics, my first reaction to the above was, Who ever suspected that Andrew Breitbart was such an evil genius? In plucking Shirley Sherrod out of obscurity to make a point about the NAACP and the Tea Parties, could OR_39">Breitbart have started a small-scale war among black American politicians?
All I can say is, thank God that instead of telling them all to shut up, baby boomer Maureen ror" id="SPELLING_ERROR_40">Dowd encouraged these political old timers to publicly nurse egos bruised when the Generation X occupants of the White House didn't fall down in awe of all things from the 1960s. The fault lines Dowd writes about have actually existed for some time now, but it is hard to imagine a less appropriate time for veterans of the civil rights era to be dissing Obama for lacking a personal claim to authentic black victim status. While Obama may not have shared their experiences in a pre-Civil Rights era South, neither do millions of other blacks born in the north at too late a date to recall seeing stories about Freedom Riders on the Huntley-Brinkley Report, or who heard parents talk about newspaper headlines about members of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee over breakfast.
Those doing the complaining about Obama on race seem to miss what the focus of most people in the Tea Party is. Obama not only shares the redistributionist agenda many so-called civil rights activists have promoted their entire political careers, but he is also coming close to putting that agenda into operation in major segments of the economy. There is nothing racial about being opposed to Marxist-style class warfare solutions that, for all their claims of social justice and fairness, have been repeatedly proven to worsen economic conditions for the vast majority of a nation's citizens.
This fall, Democrats need an enthusiastic turnout by black voters in several statewide election contests. Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio immediately come to mind. While expressed support for Obama among blacks remains very high in the polls, converting that support to actual votes for other Democrats on the November ballot is not a given -- not with the stated black unemployment rate currently exceeding 15%, black-on-black crime high, and large cities all across the nation cutting back on services.
Even a small drop in the turnout percentage among black voters could cost the Democrats several Senate seats and governor's mansions. Intensity of political support can be very much a function of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately. This is not usually measured in the the abstract terms favored by academic types, who love mankind in general while showing disdain for most humans as individuals. "Where are the jobs?" is an almost universal political question this summer.
As someone who was a local political junkie when I lived in Chicago, Dowd's unawareness that Obama has heard the complaints she reported at least once before in his political career is amusing. In the tribalism of Chicago politics, the reaction to the Hawaiian-born, Indonesia-raised Barack Obama's status until quite recently was the wait-and-see attitude reserved for an untried son in-law, not the full embrace given a genuinely beloved member of the civil rights community. For years, some blacks looked at Obama's exceptionally large number of "present" votes in the State Senate and wondered what exactly his game was. Where could he be fit along the traditional local scale between the greedy pragmatists, who wanted only to run the Cook County Democrat machine for themselves, and the starry-eyed reformers, who desired to tear it all down in favor of their own pet theories of government?
Then, in their 2000 primary contest, Civil Rights-era veteran Congressman Bobby Rush effectively painted primary challenger Obama, the favorite of the University of Chicago community in Hyde Park, as an "educated fool" and an elite outsider. In promoting his own long career as a black nationalist to voters in Illinois' First Congressional District, Rush noted exactly what Dowd's sources say today: "Barack Obama is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it."
Chicago political insiders also noticed that in a redistricting map drawn after the 2000 census that was notorious for allowing incumbents of both parties to pick their constituents instead of the other way around, Obama ended up with a district that contained more affluent white liberals and fewer poor blacks. Black political colleagues would poke fun at Obama's trying to fit in as one of them by talking jive even as he also reminded everyone of his Harvard law degree. Several expressed open dislike of him to one of the few white reporters in the 2004 election cycle who bothered to ask.
My own suspicion is that we will know if the black dissatisfaction Dowd writes about is real by how actively partisan the First Lady is on the campaign trail this fall. If her schedule includes a great many stops in cities in key states and appearances in front of local chapters of the NAACP, ACORN offshoots, and other black activist venues, we will know there is a general enthusiasm gap, and not just some grousing by old-timers about the Generation X crowd. That's because, in her criticism of Barack Obama's "too white" set of advisors, Dowd overlooked Michelle Obama. Her family's background in Chicago's identity politics makes her the member of the administration best-suited for outreach to those who refuse to let go of "the slave thing."
Coming on the heels of the Journolist revelations, Dowd's musings about Obama's White House being too white call to mind one of Obama's peers in the Illinois State Senate. Before the national media climbed onto Obama's bandwagon and he started bringing home the political bacon from Washington, D.C., critical comments about him were far from heresy in Chicago political circles. In 2000, Illinois State Senator Donne Trotter also challenged Congressman Bobby Rush in the primary. When asked about the campaign, Trotter said this to a reporter from the alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader:
Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community. You have only to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It's these individuals in Hyde Park, who don't always have the best interest of the community in mind.
Today, Senator Trotter's criticism can be seen as both insensitive to Obama's mixed-race background and remarkably prescient about his political base being strongest among the white radical left. Over twenty months after they elected Obama president, many American voters feel they still don't know the full measure of the man they voted for, while the motives of those supporters on Journolist who labored to keep the voters intentionally blind -- even while urging them to make a leap of faith -- have become increasingly suspect.
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3)Nobody Can Fire Andrew Breitbart
By Christopher Chantrill
As the mainstream media synchronized their watches over the Shirley Sherrod affair, the object of their little trench raid was clear. Demonize Andrew Breitbart for the unethical publication of a video featuring Ms. Sherrod uttering racist remarks at an NAACP awards dinner.
You could see the strategy. The MSM wanted to discredit and demonize Breitbart so that he could be fired or marginalized, just like Rush Limbaugh was fired from ESPN for the thoughtcrime of suggesting that the media wanted Donovan McNabb to succeed as the Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback because he was black.
But then I thought: Yeah, but who can fire Andrew Breitbart?
When Rush Limbaugh wanted to buy the St. Louis Rams, the Ruling Elite trailed a few stories about his supposed racist remarks. They pressured the NFL, and the NFL could pressure the syndicate to remove Rush.
But Andrew Breitbart? Can anyone fire him?
For that matter, what about Rush? You can kick him off ESPN; you can kick him off the St. Louis Rams. You can even force Snapple drinks and the Florida oranges off his radio show. But "they" haven't been able to fire him from his position as host of the Rush Limbaugh Program. The reason is, I suspect, that Rush's show is owned by not a public corporation, but a private venture. Rush has to keep the confidence of only his partners and affiliates, not the executive committee of the Ruling Class as a whole.
No doubt the same is true of Andrew Breitbart.
Here we see the late-dynasty stupidity of the Ruling Elite. A Ruling Elite that was up to the job would have co-opted or destroyed Limbaugh and Breitbart long ago.
Rush remarked on his radio show last week that he anticipated, when he moved to New York in 1988 and made talk radio into a national phenomenon, that he would get accepted into the social circles of the media elite.
But the invitation never came. Sorry, old chap -- not Ruling Class solidarity, you see.
Even Rush's acceptance into the modest social circle of conservative media was a big deal for him. When Bill Buckley died, he spoke on his show about his first visit to Buckley's New York home. He had his driver drive around the block before he could summon up the courage to enter Buckley's lair.
This is the guy who fearlessly skewers liberals daily on the EIB Network's fun, frolic, and serious discussions of the issues.
I suspect that Andrew Breitbart is even less biddable than Rush.
There is a generational pattern here. In Generation One, we had Buckley, the Catholic rich man's son with a non-profit movement. In Generation Two, we had Rush, the local WASP judge's grandson and a for-profit enterprise. But Generation Three, with Drudge and Breitbart, is an outsider generation, a trouble-making insurgency. Drudge (born 1966) and Breitbart (born 1969) are both Jewish, and they take their place in a conservative movement that is increasingly combative and increasingly led by Jews.
In Generation One, conservatives fenced with the Ruling Class using foils, masks, jackets, and breeches. In Generation Two, conservatives roamed in the talk radio AM band hinterland around the Ruling Class's NPR-fortified cities. Now, in Generation Three, conservatives move through the internet as a fish swims in the sea.
In Generation One, conservatives wanted to be treated as part of the elite. So they were, grudgingly; Bill Buckley got his "Firing Line" show on PBS, and Milton Friedman got his "Free to Choose." Generation Two never got past the TV Nazis. No PBS shows for them. Rush's syndicated television show was confined to middle-of-the-night time slots. Generation Three is different. It aims to get respect with hard-knuckle action in the mean streets of the internet. That is what Andrew Breitbart is all about, as Kyle Wingfield recognizes:
Breitbart is clear about his desire to turn the tables on liberal media and activist groups. That's why he went after ACORN, and why it makes sense that he'd set his sights higher than an obscure bureaucrat.
Breitbart aimed to play the race card right back in the face of the racist NAACP. While the media was busy getting its knickers in a twist about out-of-context quotes, Breitbart had managed to make fools of both the NAACP and the Obama administration.
Or maybe it's just a coincidence that the Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index dipped to -20 over the weekend.
You can't hurt Andrew Breitbart by playing the "out-of-context" card, the one that leads into a demand to have the conservative racist fired. In the kind of ball that Breitbart plays, there is no appealing to the friendly umpire or the CEO who fears a call from the White House.
Breitbart is BigGovernment.com. He is BigJournalism.com, and BigHollywood.com, and BigPeace.com. He's not shilling for some Mr. Big, some right-wing George Soros.
Guess what, liberals. He can't be fired.
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com.
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4)How Smart Are We?
By Thomas Sowell
Many of the wonderful-sounding ideas that have been tried as government policies have failed disastrously. Because so few people bother to study history, often the same ideas and policies have been tried again, either in another country or in the same country at a later time-- and with the same disastrous results.
One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and far-sighted people need to take control and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things being allowed to take their own course. It sounds so logical and plausible that demanding hard evidence would seem almost like nit-picking.
In one form or another, this idea goes back at least as far as the French Revolution in the 18th century. As J.A. Schumpeter later wrote of that era, "general well-being ought to have been the consequence," but "instead we find misery, shame and, at the end of it all, a stream of blood."
The same could be said of the Bolshevik Revolution and other revolutions of the 20th century.
The idea that the wise and knowledgeable few need to take control of the less wise and less knowledgeable many has taken milder forms-- and repeatedly with bad results as well.
One of the most easily documented examples has been economic central planning, which was tried in countries around the world at various times during the 20th century, among people of differing races and cultures, and under government ranging from democracies to dictatorships.
The people who ran central planning agencies usually had more advanced education than the population at large, and probably higher IQs as well.
The central planners also had far more statistics and other facts at their disposal than the average person had. Moreover, there were usually specialized experts such as economists and statisticians on the staffs of the central planners, and outside consultants were available when needed. Finally, the central planners had the power of government behind them, to enforce the plans they created.
It is hardly surprising that conservatives, such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, opposed this approach. What is remarkable is that, after a few decades of experience with central planning in some countries, or a few generations in others, even communists and socialists began to repudiate this approach.
As they replaced central planning with more reliance on markets, their countries' economic growth rate almost invariably increased, often dramatically. In the largest and most recent examples-- China and India-- people by the millions have risen above these countries' official poverty rates, after they freed their economies from many of their suffocating government controls.
China, where famines have repeatedly ravaged the country, now has a problem of obesity-- not a good thing in itself, but a big improvement over famines.
This has implications far beyond economics. Think about it: How was it even possible that transferring decisions from elites with more education, intellect, data and power to ordinary people could lead consistently to demonstrably better results?
One implication is that no one is smart enough to carry out social engineering, whether in the economy or in other areas where the results may not always be so easily quantifiable. We learn, not from our initial brilliance, but from trial and error adjustments to events as they unfold.
Science tells us that the human brain reaches its maximum potential in early adulthood. Why then are young adults so seldom capable of doing what people with more years of experience can do?
Because experience trumps brilliance.
Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they pre-empt. The education and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as the well-being, of the people as a whole.
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5)What We Can Learn: An Excerpt from Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
How Europe builds better products for better lives.
By Thomas Geoghegan
A young member of the IG Metall union protests during a rally at the Opera Square on September 5, 2009, in Frankfurt, Germany. (Photo by: Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images)
It's no accident that the social democracies—Sweden, France and Germany, who kept on paying high wages—now have more industry than the United States or the UK.SHARE THIS ARTICLE Americans may believe the United States is set up for the middle class, and Europe is set up for the bourgeois. Or let’s put it this way: America is a great place to buy kitty litter at Wal-Mart and relatively cheap gas. But it is not designed for me, a professional without a lot of money. That’s who Europe is for: people like me.
OK, as a union-side lawyer, Europe’s really set up for people like my clients, or those who used to be my clients before the unions in America collapsed. Let’s put my own self-interest aside: Where would my clients, who are not poor, who make $30,000 to $50,000 a year and yet keep coming up short, maybe by $100, $200 a month, really be better off?
That’s easy: Europe. I can answer that as their lawyer, the way a doctor could answer about their health. The bottom two-thirds of America would be better off in Europe. I mean the people who have not had a raise (an hourly raise in real dollars) in maybe 40 years, and who do not even have a 401(k), nothing but Social Security, and either have no health insurance or pay deductibles of $2,000 or more. Sure, they’d be better off in Europe. When unemployed, they’d certainly be better off in Europe. Over there, even single men can get on welfare. And in much of Europe, contrary to what we hear, unemployment is much lower than over here.
One of the ways Europe is set up for the bourgeois — including, perhaps, many readers of this magazine — is the very fact that it is also set up for people who make $50,000 or below. Since it’s set up for these people too, the bourgeois — me, maybe you — get the political cover to have it set up for them. What the people-in-the-unions get, people-from-the-good-schools also get. (And indeed, in Europe people-in-the-unions are often people-from-the-good-schools.) They get the six weeks of vacation each year and the pension like a golden parachute. And the higher up we are in terms of income, the more valuable these things are. In America, they don’t tell us: Social democracy, or socialism, or whatever Europe has, pays off biggest for people in the upper middle class, those just below the top.
Public and private wealth
Take Zurich and Chicago. One looks good and the other, broken down. If America has such a famously high GDP per capita and Chicago is one of America’s crown jewels, maybe there is something wrong with using GDP per capita as an index of social well-being. It’s not that the numbers “lie” in any crude way, but past a certain point, maybe these numbers mislead us as to where we’re better off. For to look at the numbers, who would guess that Zurich looks gloriously like Zurich all over, and that Chicago looks glorious in Lincoln Park, dumpy west of Pulaski Avenue, and gulag-like by 26th and California? But forget the look of the place. It’s also the way of life.
The numbers say, on paper, I have a better way of life in Chicago. But are these numbers right? It may be that, past a certain level, an increase in GDP per capita pushes my living standard down. I don’t mean this in a spiritual sense — I mean it in a cold, neutral, out-of-pocket sense. Example: If I make more by working longer, I might subcontract out more of my life and incur other “costs,” like losing a trip to Zurich, which may be of far more value than the extra income. Or another example: If I get a raise, I might be worse off. I might widen the gap in income with others around me. Who cares? Well, by doing this, I might be spreading poverty, which, like everything, is relative. I might make my public space more of a hellhole than before.
People at the libertarian Cato Institute love to scoff: “Oh, our poor in America are so well off in GDP per capita.” Go ahead. Argue. I’ll let you win. But I dare the Cato types, when the argument is over, to go outside and walk around some Chicago neighborhoods.
In other words, the further ahead we get, the more our standard of living drops. Let’s say, as a European, I work 1,500 hours a year. Now, let’s put me at 1,800 or even 2,300 hours, like many Americans. While I’ve moved to higher GDP per capita, I don’t have:
• Six weeks off.
• A perfect cup of coffee to sip at some place other than the office.
• A city to inhale like a bank of violets.
In 2005, the real hourly wage for production workers in America was approximately 8 percent lower than it was in 1973, while our national output (productivity) per hour is 55 percent higher. So it’s dubious whether most Americans have gained even a penny in purchasing power since 1989. And even skewed by all this U.S-type inequality, we understate what Europeans at the “middling” level are able to get for free, i.e., publicly provided goods like education, healthcare, cities like banks of violets. Even apart from the grotesque U.S. social inequality, the net purchasing power disparity after we toss in the public goods is not so great.
Or maybe I mean this: Europe has a kind of invisible GDP, which we don’t know how to count. The ambitious European who might want to work 2,300 hours may be the luckiest to escape his or her fate under the U.S. model. When that person has 700 more hours a year, to learn an extra language, to go to Sri Lanka, or just to read, it’s that high achiever who may be best off under the European model.
It’s no accident that the social democracies — Sweden, France and Germany, who kept on paying high wages — now have more industry than the United States or the UK. During the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, the Anglo-Americans, the neoliberals, The Economist crowd, and the press generally, would taunt the social democrats in Europe: “You’d better break the unions.” That’s the way to save your industry.
Indeed, that’s what the United States and the UK did: They smashed the unions, in the belief that they had to compete on cost. The result? They quickly ended up wrecking their industrial base. But Germany, Sweden and France ignored the advice of the Anglo-Americans, the Financial Times elite, the banking industry: Contrary to what they were told to do, they did not wreck their unions.
And it was the high labor cost that pushed those countries into making higher “value-added” things. Where is Germany competitive? It’s in high-end, precision machinery, made by people with the highest skills. It’s in engineering services. People look at Germany and say, “What about the German unemployment?” But no one in the United States ever says, “What about the German labor shortages?”
Even in 2008, precisely because of “globalization,” Germany had a serious shortage of people able to fill high-skill, high-paying jobs, especially engineers. In the United States, engineers complain they can’t find work; many of them just end up in sales. In the union-free, lower-cost United States, we don’t create the kind of jobs engineers can do. Germany’s problem? It has too many such jobs. It’s our whole globalization thesis turned upside down.
That leads to a seeming paradox: Higher labor costs can make a country more, not less, competitive. In many ways, the United States and the UK got out of manufacturing because their labor costs were too low. I have spent my life watching plants close in Milwaukee and Waukegan, where skilled labor was paid $26 an hour, only to reopen in Georgia and North Carolina, where it was paid $8 an hour. While still fighting over severance two years later, we get the news: The company is bankrupt. The products it makes so cheaply are now crap.
The German model
In the United States, our elite, scoffing, says that there is just not enough labor-market flexibility in a country like Germany to allow it to adapt to globalization as we do. But it’s precisely because of our flexibility that we can’t compete. What the laws manage to do in Germany is to keep people together and to hold onto their skills in groups. Co-determination and works councils — in other words, worker control — keep people in groups, rubbing elbows with each other, and all this rubbing of elbows helps build up human capital.
Indeed, for some economists this is now a fashionable idea. Think of all the buzz about the “knowledge” economy, which, in the world of academic economists, is an inquiry into how knowledge drives economic growth. David Warsh in his 2006 book, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, introduces us to economists trying to untangle the connections between the kind of knowledge that comes from groups and economic growth.
German worker control contributes to a group interaction that over time not only builds up but also protects a certain amount of human capital, especially in engineering and quality control. This kind of knowledge is not just individual but group knowledge. It’s the kind of group knowledge that our efficient, “flexible” labor markets so readily break up and disperse. It’s our flexible labor markets that make it so hard for the United States and the UK to compete. We spend vastly more on basic research than the Germans do — U.S. companies are unrivaled. We spend far more on higher education. But with our flexible labor markets, we’re unable to capitalize on this research and education. Sometimes we try the Japanese model of work, but we never try the German, because we don’t want to cede any real control to workers. Supposedly it’s a great mystery why Germans keep investing in manufacturing and even prospering, despite the claims that the German education system is broken (OK, it needs help) and they aren’t spending enough on research (OK, they aren’t). But they’re doing something right. What is distinctive about Germany is the privileged position the worker has within the firm.
And we must look to that privileged position of the worker to explain how our own middle-class way of life can survive. Putting more money into education is a waste of effort. Putting more money into basic research is a waste of effort. We already spend enough. In fact, we have every factor of production going for us: We have more land, more labor, more capital and higher levels of formal education. But with our flexible labor markets, we cannot develop the human capital or knowledge needed to wean ourselves away from turning out crap. In global competition, the United States has almost every comparative advantage over Germany, but the one great comparative advantage Germany still has over us is that it is a social democracy. Yes, I admit Germany has its problems. But we’re losing our middle class, and our problems are even worse.
The real knowledge economy
The strangest thing I saw this year is a YouTube video, with a hip-hop soundtrack, about a lot of German kids on strike. These were IG Metall apprentices, and they weren’t like the kids in the cafés. (IG Metall is the largest metal workers’ union in Germany.) Instead they wore black, gray and white car coats and were from obscure little German towns, but all of them were marching, at night, both boys and girls, striking against the big global companies for not delivering on jobs. At about the same time as the strike, IG Metall held a rock concert with Bob Geldof, which drew 50,000 people, mostly kids. Here’s a shocking thing to a U.S. labor lawyer like me: In 2008, youth membership in IG Metall — kids under 27 who voluntarily pay union dues — climbed yet again, this time by 6 percent. At last count, IG Metall had more than 200,000 of these kids! As someone who ran for Congress and found out why campaign staffs think it a waste of time to bother with young people, I find that stunning. Even the Financial Times, which always writes off labor, has had to admit that in Germany, unions are resurging among kids who are highly skilled.
Why are kids in Germany paying dues, voluntarily?
I think it’s an American who can best explain why. It’s not Marx but John Dewey whose picture should be in the lobby of the Willy Brandt Haus, the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party. It’s Dewey who believed that schools should not just teach practical skills but explain why kids have to be political, to be citizens and yes, to get into labor movements to protect the skills they are acquiring. One can say that union membership is a “tradition” in certain industries. But that’s just an opaque way of saying that the kids get politicized both at home and at school as they go through the Dual Track — Germany’s specialized, apprenticeship vocational schools.
The answer to the problems of our country is education, but not the kind we’re pursuing, i.e., jamming more kids into college or even teaching practical skills; instead, it’s teaching them how, politically, to cut themselves a better deal. As long as that’s going on, it’s impossible to write off the European or, more specifically, the German model.
Just as the answer to the problems of democracy is usually more democracy, so the answer to the problems of a social democracy is usually more social democracy.
This essay was adapted from Thomas Geoghegan’s new book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life (The New Press)
5a)The Foreign Investment Solution for American Jobs
You know that battery plant in Michigan the president visited the other day? It's Korean-owned.
By ROBERT M. KIMMITT AND MATTHEW J. SLAUGHTER
At the ground-breaking ceremony for a new factory in Michigan this month, President Barack Obama touted the fact that 300 people will soon be employed building lithium-ion car batteries there. "These are jobs in the industries of the future," Mr. Obama said at the Compact Power Inc. plant. "You are leading the way in showing how manufacturing jobs are coming right back here to the United States of America."
Nowhere in his remarks did the president mention that Compact Power is a subsidiary of LG Chem Limited, a multinational firm headquartered in South Korea. But it is important for the administration to acknowledge explicitly that it can promote job creation by supporting investment in the U.S. by foreign companies like LG Chem. Such support should begin with free trade agreements (the U.S.-South Korean agreement remains stalled in Congress), but extend far beyond.
Since December 2007, the U.S. has lost 16% of its manufacturing jobs. Just 11.7 million Americans work in manufacturing today, the fewest since April 1941. Michigan has been hit hardest, losing 11.3% of its total jobs as the number of unemployed Michiganders has nearly doubled. The state unemployment rate hit 14.5% last December and is now at 13.6%.
For decades, multinational companies headquartered outside the U.S. have been creating high-paying American jobs. According to the Commerce Department's most recent data, over 5.5 million Americans—4.6% of all private-sector workers—are employed at such companies here. Foreign multinationals account for 11.3% of capital investment and 14.8% of research and development in the U.S. private sector, along with 18.5% of all exports of goods. Much of this activity is in manufacturing. More than 36% of the Americans working for foreign multinationals—nearly two million—are in manufacturing, which accounts for less than 11% of all private-sector U.S. workers.
In 2007, total U.S. compensation at these multinational companies was $403.6 billion—a per-worker average of $72,363. That was 33.2% higher than the average of $54,319 for the rest of the U.S. private sector. Moreover, contrary to popular opinion, these companies have high unionization rates. In 2007, 12.4% of their U.S. employees were covered by collective bargaining agreements—versus just 8.2% of private-sector workers overall.
LG Chem is a prime example of how international investment benefits the U.S. economy. The company started researching lithium-ion batteries in South Korea in 1995, began producing them three years later, and now employs 14,000 employees across 28 subsidiaries world-wide. Compact Power was founded in 2001 as one such subsidiary, and its R&D operations in Michigan have won multiple contracts from the U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium.
To support similar international investment into the U.S., the Obama administration can take two significant steps immediately.
First, it should issue an "open investment policy" statement to affirm its commitment to policies that promote foreign investment, such as granting foreign investors "national treatment" so they can operate in the U.S. as American companies do with regard to bidding on contracts, making capital investments, and hiring personnel. (An important exception, however, is that the government justifiably denies national treatment to foreign companies whose operations present potential national security concerns.)
Second, Mr. Obama should formally designate a single official as the federal government's point person on international investment. Many different federal agencies currently have responsibility for some element of U.S. investment policy, including the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the departments of State, Treasury and Commerce. This dispersion of authority can create turf battles that muddle policy. Designating a single senior official—such as the National Economic Council deputy who also serves as the president's sherpa for the G-20—would underscore the importance that the U.S. attaches to investment from multinationals.
These steps are especially important since the U.S. faces increasing competition to attract and retain companies like LG Chem. The U.S. share of global foreign direct investment is now only about half what it was 20 years ago. Meanwhile, countries like China and India continue to grow and gradually liberalize their economies. This highlights the need for smart U.S. investment policies that support American job growth.
Mr. Kimmitt served as deputy secretary of the Treasury from 2005-2009. Mr. Slaughter served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2005 to 2007.
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6)Go for Growth: An agenda for Republicans.
BY Matthew Continetti
If Republicans were James Bond villains, this would be the moment in the movie when they chuckle and say deviously, “Everything is going according to plan.” The president’s approval rating continues to fall. Last week Gallup found that Congress is the least popular institution in the land. The GOP maintains a slight lead in the congressional generic ballot, a metric in which the Republicans typically underperform. What was recently unthinkable—that the GOP could take one or both houses of Congress this November—is a real possibility.
If only Republicans knew what to do when (and if) they return to power.
True, there are some conservatives and Republicans who believe an agenda isn’t necessary. Let the Democrats fall under their own weight, they say. Then we can clean up the mess. Alternative policies, in their view, would only give liberals and Democrats something to demagogue in the campaign. Better to remain cautious. Better to wait until the storm is over.
They’re wrong. Not only is such a strategy timid, it is also a false reading of the last two years in American politics. After all, the Democrats are a case study in the perils of victory by default. It was not a strong alternative agenda that netted the Democrats 55 House seats and 16 Senate seats between 2006 and 2008. The party made those gains by vigorously opposing an unpopular war, an unpopular president, a corrupt Republican majority, and an economy in recession. The Democrats won by being the other guy. (A little luck, in the form of razor-thin Senate victories in Montana and Virginia in 2006 and Minnesota in 2008, and Arlen Specter’s defection in 2009, helped too.) Nor did Obama run on bailouts, a trillion-dollar stimulus, and a health insurance mandate. He ran on an airy promise to bring the country together and govern differently from George W. Bush.
Look where that has brought him and his party. A lack of new ideas and victory through opposition may have provided the Democrats with tactical victories. But every day those victories look more and more Pyrrhic—indeed, they may have opened the door for Republican strategic victory in 2010 and 2012 and beyond. Yes, the Democratic majority emerged. But it isn’t durable. Liberalism is exhausted.
Liberals and Democrats write all this off, of course. The reason President Obama is unpopular, they argue, isn’t that his agenda is too liberal for public consumption. It’s that the economy continues to be in the doldrums. That’s true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far.
Obama’s agenda has hurt him. It is hard to think of an era in which the political majority pushed so many unpopular initiatives in such a short span of time. From the stimulus to the mandate to cap and trade to flirting with a trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court to suing Arizona for enforcing federal immigration law, it’s almost as if this administration enjoys being on the wrong side of public opinion. Can liberals honestly believe that these policies would be more popular if America were at full employment?
The reason the economy hurts Obama is that his agenda has not produced a recovery. At best, the legislation he has signed into law has delayed the financial reckoning. At worst, it has actively hindered recovery by increasing the regulatory and tax burdens on business and crowding out private investment. And so a principled and cheerful opposition to the Obama-Pelosi-Reid legislation, and a promise to overturn that legislation’s worst elements, is the beginning of a Republican agenda. But just the beginning.
Luckily, the GOP still has some idea men in its ranks. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), led by Representative Tom Price of Georgia, has designed an alternative budget resolution. And Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has designed a long-term Roadmap for America’s Future. Both plans limit government and encourage growth. Ryan’s plan is especially audacious, as it overhauls the welfare state in a market-oriented, conservative direction. The really remarkable thing, however, is that these are the only two Republican visions of the future at this time of political and economic ferment. Why aren’t there more?
An enterprising conservative would build on the RSC and Ryan plans with an explicitly pro-growth agenda. He (or she!) would do this with the understanding that only robust, broad-based, and prolonged economic growth will produce jobs, reduce the debt burden, and increase social cohesion. He (or she) would be aware of a recent study by the Kauffman Foundation that found that net job growth in the United States comes from firms less than one year old. This enterprising conservative’s growth agenda, therefore, would make it a point to reduce hindrances to entrepreneurship and small business.
Meaning? An extension of current tax rates on income, dividends, and capital gains until the economy is booming and Congress is ready to undertake large-scale, pro-family, pro-investment tax reform. A payroll tax cut. A promise to take the Federal Register to the paper shredder, reducing the number of regulations that aspiring businessmen face when they start new ventures. A plan to withdraw from GM and Fannie and Freddie and end corporate welfare. A commitment to advance free trade by passing stalled agreements with South Korea and Colombia and championing new agreements with India and Africa.
The benefits associated with this agenda would not only be economic. The public would know where conservatives and Republicans stand. They would know what to expect in the years to come. And they would be able to hold the GOP accountable. The alternative is for Republicans to stand pat, benefit in the short term from Obama’s unpopularity in 2010—and reap the whirlwind in 2012.
—Matthew Continetti
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7)The Desperation of an Afghan Deal
By Michael Gerson
The Wikileaks document download -- illustrating Afghan corruption, Pakistani duplicity and Taliban toughness -- revealed little that is new. But it will intensify a popular kind of desperation.
A consensus is growing among foreign policy realists, skittish NATO allies and anti-war activists that the time has come to cut a deal with the Taliban. The Afghan government is hopeless; recent elections were discrediting; nation-building has failed. The only hope is to pursue not only reintegration of low- and mid-level Taliban fighters into Afghan society but reconciliation with Taliban leaders based in Pakistan. As long as these leaders end their relationship with al-Qaeda -- the only firm, non-negotiable red line -- the Taliban could return to effective control of southern Afghanistan in a more decentralized system.
Some Afghans are preparing for this prospect -- particularly those who find themselves on the wrong side of the red line. "Women are living in great fear for a peace deal with the Taliban because of what it will mean for their rights," says the manager of an Afghan woman's shelter. In areas currently controlled by the Taliban, schools for girls are shut down, women terrorized for working outside the home, woman politicians and activists attacked and murdered. A typical "night letter" from the Taliban reads: "We warn you to leave your job as a teacher as soon as possible otherwise we will cut the heads off your children and we shall set fire to your daughter." An Afghan women's rights activist recently explained to Human Rights Watch, "Every woman activist who has raised her voice in the last 10 years fears they (the Taliban) will kill us."
This debate is not only a conflict of two policy views but of two worlds. Recently, I attended a meeting of diplomats, foreign policy experts and journalists where a diplomatic settlement with the Taliban was broadly endorsed. The participants admitted that some regrettable abuses would result. But Afghanistan, in the general view, had become a costly distraction from issues such as Iran and North Korea. Best to cut our losses and get out. Around the polished table, every participant was a well-dressed, Western man, casually condemning millions of poor and powerless women to fear and slavery.
Supporters of a settlement with the Taliban respond that they are just facing reality -- that protecting the rights of Afghan women is desirable; it is simply not possible. In truth, they know no such thing. Those who predict defeat in Afghanistan significantly overlap with those who confidently predicted defeat in Iraq. Their military judgments merit some skepticism, particularly when American commanders are pursuing a new strategy in Afghanistan they believe may succeed. We should be suspicious of a realism that always amounts to defeatism.
The prospect of serious negotiations with the Taliban does not seem particularly realistic. If America were to insist on protections for the rights of women, ethnic minorities and civil society as preconditions for power sharing discussions with the Taliban, it would probably be a deal breaker. As it stands, the Taliban has every reason to think that it wins by enduring. A panting desire for a hasty deal only encourages this belief. Coming to the table at this point, the Taliban would have little motivation to make concessions on the most fundamental aspects of its ideology.
If the coalition does not insist on the protection of human rights as a precondition for negotiations, the whole thing gets much easier. It is always easy to end a conflict by giving in to the enemy. Reconciliation with the Taliban from a position of weakness -- granting the Taliban control over portions of the country -- bears a close resemblance to surrender. No paper assurances could hide the reality that America, under military pressure from Islamist radicals, had betrayed millions of Afghan men and women into comprehensive tyranny.
When asked last month about the possibility of an American settlement with the Taliban, CIA Director Leon Panetta responded: "We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation, where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce al-Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society. We've seen no evidence of that and very frankly, my view is that with regards to reconciliation, unless they're convinced that the United States is going to win and that they're going to be defeated, I think it's very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that's going to be meaningful."
This is the realistic alternative: Win first, then negotiate.
7a)From WikiLeaks to the Killing Fields Liberals contemplate withdrawal from Afghanistan, heedless of the consequences
By BRET STEPHENS
Innocent civilians become the tragic casualties of war. Insurgents plant thousands of IEDs. Special-ops teams hunt down insurgents. The Taliban may have a few Stinger missiles. Pakistan plays a double game with the Taliban. The U.S. government can't keep its secrets. The New York Times has about as much regard for those secrets as a British tabloid has for a starlet's privacy. The Obama administration blames everything on Bush.
Is any of this news? Not exactly.
Still, you'd be forgiven for thinking it is, given the Pentagon Papers-style treatment now being accorded to the WikiLeak of 92,000 classified documents on the Afghan War. John Kerry says the documents "raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan." WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sees "evidence of war crimes." A Time magazine columnist, making explicit the comparison with the Vietnam War, offers that the leak underscores "how futile the situation in Afghanistan is."
We'll see about that. In the meantime, take note of another item in the news: Yesterday's conviction by a U.N. tribunal of former Khmer Rouge prison commandant Kaing Guek Eav—better known as "Comrade Duch"—to 19 years in prison for his role in the Cambodian genocide. Remarkably, Duch is the first senior Khmer Rouge official to be convicted for the crimes of Pol Pot's regime, more than three decades after it was evicted from Phnom Penh.
The Cambodian genocide is especially worth recalling today not only for what it was, but for the public debates in the West that immediately preceded it. "The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns," said then-congressman, now senator, Chris Dodd, by way of making the case against the Ford administration's bid to extend military assistance to the pro-American government of Lon Nol.
In the New York Times, Sydney Schanberg reported from Cambodia that "it is difficult to imagine how [Cambodian] lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." Mr. Schanberg added that "it would be tendentious to forecast [genocide] as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over."
A year later, Mr. Schanberg was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, though not for tendentiousness.
All in all, America's withdrawal from Southeast Asia resulted in the killing of an estimated 165,000 South Vietnamese in so-called re-education camps; the mass exodus of one million boat people, a quarter of whom died at sea; the mass murder, estimated at 100,000, of Laos's Hmong people; and the killing of somewhere between one million and two million Cambodians.
Now we have the debate over Afghanistan. Should America begin to withdraw, and if so, how soon and by how much? These are important questions, although it's interesting to note how so many of the same people—including the Time columnist mentioned above—who now see nothing but quagmire and futility in Afghanistan were making precisely the same noises about Iraq in 2007. As was once said about the old Bourbon dynasty, they forget nothing—and they learn nothing.
It's also interesting to note that the further the debate moves politically leftward, the louder the calls for an immediate withdrawal become. Here again, the same people who protest every drone strike as a violation of the laws of war, or trumpet every inflated Taliban claim of civilian casualties as irrefutable fact, also want America out of Afghanistan. Right now. For the sake of peace.
As it happens, there is a defensible, if flawed, case for an American exit from Afghanistan. It is an argument based on a bloodless tabulation of economic and strategic costs and benefits, an argument about whether—as former Secretary of State James Baker was alleged to have said about the Balkans—the U.S. really has a dog in this fight. It is an argument that discounts considerations of American sacrifice and honor. It is an argument that is profoundly indifferent to whatever furies will engulf Afghanistan once the Taliban returns, as surely they will, provided the spillover effects are somehow contained.
In an old-fashioned sense, it is a very Republican argument. Just ask Pat Buchanan.
But somewhere in the bowels of the State Department, somebody might want to think hard about the human consequences of American withdrawal. What happens to the Afghan women who removed their burqas in the late fall of 2001, or the girls who enrolled in government schools? What happens to the army officers and civil servants who cooperated with the coalition? What happens to the villagers who stood with us when we asked them to?
It is a peculiar fact of modern liberalism that its best principles have most often been betrayed by self-described liberals. As with Cambodia, they may come to know it only when—for Afghans, at least—it is too late.
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8)Giving Lousy Teachers the Boot Michelle Rhee does the once unthinkable in Washington.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
Donald Trump is not the only one who knows how to get attention with the words, "You're fired." Michelle Rhee, chancellor for the District of Columbia schools, has just done a pretty nifty job of it herself.
On Friday, Ms. Rhee fired 241 teachers—roughly 6% of the total—mostly for scoring too low on a teacher evaluation that measures their performance against student achievement. Another 737 teachers and other school-based staff were put on notice that they had been rated "minimally effective." Unless these people improve, they too face the boot.
The mass dismissals follow a landmark agreement Ms. Rhee negotiated with the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) at the end of June. The quid pro quo was this: Good teachers would get more money (including a 21.6% pay increase through 2012 and opportunities for merit pay). In exchange, bad teachers could be shown the door.
At the time, many gave the teachers union credit for approving this deal. Here's how another New York-based newspaper described the contract:
"Teachers' unions around the country are realizing that they can either participate in shaping reforms or have others' reforms forced upon them. The latest example comes from Washington, where the union has wisely negotiated and ratified a contract that gives the city greater leeway to pay, promote or fire teachers based on performance."
The danger, of course, was always that the taxpayers would make good on the money, but the promised accountability would never materialize. In this case, however, the accounting has begun. Apparently Ms. Rhee is a lady who means what she puts her name to.
The same cannot be said for the other side. WTU President George Parker told the Washington Post that the union would appeal the firings—and he threatened to file an unfair labor practice complaint with the District. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, accused Ms. Rhee of "stubbornly adhering to the destructive cycle of 'fire, hire, repeat.'"
Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a national voice for charters and school choice, says the responses from union leaders show they are not used to dealing with a chancellor willing to call their bluff. "The union has been given so much credit for 'coming to the table,'" she says. "But if you really believe what you signed, you don't then announce to the local paper you are filing a grievance when the other side tries to make good on that contract."
Now, getting good teachers in the classroom and rewarding them for their work has always been a key aim of reformers. Alas, that also requires getting the dead weight out of the classroom and off the payroll. That's not so easy to do in big-city school districts, as reformers like Joel Klein, New York's school chancellor, have found.
So why has Ms. Rhee succeeded where others have come up short? One huge reason is the advance of school choice and accountability throughout Washington. Though reform has come fitfully to D.C., today 38% of the district's students are in charter schools. Until the Democrats killed it, there was also a voucher program for a few thousand more. The result of all this ferment is that the teachers union is feeling pressure it has never felt before.
Maybe that's why, unlike so many in her position, Ms. Rhee has not been afraid to speak up for more choice and more competition. "I'm a huge proponent of choice," she told The Wall Street Journal three years ago, "but I'm also an unbelievably competitive person, and my goal is . . . to create schools within the system that I believe are the most compelling choices."
Another way of putting that is this: Ms. Rhee is smart enough to know that when she negotiates with the unions, the shift to charters and choice in the district gives her more leverage for the reforms she needs.
When I emailed a spokesman for Education Secretary Arne Duncan asking if the administration supported Ms. Rhee's decision to fire the teachers not measuring up, the answer came back that "we have not weighed in on D.C. specifically but we support the use of student achievement as one factor in teacher evaluation." When asked if I could say that meant the secretary supports Ms. Rhee, the answer was "No," because "we do not know the facts." Two emails later, the clarification: "This is basically a staffing decision executing on their new labor agreement—something that is happening all across America—which is a local issue."
So goes the Obama administration. On the one hand, it deserves credit for contributing to a climate that challenges the status quo and supports certain initiatives. On the other hand, when a brave reformer such as Ms. Rhee actually makes a tough decision, it can be shy with the backup.
The good news is that Ms. Rhee isn't waiting for it.
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