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b) Antisemitism
c) Wokeness
d) Anti-capitalism and the embrace of Socialism and Communism
e) Defund the police
e) disregard enforcement of laws
f) contempt for respect for law and order
g) destruction of disciplined military
h) double standard of justice
i) equity instead of equality
k) challenges to many of the precepts in the Bill of Rights
l) weaponization of politics
m) character assassination and intimidation
n) affirmative action to elevate unachieved rights , ie. discrimination to fight discrimination
o) didactic teaching rather than open and free discussion
p) opposition to religion and freedom to worship
q) support and funding of terrorism and biased reporting
r) their new math
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1. TEACHING MATH IN 1950
A logger sells a truckload of timber for $100 His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit? $____
2. Teaching Math In 1970...
A logger sells a truckload of timber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit? $___
3. Teaching Math In 1990...
A logger sells a truckload of timber for $100. His cost of production is $80. Did he make a profit? __Yes or __No
4 Teaching Math In 2000...
A logger sells a truckload of timber for $100. His cost of production is $80, and his profit is $20.
Your assignment: Underline the number 20
5 Teaching Math In 2015...
A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living?
Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes?
6 Teaching Math in 2022...
Students no longer need any math skills to go to Graduate school.
2+2 = 4, or 22, or whatever you feel is correct.
There are no wrong answers, feel free to express your feelings e.g., anger, anxiety, inadequacy, helplessness, etc. Should you require debriefing at the conclusion of the exam there are counselors available to assist you to adjust back into the real world
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Public Unions vs. the People
A new book argues that government unions have seized unaccountable power. The author, Philip Howard, plans to make the case in court.
By Mene Ukueberuwa
Here’s a three-step summary of American politics. Conservatives harp about bad governance. Liberals ignore them and boost funding anyway, with the occasional exception of police. Then conservatives give up and bad governance goes on.
You know the results—dreary schools, dangerous streets and poor, costly services. But politicians bent on reform tend to hit the same wall: government unions. Philip Howard has spent three decades studying this problem, and he’s convinced it can never be solved through ordinary politics. Only the courts can uproot public unions and restore accountable government.
Mr. Howard, a lawyer and writer, first noticed how unions stymie governance during his public service in New York as a member of a neighborhood zoning board and chairman of the Municipal Art Society. “I kept wondering why my friends who had responsible jobs in government couldn’t do what they thought was right,” he recalls. That might be speeding up a land-use review for a construction project or approving repairs on a school building.
“I’d have discussions with them about what made sense in a particular situation, and they would say, ‘I wish I could, but I can’t.’ ” Any careful or profitable plans were quickly blown up by union rules, such as limits on workers’ hours and duties.
This week the New York transit union gave an example for the ages. It blocked the subway system’s plan to sync its schedule to new ridership norms, with fewer trains on slow days and lightly traveled routes and more trains on busy ones. The change would have saved $1.5 million a year, benefited riders and preserved workers’ paid hours. But an arbitrator shelved it Tuesday because the union couldn’t bear the “variations in start and end times.”
“They’re not just inefficient,” Mr. Howard says of the unions. “They’re designed for inefficiency.”
“They’re designed to require a new work crew to come cut a tree limb because the people fixing the rails don’t have authority to remove a tree limb. They’re designed to prevent supervisors from observing teachers, except under very controlled circumstances. They’re designed to prevent the principal from giving extra training to a teacher. They’re designed to prevent a supervisor in an agency from going and talking to a worker and soliciting ideas about how to make things work better.”
Mr. Howard, 74, keeps listing examples until I jump in to stop him. They’re fresh in his mind because these schemes are the target of his new book, “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions.”
He thinks one prerequisite for tackling the problem is to remind people how recent it is. “Most people in policy and government assume that public unions are a state of nature,” he laments. But while private workers first organized en masse in the 1870s, union contracts didn’t creep into government until the mid-20th century because leaders feared losing their leverage.
“Teddy Roosevelt, an original civil-service reformer, created a policy that basically said we’ll guard public employees against political firing, but we are not going to give them anything that looks like tenure.” That’s a reference to guidance Roosevelt issued in 1902 mandating that no labor rules could impede the firing of federal workers.
The next President Roosevelt held the line decades later. “FDR was firmly against public unions,” Mr. Howard says. “He understood that there was an inherent conflict of interest in public employees bargaining against government. They’re supposed to be working for the people, not getting more out of them.” That’s why two years after FDR blessed private unions by signing the National Labor Relations Act, he forbade public unions with equal fervor. “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” he wrote in 1937.
Mr. Howard describes what makes public and private unions so different. “Their incentives are different, because public workers are not at risk of overreach. If a private union asks for inefficient work rules, the company will go out of business or move to another place and they will lose their jobs. But government can’t move.” There’s almost no limit to what politicians can take from the public purse and give to employees, as long as each offer is small enough to evade headlines. So workers get incremental benefits that add up to insolvency, like zero healthcare premiums and mass exemptions from vital job duties.
But what makes public unions worse than other interest groups? Don’t they play the same game as Wall Street, or farmers, or the environmental lobby? Each of these pours money into elections and then asks politicians for payback at the public expense.
Mr. Howard says there’s no comparison. “First of all, other interest groups don’t have the legal authority of collective bargaining, which creates this huge interest group that political leaders have to satisfy in creating a contract,” he says. No one can force a governor to subsidize this or that industry like he promised on the campaign trail. But if he can’t meet the teachers union halfway on their demands, an arbitrator steps in to impose a settlement.
“Secondly, other interest groups are looking for a favor—a tax break, a subsidy. But the public unions are looking to exercise control over the entire operating machinery of government. It’s not a favor. It’s not a sliver from the public fisc. It’s the entire way the system works.” And they donate enough to get what they want. In his book, Mr. Howard reports that teachers unions often spend more on state elections than all business groups combined. Those funds go to Democrats by a factor of about 19 to 1.
The dam against public unions broke in 1962 when President John F. Kennedy allowed collective bargaining in the federal workforce. “That was payback for union support,” Mr. Howard says simply. But he believes the spread of unions to state governments had more to do with the liberal zeal of the 1960s than an exchange of political favors.
“You had the tide of the ‘rights revolution.’ Everyone had gotten rights. And it was long overdue in most areas. We had civil rights, we had gender rights, we got rights to help the disabled. And the state workers saw an opportunity and said, well, how about us? Why shouldn’t we have rights?” Governors in the Midwest and on the coasts didn’t put up a fight. Twenty states opened the door to public unions by 1968.
In less than a half-century, many of these states have stacked liabilities that they’ll never escape. In Illinois a 2021 Moody’s study found that it would cost an extra $65,000 from every household to cover unfunded pension commitments. A 10-year-old girl stuck in a bad Chicago school today might get a tax hike in two decades to fund her inept teacher’s retirement.
Mr. Howard says any politician who wants to roll back union power should prepare to give it all. “Scott Walker is really illustrative,” he says, citing the former Wisconsin governor who banned collective bargaining over pensions and health benefits. “He won, and it’s been good for Wisconsin. They save billions of dollars a year.” But the saga shows how unions “stop at nothing” when threatened.
“The unions collected tens of millions of dollars to recall Walker. But Walker won that. Then they got the DA to investigate him for alleged campaign violations in the recall election. And that ultimately was decided and thrown out by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.” Mr. Walker survived along with his reforms, but the drama upended his governorship, and he lost his bid for a third term in 2018. Similar resistance has blocked or reversed collective-bargaining reform in New Jersey, California and Ohio.
That’s where the courts come in. Mr. Howard thinks judges can curb union power where executives and legislatures have failed. And he sees a clear legal basis for the movement.
First he mentions the step the Supreme Court already took in Janus v. Afscme (2018). “The Janus decision made it unconstitutional to force nonunion members to pay agency fees,” he says. The court held that forced dues violate employees’ free-speech rights, because unions “couldn’t segregate those moneys from the funds that go to political speech.”
But the ruling’s impact has been minimal so far. “There’s been a marginal decrease in the dollars coming in, but there’s still huge dollars.” Unions claimed the same share of public employees last year as they did in 2018—about 34%. And they simply raised their dues to cover lost funds from nonmembers.
Mr. Howard has a bolder strategy, aimed at government’s duties instead of employees’ rights.
At the federal level, he says, the Constitution forbids the president to make agreements that limit his own essential powers, including the power to fire employees freely. “There is ample Supreme Court precedent on the need of the president and his officers to retain executive power.” He cites a series of cases that have upheld firing power with only narrow exceptions, from Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. (1935) to Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (2010). And he recalls that in the latter case, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote of “the president’s ‘exclusive and illimitable power of removal.’ So it’s a principle that’s been upheld many times.”
That line of reasoning could tear down the 1978 law that codifies federal bargaining. “It seems clear to me,” Mr. Howard says, “that the Civil Service Reform Act, which mandates collective bargaining in the federal service and also mandates procedures that make it virtually impossible to terminate civil servants, is unconstitutional.” For example, union employees are entitled to grievance arbitration before they can be fired, which usually takes months. “I think that the constitutional case there requires no step forward in existing precedent.”
His plan for the states is a bit more adventurous. He argues that unions rob elected officials of their governing power and thus violate the Constitution’s mandate that states have a republican form of government.
“James Madison talked about what that meant during the constitutional debates,” Mr. Howard says of the mandate, known as the Guarantee Clause. “And it meant that you can’t do precisely what they’ve done with the unions. You can’t give away power to any favored class.”
The rub here is that the Supreme Court has held the Guarantee Clause to be purely political and nonjusticiable. Mr. Howard acknowledges this, but he believes collective bargaining warps state governments’ structure beyond obvious limits. “It would take at least a modest step forward to get the courts to enforce it.”
The theory sounds far out, but Mr. Howard is putting time and money where his convictions are, working with public-interest firms to get in court as soon as possible. “I’m hopeful that we will bring cases in several states, because the states have somewhat different problems. That includes Illinois and New York, and probably California.”
He hasn’t entirely given up on politics either. “My hope is that the manageability of government will become a key issue in the 2024 election. People could start talking about the need to really make government work.” Unfortunately, few candidates do as Mr. Howard does and take on the actual culprit.
Mr. Ukueberuwa is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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Biden's indifference could spur Bibi's decision, concerns and need to pre-empt.
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Pundit: US concerned Israel will strike Iran without prior coordination
Ynet’s Ron Ben-Yishai: Reason for US top defense officials' visit to Israel is concern that Israel might attack Iran without notifying Washington ahead of time.
The Biden administration is concerned that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear sites without notifying Washington ahead of time, according to Ynet’s military analyst, Ron Ben-Yishai.
In a column he published on Sunday, Ben-Yishai wrote that the concerns brought the US to send to Israel, at short notice, the two most senior figures in the Pentagon - the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense - for clarification and coordination talks with senior officials of the Israeli defense establishment and with the senior political figures in Jerusalem.
US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, landed in Israel on Friday and met with IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is scheduled to arrive in Israel on Thursday of this week.
The reason for the visits, according to a senior member of Israel's defense establishment who was quoted in Ben-Yishai’s column, is that the White House and the Pentagon fear that the current Israeli government will surprise the United States by striking Iran and dragging Washington into a military conflict in the Middle East, while the United States and its allies are investing most of their resources in the Ukraine war and in the escalation of the "cold" conflict with China.
From an American point of view, noted Ben-Yishai, the situation now is similar to the one that prevailed between 2010 and 2012, when Barack Obama was President of the United States, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak planned to attack Iran.
The visits of the US officials follow the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) discovery of uranium enriched to 84% purity at the underground plant in Fordow.
Ben-Yishai noted that the element of time is the critical element that has gone wrong in the Israeli-American "security work plan", which was designed to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, as a result of the IAEA revelation.
If, until now, Jerusalem and Washington estimated that Israel has more than a year to complete preparations for a major attack in Iran and a war in other arenas that will develop in its wake, the assessment in Israel now is that the timetable will be significantly reduced.
Ben-Yishai outlines four issues which will be at the center of the meetings between the visiting top US officials and their Israeli counterparts:
The first - how the two countries can jointly deter Iran from enriching uranium to the 90% level which would be sufficient for one or more nuclear bombs. Israel believes that a credible Israeli-American military threat and additional severe sanctions will make the Iranians think twice before moving ahead.
The second - how Israel and the United States react if Iran becomes a fully-fledged nuclear threshold state. US officials are not hiding from their Israeli compatriots their concerns about a scenario in which Prime Minister Netanyahu gives the order to attack Iran, not only because it will thwart the Iranian nuclear program, but because it will silence and push the public protest over the judicial reform to the margins of the Israeli public's agenda.
That is why, according to Ben-Yishai, the Americans are demanding that Israel not act without coordinating and confirming with them. "You are a sovereign country," they will say in the meetings, "but it is better that we decide together how to react because in the end we too will have to be involved in the war that will develop".
The third issue - Israel will demand that the United States and the Europeans, through the United Nations, impose additional tough sanctions on Iran within the framework of the Security Council or outside of it, in order to force Iran to reduce military aid to Russia.
The fourth issue - Israeli officials believe that Austin and Milley will demand that Israel refrain from civil and military actions that would agitate the situation with the Palestinian Authority, and also result in the fact the two-state solution will no longer be feasible. The Americans will also demand that the government refrain from actions that would lead to conflicts on the Temple Mount and in Jerusalem during the month of Ramadan. The bottom line is that the Americans are telling Israel: “We will help you as much as possible in the Iranian context but, in return, was ask that you do not ignite a conflict with the PA that will oblige us to be involved in another conflict besides Ukraine and the South China Sea.”
And:
Biden isn’t serious about opposing Palestinian terrorism
A bid to strengthen the Taylor Force Act that penalizes the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” policy is necessary. But the administration is still evading the law in other ways.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(March 3, 2023 / JNS) The victim of the most recent Palestinian terrorist attack was a young American. Elan Ganeles, a 27-year-old native of West Hartford, Conn., was gunned down on the road between Jericho and the Dead Sea on Feb. 27. Though he had previously served in the Israel Defense Forces, Ganeles was currently living in New York and was murdered while on a trip to attend a friend’s wedding.
While this crime was condemned by the U.S. government, the Biden administration’s claims that it opposes Palestinian terrorism ring hollow for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the fact that although federal law prohibits the sending of financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority if it continues to pay salaries and pensions to terrorists, Biden continues to send aid to the P.A. with promises of more to come.
The law in question is the 2018 Taylor Force Act, named after another man in his 20s who was visiting Israel. Force also spent time in the military; he was a non-Jewish West Point graduate murdered by a Palestinian terrorist while studying abroad. The Force family and others worked tirelessly to get Congress to pass the law so as to use the immense financial leverage of the United States to pressure the P.A. and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to discontinue their practice of subsidizing and supporting acts of violence.
In addition to signing the Taylor Force Act into law, former President Donald Trump cut off all forms of aid to the P.A. over the issue of their support of terrorism. Abbas had tried to con Trump, who was fairly ignorant about the issue when he arrived in office, into thinking that he was a man of peace on that first meeting with him in the White House. But by the time Trump met with Abbas on his visit to Israel and the territories in May 2017, the president had gotten wise to the veteran PLO bureaucrat’s grift. He reportedly pounded the table during his meeting with Abbas and demanded that he stop the “pay for slay” policies.
Though the Palestinians and some of their Western apologists like to argue that the money merely constitutes welfare payments to the needy, the system generates as much as $350 million a year to terrorists and those connected to them via their “Martyrs Fund.” The payments are on a sliding scale with those who shed blood and kill people getting more than those who merely commit assaults and fail to kill their victims.
More to the point, it is so important to the political culture of the Palestinians that despite the real financial hardships imposed by Trump’s aid cutoff, Abbas refused to end those payments. Indeed, it can be argued that it would be impossible for him or any successor to the ailing 87-year-old former assistant to arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat to do so and survive politically against their Islamist rivals Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad based in the Gaza Strip.
But rather than turning up the heat on Abbas, Trump’s successor has done the opposite. As he has with most of what Trump did, Biden immediately reversed his ban on aid to the Palestinians once he took office, and vast sums have poured into various Palestinian agencies. Though his foreign-policy team continues to insist that they are managing all this without committing technical violations of the Taylor Force Act, they have promised to increase this aid.
They’re doing so in part as a way to bludgeon Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. Biden’s team despises the current governing coalition because of its right-wing and religious composition, and because of the grudges that most of them still hold against Netanyahu dating back to their service under former President Barack Obama.
Indeed, despite the recent surge of Palestinian terror that has cost the lives of 13 Israelis in the last few weeks, Washington remains focused on its anger at Netanyahu’s government. That’s because of its commitment to strengthening Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, and plans for judicial reform. Though they have no right taking any position on the issue of efforts to rein in Israel’s out-of-control Supreme Court, they are taking a cue from the Israeli opposition (which, in turn, is mimicking Democratic Party talking points in the 2022 midterm elections in the United States) and claim that it threatens democracy.
While intervening in Israeli domestic politics is an irresistible temptation for Democrats, Biden and his aides would do more for peace in the Middle East if they were more interested in stopping Abbas from paying terrorists than looking for ways to reward him.
Still, there are some people in Washington who are paying attention to the fate of Ganeles and understand that there is something Congress can do to strengthen the Taylor Force Act, even while Biden tries to undermine it.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) knows that even if Biden were trying to stop the Palestinians rather than covering for them, Abbas and his Fatah Party will continue to use foreign aid to pay those who murder Israelis and Americans. So he is planning to introduce a bill that will put more teeth in the legislation. His bill would prevent any bank that processes or facilitates payments to terrorists from doing business in the United States or using dollars in any transaction. It would also restrict any financial institution that did or does business with Hamas.
Given the global commercial network that connects most fiscal institutions large and small throughout most of the world, this would inflict considerable hardship on the P.A. That’s because it needs its banks to have connections to the West in order for it to receive the massive payments it gets from international bodies and European governments, much of which is lost due to the rampant corruption in the P.A. that extends all the way up to Abbas and his family.
Cotton first tried to pass this bill back in 2021, but it failed in the Senate due to opposition from Democrats and indifference from some establishment Republicans. The latter may still be an obstacle. According to Jewish Insider, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who was the original principal sponsor of the Taylor Force Act, thinks it isn’t necessary. Graham actually thinks the act is working well.
That is a typical congressional reaction. Having passed a law that was supposed to deal with a challenging issue, Graham, who spends most of his time lately promoting more U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s war with Russia, considered the problem solved once his bill was passed. That’s true even if, as with Palestinian terrorism, the law isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do because of loopholes and the executive branch’s unwillingness to enforce it.
Though the odds are still against him given the lack of Democratic interest in stopping Palestinian terrorism, Cotton is still to be commended for trying. But as long as Biden is committed to evading the Taylor Force Act, Washington will still be part of the problem rather than the solution.
With the intersectional left largely calling the tune in a Biden administration that has been in thrall to so-called “progressives” and their even more radical allies in the congressional “Squad” since it took office on a host of issues, the issue goes deeper than mere indifference. In a party and administration where adherence to toxic left-wing myths like critical race theory is pervasive, the labeling of Israel as a state benefiting from “white privilege” and oppressing “people of color” is routine. Among such people, genuine concern about terrorist murders of Israelis isn’t terribly likely. That’s why despite lip service being paid to the memory of Elan Ganeles, the Biden administration has become a principal obstacle to efforts to end Palestinian terrorism.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
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