By Michael Barone
Monday, February 28, 2011
It's a question that puzzles most liberals and bothers some conservatives. Why are so many modest-income white voters rejecting the Obama Democrats' policies of economic redistribution and embracing the small-government policies of the tea party movement?
It's not supposed to work out that way, say the political scientists and New Deal historians. Politics is supposed to be about who gets how much when, and people with modest incomes should be eager to take as much from the rich as they can get.
Moreover, as liberal economists and columnists point out, income levels for middle-class Americans remained stagnant for most of a decade during the George W. Bush presidency and then plunged in the recession. Housing values fell even more.
The conservative writer David Frum has made the same point and has said that Republicans must come up with policies that will raise ordinary people's incomes if they hope to win.
But the fact is that Republicans did pretty well among whites who did not graduate from college -- the exit poll's best proxy for the white working class -- even in the otherwise dismal year of 2008. John McCain carried non-college whites by a 58 percent to 41 percent margin, more than his 51 percent to 47 percent margin among college whites.
Barack Obama won because he carried all other voters 79 percent to 21 percent. But he carried non-college whites in only 14 states and the District of Columbia with 127 electoral votes.
Liberals are puzzled by this. Thomas Frank's book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" argued that modest-income whites were bamboozled by the moneyed elite to vote on cultural issues rather than in their direct economic interest.
But that's no more plausible than the notion that rich liberals from Park Avenue to Beverly Hills have been bamboozled to vote the opposite way on similar issues rather than for those who would extend the Bush tax cuts. People are entitled to base their vote on the things they think important. They don't always vote just to maximize their short-term income.
In any case, the cultural issues seemed to be eclipsed by economic issues in 2010, when Republicans carried non-college whites 63 percent to 33 percent in House elections. That was almost as large a percentage margin as the Democrats 74 percent to 24 percent among the smaller number of nonwhites.
My own assumption is that economic statistics have been painting an unduly bleak picture of modest-income America. When we measure real incomes we use inflation indexes, which over time inevitably overstate inflation, because they're based on static market baskets of goods.
The problem is if one item spikes in price, we quit buying it. In addition, inflation indexes cannot account for product innovation and quality increases.
Liberal writers look back to 1973 as a year when real wages supposedly peaked -- just before a nasty bout of inflation. But back then, a pocket calculator cost $110. The smartphone you can buy today for $200 has a calculator and hundreds of other devices.
If you get out beyond the Beltway to Middle America, you find supermarkets with wonderful produce and big box stores with amazing variety, all at prices that are astonishingly low. You can eat well and dress stylishly at prices far below what elites in places like Washington and New York are accustomed to paying. In many ways, people with modest incomes have a significantly better standard of living than they did four decades ago.
The recoil in 2010 against the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of the size and scope of government seems to have a cultural or a moral dimension as well. It was a vote, as my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy P. Carney wrote last week, expressing "anger at those unfairly getting rich -- at the taxpayer's expense."
Those include well-connected Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs that got bailed out and giant corporations like General Electric that shape legislation so they can profit. They include the public employee unions who have bribed politicians to grant them pensions and benefits unavailable to most Americans.
A government intertwined with the private sector inevitably picks winners and losers. It allows well-positioned insiders to game the system for private gain. It bails out the improvident and sticks those who made prudent decisions with the bill.
Modest-income Americans think this is wrong. They want it fixed more than they want a few more bucks in their paychecks.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Celebrities Should Stick To Their Song And Dance
By Jeff Stier
Monday, February 28, 2011
At a food exhibit last month I met a man hawking specialty teas. He handed me a cup of mango tea and I took a moment to chat with him. He told me that while the tea may feel good after eating, it will do little to aid my digestion. "Enzymes!," he declared.
"Excuse me?" I asked.
"You need them to digest your food," he exclaimed. "You only get so many enzymes in your lifetime, and as you use them to digest your food, you deplete your supply." He looked over both shoulders as if about to tell me a secret, held the bottle of pills, and whispered deliberately but increasingly loudly, "You need to take these enzyme pills while you are still young. If you use up your enzymes without replenishing them, you'll run out, and then BAM! PARTY'S OVER!"
Bizarre unscientific ideas like this rarely makes their way into mainstream thinking. Unless, of course, they are promoted by a celebrity. As explained in "Celebrities and Science," an annual report by the British non-profit, Sense About Science, (SAS) this happens all too frequently. When celebrities speak without the support of mainstream science, they disproportionately distort our decision making, both at the individual, as well as policy-making level.
In the case of digestive enzymes, Olivia Newton-John told the British Daily Mall that she takes digestive enzymes with every meal, "as well as a tonic containing South American plant extracts that helps boost my immune system and promote calmness." Is that how the body really works? Well, let's get physical and consult the science. Dr. Melita Gordon, a gastroenterologist at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital explained in the SAS report, "All the digestive enzymes you need are produced in a beautifully coordinated way by different structures in your gut...your body makes all the enzymes you need, in the right place, at the right time." So no need to take those pills, the party will go on!
Other examples abound. Where would discredited anti-vaccine fraudster Andrew Wakefield be without Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy? Sometimes, celebrities go to Capitol Hill to lobby for their favorite cause, promoting their image but not always promoting sound policy. In 2002, Julia Roberts asked Congress to earmark $15 million for Retts Syndrome and Congress listened. But should celebrities be advising policy-makers on how to best allocate limited resources? Maybe the funds could have been better spent on some other disease -- or maybe not. But I'd rather scientists inform those critical decisions.
In fairness, celebrities aren't wrong every time they engage in a scientific issue. Michael J. Fox's eponymous foundation has funded nearly a quarter billion dollars of mainstream science, researching Parkinson's disease.And rarely, celebrities will take a stand on the scientific, although less sexy side of a controversy, such as Amanda Peet, who with the backing of top scientists like Dr. Paul Offit, defends the safety of vaccines. Take that, Jim Carrey.
In a culture fascinated with celebrities, we should remember that those we gawk at may be very talented and are often even brilliant -- at what they do. But just like we probably shouldn't watch most scientists act, sing, or worse yet, model, let's keep the celebrities in their proper places too.
Monday, February 28, 2011
At a food exhibit last month I met a man hawking specialty teas. He handed me a cup of mango tea and I took a moment to chat with him. He told me that while the tea may feel good after eating, it will do little to aid my digestion. "Enzymes!," he declared.
"Excuse me?" I asked.
"You need them to digest your food," he exclaimed. "You only get so many enzymes in your lifetime, and as you use them to digest your food, you deplete your supply." He looked over both shoulders as if about to tell me a secret, held the bottle of pills, and whispered deliberately but increasingly loudly, "You need to take these enzyme pills while you are still young. If you use up your enzymes without replenishing them, you'll run out, and then BAM! PARTY'S OVER!"
Bizarre unscientific ideas like this rarely makes their way into mainstream thinking. Unless, of course, they are promoted by a celebrity. As explained in "Celebrities and Science," an annual report by the British non-profit, Sense About Science, (SAS) this happens all too frequently. When celebrities speak without the support of mainstream science, they disproportionately distort our decision making, both at the individual, as well as policy-making level.
In the case of digestive enzymes, Olivia Newton-John told the British Daily Mall that she takes digestive enzymes with every meal, "as well as a tonic containing South American plant extracts that helps boost my immune system and promote calmness." Is that how the body really works? Well, let's get physical and consult the science. Dr. Melita Gordon, a gastroenterologist at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital explained in the SAS report, "All the digestive enzymes you need are produced in a beautifully coordinated way by different structures in your gut...your body makes all the enzymes you need, in the right place, at the right time." So no need to take those pills, the party will go on!
Other examples abound. Where would discredited anti-vaccine fraudster Andrew Wakefield be without Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy? Sometimes, celebrities go to Capitol Hill to lobby for their favorite cause, promoting their image but not always promoting sound policy. In 2002, Julia Roberts asked Congress to earmark $15 million for Retts Syndrome and Congress listened. But should celebrities be advising policy-makers on how to best allocate limited resources? Maybe the funds could have been better spent on some other disease -- or maybe not. But I'd rather scientists inform those critical decisions.
In fairness, celebrities aren't wrong every time they engage in a scientific issue. Michael J. Fox's eponymous foundation has funded nearly a quarter billion dollars of mainstream science, researching Parkinson's disease.And rarely, celebrities will take a stand on the scientific, although less sexy side of a controversy, such as Amanda Peet, who with the backing of top scientists like Dr. Paul Offit, defends the safety of vaccines. Take that, Jim Carrey.
In a culture fascinated with celebrities, we should remember that those we gawk at may be very talented and are often even brilliant -- at what they do. But just like we probably shouldn't watch most scientists act, sing, or worse yet, model, let's keep the celebrities in their proper places too.
The Democrats' Tactic: Fearmongering
By Lurita Doan
Monday, February 28, 2011
Democrat leaders have been working overtime to foster fear among Americans by exaggerating the potential repercussions of a shutdown of the federal government. Why? Fearmongering is a great diversionary tactic for Democrats who do not want to be held accountable for out-of-control government spending and who have no intention of getting serious about budget cuts.
They myth of a reign of chaos induced by a government shutdown is just that—a myth. Harkening back to the shutdown of 1995, it seems as if every would-be pundit with a tale of woe has been paraded on the liberal media circuit.
In reality, the country is in great shape to handle a shutdown because for about a decade, the government has spent billions of taxpayer dollars on Continuity of Ops (COOP). Continuity of operations is the way the federal government prepares and plans for how it would operation during a time of national disaster, during a time when critical systems fail, or when unexpected changes in leadership occur, or when unexpectedly there is a need to change the location of the government. COOP is the government’s plan for identifying which personnel are considered essential and what tasks are considered operationally mandatory for the smooth and effective operation of our government.
I know, from my experience leading one of the federal agencies responsible for developing these plans that each federal agency already has in place a series of well-documented, frequently exercised, standard operating procedures that answer most of the questions currently causing the hand-wringing around Washington, DC.
These standard operating procedures exist for all three branches of government to ensure an enduring constitutional government. Annually, the government undergoes a minimum of two weeks of rigorous exercises to identify potential gaps in capabilities. Each year the government rigorously identifies problem areas and solutions that are cost effective and sustainable. Each year the federal government prepares after-action reports that form the basis of future areas for improvement and expansion.
These joint exercises are usually in support of national security, but the operational principles and the decision matrices are the same. Complex logistical scenarios are exercised. Complex joint contingency plans are developed, documented and put into play for all key stakeholders.
Above all, these exercises ensure that government responds calmly and responsibly and does not succumb to the fearmongering and hysteria that Dems are trying to whip up among Americans.
Democrats in congress and members of the Executive Branch who claim that the nation will be in trouble if a shutdown were to occur are being disingenuous or are perhaps intending to deliberately sabotage years of careful planning and billions of dollars and thousands of hours of professionals efforts to ensure that nothing bad happens to our great nation, its leaders or our constitutional government.
So what will happen if the government shuts down? All federal agencies have key personnel plans now in place that did not exist back in 1995. So, social security checks and government welfare subsidies get paid (most are EFT anyway). Benefits to veterans and the military and other government workers continue to be paid. The country will continue to be protected; policemen, firemen and hospitals will continue to serve their communities with distinction. What a shutdown will do is stop non-essential functions. So, for example, many of Obama’s czars and their horde would no longer be funded. Of course, there are many Americans who would not see this as a negative.
In fact, given the extraordinary amount of time lost in multitudinous government meetings that often serve no purpose other than to plan the next meeting, our government might even experience a surge of unexpected productivity.
Perhaps proof that the country could function just fine with a smaller, more productive government is what Dems fear the most. In fact, it could be that the greatest risk is simply that some in government might work to ensure that several, high-visibility programs that could be continued under a government shutdown are not—just to prove a point.
But, it would be both a crime and a disgrace if certain military or other essential efforts are put in jeopardy as a way to heighten the sense of panic and doom. Let’s hope that all legislators roll up their sleeves, sharpen their budget-cutting pencils and realize, as President Obama often reminded conservatives over the last two years that “elections have consequences”. Voters this past November have spoken: they want government to cut the federal budget and they want it to happen now. GOP legislators who are determined to return our country to a culture of fiscal discipline have nothing to fear but fearmongering itself.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Democrat leaders have been working overtime to foster fear among Americans by exaggerating the potential repercussions of a shutdown of the federal government. Why? Fearmongering is a great diversionary tactic for Democrats who do not want to be held accountable for out-of-control government spending and who have no intention of getting serious about budget cuts.
They myth of a reign of chaos induced by a government shutdown is just that—a myth. Harkening back to the shutdown of 1995, it seems as if every would-be pundit with a tale of woe has been paraded on the liberal media circuit.
In reality, the country is in great shape to handle a shutdown because for about a decade, the government has spent billions of taxpayer dollars on Continuity of Ops (COOP). Continuity of operations is the way the federal government prepares and plans for how it would operation during a time of national disaster, during a time when critical systems fail, or when unexpected changes in leadership occur, or when unexpectedly there is a need to change the location of the government. COOP is the government’s plan for identifying which personnel are considered essential and what tasks are considered operationally mandatory for the smooth and effective operation of our government.
I know, from my experience leading one of the federal agencies responsible for developing these plans that each federal agency already has in place a series of well-documented, frequently exercised, standard operating procedures that answer most of the questions currently causing the hand-wringing around Washington, DC.
These standard operating procedures exist for all three branches of government to ensure an enduring constitutional government. Annually, the government undergoes a minimum of two weeks of rigorous exercises to identify potential gaps in capabilities. Each year the government rigorously identifies problem areas and solutions that are cost effective and sustainable. Each year the federal government prepares after-action reports that form the basis of future areas for improvement and expansion.
These joint exercises are usually in support of national security, but the operational principles and the decision matrices are the same. Complex logistical scenarios are exercised. Complex joint contingency plans are developed, documented and put into play for all key stakeholders.
Above all, these exercises ensure that government responds calmly and responsibly and does not succumb to the fearmongering and hysteria that Dems are trying to whip up among Americans.
Democrats in congress and members of the Executive Branch who claim that the nation will be in trouble if a shutdown were to occur are being disingenuous or are perhaps intending to deliberately sabotage years of careful planning and billions of dollars and thousands of hours of professionals efforts to ensure that nothing bad happens to our great nation, its leaders or our constitutional government.
So what will happen if the government shuts down? All federal agencies have key personnel plans now in place that did not exist back in 1995. So, social security checks and government welfare subsidies get paid (most are EFT anyway). Benefits to veterans and the military and other government workers continue to be paid. The country will continue to be protected; policemen, firemen and hospitals will continue to serve their communities with distinction. What a shutdown will do is stop non-essential functions. So, for example, many of Obama’s czars and their horde would no longer be funded. Of course, there are many Americans who would not see this as a negative.
In fact, given the extraordinary amount of time lost in multitudinous government meetings that often serve no purpose other than to plan the next meeting, our government might even experience a surge of unexpected productivity.
Perhaps proof that the country could function just fine with a smaller, more productive government is what Dems fear the most. In fact, it could be that the greatest risk is simply that some in government might work to ensure that several, high-visibility programs that could be continued under a government shutdown are not—just to prove a point.
But, it would be both a crime and a disgrace if certain military or other essential efforts are put in jeopardy as a way to heighten the sense of panic and doom. Let’s hope that all legislators roll up their sleeves, sharpen their budget-cutting pencils and realize, as President Obama often reminded conservatives over the last two years that “elections have consequences”. Voters this past November have spoken: they want government to cut the federal budget and they want it to happen now. GOP legislators who are determined to return our country to a culture of fiscal discipline have nothing to fear but fearmongering itself.
And So Rationing Begins: ObamaCare vs. Breast Cancer Patients
By Garrett Murch
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Influenced by the president’s mandate to “bend the health care cost curve,” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to deny late-stage breast cancer patients access to the critical, but expensive, life-extending drug Avastin. The FDA wants to “de-label” the drug, a move that would force patients with insurance or Medicare coverage to pay for the drug out of their own pocket in order to survive. Now patients groups are speaking out.
Led by the Susan B. Komen Foundation for a Cure, 15 patient advocacy groups have petitioned the FDA to reverse their effort to ration the drug. In a letter to the FDA, Elizabeth Thompson, the organization’s President, expresses concern over the potential negative impact that the FDA’s decision will have on women who are benefiting from Avastin:
"We know that for some number of women, Avastin works and works well. We have heard from women who are gaining not just months, but years with a high quality of life, from this treatment.
We are concerned about the potential impact on women who are benefiting from Avastin if the FDA ultimately removes its approval for the drug for metastatic breast cancer treatment. We want to be sure that women who are using Avastin, and for whom it is working, can continue to have access to it, and that their insurers will continue to pay for it...
Today, the issue is Avastin. In the coming years, there will be other treatments that may be controversial but will help some number of women and men with breast cancer live longer, high quality lives, and perhaps to ‘beat’ breast cancer altogether…[w]e must make it possible for these treatments to be available to all who will benefit from them. The decision on Avastin is precedent setting and deserves to be considered in a public setting."
The Avastin case is the rationing camel nose under America’s health care tent. Should the FDA successfully introduce cost into the drug approval process, the long-term implications will be enormous. It will not be breast cancer patients alone who will suffer. Avastin is first step on the slippery slope toward rationing. The FDA’s action is dangerous and cannot stand.
Fortunately, Judge Vinson’s ruling that ObamaCare is unconstitutional has temporarily given hope that we may reverse course before it is too late. While Vinson’s decision finds Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional, it strikes down the entire law as the mandate is not severable from the full legislation.
Like the individual mandate, FDA rationing is a flawed (some might say lazy, dishonest, or inhumane) attempt to lower Obamacare’s alarming financial cost. But both come with heavy price tags, nonetheless. While the mandate will cost jobs and wages, FDA rationing will cost lives that could otherwise be extended, improved, or even saved. We simply cannot afford the real cost of ObamaCare.
Vinson’s decision makes clear ObamaCare implementation by state and federal officials should immediately cease. The Cato Institute’s Mike Cannon and Ilya Shapiro, in a devastating column in the Providence Journal note:
"In ruling as he did, Judge Vinson wrote that “it must be presumed that federal officers will adhere to the law as declared by the court.” Yet the Obama administration has thus far shown no inclination to do so. But neither has it sought to stay the practical effects of the ruling — perhaps because it thinks that doing so would give credence to the court’s decision."
Sadly, the Obama Administration appears to be making calls out of President Andrew Jackson’s playbook. America’s seventh President reportedly once said about a Supreme Court ruling that Georgia could not impose its laws upon Cherokee tribal lands, "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!"
Rather than adhering to Judge Vinson’s ruling or request a stay, the Obama Administration is instead requesting a ‘clarification’ of the decision, a thinly veiled attempt to run interference for ObamaCare’s supporters to continue moving forward with implementation of the law. Like its attempts to use the Environmental Protection Agency to bypass Congress in issuing politically unpalatable energy and environmental regulations, the Administration is showing a blatant disregard for the Constitutional separation of powers in ignoring Judge Vinson’s ruling.
Even with Vinson’s decision, the fight is not over and ObamaCare advocates may ultimately prevail, FDA health care rationing and all. The case is expected to move to the 11th Circuit Court by this summer. Efforts are even underway to expedite consideration by the Supreme Court. Until, then, however, it is clear ObamaCare implementation must be put on hold. We do still live in a nation of laws, after all.
Mr. President, Judge Vinson has made his decision, now you have to enforce it!
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Influenced by the president’s mandate to “bend the health care cost curve,” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to deny late-stage breast cancer patients access to the critical, but expensive, life-extending drug Avastin. The FDA wants to “de-label” the drug, a move that would force patients with insurance or Medicare coverage to pay for the drug out of their own pocket in order to survive. Now patients groups are speaking out.
Led by the Susan B. Komen Foundation for a Cure, 15 patient advocacy groups have petitioned the FDA to reverse their effort to ration the drug. In a letter to the FDA, Elizabeth Thompson, the organization’s President, expresses concern over the potential negative impact that the FDA’s decision will have on women who are benefiting from Avastin:
"We know that for some number of women, Avastin works and works well. We have heard from women who are gaining not just months, but years with a high quality of life, from this treatment.
We are concerned about the potential impact on women who are benefiting from Avastin if the FDA ultimately removes its approval for the drug for metastatic breast cancer treatment. We want to be sure that women who are using Avastin, and for whom it is working, can continue to have access to it, and that their insurers will continue to pay for it...
Today, the issue is Avastin. In the coming years, there will be other treatments that may be controversial but will help some number of women and men with breast cancer live longer, high quality lives, and perhaps to ‘beat’ breast cancer altogether…[w]e must make it possible for these treatments to be available to all who will benefit from them. The decision on Avastin is precedent setting and deserves to be considered in a public setting."
The Avastin case is the rationing camel nose under America’s health care tent. Should the FDA successfully introduce cost into the drug approval process, the long-term implications will be enormous. It will not be breast cancer patients alone who will suffer. Avastin is first step on the slippery slope toward rationing. The FDA’s action is dangerous and cannot stand.
Fortunately, Judge Vinson’s ruling that ObamaCare is unconstitutional has temporarily given hope that we may reverse course before it is too late. While Vinson’s decision finds Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional, it strikes down the entire law as the mandate is not severable from the full legislation.
Like the individual mandate, FDA rationing is a flawed (some might say lazy, dishonest, or inhumane) attempt to lower Obamacare’s alarming financial cost. But both come with heavy price tags, nonetheless. While the mandate will cost jobs and wages, FDA rationing will cost lives that could otherwise be extended, improved, or even saved. We simply cannot afford the real cost of ObamaCare.
Vinson’s decision makes clear ObamaCare implementation by state and federal officials should immediately cease. The Cato Institute’s Mike Cannon and Ilya Shapiro, in a devastating column in the Providence Journal note:
"In ruling as he did, Judge Vinson wrote that “it must be presumed that federal officers will adhere to the law as declared by the court.” Yet the Obama administration has thus far shown no inclination to do so. But neither has it sought to stay the practical effects of the ruling — perhaps because it thinks that doing so would give credence to the court’s decision."
Sadly, the Obama Administration appears to be making calls out of President Andrew Jackson’s playbook. America’s seventh President reportedly once said about a Supreme Court ruling that Georgia could not impose its laws upon Cherokee tribal lands, "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!"
Rather than adhering to Judge Vinson’s ruling or request a stay, the Obama Administration is instead requesting a ‘clarification’ of the decision, a thinly veiled attempt to run interference for ObamaCare’s supporters to continue moving forward with implementation of the law. Like its attempts to use the Environmental Protection Agency to bypass Congress in issuing politically unpalatable energy and environmental regulations, the Administration is showing a blatant disregard for the Constitutional separation of powers in ignoring Judge Vinson’s ruling.
Even with Vinson’s decision, the fight is not over and ObamaCare advocates may ultimately prevail, FDA health care rationing and all. The case is expected to move to the 11th Circuit Court by this summer. Efforts are even underway to expedite consideration by the Supreme Court. Until, then, however, it is clear ObamaCare implementation must be put on hold. We do still live in a nation of laws, after all.
Mr. President, Judge Vinson has made his decision, now you have to enforce it!
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Have You Noticed That "Big Government" Is Failing Everywhere?
By Austin Hill
Sunday, February 27, 2011
“Big government” is failing around the globe.
From Sacramento to Saudi Arabia , big, controlling, impersonal and coercive government is failing to fulfill the most basic human needs of the people it is purports to serve. And while scores of individuals around the world struggle to free themselves of “big government’s” shackles - some in the Middle East even losing their lives in the process - many of my fellow Americans have been gathering publicly and chanting and banging drums and carrying banners and demanding more of it.
It’s quite a spectacle to watch. And depending on whether the demonstration is in Columbus , or Cairo , the demands of the demonstrators can be different. But at the epicenter of their commotion is a common thread – the universal needs of all human beings, and the promises, and failures, of “big government.”
I put quotation marks around the words “big government” because, technically, the term doesn’t apply so well in certain parts of the world. It makes sense for us in the United States - we rightly juxtapose the term “big government” with “limited government,” or “small government.” That’s because in America we have a voice in how our government is structured, and over the course of our nation’s history the pendulum has swung in both directions between a limited government that controls less of our private affairs, and a “big government” that controls more.
But in Libya there hasn’t been a pendulum to swing between “big government” and “limited government.” There has simply been government - Muammar Gaddafi and his band of thugs who do the “ruling,” and the citizenry are “the ruled.”
Oh sure, there has been one of the “chambers” of Libya ’s legislative body where members are supposedly “elected” from among the governed. But there is no reason to believe that Libyan elections have been held freely and accurately, and no reason to believe that those who get “elected” can defy or contradict the demands of Mr. Gaddafi (frequently spelled “Kadafi”), a man who acquired his position by means of a political coup.
The phoniness of “elections” in Libya is as bad as the 2009 re-election of Ahmadinejad in Iran . And the elections of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in 1999, and former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak in 1981 bare significant resemblance as well – both characters were “elected,” yes, but then substantively changed the laws of their governments so they could hang on to power indefinitely.
But look at all that is, and is not going on in these nations. Mubarak has been removed after nearly thirty years. Kadafi is on the run (if, indeed, he is still alive). Chavez can’t seize enough radio and tv stations and kill enough of his countrymen in the streets of Caracas to quell the discontent over his failed socialistic economy. Even King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia can’t silence the youth-led uprising in his country, and has chosen to extend some $35 billion worth of “hand outs” as a short-term “fix.”
So what are we to make of this? For one, the turmoil of these countries demonstrates that the natural state of the human soul is a state of freedom. People are not content to merely “vote” every once in a while. They want a say in how they are governed, yes, but they also want the freedom to engage their god-given talents, and to improve their lives. They may acquiesce and be passive in the face of dictators and “put up with it” for a while, and may even for a time believe the claims of rulers who promise peace and provision. But younger generations in Venezuela , Saudi Arabia , Iran , Egypt and Libya have always known the failures of “big government,” and they’re willing to take enormous risks – in some cases even risking their very lives – to pursue freedom.
Secondly, we should note that when the force of government is utilized to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, the few will stop at nothing to hang-on. Venezuela and Libya and Saudi Arabia have been good for Chavez and Kadafi and King Abdullah (yet not so good for everybody else). Similarly, the incestuous relationship between American politicians and government employee unions is good for the politicians and the union members – politicians give union members what they want and union members vote to re-elect their union-loving politicians – but it’s bad for the taxpayer who ultimately pays the bill.
Ultimately, “big government” produces sluggish and un-productive economies. And the lack of economic productivity leads to civil unrest. It’s a vicious cycle that has got the world in a tailspin right now.
“Big government” is failing, around the globe and here at home. Will America make a better choice going forward?
Sunday, February 27, 2011
“Big government” is failing around the globe.
From Sacramento to Saudi Arabia , big, controlling, impersonal and coercive government is failing to fulfill the most basic human needs of the people it is purports to serve. And while scores of individuals around the world struggle to free themselves of “big government’s” shackles - some in the Middle East even losing their lives in the process - many of my fellow Americans have been gathering publicly and chanting and banging drums and carrying banners and demanding more of it.
It’s quite a spectacle to watch. And depending on whether the demonstration is in Columbus , or Cairo , the demands of the demonstrators can be different. But at the epicenter of their commotion is a common thread – the universal needs of all human beings, and the promises, and failures, of “big government.”
I put quotation marks around the words “big government” because, technically, the term doesn’t apply so well in certain parts of the world. It makes sense for us in the United States - we rightly juxtapose the term “big government” with “limited government,” or “small government.” That’s because in America we have a voice in how our government is structured, and over the course of our nation’s history the pendulum has swung in both directions between a limited government that controls less of our private affairs, and a “big government” that controls more.
But in Libya there hasn’t been a pendulum to swing between “big government” and “limited government.” There has simply been government - Muammar Gaddafi and his band of thugs who do the “ruling,” and the citizenry are “the ruled.”
Oh sure, there has been one of the “chambers” of Libya ’s legislative body where members are supposedly “elected” from among the governed. But there is no reason to believe that Libyan elections have been held freely and accurately, and no reason to believe that those who get “elected” can defy or contradict the demands of Mr. Gaddafi (frequently spelled “Kadafi”), a man who acquired his position by means of a political coup.
The phoniness of “elections” in Libya is as bad as the 2009 re-election of Ahmadinejad in Iran . And the elections of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in 1999, and former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak in 1981 bare significant resemblance as well – both characters were “elected,” yes, but then substantively changed the laws of their governments so they could hang on to power indefinitely.
But look at all that is, and is not going on in these nations. Mubarak has been removed after nearly thirty years. Kadafi is on the run (if, indeed, he is still alive). Chavez can’t seize enough radio and tv stations and kill enough of his countrymen in the streets of Caracas to quell the discontent over his failed socialistic economy. Even King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia can’t silence the youth-led uprising in his country, and has chosen to extend some $35 billion worth of “hand outs” as a short-term “fix.”
So what are we to make of this? For one, the turmoil of these countries demonstrates that the natural state of the human soul is a state of freedom. People are not content to merely “vote” every once in a while. They want a say in how they are governed, yes, but they also want the freedom to engage their god-given talents, and to improve their lives. They may acquiesce and be passive in the face of dictators and “put up with it” for a while, and may even for a time believe the claims of rulers who promise peace and provision. But younger generations in Venezuela , Saudi Arabia , Iran , Egypt and Libya have always known the failures of “big government,” and they’re willing to take enormous risks – in some cases even risking their very lives – to pursue freedom.
Secondly, we should note that when the force of government is utilized to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, the few will stop at nothing to hang-on. Venezuela and Libya and Saudi Arabia have been good for Chavez and Kadafi and King Abdullah (yet not so good for everybody else). Similarly, the incestuous relationship between American politicians and government employee unions is good for the politicians and the union members – politicians give union members what they want and union members vote to re-elect their union-loving politicians – but it’s bad for the taxpayer who ultimately pays the bill.
Ultimately, “big government” produces sluggish and un-productive economies. And the lack of economic productivity leads to civil unrest. It’s a vicious cycle that has got the world in a tailspin right now.
“Big government” is failing, around the globe and here at home. Will America make a better choice going forward?
Wisconsin Myths and Facts
Rent-seeking spin vs. the truth
Matthew Shaffer
Thursday, February 24, 2011
With all the interests, political grandstanding, and cheap punditry surrounding the union demonstrations in Wisconsin, it’s no surprise that a mythology has developed around Gov. Scott Walker’s proposals. Here are some of the most common myths being propagated, and the countervailing facts.
MYTH: Wisconsin is not actually facing a deficit. Rachel Maddow on her February 17 show said, “Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, the state is on track to have a budget surplus this year. I am not kidding.”
FACT: Maddow wasn’t kidding, but she was wrong. She evidently derived her conclusion by reading to page 2 of a poorly structured report from the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Page 2 does indeed show a $57 million net balance for Wisconsin on June 30 of this year. But that doesn’t account for several other commitments, including Medicaid shortfalls, unpaid bills, and debts to Minnesota, which are spelled out later in the document. The governor of Wisconsin accounted for these in deriving his deficit figures.
MYTH: Wisconsin’s budget shortfalls are not dire.
FACT: The state is currently projected to face a $3.6 billion deficit in 2013. In FY 2010, Wisconsin took in approximately $12.7 billion in taxes. So — depending on income and tax levels in the next two years, obviously — that means deficits between 25 and 30 percent of Wisconsin tax revenue by 2013.
MYTH: “This is not about the budget deficit.” Liberals say that Walker’s proposals can’t really be about the budget because he is also restricting bargaining rights more generally over the long term. Therefore, Walker doesn’t really care about budgets — he’s performing a power grab for power’s sake, QED. This is the theme of Paul Krugman’s latest column, which several protesters have echoed on video.
FACT: Even though restricting bargaining rights over the long term won’t do anything to reduce the deficit immediately, public-sector unions will become more expensive the more political power they have — they, like everybody else, seek greater pay and benefits using the means available to them. So restricting public-sector unions’ political and bargaining power is obviously a component of restoring sanity to the budget in the long term. Krugman’s distinction of the power issue and the budget issue is without a difference.
MYTH: Walker caused the budget shortfall.
FACT: This claim is usually based off of the fact that Walker and the Republican government have enacted corporate-tax cuts. But those cuts haven’t gone into effect yet, so they aren’t responsible for this year’s deficit. And for the future, the state of Wisconsin predicts that the tax breaks will actually increase revenue by stimulating more business in Wisconsin. Liberals may dispute this economic reasoning. But they can’t claim the tax cut is part of current fiscal woes.
MYTH: Walker, if he succeeds, will make Wisconsin peculiarly hard on its employees.
FACT: The governor proposes that public employees contribute 12.6 percent of the cost of their health care. That is still less than half of the national average. He proposes that they pay less than 6 percent of their earnings toward their pensions — that is in line with the national average.
MYTH: Walker is an extremist taking away collective-bargaining rights.
FACT: He’s taking away the right to collectively bargain on pensions and benefits, but not on wages — though wage increases will be capped at the rate of inflation. This is a very modest and sensible reform. Without it, governors and legislatures can be pressured into making unsustainable commitments that — because these expenditures do not show up immediately in yearly deficits and will balloon only in the future — they will not be held responsible for. Under Walker’s proposals, public-sector unions will maintain their ability to collectively bargain for their members’ quality of life — just not to bargain away their grandchildren’s. Further, limits on collective bargaining in the public sector are not rare in the U.S.: Right now, only 26 states operate on Wisconsin’s current model, with collective-bargaining rights for all public employees.
MYTH: Wisconsin teachers live lives of austerity.
FACT: Wisconsin teachers are paid an average salary of $51,000. Annualized to account for their 180-day work year, that’s $68,000, and that is in addition to their very fine benefits, pensions, and job security. The median household income — that is, total household income, including households with two or more earners — was $49,993 in 2009 in Wisconsin. Therefore, after adjusting for the different work years — and not including teachers’ unusually generous benefits — a typical single Wisconsin teacher earns 36 percent more than the typical Wisconsin home.
MYTH: Walker blindsided everybody.
FACT: During his campaign, Walker was explicit about his intention to cut wages and benefits and generally take on the public sector. He ran on it. He had a reputation for anti-public-sector action as county executive in Milwaukee. During his campaign, the unions themselves issued flyers warning that he would take away collective-bargaining rights if elected. He never denied that he would take on collective-bargaining privileges — we would have heard all about it if he had.
If liberals were surprised, it may be because liberal media outlets were more focused on Christine O’Donnell’s past occult activities than Walker’s labor proposals.
MYTH: “This is about democracy” — a familiar rallying cry at leftists protests in Madison.
FACT: Protesters are never explicit about the logic of their claim that the pro-union side of the debate is inherently more democratic. And perhaps with good reason. A set of perverse incentives and structural problems actually make public-sector unions have particularly outsized power relative to the number of people they represent, such that even Left/Democratic icons such as FDR didn’t support the unionization of government employees. It can if anything be called especially undemocratic for public workers to strike — to hold the resources that belong to the public hostage, in order to advance the interests of a minority. This subverts the normal democratic process of directing public resources (namely voting). Legislators’ fleeing the state to prevent a vote by the legislative majority the voters of Wisconsin elected is also not very democratic. Not to mention forcing public employees to contribute to unions whose political advocacy they may disagree with. (Governor Walker proposes to allow public employees to opt out of financial contributions to the unions).
MYTH: There is no reason to believe public-sector unions are responsible for budget crises.
FACT: Think about the logic of that claim. How could there not be a burdening effect on state budgets when workers whose livelihoods are dependent upon government expenditures become more organized and more politically active? Second, look at the data: There is a correlation between the unionization of a state’s public workers and its deficits. There is also a correlation between a state’s level of unionization and Pew’s measures of its management quality. Public-sector unions have historically been not just advocates for workers’ rights, but for bigger government in general.
MYTH: Wisconsin’s public-sector workers are underpaid relative to comparable private-sector workers. Ezra Klein has approvingly cited an Economic Policy Institute study that purports to demonstrate this fact, and the claim has been echoed elsewhere.
FACT: Admittedly, this is not a matter of simple factual truth and falsehood. But Reihan Salam, Jim Manzi, and Andrew Biggs have cast serious doubt on the study, and given reason to believe the relationship may be the other way around.
MYTH: The Kochs are behind this!
FACT: The Kochs have been behind Scott Walker financially, and can be connected to almost any anti-big-government activism in the United States. But a would-be exposé from the New York Times couldn’t establish a single financial interest the Koch brothers would have in busting public-sector unions in Wisconsin. All evidence suggests the Kochs supported Walker because they believe in his policies’ justice, not their own interests.
Matthew Shaffer
Thursday, February 24, 2011
With all the interests, political grandstanding, and cheap punditry surrounding the union demonstrations in Wisconsin, it’s no surprise that a mythology has developed around Gov. Scott Walker’s proposals. Here are some of the most common myths being propagated, and the countervailing facts.
MYTH: Wisconsin is not actually facing a deficit. Rachel Maddow on her February 17 show said, “Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, the state is on track to have a budget surplus this year. I am not kidding.”
FACT: Maddow wasn’t kidding, but she was wrong. She evidently derived her conclusion by reading to page 2 of a poorly structured report from the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau. Page 2 does indeed show a $57 million net balance for Wisconsin on June 30 of this year. But that doesn’t account for several other commitments, including Medicaid shortfalls, unpaid bills, and debts to Minnesota, which are spelled out later in the document. The governor of Wisconsin accounted for these in deriving his deficit figures.
MYTH: Wisconsin’s budget shortfalls are not dire.
FACT: The state is currently projected to face a $3.6 billion deficit in 2013. In FY 2010, Wisconsin took in approximately $12.7 billion in taxes. So — depending on income and tax levels in the next two years, obviously — that means deficits between 25 and 30 percent of Wisconsin tax revenue by 2013.
MYTH: “This is not about the budget deficit.” Liberals say that Walker’s proposals can’t really be about the budget because he is also restricting bargaining rights more generally over the long term. Therefore, Walker doesn’t really care about budgets — he’s performing a power grab for power’s sake, QED. This is the theme of Paul Krugman’s latest column, which several protesters have echoed on video.
FACT: Even though restricting bargaining rights over the long term won’t do anything to reduce the deficit immediately, public-sector unions will become more expensive the more political power they have — they, like everybody else, seek greater pay and benefits using the means available to them. So restricting public-sector unions’ political and bargaining power is obviously a component of restoring sanity to the budget in the long term. Krugman’s distinction of the power issue and the budget issue is without a difference.
MYTH: Walker caused the budget shortfall.
FACT: This claim is usually based off of the fact that Walker and the Republican government have enacted corporate-tax cuts. But those cuts haven’t gone into effect yet, so they aren’t responsible for this year’s deficit. And for the future, the state of Wisconsin predicts that the tax breaks will actually increase revenue by stimulating more business in Wisconsin. Liberals may dispute this economic reasoning. But they can’t claim the tax cut is part of current fiscal woes.
MYTH: Walker, if he succeeds, will make Wisconsin peculiarly hard on its employees.
FACT: The governor proposes that public employees contribute 12.6 percent of the cost of their health care. That is still less than half of the national average. He proposes that they pay less than 6 percent of their earnings toward their pensions — that is in line with the national average.
MYTH: Walker is an extremist taking away collective-bargaining rights.
FACT: He’s taking away the right to collectively bargain on pensions and benefits, but not on wages — though wage increases will be capped at the rate of inflation. This is a very modest and sensible reform. Without it, governors and legislatures can be pressured into making unsustainable commitments that — because these expenditures do not show up immediately in yearly deficits and will balloon only in the future — they will not be held responsible for. Under Walker’s proposals, public-sector unions will maintain their ability to collectively bargain for their members’ quality of life — just not to bargain away their grandchildren’s. Further, limits on collective bargaining in the public sector are not rare in the U.S.: Right now, only 26 states operate on Wisconsin’s current model, with collective-bargaining rights for all public employees.
MYTH: Wisconsin teachers live lives of austerity.
FACT: Wisconsin teachers are paid an average salary of $51,000. Annualized to account for their 180-day work year, that’s $68,000, and that is in addition to their very fine benefits, pensions, and job security. The median household income — that is, total household income, including households with two or more earners — was $49,993 in 2009 in Wisconsin. Therefore, after adjusting for the different work years — and not including teachers’ unusually generous benefits — a typical single Wisconsin teacher earns 36 percent more than the typical Wisconsin home.
MYTH: Walker blindsided everybody.
FACT: During his campaign, Walker was explicit about his intention to cut wages and benefits and generally take on the public sector. He ran on it. He had a reputation for anti-public-sector action as county executive in Milwaukee. During his campaign, the unions themselves issued flyers warning that he would take away collective-bargaining rights if elected. He never denied that he would take on collective-bargaining privileges — we would have heard all about it if he had.
If liberals were surprised, it may be because liberal media outlets were more focused on Christine O’Donnell’s past occult activities than Walker’s labor proposals.
MYTH: “This is about democracy” — a familiar rallying cry at leftists protests in Madison.
FACT: Protesters are never explicit about the logic of their claim that the pro-union side of the debate is inherently more democratic. And perhaps with good reason. A set of perverse incentives and structural problems actually make public-sector unions have particularly outsized power relative to the number of people they represent, such that even Left/Democratic icons such as FDR didn’t support the unionization of government employees. It can if anything be called especially undemocratic for public workers to strike — to hold the resources that belong to the public hostage, in order to advance the interests of a minority. This subverts the normal democratic process of directing public resources (namely voting). Legislators’ fleeing the state to prevent a vote by the legislative majority the voters of Wisconsin elected is also not very democratic. Not to mention forcing public employees to contribute to unions whose political advocacy they may disagree with. (Governor Walker proposes to allow public employees to opt out of financial contributions to the unions).
MYTH: There is no reason to believe public-sector unions are responsible for budget crises.
FACT: Think about the logic of that claim. How could there not be a burdening effect on state budgets when workers whose livelihoods are dependent upon government expenditures become more organized and more politically active? Second, look at the data: There is a correlation between the unionization of a state’s public workers and its deficits. There is also a correlation between a state’s level of unionization and Pew’s measures of its management quality. Public-sector unions have historically been not just advocates for workers’ rights, but for bigger government in general.
MYTH: Wisconsin’s public-sector workers are underpaid relative to comparable private-sector workers. Ezra Klein has approvingly cited an Economic Policy Institute study that purports to demonstrate this fact, and the claim has been echoed elsewhere.
FACT: Admittedly, this is not a matter of simple factual truth and falsehood. But Reihan Salam, Jim Manzi, and Andrew Biggs have cast serious doubt on the study, and given reason to believe the relationship may be the other way around.
MYTH: The Kochs are behind this!
FACT: The Kochs have been behind Scott Walker financially, and can be connected to almost any anti-big-government activism in the United States. But a would-be exposé from the New York Times couldn’t establish a single financial interest the Koch brothers would have in busting public-sector unions in Wisconsin. All evidence suggests the Kochs supported Walker because they believe in his policies’ justice, not their own interests.
Breaking Public Unions: Good!
By Kevin McCullough
Sunday, February 27, 2011
When the delinquent state democrats who had illegally abandoned their duties as representatives of the good people of Wisconsin finally showed up for work, Gov. Scott Walker will have won a decisive victory against the public sector unions in his state.
But in reality he was fighting for all of us, even those far beyond the cheese curd borders. What the unions were doing to the education of the state of Wisconsin was derelict but what they were doing against the taxpayers of the nation was criminal.
The State of Wisconsin had been awarded hefty sums in the Obama stimulus package - over four billion ($4,000,000,000) in awards all totaled. Public school teachers and the public education system in general were awarded nearly half of that from various sources at the federal level. The Department of Education alone contributing more than 1,000,000,000 to the state.
When you drilled down a bit more we find that there were roughly 18 documented stimulus awards that were made to public education. In the fine print on merely one of the awards you discover in that award alone more than $717,000,000 were awarded for the express purpose of shoring up the salaries of teachers, administrators, teachers aides, and what we found about late this week was the past due amount owed to teachers' pensions and health benefits. These were the very same issues that Gov. Scott Walker had begged cooperation from the legislature on.
The theory goes that Walker's predecessor Gov. Jim Doyle a bought and paid for union supporter had been purposefully concealing the fact that he and other pro-union democrats had raided the education funds and the stimulus fix temporarily plastered over the gaping hole.
Until stimulus funds ran out of course.
Hence the situation that Gov. Scott Walker walked into was not only unsustainable, but the state found itself with a deficit of 3.6 billion dollars, after having received stimulus fund awards to the tune of a tad over 4 billion. Thusly the question that has not been asked is, "where did the nearly 8 billion dollars go that created this hole?"
Walker was forced with the reality that public sector unions were holding hostage, not just the taxpayers of Wisconsin, but of the nation, and decided that time would come to an end.
Unions in the private sector generally seek to regulate, punish, or hold accountable a private corporation for fair play. They were designed for the protections of the workers in the private sector specifically so that greedy businessmen could not escape ethical realities for their staff.
Unions in the public arena, are not needed for several reasons. One the employer they rage against isn't some big "evil" corporation, but their fellow neighbors. And in the economy we've had under Obama, for the duration of Obama, and to the specific plan of Obama has only reinforced how tough the average tax-payer has it these days.
So when we hear that our taxes are paying for benefits and the ability to leverage favor that goes far beyond the ability of the average American, we may get miffed. But when we hear that our taxes are paying for those benefits, plus giving millions to billions of additional funds to simply "shore up" the bad accounting of pro-union legislators who have had unchecked access to write additional checks on the backs of the taxpayers--and not be held accountable for them--the tax payer should be fuming.
In Wisconsin, as in most other states where the evidence of the failure of Obama's stimulus is so readily apparent, the mass hirings, 100% tax-payer subsidized health care benefits, and pension had to be undone, but more importantly the idea of public sector unions having the ability to bargain collectively (especially without any binding arbitration to the equation) had to be permanently put down.
In Wisconsin for Gov. Walker, like in New Jersey for Gov. Cristie the day of awakening happened early, but what we are gaining from watching these problems be resolved in legislative, orderly and legal steps is very telling.
Public sector unions should be flat out banned, especially with all the federal and state standards for state and federal workers that are already on the books.
As this begins to happen a massive correction is going to begin to take place in the public discussion, one that treats the tax-payer for what they are. And union leadership will begin to lose its chokehold on power in State houses all across America, and this is long overdue.
And if you think that 95% subsidized pension, and 88% subsidized health care is unreasonable, then I call your public doll bluff and challenge you to get a real job in the real world.
Those of us who already live here are confidant you will change your mind.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
When the delinquent state democrats who had illegally abandoned their duties as representatives of the good people of Wisconsin finally showed up for work, Gov. Scott Walker will have won a decisive victory against the public sector unions in his state.
But in reality he was fighting for all of us, even those far beyond the cheese curd borders. What the unions were doing to the education of the state of Wisconsin was derelict but what they were doing against the taxpayers of the nation was criminal.
The State of Wisconsin had been awarded hefty sums in the Obama stimulus package - over four billion ($4,000,000,000) in awards all totaled. Public school teachers and the public education system in general were awarded nearly half of that from various sources at the federal level. The Department of Education alone contributing more than 1,000,000,000 to the state.
When you drilled down a bit more we find that there were roughly 18 documented stimulus awards that were made to public education. In the fine print on merely one of the awards you discover in that award alone more than $717,000,000 were awarded for the express purpose of shoring up the salaries of teachers, administrators, teachers aides, and what we found about late this week was the past due amount owed to teachers' pensions and health benefits. These were the very same issues that Gov. Scott Walker had begged cooperation from the legislature on.
The theory goes that Walker's predecessor Gov. Jim Doyle a bought and paid for union supporter had been purposefully concealing the fact that he and other pro-union democrats had raided the education funds and the stimulus fix temporarily plastered over the gaping hole.
Until stimulus funds ran out of course.
Hence the situation that Gov. Scott Walker walked into was not only unsustainable, but the state found itself with a deficit of 3.6 billion dollars, after having received stimulus fund awards to the tune of a tad over 4 billion. Thusly the question that has not been asked is, "where did the nearly 8 billion dollars go that created this hole?"
Walker was forced with the reality that public sector unions were holding hostage, not just the taxpayers of Wisconsin, but of the nation, and decided that time would come to an end.
Unions in the private sector generally seek to regulate, punish, or hold accountable a private corporation for fair play. They were designed for the protections of the workers in the private sector specifically so that greedy businessmen could not escape ethical realities for their staff.
Unions in the public arena, are not needed for several reasons. One the employer they rage against isn't some big "evil" corporation, but their fellow neighbors. And in the economy we've had under Obama, for the duration of Obama, and to the specific plan of Obama has only reinforced how tough the average tax-payer has it these days.
So when we hear that our taxes are paying for benefits and the ability to leverage favor that goes far beyond the ability of the average American, we may get miffed. But when we hear that our taxes are paying for those benefits, plus giving millions to billions of additional funds to simply "shore up" the bad accounting of pro-union legislators who have had unchecked access to write additional checks on the backs of the taxpayers--and not be held accountable for them--the tax payer should be fuming.
In Wisconsin, as in most other states where the evidence of the failure of Obama's stimulus is so readily apparent, the mass hirings, 100% tax-payer subsidized health care benefits, and pension had to be undone, but more importantly the idea of public sector unions having the ability to bargain collectively (especially without any binding arbitration to the equation) had to be permanently put down.
In Wisconsin for Gov. Walker, like in New Jersey for Gov. Cristie the day of awakening happened early, but what we are gaining from watching these problems be resolved in legislative, orderly and legal steps is very telling.
Public sector unions should be flat out banned, especially with all the federal and state standards for state and federal workers that are already on the books.
As this begins to happen a massive correction is going to begin to take place in the public discussion, one that treats the tax-payer for what they are. And union leadership will begin to lose its chokehold on power in State houses all across America, and this is long overdue.
And if you think that 95% subsidized pension, and 88% subsidized health care is unreasonable, then I call your public doll bluff and challenge you to get a real job in the real world.
Those of us who already live here are confidant you will change your mind.
Getting Schooled in Wisconsin
By Bill O'Reilly
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Here's a lesson that is both ironic and sad at the same time. According to the U.S. Department of Education, two-thirds of the eighth graders in Wisconsin cannot read proficiently. But assuming the kids are skilled enough to watch TV, they can now see their teachers demonstrating to keep their generous union benefits. So while things do not seem to be going well in the classroom, any thought of holding teachers somewhat responsible is cause for a protest march.
As a former high-school teacher, it pains me to criticize those trying to educate American children. You will never become rich doing that, and the job can be maddening. Today, many children are the victims of a permissive society that often refuses to hold kids responsible for their actions. Cowardly parents make excuses for the failures of their kids, rather than finding a solution to their poor academic performance. Instead of preparing their children for rigorous academic challenges, derelict parents sit it out.
But teachers are supposed to overcome apathetic parenting and at least give the kids a fighting chance to succeed. That is a challenge that's supposed to be met.
As I've written before, in my eighth-grade class at St. Brigid's School on Long Island, there were 60 students and one nun in the classroom. We all could read proficiently, and believe me, some of the parents were not exactly Ozzie and Harriet, if you understand what I'm saying. The nun brooked no nonsense. She forced us to learn.
But that was then.
In 10 years, starting in 1998, Wisconsin doubled the amount of money spent on each public-school student to more than $10,000 per pupil per year. And test scores went down! Doing the math, the equation seems to be that money is not the key to knowledge.
Discipline is.
The teachers in Wisconsin should be compensated to the best of the state's ability. But the educational gravy train is off the tracks. There's no more money. The taxpayer is tapped out.
In the future, if you want to teach kids you'll have to accept less to do it. That may not be fair, but it's the lesson Wisconsin is teaching us. The writing is very clear on the blackboard: No more public money is on the way.
I left teaching because I understood the limitations of the job. I knew at a young age that my income would be restricted and my life would be fairly predictable.
Selfishly, I wanted more.
But I respect immensely those who devote their lives to teaching. I want them to have as much as the market will bear.
Sadly, that point has now been reached.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Here's a lesson that is both ironic and sad at the same time. According to the U.S. Department of Education, two-thirds of the eighth graders in Wisconsin cannot read proficiently. But assuming the kids are skilled enough to watch TV, they can now see their teachers demonstrating to keep their generous union benefits. So while things do not seem to be going well in the classroom, any thought of holding teachers somewhat responsible is cause for a protest march.
As a former high-school teacher, it pains me to criticize those trying to educate American children. You will never become rich doing that, and the job can be maddening. Today, many children are the victims of a permissive society that often refuses to hold kids responsible for their actions. Cowardly parents make excuses for the failures of their kids, rather than finding a solution to their poor academic performance. Instead of preparing their children for rigorous academic challenges, derelict parents sit it out.
But teachers are supposed to overcome apathetic parenting and at least give the kids a fighting chance to succeed. That is a challenge that's supposed to be met.
As I've written before, in my eighth-grade class at St. Brigid's School on Long Island, there were 60 students and one nun in the classroom. We all could read proficiently, and believe me, some of the parents were not exactly Ozzie and Harriet, if you understand what I'm saying. The nun brooked no nonsense. She forced us to learn.
But that was then.
In 10 years, starting in 1998, Wisconsin doubled the amount of money spent on each public-school student to more than $10,000 per pupil per year. And test scores went down! Doing the math, the equation seems to be that money is not the key to knowledge.
Discipline is.
The teachers in Wisconsin should be compensated to the best of the state's ability. But the educational gravy train is off the tracks. There's no more money. The taxpayer is tapped out.
In the future, if you want to teach kids you'll have to accept less to do it. That may not be fair, but it's the lesson Wisconsin is teaching us. The writing is very clear on the blackboard: No more public money is on the way.
I left teaching because I understood the limitations of the job. I knew at a young age that my income would be restricted and my life would be fairly predictable.
Selfishly, I wanted more.
But I respect immensely those who devote their lives to teaching. I want them to have as much as the market will bear.
Sadly, that point has now been reached.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Hate-A-Rama: The Vulgar, Sexist, Racist, Homophobic Rage of the Left
By Michelle Malkin
Friday, February 25, 2011
Barack Obama's new era of civility was over before it began. You wouldn't know it from reading The New York Times, watching Katie Couric or listening to the Democratic manners police. But America has been overrun by foul-mouthed, fist-clenching wildebeests.
Yes, the tea party movement is responsible -- for sending these liberal goons into an insane rage, that is. After enduring two years of false smears as sexist, racist, homophobic barbarians, it is grassroots conservatives and taxpayer advocates who have been ceaselessly subjected to rhetorical projectile vomit. It is Obama's rank-and-file "community organizers" on the streets fomenting the hate against their political enemies. Not the other way around.
The trendy new epithet among Big Labor organizers who've been camping out at the Madison, Wis., Capitol building for more than a week to block GOP Gov. Scott Walker's budget reform bill: "Koch whore." Classy, huh? It's a reference to the reviled Koch brothers, David and Charles, who have used their energy-industry wealth to support limited-government activism. A left-wing agitator based in Buffalo who impersonated Koch in a prank phone call this week used the slur to headline his "gonzo journalism" report. (If a right-leaning activist had perpetrated such a stunt, he'd be labeled a radical, stalking fraudster. But that's par for the media's double-standards course.)
The 20-minute phone call undermined the grand Koch conspiracy by exposing that Walker didn't know Koch at all. No matter. "Koch whore" is the new "Halliburton whore." The Captains of Civility are sticking to it. And the sanctimonious "No Labels" crowd is missing in action -- just like Wisconsin's Fleebagger Democrats.
Sexual vulgarity is a common theme in the left's self-styled "solidarity" movement. Among the Madison pro-union signs the national media chose not to show you: "Buttholes for Billionaires" (complete with a photo of Walker's head placed in the middle of a graphic photo of someone's posterior) and "If teabaggers are as hot as their Fox News anchors, then I'm here for the gang bang!!!"
Last month, GOP Lieutenant Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch was subjected to similar misogyny for her outreach efforts to private businesses. Liberal WTDY radio host John "Sly" Sylvester accused her of performing "fellatio on all the talk-show hosts in Milwaukee" and sneered that she had "pulled a train" (a crude phrase for group sex).
At an AFSCME rally in Providence, R.I., on Tuesday, an unhinged pro-union supporter picked an unprovoked fight with a citizen journalist taping the event for public access TV. His eyes bulging, the brawler yelled: "I'll f**k you in the a**, you faggot!" After several unsuccessful minutes of trying to calm their furious ally down, the solidarity mob finally started chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, union-busting's got to go" to drown out his intimidating vow to follow the cameraman outside the building. Criminal charges are now pending against him. None of the local media who covered the event thought to mention the disruption in their coverage.
In Columbus, Ohio, supporters of GOP Gov. John Kasich's fiscal reforms were confronted with a fulminating union demonstrator who railed: "The tea party is a bunch of d**k-sucking corporate butt-lickers who want to crush the working people of this country."
In Denver, Colo., Leland Robinson, a gay black tea party activist and entrepreneur who criticized teachers unions at a Capitol rally, was told by white labor supporters to "get behind that fence where you belong." They called the 52-year-old limousine driver "son" and subjected him to this ugly, racially charged taunt: "Do you have any children? That you claim?"
Tea party favorite and former Godfather's Pizza President Herman Cain is another outspoken black conservative businessman who has earned the civility mob's lash. Two weeks ago, a cowardly liberal writer derided Cain as a "monkey in the window," a "garbage pail kid" and a "minstrel" who performs for his "masters." Monkey. Parrot. Puppet. Lawn jockey. Uncle Tom. Aunt Thomasina. Oreo. Coconut. Banana. We minority conservatives have heard it all.
In Washington, D.C., a multi-union protest at the offices of conservative activist group FreedomWorks resulted in one young female employee, Tabitha Hale, getting smacked with a sign by a barbarian wearing a Communications Workers of America T-shirt -- and another FreedomWorks employee getting yelled at as a "bad Jew" for opposing public union monopolies and reckless spending.
In the wake of the Tucson massacre, Obama urged the nation "to do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations." He pushed for "a more civil and honest public discourse."
As Big Labor-backing MoveOn.org (the same outfit that smeared Gen. David Petraeus as a traitor) prepares to march on all 50 state Capitols this weekend, where's the Civility Chief now? AWOL.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Barack Obama's new era of civility was over before it began. You wouldn't know it from reading The New York Times, watching Katie Couric or listening to the Democratic manners police. But America has been overrun by foul-mouthed, fist-clenching wildebeests.
Yes, the tea party movement is responsible -- for sending these liberal goons into an insane rage, that is. After enduring two years of false smears as sexist, racist, homophobic barbarians, it is grassroots conservatives and taxpayer advocates who have been ceaselessly subjected to rhetorical projectile vomit. It is Obama's rank-and-file "community organizers" on the streets fomenting the hate against their political enemies. Not the other way around.
The trendy new epithet among Big Labor organizers who've been camping out at the Madison, Wis., Capitol building for more than a week to block GOP Gov. Scott Walker's budget reform bill: "Koch whore." Classy, huh? It's a reference to the reviled Koch brothers, David and Charles, who have used their energy-industry wealth to support limited-government activism. A left-wing agitator based in Buffalo who impersonated Koch in a prank phone call this week used the slur to headline his "gonzo journalism" report. (If a right-leaning activist had perpetrated such a stunt, he'd be labeled a radical, stalking fraudster. But that's par for the media's double-standards course.)
The 20-minute phone call undermined the grand Koch conspiracy by exposing that Walker didn't know Koch at all. No matter. "Koch whore" is the new "Halliburton whore." The Captains of Civility are sticking to it. And the sanctimonious "No Labels" crowd is missing in action -- just like Wisconsin's Fleebagger Democrats.
Sexual vulgarity is a common theme in the left's self-styled "solidarity" movement. Among the Madison pro-union signs the national media chose not to show you: "Buttholes for Billionaires" (complete with a photo of Walker's head placed in the middle of a graphic photo of someone's posterior) and "If teabaggers are as hot as their Fox News anchors, then I'm here for the gang bang!!!"
Last month, GOP Lieutenant Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch was subjected to similar misogyny for her outreach efforts to private businesses. Liberal WTDY radio host John "Sly" Sylvester accused her of performing "fellatio on all the talk-show hosts in Milwaukee" and sneered that she had "pulled a train" (a crude phrase for group sex).
At an AFSCME rally in Providence, R.I., on Tuesday, an unhinged pro-union supporter picked an unprovoked fight with a citizen journalist taping the event for public access TV. His eyes bulging, the brawler yelled: "I'll f**k you in the a**, you faggot!" After several unsuccessful minutes of trying to calm their furious ally down, the solidarity mob finally started chanting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, union-busting's got to go" to drown out his intimidating vow to follow the cameraman outside the building. Criminal charges are now pending against him. None of the local media who covered the event thought to mention the disruption in their coverage.
In Columbus, Ohio, supporters of GOP Gov. John Kasich's fiscal reforms were confronted with a fulminating union demonstrator who railed: "The tea party is a bunch of d**k-sucking corporate butt-lickers who want to crush the working people of this country."
In Denver, Colo., Leland Robinson, a gay black tea party activist and entrepreneur who criticized teachers unions at a Capitol rally, was told by white labor supporters to "get behind that fence where you belong." They called the 52-year-old limousine driver "son" and subjected him to this ugly, racially charged taunt: "Do you have any children? That you claim?"
Tea party favorite and former Godfather's Pizza President Herman Cain is another outspoken black conservative businessman who has earned the civility mob's lash. Two weeks ago, a cowardly liberal writer derided Cain as a "monkey in the window," a "garbage pail kid" and a "minstrel" who performs for his "masters." Monkey. Parrot. Puppet. Lawn jockey. Uncle Tom. Aunt Thomasina. Oreo. Coconut. Banana. We minority conservatives have heard it all.
In Washington, D.C., a multi-union protest at the offices of conservative activist group FreedomWorks resulted in one young female employee, Tabitha Hale, getting smacked with a sign by a barbarian wearing a Communications Workers of America T-shirt -- and another FreedomWorks employee getting yelled at as a "bad Jew" for opposing public union monopolies and reckless spending.
In the wake of the Tucson massacre, Obama urged the nation "to do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations." He pushed for "a more civil and honest public discourse."
As Big Labor-backing MoveOn.org (the same outfit that smeared Gen. David Petraeus as a traitor) prepares to march on all 50 state Capitols this weekend, where's the Civility Chief now? AWOL.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Public Unions Must Go
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The protesting public school teachers with fake doctor's notes swarming the Capitol building in Madison, Wis., insist that Gov. Scott Walker is hell-bent on "union busting." Walker denies that his effort to reform public-sector unions in Wisconsin is anything more than an honest attempt at balancing the state's books.
I hope the protesters are right. Public unions have been a 50-year mistake.
A crucial distinction has been lost in the debate over Walker's proposals: Government unions are not the same thing as private-sector unions.
Traditional, private-sector unions were born out of an often-bloody adversarial relationship between labor and management. It's been said that during World War I, U.S. soldiers had better odds of surviving on the front lines than miners did in West Virginia coal mines. Mine disasters were frequent; hazardous conditions were the norm. In 1907, the Monongah mine explosion claimed the lives of 362 West Virginia miners. Day-to-day life often resembled serfdom, with management controlling vast swaths of the miners' lives. Before unionization and many New Deal-era reforms, Washington had little power to reform conditions by legislation.
Government unions have no such narrative on their side. Do you recall the Great DMV cave-in of 1959? How about the travails of second-grade teachers recounted in Upton Sinclair's famous schoolhouse sequel to "The Jungle"? No? Don't feel bad, because no such horror stories exist.
Government workers were making good salaries in 1962 when President Kennedy lifted, by executive order (so much for democracy), the federal ban on government unions. Civil service regulations and similar laws had guaranteed good working conditions for generations.
The argument for public unionization wasn't moral, economic or intellectual. It was rankly political.
Traditional organized labor, the backbone of the Democratic Party, was beginning to lose ground. As Daniel DiSalvo wrote in "The Trouble with Public Sector Unions," in the fall issue of National Affairs, JFK saw how in states such as New York and Wisconsin, where public unions were already in place, local liberal pols benefited politically and financially. He took the idea national.
The plan worked perfectly -- too perfectly. Public union membership skyrocketed, and government union support for the party of government skyrocketed with it. From 1989 to 2004, AFSCME -- the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees -- gave nearly $40 million to candidates in federal elections, with 98.5 percent going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Why would local government unions give so much in federal elections? Because government workers have an inherent interest in boosting the amount of federal tax dollars their local governments get. Put simply, people in the government business support the party of government. Which is why, as the Manhattan Institute's Steven Malanga has been chronicling for years, public unions are the country's foremost advocates for increased taxes at all levels of government.
And this gets to the real insidiousness of government unions. Wisconsin labor officials fairly note that they've acceded to many of their governor's specific demands -- that workers contribute to their pensions and health-care costs, for example. But they don't want to lose the right to collective bargaining.
But that is exactly what they need to lose.
Private-sector unions fight with management over an equitable distribution of profits. Government unions negotiate with friendly politicians over taxpayer money, putting the public interest at odds with union interests, and, as we've seen in states such as California and Wisconsin, exploding the cost of government. California's pension costs soared 2,000 percent in a decade thanks to the unions.
The labor-politician negotiations can't be fair when the unions can put so much money into campaign spending. Victor Gotbaum, a leader in the New York City chapter of AFSCME, summed up the problem in 1975 when he boasted, "We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss."
This is why FDR believed that "the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," and why even George Meany, the first head of the AFL-CIO, held that it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government."
As it turns out, it's not impossible; it's just terribly unwise. It creates a dysfunctional system where for some, growing government becomes its own reward. You can find evidence of this dysfunction everywhere. The Cato Institute's Michael Tanner notes that federal education spending has risen by 188 percent in real terms since 1970, but we've seen no significant improvement in test scores.
The unions and the protesters in Wisconsin see Walker's reforms as a potential death knell for government unions. My response? If only.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The protesting public school teachers with fake doctor's notes swarming the Capitol building in Madison, Wis., insist that Gov. Scott Walker is hell-bent on "union busting." Walker denies that his effort to reform public-sector unions in Wisconsin is anything more than an honest attempt at balancing the state's books.
I hope the protesters are right. Public unions have been a 50-year mistake.
A crucial distinction has been lost in the debate over Walker's proposals: Government unions are not the same thing as private-sector unions.
Traditional, private-sector unions were born out of an often-bloody adversarial relationship between labor and management. It's been said that during World War I, U.S. soldiers had better odds of surviving on the front lines than miners did in West Virginia coal mines. Mine disasters were frequent; hazardous conditions were the norm. In 1907, the Monongah mine explosion claimed the lives of 362 West Virginia miners. Day-to-day life often resembled serfdom, with management controlling vast swaths of the miners' lives. Before unionization and many New Deal-era reforms, Washington had little power to reform conditions by legislation.
Government unions have no such narrative on their side. Do you recall the Great DMV cave-in of 1959? How about the travails of second-grade teachers recounted in Upton Sinclair's famous schoolhouse sequel to "The Jungle"? No? Don't feel bad, because no such horror stories exist.
Government workers were making good salaries in 1962 when President Kennedy lifted, by executive order (so much for democracy), the federal ban on government unions. Civil service regulations and similar laws had guaranteed good working conditions for generations.
The argument for public unionization wasn't moral, economic or intellectual. It was rankly political.
Traditional organized labor, the backbone of the Democratic Party, was beginning to lose ground. As Daniel DiSalvo wrote in "The Trouble with Public Sector Unions," in the fall issue of National Affairs, JFK saw how in states such as New York and Wisconsin, where public unions were already in place, local liberal pols benefited politically and financially. He took the idea national.
The plan worked perfectly -- too perfectly. Public union membership skyrocketed, and government union support for the party of government skyrocketed with it. From 1989 to 2004, AFSCME -- the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees -- gave nearly $40 million to candidates in federal elections, with 98.5 percent going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Why would local government unions give so much in federal elections? Because government workers have an inherent interest in boosting the amount of federal tax dollars their local governments get. Put simply, people in the government business support the party of government. Which is why, as the Manhattan Institute's Steven Malanga has been chronicling for years, public unions are the country's foremost advocates for increased taxes at all levels of government.
And this gets to the real insidiousness of government unions. Wisconsin labor officials fairly note that they've acceded to many of their governor's specific demands -- that workers contribute to their pensions and health-care costs, for example. But they don't want to lose the right to collective bargaining.
But that is exactly what they need to lose.
Private-sector unions fight with management over an equitable distribution of profits. Government unions negotiate with friendly politicians over taxpayer money, putting the public interest at odds with union interests, and, as we've seen in states such as California and Wisconsin, exploding the cost of government. California's pension costs soared 2,000 percent in a decade thanks to the unions.
The labor-politician negotiations can't be fair when the unions can put so much money into campaign spending. Victor Gotbaum, a leader in the New York City chapter of AFSCME, summed up the problem in 1975 when he boasted, "We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss."
This is why FDR believed that "the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," and why even George Meany, the first head of the AFL-CIO, held that it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government."
As it turns out, it's not impossible; it's just terribly unwise. It creates a dysfunctional system where for some, growing government becomes its own reward. You can find evidence of this dysfunction everywhere. The Cato Institute's Michael Tanner notes that federal education spending has risen by 188 percent in real terms since 1970, but we've seen no significant improvement in test scores.
The unions and the protesters in Wisconsin see Walker's reforms as a potential death knell for government unions. My response? If only.
‘Free’ Public Radio Is Anything But
For all NPR’s vaunted private donations, it is raising the battle cry to avoid losing a dime of taxpayer money.
Bruce Edward Walker
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
National Public Radio listeners are being inundated with warnings that they soon may have to drive to work every morning without the sonorous intonations of Morning Edition’s Corey Flintoff, Steve Inskeep, and Renée Montagne, and may be forced to drive home without the narrative drone of All Things Considered’s Robert Siegel, Michele Norris, and Melissa Block.
Just this morning, I received a panicked e-mail from the director of broadcasting at an NPR affiliate in my home state, Michigan. You know, one of those state-based public-radio operations that just last October received a portion of George Soros’s $1.8 million Open Society Foundation gift to hire two government reporters in each of the 50 states; one of the same group of radio stations benefiting from the Joan Kroc Foundation’s $200 million endowment in 2003; one of the same stations that host interminable on-air fundraisers at least twice a year.
They are warning that Congress may eliminate taxpayer subsidies to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that heaps money on 900 NPR affiliates across the country.
The warnings reek of disingenuousness.
After all, crying poverty is public broadcasting’s modus operandi. If it didn’t do it extremely well, no one would donate during those radiothons, corporations wouldn’t spend huge sums of money to sponsor programming, and “people just like you” wouldn’t forgo paying the cable bill so they could help meet a challenge grant from their neighbors and co-workers.
As an example of how much begging public radio does, Wisconsin Public Radio — a network of 32 stations programmed by seven regional stations – reported that 13 percent of its total budget in 2009 was used for fundraising. Additionally, the network’s website reveals that 25 percent ($1.94 million) of the revenues garnered from listener and corporate donations ($6.25 million and $1.58 million, respectively) are directly allocated to fundraising.
So it came as no surprise when I received the director’s e-mail, which warns, “I believe this is one of the most serious challenges to public broadcasting that we have ever faced.”
Not mentioned in his emotional appeal are the substantial costs American taxpayers are stuck with.
According to dedicated public-broadcasting professionals at several stations in Michigan with whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking without a single Freedom of Information Act request, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting allocates federal tax dollars every year to state NPR affiliates. Station personnel I interviewed this past week said that the sums granted to affiliates range from $258,000 to approximately $450,000 annually.
Why, that’s “only $1.35 per American per year,” according to the e-mail. But not every one of the 300-plus million people in the United States is forced to pony up that buck thirty-five. If we hypothetically assume that 150 million people file federal tax returns and that half of those receive substantial refunds, that makes NPR’s share more like $5.40 per person. That’s still relatively insignificant for enlightened fans of Terry Gross and Diane Rehm — but it’s $5.40 more than most of the people who don’t listen to public radio would pay if they had a choice.
Moreover, the public “donations” don’t stop at direct coercion by the federal government. State taxpayers cover a big chunk of public radio’s bill through subsidies to state universities and colleges that house transmitters, offices, studios, and utilities. One publicly supported station in Michigan told me that this arrangement amounts to 12 percent ($405,159) of its annual budget. Wisconsin Public Radio has a similar 10 percent ($1.6 million) “indirect/in-kind” arrangement.
In addition, there is often direct support from the colleges and universities, which again are supported by taxpayers. In many cases the college’s board of trustees owns the broadcast license of the station nestled on its campus, so a line-item designation is included in the college’s annual budget. The Michigan public university referred to above bestows $1.1 million on its public-radio station (that’s 32.8 percent of the station’s total annual revenues). Likewise, Wisconsin colleges contributed 23 percent of Wisconsin Public Radio’s $16 million revenues in 2009.
There are plenty of other arguments for defunding public radio (and public television as well), but the basic one is this: Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to support the luxury of public radio.
Bruce Edward Walker
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
National Public Radio listeners are being inundated with warnings that they soon may have to drive to work every morning without the sonorous intonations of Morning Edition’s Corey Flintoff, Steve Inskeep, and Renée Montagne, and may be forced to drive home without the narrative drone of All Things Considered’s Robert Siegel, Michele Norris, and Melissa Block.
Just this morning, I received a panicked e-mail from the director of broadcasting at an NPR affiliate in my home state, Michigan. You know, one of those state-based public-radio operations that just last October received a portion of George Soros’s $1.8 million Open Society Foundation gift to hire two government reporters in each of the 50 states; one of the same group of radio stations benefiting from the Joan Kroc Foundation’s $200 million endowment in 2003; one of the same stations that host interminable on-air fundraisers at least twice a year.
They are warning that Congress may eliminate taxpayer subsidies to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that heaps money on 900 NPR affiliates across the country.
The warnings reek of disingenuousness.
After all, crying poverty is public broadcasting’s modus operandi. If it didn’t do it extremely well, no one would donate during those radiothons, corporations wouldn’t spend huge sums of money to sponsor programming, and “people just like you” wouldn’t forgo paying the cable bill so they could help meet a challenge grant from their neighbors and co-workers.
As an example of how much begging public radio does, Wisconsin Public Radio — a network of 32 stations programmed by seven regional stations – reported that 13 percent of its total budget in 2009 was used for fundraising. Additionally, the network’s website reveals that 25 percent ($1.94 million) of the revenues garnered from listener and corporate donations ($6.25 million and $1.58 million, respectively) are directly allocated to fundraising.
So it came as no surprise when I received the director’s e-mail, which warns, “I believe this is one of the most serious challenges to public broadcasting that we have ever faced.”
Not mentioned in his emotional appeal are the substantial costs American taxpayers are stuck with.
According to dedicated public-broadcasting professionals at several stations in Michigan with whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking without a single Freedom of Information Act request, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting allocates federal tax dollars every year to state NPR affiliates. Station personnel I interviewed this past week said that the sums granted to affiliates range from $258,000 to approximately $450,000 annually.
Why, that’s “only $1.35 per American per year,” according to the e-mail. But not every one of the 300-plus million people in the United States is forced to pony up that buck thirty-five. If we hypothetically assume that 150 million people file federal tax returns and that half of those receive substantial refunds, that makes NPR’s share more like $5.40 per person. That’s still relatively insignificant for enlightened fans of Terry Gross and Diane Rehm — but it’s $5.40 more than most of the people who don’t listen to public radio would pay if they had a choice.
Moreover, the public “donations” don’t stop at direct coercion by the federal government. State taxpayers cover a big chunk of public radio’s bill through subsidies to state universities and colleges that house transmitters, offices, studios, and utilities. One publicly supported station in Michigan told me that this arrangement amounts to 12 percent ($405,159) of its annual budget. Wisconsin Public Radio has a similar 10 percent ($1.6 million) “indirect/in-kind” arrangement.
In addition, there is often direct support from the colleges and universities, which again are supported by taxpayers. In many cases the college’s board of trustees owns the broadcast license of the station nestled on its campus, so a line-item designation is included in the college’s annual budget. The Michigan public university referred to above bestows $1.1 million on its public-radio station (that’s 32.8 percent of the station’s total annual revenues). Likewise, Wisconsin colleges contributed 23 percent of Wisconsin Public Radio’s $16 million revenues in 2009.
There are plenty of other arguments for defunding public radio (and public television as well), but the basic one is this: Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to support the luxury of public radio.
Nations United Against Israel
By Cliff May
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen are in turmoil. In Libya, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi is using mercenaries to slaughter peaceful protestors. Hezbollah is staging a slow-motion coup in Lebanon. Iran’s rulers are executing dissidents daily, developing nuclear weapons and sending warships through Suez. The response of the United Nations to these many threats to global peace and security? Condemn Israel! Is there anything else the UN does as often or as well?
Here’s how it went down this time: At the urging of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, temporary Security Council member Lebanon – a nation, as noted, increasingly ruled by Hezbollah, the Iranian-funded terrorist group that in 1983 murdered 241 American servicemen in Beirut – sponsored a resolution condemning Israel for constructing “illegal settlements.”
In other words, the issue that the UN considers most critical in the world at this hinge moment in history is that Israelis have been building homes on land the Palestinians want – and might be able to have if they were prepared to negotiate a peace treaty with Israelis.
On Thursday, 110 members of Congress sent a letter to the Obama administration asking that it veto this latest attempt to delegitimize Israel, a democratic ally that has taken serious steps “to bring peace to the region.” Those steps included a ten-month moratorium on new housing in the West Bank which Israelis hoped would bring Palestinians back to the negotiating table. But why should Palestinians negotiate if they can get the UN to force Israel to make concessions in exchange for nothing?
In the end and to its credit, the Obama administration did veto the resolution. But U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice did not even attempt to suggest how hypocritical, counterproductive and just plain deranged it is for the UN to ignore the crimes being committed by Islamist terrorists and Arab despots while demanding that Israelis surrender territory -- taken in a defensive war -- to those who remain committed to their extermination.
Instead, Rice meekly conceded that the U.S. agrees "about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity," adding that the resolution was nevertheless “unwise."
A more honest and courageous US ambassador to the UN – John Bolton, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Moynihan spring to mind – would have stated clearly that this resolution is a shameful attempt to deflect attention from real crises while enhancing Abbas’ position within the Arab and Muslim worlds. He can take America’s money and spit in America’s eye? What a guy!
Perhaps Ambassador Rice would benefit from spending more time on these issues and less, as my FDD colleague Claudia Rosett has reported, lecturing Americans on “Why America Needs the United Nations.” Since when did the job description of an American ambassador to the UN including marketing the UN to the taxpayers who subsidize the UN?
But I digress. The more important point is this: The UN’s leadership and most of its members are not remotely interested in securing peace anywhere. And there is no Palestinian leader who will or even can make peace with Israel so long as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and similar groups are calling the shots – in many instances literally.
Hamas, Hezbollah and the theocratic rulers of Iran have been candid: Creation of a Palestinian state is, at best, a secondary goal. Their primary objective is the defeat and destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. No serious person can still believe the core issue is housing in the West Bank – also known as Judea and Samaria -- territories that have never been part of a Palestinian state -- because there has never been a Palestinian state-- territories occupied by Jordan from 1949 until 1967 when Jordan, Egypt and other Arab nations launched a conventional war intended to wipe Israel off the map.
Islamists cannot accept the existence of a nation led by infidels in a part of the world targeted for religious cleansing, the imposition of sharia, and the establishment of a modern caliphate -- one that is to be oil-rich, nuclear-armed and dedicated to diminishing American power globally and permanently.
Were Arab and Muslim nations willing to tolerate Israel’s existence – not love Israelis, just tolerate them -- negotiating borders would be a piece of cake. In the absence of such tolerance it would be a mistake for Israel to surrender another square inch of soil -- as its earlier withdrawals from southern Lebanon (where Hezbollah has installed thousand of missiles under the noses of UN “peacekeepers”) and Gaza (from which thousands of missiles have been launched at Israeli villages) have demonstrated to all but the delusional (a substantial percentage of the international foreign policy community).
Israel also turned over the Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace treaty signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. His assassination at the hands of a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group soon followed. Three decades later that peace treaty may be scrapped by whichever government comes to power in Egypt in the days ahead. That does not imply that another war with Egypt is imminent or even inevitable. It does imply that Israel cannot depend for its survival on pieces of paper signed by dictators. How often do free peoples need to be taught that lesson?
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen are in turmoil. In Libya, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi is using mercenaries to slaughter peaceful protestors. Hezbollah is staging a slow-motion coup in Lebanon. Iran’s rulers are executing dissidents daily, developing nuclear weapons and sending warships through Suez. The response of the United Nations to these many threats to global peace and security? Condemn Israel! Is there anything else the UN does as often or as well?
Here’s how it went down this time: At the urging of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, temporary Security Council member Lebanon – a nation, as noted, increasingly ruled by Hezbollah, the Iranian-funded terrorist group that in 1983 murdered 241 American servicemen in Beirut – sponsored a resolution condemning Israel for constructing “illegal settlements.”
In other words, the issue that the UN considers most critical in the world at this hinge moment in history is that Israelis have been building homes on land the Palestinians want – and might be able to have if they were prepared to negotiate a peace treaty with Israelis.
On Thursday, 110 members of Congress sent a letter to the Obama administration asking that it veto this latest attempt to delegitimize Israel, a democratic ally that has taken serious steps “to bring peace to the region.” Those steps included a ten-month moratorium on new housing in the West Bank which Israelis hoped would bring Palestinians back to the negotiating table. But why should Palestinians negotiate if they can get the UN to force Israel to make concessions in exchange for nothing?
In the end and to its credit, the Obama administration did veto the resolution. But U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice did not even attempt to suggest how hypocritical, counterproductive and just plain deranged it is for the UN to ignore the crimes being committed by Islamist terrorists and Arab despots while demanding that Israelis surrender territory -- taken in a defensive war -- to those who remain committed to their extermination.
Instead, Rice meekly conceded that the U.S. agrees "about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity," adding that the resolution was nevertheless “unwise."
A more honest and courageous US ambassador to the UN – John Bolton, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Moynihan spring to mind – would have stated clearly that this resolution is a shameful attempt to deflect attention from real crises while enhancing Abbas’ position within the Arab and Muslim worlds. He can take America’s money and spit in America’s eye? What a guy!
Perhaps Ambassador Rice would benefit from spending more time on these issues and less, as my FDD colleague Claudia Rosett has reported, lecturing Americans on “Why America Needs the United Nations.” Since when did the job description of an American ambassador to the UN including marketing the UN to the taxpayers who subsidize the UN?
But I digress. The more important point is this: The UN’s leadership and most of its members are not remotely interested in securing peace anywhere. And there is no Palestinian leader who will or even can make peace with Israel so long as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and similar groups are calling the shots – in many instances literally.
Hamas, Hezbollah and the theocratic rulers of Iran have been candid: Creation of a Palestinian state is, at best, a secondary goal. Their primary objective is the defeat and destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. No serious person can still believe the core issue is housing in the West Bank – also known as Judea and Samaria -- territories that have never been part of a Palestinian state -- because there has never been a Palestinian state-- territories occupied by Jordan from 1949 until 1967 when Jordan, Egypt and other Arab nations launched a conventional war intended to wipe Israel off the map.
Islamists cannot accept the existence of a nation led by infidels in a part of the world targeted for religious cleansing, the imposition of sharia, and the establishment of a modern caliphate -- one that is to be oil-rich, nuclear-armed and dedicated to diminishing American power globally and permanently.
Were Arab and Muslim nations willing to tolerate Israel’s existence – not love Israelis, just tolerate them -- negotiating borders would be a piece of cake. In the absence of such tolerance it would be a mistake for Israel to surrender another square inch of soil -- as its earlier withdrawals from southern Lebanon (where Hezbollah has installed thousand of missiles under the noses of UN “peacekeepers”) and Gaza (from which thousands of missiles have been launched at Israeli villages) have demonstrated to all but the delusional (a substantial percentage of the international foreign policy community).
Israel also turned over the Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace treaty signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. His assassination at the hands of a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group soon followed. Three decades later that peace treaty may be scrapped by whichever government comes to power in Egypt in the days ahead. That does not imply that another war with Egypt is imminent or even inevitable. It does imply that Israel cannot depend for its survival on pieces of paper signed by dictators. How often do free peoples need to be taught that lesson?
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
What Madison Revealed
Teachers are rent seekers.
Mona Charen
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. — John Maynard Keynes
The defunct economist who most dominates the minds of the Obama administration and the Democratic party is Keynes himself. But events in Wisconsin and a few other states are bringing other economists — some still very much alive — to the fore.
In Wisconsin and other states facing severe budget crises, we are witnessing the clash of special interests against the public interest. Although the term “special interests” is usually deployed as an epithet by Democrats and is meant to refer to oil companies, “the rich,” or other undesirables, in fact, as economist James M. Buchanan and other “public choice” theorists explain, a special interest is any community that attempts to gain a particular advantage from government.
Buchanan taught that government officials — office holders and bureaucrats alike — respond to incentives and pursue their self-interest just as other economic actors do. So do “rent seekers.” The classic example offered is that of protectionism. An industry — say, the sugar growers — lobbies the government to impose tariffs on imported sugar in order to keep prices high. A tariff will benefit each sugar grower substantially. So it is in the sugar growers’ interest to form a trade association, to make campaign contributions, and to pay close attention to the way politicians vote on the question.
The broad public, by contrast, is potentially disadvantaged by a tariff on imported sugar because prices for candy, soda, and other products that contain sugar will rise. But the incremental added cost, per consumer, is very small. It is therefore extremely difficult to organize the public to oppose sugar quotas or a host of other measures. Thus does government spending ratchet ever upward.
Public employees in many states are classic rent seekers, but they go sugar growers and the like one better. Through collective bargaining, unions negotiate with elected officials for wages and benefits. They then get the state to collect union dues for them by withholding the dues from public employees’ checks. With the accumulated cash, the union then makes campaign contributions to the favored public officials. Neat. As labor historian Fred Siegel told John Fund of the Wall Street Journal: “Ending dues deductions breaks the political cycle in which government collects dues, gives them to the unions, who then use the dues to back their favorite candidates and also lobby for bigger government and more pay and benefits.”
This system has worked well for public employees across the nation. Until 2010, New Jersey teachers contributed nothing to their lavish health-care packages. Permitted to retire after 25 years of service, teachers receive pensions of 70 percent or more of their top salary (among the highest in the country) as well as health care for life. Yet the NJ Teachers Association howled when Gov. Chris Christie asked them, in light of the state’s dire financial straits, to accept a one-year wage freeze and to contribute 1.5 percent of their salaries to the cost of their health plans.
Wisconsin teachers too have negotiated cushy deals for themselves. As Gov. Scott Walker has pointed out, private employees contribute an average of 29 percent of the cost of health benefits. Wisconsin union members contribute only about 6 percent. With the state budget in the red, something had to be done.
The bargains between governments and unions (or other special interests) require one thing above all to be successful — an inattentive electorate. Just as the sugar growers would be eager to keep people in the dark about quotas or subsidies, so unions want the public to be kept ignorant of the overly generous compensation packages that are negotiated at the taxpayers’ expense.
That’s why the massive, tub-thumping, sign-waving hippie sit-in staged by teachers and their allies in Madison over the last week makes no sense. (By the way, did you notice the demise of “civility” in politics? Where are the denunciations of the pictures of Walker as Hitler? The signs calling him a “Midwest Mussolini”?) The protests, with their attendant disdain for the school kids (so many teachers fraudulently called in sick that schools in Milwaukee, Madison, and Janesville had to close), serve as huge neon signs alerting the sleeping electorate to what has been happening to their tax dollars.
The rent seekers stand exposed. Nothing that Governor Walker and the Republican legislature had in mind is as damaging to the teachers’ unions as that spotlight.
Mona Charen
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. — John Maynard Keynes
The defunct economist who most dominates the minds of the Obama administration and the Democratic party is Keynes himself. But events in Wisconsin and a few other states are bringing other economists — some still very much alive — to the fore.
In Wisconsin and other states facing severe budget crises, we are witnessing the clash of special interests against the public interest. Although the term “special interests” is usually deployed as an epithet by Democrats and is meant to refer to oil companies, “the rich,” or other undesirables, in fact, as economist James M. Buchanan and other “public choice” theorists explain, a special interest is any community that attempts to gain a particular advantage from government.
Buchanan taught that government officials — office holders and bureaucrats alike — respond to incentives and pursue their self-interest just as other economic actors do. So do “rent seekers.” The classic example offered is that of protectionism. An industry — say, the sugar growers — lobbies the government to impose tariffs on imported sugar in order to keep prices high. A tariff will benefit each sugar grower substantially. So it is in the sugar growers’ interest to form a trade association, to make campaign contributions, and to pay close attention to the way politicians vote on the question.
The broad public, by contrast, is potentially disadvantaged by a tariff on imported sugar because prices for candy, soda, and other products that contain sugar will rise. But the incremental added cost, per consumer, is very small. It is therefore extremely difficult to organize the public to oppose sugar quotas or a host of other measures. Thus does government spending ratchet ever upward.
Public employees in many states are classic rent seekers, but they go sugar growers and the like one better. Through collective bargaining, unions negotiate with elected officials for wages and benefits. They then get the state to collect union dues for them by withholding the dues from public employees’ checks. With the accumulated cash, the union then makes campaign contributions to the favored public officials. Neat. As labor historian Fred Siegel told John Fund of the Wall Street Journal: “Ending dues deductions breaks the political cycle in which government collects dues, gives them to the unions, who then use the dues to back their favorite candidates and also lobby for bigger government and more pay and benefits.”
This system has worked well for public employees across the nation. Until 2010, New Jersey teachers contributed nothing to their lavish health-care packages. Permitted to retire after 25 years of service, teachers receive pensions of 70 percent or more of their top salary (among the highest in the country) as well as health care for life. Yet the NJ Teachers Association howled when Gov. Chris Christie asked them, in light of the state’s dire financial straits, to accept a one-year wage freeze and to contribute 1.5 percent of their salaries to the cost of their health plans.
Wisconsin teachers too have negotiated cushy deals for themselves. As Gov. Scott Walker has pointed out, private employees contribute an average of 29 percent of the cost of health benefits. Wisconsin union members contribute only about 6 percent. With the state budget in the red, something had to be done.
The bargains between governments and unions (or other special interests) require one thing above all to be successful — an inattentive electorate. Just as the sugar growers would be eager to keep people in the dark about quotas or subsidies, so unions want the public to be kept ignorant of the overly generous compensation packages that are negotiated at the taxpayers’ expense.
That’s why the massive, tub-thumping, sign-waving hippie sit-in staged by teachers and their allies in Madison over the last week makes no sense. (By the way, did you notice the demise of “civility” in politics? Where are the denunciations of the pictures of Walker as Hitler? The signs calling him a “Midwest Mussolini”?) The protests, with their attendant disdain for the school kids (so many teachers fraudulently called in sick that schools in Milwaukee, Madison, and Janesville had to close), serve as huge neon signs alerting the sleeping electorate to what has been happening to their tax dollars.
The rent seekers stand exposed. Nothing that Governor Walker and the Republican legislature had in mind is as damaging to the teachers’ unions as that spotlight.
Claremont McKenna’s Pro-Islamist Professor
Instead of censuring Bassam Frangieh for his support of terrorist organizations, the college administrators regard him as a major asset.
Charles C. Johnson
Monday, February 21, 2011
Claremont McKenna College is a nationally recognized leader in training Defense Department officials and State Department personnel (including numerous ambassadors). Professor Bassam Frangieh is head of Claremont McKenna’s Arabic Department and Middle East Studies program, where he teaches tomorrow’s diplomats about the Middle East, plans study-abroad programs — and supports recognized terrorist groups, namely, Hezbollah and Hamas.
In the wake of Hamas’s election victory in 2006, Frangieh told an interviewer that he looks to Hamas with “great joy” and supports violence against Israel. Hamas’s control, he said, “might be able to produce the beginning of salvation. . . . I wonder what else would the Arabs have without Hamas and Hezbollah? Nothing. Except humiliation. I congratulate Hamas on its victory.” Meanwhile, in his academic work, he has written in favor of suicide bombing and martyrdom. In a speech at the University of Bridgeport in 2007, he said that Islam is “very democratic,” and he praised Saddam Hussein as a model leader who “wasn’t a thief” and who “really did something for his country.”
Frangieh has also made his views known through petitions, which, he says, “stem from the heart and are cast onto paper.” In 2006 he signed a pro-Hezbollah petition that was circulated along with a flyer encouraging its signatories to “Boycott Israel. . . . We are all Hizbullah now.” The petition, promoted by prominent anti-Israel, anti-American activists like Tariq Ali, Omar Barghouri, and Norman Finkelstein, demanded a boycott of Israel and encouraged Israeli academics to stop the “Zionist killing machine.” It called Hezbollah the “Lebanese Resistance” and a “legitimate” army, and praised its “heroic operations” against Israel. A 2007 petition blamed a “Zionist conspiracy” for then-senator Biden’s plan to divide Iraq into three separate autonomous regions. In 2009, Frangieh brought the Syrian ambassador, Imad Moustapha, to speak as an honored guest of the college; he had earlier instructed his students to warmly serenade Moustapha with singings from the Koran. (One student even asked, in all earnestness, what students could do to help Syria promote peace.) Syria, designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, has been governed for 40 years by a brutal dictatorial dynasty. Along with the Muslim Student Association (MSA), Frangieh also brought to campus Imam Zaid Shakir, who blamed the Fort Hood massacre on America’s easy access to guns. Yet another major guest was PLO member Sari Nusseinbeh, who during the first intifada helped terrorists avoid arrest and secure funding.
Frangieh’s radicalism is shared by his wife, Aleta Wenger. A former State Department official who worked on the Middle Eastern desk, Ms. Wenger is currently director of Claremont’s Center for Global Education and, as such, is the public face of the college overseas. Like her husband, she takes a conspiratorial view of Israel’s military, accusing it, without evidence, of bombing universities and hospitals. She also supports the Hamas-linked Gaza flotilla movement. In a posting on the New York Times website, she wrote,
In March 2010, Claremont McKenna President Pamela Gann traveled with Frangieh and Wenger to the Middle East, where she compared Frangieh’s advocacy for Hezbollah and Hamas to another professor’s testimony in the Proposition 8 case last year. Gann hopes to get funding for Frangieh’s Arabic program from the Kuwaiti royal family, several members of which attended Claremont McKenna College.
According to one member of the board of trustees, President Gann recently sent out a memo that essentially copied Dean Hess’s. The trustee noted that this was the first time Gann had sent all the trustees a memo since the famous Kerri Dunn incident in 2004, in which a professor of psychology faked a hate crime against herself.
The circumstances of Frangieh’s tenure hearing three years ago were rife with procedural misconduct. No one reviewing Frangieh’s work spoke Arabic or, according to one faculty source, even Googled his name. Nevertheless, President Gann moved to grant Frangieh automatic tenure — the first time ever that this was done at Claremont McKenna. By way of comparison, Dean Hess took an opposite tenure decision a year later and denied Professor Christopher Lynch a tenure-track position for “lacking substantive publications” — despite the enthusiastic support for him from the Government Department and a significant publication record. Hess refused to comment on this manifest double standard.
At Yale, Frangieh, as a language instructor, was denied consideration for tenure because, in the words of the provost, he lacked “substantive original research.” At Claremont, despite his lack of credentials, he has free range to create classes that teach his interpretation of the Middle East. He has a Ph.D. in Arabic literature — not history — and yet he teaches the required course for Middle East Studies majors, “Trends and Movements in the Middle East,” which promises to expose students to the “major themes in Arab society, culture, and tradition.” Islamist-motivated terrorism, anti-Semitism, and suicide-bombing are indeed major themes in modern Arab society — and Frangieh supports all of them.
Hezbollah has killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization except al-Qaeda. We wouldn’t tolerate a professor who supported al-Qaeda, so why do we tolerate one who supports Hezbollah?
Charles C. Johnson
Monday, February 21, 2011
Claremont McKenna College is a nationally recognized leader in training Defense Department officials and State Department personnel (including numerous ambassadors). Professor Bassam Frangieh is head of Claremont McKenna’s Arabic Department and Middle East Studies program, where he teaches tomorrow’s diplomats about the Middle East, plans study-abroad programs — and supports recognized terrorist groups, namely, Hezbollah and Hamas.
In the wake of Hamas’s election victory in 2006, Frangieh told an interviewer that he looks to Hamas with “great joy” and supports violence against Israel. Hamas’s control, he said, “might be able to produce the beginning of salvation. . . . I wonder what else would the Arabs have without Hamas and Hezbollah? Nothing. Except humiliation. I congratulate Hamas on its victory.” Meanwhile, in his academic work, he has written in favor of suicide bombing and martyrdom. In a speech at the University of Bridgeport in 2007, he said that Islam is “very democratic,” and he praised Saddam Hussein as a model leader who “wasn’t a thief” and who “really did something for his country.”
Frangieh has also made his views known through petitions, which, he says, “stem from the heart and are cast onto paper.” In 2006 he signed a pro-Hezbollah petition that was circulated along with a flyer encouraging its signatories to “Boycott Israel. . . . We are all Hizbullah now.” The petition, promoted by prominent anti-Israel, anti-American activists like Tariq Ali, Omar Barghouri, and Norman Finkelstein, demanded a boycott of Israel and encouraged Israeli academics to stop the “Zionist killing machine.” It called Hezbollah the “Lebanese Resistance” and a “legitimate” army, and praised its “heroic operations” against Israel. A 2007 petition blamed a “Zionist conspiracy” for then-senator Biden’s plan to divide Iraq into three separate autonomous regions. In 2009, Frangieh brought the Syrian ambassador, Imad Moustapha, to speak as an honored guest of the college; he had earlier instructed his students to warmly serenade Moustapha with singings from the Koran. (One student even asked, in all earnestness, what students could do to help Syria promote peace.) Syria, designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, has been governed for 40 years by a brutal dictatorial dynasty. Along with the Muslim Student Association (MSA), Frangieh also brought to campus Imam Zaid Shakir, who blamed the Fort Hood massacre on America’s easy access to guns. Yet another major guest was PLO member Sari Nusseinbeh, who during the first intifada helped terrorists avoid arrest and secure funding.
Frangieh’s radicalism is shared by his wife, Aleta Wenger. A former State Department official who worked on the Middle Eastern desk, Ms. Wenger is currently director of Claremont’s Center for Global Education and, as such, is the public face of the college overseas. Like her husband, she takes a conspiratorial view of Israel’s military, accusing it, without evidence, of bombing universities and hospitals. She also supports the Hamas-linked Gaza flotilla movement. In a posting on the New York Times website, she wrote,
I now have a good cause to support financially, and am very happy that my fellow Americans are interested in joining the blockade movement. Now to see if I can get on that boat. As a retired U.S. foreign service officer now unleashed, I can do and say what I want. Now let’s hear all of your readers tell me how naive I am . . . but I’m telling you, I’ve truly been there and seen it all . . . go Gaza flotilla ships go!!!Repeated requests from alumni, students, parents, and faculty for comment from the college about the allegations against Bassam Frangieh have been consistently ignored. Worse, the college trots Frangieh out for fundraising; CMC Magazine Winter 2011 listed him as reason No. 33 to donate to Claremont McKenna. This was months after his views on Hamas and Hezbollah were established. The college’s PR chief, Richard Rodner, scrubbed all mention of Frangieh’s views from Wikipedia. Dean of Faculty Greg Hess e-mailed the faculty saying that it was only “a student writer’s opinion” that Hezbollah and Hamas are terrorist organizations — ignoring the fact that it was the State Department, where many of Frangieh’s students hope to work, that designated them as such.
In March 2010, Claremont McKenna President Pamela Gann traveled with Frangieh and Wenger to the Middle East, where she compared Frangieh’s advocacy for Hezbollah and Hamas to another professor’s testimony in the Proposition 8 case last year. Gann hopes to get funding for Frangieh’s Arabic program from the Kuwaiti royal family, several members of which attended Claremont McKenna College.
According to one member of the board of trustees, President Gann recently sent out a memo that essentially copied Dean Hess’s. The trustee noted that this was the first time Gann had sent all the trustees a memo since the famous Kerri Dunn incident in 2004, in which a professor of psychology faked a hate crime against herself.
The circumstances of Frangieh’s tenure hearing three years ago were rife with procedural misconduct. No one reviewing Frangieh’s work spoke Arabic or, according to one faculty source, even Googled his name. Nevertheless, President Gann moved to grant Frangieh automatic tenure — the first time ever that this was done at Claremont McKenna. By way of comparison, Dean Hess took an opposite tenure decision a year later and denied Professor Christopher Lynch a tenure-track position for “lacking substantive publications” — despite the enthusiastic support for him from the Government Department and a significant publication record. Hess refused to comment on this manifest double standard.
At Yale, Frangieh, as a language instructor, was denied consideration for tenure because, in the words of the provost, he lacked “substantive original research.” At Claremont, despite his lack of credentials, he has free range to create classes that teach his interpretation of the Middle East. He has a Ph.D. in Arabic literature — not history — and yet he teaches the required course for Middle East Studies majors, “Trends and Movements in the Middle East,” which promises to expose students to the “major themes in Arab society, culture, and tradition.” Islamist-motivated terrorism, anti-Semitism, and suicide-bombing are indeed major themes in modern Arab society — and Frangieh supports all of them.
Hezbollah has killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization except al-Qaeda. We wouldn’t tolerate a professor who supported al-Qaeda, so why do we tolerate one who supports Hezbollah?
Your Unsolicited Letter of Recommendation
By Mike Adams
Monday, February 21, 2011
Dear Stan:
You may be wondering why I'm writing you a short e-mail with a letter of recommendation attached to the bottom. After all, you have not requested such a letter. Nonetheless, I occasionally like to send letters of recommendation to students who have not requested them. The reason I do this is to let them know how they are doing and what kind of impression they are making on at least one of their professors. You are one of my advisees, and it is likely that in the future a prospective employer will specifically ask for a recommendation letter from me. If such a request were to be made of me today, this is what the letter would look like.
To Whom It May Concern:
Stanley Galbraith is one of my advisees. He has informed me that you are considering hiring him for a full-time position. He has also informed me that you require a letter from his academic adviser. I am pleased to provide such a letter.
Stanley is the rare student who takes a substantial portion of what he learns in the classroom and applies it to his everyday life. His professors are overwhelmingly liberal, and he seems to listen to them and apply their ideas on a regular basis. Let me provide a few examples.
*In addition to advising Stanley, I taught him once in an upper-level night class. The class was full when he tried to sign up, but I made extra room for him because he had missed his advising appointments and therefore needed to get into several classes lest his financial aid be canceled. I also agreed to serve as his new adviser after he upset his previous adviser by failing to keep advising appointments. She berated him, and that upset him. I took him on because I thought he could learn from the experience of being advised by the only Republican in the department. Dealing with his liberal victim mindset has been a challenge, to say the least. To date, he has never kept one of his advising appointments. That is why he never gets the classes he desires. In short, Stanley seems to believe that rules are mandatory in reference to others and discretionary in reference to Stanley.
*Stanley had a tendency to come to class listening to an iPod, which he did not turn off once the lecture began. He just kept his earplugs in and swayed to the music while I lectured on light topics such as first-degree murder and aggravated rape (I teach criminology, by the way). The syllabus clearly stated that he was not to do this (and allowed me to deduct a point from his final average for every transgression). I also reminded him of this by sending numerous e-mails. But since he did not read the syllabus and did not check his e-mail, he never figured out that he was risking failing the class until it was too late. In short, Stanley’s disregard for rules is exacerbated by his lack of common sense and his propensity to live in the moment without regard for the long-term consequences of his conduct.
*Stanley seemed to get confused in many of my lectures. I know this because once he took off his earplugs and started to listen to the lecture, he often made strange faces. When I saw these pained expressions, I always stopped and politely asked Stanley what was wrong. He then announced that he was “lost.” I just suggested that he should bring a pen and notebook to class, rather than his iPod. That usually made him even angrier. In short, Stanley seems to be more interested in broadcasting his problems to others than he is in pursuing common-sense solutions. He clings to his status as a victim because he has Attention Deficit Disorder – a pathological need to draw attention to himself, which, seemingly, can never be satisfied.
Stanley will probably be graduating this semester. But it has been a close call. He began his final semester on five waiting lists (to get into the last five classes he needs to graduate). This happened because he missed his final advising appointment and all the required courses were filled up by the time he came by my office. He had to personally track down all of these professors and beg to get into their classes. For two weeks, he called my office constantly (and consumed more of my time than all of my other advisees combined). I advised him patiently throughout the ordeal but, to date, I have received no thanks for doing so. In short, Stanley sees government officials as servants obligated to insulate him from the consequences of his own actions. At no point does he consider the possibility that the system would break down if everyone behaved the way that he does.
There is a chance that someday Stanley will grow up and stop living in accordance with the worldview espoused by his sociology professors. But I pity his first employer. If you hire Stanley, you can expect him to be late, inattentive, confused, angry, and in constant need of supervision.
Aside from these concerns, I have no other reservations.
Sincerely,
Mike S. Adams
Stan, I know you might never read this e-mail because you rarely check your university e-mail account. So my words will probably never benefit you personally. That is why I have published your letter of recommendation on the internet. When others read it, they can benefit from your ill-considered decision to incorporate liberal ideas into a liberal lifestyle. Some day you might grow out of this and become a responsible and productive citizen. If that ever happens, and if you do eventually read this e-mail, I ask only one thing: Please share the attached letter with someone who needs it.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Dear Stan:
You may be wondering why I'm writing you a short e-mail with a letter of recommendation attached to the bottom. After all, you have not requested such a letter. Nonetheless, I occasionally like to send letters of recommendation to students who have not requested them. The reason I do this is to let them know how they are doing and what kind of impression they are making on at least one of their professors. You are one of my advisees, and it is likely that in the future a prospective employer will specifically ask for a recommendation letter from me. If such a request were to be made of me today, this is what the letter would look like.
To Whom It May Concern:
Stanley Galbraith is one of my advisees. He has informed me that you are considering hiring him for a full-time position. He has also informed me that you require a letter from his academic adviser. I am pleased to provide such a letter.
Stanley is the rare student who takes a substantial portion of what he learns in the classroom and applies it to his everyday life. His professors are overwhelmingly liberal, and he seems to listen to them and apply their ideas on a regular basis. Let me provide a few examples.
*In addition to advising Stanley, I taught him once in an upper-level night class. The class was full when he tried to sign up, but I made extra room for him because he had missed his advising appointments and therefore needed to get into several classes lest his financial aid be canceled. I also agreed to serve as his new adviser after he upset his previous adviser by failing to keep advising appointments. She berated him, and that upset him. I took him on because I thought he could learn from the experience of being advised by the only Republican in the department. Dealing with his liberal victim mindset has been a challenge, to say the least. To date, he has never kept one of his advising appointments. That is why he never gets the classes he desires. In short, Stanley seems to believe that rules are mandatory in reference to others and discretionary in reference to Stanley.
*Stanley had a tendency to come to class listening to an iPod, which he did not turn off once the lecture began. He just kept his earplugs in and swayed to the music while I lectured on light topics such as first-degree murder and aggravated rape (I teach criminology, by the way). The syllabus clearly stated that he was not to do this (and allowed me to deduct a point from his final average for every transgression). I also reminded him of this by sending numerous e-mails. But since he did not read the syllabus and did not check his e-mail, he never figured out that he was risking failing the class until it was too late. In short, Stanley’s disregard for rules is exacerbated by his lack of common sense and his propensity to live in the moment without regard for the long-term consequences of his conduct.
*Stanley seemed to get confused in many of my lectures. I know this because once he took off his earplugs and started to listen to the lecture, he often made strange faces. When I saw these pained expressions, I always stopped and politely asked Stanley what was wrong. He then announced that he was “lost.” I just suggested that he should bring a pen and notebook to class, rather than his iPod. That usually made him even angrier. In short, Stanley seems to be more interested in broadcasting his problems to others than he is in pursuing common-sense solutions. He clings to his status as a victim because he has Attention Deficit Disorder – a pathological need to draw attention to himself, which, seemingly, can never be satisfied.
Stanley will probably be graduating this semester. But it has been a close call. He began his final semester on five waiting lists (to get into the last five classes he needs to graduate). This happened because he missed his final advising appointment and all the required courses were filled up by the time he came by my office. He had to personally track down all of these professors and beg to get into their classes. For two weeks, he called my office constantly (and consumed more of my time than all of my other advisees combined). I advised him patiently throughout the ordeal but, to date, I have received no thanks for doing so. In short, Stanley sees government officials as servants obligated to insulate him from the consequences of his own actions. At no point does he consider the possibility that the system would break down if everyone behaved the way that he does.
There is a chance that someday Stanley will grow up and stop living in accordance with the worldview espoused by his sociology professors. But I pity his first employer. If you hire Stanley, you can expect him to be late, inattentive, confused, angry, and in constant need of supervision.
Aside from these concerns, I have no other reservations.
Sincerely,
Mike S. Adams
Stan, I know you might never read this e-mail because you rarely check your university e-mail account. So my words will probably never benefit you personally. That is why I have published your letter of recommendation on the internet. When others read it, they can benefit from your ill-considered decision to incorporate liberal ideas into a liberal lifestyle. Some day you might grow out of this and become a responsible and productive citizen. If that ever happens, and if you do eventually read this e-mail, I ask only one thing: Please share the attached letter with someone who needs it.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Environmentalist Fraud and Manslaughter
By Paul Driessen
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Many chemotherapy drugs for treating cancer have highly unpleasant side effects – hair loss, vomiting, intense joint pain, liver damage and fetal defects, to name just a few. But anyone trying to ban the drugs would be tarred, feathered and run out of town. And rightly so.
The drugs’ benefits vastly outweigh their risks. They save lives. We need to use chemo drugs carefully, but we need to use them.
The same commonsense reasoning should apply to the Third World equivalent of chemotherapy drugs: DDT and other insecticides to combat malaria. Up to half a billion people are infected annually by this vicious disease, nearly a million die, countless survivors are left with permanent brain damage, and 90% of this carnage is in sub-Saharan Africa, the most impoverished region on Earth.
These chemicals don’t cure malaria – they prevent it. Used properly, they are effective, and safe. DDT is particularly important. Sprayed once or twice a year on the inside walls of homes, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land. No other chemical, at any price, can do this.
Even better, DDT has few adverse side effects – except minor, speculative and imaginary “risks” that are trumpeted on anti-pesticide websites. In the interest of saving lives, one would think eco activists would tone down their “ban DDT” disinformation. However, that is unlikely.
Anti-DDT fanaticism built the environmental movement, and gave it funding, power and stature it never had before. No matter how many people get sick and die because health agencies are pressured not to use DDT, or it is totally banned, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Pesticide Action Network, US Environmental Protection Agency and allied activist groups are unlikely to reform or recant.
Worse, they have now been joined by the United Nations Environment Program, Global Environment Facility and even World Health Organization Environmental Division – all of whom share the avowed goal of ending all DDT production by 2017, and banning all use of DDT in disease control by 2020.
A recent GEF “study” demonstrates how far they are willing to go, to achieve this goal, no matter how deadly it might be. The study purported to prove DDT is no longer needed and can be replaced by “integrated and environment-friendly” alternatives: eg, mosquito-repelling trees, and non-chemical control of breeding sites and areas around homes that shelter insects.
The $14-million study claimed that these interventions resulted in an unprecedented “63% reduction in the number of people with [malaria], without using DDT or any other type of pesticide.” However, as analyses by malaria and insecticide experts Richard Tren and Dr. Donald Roberts clearly demonstrate (see Research and Reports in Tropical Medicine and AEI Outlooks), the study, conclusions and policy recommendations are not merely wrong. They are deliberately misleading and fraudulent.
GEF did its 2003-2008 study in Mexico and seven Central American countries – all of which had largely ceased using DDT and other pesticides years before the GEF project. Instead of chemical sprays, these countries now employ huge numbers of chloroquine and primaquine (CQ and PQ) pills to prevent and treat malaria: 2,566 pills per diagnosed case in Mexico; 22,802 pills (!) in El Salvador; 50 to 1,319 pills per case in the other countries, according to 2004 health records.
It was these powerful drugs, not the “environment-friendly” GEF interventions, that slashed malaria rates. Indeed, they had begun to do so before GEF even arrived. This terribly inconvenient reality was further underscored by the fact that malaria rates were the same in “study” areas and “control” areas, where GEF did nothing – and that the number of malaria cases increased when the number of pills per case decreased. In other words, GEF could have gotten its same results using one bed net or one larvae-eating fish.
GEF’s fraudulent claims were then compounded by its insistence that the results and conclusions are relevant to other malaria-endemic regions. They are not. Malaria parasites in Latin American countries are Plasmodium vivax; in Africa and Southeast Asia, they are the far more virulent P. falciparum.
CQ and PQ are effective in preventing and treating vivax; they rarely prevent or cure falciparum malaria. Moreover, the eight Latin American countries have 140 million people. Sub-Saharan Africa has 800 million and a woeful medical and transportation infrastructure; Southeast Asia has 600 million people. Both have infinitely more malaria. Getting adequate medicines that work (far more expensive Artemisia-based ACT drugs) to 1.4 billion people would be a budgetary, logistical and medical impossibility.
But apparently none of these facts occurred to the bureaucrats who did this study. That’s hardly surprising, since the project was designed and directed, not by disease control experts, but by the UNEP and radical environmental groups – which also spent millions distributing and promoting the study and other anti-DDT propaganda all over the world, ensuring that it received substantial media attention.
The anti-pesticide fanatics know this “study” is fraudulent. They just have a very high tolerance for how many malaria cases, brain-damaged people and dead babies are deemed “acceptable” or “sustainable.” They just don’t care enough to bother learning the basic facts about malaria, CQ versus ACT, vivax versus falciparum. They need to get out of the malaria control policy business and let medical professionals do their jobs.
(To learn more facts about malaria, see Tren and Roberts’ book The Excellent Powder, Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s documentary film “3 Billion and Counting,” and the website for Africa Fighting Malaria.)
The final report claims its authors submitted manuscripts to prominent peer-reviewed medical journals. However, nothing was ever published. That suggests that they lied, and never submitted any manuscripts; or they did submit papers, but they were rejected as being shoddy, unscientific, unprofessional, or even on par with Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent vaccine-and-autism work.
To cap it all off, the bogus GEF project appears to have been conducted using funds diverted from already insufficient malaria control budgets. The GEF, UNEP, Stockholm Convention Secretariat and radical environmental groups are using money intended for malaria control to launch anti-pesticide programs in countries plagued by malaria, and gain control over public health insecticides, policies and programs.
Overall, the GEF has spent over $800 million on efforts to eliminate DDT and other “persistent organic pollutants” (POPs). It budgeted nearly $150 million in 2007 alone on its campaign to ban DDT production and use – but spent a lousy $22 million researching alternatives to DDT for vector control.
Until an equally effective and long-lasting substitute for DDT is developed – one that repels, irritates and kills mosquitoes – this vital weapon needs to remain in the disease control arsenal.
The GEF, UNEP, POPs Secretariat and WHO need to withdraw the study; discipline the people who perpetrated this fraud; retract World Health Assembly Resolution 50.13, calling for malaria-infested countries to slash their use of public health insecticides; and issue a statement making it absolutely clear that this “study” was erroneous and deceptive, and should not be considered in setting malaria policies.
Donors to the GEF and radical groups should be exposed. For any activists to continue promoting this study or demand that malaria-endemic countries stop using DDT and insecticides, and adopt the bogus “eco-friendly” GEF “solutions,” is gross medical malpractice – and deliberate manslaughter.
Malaria can be controlled, and even eradicated in many areas. We simply need to use every available weapon – including DDT, pesticides, nets, window screens, drugs and other interventions – in an orderly, coordinated and systematic manner; and ensure that mosquito infestations, disease outbreaks, malaria control successes and problems are monitored and evaluated accurately and honestly.
If we do that – and end the anti-pesticide hysteria – we can get the job done.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Many chemotherapy drugs for treating cancer have highly unpleasant side effects – hair loss, vomiting, intense joint pain, liver damage and fetal defects, to name just a few. But anyone trying to ban the drugs would be tarred, feathered and run out of town. And rightly so.
The drugs’ benefits vastly outweigh their risks. They save lives. We need to use chemo drugs carefully, but we need to use them.
The same commonsense reasoning should apply to the Third World equivalent of chemotherapy drugs: DDT and other insecticides to combat malaria. Up to half a billion people are infected annually by this vicious disease, nearly a million die, countless survivors are left with permanent brain damage, and 90% of this carnage is in sub-Saharan Africa, the most impoverished region on Earth.
These chemicals don’t cure malaria – they prevent it. Used properly, they are effective, and safe. DDT is particularly important. Sprayed once or twice a year on the inside walls of homes, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land. No other chemical, at any price, can do this.
Even better, DDT has few adverse side effects – except minor, speculative and imaginary “risks” that are trumpeted on anti-pesticide websites. In the interest of saving lives, one would think eco activists would tone down their “ban DDT” disinformation. However, that is unlikely.
Anti-DDT fanaticism built the environmental movement, and gave it funding, power and stature it never had before. No matter how many people get sick and die because health agencies are pressured not to use DDT, or it is totally banned, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Pesticide Action Network, US Environmental Protection Agency and allied activist groups are unlikely to reform or recant.
Worse, they have now been joined by the United Nations Environment Program, Global Environment Facility and even World Health Organization Environmental Division – all of whom share the avowed goal of ending all DDT production by 2017, and banning all use of DDT in disease control by 2020.
A recent GEF “study” demonstrates how far they are willing to go, to achieve this goal, no matter how deadly it might be. The study purported to prove DDT is no longer needed and can be replaced by “integrated and environment-friendly” alternatives: eg, mosquito-repelling trees, and non-chemical control of breeding sites and areas around homes that shelter insects.
The $14-million study claimed that these interventions resulted in an unprecedented “63% reduction in the number of people with [malaria], without using DDT or any other type of pesticide.” However, as analyses by malaria and insecticide experts Richard Tren and Dr. Donald Roberts clearly demonstrate (see Research and Reports in Tropical Medicine and AEI Outlooks), the study, conclusions and policy recommendations are not merely wrong. They are deliberately misleading and fraudulent.
GEF did its 2003-2008 study in Mexico and seven Central American countries – all of which had largely ceased using DDT and other pesticides years before the GEF project. Instead of chemical sprays, these countries now employ huge numbers of chloroquine and primaquine (CQ and PQ) pills to prevent and treat malaria: 2,566 pills per diagnosed case in Mexico; 22,802 pills (!) in El Salvador; 50 to 1,319 pills per case in the other countries, according to 2004 health records.
It was these powerful drugs, not the “environment-friendly” GEF interventions, that slashed malaria rates. Indeed, they had begun to do so before GEF even arrived. This terribly inconvenient reality was further underscored by the fact that malaria rates were the same in “study” areas and “control” areas, where GEF did nothing – and that the number of malaria cases increased when the number of pills per case decreased. In other words, GEF could have gotten its same results using one bed net or one larvae-eating fish.
GEF’s fraudulent claims were then compounded by its insistence that the results and conclusions are relevant to other malaria-endemic regions. They are not. Malaria parasites in Latin American countries are Plasmodium vivax; in Africa and Southeast Asia, they are the far more virulent P. falciparum.
CQ and PQ are effective in preventing and treating vivax; they rarely prevent or cure falciparum malaria. Moreover, the eight Latin American countries have 140 million people. Sub-Saharan Africa has 800 million and a woeful medical and transportation infrastructure; Southeast Asia has 600 million people. Both have infinitely more malaria. Getting adequate medicines that work (far more expensive Artemisia-based ACT drugs) to 1.4 billion people would be a budgetary, logistical and medical impossibility.
But apparently none of these facts occurred to the bureaucrats who did this study. That’s hardly surprising, since the project was designed and directed, not by disease control experts, but by the UNEP and radical environmental groups – which also spent millions distributing and promoting the study and other anti-DDT propaganda all over the world, ensuring that it received substantial media attention.
The anti-pesticide fanatics know this “study” is fraudulent. They just have a very high tolerance for how many malaria cases, brain-damaged people and dead babies are deemed “acceptable” or “sustainable.” They just don’t care enough to bother learning the basic facts about malaria, CQ versus ACT, vivax versus falciparum. They need to get out of the malaria control policy business and let medical professionals do their jobs.
(To learn more facts about malaria, see Tren and Roberts’ book The Excellent Powder, Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s documentary film “3 Billion and Counting,” and the website for Africa Fighting Malaria.)
The final report claims its authors submitted manuscripts to prominent peer-reviewed medical journals. However, nothing was ever published. That suggests that they lied, and never submitted any manuscripts; or they did submit papers, but they were rejected as being shoddy, unscientific, unprofessional, or even on par with Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent vaccine-and-autism work.
To cap it all off, the bogus GEF project appears to have been conducted using funds diverted from already insufficient malaria control budgets. The GEF, UNEP, Stockholm Convention Secretariat and radical environmental groups are using money intended for malaria control to launch anti-pesticide programs in countries plagued by malaria, and gain control over public health insecticides, policies and programs.
Overall, the GEF has spent over $800 million on efforts to eliminate DDT and other “persistent organic pollutants” (POPs). It budgeted nearly $150 million in 2007 alone on its campaign to ban DDT production and use – but spent a lousy $22 million researching alternatives to DDT for vector control.
Until an equally effective and long-lasting substitute for DDT is developed – one that repels, irritates and kills mosquitoes – this vital weapon needs to remain in the disease control arsenal.
The GEF, UNEP, POPs Secretariat and WHO need to withdraw the study; discipline the people who perpetrated this fraud; retract World Health Assembly Resolution 50.13, calling for malaria-infested countries to slash their use of public health insecticides; and issue a statement making it absolutely clear that this “study” was erroneous and deceptive, and should not be considered in setting malaria policies.
Donors to the GEF and radical groups should be exposed. For any activists to continue promoting this study or demand that malaria-endemic countries stop using DDT and insecticides, and adopt the bogus “eco-friendly” GEF “solutions,” is gross medical malpractice – and deliberate manslaughter.
Malaria can be controlled, and even eradicated in many areas. We simply need to use every available weapon – including DDT, pesticides, nets, window screens, drugs and other interventions – in an orderly, coordinated and systematic manner; and ensure that mosquito infestations, disease outbreaks, malaria control successes and problems are monitored and evaluated accurately and honestly.
If we do that – and end the anti-pesticide hysteria – we can get the job done.
Death to Apostates: Not a Perversion of Islam, but Islam
The case of Said Musa shows why we cannot graft democracy onto Islamic societies.
Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, February 19, 2011
On NRO Friday, Paul Marshall lamented the Obama administration’s fecklessness, in particular the president’s appalling silence in the face of the death sentence Said Musa may suffer for the crime of converting to Christianity. This is in Afghanistan, the nation for which our troops are fighting and dying — not to defeat our enemies, but to prop up the Islamic “democracy” we have spent a decade trying to forge at a cost of billions.
This shameful episode (and the certain recurrence of it) perfectly illustrates the folly of Islamic nation-building. The stubborn fact is that we have asked for just these sorts of atrocious outcomes. Ever since 2003, when the thrust of the War On Terror stopped being the defeat of America’s enemies and decisively shifted to nation-building, we have insisted — against history, law, language, and logic — that Islamic culture is perfectly compatible with and hospitable to Western-style democracy. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.
This is not the first time an apostate in the new American-made Afghanistan has confronted the very real possibility of being put to death by the state. In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness — after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam? His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence.
They are right. Under the construction of sharia adopted by the Afghan constitution (namely Hanafi, one of Islam’s classical schools of jurisprudence), apostasy is the gravest offense a Muslim can commit. It is considered treason from the Muslim ummah. The penalty for that is death.
This is the dictate of Mohammed himself. One relevant hadith (from the authoritative Bukhari collection, No. 9.83.17) quotes the prophet as follows: “A Muslim . . . may not be killed except for three reasons: as punishment for murder, for adultery, or for apostasy.” It is true that the hadith says “may,” not “must,” and there is in fact some squabbling among sharia scholars about whether ostracism could be a sufficient sentence, at least if the apostasy is kept secret. Alas, the “may” hadith is not the prophet’s only directive on the matter. There is also No. 9.84.57: “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” That is fairly clear, wouldn’t you say? And as a result, mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that apostasy, certainly once it is publicly revealed, warrants the death penalty.
Having hailed the Afghan constitution as the start of a democratic tsunami, the startled Bush administration made all the predictable arguments against Abdul Rahman’s apostasy prosecution. Diplomats and nation-building enthusiasts pointed in panic at the vague, lofty language injected into the Afghan constitution to obscure Islamic law’s harsh reality — spoons full of sugar that had helped the sharia go down. The constitution assures religious freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained. It cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and even specifies that non-Muslims are free to perform their religious rites.
Read the fine print. It actually qualifies that all purported guarantees of personal and religious liberty are subject to Islamic law and Afghanistan’s commitment to being an Islamic state. We were supposed to celebrate this, just as the State Department did, because Islam is the “religion of peace” whose principles are just like ours — that’s why it was so ready for democracy.
It wasn’t so. Sharia is very different from Western law, and it couldn’t care less what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has to say on the matter of apostasy. Nor do the authoritative scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo give a hoot that their straightforward interpretation of sharia’s apostasy principles upsets would-be Muslim reformers like Zuhdi Jasser. We may look at Dr. Jasser as a hero — I do — but at al-Azhar, the sharia scholars would point out that he is merely a doctor of medicine, not of Islamic jurisprudence.
The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates. Case closed.
The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.
To grasp this, one need only read the first three articles of its constitution:
Moreover, consistent with the Muslim Brotherhood’s blueprint for society (highly influential in Sunni Islamic countries and consonant with the transnational-progressive bent of the State Department), the constitution obliges the Afghan government to “create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice” (which, naturally, includes free universal health care). It commands that the Afghan flag be inscribed, “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet, and Allah is Great [i.e., Allahu Akbar].” The state is instructed to “devise and implement a unified educational curriculum based on the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam” and to “develop the curriculum of religious subjects on the basis of the Islamic sects existing in Afghanistan.” In addition, the constitution requires the Afghan government to ensure that the family, “a fundamental unit of society,” is supported in the upbringing of children by “the elimination of traditions contrary to the principles of the sacred religion of Islam.” Those contrary traditions include Western Judeo-Christian principles.
Was that what you figured we were doing when you heard we were “promoting democracy”? Is that a mission you would have agreed to commit our armed forces to accomplish? Yet, that’s what we’re fighting for. The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. “This conflict and country are [theirs] to win,” he wrote, “not mine.”
It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. “We are not trying to win this militarily,” the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last fall. Indeed, the administration had concluded — upon what Ambassador Holbrooke described as consultation with our military commanders — that the war could not be won “militarily.” So the goal now is not to defeat the Taliban but to entice them into taking a seat at the table — in the vain hope that if they buy into the political process they will refrain from confederating with the likes of al-Qaeda.
Afghanistan is not an American war anymore. It’s a political experiment: Can we lay the foundation for Islamic social justice, hang a “democracy” label on it, and convince Americans that we’ve won, that all the blood and treasure have been worth it? The same thing, by the way, has been done in Iraq. Ever since the Iraqis adopted their American-brokered constitution, Christians have left the country in droves, and homosexuals, similarly, have been persecuted. And the Iraqis are so grateful for all the American lives and “investment” sacrificed on their behalf that, just this week, the capital city of Baghdad demanded that the U.S. apologize and fork up another $1 billion in reparations. For what? Why, for “the ugly and destructive way” the American army’s Humvees and fortifications have damaged the city’s aesthetics and infrastructure. Yes, a brief time-out from the usual serenity of life in a sharia state to chastise Americans for their “deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste.”
In 2006, promoters of Islamic democracy — having dreamed that this chimera was not merely plausible but a boon for U.S. security against terrorists — were stunned upon awakening to the reality of “democratic” Afghanistan’s intention to execute Abdul Rahman for apostasy. This was an “affront to civilization,” we at NR said at the time. As Samuel Huntington explained, however, there are two senses of “civilization.” One assumes that all human beings, all cultures, are essentially the same and share the same concept of the higher form of life — that there is only one real civilization. The other holds that different cultures have very different ways of looking at the world — that there are several different civilizations, and what is an affront to one may be a convention to another.
The underlying premise of the democracy project is the former sense of “civilization.” As I argued at the time, the real world is the latter. And now, five years removed from the Abdul Rahman case, five more years of intensive, costly American entanglement with Afghanistan, Paul Marshall gives us the harrowing plight of Said Musa. When he told the Afghan court he was a Christian man, no Afghan defense lawyer would have anything to do with him — except the one who spat on him. He was thrown in jail as an apostate among 400 Afghan Muslims, and he has since been beaten, mocked, deprived of sleep, derisively referred to as “Jesus Christ,” and sexually abused. And just as no Afghan lawyer was willing to aid an apostate, the Afghan sharia state declined to aid him — refusing him access to foreign counsel. We think of this as an affront to civilization. They, on the other hand, think they have their own civilization, and that our civilization and Said Musa are affronts to it.
The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.
Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, February 19, 2011
On NRO Friday, Paul Marshall lamented the Obama administration’s fecklessness, in particular the president’s appalling silence in the face of the death sentence Said Musa may suffer for the crime of converting to Christianity. This is in Afghanistan, the nation for which our troops are fighting and dying — not to defeat our enemies, but to prop up the Islamic “democracy” we have spent a decade trying to forge at a cost of billions.
This shameful episode (and the certain recurrence of it) perfectly illustrates the folly of Islamic nation-building. The stubborn fact is that we have asked for just these sorts of atrocious outcomes. Ever since 2003, when the thrust of the War On Terror stopped being the defeat of America’s enemies and decisively shifted to nation-building, we have insisted — against history, law, language, and logic — that Islamic culture is perfectly compatible with and hospitable to Western-style democracy. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.
This is not the first time an apostate in the new American-made Afghanistan has confronted the very real possibility of being put to death by the state. In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness — after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam? His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence.
They are right. Under the construction of sharia adopted by the Afghan constitution (namely Hanafi, one of Islam’s classical schools of jurisprudence), apostasy is the gravest offense a Muslim can commit. It is considered treason from the Muslim ummah. The penalty for that is death.
This is the dictate of Mohammed himself. One relevant hadith (from the authoritative Bukhari collection, No. 9.83.17) quotes the prophet as follows: “A Muslim . . . may not be killed except for three reasons: as punishment for murder, for adultery, or for apostasy.” It is true that the hadith says “may,” not “must,” and there is in fact some squabbling among sharia scholars about whether ostracism could be a sufficient sentence, at least if the apostasy is kept secret. Alas, the “may” hadith is not the prophet’s only directive on the matter. There is also No. 9.84.57: “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” That is fairly clear, wouldn’t you say? And as a result, mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that apostasy, certainly once it is publicly revealed, warrants the death penalty.
Having hailed the Afghan constitution as the start of a democratic tsunami, the startled Bush administration made all the predictable arguments against Abdul Rahman’s apostasy prosecution. Diplomats and nation-building enthusiasts pointed in panic at the vague, lofty language injected into the Afghan constitution to obscure Islamic law’s harsh reality — spoons full of sugar that had helped the sharia go down. The constitution assures religious freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained. It cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and even specifies that non-Muslims are free to perform their religious rites.
Read the fine print. It actually qualifies that all purported guarantees of personal and religious liberty are subject to Islamic law and Afghanistan’s commitment to being an Islamic state. We were supposed to celebrate this, just as the State Department did, because Islam is the “religion of peace” whose principles are just like ours — that’s why it was so ready for democracy.
It wasn’t so. Sharia is very different from Western law, and it couldn’t care less what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has to say on the matter of apostasy. Nor do the authoritative scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo give a hoot that their straightforward interpretation of sharia’s apostasy principles upsets would-be Muslim reformers like Zuhdi Jasser. We may look at Dr. Jasser as a hero — I do — but at al-Azhar, the sharia scholars would point out that he is merely a doctor of medicine, not of Islamic jurisprudence.
The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates. Case closed.
The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.
To grasp this, one need only read the first three articles of its constitution:
1. Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary, and indivisible state.Need to hear more? The articles creating the Afghan judiciary make higher education in Islamic jurisprudence a sufficient qualification to sit on the Afghan Supreme Court. Judges are expressly required to take an oath, “In the name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate,” to “support justice and righteousness in accord with the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” When there is no provision of law that seems to control a controversy, Article 130 directs that decisions be in accordance with “the Hanafi jurisprudence” of sharia.
2. The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.
3. In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.
Moreover, consistent with the Muslim Brotherhood’s blueprint for society (highly influential in Sunni Islamic countries and consonant with the transnational-progressive bent of the State Department), the constitution obliges the Afghan government to “create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice” (which, naturally, includes free universal health care). It commands that the Afghan flag be inscribed, “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet, and Allah is Great [i.e., Allahu Akbar].” The state is instructed to “devise and implement a unified educational curriculum based on the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam” and to “develop the curriculum of religious subjects on the basis of the Islamic sects existing in Afghanistan.” In addition, the constitution requires the Afghan government to ensure that the family, “a fundamental unit of society,” is supported in the upbringing of children by “the elimination of traditions contrary to the principles of the sacred religion of Islam.” Those contrary traditions include Western Judeo-Christian principles.
Was that what you figured we were doing when you heard we were “promoting democracy”? Is that a mission you would have agreed to commit our armed forces to accomplish? Yet, that’s what we’re fighting for. The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. “This conflict and country are [theirs] to win,” he wrote, “not mine.”
It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. “We are not trying to win this militarily,” the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last fall. Indeed, the administration had concluded — upon what Ambassador Holbrooke described as consultation with our military commanders — that the war could not be won “militarily.” So the goal now is not to defeat the Taliban but to entice them into taking a seat at the table — in the vain hope that if they buy into the political process they will refrain from confederating with the likes of al-Qaeda.
Afghanistan is not an American war anymore. It’s a political experiment: Can we lay the foundation for Islamic social justice, hang a “democracy” label on it, and convince Americans that we’ve won, that all the blood and treasure have been worth it? The same thing, by the way, has been done in Iraq. Ever since the Iraqis adopted their American-brokered constitution, Christians have left the country in droves, and homosexuals, similarly, have been persecuted. And the Iraqis are so grateful for all the American lives and “investment” sacrificed on their behalf that, just this week, the capital city of Baghdad demanded that the U.S. apologize and fork up another $1 billion in reparations. For what? Why, for “the ugly and destructive way” the American army’s Humvees and fortifications have damaged the city’s aesthetics and infrastructure. Yes, a brief time-out from the usual serenity of life in a sharia state to chastise Americans for their “deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste.”
In 2006, promoters of Islamic democracy — having dreamed that this chimera was not merely plausible but a boon for U.S. security against terrorists — were stunned upon awakening to the reality of “democratic” Afghanistan’s intention to execute Abdul Rahman for apostasy. This was an “affront to civilization,” we at NR said at the time. As Samuel Huntington explained, however, there are two senses of “civilization.” One assumes that all human beings, all cultures, are essentially the same and share the same concept of the higher form of life — that there is only one real civilization. The other holds that different cultures have very different ways of looking at the world — that there are several different civilizations, and what is an affront to one may be a convention to another.
The underlying premise of the democracy project is the former sense of “civilization.” As I argued at the time, the real world is the latter. And now, five years removed from the Abdul Rahman case, five more years of intensive, costly American entanglement with Afghanistan, Paul Marshall gives us the harrowing plight of Said Musa. When he told the Afghan court he was a Christian man, no Afghan defense lawyer would have anything to do with him — except the one who spat on him. He was thrown in jail as an apostate among 400 Afghan Muslims, and he has since been beaten, mocked, deprived of sleep, derisively referred to as “Jesus Christ,” and sexually abused. And just as no Afghan lawyer was willing to aid an apostate, the Afghan sharia state declined to aid him — refusing him access to foreign counsel. We think of this as an affront to civilization. They, on the other hand, think they have their own civilization, and that our civilization and Said Musa are affronts to it.
The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Left Re-embraces Hate and Vitriol
By Kyle Olson
Friday, February 18, 2011
Now that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is on the road to recovery, labor unions and others on the American left have pulled out all the stops in blocking spending cuts in D.C. and across the country. Since the left has no substantive, intellectually-honest arguments to offer in defense of the insane levels of government spending, they are once again resorting to hate, vitriol and downright nastiness as its political weapons of choice.
Right now, ground zero is Madison, Wisconsin where legislators and newly-elected Gov. Scott Walker are attempting to stop the state from financially bleeding to death. To get state spending under control, the governor and the Republican-controlled legislature are planning to end collective bargaining rights for public sector employees.
EAGtv released a story showing union activists ditching class to protest spending reform.
The left has come unglued. Forgetting that public sector employees work for the taxpayers (and not the other way around), unions descended upon the Capitol in protest.
Among the loudest protesters were the teacher unions. Angry that the governor was not treating them as professionals, some teachers unions staged a “sickout,” causing schools to cancel classes due to insufficient staff levels. (Talk about a mixed message.)
Better still, some teachers dragged students to the Capitol as political props. Video released by the MacIver Institute shows students marching through the streets, carrying signs and protesting. Only one problem: the kids don’t have the slightest clue why they’re there. In the video, one student says, “We’re trying to stop whatever this dude (meaning Gov. Walker) is doing.”
But the depth of the students’ cluelessness was matched only by the nastiness of their teachers. Some union members were also seen holding signs that read, “Death to Tyrants.” Other messages included, “Hosni Walker,” “Hitler Outlawed Unions, Too,” and “Walker puts the dic in dictator.” Stay classy, government school teachers!
One protestor had sign that read, “I am not replaceable. I am professional.” Really? Do professionals disrupt the learning process to engage in silly political theatrics? Do professionals use students as political pawns to help secure hefty retirement and benefit packages for themselves?
Perhaps the teacher unions would have more credibility if taxpayers ever saw the unions’ expend this much passion and energy over the drop-out rate and the travesty of seeing high school graduates who cannot read their diplomas. Remember teachers, actions still speak louder than words.
Now that the unions are fighting for their very existence, they are open to discussing education reforms and spending concessions. But the unions should have cooperated long ago, before states such as Wisconsin started careening toward insolvency.
The unions and the other special interest groups are reaping what they have sown. They’ve called the shots for so long, that they’ve made harsh budget decisions a necessity. But instead of seeking constructive solutions, they are back to spewing anger, hate and vitriol.
Soon, that may be all that remains of the American left.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Now that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is on the road to recovery, labor unions and others on the American left have pulled out all the stops in blocking spending cuts in D.C. and across the country. Since the left has no substantive, intellectually-honest arguments to offer in defense of the insane levels of government spending, they are once again resorting to hate, vitriol and downright nastiness as its political weapons of choice.
Right now, ground zero is Madison, Wisconsin where legislators and newly-elected Gov. Scott Walker are attempting to stop the state from financially bleeding to death. To get state spending under control, the governor and the Republican-controlled legislature are planning to end collective bargaining rights for public sector employees.
EAGtv released a story showing union activists ditching class to protest spending reform.
The left has come unglued. Forgetting that public sector employees work for the taxpayers (and not the other way around), unions descended upon the Capitol in protest.
Among the loudest protesters were the teacher unions. Angry that the governor was not treating them as professionals, some teachers unions staged a “sickout,” causing schools to cancel classes due to insufficient staff levels. (Talk about a mixed message.)
Better still, some teachers dragged students to the Capitol as political props. Video released by the MacIver Institute shows students marching through the streets, carrying signs and protesting. Only one problem: the kids don’t have the slightest clue why they’re there. In the video, one student says, “We’re trying to stop whatever this dude (meaning Gov. Walker) is doing.”
But the depth of the students’ cluelessness was matched only by the nastiness of their teachers. Some union members were also seen holding signs that read, “Death to Tyrants.” Other messages included, “Hosni Walker,” “Hitler Outlawed Unions, Too,” and “Walker puts the dic in dictator.” Stay classy, government school teachers!
One protestor had sign that read, “I am not replaceable. I am professional.” Really? Do professionals disrupt the learning process to engage in silly political theatrics? Do professionals use students as political pawns to help secure hefty retirement and benefit packages for themselves?
Perhaps the teacher unions would have more credibility if taxpayers ever saw the unions’ expend this much passion and energy over the drop-out rate and the travesty of seeing high school graduates who cannot read their diplomas. Remember teachers, actions still speak louder than words.
Now that the unions are fighting for their very existence, they are open to discussing education reforms and spending concessions. But the unions should have cooperated long ago, before states such as Wisconsin started careening toward insolvency.
The unions and the other special interest groups are reaping what they have sown. They’ve called the shots for so long, that they’ve made harsh budget decisions a necessity. But instead of seeking constructive solutions, they are back to spewing anger, hate and vitriol.
Soon, that may be all that remains of the American left.
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