My Beauty Best Teacher

Written by Candi Peterson

Join Empower DC's Exposing DC's Equation for Displacement: Info on DCPS closings & plan of action Saturday,  Feb. 4 @ 11 am -1:30pm @  1419 V St NW

The headlines from today's top education stories reads: "Many public schools in D.C.’s poorest area should be transformed or shut, study says; more charters recommended" written by Bill Turque, Washington Post writer while Mike Debonis' blog: DeMorning Links reads: "School Closings Contemplated" and Channel Fox Five TV news reported the DC School System study recommends making major improvements or close three dozen under performing public schools or expand high performing charter schools.

The Washington Teacher blog first reported on October 31, 2011 about future plans to close additional DC public schools. An excerpt from the 21st Century School Fund September - October newsletter stated: "The Deputy Mayor for Education, with a 100,000 dollar grant from the Walton Family Foundation, engaged IFF (Illinois Facility Fund) to study the capacity and performance of DCPS and public charter schools. IFF has authored reports in Denver, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, using a defined method to determine what they term "performing" or "non- performing" seats.  This analysis is being done with an eye to "right sizing" district schools which beyond consolidation could include reconstitution and replacement with school management organizations."

Not unlike other major cities including NY, Chicago, Ohio- DC has been at the forefront of shutting down traditional public schools. In 2008, twenty-three public schools were closed under former DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee and then mayor Adrian Fenty which led to a community outcry to save our public schools. Local education stakeholders voices weren't heeded by Rhee or Fenty and only one neighborhood elementary school- John Burroughs was saved from the chopping block.

Natalie Hopkinson who authored the article - "Why School Choice Fails"which appeared in the December 4, 2011 N.Y. Times discussed how this country’s reform policies in Washington, DC- put in place by a Republican led congress in 1995 led to the birth of many of our charter schools. Hopkinson wrote:" if a school was deemed failing, students could transfer schools, opt to attend a charter school or receive a voucher to attend a private school. The idea was to introduce competition; good schools would survive; bad ones would disappear. It effectively created a second education system, which now enrolls nearly half the city’s public school students. The charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed."

The results of IFF's study recommend that DC make major improvements or close thirty six under performing schools in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods or expand high performing charter schools. It’s a finding that heralds the continued growth of the charter schools sector at the expense of the D.C. Public Schools, if not its outright domination. While some people are questioning the motives of the Illinois Facilities Fund, the study is “likely to rekindle impassioned debate about possible school closures and the future of public education in the District,” Bill  Turque notes. Officials tell Turque, education writer for the Post that any decisions about a “major restructuring” are at least a year and many community meetings away.

What comes as no surprise to anyone is that schools in ward 8 were identified as having the greatest need, according to the IFF study. The study recommended turning around or closing the following public schools: Simon, Patterson, Terrell-McGogney and Ferebee-Hope and closing two bottom-rung charter schools, Center City Congress Heights (pre-K to 8) and Imagine Southeast (pre-K to 5). H.D. Woodson Senior High School which is located in Ward 7  was also recommended for turn around or closure, a school which recently has undergone capital investment which cost millions of dollars in investment. 

One of the things that I find disturbing about IFF's report is the recommendation for DC to consider expanding charter schools in the 10 targeted neighborhood clusters and call for the DC Public Charter School Board to authorize about 6,500 new charter seats (current enrollment is about 32,000) while utilizing former public school buildings as incentives to get the public charter board to actively recruit the highest performing charter school operators to replicate their school models. 


The writing should be on the wall for all of us to see. If it's not, I don't know what to tell you. From where I sit, this situation looks bleak for working, middle class families and many of our teachers in some of our poorest communities. The loss of our public schools is a disinvestment in our school communities and may lead to higher classrooms sizes, further declining enrollment in DC public schools and extinction of traditional public schools and fewer teaching jobs. Now is not the time for parents, students, teachers, school staff and community members to sit back. We have to ask the hard questions, organize and demand to have a voice as education stakeholders or we may likely have a re-run of the 2008 school closures.

On November 8, 2011 - I issued a call to action to DC teachers and school personnel: "In the midst of upcoming contract negotiations, there are big plans ahead to close our traditional public schools. Never in our history has been there been a greater need for teachers and school personnel to have an effective organizing union. Our very future as educators and the future of our students will be determined by how vigorously we, alongside parents and community members are willing to fight to save our public schools." Won't you heed the call to get involved before your local school is reconstituted and turned over to a charter school, your job is lost and your community no longer includes you?

Today let's learn about our Science Czar, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren.

As the United States of America continues its descent under President Obama and his New Democrat Party into a third-world dictatorship, I still find myself unfamiliar with the overlords who now control my behavior and distribute to me gifts and favors. Oh, I know who is elected into office, and being a teacher of this sort of stuff I understand the bureaucracy and how it works. But who the heck is John Holdren, what role does he play in our political system, how did he get that role, and what sort of a person is he to be controlling me?

It's tough to keep all these czars straight, you know, since under Obamathe number of unelected, unconfirmed offices who go by the old imperial Russian title of Czar has gone up quite a bit (although to be fair, the number of people who have been considered czars under Obama is still just under the number of people who were considered czars under Bush, a two-term President roundly criticized by both the right and left as being undemocratic and statist). Still, I'm determined to get to know all of them- from Kenneth Feinberg, Head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront and Pay Czar who although being a long-time Democratic operative and chief of staff for Democratic Senator Kennedy was put in charge of determining how much CEO's should be paid in once-free America, to Gary Samore, former US Communist party member and current WMD Policy Czar, to Ed Montgomery, auto-worker czar and distributor of gifts and favors.

It's going to be important for all of us to become more familiar with how things work in America now- after the change- we'll need to know how to curry favor with royal envoys, how to avoid being intimidated and bullied by bowing low and saying the right things, and how to bow get gifts from to our new overlords, who now tour around the land giving gifts to favored people.

So today let's get to know a little bit better our Science Czar, John Holdren. From Who Runs Gov:

Holdren is a powerhouse in the world of science and public policy. As director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST), he is the top adviser to President Barack Obama on science and technology, issues that are increasingly relevant to homeland security, energy and the environment. Holdren casts all of the above as priorities.

He also leads interagency efforts to develop and implement sound science and technology policies and budgets, and works with the private sector, state and local governments, the science and higher education communities, and other nations to advance his policy initiatives.

Although a lot of conservatives may focus on other aspects of John Holdren- for example, in a book he published in 1977, he wrote about and appeared to be supportive of forced abortions, mass sterilization, a "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens, populations that would be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food, and other similarly frightening ideas. This research is important and should be realized, but I want to focus instead on another aspect of Holdren- his belief in a benevolent world dictatorship of the enlightened elite that will forcibly transfer wealth for some reason or another.

Holdren is a believer in the so-called Unified Theory of Left-Wing Causes. This theory is that all left wing causes- including global warming, global cooling, overpopulation, endangered species, poverty, diversity, and many others- can all be solved by a benevolent world dictatorship of the enlightened elite that will force others to live their lives differently and will redistribute their property as they see fit.

Basically, Holdren is a run-of-the-mill tyranny supporter, and was appointed to his position by tyrant-in-chief President Barack Obama, and he is to be opposed by all freedom and liberty loving patriots out there.

The worst part about Holdren, aside from the fact that he seizes on the left wing cause of the day to push his tyrannical beliefs, is that his ideas and theories about everything are wrong. From Forbes:

....In keeping with his dogmatic limits-to-growth convictions, Holdren joined his frequent co-author, eco-doomster Paul Ehrlich, in a famous bet against cornucopian economist Julian Simon. In 1980, Holdren, Ehrlich and Stanford colleague John Harte picked a basket of five commodities--chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten--that they were sure were going to rise in price as they became increasingly scarce. They drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Holdren, Ehrlich and Harte the same quantities of five metals that could be purchased for $1,000 10 years later at 1980 prices.

If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990. Simply put, the combined real prices of the metals selected by Holdren and his colleagues fell by more than 50% during the 1980s, confirming cornucopian claims that the supply of resources over time becomes more abundant, not scarcer.....

...Holdren introduced in 1971--with his colleague and perennial population-alarmist, Ehrlich--the concept of the I=PAT identity. Human Impact on the environment is equal to Population x Affluence/consumption x Technology. All of which are supposed to intensify and worsen humanity's impact on the natural world.

History shows that the I=PAT identity largely gets it backward. Population is at worst neutral, while affluence and technology actually promote environmental flourishing. It is in the rich, developed countries that the air becomes clearer, the streams cleaner and the forests more expansive....

...Holdren doesn't appear to have an adequate understanding of the economic process through which these technological advances are achieved. He seems to think new technologies arise full-blown from government agencies and university laboratories....

This is the general flaw to the Unified Theory of Left-Wing Causes- that bureaucrats like Holdren know what they are doing and if they are given more power over others- power that those free people once exercised- and are given more resources- resources taken from the labor of once-free people- that these bureaucrats will make the world a better place for us all to live- a more prosperous, free, and happy place. It turns out though that he is wrong in almost all of his theories- from bets he placed to equations he invented to his general understanding of economics. He is a failed person- perhaps no more failed than the rest of us, but yet given more power and authority and wealth over the rest of us by a government not in any way empowered to do so.

People are not completely 'benelevent', and neither are the governments they create, and there are no 'enlightened' people in charge of our government today, either Democrat or Republican or liberal or conservative. Whatever the cause that you believe in or support, the answer is never the Unified Theory of Left-Wing Causes, and yet the Obama administration has appointed as Science Czar one of the greatest believers in this theory- a guy who is supposed to be a scientist actually at his heart a firm believer in a theory that is demonstratively wrong.

John Holdren is yet another example of a failed administration based on failed theories and ideas putting in placed failed administrators who implement failed policies- and we can see the results of this failure in America today.

The President of the United States fills a lot of important roles in our political system- Commander-in-Chief, Chief Executive, Chief Legislator, Chief Jurist, Chief of State, Chief Diplomat, Head of Political Party, Popular Leader, etc- and to the list of these roles we now apparently must add 'Investor-in-Chief.'

Head of executive branches, whether at the state level as Governors or at the national level with our President, increasingly believe that it is part of their job description to take the money that taxpayers send to them to perform important government functions and instead gamble that money away on risky investments- the more risky and uncertain the investment, the more it seems that these executives are likely to dump precious taxpayer money into them.

Here in Michigan, we had a Governor that won a second term of office believing that she was a good Governor because she dumped taxpayer money into 'green energy' and 'cool cities' and the movie industry; upon further review and looked at with a true eye for costs and investment gains, these investments all turned out to range from bad to poor to horrible. Taxpayer money was distributed in a corrupt manner based more on political favors and little to no lasting gains came from these investments, certainly not enough to justify calling these schemes 'investment' in the private marketplace.

At the national level, Barack Obama believes that one of his major roles as President is to direct investments for the future, in spite of his lack of experience, training, or record of success in investing. No one would ever hire him to direct their personal investments, and yet as President he is doing just this with our public money at a time when public money is in short supply and needed ever more vitally. And the process that these investments are awarded are corrupt, filled with political considerations and backroom deals that would put any private businessman in prison for their actions.

The Washington Post writes about this role of the President in its article Barack Obama, investor-in-chief. From the article:

Would you buy a used car from Barack Obama? Or would you want him managing your 401(k) investment retirement plan at work? The president, of course, isn’t in that business specifically, but in a larger sense he’s been investing our money, picking the businesses he thinks will fuel economic expansion, new jobs and the technology of the future, and rebuild the nation’s fraying infrastructure.

All it takes is money - ours - he says, and he’s been spending it as fast as he can in a failed attempt to get the economy growing again. The economic policy term for this is “central planning,” wherein the government tries to pick the winners and losers and dumps hundreds of billions of dollars into various business sectors in the belief that it will pay off in the long run.

The government isn’t very good at this business, as we’ve seen in the disastrously ineffective $825 billion spending stimulus plan that President Obama and the Democrats shoved through Congress in 2009. Much of that money went into the budgets of countless federal departments, agencies and other programs that spent it. Still more went to states, counties, cities and towns for infrastructure programs or to keep public workers employed. A lot of the money was given to businesses that Mr. Obama thinks will be good for the environment, though his investment decisions didn’t always work out the way he hoped.

Consider the White House-backed solar energy firm Solyndra Inc., which declared bankruptcy this week after pocketing a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. Critics called the deal a “stimulus black hole.”

When Mr. Obama visited the Solyndra factory in May 2010, he called the company a success story that was “leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.”

He was quite proud of his investment, boasting at the time, “Less than a year ago, we were standing on what was an empty lot,” but now here was this shiny, new factory that “is the result of those loans” backed by his administration.
It was later learned that the White House fast-tracked Solyndra’s loan application, rushing Mr. Obama’s pet project through without a lot of serious checking. Federal investigators said that the administration had bypassed procedures to safeguard the taxpayers’ investment.

Mr. Obama is big on the solar-panel industry and under his policies, the government has dumped a lot of our money into it in the past three years. But it turns out that the U.S. industry has not turned out to be the bonanza that he sold to the country. Prices for solar panels have fallen because of strong competition from China, making the fledgling industry precarious at best without heavy federal subsidies.

Evergreen Solar Inc. filed for bankruptcy last month after being forced to close its plant in Massachusetts that was built with state and local government subsidies.

Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico Democrat, says the loan guarantee program “has not worked as well as we had hoped.” Sounds like a Wall Street investment banker defending a fat bundle of subprime real estate securities that went bad.

The solar-panel industry is not the only “investment” Mr. Obama has sunk a lot of our money into. While the plants build with his loans make for great campaign photo ops, the costly reality is that government is trying to pick the winners and losers in our economy instead of the private sector.

But Mr. Obama thinks he’s good at this investment business and now he is trying to convince us to buy into to a new federal “infrastructure bank” that will make off-budget grants and loans to rebuild “roads, bridges and ports and broadband lines and smart grids” with $30 billion of our money.

The bank would put “all those [unemployed] construction workers” back to work, he said. And it would provide Mr. Obama with lots of photo ops at jobsites, saying “look what I’ve done for you.”

If this sounds familiar, it was sold to us in the guise of the 2009 job stimulus bill that was supposed to put the construction industry back to work. Some short-term jobs were created but when the building projects were completed, the jobs ended. The construction industry today is in a recession.

Making Mr. Obama the investor-in-chief, deciding how and where the nation’s capital resources should be spent, hasn’t worked and isn’t going to work. Ask Japan, which has gone on a public-works spending binge though its economy has been in a slump for two decades.

Better to shift federal public-works spending decisions to the states, along with the gas tax money for highways, and let them - not remote federal bureaucrats - set their own priorities. Broaden the tax base by eliminating dozens of loopholes, then cut business and individual tax rates, and slash the capital gains tax to unlock needed, job-creating investment capital.

Let the marketplace make the investment decisions that have made America the largest and most successful economy in the world. Mr. Obama has got better things to do with his time, like trying to figure out why his job approval polls have fallen to 39 percent.

The title of this post isn't mine- Ralph R. Reiland came up with it in his post which I will talk about. But it's a great title- in my mind, I see the American economy hitting an iceberg around 2007 and start taking on some water, enough that it badly listed by 2008 and went into a recession. The iceberg was too much federal spending that soaked up savings and investments, too many federal government policies that encouraged bubbles in investing and housing, and increasing regulations that choked off economic growth, especially in small businesses, and signaled to business owners that now was the time to play it safe and not take risks and create jobs. The tip of this iceberg of federal policy ripped a large hole in the Titanic of the US economy, and soon the boat started to dangerously take on water.

Although I'm no expert of this, I imagine that once your boat hits an iceberg and takes on water, you have two options. Option one is to continue moving forward and patch the hole- in other words, keep America's booming private economy and remove the harmful regulations and policies that caused the damage. Option two is to stop moving and widen the hole, by which I mean to attack private business and those who are successful in it and put in place more harmful policies. Oh, I guess there was a double-secret third option too, and that is to turn the boat around and try to ram the boat on the iceberg again, this time with the intent on sinking the whole thing. For a while, I thought that Obama and the Democrats were just intent on going with option 2, but it looks like they are honestly considering circling back on that iceberg with the goal of sinking the economy of the United States for good.

President Barack Obama was once named by me as Captain of the US Titanic Spending (see my complete list of Obama nicknames)- and now he's going after that iceberg again!

Here are some parts of the article by Reiland called Obama: Circling back to the iceberg:

Only 26 percent of the public approve of President Barack Obama's handling of the economy in the latest Gallup poll, conducted Aug. 11-14, while a whopping 71 percent disapprove. That's down from Obama's previous low point of 35 percent approval on this top issue.

The public's growing dissatisfaction shouldn't be surprising. Going back to 1890, reports the National Bureau of Economic Research, the only U.S. president with a worse record than Obama in job creation in his first two-and-a-half years in office, measured in terms of percentage change, was Herbert Hoover, presiding over the emergence of the Great Depression.

"Official unemployment is 9.1 percent," stated a New York Times editorial on Aug. 15, decrying the nation's jobs picture, "but it would be 16.1 percent, or 25.1 million people, if it included those who can only find part-time jobs and those who have given up looking for work." "Keeping the economy going and making sure jobs are available is the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning," Obama said back in March. "It's the last thing I think about when I go to bed each night."

Now, nearly six months later, the White House reports that Obama is working on a new strategy for job creation that will be unveiled after he returns from vacation. The task of coming up with a jobs plan that works shouldn't be all that terribly difficult. All Mr. Obama has to do is reverse what he's done and change what he thinks.

First, by the government's own numbers, small businesses have created 64 percent of the net new jobs in the U.S. economy over the past 15 years.

In fact, that understates the role of small business, since the vast majority of America's medium-sized and large businesses began as small businesses. The Heinz corporation began when 16-year-old Henry Heinz grated piles of horseradish at home, using his mother's recipe, and sold the bottled product door-to-door in Sharpsburg out of a wheelbarrow.

Yet since Obama took office, employment at federal regulatory agencies has jumped 13 percent while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6 percent. Second, 39 percent of small-business owners said in a Chamber of Commerce survey in July that ObamaCare was either their greatest or second-greatest obstacle to new hiring....

...Additionally, 84 percent of small business owners in the survey said the economy is on the wrong track, 79 percent view the current regulatory environment as unreasonable, and 79 percent believe Washington should get out of the way of small business, rather than offering a helping hand (14 percent).

In its first 26 months, reports The Heritage Foundation, the Obama administration imposed new regulatory rules that will cost the private sector $40 billion. In July alone, reports Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., federal regulators imposed a total of 379 new rules that will add some $9.5 billion in new costs.

Bottom line: What's required from Obama is a complete about-face, the shelving of his flawed economic philosophy and a reversal of his counterproductive policy prescriptions.

For those who want to see which way the United States is going under President Obama and his progressive policies supported by the new progressive Democratic Party, watch this movie- Titanic (10th Anniversary Edition).

People produce goods and services, create wealth, and through their talent and hart work are making America a better place. At the heart of our economic system you have someone with an idea on how to make the world a better place by providing a good or service better than others, and then you have people who help this person to make their dream a reality. Some of these dreams are big (Bill Gates dreamed of making a better home computer) and some of these dreams are small (I dream of being an entertaining and interesting freelance writer and radio personality with a perspective that others don't have), but what makes our nation hum is that we all have the freedom to explore these gifts and ideas and the freedom to work hard to make our dreams a reality.

Except when we can't because our dreams and hard work and ideas are blocked by government regulations. Regulations serve a purpose in our nation- they protect public spaces, they protect areas that are owned by the collective nation, they protect lives, and they protect the freedom of people to participate in our nation- and so it is to be expected that in our nation of laws and standards that there will be laws and standards.

Truth in labeling laws, laws against dumping chemical sewage into lakes and rivers, etc- are reasonable and responsible regulations. Twenty or thirty years ago, I would guess that most people would say that most of the reasonable and responsible regulations had already been passed, and that people were pretty well protected in our nation under its laws.

In 2008, I think most of the people in our nation felt that our nation was pretty well regulated; in fact, many perhaps felt that it was heavily regulated, but very few were demanding a massive explosion in the number of regulations and regulators in our nation.

And yet, one of the fastest growing employment sectors in our nation since March of 2010 is in federal regulatory agencies. President Barack Obama (Democratic President since 2009) and his Democratic allies in the House (Democrat control from 2007-2011) and Senate (Democrat control from 2007) have decided that although the number of private sector jobs has grown only 1.4% that our federal government needed to hire vastly more employees whose sole employment purpose is to control these private citizens, to make rules regarding their behaviors, to enforce those rules, and to punish these citizens when they break the rules that these regulatory agencies invent.

It is tyranny, plain and simple, when regulatory agencies who are not elected and who are unaccountable break down the separation of powers in our nation and exceed their authority to further their political agenda's, and while our nation is willing to tolerate this at a low level, under President Obama and the Democrats this sort of tyranny has exploded in size and number and cost.

Employment at regulator agencies has climbed 13% since Obama took office, and in the past year alone the number of people who are hired to control our economy and its people has grown by 5.2%!

Is this what you all voted for? Is this the change and hope that was supposed to come with Obama winning office- more regulators, more people devoted to controlling business, more people inventing rules and punishing people who violated them? Is this the kind of leadership that you want to keep in office for another 4 years?

I maintain that anyone- anyone Republican or Democrat- would be a better President than Barack Obama, and the Democrats who have supported his agenda and backed him deserve to lose their jobs too for this misplaced trust in a President who is choking off job creation through excessive regulations and misusing taxpayer money by hiring more and more regulators while the United States of America goes bankrupt.

Hat-tip to Ace of Spades.

Keith Hart writing in Memory Bank:

When I graduated to the field of development studies, the picture of West Africa’s cities was just as distorted as one you might get from boorowing a Manchester school perspective. Here the emphasis of the economists was on the new states’ ability to pursue a neo-Keynesian development program. How could ‘we’ (the politicians, bureaucrats and their academic advisers) provide the jobs and other needs of the hordes flocking into the cities at the time? It was assumed that such provision had to come through the bureaucracy and conform to state-made laws. My paper on ‘informal income opportunities and urban employment’ pointed to the wide range of economic activities that were invisible to bureacracy. But even I saw them through a statist lens (“seeing like a state”), hence the term ‘informal’, not regulated by the bureaucracy. At that time I assumed that the bulk of economic progress must come though public and private sector enterprise of a corporate type.
The informal economy was never adequately described or defined, but these days it is commonplace to read assertions that African economies are 70-90% ‘informal’. Certainly the deregulation undertaken over the last three decades of neoliberal economic policies have led to a radical informalization of the world economy, not least in Africa. But to label these activities ‘informal’ is to avoid identifying what they are positively for or how they are organized, by which social principles.
I would say that the last half-century has seen a massive transfer of population to the cities, where most people have been left to generate their own forms of commerce. The informal economy in this sense has been a holding operation allowing many people to survive in the city and some to flourish. Whatever is coming up next will draw to some extent on this sprawling self-organized economic activity. Our task is to find out more about the promising sectors spawned by such a development.

More here

Buried in the story Stimulus projects under fire I saw this gem:

But supporters counter that the stimulus funds have had a major impact. Out of $7.6 billion awarded, Michigan has received $3 billion for projects that have led to 70,000 jobs, according to the Michigan Economic Recovery Office.

Let's do some quick math- 3,000,000,000/70,000. It equals $42,857.

So you work hard and produce a certain good or perform some sort of service. For your labor and effort skill, the government comes along and taxes you, and the more labor or effort or skill you put in, the more then government taxes you. That tax money is collected by a government agency, housed in a nice office building staffed by government agents paid a salary higher to one they would be paid if they worked in the private sector. These agents take that tax money and put it into an account. Elected officials (nice offices, nice salaries, lifetime benefits) then vote to take that money (plus money from your children and grandchildren, borrowed on interest from China) and spend it building roads or bridges or conducting studies or science or something. That money now goes to a government agency (nice offices, high salaries) which debates what to do with all that money. After much deliberation, they decide to spend it on such things as a professor  getting $145,000 to take students to Africa or a University of Michigan scientist getting $500,000 for a study on people's impact on the environment in Nepal. Then these bureaucrats put the money into accounts for each of these products.

By this point, the money has been cycled through many government agents and agencies, each one taking a cut of the money, and in reality very little of that money makes it to the 'shovel-ready' project. That explains why it costs $42K for the government to create a single job in Michigan, a job that performs actions that are questionable at best.

Any Congressman that voted in favor of the stimulus bill should be thrown out of office for their role in the mismanagement and wastefulness of public funds, and you can find this data at http://nationalrepublicantrust.com/PelosiIndex/Table_complete.php and see where your Congressman voted on key legislation. For their stupidity, lack of knowledge, and failure to lead our nation they deserve to be removed from their jobs. Spending $42K in taxpayer money to save a single job is not an efficient use of government money.

For those who are interested in learning more, check out Guide to the Stimulus: The Definitive Desk Reference to the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act 2009.

Looking forward to Nigeria's elections Charles Soludo contends that:

....we need answers to is how the candidates hope to reconstruct our public finance and put it back on the path of sustainability. How can they rein-in the obtuse and rapacious federal bureaucracy in particular, and the state bureaucracies, balance our budget during this period of oil boom, and yet spend at least 40% of the budget on capital expenditure as required by the Fiscal Responsibility Act? Personally, I am not convinced that we need more than 10 ministries and 10 ministers at the Federal level. They should explain to us their contingency plans in case oil price crashes tomorrow. Candidates should also let us know their views on, and framework for, borrowing (when to borrow, for what, and how it will be paid back?). Without clarity on these issues, much of the talk about government providing power/electricity and infrastructure on a sustainable basis will remain a joke as funding will always remain a binding constraint. In other words, candidates should tell us their plans to shrink the domain of the public sector to free resources to enlarge the domain of the private sector— to truly have a private sector-led, market economy. For example, I have always believed that company profit tax rate should not be more than 10% (down from the current 30% plus education tax of another 2%) especially at a period of oil price boom, and where the businesses provide their own infrastructure. For businesses to expand and create jobs, the tax rate needs to go down significantly. We need to debate this.

More here

On the north end of Democrat Gary Peters 9th District, the story of two different Americas is clearly visible for everyone to see. One America is the America of capitalism and private-sector jobs, and the other America is of corporatization and public-sector jobs. One America is the bankrupt ruins of a $2 billion shopping and housing development, and the other America is the road construction workers dutifully ripping up and rebuilding a major road right in front of it.

Democrats like Peters believe that the best way to lead our nation back to growth and prosperity is to have the national government lead the way by having the national government borrow money from banks in the US and from lenders like China abroad and then use that money to build roads, bridges, schools, and public buildings. In this America, there is job growth and pay raises, assuming that you have the correct political connections to get the jobs and you belong to the labor unions that do business with the state. In this America, there is little accountability to customers and little money to be made by taking risks, increasing efficiency, or cutting costs- in the Democrats America, there is always a job for everyone willing to do the bidding of the state.

This America is the road construction that you see in the pictures and videos, and is something that Democrats like Gary Peters can rightly take credit for.

But there is another America out there, an America where jobs are increasingly scarce, investment funds are nonexistent, and pay cuts are the norm. In this America, increasing taxes, increasing regulation, and increasing uncertainty caused by a growing state presence in the marketplace has caused it to be less profitable to do business, has scared customers and investors, and has led to high unemployment and low job growth. The government is borrowing funds for their projects, and so businesses find it increasingly difficult to borrow money for their projects. Efforts to cut costs and increase efficiency are met by political leaders publicly speaking ill about your company, and it becomes increasingly difficult to meet the bottom line when the government forces the bottom line up and talks profits down.

This America is the abandoned and bankrupt building project that you can see in the pictures and videos, and this is also something that Democrats and Gary Peters can take credit for.

The two Americas meet at the 93-acre site on Telegraph Road near Square Lake Road in Bloomfield Hills. Bloomfield Park was once the symbol of booming private America- a place where citizens could work, buy products, and live. It now lies abandoned, naked steel girders and half-built looming structures, some seven stories tall, crumbling and rusting in front of construction work to rebuild the public road that goes past it. Its marble foundations and ambitious scale are the risks that America once took on itself, but at its feet now scurry the workers of the America that now safely puts its power in the hands of government officials.

But work continues on Telegraph road. Signs boldly advertise that the project was paid for by stimulus dollars voted for and signed into law by Democrats. Democrats like Peters point to this as a sign that his plan is working, and wants to be returned to office based on public works projects like these. That's the America that Democrats ultimately want- an America that is dependent on the state for jobs and income and growth while the private sector dies.

All video and picture was taken by me from my camera phone, after I snuck past security and risked my life walking through the dangerous ruins of America's once glorious past (pre-2008).

UPDATE: Thanks for linking!

Andrew Mwenda contends that:

The most enduring democratic reforms in Africa over the last two decades have not been in the sphere of politics but the economy. Governments across our continent have liberalised our economies, privatised public enterprises and deregulated economic activity. These reforms have created sufficient economic freedom and with it, the structural and technological foundations of democracy are growing.
The growth of the private sector in Uganda, for example, is creating opportunities for many professional Ugandans outside of the state. Those who work for private companies have greater space to speak their minds than state employees. The spread of internet and telecommunications is rapidly liberating information flow from state control. The boom in education is producing an enlightened population who are using Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and other social networking sites to debate public policy.

More here

Via American Thinker:

President Obama stated in a Presidential Memorandum last month:

the Federal government...has a responsibility to... [r]econnect Americans, especially children, to America's rivers and waterways, landscapes of national significance, ranches, farms and forests, great parks,
and coasts and beaches.

Obama's response to this crisis is to create another of the government programs that seem to be spun out of the White House at a rate of two or three a week. This one is called "America's Great Outdoors Initiative." It calls on no less than three Cabinet Secretaries (Interior, Agriculture and EPA), plus the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality to develop "A 21st Century Strategy for America's Great Outdoors." According to the Memorandum:

The Federal Government, the Nation's largest land manager, has a responsibility to engage with these partners to help develop a conservation agenda worthy of the 21st Century. We must look to the private sector and nonprofit organizations, as well as towns, cities, and States, and the people who live and work in them, to identify the places that mean the most to Americans, and leverage the support of the Federal Government to help these community-driven efforts to succeed. Through these partnerships, we will work to connect these outdoor spaces to each other, and to reconnect Americans to them.

These "public/private partnerships," and "leveraging" mean one thing: the Federal Government is expanding into yet another part of our lives. It's going to cost us some money, but connecting outdoor spaces and reconnecting Americans to them is vital work that can only be done by the Federal Government. As Obama reminded us at his recent speech to the Business Council, "no business, no individual is going to provide [public goods] on their own."

Hmm... perhaps this 'federal responsibility to reconnect America with nature' is somewhere in the list of delegated and lawful powers of the federal government... I'm looking... Article I, Section 8.... don't see it in there. Perhaps the Necessary and Proper clause can be used... is it 'necessary' and 'proper' for the national government to have the power to 'reconnect America with nature' in order to exercise the power of... regulating interstate commerce... promoting science... establishing post offices... probably it is part of the general welfare clause....

Or perhaps it doesn't matter if this is a lawful power of the federal government, because President Obama believes in rule of men, not rule of laws, and decided to operate our federal government in an unlawful manner fitting of tyrants and dictators. Perhaps it doesn't even matter anymore what is delegated and proper and constitutional, because we now live in a tyranny where power over others is exercised by those who have political connections (public-private partnerships or individuals leveraging the power of the federal government).

Personally, I don't know what the heck President Obarfo is talking about- I'm not disconnected with nature at all- I fish, I hunt, I go outside, my five kids go outside, and I even take my dog for a walk every day, and I live in an apartment in the middle of the city! Leverage the power of the state all you want, Obarfo, but the only way I can spend more time connecting with nature is if you follow through on your plans to destroy all energy production in this country and tax and regulate me out of a job.

The private sector is just as rotten, Salisu Suleiman writes:

The kind of theft that has taken place in our banks in the four short years of post consolidation has left civil servants and other public sector workers looking like angels. The entire banking sector workforce is less than 100,000. A few crooks among them have, at the risk of generalization nearly crippled the entire Nigerian economy. Add to them the plethora of crooked stock broking firms, insurance companies and other private sector operators you wonder the sorts of underhand deals that go on virtually unreported.
A civil servant that steals is a corrupt official. A businessman that steals 10 times as much is a whiz kid.

More here

Last year, our nation had a choice for President. On one hand we had a man who sprouted very nice sounding platitudes but lacked experience and had a very extreme voting record. On the other hand we had a man who spoke truthfully about the situation and had a lot of experience and had solid and well thought out policy positions. Sadly, those two were not on the same ballot- the experienced solid conservative lost in the primaries to John McCain. If only we could have had a chance to elect Mitt Romney last election, things might have turned out differently.

That's not to say that there would have been no recession, healthcare would not have been a concern, and Iran would have continued to enrich uranium. If Mitt Romney would have become President instead of Barack Obama, those things would still have happened. But the key question is how would Romney have handled those situations differently than Obama and how those differences might affect our nation.

Some people think there is no difference between the two major parties or think that Romney wasn't really that different than someone like Obama. They are wrong. In many important and key situations Romney would have advocated considerably different policies than Obama, policies that may have led to a shorter and less severe recession, that would have lowered the cost of healthcare, and that would have led to Iran thinking twice about seeking the bomb.

This is not idle thoughts- Mitt Romney wrote an editorial this week in USA Today where he laid out some things he would have done as President differently than Barack Obama. This is why he was and remains my choice for President:

• Repair the stimulus. Freeze the funds that haven't yet been spent and redirect them to immediate, private sector job-creation priorities.
• Create tax incentives that promote business expansion and hiring. For example, install a robust investment tax credit, permit businesses to expense capital purchases made in 2010, and reduce payroll taxes. These will reignite construction, technology and a wide array of capital goods industries, and lead to expanded employment.
• Prove to the global investors that finance America's debt that we are serious about reining in spending and becoming fiscally prudent by adopting limits on non-military discretionary spending and reforming our unsustainable, unfunded entitlements. These are key to strengthening the dollar, reducing the threat of rampant inflation and holding down interest rates.
• Close down any talk of carbon cap-and-trade. It will burden consumers and employers with billions in new costs. Instead, greatly expand our commitment to natural gas and nuclear, boosting jobs now and reducing the export of energy jobs and dollars later.
• Tell the unions that job-stifling "card check" legislation is off the table. Laying new burdens on small business will kill entrepreneurship and job creation.
• Don't allow a massive tax increase to go into effect in 2011 with the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. The specter of more tax-fueled government spending and the reduction of capital available for small business will hinder investment and business expansion.
• New spending should be strictly limited to items that are critically needed and that we would have acquired in the future, such as new military equipment to support our troops abroad and essential infrastructure at home.
• Install dynamic regulations for the financial sector — rules that are up to date, efficient and not excessively burdensome. But do not so tie up the financial sector with red tape that we lose a vital component of our economic system.
• Open the doors to trade. Give important friends like Colombia favored trade status rather than bow to protectionist demands. Now is the time for aggressive pursuit of opportunities for new markets for American goods, not insular retrenchment.
• Stop frightening the private sector by continuing to hold GM stock, by imposing tighter and tighter controls on compensation, and by pursuing a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers. Government encroachment on free enterprise is depressing investment and job creation.

These are great points and both Republicans and Democrats should get behind Romney and support his bid for President in 2012.

Today I read a great article in National Affairs called "Capitalism After the Crisis." It discusses what is happening to the idea of capitalism after the recent economic crisis, and makes some very important points. One of the most important ideas is that the idea of capitalism is dying today, but not because of it's failures, but instead because we are turning away from capitalism:

When the government is small and relatively weak, the way to make money is to start a successful private-sector business. But the larger the size and scope of government spending, the easier it is to make money by diverting public resources. Starting a business is difficult and involves a lot of risk — but getting a government favor or contract is easier, and a much safer bet. And so in nations with large and powerful governments, the state tends to find itself at the heart of the economic system, even if that system is relatively capitalist. This tends to confound politics and economics, both in practice and in public perceptions: The larger the share of capitalists who acquire their wealth thanks to their political connections, the greater the perception that capitalism is unfair and corrupt.

Under Democratic-control and influence, America is increasingly becoming less a company where your fortunes are defined by what you do, and is increasingly becoming a nation of who you know- who your political connections are, who is giving you grants of taxpayer money, who your parents are, etc. If you have a million dollars now, the best way to turn it into two million is not to work harder and develop a better product- it is to lobby government to have government help protect your product from competition, or to give you a government contract, or to help you in some other way. Our nation is becoming corrupt under Democrats and corruptible Republicans.

Think about what is going on today, especially in the debates regarding healthcare and energy. Supporters of government control of these areas of the economy talk about all the failures of these 'private capitalist systems'- but over the past decades, energy production and healthcare have become amoung the most non-private non-capitalist systems in our economy. The soda-pop market or movie business does not have the same problems as transportation, energy, healthcare, etc- and the difference is not that these problem areas are more capitalist, it is that they are less capitalist.

The problem with healthcare is not not enough government, it is too much government. The problem with energy is not not enough government, it is too much government. The problem with transportation is not not enough government, it is too much government. The problem with education is not not enough government, it is too much government.

The sad thing is, America might have turned the corner towards statism and corruption, and what once made us exceptional may have been lost forever:

Once economic and political systems are built to reward relationships instead of efficiency, it is very difficult to reform them, since the people in power are the ones who would lose most in the change.

One way to possibly make America exceptional again is to remember how we got here. When your children read stories or watch movies, what sort do they read or watch?

The image many Americans have of capitalism is therefore that of Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches-via-hard-work stories, which have come to define the American Dream. By contrast, in most of the rest of the world, Horatio Alger is unknown — and the image of social mobility is dominated by Cinderella or Evita stories: fantasies more than plausible dreams.

Are your children taught to win the government lottery? To win riches by being a professional athlete? To go to Hollywood and star in movies? To marry someone rich? Or are you teaching your children that the way to success in life is hard work and a good attitude? And is our society still reinforcing those teachings by rewarding hard work and a good attitude more so than luck and connections?

Read the whole article- I'm only pulling from a tiny portion of it, but the whole thing is indeed a good read.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution discusses Paul Collier's book,Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places:

The key point of the book is how and why democracy doesn't work so well for the bottom billion. The early discussion of the incentives facing quasi-democratic governments is dysfunctional societies is brilliant. It's the best discussion I've seen of why "produce better government" is not the prevailing incentive in such societies. You can learn why ethnic diversity lowers the value of public sector activity but raises private sector productivity, why skills for construction are often a binding constraint in very poor societies, why the social returns to peacekeeping are so high, why Kalashnikovs are cheaper in Africa, why there are fewer civil wars in larger countries, and how the Ivory Coast went from development model to disaster...[continue reading]

James Stanfield writes in Economic Affairs:

Although education may be important for economic growth, this does not mean that nationalising and centrally planning the whole sector is the best way forward, as this will restrict total investment in education (public and private) and will often result in education being provided which is of a low quality and of the wrong type. Increasing government investment in this type of education is likely to restrict growth by diverting scarce resources away from more productive uses...[continue reading(PDF)]

After this election, it is a time for self-reflection, on both this website and others. Contributing to this self-reflection is Republican Representative Thaddeus McCotter, who today wrote a great article on what it means to be a Republican, via Hot-Air.

“re-branding” — as if the Republican Party was a corporate product to be repackaged, not a transformational political movement to be led. Despite what the media will tell you, and what so-called “conservative leaders” will discuss ad nauseam during “secret” meetings, this situation is not a crisis. It is an opportunity. Today, we are as the Great Emancipator proclaimed during another time of national trial: unbound by the tired dogmas of the past; and free to think and act anew.

First, we must not mindlessly mimic the momentarily triumphant Left. Sleek, detached, media savvy non-entities posing as existentially anguished leaders are neither in our nature nor our future. We are not teeny-bopper, pop-star politicians or the ideological dinosaurs of wealth redistribution.

At heart, we Republicans are flesh and blood and backbone, the proud servants of people. If we re-orient our vision, renew our purpose, and reaffirm our principles, the times will demand us — not as we were, but as we must be!

McCotter goes on to ask and answer several questions. First, what are the Republican Party's principles? McCotter identifies several- here are the major ones- that our liberty is from God not the government, that our security is through strength not surrender, and that our prosperity is from the private sector not the public sector. Second, he asks what are the Republican Party's goals? In his mind, they are to advance liberty, preserve tradition, and achieve constructive solutions to policy issues.

This is not meant to project Republican ideas- this is meant to convince you to change the Republican party to one based on the ideals and beliefs of our founding fathers. This is not meant for you to support Republicans, but to push Republicans to believe in its principles and to push for the right goals.

This post is going to attempt to tie together commentary of FDR, Green Jobs, the Michigan 21st Century Investment Fund, and Jeff Daniels... I hope it makes sense.

As a teacher, I always become annoyed when students repeat the myth that FDR saved us from the Great Depression. It is now such a widely accepted myth that when I voice my doubts, the students think that I must be joking. It is like claiming the world is flat they think- after all, look at all the jobs that FDR created to fight the Great Depression. Look at all the never-done-before government actions, and the massive expansions in federal power that he shoved through during an unprecedented 4 terms in office. Surely he saved us, because after all, massive government action must be good, right?

Wrong. It is a myth that FDR saved us from the Great Depression. Excellent information this can be found in the essay Great Myths of the Great Depression. In fact, FDR's New Deal program was an economic failure that likely stretched a usual downturn in the economy (albeit a bad sharp one) into a depression that the US did not truly emerge from until after FDR was dead. Roosevelt’s formula of substituting government programs for a normal business recovery did not create the high unemployment. FDR's idea of extracting tax dollars from individuals and corporations to fund government programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a bad idea. The WPA hired workers to pick up trash, cut down trees, and build roads, bridges, and schools- but even though the government was 'creating jobs,' in reality they merely transferred jobs from the productive private sector to the inefficient public one. For more yet, see this site.

This myth does not die though. In Michigan, our government has dramatically increased the amount of money that it spends on two 'job creation programs' that are the centerpiece of Granholm's economic recovery program for Michigan. In fact, during her campaign, these two 'job creation programs' featured prominently, and obviously people bought this myth, because she won re-election over a real job creator in Michigan, Republican Dick DeVos. As michiganliberal.com put it "Granholm announced the creation of funding for new companies that will help diversify our economy and keep people and ideas in this state," buying into the myth that the government can tax productive companies and then somehow create jobs with that money.

In reality though, government can not create jobs, it can only force people from productive private sector jobs to inefficient public sector jobs. An article in the Detroit Free Press described how tax dollars in Michigan (where taxes have been steadily been raised) were used by two state programs, the Venture Michigan Fund and the Michigan 21st Century Investment Fund, to try to help bring new jobs to Michigan. These programs were created because Democrat Governor Jennifer Granholm and liberal state lawmakers believed that they could create jobs using the power of the government. The result?

According to the research, Michigan's government spent 116 million dollars and to create 40 new Michigan jobs over the last two years - at the cost of almost $3 million per 'created' job! What's even worse, liberals and government has reached the wrong conclusion- they think that this is a success (the headline of the Free Press article- 'State Venture Capital Funds Start Paying Off'). Thank you to the Michigan Taxpayers Association for staying on top of this one.

So what sent me off on this long rant and prompted me to spend 30 minutes coming up with this post? Those annoying commercials I have to listen to that are narrated by Jeff Daniels! The Michigan Economic Development Corporation has a whole library of video's that they run on TV and the radio that they have put together to tout the myth of government creating jobs. The most annoying of these are the ones that claim that the MEDC is doing great things when it uses massive amounts of taxpayer money to lure environmental companies here, and by doing so somehow creates jobs. Michigan is now fully behind the myth of government job creation- even worse, it is buying in more and more into the more specific myth of green jobs.

John Stossel destroys this myth in his recent article "The Fallacy of Green Jobs." I'm going to pull from it and edit it below:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has a great twofer pitch: "green jobs." It sounds like a winner. Politicians always promise that their programs will create jobs. The fallacy is the same in every case: Even if the program creates jobs building bridges or windmills, it necessarily prevents other jobs from being created. This is because government spending merely diverts money from private projects to government projects.

Governments create no wealth. They only move it around while taking a cut for their trouble. So any jobs created over here come at the expense of jobs that would have been created over there. Pharaohs created thousands of jobs by building pyramids. Our government could create jobs by paying people to dig holes and then fill them up. Would actual wealth be created? Of course not. It would be destroyed. It's like arguing the hurricanes create jobs. After all, the destruction is followed by rebuilding. But does anyone seriously believe that replacing destroyed buildings creates wealth?

Look at Obama's plan- it wholeheartedly buys the myth. If "green jobs" make so much sense, the market will create them. They will be created by private entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who are eager to profit from winning investments. The best ideas will rise to the top, and green energy will gradually replace coal and oil. If politicians were serious about creating jobs and cleaner technologies, they would step aside and let the free market go to work.

The last thing I want to leave you with is the Broken Window Fallacy, as spelled out by French economist Frederic Bastiat. He pointed out that a broken shop window will create work for a glassmaker, but that work comes only at the expense of the cook or tailor the shopkeeper would have patronized if he didn't have to replace the window. Government taxing tax money, cycling it through inefficient bureaucracies and vast overhead, and then trying to build things inefficiently that the market is not does not create jobs- it destroys jobs.

Need proof- during the Great Depression, FDR's unemployment rate hovered around 15%. And in Michigan, under liberal Democrat Granholm's administration and her government-jobs creation program, Michigan has lurched into a one-state recession and had it's unemployment rate climb from 3.7 to 7.2%.

In 1984 Michael A. Samuels stated:

Sustained rapid economic growth doesn’t occur by accident. It is the logical result of a coherent set of polices designed to unleash the creative spirit and enterprise of the people. Few, if any, African countries have yet figured out what those policies are. The number one challenge to the public sector is to devise policies that will free up the private sector. Policies and people, not resources, are the major determinant to growth...[continue reading]

The question becomes,what have we learned in the intervening quarter century?
via African Executive

Related articles by Zemanta

• Africa 'sees benefits of growth'