If Elected (A Fantasy)

By Alan Caruba

I suppose we all wonder what we would do if elected President of the United States. In the run-up to the 2012 elections we will first have the primaries in which the candidates seek the nomination of their party.

It will be easier on Democrats because no one expects Barack Hussein Obama to face any opposition. That’s good news for the Republicans because there hasn’t been a President this incompetent since Jimmy Carter and never one as malevolent.

The Republicans have a surfeit of rather good candidates from which to choose. I do not agree with everything each one says and I have some concerns about some of the positions some have already taken, but the only way to keep the nation from being deliberately destroyed by progressive policies and legislation will be to remove Democrats and RINOs from office.

Twenty-six States have joined in a court case against the implementation of Obamacare and the House of Representatives has voted to repeal it. It was, if you recall, the central focus of Obama’s first two years in office. During those two years unemployment increased and the value of the dollar declined. He didn’t take notice until it came time to run for the office again. Famously, he called them “bumps in the road.”

So, if elected, what would I do? Here’s my fantasy!

I would make shutting down the Environmental Protection Agency a priority. It is a rogue agency that appears to think it is not accountable to Congress or the American people. It is filled with fanatics who have no regard for real science. It is costing the nations jobs and thwarting our energy needs. If I was President there would be no further mention of “global warming” or “climate change.” The climate is always changing; it’s called “the seasons” or “warming and cooling cycles.” There will be no regulation of carbon dioxide. That’s a scam.

I would shut down the Department of Education next. This department has almost single-handedly destroyed education in the nation, depriving all those passing through the government schools of knowledge of the U.S. Constitution and how the nation is governed. It has foisted “fuzzy” math on them. Mostly, though, teachers have been told they are “agents of change” responsible to indoctrinate students with liberal views including the odd notion that they can choose their gender and should be taught homosexual practices.

I would begin to strengthen our defense capability because we are going to need a larger navy, an Air Force with newer fleets of aircraft, and other improvements in an age of digital warfare. At the same time, I would begin to draw down the large numbers of troops still in Afghanistan and Iraq. Let them fight their own terrorists. If Iran continues to make threats, I would light up the skies over military and nuclear facilities in a fashion comparable to the elimination of Osama bin Laden. It would be quick and lethal.

I would install a missile shield in Poland as formerly promised, provide military assistance to Israel and make it known that a threat or an attack on Israel will be regarded as an attack on the U.S.A. We offer this protection to Taiwan, as well as Japan and South Korea.

I would restructure the Department of Homeland Security and put someone serious in charge. Currently it is just a monstrous bureaucracy. Those airport pat-downs would be among the first programs to go.

I will make it known to the Department of Energy that I want more energy, not less. Therefore I want to see permits being issued for exploration and extraction of oil, natural gas, and coal. I like coal-fired plants that generate electricity. I like nuclear power. I like pipelines to ensure we get what we need when we need it.

I would build a tall fence between the United States and Mexico. Even though we are economic partners in many ways, it has long been Mexico’s policy to send its people north so they can take jobs from Americans and send money back to Mexico. That has to stop along with the wholesale invasion of our nation. Illegal aliens would be told they have six months to either apply for naturalization or go home. No more free schooling, hospitals, and welfare.

I would withdraw the U.S. from the United Nations. I would tell the UN to find new headquarters elsewhere. As corrupt as it was under Kofi Annan, it is even worse under Ban Ki-moon, the latest Secretary General.

I would cut the individual and corporate tax rates so people have more of their own money to spend as they wish, save or invest. I would create a commission whose mission is to identify regulations that need to be ended. And, yes, I would restructure Social Security and Medicare so they don’t go broke.

All federal departments and agencies would see their budgets reduced and there would have to be a reduction in force across the boards. The government is simply too big and wastes money like a demented Willy Wonka candy factory. The savings would be plowed back into debt reduction. And, while I was at it, I would put the U.S. back on the gold standard. Right now our dollars are based on nothing but a promise.

I could go on, but I promise I will not take up golf, though I am likely to install a pool table in the West Wing.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The United States of Stupid

By Alan Caruba

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released a report titled “A Nation at Risk” that documented nationwide failure in American schools. Not much has changed since then and the federal takeover of school curriculums and testing methods has mercilessly continued with the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top.

They are the top-down approaches to learning that have played a large part in the continual “dumbing-down” of American education. Once the province of local school boards, innovative schools, and individual teachers, the education of children has been taken over by Big Government.

Making matters worse, amid the confusion of federally mandated education requirements, state legislatures are now straying beyond their traditional roles to tinker with schools in unprecedented ways.

A recent example of this involves two bills making their way through the North Carolina legislature – House Bill 766 and Senate Bill 479 – which focus on testing in that state’s public schools. While the motive behind these identical bills may seem to be to “improve” testing, the bills serve only to further dumb-down education through legislative micromanagement.

In the case of North Carolina, the bills not only order schools to administer a specific college admissions test to all students in the 11th grade—the ACT—it also mandates “diagnostic tests” for students in grades eight and 10 that will “align” with the ACT.

In effect, the North Carolina legislature is using the force of law to compel classroom teachers to teach to the test rather than providing a solid education.

Since there is a long established, respected alternative---the SAT---it further reduces the element of choice for local boards.

It begs the question, when does a legislative body possess the requisite knowledge to decide which test is in the best interest of students and their education? Isn’t that a pedagogic, not legislative, question?

Even the uninitiated could be forgiven for thinking that this legislation was rigged from the outset and reflects the best bill writing that special interest money can buy, but it gets even worse.

The North Carolina proposal requires that “students who do not pass the tests adopted for eighth grade shall be provided remedial instruction in the ninth grade.” Using legislative fiat to push weak students from eighth to ninth grade and expecting them to learn new material when they don’t know the old material is a sure fire recipe for utter failure.

Common sense says that not all students at all ages learn at the same pace. Some learn faster than others. Some students come from lower income brackets, are raised by single parents or even their grandparents, and face other socio-economic factors that lead to greater obstacles and fewer incentives to study.

Rather than face this simple truth and deal with it through an effective, flexible policy, North Carolina lawmakers would let struggling students sink even further behind as they are pushed to the next grade level with a vague promise of remedial teaching.

The real problem with such top-down, one-size-fits-all legislation is that, once passed in one State, it spreads to others and, of course, it has its origins at the federal level. That makes it attractive to lawmakers beyond the Tar Heel State where politicians are juggling shrinking state budgets and teacher layoffs with their need for popular poll numbers and reelection.

Education has become highly politicized, providing opportunities for special interests to inject themselves into policy debate. This deliberate dumbing down of education and students has afflicted the U.S. since the 1960s. It shows no signs of being reformed.

Former Attorney General, Edwin Meese III, said, “We must always evaluate policy proposals in light of principles like rule of law and the logic of our constitutional system. The Education Department’s sponsoring and funding of national curriculum runs counter to both laws of Congress and the wisdom of the Founders.”

The Founders who wrote the Constitution, knowing that the best education was locally determined and directed education, did not even mention the word “education” in that document. If for no other reason than this, the North Carolina legislature should scrap these education proposals and make a fresh start.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Great Education Rip-Off

By Alan Caruba

It has taken a severe recession, combined with rising costs for gas and the weekly grocery list, for Americans to begin to seriously question where their tax dollars are going and why. As individuals, as families, and communities, we can no longer be indifferent or profligate.

The events in Wisconsin where the teacher’s union led to protests against collective bargaining has made many Americans begin to question all those TV ads about what a great job teachers are doing and the reassuring message that it’s all about the kids. No, it’s all about salaries, health benefits, and pensions that far exceed those in the private sector.

A recent Policy Analysis (No. 662) published by the Cato Institute on March 10th and written by Adam Schaeffer is titled “They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools.”

The analysis is based on a review of district budgets and state records for the nation’s five largest metro areas and the District of Columbia. “It reveals that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44% higher than officially reported.” In other words, taxpayers simply had no idea how big a part of their local and state budget the educational system actually represented. That is deceit on a massive scale.

“Real spending per pupil ranged from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23% in the Chicago area to a high of 90% in the Los Angeles metro region. (Emphasis added)

The educational system has been so thorough degraded with political correctness and idiotic “No Child Left Behind” national testing standards that it is little wonder many school systems have massive, unforgivable dropout rates. Black students are routinely put on a fast track to juvenile detention while others are passed through the system to avoid closer scrutiny from the state and federal Department of Education.

And Mr. and Mrs. America are picking up the tab. “Citizens drastically underestimate current per-student spending and are misled by official figures,” says Schaeffer. “Taxpayers cannot make informed decisions about public school funding unless they know how much districts currently spend.”

This is no small concern because state and local officials came up more than $158 billion short of projected tax revenue when they planned their 2010 budgets in the previous year. In response, more than 30 states raised taxes and 43 reduced services. It just got worse, “as the economy deteriorated and tax revenue plummeted more quickly than expected, 39 states discovered additional budget shortfalls of nearly $34 billion.”

Schaeffer noted that “K-12 schooling is the biggest item on state and local budgets. How big? Based on 2005-2006 totals from the national Center for Education Statistics updated to 2009 dollars, state and local governments are spending well over $500 billion on public K-12 education.”

Both the Bush and Obama administrations are responsible for “a startling increase in the federal involvement in and funding of K-12 education, but state and local governments still provide the majority of funds.” That’s YOU.

As shocking as the expenditure of all this money for schools generating students who do not compete academically with those in dozens of other nations is the fact that the statistics being published about the cost of this money pit is always three to four years out of date!

If you were to try to find out what the actual amounts involved were, you could look for timely information on total spending at individual school district budgets and even a skilled analyst like Schaeffer says “The budgets are complex and often confusing.”

“If a district is spending $30,000 per child, surely that is enough to ensure a high-quality education. If the school buildings are nonetheless in disrepair and the kids can’t read, then there is good reason to suspect that a massive share of that money is being wasted.”

Call it the Great Education Rip-Off.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

A Sudden Surfeit of Bullies

By Alan Caruba

Have you noticed how the subject of “school bullies” or “bullying” is suddenly in the news? These things don’t happen spontaneously.

For most of my life I have earned my living in public relations and one learns a few things about the way the public is herded toward certain assumptions and actions when enough money and effort is made to influence their judgment.

In early March, in concert with the White House, the National Education Association, a union, not a benevolent “association” of teachers, released “a new survey on bullying” that found, not surprisingly, that teachers “and education support professions” were in desperate need of “additional training on when and how to intervene in bullying situations.”

If the raucous crowds of teachers and other public sector union members who gathered in Wisconsin’s state house and outside of New Jersey’s in Trenton are any indication, the NEA knows a lot about bullying and hardly needs any instruction on how to deal with it.

“Our members,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, “know that bullying is a significant problem” and, naturally, they need “more training” to deal with it. These are people who presumably passed through four years of college education in order to become teachers and, if the NEA is to be believed, they simply did not receive enough training to deal with school bullies.

This is so absurd one hardly knows how to address it. The NEA produced statistics that “82 percent of school employees report they have witnessed bullying two or more times in the last month.” This does not strike me as an epidemic of bullying.

“98 percent believe it is their job to intervene when they see bullying happening in their school.” Well, duh! What are they being paid for?

Unless I am just too old or too terribly out of touch, bullying has been going on since the days of the one-room schoolhouse. The delicate psyches of school children, whether they are the bullies or the bullied, manage to survive. At one time or another, the masses of children condemned to government schools have all had to deal with this.

Why is this bullying issue being ginned up? In an age of the Internet with its FaceBook, MySpace, and YouTube ability to turn any bullying incident into a worldwide event, we are simply more aware of them. We are aware, too, that some few children whose parents were unaware or inattentive commit suicide.

Many children are the typical targets of bullies, male and female, because they are having gender identification problems, are fat, are white, are black, are not on any sports teams, are serious students getting good grades, or are simply available to be bullied. Surely every school has its cliché of bullies.

Blogger Hans Bader recently took note of the fact that the Obama administration sent a letter to school officials “that undermines both free speech and due process.” Bader noted that “a political appointee in the Education Department sent a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter to the nation’s school boards claiming that many forms of homophobia and bullying violate federal laws against sexual harassment and discrimination, but those laws only ban discrimination based on sex or race—not bullying in general.”

“The letter from the Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights, Russlyn Ali, defined ‘harassment’ so broadly,” noted Bader, “as to reach both speech protected by the First Amendment, and conduct the Supreme Court says does not legally qualify as harassment.”

Why is the White House and the Department of Education reaching all the way down into your local school is push for greater acceptance of homosexuality in particular and government intervention in general for an element of school life as old as education in America?

Is there any parent or citizen that is not aware of how poor the quality of education is in America these days? Is there anyone who has passed through grades K-thru-12 who doesn’t understand that bullying has always been a problem; that teachers and school administrators routinely intervene to deal with individual cases? That no “additional training” is required for this?

In a new book coming in May, “Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse”, author Annette Fuentes makes a case for the way too many schools treat students as potential jailbirds, requiring them to pass through metal detectors, and be subject to intrusive searchers, or suspended for alleged infractions of idiotic “zero tolerance” policies.

Following the Columbine High School tragedy, Fuentes noted that the “public’s perception of school violence and youth behavior was seriously out of whack with reality,” adding that “Failing schools breed failing students and place them at risk of falling into the juvenile justice system, especially as policing and the practices of that system increasingly make their way into the schoolhouse.”

How crazy is it when a five-year-old is arrested for bringing a butter knife to school or a teenage girl is suspended for bringing Midol for her menstrual cramps? Why are six-year-old strip-searched in a classroom when a few dollars goes missing from the teacher’s desk? These incidents are too often a part of school life for today’s students trying to learn anything in a hostile environment.

“Hysteria, not clear-eyed analysis, has colored the public’s understanding and, regrettably, tainted media coverage of school violence,” writes Fuentes. “The climate of fear has created ripe conditions for imposing unprecedented restrictions on young people’s rights, dignity, and educational freedoms.”

So, it follows naturally that the NEA and the White House are busy of late creating a campaign that will underwrite the wasting of millions on “additional training” to deal with an overheated and deliberate campaign to make Americans think that schools are rife with bullying when it is nothing more than one of the most common problems when masses of young people are “educated” in schools that more closely resemble minimum security prisons than places of learning.

© Alan Caruba

Making Too Many Americans Stupid

By Alan Caruba

We’ve all encountered them. The people manning the check out line in the supermarket, the fast-food restaurant, all the way up the line to those in management who can’t even manage themselves let alone anyone else. They are an entire class of Americans, the irretrievably stupid ones or, to be kind, the ones whose ignorance began early and never improved.

Let it be said there are a lot of very smart Americans and I am not talking about the PhDs, but the ones who chose to become engineers, architects, physicians, and other endeavors that require serious study that never really ends. There are others in the arts and literature. You know who you are.

America’s problem is America’s schools.

Naturally, we all look for someone or some system to blame for a large slice of the population that does not measure up.

As someone who passed through elementary, middle and high school in the 1940s and 50s, I continually hear from others of my generation who praise a merciful God for the education they received when they compare it with their grandchildren’s lack of the most basic skills, reading, writing and arithmetic.

I read The Wall Street Journal every day because it is quite likely the only newspaper left in America that is not written and edited by chimpanzees.

In the March 15 edition, in the Greater New York section, there was an article, “Student’s English Misses the Mark” by Barbara Martinez. “More than a third of New York City students who entered first grade in 2003 identified as English language learners couldn’t pass an English-language proficiency test last year when they were in the seventh grade, according to Department of Education data.”

Let me share a family story. My father was born in 1901 to two Italian immigrants, both of whom knew they could not speak English well enough to teach it to their son. They also knew he would learn it when he went to school. Once there, the teacher sat him beside a bilingual student and, rather swiftly, my father acquired fluency without any special tutoring or multi-million dollar program. In time, he would put himself through college, working during the day and attending NYU at night. He would become the youngest Italian-American to pass the CPA exam in New Jersey.

“Of New York City’s 1.1 million school children, 153,338 or 14% are classified as English language learners. The Department of Education spent more than $250 million on extra instruction for them in 2009. About 20% of students have come to the U.S. in the past two years, but nearly 70% who have received six years or more of services were born here.”

Are these children all stupid? Are they all retards? No! What’s stupid is the educational system that cannot do for them what my father was able to do without any help other than another student his own age!

I have been thinking about education in America while reading a book that is both entertaining because of its felicitous writing and depressing because of what the author imparts. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accident Academic” by Professor X ($25.95, Viking) is a look into the bowels of probably every community college in America and probably quite a few four-year universities.

“Fully 50% of community college students drop out before their second year and only 25% manage to finish the two-year program in three years.” Let that soak in. Of those that made it through four years, 66% left with considerable debt, the top 10% owing $44,500 or more; 50% owing at least $20,000.

Too often, these schools of so-called higher education are just money-mills producing debt-ridden human sausage.

What Professor X discovered upon becoming an adjunct, a position filled by people like himself with a Master’s in English Literature who needed an additional source of income to pay the mortgage and other bills, was this: “College is difficult even for highly motivated students who know how to write papers and study for exams, My students had no such abilities. They lack rudimentary study skills; in some cases they are not even functionally literate.”

How does anyone pass through twelve years of schooling and still remain illiterate, unable to read or write English so poorly that it would allow them to perform only the most unskilled job available?

By 2004, there were nearly 17.5 million students enrolled in colleges of every description. “Everybody goes to college now, though not everybody graduates”, says Professor X. “No one is thinking about the larger implications, or even the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass.”

Why were Professor X’s students filling the seats in the classroom? A lot were there because many jobs these days require an associate degree as the ticket to employment. “We have a vague feeling that the world would run more smoothly, more efficiently, more professionally if every worker had some college under his or her belt.”

The bottom line is that America’s schools have been failing one generation after another since around the 1960s when the teacher’s union got a firm grip on local schools and on the U.S. Department of Education.

Those students were not necessarily less eager or less equipped to learn, but our schools more often resemble minimum security prisons and are burdened with so much political correctness that the joy of learning has been squeezed out of them.

The schools are making too many potentially smart people stupid.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Our Schools, Dumb and Dumber

By Alan Caruba

As the nation’s children return to elementary and secondary schools, it is increasingly essential that their parents and communities coast to coast realize how poorly served they are and how their learning environment is increasingly tainted by a socialist agenda.

Our nation’s schools have long been factories of boredom, centers of academic incompetence. High school graduation rates have been in a fairly steady decline. At its peak in 1969, the rate was 77 percent. By 2007 it was 68.8 percent.

In mid-August, The Wall Street Journal reported that “New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S. high school students in the last few years.”

What caught my eye was a quote from Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, who said that “if our kids aren’t dropping out physically, they are dropping out mentally.”

The subject of education is important because they are the generation to which the future of the nation must be entrusted and “A recent study found the U.S. ranks only 12th in the percentage of adults aged 25 to 34 who hold college degrees.”

The failure of our nation’s schools, to my mind, coincides with the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, and which began operating on May 16, 1980.

The word “education” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution and, until the Department of Education came along, it was the responsibility of States and local communities. A government that has managed Conrail since 1976 without once making a profit should not have been trusted with the nation’s educational system.

I opposed No Child Left Behind when former President Bush proposed it and, like former President Reagan, I have long believed the Department of Education should be ended and that responsibility be returned to the States and local communities. The DOE exists today as little more than an obstacle to learning in the classroom and a giant funding machine.

The DOE is pretty much owned by the National Education Association which is not an “association”, but a powerful union, the largest with an estimated 3.2 members. The Democrat Party is heavily indebted to it for funds and campaign workers.

It is doubtful that most Americans know that, for the past several months, the NEA’s website has recommended that its members read “Rules for Radicals” by the late Saul Alinsky, a dedicated communist. If NEA members adopt its political agenda, the enemy will literally be in our nation’s classrooms.

It has not gone unnoticed that Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”, otherwise known as the “Stimulus Act” enabled the education lobby to suck up billions more from taxpayers.

The Act allocated $5 billion to early learning programs, including the failed Head Start and Early Head Start, child care and programs for children with special needs. It also allocated $77 billion for “reforms” to allegedly strengthen elementary and secondary education, including $48.6 billion to “stabilize” state education budgets. It was a Full Employment Act for teachers and school administrators.

Apparently those billions were not enough because on August 11, President Obama signed a bill authorizing an additional $10 billion to states for education salaries. The Senate was so concerned the money might be spent for other purposes it included a provision that the money could not be used for anything else.

It apparently was not enough because in July the NEA president, Dennis Van Roekel, was calling for a complete overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act, one that is entirely test-based without any notice of the fact that individual children learn at different rates. He didn’t much like the Obama Race to the Top program where schools competed for grants if they demonstrated any improvement in learning and graduation rates. Another $3.4 billion in grants is at yet unspent. Roekel didn’t like the idea of competition.

Clearly, schools that are graduating students ill-prepared to go onto college and that continue to experience high dropout rates are doing something wrong. Putting kids into teach-to-the-test straight jackets is not working.

In a new book by Dr. Tim Elmore, “Generation iY: Our Last Change to Save Their Future”, the author who founded a non-profit organization, Growing Leaders, writes that “I have spoken to employers who told me they will never hire another new graduate. I have heard teachers say they can hardly wait for retirement since they can’t do a thing about kids today. I’ve had parents confide in me that they don’t know what to do with their kids except scream at them.”

Statistics published by UNESCO and the CIA reveal that, while American students spend twelve years in school, ranking them first out of a hundred, they rank fifteenth out of twenty-seven in terms of literacy. Their math and science scores are poor. They poll at 35%, fifth out of seventeen, for their dislike of school, and 61%, second out of seventeen, find school boring.

The schools are failing, the students are being cheated of the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to become productive adults, and the U.S. government thinks that, if it just spends a few more billions, this will change. It won’t.

The federal government must get out of the education business, must devolve responsibility back to the states and local communities, and they in turn should refuse to deal with teachers unions in order to regain control over the education of the nation’s most precious resource, its children.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Illiterates Vote Too

Living Through History

By Alan Caruba

We live our lives one day at a time and, at best, understand them only in hindsight. The chief advantage of old age is the ability to look back and, hopefully, to draw some lessons from the history through which we have lived.

My chief regret is that so many among the generations coming up behind me have so little real knowledge of America’s or the world’s history, be it recent or long past. Indeed, history books in our nation’s classrooms have become a battleground between competing ideologies because those who determine what history is taught will shape what history is to come.

The destruction of our education system since the 1960s is not an accident. It has been deliberate.

I have lived through seven decades of history. Born in 1937 in the midst of the Great Depression, I have lived to see a comparable Depression.

Anyone who persists in calling our present economic crisis a Recession is whistling passed the graveyard. You cannot have as many unemployed people as we do today, owe as much as we do to foreign central banks, and continue to spend as senselessly as the federal government, and not call this a Depression.

The main difference, as I see it, is that while Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisors were sincerely, but ineptly, trying to turn the economy around, the Obama administration sees it as an opportunity to totally destroy the nation by bankrupting it, by refusing to seal off its southern border from an invasion of illegal aliens, by imposing a healthcare act that nationalized one sixth of the economy, and via other comparable abuses.

I have been thinking about the seven decades of my life because I have been reading about them in an excellent book, “American Dreams: The United States Since 1945” by H. W. Brands ($32.95, Penguin Press).

What struck me most forcefully and personally was the fact that I was so utterly clueless throughout much of my early years, despite having graduated from university, served in the U.S. Army, and been a working journalist until I approached my thirties. Even then, jobs with the New York Housing Finance Agency, followed by a stint with the New Jersey Institute of Technology, did not connect me with the events swirling around me.

It was not that I was unaware of events. My childhood coincided with the Cold War that had shaped national policy under Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. I graduated university the same year Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959 and I finished out my Army service waiting for the outcome the Cuban missile crisis, grateful that it passed like a quick storm. The only thing I knew with certainty was that Communism was evil.

My politics were not particularly nuanced. My parents were Democrats and liberals. I followed suit because I knew no better. To their credit, they both began to have doubts with the advent of the Vietnam War and the Great Society spending. They had, however, benefited from the tremendous prosperity that followed the end of WWII, owned their home, had happily purchased all the new appliances that enhanced everyone’s lives, and raised my older brother and me in comfort.

I, along with other Americans, had seen the nation put a man on the Moon, had seen the enormous productivity of our manufacturing sector and assumed it could not end. It not only could end, it began to end as globalization undermined domestic growth. America has increasingly become a service industry economy, one dependent on easy credit, and an ever-expanding federal government.

I was into my 40s by the 1980s and only beginning to connect the dots of the history happening in the nation and the world. By then I was enjoying a career in public relations that took me all over the nation and introduced me to a wide variety of people in business, industry, and agriculture. Until then I had not realized the enormous inhibiting effect the federal government had on the economy through its intensive, expanding regulatory powers.

The environmental movement had gained momentum by then and in time it would determine how much water a toilet could use, how many miles per gallon autos must provide, and the soon to be enforced edict that literally bans the incandescent light bulb! Significantly, the Greens have seen to it that more and more of the nation’s vast sources of energy were put off limits.

The era of Ronald Reagan transformed my thinking. I became a Republican. Others did too, but it was the Clinton years in the 1990s that confirmed my distaste for the Democrat Party. When the GOP regained control of Congress in 1994, Clinton was smart enough to adopt much of the legislation they proposed and take credit for it.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by the most transformative event since WWII. September 11, 2001 and the subsequent military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq flowed from that Islamic treachery. I suspect that history will judge George W. Bush less harshly than his peers. The financial crisis in 2008 plunged the nation into a downward economic spiral that brings us to today. The election of Barack Obama has only served to exacerbate it.

The Internet loosened the grip of the “mainstream” news media as Americans with access to information as no previous generation, discovered they had been betrayed for decades by the liberal “spin” the news included. The advent of talk radio was a revelation for many.

At a time when what is most needed is serious investigative journalism regarding a virtually fictitious President, Americans must depend heavily on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to inform them of the damage being inflicted on the nation.

You cannot be, as I was, indifferent to who is in public office, intent only on your personal life as if some mysterious force will intervene to make things turn out right.

There is nothing mysterious about “the consent of the governed.”

There is nothing mysterious about the ability of Americans to put things on the right path again. The American Dream can be made to work if we elect the right people to represent us and begin to shrink the federal government. That is the lesson I have drawn from my years and one I hope to see reignited in the years to come.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Oh, Happy Graduate!

By Alan Caruba

Life was much simpler for a young man graduating in the late 1950s. If he was classified 1-A in the Draft, he could look forward to two years in the military before even contemplating a career.

I had acquired a head full of Arts and Sciences mush over four wonderful years at the University of Miami (FL). It was still a comparatively young institution at the time and, if you had a pulse, you were guaranteed acceptance. There were lots of palm trees, dinner dances, a colorful collection of faculty, and even classes to attend if you were actually inclined to learn anything.

I noticed that almost nothing I had learned had any application to the real world beyond the edges of the campus. The U.S. Army did not care. They found in me a splendid specimen of young manhood they could fashion into a fearsome warrior. But first I had to learn how to make my bed, fold my t-shirts, march, and, best of all, to shoot an M-1, handheld, gas-operated, clip-fed, semi-automatic rifle.

It never crossed my mind that I might actually have to go to war somewhere and, lucky me, I never did. My departure from the U.S. Army was delayed by an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between President Kennedy and Russian Premier Nikita Krushchev over some missiles in Cuba. As soon as they were removed I was informed I could go home.

My first job was with a human relations organization that sent me back to my beloved Miami, but by the time Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, I concluded that I had no interest in such matters. Returning home I was fortunate enough to be employed by a weekly newspaper, whereupon my real education began.

Suffice to say that jobs were plentiful in the 1960s. The nation was going to send a man to the Moon, the music was great, few had even heard of Vietnam until Lyndon B. Johnson decided to ratchet up a full-blown war there. He was also busy with a “War on Poverty” that did nothing to relieve poverty, but put a lot of lazy people on the dole, ensuring Democrat votes. That’s how it was done then. That’s how it’s done now.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be a twenty-year-old graduating from a college or university these days. They are emerging into the Great Recession and the job scene is grim.

According to a recent ABC News report, “The unemployment rate among young Americans, age 16 to 24, now stands at 18.9 percent. And while that number includes workers with only high school diplomas—-who have a hard time finding work even in good times-—there’s no getting around the mountainous challenge it represents.”

CNN Money.com reports that “This year has been extremely rough. New college graduates had forty percent fewer job prospects, a new report shows. And the outlook for 2010, while better, is still not promising.”

This is reporter-talk for ‘I have no idea what I am writing about and thank heavens for anonymous reports!’ He dutifully noted that, “Overall, hiring of grads with any degree will decline by two percent, compared to 2009.” Blah, blah, blah.

Truth be told, those with accounting, business administration, management or—-better yet—-computer-related and engineering degrees, are going to be in a stronger position to grab that first job. If you’ve graduated with a degree in statistics, you are golden!

The word on the street is that, if the newly minted graduate has had any kind of working experience, he or she is one up on those who have none. Employers are also seeking good communication and writing skills. The theory, it seems, is that you pretty much can be trained to do anything.

Also expect to be rejected. A lot! Be wary, too, of internships. Remember, everyone else in the office is getting PAID. If you get offered a JOB, take it. A better one is probably not waiting despite your extraordinary resume or unless you graduated summa cum laude.

No doubt recent graduates will get gobs of advice on how to dress, what to say, and how to make a good first impression. They’re not hiring your attire. Employers want to know you really, really, really want to work hard for them!

Lastly, start reading The Wall Street Journal and watching Fox Business News or some comparable business channel. Soon enough you will begin to connect the dots.

You may even figure out that the great leaders of our nation and the world haven’t a clue what they are doing, are in charge of hopelessly bloated engines of government, and are reluctant to get out of the way so that people who actually work for a living can get the economy going again.

That’s why so many nations are broke. That’s why there’s a Great Recession.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Environmental Mush: An Ethical Abyss

By Alan Caruba

Parents are often appalled to discover that their children’s school books are full of misinformation or have an agenda that has little to do with the supposed subject. The rise and the maintenance of the Green movement have a great deal to do with the infiltration of school systems and textbooks with often deliberately misleading information. Many Green programs are aimed at the youth here and around the world.

A few days ago I received a news release from an organization calling itself 350.org announcing the launch of “Great Power Race, a clean energy competition between America, China and India. This web 2.0 race will reveal who can rise to the challenge of the climate crisis with the most, and the most creative, clean energy action.”

I wrote to the person identified as having sent the email and asked her to identify the “climate crisis” noting that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for a decade or longer. I asked what any of the students do about this alleged crisis.

The response was that “The Great Power Race gives students in China, India, and America the opportunity to use social media to compete, communicate and collaborate on clean energy actions and projects. Campuses will each come up with their own clean energy project like, for example, light bulb exchanges, lowering thermostats, education events, installing solar panels on campus, and more.”

This is just environmental mush. It is an invitation to engage in meaningless activity and, of course, the “climate crisis” mentioned in the news release is not even mentioned.

That should come as no surprise to anyone who must read the daily flow of news releases from environmental organizations and subsets like 350.org. Much of it is devoted to stopping any form of traditional energy, coal, natural gas, or oil from ever being used for any reason. In effect, it is a campaign against electricity and against transportation.

It is not just absurd, but it is insane.

So I wrote back again. “Why should I ask more questions when you didn’t answer the one’s I asked? Your release refers to a ‘climate crisis’ and you did not tell me what that crisis is.” I then asked whether the respondent seriously thought that changing light bulbs would have any direct affect on the climate.

The response was “I’d like to think that a little action goes a long way. You’re right though…my small actions of installing solar panels on my home and getting fresh produce from a co-op garden to help avoid pesticides in my food will not have a direct impact on the climate, but it will directly impact my well being, health, and quality of life.”

“So, why are we positioning the race under the ‘climate crisis’ umbrella? It’s an urgent call to action.”

The Climate Race has, in fact, nothing to do with the climate. And, apparently, there really isn’t a climate crisis unless you believe that 350-parts-per-million of carbon dioxide (CO2) will reduce an urgent threat to life on Earth. It relies on a fraudulent “climate crisis” to further the use of the two worst forms of energy production, solar and wind.

Green propaganda is an ethical abyss.

Ultimately, my respondent admitted that “the biggest political and economic task we’ve ever faced (is) weaning ourselves from coal, gas, and oil.”

I doubt that my respondent can even conceive of a world that could function without coal, gas or oil. That’s not just naïve; it is stupid and dangerous to a future where energy is essential to improving the lives of billions, particularly in China and India.

Reducing CO2, the supposed reason for 350.org, is also the reason being offered to impose Cap-and-Trade legislation. It would drive up the cost of electricity to manufacturing facilities, to small businesses, to homeowners, and to everyone.

It would have zero effect on the climate.

This is the kind of fuzzy, feel-good, fact-less, anti-energy, anti-development, anti-capitalism philosophy that dominates environmentalism. Its appeal is to people too young to have any idea where the power for their computer comes from.

Its use of a non-existent “climate crisis” is precisely the same that has maintained the United Nations climate control hoax for decades. It’s the reason President Obama went to COP 15 in Copenhagen last December. It’s the reason that the EPA is threatening to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.

The truth, least of all scientific truth, means nothing to the Greens.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Prelutsky on Education

"Those who shower the most praise on our public education system are those least likely to ever expose their own kids to it. I refer to the pinheads who hold public office. In fact, the only time a president or first lady ever wanders into a public school in Washington, D.C., is for an election year photo op, after having made certain that their Secret Service detail is operating at full strength that day. It’s not a school system, it’s a penal colony with report cards."

Burt Prelutsky, blogger, humorist, author, and conservative, though not necessarily in that order

The Federal Choke-hold on Education

By Alan Caruba

I couldn’t have known it at the time, but my generation that attended schools in the 1950s would be among the last to get an education that the federal government hadn’t dictated or the United Nations had not infiltrated.

The education I received was intended to be primarily a function of local communities with oversight by the states. I often remind people that the word “education” does not appear in the Constitution as a function of the federal government because it was always a local responsibility.

As the school systems, especially in the urban centers of the nation, began to grow in size, various social reformers saw the schools as the perfect place to indoctrinate students. Compulsory schooling ensured that masses of young people would be imprisoned in classrooms for the purpose of turning them into productive citizens. The result was and is masses of bored young people.

Many of the innovations and inventions we take for granted were the result of people who did not attend or do well in school. Thomas Edison was sent home because he asked too many questions! He was home schooled after that and the result was countless inventions including the iconic electric light bulb.

The government has decreed that Edison’s incandescent bulb cannot be purchased in the near future in the interest of energy conservation as opposed to actually allowing more power generation plants, coal-fired and nuclear, to be being built to meet the nation’s needs.

If there is an idiotic “solution” to a non-problem, the government will find a way to make it mandatory.

One of the many bad ideas of the Carter administration was the creation of the U.S. Department of Education on October 17, 1979. Carter was and is a dolt. He installed solar panels on the roof of the White House which, when Ronald Reagan took office, were swiftly removed.

Let me be as blunt as I can. There is no need, nor ever was, for a federal Department of Education except as an instrument of the central government to control the curriculum of schools. This one-size-fits-all approach is totally contrary to what any teacher will tell you; children learn at different rates and each needs to have their particular skills and abilities encouraged.

Nat Hentoff, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, recently wrote of “Real Education Reform” in Free Inquiry magazine. He recalled being in the office of Tony Alverado, then head of the New York City school system (1987-1998), when the reading scores from standardized tests arrived. They were collectively higher, but Alverado asked, “When are we going to teach them how to think by themselves instead of just giving us just what the tests want?”

Almost any educator today would ask the same question. One of George W. Bush’s greatest blunders was the implementation of No Child Left Behind, a pet project of the late Sen. Teddy Kennedy. The present Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan is quoted by Hentoff calling NCLB “not education, since it is tied to bad tests with the wrong goal. The biggest problem is that it doesn’t encourage high learning standards.”

Why then is NCLB allowed to continue? The answer is federal control.

Karen R. Effrem, MD, the EdWatch Director of Government Relations, has sounded the alarm over a slick deal involving more good money thrown down the federal education rat hole. “Without the slightest bit of legislative discussion in either chamber, the Obama administration quietly slipped $4.35 billion in education funding into the stimulus bill passed last year for a program called Race to the Top (RTTT).

“The federal government is using this program to bribe states to accept even more federal control of education, a constitutionally and traditionally state function.”

“RTTT is accomplishing more of that same federal control without having to go through the messy process of reauthorizing the controversial NCLB.”

Hidden within the stimulus bill, RTTT has NOTHING to do with stimulating jobs or the economy in any way, but it does require states to accept the Common Core Standards Initiative. Thus initiative is funded and promoted by the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Proudly they note that it is “internationally benchmarked.”

As of mid-January, 41 cash-strapped states have signed on to this monstrosity and the result is that American school children will be taught a curriculum largely devoid of traditional American values such as the God-given rights of life, liberty and property in favor of UNESCO’s Baccalaureate Organization program.

In short, American children will be taught that the only rights they have are those the United Nations says they have. Its Earth Charter states that “sustainability education” advocates “the promotion of equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations.”

Now, let me see, who is it that believes in the distribution of wealth? Barack Obama!

The federal government is not concerned with the education of American children. It is deep into indoctrination, i.e., the victimization of American children. And it just cost the American taxpayers another $4.35 billion!

2010's Top Anxieties

The National Anxiety Center Lists Top Ten Fears

Founded in 1990, The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy, has periodically issued a list of the top anxieties Americans will experience in the coming year.

“The list,” says founder Alan Caruba, “is subjective; based on an analysis of the past year’s headlines and anticipated events. It incorporates on-going, often long term concerns that Americans have expressed.”

1. Out of Control Government Spending. It is evident to everyone except the White House and Congress that America cannot spend its way out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, but both have embraced programs that will increase the level of taxation facing Americans, while engaging in “stimulus” programs that only stimulate more anxiety. The lack of job creation in the private sector will be the major anxiety Americans encounter in 2010.

2. Iran. It is evident to Americans and the world that Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons that can be used in a missile attack on Israel and which can reach Europe and other nations throughout the Middle East. The only option available is an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and there is considerable anxiety regarding its timing and outcome.

3. Afghanistan War. Eight years after the initial effort to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban, Americans are war weary and increasingly wondering about the benefit of further involvement, its costs, and the possibility that leaving would embolden Islamist enemies there, in Iraq, and worldwide. The Middle East remains a powder keg of instability.

4. The Economy. There is anxiety concerning how long it will take for the American economy to recover from the housing and credit bubble created by Congressional programs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. No steps have been taken to eliminate these programs and, indeed, other federal programs have been introduced to assist imprudent mortgage holders already in default.

5. Inflation. The raising of the nation’s debt limit, the printing of vast amounts of paper currency by the Federal Reserve, and other comparable actions portend an inflation of prices and a possible default. Moody’s Investor Service has warned both the U.S. and British governments they are in peril of losing their triple-A ratings.

6. Medicare. Medicare, like Social Security, will be insolvent within a few years and Americans of all ages are worried, not only about solutions to this prospect, but about proposals to vastly expand Medicare at the most inopportune time.

7. Illegal Immigration and Amnesty. The drain on the nation’s economy and problems associated with illegal immigration, now estimated to number more than 12 million, as well as yet recently proposed amnesty program continue to worry Americans.

8. Education. The continued failure of the nation’s school systems to meet international standards of scholastic achievement has resulted in the decline in the ability of American’s children’s to acquire basic skills and the knowledge required to compete in a global economy.

9. Diet and Health. The growing number of overweight and obese Americans is a personal and national concern for the overall health of everyone struggling with weight problems and their potential for diabetes and other diseases.

10. American Culture. The increasing vulgarity found in films, on television, in music, fashion, and other elements of American culture remains a concern for many, particularly as it affects the younger generation.

“The good news is that more Americans are no longer concerned about global warming and carbon dioxide as they become aware that the claims justifying these fears are based on deliberately falsified computer models and the fact that the nation and the planet are now a decade into a natural cooling cycle,” says Caruba.

“2010, the end of the first decade of the 21st century, is likely to be seen in retrospect as a tipping point that will determine either a return to traditional standards of fiscal prudence,” says Caruba, “or will plunge the nation and the world into a Depression of cataclysmic proportions.”

The National Anxiety Center maintains a website at www.anxietycenter.com. Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com.

Wrecking America

By Alan Caruba

I am always wary of conspiracy theories. Most can be explained away as shared ideologies which, in the case of the current and recently past Congresses and White Houses, can be described as socialism. It did not and does not matter which Party was or is in power.

The other explanation for the national car wreck we’re in is just plain “stupidity.” Another way of describing this is “willful ignorance.” Both apply when the President, Senators or Representatives say things that have no basis in fact either historically or empirically.

We all know, for example, that it is getting colder no matter where we live, but the President has been lying about “global warming” and “greenhouse gas emissions” for some time now.

Similarly, Congress, going back to 1979 or so, has been doing everything in its capacity to thwart access to the tremendous reserves of energy in America, thus forcing Americans to pay more for imported oil and to subsidize the worst possible way to generate electricity, wind and solar power.

It has banned the manufacture or import of incandescent light bulbs starting in 2010.

It determines how much water can be used to flush your toilet.

It determines the content of every gallon of gasoline, requiring that ethanol be a component even though ethanol ensures less mileage and more carbon dioxide emissions from the tailpipe. It also drives up the cost of all foods made from corn or the livestock to which it is fed.

What kind of nation fails the most essential element of a modern society, the maintenance of its infrastructure? America’s roads, bridges, ports and other elements of infrastructure are sorely in need of repair or replacement. It’s not happening along with the failure to build a single new nuclear plant, nor refinery in three decades.

Meanwhile, following a Bush “stimulus” effort and an Obama “stimulus” bill, the economy remains mired in the doldrums. Unemployment has risen above 10%, the worst since 1983. Things like this don’t happen without a cause and, as Ronald Reagan used to say, “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.”

In a similar fashion, during a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace, the author Ayn Rand said, “A free economy will not break down. All depressions are caused by government interference and the cure that is always offered…is more of the same poisons that caused the disasters.”

Rand was referring to the Great Depression, an economic disaster made infinitely worse and longer by all the government prescriptions applied by both President Hoover and, in particular, President Franklyn D. Roosevelt. It is now understood that FDR and his economic advisors literally stretched out the Great Depression to ten year’s duration by choking off the free flow of capital and trade.

There is an interesting comparison between FDR and President Obama. Neither had any experience in the world of business and commerce. Neither ever ran a business or met a payroll. A political campaign is not a business enterprise. It is a short-term fund raising effort. It produces nothing except a candidate who either wins or loses. Obama’s economic advisors have been prescribing the same awful “remedies” as FDR’s.

The present dilemma is that Obama is an ideologue, a “red diaper” baby raised on the socialist belief in the “redistribution of wealth” which essentially means taking money from productive wage earners and investors, and giving it to “the poor.” The problem with that is that there has always been about 14% of the population that have been and will be poor. Giving them other people’s money does not make them less poor; only more dependent on government.

This transfer of wealth in exchange for getting their vote comes with no guarantees. The large percentage of Blacks who voted for Obama in 2008 did not bother to return to the polls in this year’s elections. Neither did the worshipful youth who helped elect him by a slim seven points.

As for those youth and everyone else who has passed through the U.S. education system since the 1960s, the bad news is that you received some of the worst education available in any nation on Earth. That’s why you don’t understand much about what is happening in your life or in the world around you. The curriculum has been dumbed down to ensure your ignorance of things graduates in 1950 understood even if you do not.

The good news is the swift plunge in Obama’s popularity among all voters. He has proved himself to be spectacularly ill-prepared for the presidency on the basis of its ideology, his experience, and his judgment. One almost expects him to show up on “Dancing with the Stars” any day.

So what or who is wrecking America? A lot of very stupid people.

Only a Congress that openly admits it does not read the bills put before it votes on them could be so indifferent to the public will or the public good.

Two bills will wreck the economy beyond recognition. There is no public support for either healthcare reform or the energy cap-and-trade bill. Yet both are the keystone legislative goals of the White House.

Beyond stupidity, there is ideology.

The environmental movement, a quasi-religious cult, is fighting every form of energy production except solar or wind. It is engaged in a war on private property. It regards all chemicals as poisons despite the fact that the human body is a virtual chemical processing factory. It is the megaphone for “global warming”, the largest hoax—other than Communism—in modern history.

It’s just too easy to beat up the news and entertainment media, particularly the latter. What passes for entertainment is too stupid, too childish, and too vulgar for words. As for news, Americans are increasingly finding their own sources on the Internet and/or relying on sources such as The Wall Street Journal and others they trust.

So, if you are looking around for an answer to what or who is wrecking America, just keep looking around you. It’s Congress. It’s the White House. It’s people who believe the Democrat Party cares what they think. It’s people who think Islam is a religion of peace. It’s people who follow news of “celebrities.” It’s Nancy Pelosi. It’s Harry Reid. It’s Barney Frank. It’s Barack Hussein Obama.

Here Comes the President. Hide the Kids!

By Alan Caruba

So the President wants to get the school year off with a speech to all the kids from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Under normal circumstances, this would not arouse my comment although it must be said that I do not recall any previous president doing this.

I do not recall schools announcing they would not let the President’s speech be heard by the children in their care and, most certainly, I do not recall parents saying they would rather keep their children home than have them exposed to the President’s message.

I am not aware of what that message would be. There has been speculation that President Obama just wants to encourage children to stay in school, study hard, and listen to their teachers.

The real message, however, is more subtle than that and people don’t like it. They don’t like the way, in the midst of a major recession, the President began his term in office by flying off to foreign lands, apologizing for America in one fashion or another, and saying strange things like America was not a Christian nation.

Americans are not keen on the imposition of more than thirty “czars”, on top of the existing structure of the executive wing where, until now, the secretaries of various departments were understood to be in charge. And, worse, it turns out that one of those czars, Van Jones, is a communist and former community organizer.

No, Obama’s message is the same one that all wannabe dictators seek to inculcate into the youth of the nation. It is the message that Hugo Chavez is imposing on Venezuela’s school system, magnifying himself into a god-like status. It’s the message that two generations in Cuba grew up with after Fidel took over in 1959.

These days we call it a “cult of personality” and we know it when we see it. Americans have begun to conclude they have already see far too much of Barack Obama. He has held more primetime press conferences in the first months of his term than George W. Bush had in his eight years in office.

This constant exposure goes well beyond the normal attention paid the President which, in itself, is a daily exercise of tea-leaf reading. This constant exposure is deliberate and, while rarely revealing anything specific, is intended to remind everyone that Barack Obama is President.

Now he wants to reach into the nation’s schoolrooms with that message. He wants school children to know that they should turn to him because he occupies the highest office in the land.

This process began during the 2008 campaign when Obama was lightly mocked as “the One” or “the Messiah” for the way his handlers presented him to the world. No one is laughing any more.

He needs a youth corps that looks to him, not their parents or mentors for direction. Chairman Mao had his Red Guards and, of course, there were the famed Hitler Youth. None of this is the stuff of fiction. It was real.

That’s why some schools are saying no and some parents will keep their children home when he speaks.

This President is building a shadow government inside the White House, chosen appointees who will answer to him in “a crisis” and we all know “a crisis” is coming.

A Russian Warns Americans Against a Communist Takeover

By Alan Caruba

There is considerable irony involved when a Russian warns Americans against what is taking place before their eyes as President Obama seeks to transform and ultimately acquire dictatorial powers by a series of steps that are both bold and obvious.

In April, Stanislav Mishin’s post on his blog, Mat Rodina, was published in Pravda. The title was “American capitalism gone with a whimper."

You can read the commentary at
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/107459-american_capitalism-0.

Having lived under Communist rule in the former Soviet Russia, Mishin and his fellow Russians were literally freed by the fall of that regime that began with the overthrow of the Czar in 1917 by the Bolsheviks. What followed was an experiment in Communism that killed millions of Russians as a succession of dictators, starting with Lenin, sought to impose an economic and political system that simply does not work.

Mishin enumerated the ways the path to the present effort to destroy capitalism and our political system has been laid in America.

“First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather than the classics.” There are few that would argue that the American education system is not controlled by the National Education Association, a union, and the American Federation of Teachers, a union. Both have long supported the Democrat Party. Virtually every way one can measure the system reveals its failure to educate the millions passing through government schools.

“Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different ‘branches and denominations’ were for the most part little more than Sunday circuses…” America is a “religious” nation if one looks at the survey numbers of those who say they believe in a supreme being. This, however, is not reflected in the breakdown of moral values as seen in the spread of pornography, the use of illegal drugs, the divorce rate, and the touchstone issue of abortion in America. Our popular culture is drenched in sex and violence.

“The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama,” says Mishin. I would argue that the threat Obama poses to the U.S. Constitution and to our economy is indisputable. “His spending and money printing has been (a) record setting,” all pointing to an America that “will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.” The former preceded the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930s and the latter’s money is worthless.

What better way to destroy America than to destroy the value of the U.S. dollar, the standard against which all other currencies are set? If you want to know why Obama has instituted the spending of billions in just over a half year's time and imposed a $9 trillion deficit on the nation, you need look no further for an explanation.

Nor did it escape Mishin’s notice, having lived in a nation in which all industry was under the control of a central government, that under Obama the government now owns General Motors and that the President demanded and got the resignation of the company’s former president. Every other CEO in America got the message. No where in the Constitution will you find permission for public money to be spent in this fashion.

The ironies and the threat to our nation continue. “Prime Minister Putin…warned Obama…not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster.”

In brief, here’s the case for free market capitalism as opposed to government-run enterprises and interference.

The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. It took 234 years to get it right. It is broke.

Social Security was established in 1935. It has had 74 years to get it right. It is broke. Cost of living increases to recipients will not be enacted for the next two years. It is broke.

Fannie Mae, an intrusion into the housing and mortgage market place was established in 1938. There have been 71 years to get it right. It is broke and it was a major contributing factor in the failure of the mortgage lending system and the present failures of banks across the nation. Likewise, Freddie Mac was established in 1970. After 39 years to get it right, it is broke.

The “war on poverty” set in motion in 1964 was a classic “redistribution of money” as a transfer to “the poor.” Now the nation is, for all intents and purposes, broke.

Medicare and Medicaid were established 1965. After 44 years, both are broke.

The Obama administration is allegedly seeking to “reform” both by rationing medical services to the elderly while expanding the systems to require all Americans to involuntarily purchase insurance. Universal healthcare requires more doctors. Until tort reform is enacted and until doctors can be free to practice in a free market, there will be fewer and fewer doctors.

The trillions of dollars spent by TARP and the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009, are showing no signs of working. ACORN, a “community organizing” group received millions and is likely to be given a working role in the forthcoming U.S. Census, a program that is part of the Department of Commerce, but whose management has been transferred to the White House!

“The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world how free he really is. The world will only snicker,” predicted Mishin.

If the town hall meetings and “tea parties” from coast to coast are any indication, Mishin is wrong that Americans will not fight. A forthcoming September 12 protest gathering in Washington, D.C., is likely to draw more than a million protesters to the capitol.

Obama and his panoply of “czars” have only a few months in which to manufacture a "crisis"as a pretext to transfer all power to the White House. They will fail.

Teaching U.S. Kids the U.N. Way

By Alan Caruba

It’s horrible enough to think of the way school children have been deliberately and unnecessarily frightened by the teaching in American schools about “global warming.” Since the 1980s it has been part of the curriculum in schools throughout the nation, convincing a lot of children that the Earth was doomed.

It was difficult enough to grow up as I did knowing that the Soviet Union could annihilate most of the population with nuclear missiles or that their brand of communism could destroy the liberties Americans take for granted.

Ever since Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, the nation’s educational systems, once among the best in the world and answering directly to local school boards, have produced a dismal record of general failure to teach the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic. It was taken over by the National Education Association, a union, and a curriculum of liberalism has existed ever since.

American children grew up learning that the Founding Fathers were slave owners. They were forced to learn “fuzzy math” and “whole words”, two systems that left them unable to add or subtract sums without a calculator in hand and to read without some difficulty.

Schools became increasingly dangerous places, often requiring the fulltime presence of a police officer. In sum, schools, i.e. administrators and faculty, increasingly sought to place themselves between the student and his parents as the primary authority.

Now we learn that the Obama administration is imposing “education reform efforts” that will adopt “internationally benchmarked education standards.” They will become national standards. The incentive will be federal “stimulus” dollars. There’s more to learn about this at http://www.edwatch.org/,

It’s worth keeping in mind that “No Child Left Behind” is widely regarded as a failure and that all children do not learn at the same rate. Albert Einstein was deemed a dimwit because, for his first years, he did not speak much to anyone. NCLB became a “teach to the test” monstrosity that eliminated any creativity from the teaching process and produced results that, along with previous “reforms” left American students ranked way behind many other nations.

Instead of expecting children whose first language was Spanish or some other to learn English, bilingual education was introduced at considerable expense that ensures those most in need of learning English would have one more obstacle to overcome. Then schools were saddled with mandates for “special” students with disabilities who often cost local school boards hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet their needs.

What this indoctrination is all about is “a de facto federal curriculum” that will financially reward states that adopt what the DOE wants taught. Here’s where it really gets ugly. As Allen Quist of EdWatch points out, the curriculum will be “internationally benchmarked” which is a way of saying American educational standards will be determined by UNESCO, the United Nations education arm.

In practice this means children will be taught about the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but might not get much or any instruction regarding the U.S. Constitution. As Quist puts it, “American schools used to teach the fundamentals of the United States, including the inalienable, God-given rights of life, liberty and property, as guaranteed by our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Not any more. Our children will be taught that they only have those rights the UN says they have.”

Then, for good measure, throw in the UN’s Earth Charter which includes the “promotion of the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations.” It also endorses nuclear disarmament, gay marriage, legalized abortion, and a general curriculum of flat out Earth worship.

The UN is unquestionably the most corrupt international institution on the face of the Earth. President Obama has just ensured future generations of American students will be indoctrinated with its belief system instead of the one our Founding Fathers gave us.

Is it any wonder that home schooling has become such a fast-growing trends among parents who do not want to turn their children over to a system that denigrates American values?

If you think this nation is being sabotaged by the White House, add education to the list of its handiwork.

Why Some PhDs are Jerks

By Alan Caruba

I was talking with a friend about the latest hot topic involving Prof. Henry Lewis Gates of Harvard and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department.

We both agreed that some of the stupidest people we have ever known were PhDs who too frequently turned out to be over-educated fools.

In this country, we have been taught to revere anyone with the title of doctor, starting with physicians and working our way through the maze of doctors of law, education, music, library science, and the long list of fields of a study that grant these degrees.

These days physicians leave medical school owing about $100,000 on the average and, if the president’s healthcare reform passes, they will never be able to pay it back no matter how long they are in practice. Having to pay $200,000 for insurance against malpractice every year has done more to drive up the cost of medical care than anything else.

I used to work for an institution of higher knowledge, a well-respected institute of technology and, while I came to respect the technical achievements of those pursuing engineering or architecture degrees, I also learned that many of those teaching these ancient skills and modern technologies often displayed all the personal failures of judgment and deportment of those far less educated than they.

The one thing one learns in a college or university is that the admiration which its faculty and deans feel toward themselves. It is their bulwark against the real world where people are actually growing, inventing, making, and selling things.

The problem, as my friend noted, is that PhDs may know a great deal about a particular thing, they are often totally out of their league when it comes to extrapolating that niche of knowledge to practical matters or the great issues of the world.

The recent passing of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for Lyndon B. Johnson is a case in point. A good and decent man, McNamara was a wunderkind of the Ford Motor Company who had previously taught at Harvard. He was one of “the best and the brightest” brought into government by John F. Kennedy.

The re-airing of a C-Span interview with him made clear that he went to his grave knowing that he, President Johnson, and his colleagues had been quite thoroughly wrong about expanding the Vietnam War beyond the provision of U.S. military advisors. One can be very gifted in an area of expertise, but that does not necessarily transfer to real world, real time situations.

Moving forward in time to the present, President Obama has surrounded himself with lots of PhDs and each one is just weirder than the next. Dr. John Holdren, his science advisor, once advocated putting stuff in the food supply that would reduce the fertility rate. His Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, is a Nobel Laureate who thinks painting all our roofs white will stave off global warming. His Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, is hell bent on ensuring that not a drop of oil is sucked out of the vast U.S. reserves, nor a single new ton of coal if he has anything to say about it.

Barely a day goes by when one of these loons says something so stupid that you have cause to fear for the future of the republic.

The reason “Joe the Plumber” made all those headlines during the campaign was that he was not a PhD. He was a working man with a very useful skill and he was smart enough to know that Obama was a…how can I say this nicely? Someone not telling the truth and a Marxist.

Prof. Gates suffers from the hubris that goes with being a Harvard professor. He has made his reputation on the basis of his research about the Negro race in America. Any ghetto homeboy could have told him to be polite to the police officer, but Prof. Gates flew into a rage when asked to identify himself and continued to hurl the racism charge at a police officer who was immediately defended by his Black and Hispanic colleagues.

President Obama, despite saying he was unfamiliar with the details of the incident, could not resist visiting the theme of racial profiling. We are now decades passed the great achievements of the Civil Rights movement but the beat goes on.

America used to be a meritocracy. Now the nation is so heavily into “diversity” that we are dumbing down the standards for everyone from firemen to surgeons.

It’s a good idea to proceed with caution when some PhD advises you on anything more complex than your digital camera. It is said that a little education can be a dangerous thing, but too much education can actually blind those chosen to lead the nation and teach its youth to the lessons of history and to plain old common sense.

Greening Our Schools and Nation

By Alan Caruba

If those of you who have doubts that the Earth is dramatically warming and that the planet is about to be plunged into the kind of heat that will likely destroy all life, then it must be puzzling that so many people continue to believe that “global warming” is happening when the planet is quite obviously into a decade-old cooling cycle that is likely to last for several more decades.

A large component of this belief is the indoctrination in the nation’s schools in which virtually every subject area has been given a “green” component and textbooks are filled with references to drowning polar bears, disappearing rain forests, rising sea levels, and the usual claptrap about “global warming.” No child could pass through such an avalanche of junk science without becoming convinced of its authenticity.

An example of this occurred when Michael Kundu, “a whale photographer” and school board president in Marysville, Washington, threw a fit after receiving The Skeptic’s Handbook by Australian science communicator, Joanne Nova.

The 16-page booklet is published by The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank headquartered in Chicago. The booklet was sent to all 14,000 public school board presidents, accompanied by a letter from climate scientist, Bob Carter, a professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.

Kunda sent an email to other school board presidents encouraging them “to stuff that junk mail directly into the recycle basket.” I picked up my copy at a three-day climate change conference sponsored by Heartland in March of this year in New York City. The conference featured seminars led by national and internationally leading climate scientists, all of whom demonstrated that the “science” of “global warming” is balderdash.

The vitriol of the school board president reflects the desperation of “global warming” advocates such as Al Gore who keeps revising his End of the World predictions and is now demanding “global governance” to save the Earth. Considering that the hoax was generated by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this is global governance we can do without.

The “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a huge tax on energy use that will drive up the rates that utilities charge all Americans, passed the House and is now in the Senate for consideration. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is on record saying that if the Senate doesn’t pass the bill there will be droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening pollution and, one assumes, plagues of frogs and locusts.

Did I mention the desperation surrounding the “global warming” hoax? Yes, I did. The Greens have reason to be desperate because both “global warming” and the economy-killing legislation based on it is in big trouble in the U.S. and increasingly around the world. At the recent G-8 conference, both China and India made it clear they have no intention of destroying their economies in the name of something that is not happening.

You can and should ignore President Obama’s promises of millions of “green jobs” and “energy independence.” The jobs are a myth and, for decades, the U.S. government has made it impossible to access our own vast reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, negating any hope of greater energy self-sufficiency.

The White House just announced its guidelines that will allow “renewable energy” companies, about 5,000 in all, to apply for some $3 billion in government funds—your money. Three billion dollars on wind and solar power that currently accounts for just over one percent of the electricity we use daily! Without subsidies, few of these companies would even exist. Even billionaire T. Boone Pickens has tossed in the towel over his plan to install hundreds of wind turbines.

Meanwhile, back in Heartland’s Chicago, a July 9 news report noted that “For the 12th time this meteorological summer (since June 1), daytime highs failed to reach 70 degrees Wednesday. Only one other year in the past century has hosted so many sub-70-degree days up to this point in a summer season—1969, when 14 such days occurred.” It’s getting colder in Chicago and I guarantee you that it is going to get colder there and everywhere else in the U.S.

It behooves the school board presidents and members around the nation to take a look at the “environmental” agenda being taught in their schools because it is mostly the same kind of lies being told by Al Gore, Sen. Boxer, along with Reps. Henry Waxman, and Edward Markey, the authors of Cap-and-Trade.

Kudos to The Heartland Institute for leading the effort to educate the public, our nation’s legislators, and those responsible for the education of our children in this national life-and-death struggle to demonstrate that real climate science totally rejects this hoax.