Waiver Welfare

Real people are individually and totally accountable for themselves and their actions.  This means in matters of choice, such as belief and, most especially, voluntary behavior.  The current US administration has invented waiver welfare to avoid being held to the same standards that it wants to apply to others.  Some of the first recipients were White House appointees.

ABC News’s Jake Tapper revealed that in Obama’s first year in office he issued waivers to his highly touted and stringent ethics requirements.  One of the President’s first acts upon taking office was to sign the ethics executive order establishing some of the toughest ethics rules ever imposed on executive branch appointees.  He once claimed piously that lobbyists won’t find a job in my White House.  What he meant is that all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others. 

However, the rising number of waivers to O-buma’s WelfareHealthCare has drawn some attention.  According to Matt Cover at CNS News, as of June 16, 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services has granted…1372 waivers from ObamaCare insurance mandates since the law’s enactment, according to a new Government Accountability Office report. 

Of course, none of the individuals or groups involved in financially aggrandizing the O-buma re-election campaign are benefitting in any way from these waivers.  It is certainly not a quid pro quo arrangement that the United Auto Workers and their retirees were prevented from losing their Cadillac health benefits through O-buma-issued waivers.  You remember the UAW; they are the folks who walked away with a 40% ownership share of Government Motors after the O-bumites stole it from GM shareholders and bondholders.

One of O-buma’s waivers was for lobbyist Cecilia Munoz, former senior vice president of the National Council of La Raza.  They are supporters of racial segregation and anarchy, as well as recipients of an $11 million 2010 federal gift of taxpayers' money.  The President appointed her Director of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs in 2009.  The primary responsibility of the OIA is to award and direct federal funding toward state, tribal, and local community organizers to support illegal immigration and open borders policies.

Now, O-buma wants media to issue him a Welfare Waiver so that he can weasel out of being responsible for his actions.  First, he sent Little Timmy Geithner out holding a trial balloon to test the waters about raising taxes on small businesses.  O-buma's unvarnished lust to bankrupt the nation makes him a national embarrassment.  The Wall Street Journal points out that even orthodox Keynesian policy doesn't recommend a tax increase with growth under 2% and the jobless rate at 9.1%. 

After the obedient lapdog media failed to jump on him with both feet for trying to raise taxes during a recession—the one that no longer exists—he claimed that what he really wants is revenue enhancement, not tax increases.  Progressives remain notably silent about how to increase revenue without increasing taxes.

Waiver Welfare comes into play here when the legacy media refuse to acknowledge that the federal revenue shortfall is the direct result of O-buma’s policies that have larded public spending and prevented sufficient economic growth to end the current recession.  The Theftocrats exacerbated the crash that they created with their welfare housing scheme, worsened matters by squandering trillions of borrowed dollars, and hamstrung the very industries that could have righted our economic ship.

Sheer coincidence, you say?

May your gods be with you.

Education's Sleight of Hand

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or No Child Left Behind, is flawed; however, its purpose was to make educational policies and practices more transparent and to make educators accountable to taxpayers for their performance.  There’s the rub.  The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are aghast at the prospect of transparency.  Apparently, they have much to fear if taxpayers learn what they are getting for their money.  As for accountability, they cower like Dracula threatened with a cross at the very thought of it.  Don’t even mention standards or competition.

NCLB was up for re-authorization when Theftocrats controlled the House, Senate, and the White house.  They did nothing, and the flaws in it remain uncorrected, despite objections from Democrats.  This article in The Christian Science Monitor reveals that Arne Duncan, head of the federal Department of Indoctrination, plans to take matters into his own hands by issuing waivers to it.  Of paramount concern to Arne and the Educrats is that NCLB requires 

all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, among other things. 

As that deadline approaches with no sign of the benchmark being met – and as more and more schools are labeled as failing as a result – many states and districts have been clamoring for relief from the sanctions imposed by NCLB for schools that fail to meet their targets.

Duncan advocates accountability—for the term to be meaningful, it must require comparison to a standard—then, he advocates flexibility in meeting those standards.  This fraud is equivalent to Bill Clinton’s flexible ethics.  The atomic weight of gold is a standard; maybe, sort of, and nearly are weaseling.

Author Amanda Paulson speculates that one part of NCLB that Duncan is almost certain to waive is the requirement that failing schools offer school choice options to students.  What a shock; he opposes provisions that would lessen educrats’ stranglehold on education by forcing competition with private education opportunities.

Duncan claimed that 80% of schools will be judged failures if the NCLB standard remains in effect; therefore, he wants to hide the measuring stick.  His desperation to bury the problem reveals that education is a mess.  In “Different Decisions,” Thomas Sowell compares public and private sector methods and results of producing products for consumers.

Sowell points out that when banks foreclose on property, they sell it for whatever they can manage and get out from under it quickly.  They do this because their expertise is banking, not real estate.  Public schools offer a stark contrast.  The author ponders why schools are using their time to indoctrinate kindergartners and fourth graders with politically correct attitudes about sex. 

Anyone familiar with the low standards and mushy notions in the schools and departments of education that turn out our public school teachers might think that these teachers would have all they can do to make American children competent in reading, writing and math.  Anyone familiar with how our children stack up with children from other countries in basic education would be painfully aware that American children lag behind children in countries that spend far less per pupil than we do.  In other words, teachers and schools that are failing to provide the basics of education are branching out into all sorts of other areas, where they have even less competence.

If bankers lose money by dabbling in areas outside their expertise, stockholders fire them.  Teachers do not face commensurate consequences in return for ineptitude.  Only Florida and Alaska have meaningful performance appraisals for teachers.

Schools are just one government institution that takes on tasks for which they have no expertise or even competence.  Congress is the most egregious example.  Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down with it, politicians have now moved on into micro-managing automobile companies and medical care.

Government schools operate in the model of the former Soviet Union, and like the USSR, it is a failed experiment whose effectiveness has ended. 

May your gods be with you.     

Why Juan and Pamika Can't Read

This video concerns America's future, tomorrow's leaders, and the direction in which the next generation will lead us.  Notice that its main speaker is Juan Williams of National Public Radio fame.  Recall also that O-buma turned his back on some 1700 economically disadvantaged inner city children in Washington, DC, in favor well-to-do campaign supporters in the National Education Association.  In the film, Williams asks incredulously, "you mean you're not standing with the kids?"

Open Secrets reports that between the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, educrat unions donated over $67M to politicians during 2007-2008.  The NEA alone "spends more on campaign contributions than ExxonMobile, Microsoft, Walmart, and the AFL-CIO combined," and they send "95% of their contributions to Democrats."  What a neatly convoluted funding loop.  

With states hurting financially, their leaders are searching for ways to trim budgets and to maintain essential services.  One effective way is through vouchers or school choice.  The old guard education unions represent an expensive failed experiment.  We cannot afford economically or socially to continue pursuing past mistakes.  "Empowering parents to choose the best school for their children...makes good fiscal sense." 

In New Jersey, both Republican and Democratic legislators are supporting Governor Chris Christie's proposals to eliminate lifetime tenure and benefits that are cost free to education employees.  Teaching union claims that without tenure good teachers could be fired arbitrarily are specious.  "In 2008, there were 35 education tenure challenges for school employees," out of some 120,000 total workers. 

In contrast, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel claims that teacher evaluations should "not root out bad teachers."  That's right, Roekel believes that a teacher evaluation should be a cozy, hand holding exercise to determine the amount of teacher's raise.  No valid reason exists to justify why education employees should not face the same occupational uncertainties as those who pay their salaries.

We have thrown good money after bad for so long that few people have any concept of a reasonable baseline for student and teacher performance.  Tests have been re-centered, revalued, and otherwise made irrelevant until they are useless as tests; they no longer evaluate what they claim to examine, which is exactly what union leaders want.  They desperately want to avoid any system that requires individual and total accountability.  Union "officials invariably respond to the deterioration in schools by seeking to abolish the gauges of decay, tests, for one."   

Author Peter Brimelow observes about union leaders how "masterful the educrats are at mounting a noisy, well-masked offensive at the slightest threat to their Soviet-style status quo."  They have two main objectives, to maximize the financial aggrandizement of union members and to increase the numbers in their bureaucracy.

For union leaders, it's actually all about the kids, really.  

May your gods be with you.