Monthly Archives: March 2012

Chinese Governance

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The rumors of a coup in the People’s Republic of China serve to illustrate the PRC’s concept of governance.

Its economic success over the last generation and a half, or so (roughly 30 years), seems apparent.  It has accumulated the world’s largest stash of foreign currency reserves (some $3.2 trillion), and it has grown into the world’s second largest economy, albeit with the world’s largest population across which to amortize that economy.  Some even argue that this success demonstrates the superiority of the Chinese method of centrally managing an economy.  After all, those folks say, the Chinese government doesn’t waste time debating; they simply decide, and promptly.  Moreover, specific leadership candidates are selected carefully and only after a proven performance record.

But at what cost has come this success?  That’s what the coup rumors highlight.  The power struggle underway (whether it’s really a coup in progress or not is unimportant to this post) is purely a Party struggle; the people of China are not at all involved other than being stuck with living with the outcome.

The current showdown—of whatever form—threatens the carefully planned change in the party and national leadership, including seven of the nine positions on the Politburo Standing Committee.  The thrust of the argument seems to be whether China should go back to a more “revolutionary”—i.e., more directed from above—form of government or reforms should be instituted that lead toward a more constitutional state.

But even at best, whose constitution?  Notice where this argument is occurring: internally, at the top levels of PRC’s Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army government—not among the people.  In fact, the people may also be discussing this, but since they have no say in their own government, their discussions “are unimportant, and [government] does not hear them.”

The coup rumors illustrate another aspect of governance PRC-style.  The rumors began appearing about two weeks ago via Sina Weibo (“China microwave” or “China microblog”), the Chinese version of Twitter.  The government promptly deleted those messages.  Now, searches for key words like “gunfire” or “Changan Avenue” (where much of the Chinese leadership lives and where gunfire allegedly was heard during the “coup”) are answered with this message:

These terms are not being displayed in accordance with the applicable laws, regulations and political guidelines.

Here is Chinese free speech.

The PRC is a one-party dictatorship: there are no checks or balances, as from an independent judiciary or legislature.  The people are unrepresented by individuals of their own choosing in an elected government.   In sum, the people are not Sovereign in their own country—the government that has placed itself above them is.

And that economic success?  Yawning cracks in it have appeared.  The vast migration over the last several years from the hinterland to the coastal cities, where the jobs are, have led to severe housing shortages in those cities, shortages exacerbated by those cities’ governmental requirements that the people must be registered with the city government in order to get city services like utilities, housing, and so on.  The migrants are denied registration, though: they’re not residents of the city.

Additionally, those who do find jobs, including the original residents, are demanding higher wages, which hurts production, which hurts job availability.  On top of that, the lack of jobs for that massive influx of migrants leaves people without money to buy goods and services other than those basic city-provided services (which the migrants can’t get anyway).  This also hurts production, and job availability.  And on top of this, those migrants generally are their families’ bread-winners and were intending to send money back home to family members who didn’t make the move.  This lack deepens the impoverishment of the hinterlands.

All of these changes are easily handled by a flexible, free market, but a centrally managed one, even managed by carefully selected government leaders, simply cannot keep up with the dynamicisms of the country’s (any country’s) real-world economic evolutions.  It’s an edifice poised for a major retrenchment, drawdown of those reserves, or hard collapse.  Or all three.

Some “Tea Partiers” and Budgets

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The White House objects to Congressman Paul Ryan’s (R, WI) latest budget proposal as the end of the welfare state.  I certainly hope it is.

As to the rest of The Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed, what they said.

Some—by no means all, but every grouping has its extremists—who aver themselves to be tea partiers need to withdraw their heads from rectal storage and pay attention.  In DC, in politics, in any endeavor, we need to not hold out for everything all at once, or we’ll get nothing at all, and at once.  Take what we can get today, and come back tomorrow to work for more.

This working, bit by bit, toward the goal is how the Progressives have gotten us into our present strait over these last 80 years, and it’s the only way out of our present strait to fiscal sanity and its associated economic growth and prosperity.  It’s the only path away from government dependency and back to personal responsibility and individual freedom.

Take the budget and vote it up.  Make the spending, taxing, and “entitlement” corrections today that are possible today, rather than failing to get any of it by being greedy for more.  Come back tomorrow, and work then for the next increment.  And by the way, tomorrow’s effort will be informed (for those willing to listen) by the empirical data flowing from today’s reforms, and so tomorrow’s continued reforms can be more efficiently structured and thus produce its results more quickly.  Sort of a dynamic political scoring.

Failure in Iraq

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I’ve written before about the contempt with which Europe views our President.  Here is another example of their view of our leadership, this time as it concerns our precipitous departure from Iraq.   The headline says it all: ” Iraq Is Neither Sovereign, Stable nor Self-Reliant.”

Spiegel Online‘s Bernhard Zand notes

[President] Obama conceded that Iraq was “not a perfect place,” but he also pointed out that the US military was “leaving a sovereign, stable and self-reliant country with a representative government elected by its people.”

Zand then lays it on the line:

…the circumstances of the US withdrawal, and the language Obama used to whitewash it, border on negligence. [That link is worth following, also.]

Here are the facts and specifics that Zand lays out.  Nebulously, without a formal—or even physical—presence, Iran sat in on yesterday’s Arab League summit meeting in Baghdad, along with the 10, or so, Arab members who attended (of 22 members.  So much for Araby’s view of Iraq’s national viability).  This occurred through  the summit’s central question: the degree to which Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, listens to Iranian input in Iraqi affairs.  Indeed, Iraq can’t even deal with its neighbor to the northwest just beyond Jordan, Syria, without “suggestions” from Iran.  The question about the depth of Iranian influence never was clearly answered at the summit.  As Zand puts it, it’s just

difficult to detect a sense of the kind of sovereignty Obama mentioned coming from the man in charge in Baghdad.

Al-Maliki’s move against the Sunnis isn’t contributing to national stability, either.  He isn’t just acting against a few key members of Sunni leadership in (or who used to be in) the Iraqi government.  Beyond things like the arrest warrant al-Maliki issued against (Sunni) Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi and al-Maliki’s firing of one of his three Deputy Prime Ministers, Saleh al-Mutlaq, for presuming to demur from al-Maliki’s policies, al-Maliki is conducting a full-blown anti-Sunni jihad that threatens explosion into a worse civil war than that experienced in 2005-2007 before the Bush surge retrieved the country.

In Iraq’s favor, the jihad is al-Maliki’s; it’s not endemic to the Iraqi Shia.  The general (Arab) population of Shia in Iraq distrust the Iranian (Persian) Shia even more than they distrust the once-dominant Iraqi Sunnis.  And, they remember the Sunni nations—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, for instance—who played an active role in freeing them from Saddam Hussein.  But that favor can have effect only in the far future, and Iraq must survive to get there.  In the meantime, the jihad is ripping at the core of Iraqi nationhood.

Confidence in Iraq’s stability also was not enhanced by terrorist bombs going off during the summit near the Iranian embassy, just outside Baghdad’s Green Zone–where the summit was held.

Nor can Iraq be called self-reliant.  Unemployment is rampant and rising, and without the individual or public reserves that more stable countries have with which to whether such conditions.  Exacerbating what otherwise would be only an uncomfortable economic dislocation is the lack of basic services.  Other than the Kurdish lands, where the Kurds have enforced a stiff measure of autonomy from Baghdad, no one has electricity for more than a few hours a day, and even the drinking water is (barely) sufficient only through the efforts of foreign entities.  This does not permit an economy to recover.

Would things be turning out differently had Obama gotten a SOFA that would have allowed us to stay, the way we did in an earlier century after a much more bitter war?  Maybe not.  But we’ll never know because Obama didn’t even try.

Information Privacy

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In a burst of good sense, the Federal Trade Commission is on the right track.  Earlier this week, it “issued a strong call for commercial-data collectors to adopt better privacy practices and called for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation.”  While I have no great confidence in Congressional skill at protecting our privacy, this would be a better choice than leaving our information to the tender mercies of “commercial-data collectors.”  As FTC Chairman, Jon Leibowitz, notes,

Simply put, your computer is your property.  No one has the right to put anything on [your computer] that you don’t want[.]

The FTC’s initial solution, though, is at best naïve.  Putting a “Do Not Track” button into Web browsers is doomed to failure as Google’s decision to ignore even user-deliberate attempts to prevent their browsers from yielding up personal information demonstrates.  Such a button will not prevent the data collection; it can only rely on a “Pretty please, Mr Data taker, don’t take my data” plea.  Beyond that, the data collectors already are weasel-wording the meaning of “Do Not Track.”  The online-ad industry, for instance, has decided it means “Do Not Target,” and it will still collect your data for “market research,” “product development,” and the like.  Oh, and “trust us.”

The need for overt controls that actually block the collection rather than relying on begging and the good offices of the collectors is demonstrated by, even more than the equivocations, the rank cynicism of those collectors and their objections.  The Wall Street Journal article at the first link cites the Executive Vice President of the Direct Marketing Association, Linda Woolley—whose group represents many of those data hounds—as saying her Association opposes

giving consumers access to marketing information because it would be expensive, difficult to keep secure and the type of data used by marketers doesn’t harm consumers.

Sorry, Madam, your costs aren’t relevant to my privacy.  You don’t get to hide from me what you’re trying to take from me because that might hurt your pocketbook.  As to your plaint that such data would be “difficult to keep secure,” it’s not secure now.  You’re already taking it without our permission, and often without our knowledge, and as Google has demonstrated, and as Apple has demonstrated with its unauthorized tracking via our smart phones.  Worse, your view of “security” is markedly different from ours.  And on what basis should we believe your claim that the data you’re taking from us to be “used by marketers” doesn’t harm us when you’re at such pains to hide those data from us?

Woolley says,

We are very wary about taking the information out of the information economy[.]

Since it’s not your information in the first place, and we’re only looking to recover that which you’ve taken without authorization, no data are being taken “out of the information economy.”  Your argument could be used by the burglar, who having successfully stolen the jewelry from our house, also is “wary of taking…out of [his] economy.”

More than just Cheating

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported last Sunday the results of its extensive investigation into standardized testing results across the country, and its discoveries were appalling.  The links under “Related” in the left margin tell the tale (read them all; the series is illuminating).  I’ll just offer a few highlights.  It’s important to note that the AJC makes no bones about their analysis: the statistical results do not prove cheating.  However, the results to demonstrate utterly anomalous test scores and score movements from year to year.

Extreme swings in test scores, the paper reported,

occurred in several major urban school systems, including Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles and Mobile County, Alabama.

In Houston,

test results for entire grades of students jumped two, three or more times the amount expected in one year, the analysis shows.  When children moved to a new grade the next year, their scores plummeted[.]

One particularly egregious example occurred at Patrick Henry Downtown Academy in St. Louis. MO.  The AJC reported that in 2010 42% of fourth-graders passed the state’s math test (an appalling teaching performance in its own right). The following year, just 4% of those same students passed the state’s math test when they took it as fifth-graders.  The AJC added that while the 2011 tests were administered, the school was under intense scrutiny as a result of earlier cheating allegations.

Dr Andres Alonso, Chief Executive Officer of the Baltimore, MD, school district, noted that the AJC’s analysis found very large year-on-year changes that, in general, were score reductions following intensified efforts by his staff to prevent cheating in his Baltimore schools.  That intensified effort was a result of Alonso’s own investigation, triggered by a complaint at a PTA meeting.

Others, though, like Nashville, TN, district officials, responded by challenging the AJC’s methodology.  These officials emphasize both the high turnover of children in and out of their districts and that for many of their children English is not the primary language.  The AJC, though, while addressing Nashville’s concerns, points out that lots of other districts—vis., Chicago, Los Angeles, Amarillo, Texas—have similarly high student turnover, and similarly high numbers of students for whom English is not their primary language, and these districts did not have a similarly high incidence of suspicious test results.

There also are the usual cop-out excuses from those more interested in turning a blind eye to the problem than in doing the hard work of actually solving it.  Standardized test scores, they complain, put undue pressure on the teachers to do their jobs.  It’s true enough that test scores typically inform teacher evaluations and/or bonuses.  Other, more interested, educators correctly point out, however, that “cheating is a moral choice.”  No one stuck guns in these cheaters’ ears’, if cheating is what’s going on, and forced the misbehaving educators to misbehave and shortchange our children and their education.

Indeed, the objections to the analysis outcomes do not serve to deny that any cheating is occurring.  The objections instead center on three items: a) justification of the behavior because the teachers are under so much pressure; b) objection to the analysis’ methodology, as with Nashville above; and c) denial of the results.  Detroit, for instance, insisted that its scores were not “unusual or out of line in any way.”

Overall, the AJC reports, 196 of the nation’s 3,125 largest school districts had tests results whose odds of occurring by chance alone were less than 1 in 1,000.  That’s fully 6% of those largest districts.

Cheating on this scale, if that’s what is behind those suspicious scores, is more than just cheating.  These cheaters are doing more than just defrauding you and I out of our tax money.  These cheaters are doing worse than short-changing our children.  These cheaters are doing worse than abusing our children.  These cheaters are setting a devastating moral example for our children.  These cheaters also are threatening our nation’s security—and threatening the welfare of those children’s children thereby.

How is our nation supposed to compete in the world when our citizens are just adult ignoramuses because teacher and school administrator organizations like this make no effort at all actually to educate our children?  How is our nation supposed to compete in the world—or set an example for it—when tomorrow’s adults are morally destitute?