Monthly Archives: August 2013

China is our Friend?

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What’s the likelihood of that?  The new President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, is actively reviving the cult of Mao Tse-Tung that was so destructive of China and of Sino-US relations in the last century, which continue to taint our relationship today, and which poison now is being refreshed.

Early, public symbols of the revival include

  • a visit to a village from which Mao attacked Beijing in 1949 and from which Xi vowed that “our red nation will never change color.”
  • a visit to a lakeside villa where Mao summered.  At the opening of a new exhibition there, Xi declared that the villa should be a center for educating youth about patriotism and revolution.  Notably, the exhibition wholly elides the 10s of millions of Chinese butchered by Mao, particularly during the mass starvation he inflicted with his cultural “revolution.”
  • echoing Mao, Xi  is launching a “rectification” campaign to purge the Communist Party and limit discussion of ideas such as democracy, rule of law, enforcement of the constitution, and other such evils.  This is how Mao presaged his cultural revolution.

In a reflection of Mao’s “reeducation” programs, both explicit and through state media, Xi has

  • commanded army generals and senior officers to reconnect with the “masses” by serving as privates for 15 days minimum.
  • ordered officials to combat the spread of such evils as universal values, press freedom, civil society, and judicial independence.
  • through his Communist Party, with its purification in progress, warned officials to combat “dangerous” Western values.
  • related to this, officials have been instructed to “cut off at the source channels for disseminating erroneous currents of thought.”
  • published attacks on “civil society” and the concept that Party power actually should be subject to constitutional limits.
  • had police detain political activists (although this represents no actual change).

Mao was a steadfast enemy of the West and of us in particular.  His successor is showing himself to be disinterested in friendship.

That’s the Point

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In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed concerning the California state government’s response to a state court finding that the state’s high-speed rail authority had violated the 2008 ballot initiative authorizing $10 billion in bonds for the 500-mile train’s initial construction, thereby hamstringing (temporarily) this white bullet train, Allysia Finley quoted Governor Jerry Brown (D) as saying,

It’s not a setback.  As we speak we’re spending money, we’re moving ahead.

Indeed. Isn’t that the point of this project that only a Democrat could love?  To spend money?

Immigration and Border Security

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The Senate’s bill on immigration reform purports to include a requirement for border security that must be met before a citizenship path for existing illegal aliens can begin.

Regardless of what we might think about the strength of that requirement, it demands data on current and trigger border security levels.  Those data may not be available:

[CRS and GAO] reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service show the Department of Homeland Security lacks an accurate barometer to measure the success of ramped-up efforts to curtail illegal crossings.
…
…[they have the] number of apprehensions of people coming in illegally….  But those numbers…don’t necessarily show whether an increase or decrease is due to immigration trends, economic shifts, enforcement policies or all of the above.

Because

Apprehensions data…exclude two important groups when it comes to unauthorized migration: aliens who successfully enter and remain in the United States…and aliens who are deterred from entering the United States[.]

That these data are hard to collect (the deterrence factor may be impossible to assess) in no way increases the reliability of apprehensions as a measure of security.

The GAO’s beef also includes a lack of data availability for the several immigration-involved agencies that would benefit from them: “a lack of interagency coordination and information sharing” and “inconsistency in data collection.”

This is just one more example of the lack of reliability of what this government tells us, and in this case it has—or should have—a direct impact on this government’s ability to achieve immigration reform, which is badly needed in any event.

A (State) Government Proposal

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…behind which I could get (sorry.  My mother was an English teacher of the old school, and knuckle raps are hard to forget).

Tennessee has decided not to consider student performance only when assessing teacher compensation; they’ve decided to use student performance also in determining whether teachers will be allowed to continue to teach.  Last week they decided to

pull the license of teachers whose students consistently fail to improve.

“This is not about taking away teacher licenses, but about making sure our students have the best classroom teachers,” said Kevin Huffman, the state’s education commissioner.

The move also is proactive: the policy requires teachers to show they are boosting student achievement rather than requiring the state to show they are not.  If the teachers cannot demonstrate student improvement—if the teachers cannot demonstrate actual performance—they would lose their teaching licenses.  This places the burden of proof is where it belongs, a good innovation.

The teachers union in Tennessee, the Tennessee Education Association, claims not to oppose holding its members to performance standards, but….

[T]he current plan gives too much weight to the state’s measure of student growth, which she described as “complicated and problematic.”

Here’s the groundwork being laid for the excuse generation wave as the standards are begun to be upheld, which will begin with the 2015 school year.

How strongly will the union actually oppose this move?  With the excuses already starting, the union attitude will be problematical.  We’ll see in the realization, though, how strongly the unions are invested in student performance as opposed to perks for the teachers—and for union leadership.

A Victory for Labor

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…if not necessarily for organized labor or, more particularly, for organized labor leaders.

Michigan’s right-to-work law applies to 35,000 state employees, a divided state appeals court ruled Thursday in the first major legal decision on the much-debated measure eight months after it passed.

Judges voted 2-1 to reject a lawsuit filed by unionized workers who make up more than two-thirds of all state employees.

In ruling that unions cannot force workers to pay union dues, when they’re not union members as a condition of employment, the majority ruled, in part:

In light of the First Amendment rights at stake, the Michigan Legislature has made the policy decision to settle the matter by giving all employees the right to choose…[and to] remove politics from public employment and to end all inquiry or debate about how public sector union fees are spent.

It’s in fits and starts, but individual liberty is beginning to survive.