Sneaking School Choice into New Orleans

While our soldiers battle away on the frontiers of freedom in Iraq, it is easy to forget about another titanic struggle, one that is taking place here at home. It is the epochal effort to wrest the education of the nation’s children away from the clutches of the unions and the bureaucrats.

It’s an immense task because the entrenched special interests are so powerful. But every now and again a power vacuum occurs and the intrepid reformers can leap into the gap.

That is happening right now in New Orleans as educational entrepreneurs jump at the opportunity offered by hurricane Katrina and use federal grants to open charter schools in the devastated city.

As Susan Saulny admits, federal grants rolled into the hurricane relief package are

likely to cement the role of New Orleans — where the public school system is barely functional — as the nation's pre-eminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools.

As conservatives have pointed out on occasion, one of the advantages of school choice is that the entrepreneurial model can respond more quickly to the needs of children than big bureaucracies.

There are at least 45 charter schools in Louisiana, with most having opened since Hurricane Katrina. The highest concentration is in New Orleans, where the school system is now dominated by charter operators. Eighteen of the 25 schools open in New Orleans are charter schools, receiving public financing but operating independently.

You can depend on the education blob to be pouring cold water on the new experiment, and “Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a lobbying group for urban districts,” steps up to the plate.

"Nobody is quite rushing to say let's model ourselves after New Orleans," Mr. Casserly said, "because it's not clear at this early point whether this strategy is likely to work."

So the folks running the charter schools had better understand that a lot is depending on the opportunity that we, the federal taxpayers, have given them.

Let us hope that they are worthy of our trust.

The Whole Foods Guy on Business, Freedom, and Life

A couple of years ago the founder of Whole Foods gave a speech at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Now John Mackey has revised and extended his remarks in Liberty.

Mackey started out in the Sixties as the classic hippie/commune type. He “studied eastern philosophy and religion,” lived in a commune, and believed “that business and corporations were essentially evil because they selfishly sought profits.”

Then in 1978 he and his girl-friend started “a natural foods market called Safer Way” with $45,000 in startup capital. Of course, starting a business changed his life. Everything he “believed about business was proven to be wrong.” He discovered that

business is based on voluntary cooperation. No one is forced to trade with a business; customers have competitive alternatives in the market place; employees have competitive alternatives for their labor; investors have different alternatives and places to invest their capital. Investors, labor, management, suppliers — they all need to cooperate to create value for their customers.

Of course, he did find out that not everything was a bed of roses in the business world.

[O]ur customers thought our prices were too high, our employees thought they were underpaid, the vendors would not give us large discounts, the community was forever clamoring for donations, and the government was slapping us with endless fees, licenses, fines, and taxes.

Now, of course, Safer Way is Whole Foods, the most profitable food retailer in the nation.

But is Whole Foods purely about profit? Not at all, says Mackey. Business must go beyond the selfish pursuit of profit to something more. Mackey sees business

as an interdependent system of constituencies connected together in a "harmony of interests."

Freedom and prosperity must be thought of as “beginning goals.” But the freedom movement must get beyond that, and a negative emphasis of “freedom ‘from’ government coercion” must give way to

the freedom "to" take responsibility for our own lives; the freedom "to" take responsibility for our own communities and our planet.

Mackey uses Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to develop a vision of the good, the true, and the beautiful in a concrete discussion of health, peace, education, environmental sustainability, globalization, and his own initiative, FLOW, or Freedom Lights Our World.

John Mackey has gone a long way from his youth in the counter-culture movement. And he raises the great question.

How can anyone believe that you can make the world good and noble through ruthless application of force—using government, the agency of coercion and compulsion?

John Mackey has found a way to build a better world based on a “harmony of interest.” But what about the rest of us?

The End of the World is Not Yet

Every religion has its story of the end times, and accommodates the human need for existential terror about the end of the world. For Christians, it’s in the Bible. For liberals and environmentalists it is provided in the fear of global warming and the end of oil. The current theological term is Peak Oil, meaning that the peak in oil production is near and from then on it will be all down hill.

Here’s a status report on the oil situation. Oil reserves are increasing in relation to oil production and consumption, writes David Deming.

One way to determine if the world is beginning to run out of oil is to look at the ratio of petroleum reserves to annual production. In the 1960s, the average ratio of world petroleum reserves to production was 35. During the energy crises of the 1970s, the ratio decreased to 32. In the 1980s, it increased to 37. During the 1990s, the ratio of reserves to annual production rose to 45. In 2005, the ratio of oil reserves to annual production was 49, nearly a record high.

So why have oil prices skyrocketed (apart from the decline in the dollar)?

From 2002 through 2004, demand for oil increased by an average 3.7 percent annually. This is more than triple the rate of increase from 1990 through 2000, which averaged an anemic 1.1 percent. Low demand during the 1990s, combined with surging reserves, caused oil prices to bottom out near $10 a barrel in December 1998.

A glance at gold and oil prices in the last month indicate that the current price peak may be behind us. It wouldn’t be the first time. After all, when you jack up the price of something then people are going to bust their butts to find more of it to sell.

Oh, oil will run out eventually. But it will still not be the end of the world. Instead we will find another way to obtain and use energy.

Progressives in Trouble on Terror

The progressives of the world are united in their opposition to the war in Iraq, which they say is a distraction that deflects from the War on Terror. Given that a war is needed at all.

They are right about the distraction. Whatever happens in Iraq, the fate of Canada and Europe is more important. And the big news about the War on Terror is that it puts the whole progressive project in jeopardy. A couple of articles in the last week show why. Not surprisingly, both of them rely for support on Melanic Phillips’ new book Londonistan, a book that had trouble finding a publisher in London.

In London the take-no-prisoners conservative columnist Simon Heffer looks at the recent raid on a house in East London inhabited by two Muslim brothers.

The police had acted upon a tip, or intelligence, that the Muslim residents were involved in preparing a chemical device designed, perhaps, for release in the London Underground. In the end they found nothing, but accidentally wounded one of the young men living in the house.

The brothers' sister said yesterday that "you do not expect to be woken at 4am with a gun in your face". The Muslim community in the area is outraged and complains of harassment and disruption.

Yes, the Muslim community has learned to play the victim game beautifully.

In Toronto, upon the arrest of 17 alleged bomb plot conspirators, the police went out of their way to avoid identifying as Muslims the 17 Muslim accused who all went to the same mosque. Because in a multicultural society we don’t want to stigmatize or target anyone because of their minority status.

"Minority-rights doctrine," writes Melanie Phillips in her new book Londonistan, "has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority."

The reason we have been dragged into this multicultural fantasyland is that it has served our progressive friends, partly by giving them a key to the public purse and partly by giving them a sense of nobility and compassion.
The original purpose of the doctrine was to privilege the progressive activists who represented marginalized and minority communities. It allowed them to mau-mau the majority culture and advance the tribal interests of the minority communities that they led.

But when the multicultural matrix is used by radical Muslims to attack the majority host culture, then things undergo a sea-change. For then multiculturalism threatens to slip out of the control of the progressives who invented it for their own use, not for Muslim extremists. Yet how can they repudiate their own progressive belief and faith? Writes Melanie Phillips:

"It is impossible to overstate the importance -- not just to Britain but to the global struggle against Islamist extremism -- of properly understanding and publicly challenging this moral, intellectual and philosophical inversion, which translates aggressor into victim and vice versa."

In other words, Americana, British, and Canadians are going to have to choose between their traditional culture and the multicultural culture that seems, more and more, to be naked before the aggression of the Islamist extremists.

Life just isn’t going to be much fun for progressives as this plays out.

President Bush Flips the Bird

The problem that all we pajama-clad commentators share is simple. We don’t have a clue what is going on. Are we winning or losing in Iraq? We just don’t know.

President Bush emphasized that on Tuesday when he flipped the bird at everyone: at the MSM, at his critics, and at Iraq.

He told the mainstream media what he thought about them by embarking them on a bus to Camp David and then telling them that he, Bush, wasn’t going to be there. He flipped the bird to his critics by staying the course. And he flipped the bird to the Iraqis by taking over Baghdad Airport to secure it for Air Force One, and by showing up unannounced at a meeting with Prime Minister al-Maliki. Finally, he addressed a group of our military and demonstrated that he fully enjoys their confidence. It was quite a performance.

But at least when the president acts, you can read a tea-leaf or two. The announcement that, on the request of Mr. al-Maliki, combined Iraqi and Coalition forces would start sweeps of Baghdad to secure the capital, starting immediately, raises an immediate question.

Why wait until now?

The answer is pretty clear. The U.S. must have refused to help secure the capital until the Iraqis stopped squabbling and put a government in place, complete with Defense and Interior Ministers. Sorry, old chum, they must have said. We’re not coming into the capital until you guys get your act together. It must have been a powerful incentive, because the whole world was wailing like a banshee that Baghdad was descending into anarchy. Do something, they cried! Sure, said Bush. After you guys form a government.

Of course, President Bush is right. Elections, shmelections. Real legitimacy is secured by a government that can quell enemies, foreign and domestic. It does no good for the US to do everything. The new Iraqi government must prove it deserves to rule by routing the terrorists: Saddamite, Al-Qaeda, and local militias. Otherwise the mantle of political power in Iraq will fall to someone else.

But the cavalier Bush acts this week also demonstrate that, as of now, the new Iraqi government is a mere US puppet. Hopefully that will change and in a year a confident Iraqi government will tell the US to get out.

E.J. Wants a New New Deal

You can rely on columnist E.J. Dionne for the straight up-and-down liberal view of things. And we mean that in the best way, that he is an honest liberal who just wants government to solve everything. Like jobs.

Things aren’t going too well on the jobs front, he worries, for the job creation since the last recession is “the slowest in any recovery since the Kennedy administration.” And, of course, they aren’t the “good” jobs of the golden years, “secure, well-compensated jobs” like the ones they used to have at the auto companies.

What's needed, [progressive politicians have] said, is heavy investment in education and job training to allow people to make the transition from the "old" economy -- those auto jobs -- to the new. "What you earn depends upon what you can learn," President Bill Clinton said over and over.

We need a new New Deal. Otherwise it will mean uncontrolled offshoring of jobs. Dionne then gets in his “narrative,” as the postmodernists would say:

Historically, voters turn away from conservative free-market politicians after they conclude that capitalism needs help in living up to its commitment to create widely shared abundance. After World War II, voters in rich countries entered a social democratic bargain in which capitalism became the bedrock of the economy but was tempered by a large public sector and a unionized industrial sector that provided social insurance, education, pensions and health care.

Actually, voters turned away from the free market in 1933 when the Progressive suits totally screwed up the economy. And then over the next two generations New Dealers totally screwed up social insurance, education, pensions, and health care. They screwed it up by running it all through the government so that social needs were driven by the need of politicians for votes. Let’s take them in turn:

• Social insurance like Social Security and Medicare? Heading for a brick wall.
  
• Education? A wasteland utterly abandoned to the special interests.
  
• Pensions? The good old defined-benefit pension utterly ruined by greedy unions and greedy corporations.
  
• Health care? An expensive mess because people pay for health care with other peoples” money.

Here’s the problem, E.J. We can’t have a new deal, or even a New Deal. Because we are already spending something north of 15 percent of GDP on the last New Deal.

If we really want a new deal of the cards we would have to put all that stuff on the table: all the programs, the subsidies, the handouts, the waste of the past seventy years.

And that is something that progressives like you, E.J., absolutely refuse to discuss. You won’t reform Social Security, won’t reform education. And you say nothing while disability rolls double every ten years.

If we want good jobs at good wages we are going to have to get the progressives out of the way. That is something that the voters may be getting wise to.

Leave Wal-Mart Alone, Says Poll

Stop bashing Wal-Mart, Democrats, if you want to win elections. That’s the message from a poll conducted by Democratic pollster Thomas Riehle.

By a 3-to-1 margin, 62% disapprove and only 21% approve of "Democratic candidates making Wal-Mart an issue in November's elections," in the RT Strategies poll conducted June 1-5 with a representative sample of 1,209 adults nationwide. The margin of error is + 2.7.

Here at Road to the Middle Class we have been fearless in speaking truth to the powerful over Wal-Mart. We utterly deplore the disdain and the power plays that rich, well-connected liberal and union activists have deployed against Wal-Mart. What do they know? They don’t even shop there.

The temptation to "stand up to Wal-Mart" as a campaign ploy reflects the sometimes cocooning and self-deceptive nature of Democratic Party activists. Indeed, in RT Strategies polls we consistently find that the most vociferously anti- Wal-Mart groups are Northeast and West Coast liberals who themselves rarely or never shop at Wal-Mart, shunning the retailer as not worthy of their patronage. They cannot understand how others fail to reach the same conclusion.

And now that Wal-Mart is starting to sell organic products on the cheap, the liberal rage at Wal-Mart is likely to know no bounds.

After all, the whole point of consuming organic products is the same as the point of consuming Lexuses and BMWs. It is Veblenian conspicuous consumption: You can’t afford it. In the case of organic products the line is: We pay more because it is “responsible.” It sounds very high-minded. But then high-status people always have high-minded reasons for their high-handedness. They can afford it.

By staying out of the stores themselves, anti- Wal-Mart Democrats might have missed the fact that:



• 84% of Americans shopped at Wal-Mart in the past year...



• It is not uncommon for thousands to apply when a few hundred new jobs open up at a Wal-Mart...



• The vast majority of Wal-Mart store managers rose to that post from hourly jobs on the floor.



• For the average family of shoppers, the savings at Wal-Mart are over $2,000 per year.

But who cares about all that when Wal-Mart is failing to provide first dollar health insurance coverage to its non-union employees.