Dems Can't Break the Habit

Despite their promise of moderation and transparency last November the Democrats can’t break the habit of taxing and spending, reports Senate Minority Leader John Boehner writes that the Democrats recently tried to change the House rules to allow them to vote for raising taxes without leaving their fingerprints on the vote.  That’s not what Democrats promised last year.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Ca.) said in December, “[W]e promised the American people that we would have the most honest and most open government and we will.”

It’s sad but true that political parties do not get into office on the strength of their programs.  They get into power because the voters can’t stand the other party for another minute.

Iraq: After the Americans Leave

Conservatives think that when the United States leaves Iraq that all hell will break loose, and maybe it will.

But this article from StrategyPage shows that behind all the bombs and explosions there is a slow motion civil war and sorting out process going on.

Several years of having a Shia majority running the country has instilled a confidence in the Shia community that has not been felt in generations.

Of course there’s the question of Iranian influence.  But the Iraqi Shias  are beginning to think "we can do this."  Maybe they can survive without Iran.

Another interesting thought is what “counter-insurgency” will look like after the Americans leave.  Think Hamat in Syria.

But with U.S. troops gone, the Iraqi security forces will be inclined to wage war the traditional way. That means massive use of firepower against civilians in any neighborhood where the Sunni Arab terrorists show up, or are found. In Syria, the 1982 uprising by Islamic radicals was put down, in part, by the destruction of the town of Hamat, and the massacre of over 10,000 civilians there. That was meant as a message to the rebels.

It’s a message that everyone in the Middle East remembers, and a tradition that everyone understands.  And once the Americans leave, “that will no longer be a problem.”

Who Defeated the Soviet Union?

In hindsight, everyone knew that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse.  Conservatives knew that it was the firmness of Ronald Reagan.  Liberals suddenly discovered that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse anyway—although they had cleverly avoided telling anyone before 1991.

But  Yegor Gaidar in his book, The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, has a different take.  It all started when the Bolsheviks were deciding how to develop the Soviet Union in 1928-29.  Should they allow peasant argiculture and the market system while still hanging onto political power?  Or should they choose another way?

The solution preferred by Joseph Stalin was the expropriation of peasants’ property, forced collectivization, and extraction of grain. Judging from the available documents, the essence of this decision was relatively simple. Bukharin and Rykov essentially told Stalin: "In a peasant country, it is impossible to extract grain by force. There will be civil war." Stalin answered, "I will do it nonetheless."

The problem was that the forced expropriation of grain to feed the industrialization of the cities (the strategy also used by Mao) resulted in widespread famine in the countryside.

That might be fine, temporarily, while the industrial sector got up to speed, but unfortunately, it never did.  The industrial output of the Soviet Union never came up to world-class standards. As Nikolai Ryzhkov, chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, put it

 "No one will take our machinery production. That is why we are exporting mainly raw materials."

And nobody has ever argued that the Soviets had a clue when it came to consumer products.

Fortunately, the Soviets got a lucky break in the 1970s.  The oil price explosion and oil discoveries in western Siberia enabled them to pay for grain imports by exporting oil. Then came the fateful day in 1985.

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

It cost the Soviet Union $20 billion a year that it needed by buy grain from abroad.  For a few years the Soviets were able to stay afloat by borrowing money from the West.  Then came the crunch.  The banks refused to continue lending.

Anatoly Cherniayev described the situation in Moscow in March 1991:

If [the grain] cannot be obtained somewhere, famine may come by June. . . . Moscow has probably never seen anything like that throughout its history—even in its hungriest years.

And that was the end of the Soviet Union.

So maybe now we can understand why the United States has had such a chummy relationship with the Saudis.  They threw the switch that ended the Soviet Union.

Now if only they would throw the switch on their Wahabi mosques and their poisonous imams.

Jerry Falwell and Enthusiastic Christianity

What are we to say about Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Christian pastor who founded the Moral Majority?  Was he a moral hero, pushing back against a culture of immorality?  Or was he a hate-filled bigot?  For a lot of heat, but not much light, you can read the comments section after a recollection of Falwell by R. Albert Mohler Jr. here.

The facts of Falwell’s life, as reported by Kristen Gelineau, are these.

Falwell, who started a fundamentalist church in an abandoned bottling plant in Lynchburg in 1956 with just 35 members, built it into a religious empire that included the 24,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, the "Old Time Gospel Hour" carried on TV stations around the country, and 9,600-student Liberty University, which he founded in 1971 as Lynchburg Baptist College.

But what did it all mean?  The best place I have found is James M. Ault, Jr’s Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church—as experienced, we should say, by a liberal sociologist at the very apogee of the Moral Majority in 1983-84.

The pastor of the Shawmut River Baptist Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, was Frank Valenti, who started out as an Italian Catholic.  He’d barely learned to read in school and was badly wounded in Vietnam.  It was when lying wounded that he got religion, and ended up studying to be a pastor at Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg.

The curriculum at the college was heavy on hands-on education and light on academics, but “its modest reading assignments proved too much for Frank.”  But still, he graduated and founded his own Baptist church in Worcester.

Like Frank, the people drawn to fundamentalist Christianity are people on the cusp of literacy.  They are people making the transition from the culture of the spoken word to the culture of the written word.  And Bible study is the center of the experience, for it is through reading and discussing the Bible that fundamentalist Christians negotiate the transition from the world of the spoken word (tradition means passing on knowledge with the spoken word) to the world of the written word.

And reading is a challenge for them. “Wow, I skipped a whole bunch of words there,” says one man at Bible study.

Reading itself proved a challenge for others around the table, too, especially the men, whose time and attention at school had often been more limited than the women’s.

But the combination of reading and discussion creates a new culture. Here is one of the church members, Phil Strong.

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us answers.  He would open up God’s word and say, “OK, here’s what God has for you.’”

It is important to appreciate the radical nature of what has happened to a person who says that.  They are living right at the intersection of the traditional world of the spoken word and the newly experience world of the written word.  It is an experience that we, who cannot imagine an illiterate world, can barely grasp.

But of course to many the culture of the fundamentalist church is something to be stamped out.  As one Newsweek commenter wrote:

Jerry Falwell was a parasite who fed on fear, ignorance, and bigotry.

Well, yes—if you believe that exploration and creativity and tolerance are the most important, maybe the only values.  But fundamentalist Christianity is not for people in that kind of mind space. 

Fundamentalist or enthusiastic Christianity for people experiencing the “leap in being” from the world of power and powerlessness to the world of rules.  That is why it flourishes in the favelas of South America and the slums of southern Africa.

And for millions of people, it is the Bible and the desire to read it and understand it that brings them to literacy.

Entrepreneurs and Media Dinosaurs

Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is proabably as good and energetic an interviewer as you’ll get to hear.  He can disembowel a pompous MSMer as quick as a Mexican immigrant can dress a chicken in a meat-packing plant.

But he’s also good at interviewing to bring his interviewee out, as in this radio interview with Michael S. Malone, author of Bill and Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company.  The way Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard did it came to be called the HP Way:

It’s called the HP way, and it’s several things. One of it is it’s a culture built on trust, all the way from the two partners trusting each other completely, down through the entire organization, where you trust people to make their own decisions, and you put the employees first, and innovation right behind, and you drive your way forward by empowering your people to do the right thing. It’s a powerful culture. It’s unbelievable at its peak.

Above all, Bill and Dave had no nostaglia for buildings or for products.

If a product stopped being profitable, they got rid of it. They got rid of buildings, they changed locations. The only continuity in their management career, and the reason they ended up on top, and are as famous as they are, is because they put their employees first.

This has become a commonplace today.  We all say that a company is only as good as its people.  But back in the heyday of the high industrial age, people thought that capital, resources, and labor went together to make prosperity.  Now we know that resources and capital are second-tier.  It is human capital that is everything.

So then we come to the newspaper industry.  Says Malone:

A couple of years ago, I got into a lot of trouble, because I was maybe the first guy to actually come out and say newspapers are all going to die. And luckily, Rupert Murdoch came along two weeks later, and took all the flak from me with his speech. But what set me off was I realized I hadn’t read a newspaper in six months.

In the newspaper they are hanging onto their product, the physical newspaper, and the printing plant out back like grim death.

And what I noticed reading this story about Lileks and the Star Tribune was, and I’m an old newspaper man, 30 years writing for newspapers now, it’s that they’re still attached to the printing plant out back, to the trucks that deliver the newspapers, to the linoleum in the newsroom.

And what are they doing?  They are giving their senior talent golden parachutes and sending them out the door. (Of course, they probably have no option, since newspapers are union shops.)  They are hanging onto the legacy hardware and sending the talent away.

Malone went over to the business school at Oxford University and he gave them a speech.

I gave a big speech on entrepreneurship, and the power of entrepreneurship, and how I thought it was the single most important phenomenon of modern times, and that entrepreneurship needed to be cultivated. It was the source of all the new jobs in the world, the source of almost all the innovation, and yet entrepreneurs had no constituents.

It’s the great issue of our times.  The entrepreneurial model is changing the face of the workplace, but government is still doing the command-and-control thing.

Sooner or later, something’s got to give.

Riling Up the Republican Base

The art of politics is to divide up the electorate neatly into 51-49, with 51 percent for our side.  You want to fire up your base, encourage moderatew with your message of hope, and put the other base to sleep.

But Democrats seem to be working hard to fire up the Republican base.  First of all,  The Prowler reports, the Democrats are planning to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine that requires  “both sides” of an issue to be aired on the public airwaves.  And the reason seems to be pure politics.

"First, [Democrats] failed on the radio airwaves with Air America, no one wanted to listen," says a senior adviser to Pelosi. "Conservative radio is a huge threat and political advantage for Republicans and we have had to find a way to limit it. Second, it looks like the Republicans are going to have someone in the presidential race who has access to media in ways our folks don’t want, so we want to make sure the GOP has no advantages going into 2008."

Look Democrats, if you want to do one thing that would really rile up the Republican base, go ahead, make my day.

Then there’s the Democratic plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire.  According to the Heritage Foundation:

As it currently stands, the House budget resolu­tion proposes to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, which could potentially cause the average taxpayer to face an additional $3,026 in taxes. Further, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire could cause great damage to the economy, reducing both job creation and economic growth.

Last time the Democrats increased taxes, in 1993 the result was immediate.  The voters chose in 1994 a Republican Congress.

Maybe the Democrats are doing these things because that’s the only tune they know how to play.

But I’d say that the strategic thing to do would be to keep the Republican base fast asleep and discouraged.

After all, the Democrats spend something like $2.5 trillion in taxes a year on pensions, health care, education, and welfare.  Isn’t that enough to keep their supporters at home?

Let's Throw Good Money After Bad

Yes.  Give us a billion here and a billion there and we could really solve the high-school dropout problem.  That’s about what Education Secretary Spellings is proposing, according to Donald Lambro.

Back in the 1960s President Kennedy pointed out that four in ten youngsters did not finish high school.

"Forty-four years later, the dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic and Native American students approaches 50 percent. We are wasting not just lives but time," Mrs. Spellings said in an address to the National Summit on America’s Silent Epidemic

 Secretary Spellings has a solution.

Mrs. Spellings proposes Title I spending in President Bush’s No Child Left Behind reauthorization be increased another $1 billion "to improve and strengthen our public high schools serving low-income students."

Like that’s going to help.

Look, we know why kids are failing high school and high schools are failing kids.  It is part of the whole welfare state syndrome.

• Why bother to work in school when many low-income women can use the welfare system to get support?
• Why bother to work in school when women are available to you—without having to demonstrate the ability to get a “decent” job?
• Why bother to educate kids when your job is pretty well guaranteed for life?

And so on.  The problem is that we don’t know what kind of schools low-income parents want.  We don’t know what kind of schools would best prepare low-income kids for a productive life.

All we know is what the experts have told us and what the education monopoly has bullied us into funding.

Imagine that the auto industry had been run by university professors and union leaders for the last 160 years. 

That’s the point.  What schools need is what everyone needs: open competition for the votes of the consumers.