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Lesson for policymakers: China is incapable of combating food and drug fraud, which has implications for us here in America

Roger Bate is the Legatum Fellow at AEI.

Congress should investigate the increasing danger of Chinese food and drug imports so that remedies can be found to lower risks

Yet another food scandal is gripping China. On Monday tons of melamine-contaminated milk products were seized from warehouses in Chongqing, a vast municipal area with 35 million inhabitants. The tainted milk powder would have made tons of pastry and ice-cream; fortunately most of it was caught before any serious damage occurred.

But according to London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, Chongqing is awash in fraudulent foodstuffs: “some 917 cases were already under investigation in Chongqing including the use of the textile dye, Rhodamine B, in broad bean paste; the discovery of formalin, an industrial preserving and clotting agent, in the city’s famed hotpot restaurants and industrial carbon dioxide to carbonate beer."

The milk problem is the largest concern however and it is the tenth serious food scandal in just the past few years. It provides more evidence of the inability of China’s officials, corporations and consumers to prevent lethal production.

Beijing knows it has a problem and this week, 7,900 Chongqing police raided 600 premises across the city suspected of producing illegal or fake food and pharmaceuticals. Sources say this action was a bid to restore confidence in the health authorities. To coincide with the raids, city officials announced a 100-day crackdown on illicit activity, not unlike the one that preceded the Olympics in 2008 – the last time China was gripped by the fear of melamine in its milk products.

In 2008, three babies died and 300,000 others were sickened by melamine-tainted milk. Chinese authorities initially ignored the problem of contaminated milk, then tried to cover it up once the story broke, and finally over reacted by executing two executives it identified as being guilty.

This was probably the final straw in destroying the already fragile public trust in the government’s ability to keep food and drug supply safe. Even when Beijing is right it is ignored: government pleas to a nervous population to stop buying useless products, which were being touted as unnecessary remedies for radiation from Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, had no effect.

Even though high level officials have demanded a robust response to the latest milk problem, few Chinese think much will be done. Part of this is because the rhetoric remains the same as in 2008. Vice-Premier Li Keqiang, says his committee on food safety will ensure “a firm attitude, iron hand and more effort” in addressing safety concerns, and reiterated that this included the use of capital punishment. But with the threat of death looming over Chinese company directors, contamination continues – the ultimate sanction means little if enforcement is arbitrary and often pathetic.

At fault is not the occasional bad corporate apple, but the entire Chinese Communist business system. It encourages corner cutting, provides no substantial reward for integrity, doesn’t protect brands (domestic or foreign), so consumers have no meaningful market signals to respond to. After all, if brands are faked the consumer cannot rely on switching from one brand to another in the search for safety. Even when harmed, consumers have little recourse since China has no real rule of law. And capricious law enforcement means that the very best candidates are not attracted to government roles because they may be subject to the same arbitrary decision making.

Yet over the past decade, while Chinese people have progressively lost trust in their government’s oversight of food and drug production, westerners have imported more food and vastly more pharmaceutical ingredients from China than before. In 2002 US imported $1.9 billion in food and drug products from China, last year it was $6.85 billion.

There are good reasons for this, China’s ingredients are cheaper than anywhere else on the planet and most are perfectly fine. Our drugs would be a lot more expensive if we didn’t buy from China.
Western buyers are perhaps naïve in buying cheap Chinese products, implicitly assuming  that cost savings are made through lower labor costs and large economies of scale, not through systemic corner cutting. But few Chinese manufacturers have embraced the culture of safety. Western company executives are used to ticking boxes, and complying with regulations that sometimes have little meaning.  For example, a western pharmaceutical manufacturer must buy ingredients from an audited and approved site of good manufacturing practice because that is what the rules state (and it also makes sense). But company executives continue to do so even when that approved site might well be getting its ingredients from a shoddy unapproved unhygienic plant down the road (this certainly doesn’t make sense). This is such a major systemic problem in pharmaceutical production in China that maybe as much as a third of ingredients going to western companies come from unknown and hence probably non-approved locations. Last there is a fiction that the Chinese food and drug authority (SFDA) can actively regulate the market.
The SFDA is still reeling from the execution of its previous director for taking bribes from companies to overlook their quality failings. SFDA is trying to control a system which breeds corruption and has to operate over vast areas with insufficient manpower – partly because the pharmaceutical industry is growing faster than China can train inspectors. So it simply cannot oversee most of the industry, never mind the broader legal and political impediments. The US FDA has established an office in China and is increasing investigations of the plants that export to US, but at best it can only assess each site once every 13 years.

With little realistic oversight, and more importantly, little ethos of business integrity in China, a major tragedy in the US from a Chinese export is likely in the near future. And it will probably be far greater than the calamity that killed 149 Americans with contaminated heparin, a blood thinning drug, imported from China. The heparin was quality checked when it reached the US manufacturer, but the contamination was impossible to detect with the tests which were then recommended. The fraudsters could have been very lucky, but it seems more likely they chose a cunning and sophisticated method deliberately to cheat the system. The problem was only suspected after people started to die.

Yet, even after the heparin disaster, US interests imported $289 million more Chinese pharmaceutical ingredients in 2010 than in 2008. And we are already seeing more product recalls, I suspect as a result. But someday soon, the price of another disaster may be too high for American politicians to ignore.

A 20-something voter explains why Mitch Daniels is the ideal candidate for 2012

Miles Taylor has written for The Chicago Tribune, The World Politics Review, The Daily Caller, and Arms Control Today. He works in the U.S House of Representatives and previously served in the Department of Homeland Security. He is co-founder and senior editor at Partisans.org.

Haley Barbour is out. The Mississippi governor announced this week that he would not seek the presidency, surprising many in the Republican Party establishment. The announcement left observers on the right feeling pessimistic (again) about the lackluster start to the 2012 campaign.

Barbour’s exit from the stage has led to some soul-searching. Will our party put forward a serious presidential candidate? Is anyone bold enough and experienced enough to take on the task? To hopeful observers, there is an answer — and all eyes are turning to the Midwest.

Indiana’s budget-slashing, motorcycle-riding governor, Mitch Daniels, has emerged as a quiet favorite — not simply because he appeals to Barbour's now-adrift supporters, but because the Hoosier politician is the party's single best hope for re-taking the White House in 2012.

Party insiders have, for months, fantasized about Daniels as a leading contender for the nomination — and his stock has gone up quickly in recent weeks. His was the first name on the lips of former Vice President Dick Cheney when discussing the race, and Daniels’ former boss, George W. Bush, is said to have privately urged him to run.

Yet even his closest advisers remain mystified about whether he will enter the race. Indeed, Daniels has stayed true to his word that he wouldn’t speculate about a presidential run until the end of Indiana’s current legislative session.

But the wait will soon be over. The state’s general assembly wraps up its work this week, having passed a legislative package pushed through by Daniels that includes a balanced budget, tax relief, and a school voucher program — initiatives branded by news outlets as “ready-made for a Republican campaign.”

There could be no better time for Daniels to announce his candidacy than after proving, yet again, that he has become one of the most effective governors in the nation. In his six years as governor, Daniels has amassed a stunning record, for which he was named a “Public Official of the Year” in 2008 by Governing Magazine. That record is ready to be showcased to the Republican base and, more importantly, the broader American electorate.

Daniels brings to the table real executive experience. Americans care about this now more than ever, particularly after witnessing the consequences of electing a president whose executive experience consisted of running a Senate office — the management equivalent of overseeing a medium-sized McDonald’s.

Mitch Daniels ran a Senate office, too, as Sen. Dick Lugar’s chief of staff, but did so at the beginning of his career. Since then, he has overseen a major think tank, a Fortune 500 company, the White House Office of Management and Budget (and America’s three-trillion dollar budget) under President Bush, and the state of Indiana.

Daniels also has a stronger domestic policy record than any of his potential opponents — and is a fiscal conservative’s dream. He entered office facing a $600 million budget deficit and in one year turned it into a $300 million surplus. During the recession, Indiana was one of the few states to emerge in the black after Daniels cut nearly $2 billion in spending. It’s tough to find a candidate with better credentials for tackling the country’s fiscal woes. At the same time, the governor was able to attract tens of thousands of new jobs to the state through his innovative Indiana Economic Development Corporation.

He has also been a forceful advocate for de-regulation to improve America’s economy.

“The regulatory rainforest through which our enterprises must hack their way is blighting the future of millions of Americans,” the governor declared in a recent speech. “Today’s EPA should be renamed the ‘Employment Prevention Agency.’ After a two-year orgy of new regulation, President Obama’s recent executive order [to reduce regulation] was a wonderment, as though the number- one producer of rap music had suddenly expressed alarm about obscenity.”

Limited-government conservatives will be excited to note that Daniels used variations of the word “freedom” roughly 30 times in the same speech.

Daniels’ record also demonstrates a passion for real solutions to manageable problems. “Purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers,” Daniels likes to say. And he has shown a willingness to compromise in order to achieve his broader policy goals, including the successful launch of health savings accounts in Indiana, a plan to cut taxes (and to automatically return money to Hoosiers when the state runs surpluses), and bold education reforms that feature vouchers for low-income students and merit-pay for public school teachers.

Mitch Daniels is not only the “hand-in-glove” candidate to fix today’s public policy challenges, but he is the ideal leader to help shape tomorrow’s America—the America that current 20-somethings want to live in one day.  Our generation is hungry for a candidate that refuses, again and again until he is blue in the face, to pass the buck onto his children.  We are watching— and judging—our nation’s leaders on these issues, particularly whether they decide to leave America’s fiscal train wreck on our doorstep.

Obama may have swept the youth vote in 2008.  But Mitch Daniels can give him a run for his money with the Twitter generation in 2012.  Daniels talks the best game in town when it comes to confronting issues head-on that young people care about, has a proven record of addressing them, and—yes—he even rides a motorcycle.

Republican skeptics are concerned that Daniels is a “blank slate” on foreign policy, though. This may be true, but we don’t have to guess hard at what a Mitch Daniels foreign policy would look like. He was a top advisor to the president who ended the Cold War, Ronald Reagan, and was a member of the National Security Council of one of the most ardent democracy supporters to have ever occupied the Oval Office, George W. Bush. He has also offered praise for both presidents’ “peace through strength” policies.

But perhaps the best sign that Mitch Daniels would be a great candidate is his hesitance to seek higher office. As Plato famously noted, the ideal leader is the reluctant one — the one that doesn’t hunger for power and prestige. At an early age, Daniels demonstrated this quality, turning down an appointment to a vacant U.S. Senate seat, afraid it would take him away from his young family. Now he is being drafted again, this time to run for the nation’s highest office.

Daniels is the ultimate counterweight to the current president on everything from balancing the budget to fixing America’s economy, and he would electrify the Republican field and young voters. The only problem now is getting him into the ring. America needs a “Mitch Daniels” to join the fight now more than ever. And this week or next, we’ll find out whether we get one.

A version of this article appeared on Partisans.org.

How we care for orphans as a society shows what kind of society we are

 
Jedd Medefind formerly led the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives, and now serves as President of the Christian Alliance for Orphans.

“Government makes a very poor parent,” lamented a friend recently.  She’s served children in the U.S. foster system for three decades and wasn’t dismissing government’s role in protecting children from abuse.  She’d just seen too many times to count that bureaucracy, regulations and hired hands cannot provide the things children need most. 

This awareness of limitation, however—disappointing as it is for many government planners—also gives shape to a positive vision.  To do right by foster youth and orphans worldwide, we must not seek a single “grand solution.”  Rather, we must look first to caring families, especially those supported by a community of faith.

My friend’s observation about the inadequacy of large-scale parenting is affirmed by the research.  The statistics awaiting young adults who “emancipate” from the U.S. foster system without being adopted are sheer tragedy.  By their mid-20s, less than half are employed.  More than 80 percent of males have been arrested, versus 17 percent overall.  With women, 68 percent are on food stamps, compared to 7 percent overall.  As a lead researcher concluded after a sweeping 2010 study, “We took them away from their parents on the assumption that we as a society would do a better job of raising them.  We’ve invested a lot money and time in their care, and by many measures they’re still doing very poorly.”  

This reality is just as evident globally.  Studies almost universally show that even short stints in orphanages can produce a spectrum of negative consequences, from stunted size and intellect to emotional trauma.  One startling yet representative study in Romania by Harvard professor Charles Nelson found that up to age 3, children’s IQ decreased by nearly one point for every two months spent in an orphanage.                 

All this is not to say that large scale efforts to care for orphans are not required.  Physical needs like food, water and medicine can—and sometimes must—be effectively addressed by large institutions.  But for a child to thrive, not merely survive, much more is needed.  These are things government simply cannot provide:  the love and nurture of family.

This realization ties us in a Gordian knot.  We have a mass scale need that cannot be solved en masse.  Roughly 500,000 children live in the U.S. foster system.  Globally, 18.3 million orphans have lost both parents.  Yet meeting their fundamental needs is best done one child at a time, with the open hearts and homes of caring families.  No bureaucracy, no assembly-line service delivery, no government declaration can produce that. 

So it is that faith convictions must play a defining role.  Simply put, the morality of a God-empty universe requires only that we ensure our own genes survive.  The sacrifices required to love an orphan or foster youth are, quite simply, too great.  This is especially true in light of the wounds many carry, from physical deformity to emotional trauma.  The strongest, perhaps only, motivation sufficient to embrace this challenge is an animating conviction that every child is created in the image of God and of immeasurable worth.  Likewise, it is the faith community sharing such convictions that can provide the support and practical aid a family needs to walk this joyful-but-challenging road.

Does all this suggest governments and large NGOs have no role?  Certainly not.  It’s just that any serious approach to improving outcomes for foster youth in the U.S. and orphans worldwide must center on families.  In the U.S., this includes strategies that promote and incentivize adoption as top priorities, including tax credits and active recruiting.  It also requires lowering bureaucratic hurdles that currently make both adoption and fostering painfully complex.  To enlist those families most likely to participate, it’s vital that religious agencies and individuals be welcomed and respected.

Globally, orphan initiatives must also emphasize family-based solutions.  At the front end, micro-credit, health and related efforts that help keep families intact are vital.  When needed, orphanages should be used primarily for transitional care.   Ultimately, a full spectrum of responses should include local adoption and foster families, small orphan homes, and (whenever local families are not available) inter-country adoption. 

What this can look like is increasingly visible across the U.S. and beyond.  In Colorado, church families have taken the lead role in caring for foster youth—cutting the number of “waiting” children by more than 50 percent in two years.  Similar church-based efforts can be seen from Florida to Arkansas to Illinois to Texas.  These and countless other churches are involved globally as well—including inter-country adoption, international church-to-church orphan care partnerships, and support of indigenous adoption movements from Ukraine to Ethiopia. 

Children facing the world without parents know profound want, and a vast spectrum of creative, compassionate responses are certainly needed.  But if we are serious about meeting their deepest needs, no mass-produced solution will suffice.  It must happen one by one, in the homes of families motivated by faith and love to transform the life of a child.

Poverty is about unemployment, dropping out, and having children outside marriage - and we spend billions on almost everything except these

Tevi Troy is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former Deputy Secretary of HHS and senior White House aide.

The changing reality in Washington regarding the need for and inevitability of budget cuts has poverty advocates worried. According to the CATO Institute’s Michael Tanner, there are 122 different federal anti-poverty programs, spending well over $500 billion annually, which opens up a lot of opportunities for budget cuts, especially within duplicative or ineffective programs.

Republicans are understandably wary of how this budget war may play out: Lyndon Johnson’s creation of a national war on poverty has long put Republicans on the defensive when it comes to the issue of fighting poverty. But this need not be the case, especially since the face of poverty has changed considerably since the 1960s, and in ways that make conservatives better equipped to handle the problem.

The formula for avoiding poverty in the 1960s was to provide transfer payments for those unable to work, largely widows and retirees. Social Security and more widespread pension and 401(k) accounts have reduced the age of poverty, making seniors a smaller component of the poor than they were in 1960. According to the Census Bureau, approximately 35% of Americans over 65 were below the poverty line  in1959.  By 2009, that number had shrunk to 8.9%.  In 1959, working age Americans, those between 18 and 64, were the least likely to be poor. Today, it is the elderly.

The new face of poverty has created its own formula for fighting it, one laid out by my former White House colleague Ron Haskins and his coauthor Isabelle Sawhill in their book, Creating an Opportunity Society. According to an article Haskins and Sawhill wrote in the Washington Post summarizing their research: “if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children.”  As Haskins and Sawhill put it, “If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent.”

Transfer payments may have been the Democrats’ bailiwick, but these recommendations, -- work, finish school, and don’t have children out of wedlock – are more in the Republicans’ ballpark.  Welfare reform is one example of how Republicans, with Bill Clinton’s eventual assistance, employed the conservative principle of work requirements to help encourage employment among populations that too often lacked work incentives.  While some critics warned that welfare reform would drive people to homelessness and despair, the program has been a success.  As Haskins wrote in a 2006 article: “Between 1994 and 2004, the caseload declined about 60 percent, a decline that is without precedent.”

Unfortunately, we have had less success in recent years on the other two legs of the anti-poverty stool. High school graduation rates – measured by students earning a diploma in the standard four year -- peaked at 77% in 1969.  The numbers have also declined in recent years, hovering around 69% in 2007.  This differs from the high school completion rate, which measures whether individuals 18-24 have received a high school degree of GED, regardless of the time frame.

This figure stands at a more robust 89.9% overall, although the Hispanic rate is a worrisome 75.5%. Whichever figure you use, the economic results for someone getting that high school degree are considerably better than for the non-completers.  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2008, the median income of someone 18 to 67 who has completed high school was $19,000 higher than for non-graduates.  This translates to a $630,000 lifetime penalty for not completing high school.

Out of wedlock births are a problem as well. The percentage of births to unmarried mothers reached 40.6% in 2008, up from 18.4% in 1980. This figure continues to challenge anti-poverty efforts, and constitutes the weakest leg of the anti-poverty stool.  It is also the challenge that presents policy makers with the fewest tools for combating the phenomenon.  Even though Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned of this problem in his 1965 report on the state of black families, our policymakers have yet to come up with a workable solution for this growing problem.

To the extent that poverty remains an issue today, it is not for lack of trying by the federal government, as shown by the $13 trillion the U.S. government has spent thus far in the War on Poverty.  As we enter a season of retrenchment and necessary budget cuts, policymakers should take advantage of the opportunity to rethink things and end the diffuse approach that has led to these 122 separate programs.

Instead, we should create a more focused, consolidated method that focuses on shrinking the three main predictors of poverty in America today: dropping out, unemployment, and out of wedlock births.

American greatness rests on American opportunity: let's go beyond compassionate conservatism to a new level

Mark Rodgers is the Principal of The Clapham Group and Managing Director of Wedgwood Circle – two companies that seek to influence culture upstream of the political arena.

I am a Republican.  For six years I was the third-ranking leadership staffer in the United State Senate.  I am a conservative.  For sixteen years I served as former Senator Rick Santorum’s (R-PA) top staffer.  And I am hopeful. 

With new leadership in Congress and a new Presidential cycle underway, we have an opportunity for conservative Republicans to articulate a new vision. A vision for the millions of Americans pushed off the plateau of prosperity into the abyss of economic hardship marked by a 9% unemployment rate that has haunted our nation for the past three years. This new vision is one of American greatness, of American opportunity. American opportunity is unique because we believe American prosperity is based on the quality of our character, not our background or our birth.

Yet this vision, this dream, is only true to the extent that it is a reality. And it seems that today American opportunity is a reality for fewer and fewer people. For if opportunity is available to all, those who have the character and the competency to thrive should. Yet indicators of social mobility, which are an important proxy for opportunity, do not show the dream of American opportunity in practice.  42% of Americans born into the bottom fifth of the population stay there, higher than many other Western countries including the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden.[1]  

Sadly, the bipartisan silence from Hill and Administration makes you wonder if anyone is paying attention as this dream dissolves into faint echoes. Republicans should take a cue from the British Prime Minister David Cameron and seize the high ground, championing opportunity for all, particularly the least of among us. It is right and it is a winning strategy.

For years on the Hill I was active with Republican efforts to frame the issues of domestic and international poverty and opportunity, as well as human rights from a conservative prism of principles and policies.  There is no question that the best poverty fighting and opportunity promoting policy is a job-creation policy, but as my former boss used to say: “a rising tide does lift all boats, unless they have holes in them.”  There are systemic issues that need to be addressed, and conservative Republicans are in an important position to articulate a vision and propose policies for those who are sinking while others are rising.

We have done this before, and with great success.  Here at home, welfare reform is considered the most consequential social policy of the latter quarter of the 20^th century. Welfare roles were cut dramatically and large numbers of people were incentivized to work, breaking generational cycles of dependency and poverty. Abroad, one of President Bush’s (and America’s) lasting legacies has been the remarkably successful effort to arrest global growth of AIDS, reverse the alarming trend and care for the individuals, families and communities devastated by the disease.

“Compassionate Conservatism” was a framework to organize this conversation for conservatives.  Yet its definition was both too small and too big.  Some saw it as just a hand out to faith-based groups, while for others the term erroneously came to symbolize the growth in government spending and deficits under Republican control of the Congress and White House.  Both views are inaccurate, but sadly they have hurt any subsequent efforts to rearticulate a vision for the poor.

It is time for conservatives to again organize and cast a vision for the marginalized, the displaced, the enslaved and for the least of these, based on conservative principles and understandings of government, society and human nature. Why? Because it is in these solutions that the path to opportunity and prosperity lies.

Over the next several weeks, we have organized a conversation to give voice to the voiceless.  We will create space for informed and prominent conservative voices to share their thoughts and policy recommendations on a spectrum of issues. We will then finish with a vision, a statement, a framework, and a rallying cry for conservatives who want to show how we love our neighbors as ourselves. For it is precisely because we love them that we are compelled to articulate ways of promoting opportunity for them.

And hopefully, our leaders will listen. Yet if we can’t persuade our colleagues on moral or policy grounds to join us, we hope to at least convince them that there is a voter rich community who cares and is invested in the conversation. Faith-filled Evangelicals and Catholics.  Hispanics and African Americans.  Generations Y and X.  And the growing disenfranchised, many of whom are looking not just for a physical home, but an ideological one with solutions to our social ills that work. They are looking for “solutions of opportunity” that harness the ingenuity and determination of all Americans to achieve prosperity, not a reliance on government bureaucracy that fosters dependency.

---

[1] Haskins, R & Sawhill, B, Creating an Opportunity Society, Brookings Institution, 2009, p. 66

Herb London: Alexander Hamilton lives on in the brilliant Pack-Brookhiser documentary

Herbert London is president of the Hudson Institute and author of the book Decline and Revival in Higher Education (Transaction Publishers).
 
It may be hard to believe but Alexander Hamilton lives. He lives in a brilliant documentary biopic directed and produced by Michael Pack and written and hosted by Richard Brookhiser. This documentary recaptures Hamilton’s birth in Nevis, his military exploits in Yorktown, his fiscal policies on Wall Street and his duel on the Palisades of the Hudson River.
 
Hamilton was a man for all seasons and in keeping with his versatility the film features themes that shaped and molded Hamilton’s extraordinary life.
 
As America’s first Treasury Secretary Hamilton saved a debt-ridden nation from bankruptcy by establishing the legitimacy of the dollar. To test this hypothesis the filmmakers interviewed a contemporary Treasury Secretary. As one of the three authors of the Federalist Papers which set the stage for the Constitution, Hamilton created the legal and political architecture for the new nation. In keeping with their desire for a contemporary flair, the host interviewed a Supreme Court Justice to get his take on the Federalist Papers.
 
Hamilton was a man of great passion as evidenced by this illicit love affair and provoking the Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr into a duel which ultimately cost his life.
 
It is instructive and clever that the host interviewed gang members in an effort to discover the consequences of disrespect. The comments prove to be insightful and illuminating.
 
As I see it, this film is a model for a documentary style that links the past to the present. Hamilton isn’t merely a Founding Father, he is with us on the Columbia campus, at the New York Post, at Washington’s side and in the inner sanctum of government.
 
The Pack-Brookhiser film breathes with freshness. This is not a stuffy history that recounts 18th century America. It is an American tale that is timeless set against a backdrop in which the present reaches back to find clues about the past.
 
Statues are ghosts of the past, reminders of history. But a film that shines on the present to discover antecedents, lives. The pornographers, prisoners, warriors and calypso singers discuss money, rights, privilege, honor, sex and battle. They offer voice to the episodes in Hamilton’s colorful life and texture for the decisions Hamilton made.
 
Hamilton was Washington’s amanuensis, his confidente. He recorded what the Father of Our Nation said and did. Yet he was more than a secretary; he was a guide and a leader. With that thought in mind the filmmakers plumb the depths of human experience to understand leadership and kindred souls who work together for a common goal, in this case the establishment of a new nation.
 
Alexander Hamilton was a quintessential New Yorker. From the Hudson to the East River, from the Battery to Harlem, Hamilton had a presence on every acre of Manhattan. Wall Street pays obeisance to him every day and the Caribbean islands where he was born and was raised convey rhythm Hamilton delivered to his adopted land.
 
Hamilton did not die a rich man, although he could have used his position to enrich himself. He was a man of integrity who set the temperament for a great nation. The spirit of exceptionalism that I believe still resides in the United States was the gift Hamilton and his confreres gave to the new nation. That spirit, that idiosyncratic sense of liberty, is what inspired this film and what makes it such a dramatic achievement. 

James Guthrie: An effective teacher in the life of a child for 3 years = closing the achievement gap in America

James Guthrie is senior fellow and director of education policy at the George W. Bush Institute and a professor of education at Southern Methodist University.

Recently, the country has watched a governor who promised voters to get the state budget under control clash with union protestors and state legislators.  While the protests will pass, the fundamental issues will not soon disappear. In Wisconsin, as in other states where resource quarrels are beginning to occur, education spending remains the biggest item in the state budget.  It is clear that states can only start to live within their means by restraining growth in education expenditures.  At a time when we realize that America’s children ought to be receiving a far better educational experience than they do, this reality is difficult to face.

The truth is that it’s possible to pursue higher standards for education and better educational outcomes for our children while reducing school budgets.  How? By making courageous policy choices in education, and choosing policies proven by research and experience.

Fortunately, we know what these policies are. Many teachers and principals are bringing excellence to students in city and rural school districts alike, helping students – disadvantaged students most of all – reach new heights of achievement.  Their efforts are backed by academic research which shows how new schooling methods can be deployed effectively even under financial austerity. Best of all, most of the reforms proven effective by these schools and teachers can be adopted by using the same resources, just differently. 

We can identify the most productive teachers with new data systems that measure results.  If every underachieving student in America could have an instructionally effective teacher three years in a row, we could come close to closing the achievement gap afflicting economically disadvantaged children. Equally important, however, is this fact: being taught by an ineffective teacher three years in a row places a student in substantial lifetime jeopardy. 

We can drop expensive practices that don’t work, such as paying for teacher seniority and advanced academic degrees that are unrelated to student needs. Current school district incentive systems pay teachers annual increments for Masters Degrees unrelated to subject matter assignments. Hundreds of thousands of America’s teachers have administrative degrees, with little likelihood or interest of ever managing a school.

We can document how student learning is impaired when new, rather than ineffective, teachers are laid off.  A new study shows that 36% of teachers in Seattle receiving layoff notices were estimated to be more effective than teachers whose jobs were not at risk. That same study illustrated that layoffs relying on teacher effectiveness, rather than seniority, resulted in 10% fewer jobs lost. Seeing as how under seniority-based systems students lose 2-4 months’ worth of learning in a year following layoffs, that’s a win-win for students and teachers.

We know that the quest for an “ideal” class size has absorbed hundreds of billions of dollars.  We also know that there is no association (after 3rd grade) between small classes and student achievement. A change as simple as returning pupil teacher ratios to their 2000 nationwide level, 16 students to each educational professional (compared to the 2007 levels of 15:1), would save 25-30 billion dollars a year.

The status quo that some are fighting to protect has not shown any more effectiveness in delivering educational quality than it has delivered fiscal responsibility.  In truth, the most responsible practices for fiscal management turn out to deliver the best educational result for our children. We don’t need to wait for a superman to make these changes – we just need to run schools in a way that manages resources efficiently and delivers the best outcome for every American student. 

Herb London: Animosity for the American way of life is the only thing that can explain the academy's embrace of a sharia-espousing imam

Herbert London is president of the Hudson Institute and author of the book Decline and Revival in Higher Education (Transaction Publishers).
 
Hucksterism is alive and well and residing at Divinity Schools in universities across the country. In fact, these institutions designed to provide instruction on religious practice have become centers for the promotion of leftist ideology and now Islamism.
 
On March 23 Imam Feisal Rauf, founder and chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, what some have called the mosque at the World Trade Center site, spoke at Yale on “religious tolerance and interfaith cooperation.” The discussion, organized by Jews and Muslims at Yale, was moderated by Rabbi James Ponet, head of the Slifka Center for Jewish Life.
 
Imam Rauf has received international attention for the Cordoda Initiative with adherents and opponents aroused by the ensuing controversy. Rauf claims to foster strong ties and friendship among different religious faiths, but in all instances the understanding is a one-way street with Jews presumably coming to appreciate the unique contributions of Islam.
 
Having heard Imam Rauf speak, his soft and mellifluous tone conceals positions consistent with radical Islam. For example, during deliberations about the mosque near the World Trade Center site, Rauf refused to criticize Hamas as a terrorist organization, even though it is listed as a terrorist group by our State Department. He refuses as well to recognize the incompatibility between sharia – which he espouses – and Constitutional precedents in the United States.
 
Rauf attempts to convince his audience of his ironic intentions with reference to his enthusiasm for the New York Giants football team, his having grown up in New Jersey and his love of the United States. But what remains unclear, in fact what is intentionally enigmatic, is whether this love of America trumps his love for Islam and the totalistic demands of the religion.
 
Moreover, there is an inherent hypocrisy in his approach that the left wing Divinity School embraces as well. While there is much said about understanding and cooperation, the onus is put on Jewish students to appreciate Islam, but there isn’t any expectation that Muslims should learn to appreciate the Judeo-Christian tradition of the West.
 
Islam relies on the Constitutional guarantee of the First Amendment to challenge the most basic and fundamental precepts of constitutionalism. Islam does not recognize the separation of church and state. Islam doesn’t have any provision for the protection of individual rights. Islam systematically subjugates women and refuses to offer them the full protection of the law. Are these conditions which should be embraced by the Jews at Yale’s Divinity School?
 
Admittedly there are portions of the Koran which display a desire for cooperation in what is sometimes described as the Mecca period. However, Islam also applies the law of abrogation suggesting that what came later (even though the Koran is not written chronologically) is be superordinated over what came earlier. As a consequence, the Medina period in which violence is advocated and Verses of the Sword are regarded as more significant than the earlier peaceful episode in Islam’s evolution.
 
But did Imam Rauf mention this matter in his peroration? Of course not. Will Yale students challenge him on this matter? Of course not. Will this event be heralded as a peaceful exchange designed to promote understanding? Of that I haven’t the slightest doubt.
 
In fact, this should be described as Rauf’s Grand Sharia Tour Across America. It is a mission aimed at the useful dupes in the Academy who will accept his pronouncements. As I see it, the secret that won’t be revealed and is “a third rail” in discussion is that the American left and radical Islam have very little in common ideologically, except for one matter: hatred of the American system and our way of life.

Paul Revere: Five critical points Paul Krugman should consider as he continues to disregard the risk of massive inflation in America

Paul Revere is in his 20s, and is concerned about the impact of the growing national debt on his generation. Not much younger than when his namesake made his historic ride, he works in the wake of a tea party to challenge his fellow countrymen to find the courage to act now.

As a peruser of news I force myself to read every column Paul Krugman writes in The New York Times. It’s painful, but it provides me a look into how the left views various policies and political goings-on. One constant irritant is the claim by Krugman (recycled in this blog post in late February) that massive inflation is not only not happening in America but is not a risk in the near future.

I doubt that Krugman responds to most of his critics (he has too many to count) or even pays attention to what those critics say. However, I think it would be of great benefit to his readers if Krugman would respond to the following facts impacting the American economy, and why he thinks they are not factors to be considered when talking about inflationary possibilities:

1. Gas prices are up $.80 since this time last year.
2. Corn and other food prices are up, in some cases substantially, since last year.
3. One of the men in charge of the recovery, New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley, showed he is absolutely clueless when it comes to how prices impact poor and middle-income Americans. But who are you going to believe- Dudley and Krugman or your own lying grocery bill?
4. Related, at the latter link, energy prices have jumped nearly 10% in a year, and food has jumped over 2%. The Federal Reserve ignores this because its preferred Consumer Price Index (CPI) excludes energy and food costs.
5. Quantitative Easing, Part 2 (QE2) was begun in November 2010 in order to increase inflation, according to the Federal Reserve and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

As I noted above, Krugman has many, many critics. I am certainly not at the top of that list in either status or fame. However, given he has been proven dead wrong before (for example, James Agresti of JustFacts.com slammed him on claims regarding government spending), it would be nice if he would respond to the five critical points raised above. Otherwise Krugman will continue to prove to most readers to the right of Howard Dean that he is simply a demagogue, not an objective analyst of economic data and economic reality.