Update from the Bolivarian Paradise

Venezuela's Chavez to boost prison construction

by AP

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday said he is instructing officials to boost prison construction after a 27-day uprising by inmates highlighted problems of overcrowding and violence.

Chavez likened the problems in Venezuela's prisons to cancer, saying dealing with them requires "deep treatment."

Days before Chavez underwent a cancer operation last month inCuba, troops stormed a prison near Caracas in a search for weapons, and armed inmates began an uprising in response. The nearly monthlong crisis ended on Wednesday when hundreds of prisoners emerged from the adjacent Rodeo II prison after negotiations with authorities. Officials have said that several inmates also escaped, including four who were killed by troops.

"New facilities must be built," Chavez said in an interview with state television, adding that he has also decided to create a new Cabinet ministry to oversee prison issues.

"Those old jails must be transformed," Chavez said. "Thanks to God that this case was resolved."

He condemned corruption among prison guards and administrators that has allowed a flourishing trade in guns and drugs in the prisons. "It's like a cancer. We must fight against that," Chavez said.

Chavez announced on Friday that Peruvian President-elect Ollanta Humala had just arrived for a visit. Chavez called him a brother in a message on Twitter, saying "Let's give him the most patriotic of welcomes!"

Humala, a populist leftist and, like Chavez, a former military man, had delayed his visit because of the Venezuelan leader's health.

Chavez told state television that he has been waking up at sunrise and reading German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He said he also has taken up painting again and has been creating a landscape from one of the windows of the presidential palace.

"I know there are people who are happy because they believe I'm dying, that I'm going to die soon," Chavez said, "but those evil wishes are part of that hatred ... That is erased like a tsunami of love by the blessings and prayers of a nation, of millions."

Re-shaping America

How America dropped the baton

By FRANK MIELE

Every culture is either self-propagating, or by definition it is self-destructive. Culture has no meaning and no value unless it is passed on to the next generation.

Think of it as a generational relay race, with the belief systems of a group of people being the baton that is passed on from runner to runner. You can imagine the mayhem that would be caused in a race if at each hand-off, the runners stopped and debated the shape, size or color of the baton. If each new runner insisted on dictating revisions to the baton before carrying it forward, this would slow things even further. Not only would the team lose the race, but ultimately the baton would not look anything like what it was when the race started.

Under such circumstance, the idea of culture as a set of shared beliefs and values, passed on from father to son, and mother to daughter, would be meaningless. And if each runner taught his or her successor to despise the baton as unworthy, then sooner or later the baton would be dropped, and the culture would end.

It is this picture which must inform our discussion of education as we try to understand why the America of 2011 looks nothing like the America of 1911. Somewhere along the way, the baton of proud American traditions, brilliant accomplishments and upstanding virtues became a thing of shame and ridicule. Our schools, teachers and yes our parents have more and more questioned our long-held values, and have substituted expedient excuses for eternal truths.

Whether such a dangerous agenda was externally imposed or merely a form of accidental suicide, I don’t know. But I am convinced that the proof that such a change took place is just as self-evident as those Jeffersonian truths that mankind for the past 100 years has been so eager to hide from.

You can either believe J. Edgar Hoover or you can believe Nikita Khruschev, two icons from the 1950s — one a proponent of free enterprise and Americanism, the other an advocate of totalitarian communism. But what is funny is that it doesn’t matter which one you believe because they were in total agreement that America was in danger of losing its identity, its values... its cultural baton.

Hoover and Khruschev each acknowledged that there was an effort underway to destroy capitalism and the American way of life. And though both men have tarnished reputations nowadays, in the mid to late 1950s, they were at the pinnacle of their power and were certainly among those in the best position to know whether America was under attack.

Hoover, the director of the FBI during five pivotal decades, wrote in the Elks Magazine in August 1956, “We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.”

Dating Scarlett Johannson

No bargaining with Barack Obluffer

By Mark Steyn

There is something surreal and unnerving about the so-called "debt ceiling" negotiations staggering on in Washington. In the real world, negotiations on an increase in one's debt limit are conducted between the borrower and the lender. Only in Washington is a debt increase negotiated between two groups of borrowers.

Actually, it's more accurate to call them two groups of spenders. On the one side are Obama and the Democrats, who in a negotiation supposedly intended to reduce American indebtedness are (surprise!) proposing massive increasing in spending (an extra $33 billion for Pell Grants, for example). The Democrat position is: You guys always complain that we spend spend spend like there's (what's the phrase again?) no tomorrow, so be grateful that we're now proposing to spend spend spend spend like there's no this evening.

President Barack Obama holds a news conference at the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House July 15, 2011 in Washington, D.C. President Obama discussed the ongoing budget and debt limit negotiations with congressional Republicans and Democrats.

On the other side are the Republicans, who are the closest anybody gets to representing, albeit somewhat tentatively and less than fullthroatedly, the actual borrowers – that's to say, you and your children and grandchildren. But in essence the spenders are negotiating among themselves how much debt they're going to burden you with. It's like you and your missus announcing you've set your new credit limit at $1.3 million, and then telling the bank to send demands for repayment to Mr. and Mrs. Smith's kindergartner next door.

Nothing good is going to come from these ludicrously protracted negotiations over laughably meaningless accounting sleights-of-hand scheduled to kick in circa 2020. All the charade does is confirm to prudent analysts around the world that the depraved ruling class of the United States cannot self-correct, and, indeed, has no desire to.

When the 44th president took office, he made a decision that it was time for the already unsustainable levels of government spending finally to break the bounds of reality and frolic and gambol in the magical fairy kingdom of Spendaholica: This year, the federal government borrows 43 cents of every dollar it spends, a ratio that is unprecedented. Barack Obama would like this to be, as they say, "the new normal" – at least until that 43 cents creeps up a nickel or so, and the United States Government is spending twice as much it takes in, year in, year out, now and forever. If the Republicans refuse to go along with that, well, then the negotiations will collapse and, as he told Scott Pelley on CBS the other night, Gran'ma gets it. That monthly Social Security check? Fuhgeddabouddit. "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue," declared the president. "Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it."

But hang on. I thought the Social Security checks came out of the famous "Social Security trust fund," whose "trustees" assure us there's currently $2.6 trillion in there. Which should be enough for the Aug. 3 check run, shouldn't it? Golly, to listen to the president, you'd almost get the impression that, by the time you saw the padlock off the old Social Security lockbox, there's nothing in there but a yellowing IOU and a couple of moths. Indeed, to listen to Obama, one might easily conclude that the whole rotten stinking edifice of federal government is an accounting trick. And that can't possibly be so, can it?

For the Most Gifted Orator in Human History, the president these days speaks largely in clichés, most of which he doesn't seem to be quite on top of. "Eric, don't call my bluff," he sternly reprimanded the GOP's Eric Cantor. Usually, if you're bluffing, the trick is not to announce it upfront. But, in fact, in his threat to have Granny eating dog food by Labor Day, Obama was calling his own bluff. The giant bluff against the future that is government spending.

Demography is Destiny

We’re All Greeks Now

by Patrick J. Buchanan 

Departing for New Hampshire in November 2010, Sen. Judd Gregg, the fiscal conservative President Obama wanted in his Cabinet, blurted an inconvenient truth: “This nation is on a course where if we don’t do something about it, get … fiscal policy (under control), we’re Greece.”

The remark was regarded as hyperbole. But Gregg had a point. For though Greece, measured by the size of her economy, is only 2 to 3 percent of the EU or the U.S. economy, she is a microcosm of the West.

Consider the demography.

According to the most recent revision of the U.N.’s “World Population Prospects,” Greece in 2010 had 11.2 million people.

More than 24 percent were 60 or above, more than 18 percent 65 or older. Three percent were 80 or above. And, every year, for every nine Greeks who are born, 10 Greeks die.

Greece is slowly passing away.

Fast forward to 2050.

Greece’s population will have fallen by 300,000 to 10.8 million. The median age will have risen by eight years to 49.5. Half the population will be 50 or older. More critically, the share of Greece’s population 60 or older will be 37.4 percent, with 31.3 percent over 65. One in nine Greeks will be over 80.

If Athens is breaking under the weight of early retirement and pensions for seniors today, her situation will be horrendous by mid-century.

Where, in 2010, there were four Greeks under 60 for every Greek over 60, by 2050, there will only be 1.7 Greeks under 60 for every Greek over 60.

Conclusion: The retirement age must rise, and pension benefits fall, or Greece collapses.

What of the possibility of a new baby boom? Not likely, given that the fertility rate in Greece has been below replacement levels for three decades and is today only two-thirds of that needed to replace the present population.

Indeed, by 2050, the fertility rate of Greek women will have been below zero population growth for 80 years. One wonders: How can the U.N. estimate that Greece’s population will fall only 3 percent by then? Is the U.N. assuming mass immigration from the Muslim world?

But what does Greece have to do with the rest of Europe, or with us?

Only this. The median age of all of Europe is rising, and the demographic numbers for Greece look positively rosy alongside those of the east, where population declines in the tens of millions are projected for Russia and Ukraine. And outside Iceland and Albania, not one nation of Europe has a fertility rate sufficient to maintain its population. Those that are projected to grow, like Britain, have to be relying on Third World immigrants and their higher birth rate.

But while this may maintain an existing population size, immigrants from the Maghreb, Middle East, Caribbean, Latin America and South Asia, on average, lack the language, technical skills and educational levels of native-born Europeans.

The same is true in the U.S., where peoples of European descent are expected to drop to half the population by 2041. Hispanics will grow from 15 percent to near 30 percent of the U.S. population, and their absolute numbers from 50 million to 135 million by 2050.

Yet, again, Hispanics and children of Hispanic immigrants have not, as of yet, reached close to parity in educational achievement with Americans of East Asian or European ancestry.

People equate today’s immigration with the immigration of 1890-1920. But another major difference is this: We erected a Great Society over 50 years that did not exist in 1920.

In Washington in the 1950s, a city of 800,000, half black and half white, food stamps had not been invented. Families fed themselves. Today, in a District of Columbia of 600,000, one in five are on food stamps. Nationally, a program that did not exist in 1964 feeds one in seven Americans, 44 million people, at a cost of $77 billion a year. And that is but a small fraction of our new Great Society.

We are entering a new “age of austerity,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2009.

The halcyon days are over. Government payrolls, as is happening from California to New York to Washington, D.C., will have to be slashed. Pension and health care benefits, not only for seniors, will have to be reduced. Retirement ages will have to be raised. From food stamps to foreign aid, programs are going to be capped and cut.

The left believes it can get the money from the wealthy. But the top 1 percent of Americans in income already carry 40 percent of the federal income tax load, while the bottom 50 percent of wage-earners ride free. This, too, will have to end.

We are either going to man up and radically reduce government at all levels in the United States, or the bond markets are going to do it for us, as they are doing it today for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

Wishful thinking

Gorby Obama and the Collapse of the American Left

By Jeffrey Lord 

In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world…. What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. -- President Ronald Reagan addressing the British Parliament, 1982

It's over.

For the American Left -- those who have made it their work to enshrine Leftist or Leftist Lite ideology into American life and law -- the end is nigh. Ronald Reagan accurately predicted a similar fate for their more heavy-handed Communist cousins, and now their own demise is clearly in progress.

 And Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson have left Barack Obama holding the bag.

If in fact Reagan was right about the inevitability of the collapse of Communism -- and to the astonishment of his critics he was -- his "ash heap of history" speech more than applies to those who seriously believed that with a nip here and a tuck there the same left-wing theories could work in America.

By the 1980's Reagan -- and others like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II -- were dealing in a world where the signs of an eventual Communist collapse were apparent in all manner of events large and small. Here are but a few of those signs:

• East and West Germany: The two side-by-side nations, artificial constructs dating from the end of World War II, had become vivid symbols of the successes of a Western-style capitalist democracy versus a Communist Left socialist state. Prosperity oozed from West Germany -- and West Berlin. Germans were constantly trying to flee the East for the West.

• The Berlin Wall: While many in the day saw it as a permanent fixture, in fact it was a literally concrete-and-mortar admission of Communism as a failure. This showcased a society that depended on force to keep its people from leaving.

• Rebellions in the Soviet Empire: From East Germany in 1953 to Hungary in 1956 to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and even in Poland as early as 1970, rebellions against the Communist rulers had broken out.

• Poland and the rise of Solidarity: It was becoming increasingly clear that the Communist government of Poland could no longer hide its economic failures. A prominent Catholic priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a leading Polish dissident, disappeared -- his bound body finally discovered in the River Vistula. The leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, became internationally famous as he organized union strikes against the regime. And perhaps most dramatically, the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, electrifying Poland and those trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

• Failure in Afghanistan: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a failure, stretching an already failing empire for cash and troops.

• The Arms Race: It was becoming increasingly clear that with an economy in tatters, it was impossible for the Soviets to maintain a serious arms race with the United States.

Collectively these facts telegraphed (to those paying attention, at least) that the entire idea of Communism was, in Reagan's words, a "form of insanity -- a temporary aberration" in history.

Famously, Reagan -- against the most assured "wisdom" of the day -- believed that to challenge Communism directly was to win, because the insanity was ultimately unsustainable.

Take a good look around the real world in which President Obama is now operating. What do you see?

• Debt ceiling: A national debt of $14.2 trillion, with no end in sight. This has launched a battle royal over raising the limit yet again without increases and with spending cuts.

• Wisconsin: Angry Wisconsin state workers demanding a continuation of benefits the governor says will drive the state toward bankruptcy. Similar fights have erupted in New Jersey and Ohio.

• Moody's and the U.S. credit rating: Various credit rating agencies warn that to continue on the economic path of Obamanomics is to lose the AAA rating held by the U.S. government since 1917.

• Social Security Trust Fund: The Obama threat not to pay Social Security checks on August 3 is, in the words of our friends at the Wall Street Journal: an "admission, however inadvertent, that the government has spent so much that even its own accounting and political fictions are collapsing."

The Downfall

Europe's Failed Political Class

By Samuel Gregg 

The casualty list from Europe's apparently-endless financial crisis continues to grow. If you're young, a taxpayer, or a German in today's EU, you have good reason to believe you've been dealt a very bad hand.

There is, however, one impending casualty whose demise is fully merited. And that's the credibility of Europe's political class.

Having assured Europeans for the past 50 years that they know what they are doing, Europe's politicians are now helplessly presiding over the continent's worst economic maelstrom since the Depression: a calamity to which their policies have considerably contributed.

And it is a class of European politicians to which I'm referring -- a group that's even developed distinctly familial characteristics.

One European politician who's been in the spot-light since 2009, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, is the son and grandson of former Greek prime ministers Andreas Papandreou and George Papandreou Sr. The word "dynasty" comes to mind.

Likewise, a front-runner for the Socialist party's nomination for French President in the 2012 elections, Martine Aubry, is the daughter of Jacques Delors. Aside from being the eighth European Commission president, Delors served as economics minister under France's late President, François Mitterrand.

Speaking of the Mitterrands, François's nephew, Frédéric Mitterrand, is presently President Nicolas Sarkozy's culture minister. The latter's son, Jean Sarkozy, was elected as a city councilor at the tender age of 22. France's hard-right National Front illustrated just how much it had become a regular part of France's political landscape when its leadership passed from Jean-Marie Le Pen to his daughter Marine Le Pen (whose first two husbands, incidentally, were party officials) in January this year.

Ireland is a case-study in its own right. Literally dozens of family members -- sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, grandsons, granddaughters, nephews, nieces, cousins, wives, husbands, in-laws -- have followed each other into the legislature (sometimes into the same legislative seat) since Irish independence in 1922. 

In short, family ties permeate Europe's political landscape in ways that dwarf the Daleys of Chicago, the Bushes of Texas, and the Cuomos of New York.

Further compounding matters in Europe, however, is a professionalization of politics that makes the Cuomos look positively amateurish. Most European political parties with legislative representation have relatively small memberships. Nevertheless, they constitute the basis of a full-time career for many party members.

A good example is Finland's president Tarja Halonen. Her political career began at university when she served as Secretary of the National Union of Students between 1969 and 1970. The following year, Halonen joined the Social Democratic Party (which today has just 50,000 members) and worked as a lawyer for the Social Democrat-affiliated trade union movement. In 1974, she became the prime minister's parliamentary secretary. Two years later, Halonen was elected to the Helsinki city council. In 1979, she was elected to parliament, and served there for 21 years. Halonen went on to hold several ministerial posts until elected President in 2000.

In short, since her time in university, Halonen has done nothing career-wise except politically-related activity or holding government office. Her story, however, is quite typical.

Take today's President of the European Council, Belgium's Herman Van Rompuy. His political career began when he served as chairman of his Christian Democrat party's youth wing at the age of 26. Apart from a three year stint in the early 1970s working at Belgium's central bank and a short time in the 1980s as an academic, Rompuy has continuously held political offices before assuming his current position.

There are exceptions to this pattern (e.g., Germany's Angela Merkel). But you have to search long and hard to find them. That alone makes a mockery of the usual European happy-talk about "openness" and "diversity."

Which brings me to my last point: the diversity -- or rather the lack thereof -- when it comes to ideas among Europe's political classes.

Regardless of whether they're on the left or right, most European politicians share a broad commitment to the European social model.

Broadly-speaking, this model affirms some market institutions (such as free prices), but also heavily emphasizes major wealth-redistributions, large welfare states, and strong labor-market regulation. This is overlaid by a strong stress on top-down coordination by the government (i.e., professional politicians).

The problems proceeding from this mixture -- out-of-control spending, disincentives to be entrepreneurial, soft corruption, excessively large public-sectors -- have been understood since the word "Eurosclerosis" became commonplace in the 1970s. So why, even now, are Europe's politicians so slow to react accordingly by aggressively addressing the causes of sclerosis?

One reason is that market-liberalization would mean lessening their importance in the economy. Less top-down coordination means fewer top-down coordinators.

But another cause of reform-failure is that most European politicians have little-to-no experience of life in the business world.

Five years ago, a survey of the French Senate revealed that a mere 30 of its 331 members had ever worked in the private sector. Not surprisingly, they turned out to know little about hum-drum matters such as how to meet a payroll, why heavy labor market regulation makes you reluctant to hire people, or how high taxes dampens your entrepreneurial enthusiasms.

Hence, no-one should be surprised that so many EU politicians' response to the continent's current problems is to advocate morecentralization of economic policy and more regulation, and all in the name of more European-wide "coordination." Nothing could be more foreign to such mindsets than imagining that they and their rather sheltered outlook on life might be part of the problem.

Time, however, is against them. As Europe's crisis worsens, the ancien régime's efforts to control matters through yet more intergovernmental loans, bailouts, and accounting sleight-of-hands will continue yielding meager results. Unfortunately, like the Bourbons, most of Europe's political class have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. And, as in the past, it will be ordinary Europeans rather than their political masters who pay the price.

The devil made them do it

Education Is Worse Than We Thought

by Walter E. Williams

Last December, I reported on Harvard University professor Stephan Thernstrom's essay "Minorities in College – Good News, But...," on Minding the Campus, a website sponsored by the New York-based Manhattan Institute. He was commenting on the results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, saying that the scores "mean that black students aged 17 do not read with any greater facility than whites who are four years younger and still in junior high. ... Exactly the same glaring gaps appear in NAEP's tests of basic mathematics skills." Thernstrom asked, "If we put a randomly-selected group of 100 eighth-graders and another of 100 twelfth-graders in a typical college, would we expect the first group to perform as well as the second?" In other words, is it reasonable to expect a college freshman of any race who has the equivalent of an eighth-grade education to compete successfully with those having a 12th-grade education?

Maybe this huge gap in black/white academic achievement was in the paternalistic minds of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals justices who recently struck down Michigan's ban on the use of race and sex as criteria for college admissions. The court said that it burdens minorities and violates the U.S. Constitution. Given the black education disaster, racial preferences in college admissions will become a permanent feature, because given the status quo, blacks as a group will never make it into top colleges based upon academic merit.

The situation is worse than we thought. U.S. News & World Report (7/7/2011) came out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal," saying that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history, according to a scathing 413-page investigative report released Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal." The report says that more than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated cheated on the 2009 standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress. Eighty-two teachers have confessed to erasing students' answers. A total of 178 educators, including 38 principals, many of whom are black, systematically fabricated test scores of struggling black students to cover up academic failure. The governor's report says that cheating orders came from the top and that widespread cheating has occurred since at least 2001. So far, no Atlanta educator has been criminally charged, even though some of the cheating was brazen, such as teachers pointing to correct answers while students were taking the tests, reading answers aloud during testing and seating low-achieving students next to high-achieving students to make cheating easier.

Teacher and principal exam cheating is not restricted to Atlanta; it's widespread. The Detroit Free Press and USA Today (3/8/2011)released an investigative report that found higher-than-average erasure rates on tests taken by students at 34 schools in and around Detroit in 2008 and 2009. Overall, their report "found 304 schools where experts say the gains on standardized tests in 2009-10 are so statistically improbable, they merit further investigation. Besides Michigan, the other states (where suspected cheating was found) were Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Florida and California." A Dallas Morning News investigation reported finding high rates of test erasures in Texas. Six teachers and two principals were dismissed after cheating was uncovered.

In 2007, Baltimore's George Washington Elementary School was named a Blue Ribbon School after the number of students who passed state reading tests shot from 32 percent to nearly 100 percent in just four years. Last year, The Baltimore Sun reported thousands of erasures on those tests. Susan Burgess, the school's principal, had her professional license revoked after an investigation by state and city school board officials.

Why is there widespread cheating by America's educators? According to Diane Ravitch, who is the research professor of education at New York University, it's not teachers and principals who are to blame; it's the mandates of the No Child Left Behind law, enacted during the George W. Bush administration. In other words, the devil made them do it.