Newt's Answer to Barak - A MUST READ THE WHOLE THING

I don't know how such a brilliant man is so hidden from sight. He holds the key to our taking back government and restoring our broken society. Newt Gingrich gave a speech last week. The transcript has just been released.

In it he says several things you need to hear and read if you care about the principles of restoring our country:

Other groups have reasons for anger. Native Americans have a claim probably at least as great if not greater than African-Americans. Japanese-Americans went through a period of internment in World War II. Jewish Americans have a history which includes the Holocaust but extends back before the Holocaust to pogroms in Russia; anti-Semitism in Poland; expulsion from Spain; and, in the last fifty years, an unrelenting and virtually hysterical effort by their Arab neighbors to exterminate them in a way which no other group has experienced.

So there are many groups that could find causes for anger. But I would go a step further. I would argue that as citizens of a country which asserted that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, every American has things to be angry about. Simply ask yourself, if it was your daughter or son, if it was your granddaughter or grandson, trapped in some of the disastrous conditions of the very poor and very dispossessed in America, how angry would you be?

Consider some examples: At the Rosebud Sioux reservation in 2007, a population of 13,000, 144 young Native Americans tried to commit suicide—arguably the highest suicide rate in the United States.

In 2006, the poverty rate in America was 12.3 percent. For non-Hispanic whites, it was 8.2 percent, but for blacks, it was 24.3 percent.

In 2007, 46.8 percent of twelfth-graders admitted to taking some sort of illicit drug in their lifetime; 35.6 percent of tenth-graders made the same admission; and in 2006, 20.9 percent of eighth-graders—let me repeat this, among eighth-grade Americans, every fifth American child admitted to taking some sort of illicit drug.

1 percent of the American population—3 million people—are in prison. That is more than the entire population of Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Atlanta, Detroit, and Denver combined.

Now, how can you hear these things in a country that says we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights and not be angry? So I think anger can be, should be a universal American feeling about those things that dissatisfy us and about a culture and a government which is failing.

Consider homicides in our cities: in Philadelphia in 2006, there were 406 murders. To give you a sense of the scale of this, there’s an article called “The War in West Philadelphia” written by Dr. John Pryor, who was an Iraq combat surgeon and an emergency room doctor in Philadelphia. This is what he said:

In the swirl of screams and moving figures, my mind drifted to my recent experience in Iraq as an Army surgeon. There we dealt regularly with “mascals,” or mass-casualty situations. In Iraq, ironically, I found myself drawing on my experience as a civilian trauma surgeon each time mascals would overrun the combat hospital. As nine or ten patients from a firefight rolled in, I sometimes caught myself saying “just like another Friday night in West Philadelphia.” The wounds and nationalities of the patients are different, but the feelings of helplessness, despair and loss are the same. In Iraq, soldiers die for freedom, for honor, for their country and for their buddies. Here in Philadelphia, they die without honor, without purpose, for no country, for no one.

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Let me make the key case for boldness. I think this is a great national debate we need, and it’s a debate which I would hope Senator Obama would be prepared to engage in. The greatest case for boldness and new solutions is that the current system is destroying people. This is not a choice between a productive, effective system and improvement. This is a choice between utter disaster with enormous, profound human consequence, and the need for new thinking, new ideas, and new solutions.

Our choice is: how many eighth graders will take up drugs instead of math and science? How many thirteen-year-olds in Dallas will become madames before they have an honest job? How many young African-Americans will be killed or sent to prison? So when we talk about bold ideas, it is in the context of human disasters right here in America reported in your news every day. And the next time you hear these disasters, ask yourself, “To what extent is this the cost of bad culture and bad government?”

We speak here after twenty-five years of failure to fix the problems. April 26 will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” a report on education in the United States. Here’s what that report said. Quote,

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have in effect been committing an act of unthinking unilateral educational disarmament.

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Let me repeat this, because I think to have a national security group come back and tell you that you are in greater danger from the collapse of education than you are from any possible conventional war should have been a very startling thing, and should have led to very fundamental questions about how badly the system is failing and what the replacement has to look like.

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Marvin Olasky extended that critique in a brilliant book written in 1994 called The Tragedy of American Compassion. Olasky outlined the values and principles of the great nineteenth century social reformers who all believed that helping people out of poverty required tough love and work requirements. He cited reformer after reformer who condemned the compassionate wealthy who wanted to give people something for nothing. These people were convinced that giving away money—the reformers of the nineteenth century were convinced that giving away money subsidized bad behavior and encouraged people to remain dependent, and in many cases, to remain addicted to drugs and to alcohol. The modern redistributionist model of bureaucratic welfare was an outgrowth of a leftist social critique of society, according to Olasky. He documented the leftist desire to create a right to money without effort. He cited advocate after advocate on the twentieth century Left who insisted that a large underclass of permanently poor people was acceptable, and that it was cultural imperialism to insist that they acquire habits of discipline and self-management in order to lead full lives as independently productive citizens. The Tragedy of American Compassion made clear that the fight over welfare reform was at its heart a cultural and moral fight over the nature of being American and the requirements of a full and healthy citizenship. Understood on those terms, the existing welfare system was indefensible as bad government and bad culture. It was bad government and bad culture combined in a way that crippled the lives of people.

In 1996, we reformed the welfare system, but we did not change the cultural values which were destroying opportunities and crippling lives, nor did we uproot the destructive institutions of bad government in education, urban bureaucracy, and tax policy.

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The second great ground rule is simple. In a healthy society, you want the smallest possible tax rate because you want the maximum resources with people who know how to create jobs. And the choice is simple: do you make the politician or the bureaucrat more powerful by giving them more money, or do you make the job creator more effective by letting them have the money. But does anyone seriously want to argue that the bureaucrat is more likely to create the next million jobs than the entrepreneur? Very few Americans believe this. And yet it’s the base of much of our current politics.

So this question about the critique is important. And I would suggest to you, by the way, that there are plenty of factual bases for this. If you go back and look, in 1960, South Korea and Ghana had the same per capita income. Today, South Korea is the eleventh wealthiest nation in the world, with a high tech base of its industrial sector in the world market. Forty years ago, the leading export of Ireland was its children because they had no jobs. Ireland adopted a low tax 12 and a half percent corporate rate, very rigorous rule of law, investment in education and infrastructure, and today Ireland has a higher per capita income than Germany, although they’re in danger of messing it up by raising taxes and creating new work rules. But today, they are 50,000 guest workers from Eastern Europe working Ireland because they have a labor shortage. Something that was literally inconceivable, yet who on the Left is prepared to study South Korea and Ireland? Who is prepared to study success?

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Now, because the Left cannot deal with the cost of bad culture and the cost of bad government, they are constantly trying to find a scapegoat for the failures of their own institutions and the failures of their own bureaucracies.

Consider two quotes from Senator Obama’s recent speech in Philadelphia.

Senator Obama asserted:

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s white and black students.

I’m going to repeat the closing part of this. “. . . helps explain the pervasive achievement gap. . .” That is simply factually false. The Detroit schools are the third or fourth most expensive schools in America. They’re a disaster. The District of Columbia schools are not bad because of racism. The District of Columbia schools are bad because it has an incompetent bureaucracy, a failed model of education, a unionized tenured system. It is utterly resistant to improvement. That has nothing to do with racism.

And if Senator Obama is serious about helping children in urban America, he will have to question whether or not in fact he’s prepared to automatically reinforce the lockstep power of the National Education Association, which is the largest single provider of delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

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And this is not an easy problem. It was not an easy problem in Welsh villages. It is not an easy problem in rural France. It is not an easy problem anywhere on the planet. When you have cultures that are preindustrial, and you have people who don’t have the habit of work, they don’t have the habit of saving, they don’t have any willingness to pursue opportunity, it is very hard to change them.

But that’s not a problem of legalized discrimination. The poorest of the Native American reservations are not a function of legalized discrimination. They’re a function of a legal system which is anti-private property, anti-individual achievement, anti any opportunity coming in, and they created disaster, a human disaster, which no one is allowed to talk about, because it would be so politically incorrect.

So let’s take Senator Obama seriously about discussing this. His analysis is simply factually false. The collapse of Detroit, from 1950 to 2008, which I think should be the centerpiece of the fall campaign, because it is the case study in bad culture and bad government. Detroit in 1950 had 1,800,000 people. Last year, it dropped below 900,000. Less than half the housing stock is needed. It is the first American city in history to drop below a million.

The numbers are actually worse than that in the last three years: Detroit had three times the out-migration rate of any other city in the United States. Twenty-seven thousand additional people fled Detroit. It dropped from being the number one per capita income city in the United States to ranking number sixty-second.

Now, you could say, well, it’s all the auto industry’s fault. That’s simply not true. First of all, there are large parts of America that have very successful auto industries. They tend to be in right-to-work states with low tax rates and without the United Auto Workers. But they’re quite successful. We’ve had a very large increase in factories that produce cars.

Second, even in Michigan, despite a very destructive governor and a very destructive state legislature, Grand Rapids is in the middle of a building boom. Now why is Grand Rapids, on the western side of Michigan, growing dramatically while Detroit, on the eastern side of Michigan, is continuing to collapse?

The results are even worse. The best estimate of the Gates Foundation was that a freshman entering the Detroit school system had one chance in four of graduating on time. Three out of four children in Detroit are being cheated by one of the most expensive school bureaucracies in America.

But that’s because we measure the wrong metric. The primary metric of the Detroit school bureaucracy has nothing to do with the children. It has to do with whether or not the paychecks are issued every month. And it has been a stunningly effective bureaucracy at issuing paychecks. It just doesn’t do anything for the paychecks. And yet no one wants to talk about this.

So start with the idea that if we’re going to have an honest conversation, we ought to start with Detroit because if we can’t have an honest conversation about how big a disaster Detroit is, we sure can’t have an honest conversation about poverty in America, and we sure can’t have a conversation about what needs to change.

It’s that simple and that direct. And I think virtually no one on the Left is prepared today to talk candidly about Detroit because it is their institutions and their culture which has caused the collapse of one of America’s great cities.

And you may think I’m exaggerating. Consider the following. An entrepreneur offered $200 million to develop charter schools in Detroit and was rejected on the grounds that he was obviously a white racist attempting to overturn the black power structure. “I am disappointed and saddened by the anger and hostility that has greeted our proposal,” explained [Bob] Thompson to the Associated Press.

Because of these contentious conditions, we are not going to move forward with our planned charter high schools. Our proposal to build a number of new, very small charter high schools in Detroit was intended to increase options for Detroit parents and children. The proposal was meant to be for kids, and not against anyone in any institution.

Now what does that tell you about pathology, when you can have a system failing, and remember, if you’re an African-American male, and you drop out of high school, you face a 73 percent unemployment rate in your 20s and a 60 percent chance of going to jail.

There is soooooo much more. YOU HAVE TO READ THE WHOLE SPEECH. Then, let's make it the agenda that the Republican Party runs on. The old foolishness is passe. Time to take America back from the education lobby, the left and the bureaucracies.

Time for Americans to be back in charge of their destinies. Close all public schools. Close all Indian reservations, all EEOC, all everything that unlevels the playing field. The blood letting will begin but then stop.

Stop the insanity. Thank you Mr Speaker for the voice of sanity in an insane world.