Roundup on the Rotherham Story

For those looking to catch up on the horrific Rotherham scandal, I suggest reading these items,

BBC News--Key Events in the timeline

John O-Sullivan--Rotherham's and England's shame--National Review

Mark Steyn--The Reformation of Manners--SteynOnline

The Guardian--August 31 story.

The Guardian--Ann Cryer interview

The Daily Mail--Labour accused of turning a blind eye to abuse

Is Our Children Learning?

It would seem not, based on the latest statewide test scores.  The latest figures are the first to reflect the massive increase in state government spending on public education, the “Minnesota Miracle 2.”

As it turns out, merely pouring more taxpayer dollars into the same old broken system does not produce measurably better results.  Most disappointing, the state’s achievement gap (the difference in test scores posted by the state’s minority students) hardly budged.

The state’s teachers’ union wishes the testing would stop.  Tired of the reminders that the extra millions are not buying better results, the union would prefer that parents be kept in the dark about actual educational achievement.  The Education Minnesota union is the state’s wealthiest political organization, spending millions of dollars to elect Democrats who will vote to give the union millions of dollars more in taxpayer money.


There are no shortage of good ideas out there to improve student performance, even in our poorest areas.

I devoted the April 5, 2014 episode of my Minnesota Radio Forum show on AM 1570 to the subject of education reform.  We covered the entire K-12 education spectrum with Ambassdor Ben Whitney on public schools, Fr. Timothy Manatt of Cristo Rey High School, and Beth Topoluk on charter schools. It's worth a listen.

We need to get past the issue of resources and have a serious discussion on how those resources are used to educate our children.

Birds and Parks

Two adjacent headlines at the top of Saturday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune metro section neatly encapsulate the status of modern government.  Oddly enough, both involve the under-construction new Vikings football stadium.

“Park Board now balks at 'Yard'” tells the take of a much-hyped public private partnership going sideways.  “Council flocks to birds' support” is the too cute headline for a story describing the   

Let’s take the latter, first.  Bird advocates are concerned that the design of the new Vikings football cathedral, with floor to ceiling windows may not be…how do we put this…bird friendly.

The government agency actually building the stadium—the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority—doesn’t want to bust the budget to make the building more bird friendly.

So the Minneapolis City Council leapt into action, passing (via voice vote) a non-binding, symbolic, resolution in favor of birds.  As one city council member put it,

I believe this is a way to show the seriousness of the environmental issue at hand.

It’s all a very post-modern way of looking at the legislative function.

The other story involves government actually trying to do something.  The City of Minneapolis is working with a private developer to build a big development near the new Vikings stadium to revitalize the east end of downtown.  Unfortunately, no one bothered to check whether the City had the power to do the particular deal it did, first.

And now the Park Board is balking at the “fix” for papering over the legal niceties of the deal.  (It turns out that only the Park Board—not the City—can create a new city park.)

But why let the letter of the law get in the way of a much-needed public/private partnership that will make everyone so much money?

America's Largest Export is Scrap Paper

Boeing, with its commercial airliners, is likely still America's biggest exporter by value of product.  However, the list of America’s biggest exporters by volume will surprise you.

To get a sense of where America ranks in world trade competitiveness, consider the Port of Los Angeles.  Los Angeles hosts America’s largest container port (those rectangular metal boxes), serving the big cargo ships from Asia. 

Look carefully at these statistics from the port.  For every two containers imported into Los Angeles, one returns to Asia empty. 

The contents of that second container being exported is more than likely than not…junk.  The Journal of Commerce tracks U.S. exporters, by volume, at all of America’s ports.  Leading the list of the top 100 exporters is a company called America Chung Nam, whose business is to export scrap paper to China.  Scrap paper.

America Chung Nam exports 2 ½ times the volume of the No. 2-ranked exporter, who also does some business in scrap paper.  The No. 4 exporter, Sims Metal Management, exports scrap metal to China.  Seven of the top 12 exporters do business in scrap.

Hometown Minnesota heroes Cargill come in at 15^th and 3M ranks a distant 53^rd on the list of top U.S. export companies.

Some 27 of the top 100 exporters are in the recycling business—paper, plastics, and metal.  I’m all for Reduce Reuse Recycle, but when your biggest export is scrap, you no longer rank as a First World nation.

The Shape of the Playing Field, Part 5

“Shut Up!” They Explained

Writer Mark Steyn has documented the slow decline of free speech (for conservatives, anyway) around the globe.  Unfortunately, Minnesota is busily manufacturing fresh examples to add to Steyn’s sad tally.

Nearly 200 U of M professors object to Condoleezza Rice's speech.  Yes, professors at Minnesota’s flagship public university—and temple of free inquiry—object to hosting a speech this week by George Bush’s Secretary of State.

The Big Disconnect

Oh where do we begin, the rubble or our sins?

Each year the Pew Research Center surveys Americans on their top public policy priorities.  Each year, the result comes out the same:  the economy and jobs rank as the public’s top priorities in the political sphere.  I have no reason to believe that the citizens of Minnesota share different priorities than the rest of the country.

You would assume that our elected officials--with their finger on the pulse of the voter—and our media, desperate for ratings and subscribers, would choose to give the people what they want.  Yet, they don’t.

Culture of Corruption, Part 2

It was a big week for Minnesota’s political culture of corruption.  [See Part 1 here.]

The state’s Legislative Auditor determined that Democrat Governor Mark Dayton broke the law by taking a campaign staffer along for a trip on a state-owned airplane.  Last month, when this story first surfaced, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the Governor’s spokesman, Matt Swenson, said,

It is appropriate for campaign staffers to travel with the governor to campaign events if that travel is paid for by the campaign.

Clearly the Legislative Auditor disagreed.  The same audit turned up yet another disturbing incident involving the Democrat Governor.

Does Minnesota have a culture of political corruption?

In Lord Acton’s famous formulation,

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Since January 2013, Minnesota’s Democrats have enjoyed absolute power over the state, holding all four statewide offices and control of both houses of the state legislature.

The Morning After the Night Before

At least for the next few days, pundits will be combing through the 2013 election returns for any signs and portents of 2014 and beyond.  Let me offer a few words on what I think the results mean for one city.

Minneapolis has elected a new mayor.  I did not vote in that election, having fled the City of Lakes some years ago to escape the high taxes, underperforming schools, and crumbling infrastructure.  Many of my former neighbors followed.   Unfortunately, they have continued to vote for the same politics in our new home city that produced the high taxes, underperforming schools, and crumbling infrastructure in our old one.

Minneapolis has elected a new mayor, despite the best efforts of its Ranked-Choice Voting experiment (RCV).  Under RCV, you get to vote for up to three candidates for each office.  Although the outcome of last night’s election is clear to all observers, election officials will continue to count votes for some time to come, carefully tabulating the 2^nd and 3^rd choices of voters choosing among the nearly three dozen candidates.

The Banana Republic of Minnesota: Render Unto Caesar Edition

Minnesota’s Commissioner of Revenue, Myron Frans, penned a column in today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune.  The column’s disingenuousness is matched only by the complete inappropriateness of the exercise.

Commissioner Frans opens his piece as follows,

I'll take the Minnesota way any day:  Tax policy and investment under Gov. Mark Dayton has produced results.

He goes on to say,

This year, we [Gov. Mark Dayton and I] worked with the DFL majority in the Legislature to pass a fair and balanced budget.

For those readers who do not follow Minnesota politics, Gov. Dayton is a Democrat and DFL is the local branch of the Democrat party, abbreviated for Democrat-Farmer-Labor.

Minnesota’s New Feudalism

I’ve written lately of the transformation of the North Star state under the one-party rule of the Democrats under the banner of The Banana Republic of Minnesota.

Author Joel Kotkin has taken to describing the transformation of his home state of California under one-party Democrat rule as the New Feudalism.  Since Minnesota’s liberal progressives see the Golden State as a model for all of America, Kotkin’s analysis may give us a glimpse into our own future.
 

The Age of Herbert Stein

Even with the warm weather lingering into October, I’m declaring an end to summer and marking the return of The Column.

We have entered Day Two of a Federal government shutdown, the latest in a series of a dozen-and-a-half such shutdowns that have occurred over the past forty years or so.

The latest deadlock between Congress and the President is the result of the unbridgeable divide between the parties that I’ve been writing about for the past two years.  The differences between Democrats and Republicans are ones of kind, not of degree.  Since there is no overlap in what the two parties want, there is no natural point of compromise.

More interesting than the national story is the local dispute between the Minnesota Orchestra and its musicians.  This dispute/lockout/strike had dragged on for more than a year and has cost the Orchestra its celebrity conductor and more than a full season worth of concerts.

Life in the Imperial City

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on life in Washington, DC, (“What Sequester? Washington Booms as a New Gilded Age Takes Root”).[1]  The article includes pictures of some breathtaking palatial estates, including one owned by IT investor Frank Islam.  His 40,000 square-foot mansion includes gardens “modeled, in part, after those of Henry VIII's Hampton Court palace” and featuring “a self-cleaning, 2,000-square-foot koi pond.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Islam’s former company, QSS Group, specializes in providing IT consulting to the Federal government.  Mr. Islam donated $189,750 to candidates last year, one guess as to the party who received the bulk of his money.  As the Journal puts it,

[Mr. Islam’s] sprawling compound is a product of Washington's Gilded Age—a time of lush business profits initially fueled by government outsourcing and war.

Fire Sale in Detroit City

The American Interest's Walter Russell Mead is calling attention to the bankruptcy sale now underway for the City of Detroit.  The City is looking at selling some of its museum's priceless art collection.  (Priceless?  We'll find out soon.)

How did it come to this?  Mead explains,

"This is another grim reminder of just how destructive Detroit’s corrupt machine politics have been.  At one time, Detroit was the manufacturing capital of America and one of the country’s great cities; today it’s trying to stave off a kind of modern-day bonfire of the vanities."

Those same liberal/progressive policies that led inevitably, inexorably to Detroit's bankruptcy are the policies we are adopting in one-party-rule Minnesota.  Remember, Michigan was years ahead of us in forcing the unionization of home child care providers.

The Dems' Sales Tax Shakedown

In the previous edition of The Column, I mentioned the 400-page tax bill passed by the Minnesota state legislature in the waning seconds of their 2013 session.  As everyone understood, we are still unpacking all the unpleasant surprises within the bill that nobody read.  The latest victim is the state's warehousing industry.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports today that "Warehousing firms cry foul over new Minnesota taxes,"

"Most Minnesota businesses dodged a sweeping expansion of the sales tax, but not logistics firms.  The final version of the tax bill, approved moments before the end of the legislative session last week, included an expansion of the sales tax on a handful of unlucky industries. One of them is warehousing and storage."

It seems that Minnesota had not previously taxed warehouse services, nor has any other state.  The reaction of the state’s warehouse industry is to consider decamping to less hostile locales, such as Des Moines and Kansas City.

Radical Chic and Minnesota Media

On Memorial Day 2013, the Minneapolis Star Tribune honored a different kind of warrior (“New cause for ex-radical Sara Jane Olson”) on page A-7.  Billed as an Associated Press (AP) “Exclusive” and written by local AP political reporter Patrick Condon, the piece updates the reader on 1970s-era radical, convicted criminal, and St. Paul grandmother Sara Jane Olson.

Mr. Condon’s piece opens as follows,

Sara Jane Olson, the Minnesota woman who served seven years in prison for her involvement in high-profile 1970s radicalism, is edging back into public life…

Sorry, let me stop there.  She did not spend seven years in prison for radicalism, regardless of profile level or decade.  Radicalism, at least so far, is not against the law.  Ms. Olson served time in a California prison, not because she was a radical, but because she participated in violent criminal acts.  As Mr. Condon notes two paragraphs later,

Captured in 1999, Olson finally pleaded guilty to helping place pipe bombs under Los Angeles police cars and participating in a bank robbery near Sacramento in which a woman was killed.

Note the use of the passive voice in the final clause of that sentence.  Mistakes were made, a woman was killed.  Nobody, really, was responsible, you see.

Minnesota's Legislature Elects a New People

The Minnesota State Legislature ended its 2013 session with a hurried whimper, minutes before midnight on Monday, May 20^th. 

One of the last orders of business—the nearly 400-page tax bill—turns out to have been one of those “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” situations.  The next-day headlines focused on the $2.1 billion in tax increases:  income tax hikes, corporate tax hikes, tobacco tax increases, sales tax increases, etc.  Not included in that figure are the $ hundreds of millions hidden as “fees” in the dozen or so spending bills that fund state government.

Now that the tax bill has passed, the sordid details are starting to trickle out.  Since Monday we have learned about $250 million in tax breaks for the Mall of America expansion, a $33 million bailout of the Minneapolis Central Library, and taxpayer money for a 3M corporate expansion in Maplewood.  The $400 million in subsidies for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and a $33 million bailout of St. Paul’s Xcel Energy hockey arena were already known before the bill was voted on.  We are preemptively bailing out the new Vikings stadium, on which construction has yet to start.  I’m confident we will learn about more big-dollar taxpayer gifts over the next few weeks.

The Lobby Machine, What’s Wrong With Minnesota, Part 3

In this Part 3 of the behind-the-scenes series on what’s wrong with Minnesota government, we turn our attention to the role of lobbying at the state legislature.  I began this series by posting the question of “What’s wrong with Minnesota government?” and answering it with “private benefits, public costs.”

By “private,” I don’t always mean “corporate.”  By “corporate,” I don’t always mean “for-profit.”

For those readers who have never met one, I am sure that the word “lobbyist” conjures up an image of a Gucci-loafer-clad, $3,000-suit-wearing political fixer, roaming the halls of the capital.

Many want to place blame on individual lobbyists, or the profession in general, for what ails our democracy.  No bogeymen here, I’m afraid.  Like every other profession—law, medicine, engineering, etc.—the problem is not with the profession or its practitioners, but to the ends that they are employed.

It’s All in the Game

Many a tear has to fall
But it's all in the game

Those are the opening lyrics to the 1950’s pop standard “It's All in the Game.”  This sentimental love song has been covered by every artist from Nat King Cole to Van Morrison.  It also holds the curious distinction of being the only No. 1 hit to have been co-written by a Vice President of the United States (Charles Dawes).

More recently, the phrase (rendered as “It’s all in the game, yo”) was popularized by a character on the HBO drama The Wire.

The hipper members of Minnesota’s political press corps like to add the Twitter hashtag #allinthegameyo as they share their experiences on the Capitol beat.  I understand the anthropological reasons behind this behavior.  It signals both the writer’s cleverness and his/her prominent place within the political-insider hierarchy.

In the past week, I’ve been watching more live coverage of the Minnesota House and Senate proceedings than can be considered healthy.  As the end-of-session silliness unfolds, we have the usual bitter fights over obscure procedural rules.  However, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in these rules disputes.

In the past few days, I’ve seen one fight in the Senate invoking a rule to shut the doors to the chamber, a second involving voting procedures and another dispute in the House over amendments to bills that change dates.  All of which sounds so hopelessly arcane.

The Senate door dispute at least involved the comic relief of majority-Democrat senators literally sputtering with rage at having senate rules—that they imposed—being turned against them.  The two other disputes involved the Democrat majority ruling one way on a Republican motion but ruling the opposite when a Democrat made the exact same motion from the floor.

The common theme is the arbitrary application of rules by the majority against the political minority.  The “doors” episode, in particular, illustrated the assumption among Democrats that rules exist for the sole purpose of keeping Republicans in line.  That the minority actually expected Democrats to abide by their own rules was taken as a personal insult by affected members of the ruling party.

And that same attitude is at the heart of the recent national IRS scandal.  As the details emerge of the IRS’ treatment of conservative non-profit groups, it merely serves to reinforce what so many already suspected: the system (government) is systemically biased against those on the right of the political spectrum.  This week, columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the IRS scandal,

It's not part of the game.  This is not about the usual partisan slugfest.  This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.

And so it goes.  Every arbitrary ruling from the Speaker’s Chair, every time a Senator votes her own financial interest, every payoff to a campaign contributor, every broken election-year promise chips away at the public’s trust in the entire enterprise.

That our hard-bitten, speaking-truth-to-power, seen-it-all local media can turn it into a cynical punch line speaks to how complicit they are in the corruption of the public trust.  Maybe it’s just me, but I stopped laughing some time ago.

Liberalism Explained in One Paragraph

UK blogger Russell Taylor wrote this piece to explain current British politics.  However, this paragraph explains the liberal mindset the world over,

"[C]ontinuous economic growth was taken for granted.  Once you’ve been hoodwinked into believing that prosperity and social order are facts of nature or the product of enlightened government, conservative values don’t make much sense, they just appear mean and petty.  Politics becomes about lowering the criteria of success and removing the obstacles that stand between people and their rightful share of life’s bounty–things like objective values and codes of behaviour."