Educational (Racial) Thugocracy Wins; What’s New?

Education, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, libertarianism, Race, Racism

Yes, she had been reforming the educational gulag that is the D.C. public school system, instead of abolishing it (abolition should include educational vouchers and charter schools, a species of the publicly funded system). But I can’t judge Michelle Rhee by this libertarian’s ideal. Rhee, chancellor of perhaps the costliest and crappiest urban school system in the developed world, has been forced to step down because she set about purging the deadwood and detritus, and the structures that nourish them (tenure as opposed talent, for instance), from the DC educational enterprise.

WaPo: “Student test scores rose, decades of enrollment decline stopped and the teachers union accepted a contract that gave the chancellor, in tandem with a rigorous new evaluation system, sweeping new powers to fire low-performing educators.”

Pursuant to her purging, Rhee has been forced, presumably, to parrot publicly that, “We have agreed that the best way to keep the reforms going is for this reformer to step aside.”

That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

The powers that be have been reinstated in the person of Kaya Henderson.

SHE’S IN:

RHEE’S OUT:

Is this a case of out-with-the-Asian-outsider and in-with-the-African home girl? As with everything else in the US, the racial overtones are palpable.

The American Electorate As Seen By The Left

Celebrity, Democrats, Elections, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Politics, Pseudo-intellectualism, Sarah Palin, The Zeitgeist

“How D.C. Became Hollywood for Semi-Attractive People” is the title of an Esquire blog post by Tom Junod. It is not particularly well-written, or especially thoughtful—this guy is not Christopher Hitchens—but the post got its author on cable today. “Hardball” I think it was. Here is what Junod thinks of you yobbos and your politics:

“The Democrats didn’t think they had to worry about any of this. They weren’t looking for stars because they had the biggest star in the world as their president. He didn’t have a populist bone in his body, but he was a deeply thoughtful man and a galvanic speaker both, and he promised to transcend the bone-grind of American politics. With his promise of one-man racial reconciliation, he was transfixing, but the independents who were transfixed by him needed to keep being transfixed, and on this, he couldn’t deliver. The American public turned against Obama not when it found out he was radical, or wish-washy, or power-mad, or timid, or what have you; it turned against him when he stopped being entertaining. It turned against him when it found out his real secret — that under his professorial mien he was, well, a professor. Outside the enforced electricity of a national electoral referendum, he was dutiful, and he was dull.”

“It is something of an unfair fight now: a party led by a man who clearly thinks too much before he speaks against a party led by a semi-sexy woman who will say anything — hell, whose idea of a debating strategy in 2008 was a table dance. And the Democrats don’t have an answer, because they’ve so deeply misjudged what the American electorate wants and is capable of. They thought that after the trauma of the Bush years, we would want a no-drama president; a regal First Lady; endless pages of necessary legislation, achieved at a political cost that proves the party’s commitment and courage; and a few more women on the Supreme Court who prove the party’s emphasis on excellence and ethnicity over eros. They didn’t realize that what we want is drama and nothing but, and so the Democrats became the CNN to the Repubican [sic] Fox, clueless in their competence, bewildered by their own best intentions.”

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/female-candidates-2010#ixzz12Do5TbPi

Dog Fight

Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Regulation, Republicans

Can you get worked up about the latest fight between the Democratic and Republican bloodhounds and their hangers-on?

“Honing a campaign message,” the WSJ reports, “President Barack Obama and Democratic Party officials have in recent days strongly suggested the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other groups, including two run by Republican strategist Karl Rove, are illegally using money from foreign nationals or companies to fund U.S. political advertising. The groups have repeatedly denied the charges.”

And if not for this small matter, the elections—this “advance auction sale of stolen goods,” in H. L. Mencken’s words—would be just dandy.

UPDATE II: “Financial” Paperwork Crisis (No Conspiracy Thinking, Please)

Business, Conspiracy, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Reason, Socialism

As I read the facts, the latest foreclosure crisis is bureaucratic in nature, not economic. Described by The Wall Street Journal, “the wrong guy at the bank signed the foreclosure paperwork. … The affidavit was supposed to be signed by the nameless, faceless employee in the back office who reviewed the file, not the other nameless, faceless employee who sits in the front.”

The reality has not changed. We’re still talking about the same “consumer who borrow[ed] money to buy a house, [didn’t] make the mortgage payments, and then [lost] the house in foreclosure.”

Except that now 100,000 people get to keep homes for which they haven’t paid. Because bureaucracy runs the economy, the process of cleansing the housing market of these toxic acquisitions will be halted and gummed up even more so than before.

A major culprit is “GMAC Mortgage, whose parent Ally Financial is majority-owned by the U.S. government.”

Well, of course.

Every parasitical official seeking to renew or secure his sinecure on the public teat is demanding a halt to what looks to have been perfectly legitimate foreclosures on delinquent homeowners: state attorneys general, the Attorney General (Eric Holder), and assorted politicians, all interfering in local state affairs.

As the WSJ notes (rather meekly), “freezing activity in a $2.8 trillion financial market is the last thing this economy needs and is in no way proportional to the problems reported so far.”

The WSJ concludes on a stronger note:

“If evidence emerges of policies or actions that wrongly threw people out of their homes, by all means investigate and prosecute violations of law. But allowing people to live in homes without paying for them is not cost-free. That cost will be borne directly by investors in mortgage-backed securities and mortgage servicing companies, and ultimately by American taxpayers, who now stand behind 90% of new mortgages, thanks to guarantees by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration.

The bigger damage here is to the housing market, which desperately needs to find a bottom by clearing excess inventory and working through foreclosures as rapidly as possible. The moratoriums further politicize the housing market and further delay a housing recovery. In an economy and a financial system engulfed in Washington-created uncertainty, the political class has decided to create still more.”

Justice in the food-stamps nation …

UPDATE I (Oct. 11): It is clear that the above constitute “technicalities, not miscarriages of justice.” In “A Foreclosure Tightrope for Democrats,” the NYT suggests that the “White House shares those concerns, and it has tried to defuse the issue by arguing that problems can be addressed without imposing a moratorium.”

“‘There are, in fact, valid foreclosures that probably should go forward,’ David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser, said Sunday on CBS.”

The industry has argued in response that problems should be addressed without halting all foreclosures, because a moratorium would damage the economy. “It must be recognized that the mortgage market, investors and the health of the economy are all interrelated,” Tim Ryan, president of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said Monday.

Is the prospect of an election forcing some economic enlightenment at the White House?

UPDATE II (Oct. 12): It must be obvious to readers of this site that I would strongly disagree with the case my colleague Vox Day makes against the strict rule of law and for grand-conspiracy:

The idea that the foreclosure fraud is simply a little clerical error and that homeowners are attempting to capitalize on a minor issue of missing paperwork is a blatant and shameless lie. The mere fact of their focus on the borrowing parties rather than the banks is proof that they are intentionally evading the real issue. Karl Denninger, who has been on this for three years now, explains it more succinctly than anyone. “The issue is not about which paper-pusher signed documents. The issue is whether the origination and securitization of this paper in the first instance was fraudulent, and whether we now we have a Watergate-style coverup of what a gang of brigands did to steal literal trillions of dollars!” As he further elucidates, there are three primary parts to the problem; notice that the latter two have absolutely nothing to do with the borrowers that the Republican Cantor declares must “take responsibility for themselves”. But if a poor Hispanic family living in an overpriced house have to take responsibility for themselves, why don’t the bankers who are holding Cantor’s leash have to do likewise?

Similar opinions were expressed on BAB when we discussed “Strategic Defaulters.” There, John Danforth wrote:

What caused the drop in nominal property value? The inevitable collapse of prices that were superheated by banks puffing up fractional reserves with derivatives of the superheated asset prices. …No matter how debased the morality of the strategic defaulters, the banks are not any better.

Distilled, the argument for all-out sweetness and love for the foreclosed upon is that, because the banks are embroiled in the fractional reserve system, they should suffer the worst of fates.

That’s like saying that because the legal system is generally corrupt, murderers should go free; or because an owner who sells a parcel of land partakes in the property tax theft, the buyer should not have to pay him. Or because businesses often act like exuberant idiots during a phase of the business cycle—some as offenders; others as victims—their customers need not pay them. And on and on.

This is chaos theory; create chaos, and out of it, something good may come. And never mind that not all bankers are crooks; that not all of them understand the theoretical aspects of the system in which they are embroiled; and that not nearly enough bad things are said about the defaulters.

As to Vox’s point, it does not follow from “the mere fact of their focus on the borrowing parties rather than the banks,” that this “is proof that they are intentionally evading the real issue.”

Not in logic, at least.

Finally, the laws of economics are natural laws. Whoever is involved, it is categorically good that responsible buyers get to pick up foreclosed properties, and that the mortgage miasma is cleared and cleansed away.