Speech to Carroll County New Hampshire Republicans Monday, 3-15-21

Only seven at this point

Way back in the 20th century I was born into a family of Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrats, the fourth of eight children. We were taught that Protestants and Republicans were different from us and not to be trusted. My parents were politically active at the town level and some of my earliest memories are of our mother driving us kids around town to deliver fliers door-to-door encouraging people to vote for either my father running for local office, or a family friend. Politics of all kinds were discussed most nights around our supper table beginning at 5:45 pm. If I showed up late because I was fishing, playing baseball, or finishing my paper route, there would be consequences.

My mother and father

After supper I would sit in front of the television while my father watched the news. John F. Kennedy was our hero and my father proudly displayed a photo of him and Congressman JFK standing next to each other at a meeting to organize a public-employee union called NAGE — the National Association of Government Employees. That union later morphed into today’s SEIU, which functions as an army of Democrat poll workers and thugs. On weekends my father watched 30-minute episodes of “World at War” or “Victory at Sea” When a flotilla was crossing the English Channel on D-Day he would say, “I was there.” When the Battle of Okinawa was depicted with kamikazes crashing in to US ships he would say, “I was there.” 

Okinawa

But then most other fathers on our street were WWII veterans. That’s how it was in suburban Massachusetts in the 1950s and 60s. Every kid was proud of his father and that shaped our world view. In the late sixties and early seventies, however, things changed. Baby boomers grew up, went to college. Many challenged the values of the Greatest Generation. They used drugs. They ignored sexual norms, and opposed the Vietnam War. Heroes like JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King were assassinated. Cities burned in riots. Protests divided the country. President Johnson chose not to run again. Nixon resigned. My older brother started using drugs and left home. Those previously edifying conversations around our supper table became acrimonious.

Similar things were happening up and down my street and across the country. American culture was fraying. Respect for the Greatest Generation was replaced by: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” 

That unraveling of American pride then paused during eight years of the Reagan Administration, but began anew under the Obama Administration. Last summer cities were again burning in the riots following the George Floyd’s death. America has started shaking again. Today, after only two months of the Biden Administration, political polarization in America is worse than at anytime since the Civil War.

And racism is back in the form of Critical Race Theory. Although banned by President Trump, it has become dominant in public school classrooms just since the November election. If you look at sample curricula virtually anywhere in our country now you’ll see students being taught to categorize themselves by the color of their skin, not the content of their character. White people are born “privileged.” They’re inherently racist against all other people. White people perpetuate “institutional racism” the theory claims, consciously or unconsciously. 

Such BS

Curricula like “The 1619 Project” which purports the United States was built on slavery — and not on notions of liberty and freedom spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The 1619 Project is being adopted in public schools across several states and a new acronym has emerged: “BIPOC.” If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. It stands for: Black, Indigenous, People of Color. Our country is divided in two now: whites and BIPOCs. This is not good and it’s gaining momentum. Ask your children and grandchildren if they’re hearing it.

And it’s not just in schools. Coca Cola and many other mainstream corporations today train their employees to first acknowledge, then renounce their alleged “White Privilege” and learn to “Be Less White.” The training is mandatory and they must admit being racists.

My teaching career began in the 1970s after I was influenced by the craziness of the 60s and 70s. The first US History textbook I used was one of the most widely-used at the time. Today, however, it would banned. In the chapters leading up the Civil War, it summarized debates between between members of Congress from northern and southern states on slavery. Here’s what it says on page 274 of American History:

Southerners justified slavery as a good thing because:

1. The African slave was an inferior human being. As an inferior, he was suited only to special kinds of work. This work was best done under a system of slavery.

2. Slavery was approved by the Bible. Many southerners pointed out that slavery had existed in Biblical times. The Bible did not condemn slavery. Therefore, they added, it could not be bad or sinful.

3. The slave was treated better than many white factory workers in the north … who worked 12 snd 14 hours a day often in poorly-lighted and unhealthy factories. The slave did most of his work in outdoor in an area that was much warmer and healthier than a northern city.

4. Slavery was important in helping the South develop its leaders… The use of slaves made it possible for southern leaders to devote themselves to law, politics, and government service.

There were commensurate northern arguments against slavery with which you would already be familiar. My students would study, then role-play as ante-bellum northern and southern senators and members of Congress and debate just as Congress did in those years leading up to the Civil War. If a teacher were to try that today he’d be suspended immediately. On end-of-the-year evaluations, though, my students cited that debate as the lesson they learned the most from.

They learned also that slavery was practiced in every other civilization throughout human history — including in black Africa from which American slaves either purchased or captured. Many of our students today, however, believe slavery was unique to America.

The Allegedly Reverend Al Sharpton

Those southern senators and congressmen my students role-played were all Democrats. After WWII they were called Dixiecrats. Today’s Democrats, however, like to put on historical blinders when viewing their party's racist history. They claim that racist southern Democrats all became Republicans when Richard Nixon implemented his “Southern Strategy.” It’s classic projection. Trouble is, there’s little evidence for it.

Nixon said nothing remotely racist over a very long career from 1940s to the 1970s, but Democrats claim he used “racist dog whistles” like “law and order” and “states rights.” Really? Like a secret code? Only one senator — Strom Thurmond — became Republican and only one congressman — Albert Watson of South Carolina. Nearly all Dixiecrats supported Alabama Governor George Wallace, a Democrat, not Nixon. Though John Tower, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott joined the Republicans too, they hadn’t been Dixiecrats. The South became Republican in the 1980s and 90s because of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, not because of Nixon.

Few people know that a greater percentage of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights bill than Democrats and Nixon was one of them. He also supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Tom Wicker of the New York Times wrote: “There’s no doubt about it — the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived and led the administration’s desegregation effort.”

Nixon is the president who actually got Affirmative Action going which discriminated against whites in favor of blacks and women. The south became Republican not because of any strategy of Richard Nixon’s. The south became Republican because the south became conservative. It had little to do with racism.

Republicans all

So here we are in 2021. The Democrats run the country again and they just enacted a $1.9 trillion “Covid Relief” bill which has very little to do with COVID. Rather, it has everything to do with Democrat agendas, like $350 billion for bailing out cities like Chicago and Los Angeles and states like Illinois, California, New York and others. Decades of Democrat mayors and governors have brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. They did this by negotiating overly-generous pension and benefit packages they knew they couldn’t afford for public employee unions like the above mentioned SEIU, AFS/CME, and others.

Democrat leaders knew these contracts were unsustainable. They also knew they’d be out of office when the bill came due. The so-called COVID Relief Bill also gives Democrat teachers’ unions tens of billions more to open the schools they’ve kept closed. Money isn’t the problem. They still have billions they haven’t spent from the last relief bill. Maybe some of you are old enough to remember Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen’s remark from earlier times in that state: “A million here, a million there — pretty soon you’re talking real money.” If only it were still a million here and a million there. Now it’s a trillion here and a trillion there — and that’s still not enough for the Democrats!

Next will come still another multi-trillion-dollar piece of legislation — ostensibly for rebuilding infrastructure. Remember President Obama’s $800 billion in “shovel ready projects”? I challenge any of you to point to one of those shovel-ready projects we spent hundreds of billions on. I can’t point to any.

It was different with Republican public works projects over the years. We can point to the Hoover Dam in the twenties. Hoover was a Republican. We can point to Eisenhower’s interstate highways in the fifties. Eisenhower was a Republican. Where are Obama’s shovel ready projects from the 2000s? I give up.

We Republicans have our work cut out for us, don’t we? And so it goes…

Kryptonite For Teachers' Unions

Trump and DeVos

The most contentious confirmation of Trump’s cabinet nominees was for the relatively innocuous Secretary of Education. Why? National Review columnist Kevin Williamson suggests it’s because the Democrat Party power is the lowest since the Civil War; because teachers’ unions are its biggest source of funds; and because nominee Betsy DeVos supports voucher programs to reform American education. Democrats are famously “pro-choice” when it comes to mothers aborting their children, but definitely anti-choice when it comes to where their children go to school. Unless those mothers happen to be rich, their children must go to the local public school no matter how bad it may be. They have no choice, and teachers’ unions want to keep it that way.

If DeVos is successful, she will stimulate widespread school-choice programs at the state and/or national levels which are kryptonite for the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Union monopoly would be as broken as Humpty Dumpty. The Democrat Party would see both its funding and its stranglehold on academia decline precipitously.

When Congressman Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) challenged Nancy Pelosi as House Minority Leader, he said: “[Democrats are] at the point now where we are not even a national party… We have some support on the coast, but we lost the support of Middle America.” Democrats are also losing the support of many middle and lower-middle class urban blacks who vigorously support school choice programs, and constitute a vitally important Democrat voting block. The party is so anemic after eight years of Obama, it could very well pass away. That’s why DeVos is such a threat.

“There’s nothing new in education,” said Ellen May, dean of the graduate school of education I attended in the seventies and that contrasted strongly with what I was constantly hearing as a young teacher elsewhere. In seminars, in-service training sessions, and in the classes I had to attend in both undergrad and graduate school, all I heard were people saying how excited they were to be starting a new program for teaching this or that.

Throughout my thirty-six year career, “new” things would come and go so often it was impossible to keep count. You’d hear from “excited” teachers at the beginning, but you’d never from the disappointed ones when the “new” programs’ rosy prognostications didn’t materialize. Instead, teachers would get “so excited” about the next “new” thing, but the only new things I saw during my nearly four decades in education were words — jargon, newspeak, nomenclature. Academics were constantly changing terminology. Teachers weren’t teachers anymore. They were “educators.” There were no more classrooms, just “learning environments.” There were no more tests, only “assessments,” and so on. But did anything really change? Only the bureaucracy: it grew and grew.

Schools had always been local. Teachers were accountable to the children they taught, to their parents, and to local school boards. Then, state governments intervened concerning things like how long the school day and school year should be, what subjects must be taught at what levels, etc. Then the federal government got involved, and has been increasing its control ever since President Carter established the US Department of Education. And who controls that? Teachers’ unions do, especially the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. They also control most state government education departments as well as state colleges and universities where teachers must attend indoctrination sessions, I mean classes, in the “new” educational methods in order to receive state certification — a symbiotic relationship if there ever was one. Very few of the classes I was forced to sit through as a graduate and undergraduate actually helped me to teach. I had to unlearn most of it to be a good teacher.

Democrat critics say DeVos has no educational experience. She has worked for decades, however, so more children could have the educational opportunities she had coming from a wealthy family. She knows good schools from bad ones, and good teachers from bad ones. But, then, we all do. We’ve all had good teachers and bad and most of us have gone to good and bad schools as well. “Educators” insist they alone can make those distinctions but voters are wising up and trusting their own instincts.

Collins and Murkowski

Not a single Democrat senator is expected to support DeVos. Two Republicans have declared against her as well: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Maine’s own Susan Collins. Both get thousands from teachers’ unions. The Senate voted 50 to 50 this week, with Vice President Pence  breaking the tie. Betsy DeVos is now Secretary DeVos, and real educational reform can commence but the controversy isn’t over. Teachers’ unions and Democrats will escalate their attacks as she gets going. They have to. They know that if they don’t stop DeVos, they’ll die.

Not A Party Pooper

Happy Birthday Lila

“I like birthdays,” said my granddaughter last year. “You get presents. You turn another number.” She had just turned five. “Next year, I’ll be six,” she added matter-of-factly and that day comes Saturday. She’s a New-Year’s-Eve baby who arrived just in time to give her parents a tax deduction for 2010. I’ll be in attendance, bringing her a present — the Calico Critters Hazelnut Chipmunk Family Playset. It’s a box of four tiny anthropomorphic chipmunk figurines for $25. If I were shopping blindly for a present to give her and saw this on a shelf somewhere, I would never have purchased it. It looks overpriced, but that’s what she wants according to her mother. It’s not the $25 because that’s not a big number for us; it’s the objective value — but then I’m not objective when it comes to my grandchildren. She loves those little critters.

It so happens that I turn another number soon myself: 66. I’ll be entering my late sixties, one could say, and I’m going to start collecting Social Security. I’ll only be getting 30% of what I would have otherwise been entitled to because of a law signed by President Reagan thirty years ago to prevent double dipping by teachers in states like Maine. As a career public school teacher in this state, neither I nor my school district paid into Social Security for my teacher salary over 34 years. We both paid instead into the Maine State Retirement System. Because I worked other jobs all during that time, I paid into Social Security for those salaries, and I still do in the form of self-employment tax because I still work part time. If I’m only going to get 30% of my SS benefit, I should only pay in 30%, right? But no, I have to kick in the entire amount. Will I get back what I paid in? Well, that depends on how long I live, and who knows how long that will be? I don’t want to know.

Will the checks continue if I make it past 80? Probably not unless serious changes are made. There are simply too many people collecting and not enough paying in. Any dummy knows that can’t go on forever but neither President Obama nor President-elect Trump have any announced plans to address that. There’s nothing but IOUs in the Social Security Trust Fund. More than 90 million Americans are out of the workforce and obviously not contributing.

Meanwhile, there’s more than $12 billion in the Maine Public Employees Retirement Fund. It’s over 80% funded and Governor LePage has made provisions to steadily increase that percentage. Compared to retired teachers in other states like California and Illinois, my pension is meager and I can’t survive on it alone. Teachers and other public employees there get defined benefits that are two, three, and in some cases ten times what mine are, but those states are close to bankruptcy because of it. According to Forbes Magazine, Illinois has a $111 billion pension shortfall in 2016. Chicago’s alone is $9.5 billion. California had an unfunded pension liability of over $500 billion in 2014. It’s worse now despite Governor Moonbeam’s rosy reports on California fiscal situation.

Democrats have been running those states for generations. They’ve made commitments to public employee unions they knew couldn’t be kept. They also knew they’d be gone when the bills came due and they didn’t care. It’s called “kicking the can down the road.” They’re still kicking, but the end of the road is approaching fast. Should the federal government bail them out? Over my dead body.

I’m at that stage of life during which many of my contemporaries are dying or becoming debilitated with various aliments. I’m not what I used to be, but I’m doing well compared to most, and so is my wife. We both hate to exercise, but we do it anyway and it’s paying off. She also nags me about eating vegetables. Life is good, for now. I’ve been on Medicare since my last birthday and she goes on it in 2017when she turns 65. But Medicare is another kind of Ponzi scheme like Social Security. More and more are collecting it but the number paying in isn’t nearly keeping pace. Are our “leaders” in Washington addressing that? You know the answer.

President Obama has been patting himself on the back as his administration is about to end. When it does, he will have more than doubled our national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. All I can do about that issue and the others outlined above above is write about them. I’ll keep on pointing it all out to people, most of whom don’t want to hear it. When I attend my granddaughter’s birthday next Saturday where all my other grandchildren will be, I’ll think about it but I won’t say anything. Why ruin a good party?

Our Alleged Leaders

Bankruptcy is usually shameful, but not always. It means something has gone seriously wrong. Sometimes it cannot be foreseen, as when serious illness or death of a key person means survivors can’t make payments or keep a business running. No shame there. Others are willing to help in those situations.

 When bankruptcy results from irresponsible behavior, there is shame, or should be. Those undergoing it shouldn’t be trusted with authority or power until they demonstrate change. When the hammer falls on them, they try to shift blame for their ineptitude and others are disinclined to help.

What does it look like when governments go bankrupt? We get an idea watching cities deal with it. The most recent is Stockton, California, which has many problems but like most governments, their biggest problem is pensions. Politicians promised more than governments could deliver but they don’t want to admit that. Cities are facing the same crunch our federal government is, but neither Stockton nor the feds want to take responsibility. They’re looking for others to blame and observers are not inclined to help until they admit culpability.

When discovering it couldn’t pay for pie-in-the-sky pensions, Stockton didn’t cut back. Instead, it borrowed money by issuing bonds. Now, it cannot afford to pay for either pensions or bonds and is trying to stiff bondholders. Better to confront investors than confront government unions. They’ll have to scale back pensions too, but they’re refusing to for now. Bond holders will lose almost $200 million. Can’t imagine who would ever lend money to Stockton again, so how will it pay for those pensions now? One former police chief retired at $204,000 a year after serving only eight months. How can this continue? How many times can a city go bankrupt?

San Bernardino went bankrupt too, a few months before Stockton. One third of its 210,000 thousand citizens are below the poverty line but a police lieutenant can retire in his fifties at $128,000 a year, and, according to Reuters, that’s after getting “$230,000 in one-time payouts on his last day.”

Unions provide campaign contributions go to politicians who vote them pension benefits. Want to guess which political party gets those union contributions? Hint: it isn’t the Republicans. Democrats will bankrupt a city before confronting the unions.

A Detroit city councilwoman asked President Obama for a bailout last month: “Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president and there ought to be a quid pro quo,” she said. Maybe she didn’t hear that President Obama is busy trying to dodge a bankruptcy crisis of his own.

States are in flirting with bankruptcy too and for the same reasons: Government union pensions, especially for teachers, police and firemen. Even a liberal news outlet like the Huffington Post admits there’s a crisis: “[Illinois has] the nation's worst case of underfunding state employees' pensions,” it declared, “a problem approaching $100 billion and mounting by $17 million per day.” Illinois recently raised income taxes by 62% but even that didn’t make a dent.

Several other states are in danger of bankruptcy too. Will states that manage their affairs be expected to bail out states that don’t? I hope not. Will federal Democrat “leaders” try to bail out fellow Democrats running blue states? Will the United States itself go bankrupt? These are open questions as we watch irresponsible political “leaders” limp along with last-minute deals and continuing resolutions month to month.

There’s one important difference between the feds and the states: the US government can print money. States cannot. Democrats who control both the White House and the Senate refuse to deal with our looming unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Observers with rudimentary knowledge of arithmetic see impending bankruptcy unless there are huge cuts immediately. When federal Democrats try to borrow more money, creditors are reluctant to lend. Bond sales have few buyers, so what to do? Get the Federal Reserve to create digital money out of thin air and buy up unsold bonds.

Do our Democrat leaders think we’re any different than Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe? Do they think they can print funny money forever without inflationary consequences? I guess. Will they ever admit their New Deal and Great Society predecessors promised more than they could deliver? Not likely. Meanwhile, they blame “the rich” for “not paying their fair share” as if taking more from them will make it all add up.

It won’t. Even if we took 100% of what “the rich” make, it wouldn’t put a dent in our ever-expanding debt. Thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe - because if we go belly up, there’s no one else left out there to fix it.

When Government Unions Win, Everybody Else Loses

Not too much good news about public education coming out of our nation’s capital. Michelle Rhee resigned as chancellor of the Washington, DC school system. She was doing everything she could to break the left-wing teachers’ union’s power to protect its deadwood teachers and principals. She modified the teacher evaluation process by taking student progress on tests into consideration and she fired over 200 ineffective teachers and administrators. She had the support of Mayor Adrian Fenty, but other public employee unions including the infamously left-wing SEIU joined up to defeat him and pull the rug out from under Rhee. The American Federation of Teachers spent over $1 million in the effort.

Unions won. Students lost.

This came on the heels of another bit of bad news last year in our capitol city when Congress (which administers the District of Columbia) eliminated a school choice program for 1700 DC school children. President Obama, who sends his children to an expensive private school in DC, did nothing to support the school choice program for poor DC kids. Democrats are beholden to the teachers’s unions, which are the biggest supporters of that party nationwide, just ahead of trial lawyers. School choice anywhere it’s offered is anathema to teachers’ unions. Most of their political capital is spent defeating school choice (voucher) programs nationwide.

Here too, unions won. Students lost.

Shortly after Michelle Rhee resigned, the DC school system started feeding dinner to students as well as breakfast and lunch. According to an article at change.org, “This new early dinner program will feed 10,000 kids who may spend up to 10 hours a day at school in early-care and after-school programs.” So, now US taxpayers are feeding three meals a day to school kids in our nation’s capital. They’re spending ten hours a day in school with early care and after school programs, yet change.org is lamenting that food stamp aid may be cut to pay for it. “Forty percent of households reported not having enough money to buy food at least one time,” the article claims, and the federal government is “robbing Peter to pay Paul” when it cuts food stamps.

Why don’t those households have enough money for food when their kids are getting two or three free meals at school in addition to their food stamps? Are they bartering their food stamp benefits for other things on the street corner? According to an article in the Washington Examiner, the Washington DC school system has the fattest kids in the country. “The District has the highest childhood obesity rate in the country [according to] the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” yet we’re supposed to feed them still more? What the heck is going on down there?

Most newspapers report the per-pupil cost for DC schools at $13,000 per year, but if an article in the Washington Times is correct, the real number is $24,600! That’s the figure you get when you take all the money spent on the schools and divided it by the number of students. My only question at this point is: when are we going to provide beds for them? We babysit them before and after school, we feed them, we teach them to brush their teeth, teach them about the birds and the bees, provide counseling - so what’s left for parents to do? Where is it going to end?

The school choice program that Democrats in Congress cut cost the Washington DC school district only $7500 per pupil. At $24,600 per pupil the District spends, that would be a net savings of more than $17,000 per student. The 1700 students who took advantage of it were thriving. Their parents were happy with it too, but the teachers’ unions were not because it shined a bright light on what a bloated, corrupt education bureaucracy the unions created and preserved. If it expanded and was copied across the country, the teachers’ union monopoly would be smashed and Democrats would lose their biggest constituency. It had to go.

The federal government administers Washington, DC. Its schools are among the most expensive in the country, yet its students score among the lowest on standardized tests. If there’s a congressman or senator who sends his/her kids to the public schools in that city, I don’t know who it is. Nevertheless, that same federal government is taking more and more control of all the nation’s schools through an expanding US Department of Education.

As a long-time public school teacher, I don’t see that as an encouraging trend. How about we get rid of some Democrats next Tuesday?