Rodent Regatta

Letters to Rod Paige and Ted Kennedy

By Craig J. Cantoni

(For Internet publication)

Two open letters follow, one to Education Secretary Rod Paige and another to Senator Ted Kennedy.

Dear Secretary Paige:

Although it wasn’t your intent, your op-ed in the October 30 Wall Street Journal helps to explain why today’s graduates of government schools cannot think critically and logically.

The op-ed began with a recital of how much government school spending has increased under the Bush administration. To quote: ”President Bush has increased K-12 education spending by 40% since he took office. That’s more in two years than it increased during the eight previous years under President Clinton. In raw terms, this president has increased education spending by $11 billion.”

Then in the following nine paragraphs, you stated the truth about education spending—that there is little relationship between increased spending and academic achievement.

Your logic would read as follows as a syllogism: Wasting money is wrong; increased education spending is a waste of money; therefore Bush did the right thing by increasing education spending. Hurts the brain, doesn’t it?

Or try this: Republicans are the party of small government and low taxes; Bush increased government spending more than Clinton; therefore Bush is a true Republican. Ouch!

I will keep your op-ed in my files and take it out whenever I have misgivings about the financial sacrifice that my wife and I make to exercise our religious freedom and send our kid to parochial school.

Sincerely,
Craig J. Cantoni

Dear Senator Kennedy:

I am very sorry to hear that you are still fighting your demons, especially the ones about inheriting your wealth, connections and political office from your philandering, bootlegging daddy, who also pulled strings to get you into Harvard. It must be very difficult to know that you earned little of your status and power on your own. Your feelings of guilt and inadequacy probably explain why you recently came out against so-called legacy admissions to universities.

Incidentally, your dad and my grandfather had a lot in common. My grandfather worked as a coal miner when he immigrated to this country from Italy. Chances are, the coal that he mined was used by your dad to fuel the boilers in his mansion. And my grandfather was also into moonshine like your dad. During Prohibition, he made wine in the cellar for personal consumption.

Anyway, back to the legacy issue.

You want universities to begin reporting how many of their admissions are legacy admissions; that is, admissions that are made because a parent attended the same university or gave money to the university.

I went to my copy of the U.S. Constitution and could not find an enumerated power that authorizes the federal government to enact such a regulation. Nor could I find a basis for such a regulation in the Federalist Papers or any other writings of the Founders. Perhaps you were sleeping during history class at Harvard or looking up a classmate’s dress when the Constitution was covered.

Of course, your secret agenda—other than exorcising your demons—is to build a case for affirmative action for government-favored groups that vote Democratic, especially Hispanics and blacks. Since it is mostly whites who get preferential treatment from universities based on legacy and endowments, you think it logically follows that it is okay to give preferential treatment based on race. You and Education Secretary Rod Paige think alike: illogically.

Your Harvard intellect fails to grasp the difference between a race-neutral practice that has a racial effect and a race-based practice that has a racial effect.

A legacy admission is a race-neutral practice that does not violate the Constitution. Universities are colorblind when they grant legacy admissions. Affirmative action, on the other hand, is a race-based practice that violates the Constitution, irrespective of the intellectual somersaults of Sandra Day O’Connor. Universities are not colorblind when they give extra admission points to certain races.

Both practices have different effects on different groups, but their starting points are radically different.

Am I going too fast for you?

Take my son as an example. He is the first Cantoni since his great-grandparents immigrated here who will have the wherewithal to attend an Ivy League school. Unlike you, he is not lucky enough to have a parental legacy that will give him an edge over other applicants. That doesn’t bother me at all, primarily because I don’t want him to attend an Ivy League school and be indoctrinated in the kind of politically correct nonsense that you espouse. But even if it bothered me, I wouldn’t want the federal government to do anything about it. I’d simply write it off as your forebears having more money than mine.

Affirmative action is a different matter. It means that the son of a Mexican immigrant can jump the line over my son, the great-grandson of an Italian immigrant, solely on the basis of his ethnicity. Now that bothers me a lot, enough to want to grab my pitchfork and storm your family castle in Martha’s Vineyard.

If that sounds extreme to you, please keep in mind that you’re the extremist. You took an oath to uphold the Constitution, an oath that you ignore. The Consitution clearly prohibits the denial of rights based on race. It is completely silent about advantages that accrue from wealth.

Incidentally, you and your party also favor estate taxes. That means that you want the government to take a part of the nest egg that my mom and dad saved and invested all of their working-class lives. Reminder: You’re the champion of the working-class. Wink, wink.

Most members of your party favor the estate tax for egalitarian reasons, believing in equal outcomes and in the use of state power to achieve equal outcomes. Other members of your party—and, sadly, many Republicans—favor the estate tax because they believe in a meritocracy. They believe in people starting on a level playing field and earning what they get in life. But if these people had ever taken a course in critical thinking, they would understand that their beliefs logically lead to the state rearing children or killing parents. Why? Because one’s success in life depends on parental influences more than inherited money.

Take you as an example. Even if daddy Joe had not given you a dime, you would have still benefited from his connections and the Kennedy name. Or do you believe that you would have become a U.S. Senator on your own merits and did not have an enormous advantage over my father, who was raised in a two-flat on Dago Hill—sorry, but that’s what we call it—in St. Louis? If you think that, you should stay away from the liquor cabinet.

Sorry, but the legacy of connections and power that you inherited from your daddy is going to follow you to the grave, regardless of how much you pontificate about fairness on Capitol Hill. If you had had the courage of your convictions, you would have resigned your senate seat, changed your name to something with a vowel at the end of it, given all your money to charity, moved into a bungalow in the North End of Boston, and did honest work for living.

Sincerely,
Craig J. Cantoni

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

Why does Joe Lieberman believe in tyranny?

By Craig J. Cantoni

(For Internet publication)

As a Jew and a learned man, Senator Joseph Lieberman certainly understands the horrors of the racial genocide of the Third Reich and the class genocide of the Bolshevik Revolution. He should know better than Howard Dean and the other leftist presidential candidates that both ugly scars on human history began with a belief that the state was more important than the individual. That’s what makes his support of the tyranny of collectivism so inexplicable.

Lieberman outlined his economic platform in the October 27 edition of the Wall Street Journal. It is a collectivist, class-warfare platform. Like all forms of redistribution, it would use government power to forcibly take property from some citizens and give it to others. Specifically, it would take money from a small minority of higher-income citizens and give it to a large majority of lower-income citizens. Under his plan, couples earning more than $200,000 would see their taxes increase, and couples earning $200,000 or less would see their taxes decrease.

The Bolsheviks and Nazis also began thier reigns by confiscating property for state purposes—noble purposes in the twisted minds of those in power.

Of course, Lieberman is in no way advocating what the Bolsheviks and Nazis did next: send selected groups to the gulag and concentration camp. But make no mistake about it: Once the camouflage of his flowery rhetoric is stripped away, Lieberman is recommending tyranny—not the tyranny of a dictatorship, but the tyranny of the majority. Unlike the nation’s founders, he believes that if enough citizens band together, they have the moral and constitutional right to rob other people, especially if the others are part of a small demonized group.

Lieberman took 22 column-inches to justify his plan, but it can be summarized in 18 words: He proposes lowering the taxes of 98 percent of taxpayers and raising the taxes on the top 2 percent of taxpayers. In other words, he is saying that 98 percent of taxpayers have a right to the money of a small minority. It does not matter to him that the top 2 percent of wage earners already pay more than 35 percent of all federal income taxes.

One of Hitler’s first actions upon becoming the German chancellor in 1933 was to declare a one-day boycott against Jewish shops, thus depriving the owners of a portion of their income. At the time, Jews were a small minority, comprising about 6 percent of the German population.

There was no outcry in Germany or the rest of the world over the boycott. We know what came next in the absence of an outcry: German Jews were denied the right to vote, to marry gentiles, to own property and, finally, to live.

Virtually every American would say that the boycott was immoral, unfair and unjust. Why would they say that? Is it because they know about the atrocities that came later? Or is it because the boycott was immoral, unfair and unjust on its face, irrespective of the atrocities that followed?

I believe the latter—that it was immoral, unfair and unjust on its face for 94 percent of Germans to deprive 6 percent of Germans of part of their livelihood. It logically follows, then, that it is immoral, unfair and unjust for 98 percent of Americans to deprive 2 percent of Americans of part of their livelihood.

Some would say that this is an apples-to-oranges comparison—that there is not a moral equivalency between the confiscation of income based on race and the confiscation of income based on wealth. Of course, many of those who would say this are the same people who believe in racial preferences—in giving favored races preferential treatment over less-favored races.

Others would say that it is immoral, unfair and unjust for the wealthy to have too much money and not share it with the poor. In fact, that’s what Lieberman suggested in his op-ed. He called his plan a ”tax fairness plan.”

The problem with such thinking is that 98 percent of Americans are not poor and unable to provide for themselves. Only 10 percent or so do not have the mental or physical ability to provide the necessities of life to themselves or their families. But Lieberman is not saying that the state should give 10 percent of Americans other people’s money. Nor is he saying that 10 percent should be helped through private charity. He is saying that the state should forcibly take money from 2 percent of Americans and give it to the remaining 98 percent, which, under his plan, includes couples with a combined income of $200,000. That’s a strange and expansive definition of fairness.

Having painted himself into an intellectual corner, Lieberman tried to escape by talking about the dramatic increase over the years in the regressive payroll tax, in health care costs and in college tuition—costs that are borne, he said, by the middle-class. In doing so, he left footprints of wet paint all over his economic platform.

Lieberman’s rationale is wrong for two reasons. First, the middle-class does not consist of 98 percent of Americans and those earning up to $200,000. Second, although Republicans share much of the blame, his party is mostly responsible for skyrocketing payroll taxes, health care costs and tuition. Democratic presidents enacted Social Security and Medicare, both of which rely on intergenerational transfer payments and are truly Ponzi schemes. Moreover, it was a Democratic president who destroyed a consumer market in health insurance 60 years ago through a misguided policy that made workers dependent on their employers for health insurance. And Democrats more than Republicans have advocated expansions of the student loan program and increased subsidies to education, both of which have resulted in the cost of education increasing three times faster than inflation.

With paint brush in hand, Lieberman went on to rail against the declining share of taxes paid by corporations. He did not say that corporate taxes are simply passed on to consumers in higher prices for goods and services.

Lieberman uses these extraneous issues to hide his true belief. Like other Democrats and an alarming number of Republicans, he believes that your money belongs to the collective, to be doled out by the state based on the whims, class resentments, selfishness and moral turpitude of the majority of voters and the party in power.

In view of history, it is inexplicable that a Jew would want the state to have so much power.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

How China surpassed the United States

By Craig J. Cantoni

(For Internet publication)

Scene: History Class at Beijing University, Beijing China
Speaker: Professor Chou Yeng
Date: October 26, 2150

I’m going to lecture today on how China surpassed the United States as an economic and military power 75 years ago. I’ll begin by discussing the factors that contributed to America’s downfall but were not the primary reason for the downfall. Then I’ll conclude with the primary reason.

Five factors contributed to the downfall:

1. ENTITLEMENT SPENDING:

By 2030, entitlements consumed 70 percent of the United States budget. This left the American government with inadequate military resources to defend itself against the enemies that it had made through military interventionism and against the enemies that it had made by virtue of being number one and holding Western values. Ironically, because of entitlement spending and progressive taxation, the United States eventually became more socialistic and less entrepreneurial than post-Mao China.

2. LACK OF SAVINGS AND INVESTMENT

The entitlement spending and the corresponding high taxes on income lowered personal savings to a rate that was one-fifth China’s rate at the time. This in turn left the United States with inadequate capital to fund investments in industry and productivity improvements.

3. TARIFFS, SUBSIDIES AND INFLEXIBLE LABOR LAWS

Over time, the lack of investment capital resulted in lower per-capita income and a declining standard of living. These in turn increased demands for tariffs on imported goods, subsidies for uncompetitive American industries, and strict labor laws that had the misguided purpose of protecting American jobs—all of which made matters worse. The United States stopped being a haven for capital from foreign investors, who shifted their money to China, where it got a higher return.

4. DIVERSITY

Immigration had been a strength of the United States during the latter half of the19th century and early 20th century. It had been a source of cheap labor, of outstanding scientific and entrepreneurial talent, and of new ideas. But by the 21st century, when immigration had morphed into multiculturalism and group rights and privileges, it had become a source of friction, resentment, divisiveness, and litigation. At the same time, China exploited the fact that it was 92 percent homogenous and had a formal and informal network of Chinese business contacts and investment sources not only in Asia but also in North America.

5. THE MANHATTAN DIRTY BOMB

The United States never recovered from the dirty bomb that spread radioactivity across lower Manhattan and the heart of the nation’s financial district in 2025. The ensuing panic and financial turmoil caused more harm than the bomb itself. Just 24 years before, a handful of Islamic extremists had destroyed the World Trade Center and caused the United States to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on security, military campaigns and nation-building. But that was a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions that were spent as a result of the dirty bomb—expenditures that coincided with increased entitlement spending. The United States had never learned from the World Trade Center. Due to nostalgia for high-density downtowns and a growing political movement against what was then called ”suburban sprawl,” the United States kept too much of its financial industry concentrated in vulnerable downtown Manhattan instead of spreading it out in safer suburban locations across the country.

Now for the primary reason for America’s downfall: nutritional labeling in restaurants. No, I’m not kidding.

In 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration first considered mandatory nutritional labeling in restaurants as a way of countering the obesity of Americans. The FDA’s thinking was symbolic of what the United States had become. It had become a soft, paternalistic nation of big-bellied citizens who could no longer think for themselves without the government’s help.

Years before, the United States had mandated nutritional labeling on packaged food. The nation got fatter afterwards. So what did United States do? It advocated mandatory food labeling in restaurants, believing that the nation would get skinnier as a result. The government had become a government of obtuse fat heads. Instead of being a government that knew how to grow an economy, it had become a government that knew how to grow food labeling bureaucrats, food labeling consultants and food labeling lawyers who would file lawsuits on behalf of obese clients.

At the same time, restaurants in China were skinning live snakes at restaurant tables to satisfy the demand of patrons for fresh snake meat—without skin or nutritional labels.

The now defunct Wall Street Journal ran an article on October 23, 2003, about the restaurant labeling. I have it here. The article quoted a deputy FDA commissioner, who said: ”What the public really wants to do is get a reality check … to have an adequate nutritional program that does not make them overweight.”

That statement says it all about what had happened by the early 21st century to American self-reliance, individualism, common sense and initiative. Americans no longer had the intelligence to understand that overeating was making them fat, not the lack of an ”adequate nutritional program.” Americans no longer understood that steamed broccoli has less calories and is more nutritious than deep-fried chicken wings. A nation with such widespread stupidity and dependency did not deserve to rule the world—and it no longer does.

Any questions?

In the next class I’ll be covering why the United States followed in the footsteps of France, Germany and Great Britain.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

Modern management can’t work in public education
By Craig J. Cantoni

(published in the Arizona Republic on October 1, 2003)

Can such modern management techniques as TQM (total quality management), SPC (statistical process control) and employee empowerment help to transform public schools into high-performance organizations? Based on my 30 years of experience in transforming low-performing organizations into high-performing ones, the answer is no.

It is no because public schools do not have the following prerequisites for high performance.

First, they do not have a unifying mission or purpose that is embraced by all employees and that gives the organization focus.

Because of politics, the mission of public education is fuzzy and constantly changing. Some say the mission is to teach the three R’s. Others say it is to teach students how to think. George Bush says it is to leave no child behind. The Arizona Department of Education says it is to pass standardized tests. The teacher union says it is to increase teacher pay. Sports enthusiasts say it is to have a winning football team. The Left and the Right say it is to indoctrinate students in their respective ideologies. This newspaper and other media say it is to spend more money. And do-gooders say it is to be a social welfare agency.

Second, public schools do not have competition. Without the fear of losing customers, there is little impetus for overturning the status quo.

Third, public school employees are not held accountable for bad performance. Teachers can thwart management’s attempts to hold them accountable by running around management to their union, which in turn will run to legislators for protection.

Fourth, without being held accountable for measurable results, teachers and other employees cannot be given increased freedom to make decisions on their own or as members of a self-directed team. Public schools are the opposite of high-performing factories, where the workers on the line are held accountable for decisions that used to be management’s responsibility, including such decisions as hiring and evaluating coworkers.

Last, teachers are squashed under the weight of a multiplicity of overseers and second-guessers, including local administrators, district administrators, county administrators, state administrators, federal administrators, school boards, state legislators, Congress, unions, parent groups, consultants, textbook publishers, colleges of education, and the media—all of whom have conflicting goals and agendas.

In summary, modern management techniques cannot work in a Rube Goldberg contraption that is designed for inefficiency, ineffectiveness, bureaucracy and political meddling.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, public speaker and consultant. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.

University indoctrination and conservative stupidity
By Craig J. Cantoni

(For Internet publication)

While conservatives smugly and mistakenly believe that they are winning the ideological war because they control talk-radio, the presidency and Congress, their kids are being indoctrinated in leftist thinking in a new and more insidious way on college campus, where 90 percent of professors vote Democratic, according to surveys.

Everyone has his own definition of stupidity. My definition is this: Stupidity is paying tens of thousands of dollars to have your kid receive an illiberal education instead of a classical liberal education and to see your offspring enter adulthood thinking like Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton.

The new method of indoctrination was described in the September 21, 2003, edition of The Arizona Republic. Of course, the Republic portrayed the method as a positive change and not as indoctrination, probably because journalists have the same left-leaning worldview as professors. True to form, the Republic did not include any opposing views.

Like all effective indoctrination, the new method seems innocuous on the surface. It entails offering ”integrated learning” programs that tie together what is learned in separate courses in separate academic disciplines. For example, an integrated learning program might teach the interrelationships between economics, history and literature.

Arizona State University has three such programs. One is Multicultural America.

No, I’m not making this up. And, no, the university is not offering it as a parody of the politically-correct, anti-intellectual, multicultural claptrap that has been taught on universities.

These people cannot help themselves. It’s some form of mental illness.

The other two programs are War, Culture and Memory; and Human Disease and Society.

In the War, Culture and Memory program, according to the Republic, ”students are studying how nations at war often dehumanize the enemy through propaganda, art and literature.”

Wow, how profound!

The Republic went on to say that the program shows how Americans characterized the Japanese in W.W.II as ”apelike, inhuman, brutal creatures.” It also shows how the Japanese did the same thing. In other words, the program implies that there was a moral equivalency between America and Japan.

No doubt, the program does not include the following facts from the disciplines of history, political science and economics:

History: The program does not include the facts about the brutality of the Bataan Death March; the torture of American prisoners by the Japanese, including ghastly medical experiments in which organs were removed until the prisoners died; and the Rape of Nanking, where the Japanese raped women, cut fetuses from the wombs of living women, and threw babies in the air and then speared them with bayonets on the way down.

Political Science: The program does not include the common ideological thread between the autocratic regimes of Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich—namely, that each had a culture and tradition of putting the state before the individual, similar to how modern-day American liberals (really illiberals) want to put the state before the individual.

Economics: The program does not include the fact that that individual freedom cannot exist without economic freedom, which is anathema to professors, who favor collectivism and disdain capitalism, free markets and the profit motive.

How do I know that the program does not include the foregoing facts? Because I have guest-lectured to senior business classes at Arizona State University. Even business students have a bias against capitalism and are ignorant of the moral, philosophical and historical foundations of capitalism and our constitutional republic.

It is axiomatic that if leftist claptrap is being taught in individual course in individual disciplines by leftist professors, then a program that shows the interrelationships between the individual courses and disciplines will also be leftist claptrap if it is taught by leftist professors.

Of course, you will never see a program on college campus that shows the interrelationships between leftist claptrap and leftist claptrap. Conservative parents are too smug and stupid to demand such a course.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.