Posts Tagged ‘government control’
« Older Entries |Kids’ info on state database – forever
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Far more personal information on students than is necessary is being collected by public schools, according to the Fordham Law School Center on Law and Information Policy, which investigated education records in all 50 states. States are failing to safeguard students’ privacy and protect them from data misuse.
Some states collect a lot of data that has nothing to do with student test scores, including Social Security numbers, disciplinary records, family wealth indicators, student pregnancies, student mental health, illness and jail sentences. A couple of states record the date of a student’s last medical exam and a student’s weight.
The Fordham study reported that this collection of information is often not compliant with a 35-year-old law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). The only punishment for a FERPA violation is for the Department of Education to withhold federal education funding, but the department has never done that.
The building of databases that track students from pre-school through entry into the workforce began with the emphasis in the 1990s on testing and standards, and was expanded under “No Child Left Behind” mandates. This data collection has been proceeding at what observers call a “breakneck pace” under the Obama administration because of the offer of federal grants awarded through the Race to the Top competition, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and $250 million in stimulus funds.
Fordham law professor Joel R. Reidenberg, who oversaw the Fordham study, said that states are “trampling the privacy interests of those students.” He warns that years later, when these kids are adults, information from their elementary, middle and high school years can easily be misused by hackers and others.
The Fordham report made numerous recommendations to beef up student privacy, such as collecting only information relevant to articulated purposes, purging unjustified data, enacting time limits for data retention and hiring a chief privacy officer for each state. There is no indication that these suggestions will be implemented.
Obama Department of Education officials believe that collecting personally identifiable data is “at the heart of improving schools and school districts.” One of the four reform mandates of the Race to the Top competition is to establish pre-kindergarten to college-and-career data systems that “track progress and foster continuous improvement.”
The advocates of this massive data collection, in which individual students are clearly identifiable, claim that this is necessary to enable policymakers and educators to evaluate student and teacher performance. They assert that this enables educators to predict which students are in danger of dropping out, determine which are better teachers and better curricula, and track trends in academic progress by ethnicity and income level.
The advocates of this massive data collection seem to have little or no concern for privacy protection. Some 80 percent of states do not have a system to delete student records and therefore are likely to maintain them indefinitely.
Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan has an important ally in the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) for promoting this unprecedented student data system. All 50 states now have in place at least five of the DQC’s 10 “essential elements” for a statewide longitudinal data system, and 47 states plan to have eight or more elements in place within the next three years.
DQC was founded in 2005, largely with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and DQC’s January 2010 publication, “The Next Step,” praises the “enormous progress” states have made in developing these pre-K through college data systems. The DQC website explicitly supports linking education data with “workforce, social services and other critical state agency data systems.”
A recent Education Week article noted that privacy laws make it challenging to link K-12 and postsecondary data in states that prohibit schools from storing students’ Social Security numbers. However, the Fordham Center reports that at least 16 states already record each child’s SSN.
Those who object to this organized invasion of student privacy warn that some states might change their laws about Social Security numbers in order to receive federal grants offered by the Department of Education for the building of longitudinal student databases. The changing of such laws may be what the DQC has in mind with its plan to help states “identify and put in place the necessary policies and practices” to implement longitudinal data systems.
This massive collection of private information on all schoolchildren is an ominous imitation of the file (called dang’an) on each student’s performance and attitudes, from school years through employment, compiled by communist China on every individual in order to exercise totalitarian control over the population. In China, it became impossible to get a job unless the individual had a dang’an approved by the authorities.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Public Education
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Paul Ryan: America Live with Megyn Kelly on Fox News
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
March 10, 2010
Congressman Paul Ryan explains the true costs of the health care bill.
Under the Constitution, the vice president is President of the Senate.
I didn’t think Obama had the authority to order the congress to pass a bill by a certain date so I looked it up. See if you agree. Actually the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, controls the agenda.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Guess Who’s Coming to Your House? Hidden Dangers in Obamacare
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
It’s all supposed to be voluntary, those “home visits” that are tucked into the mammoth ObamaCare bill. If you have a strong stomach, and stronger bottom, you can find home visitation on pages 568-595. That’s Section 2951 of H.R. 3590, the Senate bill that Harry Reid brought down the chimney on Christmas Eve.
All voluntary, they say, but once you “volunteer” to have the oh-so-helpful folks from Social Services come in to help with your newborns, or with a number of other specified issues, will you ever be able to get rid of them?
The bill provides for federal funding and supervision for this vast expansion of government intrusion into family life. This is the Nanny State on steroids.
Is your family being “targeted” for such home visitations? Let’s see if you fit into one of these very broad categories:
• Families where Mom is not yet 21. (No mention here whether she is married or not.)
• Families where someone is a tobacco user. (Does this include the White House? Watch out, Sasha and Malia!) Does Grandpa, whom you love and have taken in, enjoy his after-dinner pipe?
• Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities.
As if that list was not wide-ranging enough, here’s the net that can encompass tens of millions:
• Families with individuals who are serving or formerly served in the armed forces, including such families that have members of the armed forces who have had multiple deployments outside the United States. [Emphasis added.]
So, while Johnny gets his gun, the government steps in to “help” his family at home. Ronald Reagan used to say the most frightening words in the English language were these: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
Who will sit atop the federal pyramid that runs this vast new invasion of family privacy? Why, it will be Sec. of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, of course. She was the most pro-abortion governor in American history when President Obama tapped her for his Cabinet.
Do you spank your children? You should know that HHS bureaucrats think you are an abuser.
Do you support the Second Amendment? How would you like HHS bureaucrats asking your children if you maintain firearms in the home for family protection?
Do you home school your kids? Take care. Members of Congress who have tried to abolish home schooling are big backers of this health care bill. Do you wonder why? Continued…
|
| | Full Article & Comments | | | Next > |
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, socialism, Terrorism
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Stimulus or Sedative?
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has, if you called the tail a leg? When the audience said “five,” Lincoln corrected them, saying that the answer was four. “The fact that you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”
That same principle applies today. The fact that politicians call something a “stimulus” does not make it a stimulus. The fact that they call something a “jobs bill” does not mean there will be more jobs.
What have been the actual consequences of all the hundreds of billions of dollars that the government has spent? The idea behind the spending is that it will cause investors to invest, lenders to lend and employers to employ.
That was called “pump priming.” To get a pump going, people put a little water into it, so that the pump will start pumping out a lot of water. In other words, government money alone was never supposed to restore the economy by itself. It was supposed to get the private sector spending, lending, investing and employing.
The question is: Is that what has actually happened?
The stimulus spending started back in 2008, during the Bush administration, and has continued under the Obama administration, so it has had plenty of time to show what it can do.
After the Bush administration’s stimulus spending in 2008, business spending on equipment and software fell– not rose– by 28 percent. Spending on durable goods fell 22 percent.
What about the banks? Four months after the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) poured billions of dollars into the banks, the biggest recipients of that money made 23 percent fewer loans than before. A year later, the credit extended by American banks as a whole was down– not up– by more than $20 billion.
Spending in general was down. The velocity of circulation of money fell faster than it had in half a century.
Just two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported, “U.S. banks posted last year their sharpest decline in lending since 1942.” You can call it a stimulus, if you want to, just as you can call a tail a leg. But the actual effect of what is called a “stimulus” has been more like that of a sedative. Continued…
|
| | Full Article & Comments | | | Next > |
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, unemployment
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Is Sebelius Misinformed or Misinforming About the Senate Health Care Bill and Abortion?
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
With the votes held by Rep. Bart Stupak and his pro-life group of Democrat Representatives standing in the way of the passage of the Senate Health Care Reform bill in the House, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius took to the Sunday talk shows to make the push for the bill.
On Meet the Press, the Secretary said the following in response to host David Gregory’s question as to whether Stupak was misinformed in his belief that the Senate Bill allowed for Federal dollars to be spent on abortion:
“There is no Federal money paying for abortion.”
On page 2355 of The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed by the Senate there is provision for direct funding of Community Health Centers without going through the normal process of the annual Health and Human Services appropriation. This would exempt it from the restrictions of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits Federal funds from being spent to provide abortions.
Is Sebelius misinformed or intentionally misinforming the public?
[In his paragraph above the author refers to page 2355 of The Patient Protection And affordable Care Act. You can read the page in our website’s post
“Healthcare Bill As It Stands Today”
patient-protection-affordable-care-act-as-passed
You won’t see the word abortion used. As he states above funds are given to the Secretary for discretionary distribution to states and Community Health Centers. In this case think Planned Parenthood which does receive federal money today.
Pro-life lawmakers urge end to federal funds to abortion providers
When you go to the bill you will clearly see references to National Health Service meaning single-payer/government option/public option/National Health Care/universal healthcare.
Tags: Abortion, Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Low-tax Texas beats big-government California
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
March 7, 2010
| (AP) |
“Stop messing with Texas!” That was the message Gov. Rick Perry bellowed on election night as he celebrated his victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary for governor. In his reference to Texas’ anti-littering slogan, Perry was making a point applicable to national as well as Texas politics and addressed to Democratic politicians as well as Republicans.
His point was that the big-government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders are resented and fiercely opposed not just because of their dire fiscal effects but also as an intrusion on voters’ independence and ability to make decisions for themselves.
No one would include Perry on a list of serious presidential candidates, including himself, even in the flush of victory. But in his 10 years as governor, the longest in the state’s history, Texas has been teaching some lessons to which the rest of the nation should pay heed.
They are lessons that are particularly vivid when you contrast Texas, the nation’s second most populous state, with the most populous, California. Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the 1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.
But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress — or lack of it — over the last decade. California has gone in for big government in a big way. Democrats hold big margins in the legislature largely because affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area favor their liberal positions on cultural issues.
Those Democratic majorities have obediently done the bidding of public employee unions to the point that state government faces huge budget deficits. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempt to reduce the power of the Democratic-union combine with referenda was defeated in 2005 when public employee unions poured $100 million — all originally extracted from taxpayers — into effective TV ads.
Californians have responded by leaving the state. From 2000 to 2009, the Census Bureau estimates, there has been a domestic outflow of 1,509,000 people from California — almost as many as the number of immigrants coming in. Population growth has not been above the national average and, for the first time in history, it appears that California will gain no House seats or electoral votes from the reapportionment following the 2010 census.
Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes — and no state income taxes — and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, compared with California’s year-round legislature. Its fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent.
But Texas seems to be delivering superior services. Its teachers are paid less than California’s. But its test scores — and with a demographically similar school population — are higher. California’s once fabled freeways and crumbling and crowded. Texas has built gleaming new highways in metro Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
In the meantime, Texas’ economy has been booming. Unemployment rates have been below the national average for more than a decade, as companies small and large generate new jobs.
And Americans have been voting for Texas with their feet. From 2000 to 2009, some 848,000 people moved from other parts of the United States to Texas, about the same number as moved in from abroad. That inflow has continued in 2008-09, in which 143,000 Americans moved into Texas, more than double the number in any other state, at the same time as 98,000 were moving out of California. Texas is on the way to gain four additional House seats and electoral votes in the 2010 reapportionment.
This was not always so. In the two decades after World War II California, with its pleasant weather, was the Golden State, a promised land, for most Americans, while Texas seemed a provincial rural backwater. Many saw postwar California’s expansion of universities, freeways and water systems a model for the nation. Few experts praised Texas’ low-tax, low-services government.
Now it is California’s ruinously expensive and increasingly incompetent government that seems dysfunctional, while Texas’ approach has generated more creativity and opportunity. So it’s not surprising that Texas voters preferred Perry over an opponent who has spent 16 years in Washington. What’s surprising is that Democrats in Washington are still trying to impose policies like those that have ravaged California rather than those that have proved so successful in Texas.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, personal responsibility, unemployment
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Milton Friedman – The Social Security Myth
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
Using Social Security as his prime example, Professor Friedman explodes the myth that the major expansions in government resulted from popular demand. In a speech delivered more than 30 years ago, he directly relates this dynamic to today’s health care debate.
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, and a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Milton Friedman’s Wiki Bio
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, national healthcare, Social Security, socialized medicine
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Time to stop lying to ourselves
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
Citigroup, one the world’s largest banks, was bailed out with some $45 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds, and we taxpayers – you and I – still own a little over one-quarter of the company.
Do you recall making this investment? I don’t.
Nevertheless, in testimony before a panel appointed by Congress to oversee management of the $700 billion TARP fund that financed the Citigroup bailout, the bank’s CEO, Vikram Pandit, thanked all of us.
“I want to thank our government for providing Citi with TARP funds. … Citi owes a large debt of gratitude to American taxpayers.”
The rest of Pandit’s testimony amounted to genuflecting before his government welfare officers and endorsing sweeping new government regulation of the financial-services industry that Democrats in the House and Senate are championing.
“I strongly believe that consumer protection can and should be strengthened at the federal regulatory level,” testified Pandit.
The $700 billion TARP fund used to bail out Citigroup, along with others, was a check written on the American taxpayers’ account that Congress gave then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to spend however he wanted.
At the center of the financial collapse that brought down these banks was the illusion of infinitely rising housing prices fueled by trillions of dollars of free-flowing credit, artificially cheap because it was backed by us taxpayers through FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In other words, the heart of our crisis can be explained by Margaret Thatcher’s famous summary of the problem with socialism: Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
Of course, we need protection. But American consumers are also American taxpayers, and it’s American citizens and taxpayers that need to be protected from their government.
The tea-party grass-roots revolt that has sprouted across our country is a basic expression of recognition that we have lost control of our own government and that if we are going to be a free and prosperous people, this can’t go on.
This year some 45 percent of our GDP, the economic production of the American people, will be taken by local, state and federal government.
Since 1970, federal government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased by 221 percent, compared to a 32 percent increase in median household income.
No, we don’t need a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. We need restoration of the rule of law, basic protections for private property essential for any free society and recognition of the limited role of the federal government, as enumerated in our Constitution.
We can’t continue living in the lawless society we’ve become where politicians and corporate welfare queens can conspire in Washington to do whatever they want with our resources.
It is illegal for businesses to collude to set prices. But somehow it was not illegal for the nation’s pharmaceutical firms to do essentially this in helping to midwife the multi-trillion-dollar health-care bill that still might be forced on us. Pharmaceutical-industry support for socializing one-sixth of the American economy was critical for moving the health-care bill forward. And they got on board by getting agreement on how government would be involved in pharmaceutical pricing.
The Department of Education has announced that Washington, D.C., is among the finalists to receive federal money as part of the $4 billion Race to the Top program. Washington already spends $28,000 per student in one of the worst schools systems in the country.
The current Obama administration budget projects a doubling of our national debt to $18.5 trillion by 2020, or about 100 percent of our GDP. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein estimates interest alone will cost $800 billion a year.
It’s time to stop lying to ourselves. We’re losing our freedom and our nation. We need to slam on the brakes before it’s too late.
Star Parker is is an author and president of CURE, Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education. Her books include “White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, Mortgage Crisis
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
