Politics Plus

In my opinion, the trade deficit is more harmful to our economy that the budget deficit.  Obama has a plan to help reduce it.

President Barack Obama on Thursday laid out plans to help U.S. businesses double their export sales and add what he said would be 2 million more jobs at home during the next 5 years.

"In a time when millions of Americans are out of work, boosting our exports is a short-term imperative," Obama said in unveiling his National Export Initiative.

"When other markets are growing, and other nations are competing, we’ve got to get even better," he told the annual conference of the Export-Import Bank. "We need to secure our companies a level playing field. We need to guarantee American workers a fair shake. In other words, we need to up our game."

Obama’s plan would boost government efforts to help U.S. businesses, create new partnerships with shipping firms such as FedEx, and ease controls over the export of technology such as cell phones, which currently have to go through lengthy reviews to ensure that they don’t compromise national security secrets…

…Among his plan’s highlights:

• Create an Export Promotion Cabinet that includes the secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, State and Treasury to focus administration efforts.
• Appoint Boeing chief Jim McNerney and Xerox chief Ursula Burns to head a President’s Export Council of outside experts to advise him.
• Add $2 billion a year for loans from the Export-Import Bank to help businesses finance exports.
• Launch more trade missions to other countries. As a start, Obama said he’d use a trip next week to Indonesia and Australia to pitch trade with U.S. companies. "I will be a strong and steady advocate for our workers and companies abroad," he said.
• Set up one-stop shops at all 250 U.S. embassies and consulates where U.S. businesses can get help from all government agencies and departments.
• Order ambassadors to stress "commercial diplomacy" and then to tour the U.S. when they return home to tell businesses here about opportunities abroad.
• Create a New Market Exporter Initiative with shipping giants such as FedEx, UPS and the Postal Service to help exporters reach new countries.
• Bring up to 300 procurement officers from other countries here to meet with U.S. companies.
• Speed approval of exports of technology that’s reviewed for national security, eliminating the review for about 2,800 of 3,300 applications a year and cutting the wait time from as many as 60 days to 30 minutes.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce responded with a call for a similar five-step program including new trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea; enforcing existing trade pacts; expanding the limits on certain technologies under national security export controls; resisting protectionism; and promoting exports. [emphasis added]

Inserted from <McClatchy DC>

I like Obama’s plan better than the Chamber’s, because the Chamber’s language hides their intent to continue to exploit third world workers, through economic imperialism, and US workers, through outsourcing US jobs at taxpayer expense.  However, I do favor imposing tariffs on imports from nations that refuse to open their markets to US goods, but we can make an exception for countries willing to import Republicans.

Education is at a crossroads in our nation.  Even third world countries are exceeding our literacy rate.  It has gotten so bad that, as a computer lab tutor for a local community college, I spent more time teaching high school graduates grade school grammar than teaching them computer skills.  Therefore I support a proposed national achievement standard.

A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have been written by local educators in every state.

Under the proposed standards for English, for example, fifth graders would be expected to explain the differences between drama and prose, and to identify elements of drama like characters, dialogue and stage directions. Seventh graders would study, among other math concepts, proportional relationships, operations with rational numbers and solutions for linear equations.

The new standards are likely to touch off a vast effort to rewrite textbooks, train teachers and produce appropriate tests, if a critical mass of states adopts them in coming months, as seems likely. But there could be opposition in some states, like Massachusetts, which already has high standards that advocates may want to keep.

“I’d say this is one of the most important events of the last several years in American education,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education who has been an advocate for national standards for nearly two decades. “Now we have the possibility that for the first time, states could come together around new standards and high school graduation requirements that are ambitious and coherent. This is a big deal.”

In recent years, many states moved in the opposite direction, lowering standards to make it easier for students to pass tests and for schools to avoid penalties under the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law.

After educators, business executives and others criticized the corrosive impact of a race to the bottom, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers set the common-standards initiative in motion last year. They convened panels of English and math experts from the College Board and A.C.T., and from Achieve Inc., a group with years of experience working to upgrade graduation standards.

Alaska and Texas are the only states that declined to participate in the standards-writing effort. In keeping his state out, Gov. Rick Perry argued that only Texans should decide what children there learn.

The Obama administration quickly endorsed the effort. Under the Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, in which states are competing for a share of $4 billion in school improvement money, states can earn 40 points of the possible 500 for participating in the common effort and adopting the new standards. Under current law, there is no penalty for states that choose not to participate.

The standards are open for public comment through April 2, before final versions are published later in the spring… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

The problem is worst in Red States where Republicans have embraced the Bush/GOP plan to dumb down America to enable public vulnerability to their disinformation.  There would be no problem accommodating superior Blue States like Massachusetts.  Just make the national standard a national minimum standard that would not effect stated that already exceed it.

However, states like Texas will rebel.  These states are more concerned with teaching students what to think than teaching them how to think, as this article clearly demonstrates.

Even as a panel of educators laid out a vision Wednesday for national standards for public schools, the Texas school board was going in a different direction, holding hearings on changes to its social studies curriculum that would portray conservatives in a more positive light, emphasize the role of Christianity in American history and include Republican political philosophies in textbooks.

The hearings are the latest round in a long-running cultural battle on the 15-member State Board of Education, a battle that could have profound consequences for the rest of the country, since Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks.

The board is expected to take a preliminary vote this week on a raft of changes to the state’s social studies curriculum proposed by the seven conservative Republicans on the board. A final vote will come in May.

Conservatives argue that the proposed curriculum, written by a panel of teachers, emphasizes the accomplishments of liberal politicians — like the New Deal and the Great Society — and gives less importance to efforts by conservatives like President Ronald Reagan to limit the size of government… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

In other words, Republicans want to rewrite history.  Reagan did little to reduce the size of government.  He merely shifted the direction of welfare from assistance for the needy to assistance for the greedy.  His “trickle down” economics worked exactly the way the GOP planned it.  Nothing trickled down except misery.  Wealth gushed up.  History must remember this, not the propaganda the GOP would substitute for the truth.

Therefore the national standard should be expanded beyond just reading and math.  It also should be a mandatory minimum to protect Red State children from the Republican goal to produce brainwashed sheep.

Anyone who wishes to review the standard and comment may do do by clicking the link in the first article.