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By Newt Gingrich Posted in Special Events — Comments (17) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

You are invited to join a movement to fundamentally change government in all 513,000 elected offices across America. This movement is much more fundamental than a presidential campaign and far deeper than the Reagan Revolution or the Contract with America.

Tomorrow, September 27, there will be a 90-minute workshop starting at 7:00 PM EDT which will launch the American Solutions movement as a national effort. The anchor site is the Cobb Galleria in Atlanta, Georgia but the workshop will be broadcast on the DISH Network, on DirecTV, and webcast at www.AmericanSolutions.com so Americans across the country can participate.

On Saturday, September 29, there will be four and a half hours of workshops from the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Georgia. That is where I taught and where as a reform-oriented college teacher in 1974 during Watergate, I first began running for Congress. The “Solutions Day” workshops will also be broadcast on DISH Network, DirecTV and at www.AmericanSolutions.com.

Read on . . .

After 33 years of active participation in public life, I believe in the need for reform, innovation, and new solutions even more than I did back in Carrollton in April, 1974.

We need an energy strategy and program that meets economic, environmental and national security concerns.

We need a focus on learning that insists that children are more important than bureaucrats and that achievements and success are more important than credentialing, tenure, and red tape.

We need a federal government that can control the border, identify people illegally in the United States and enforce the law on employers who are getting rich through illegal immigration.

We also need a federal government that encourages legal immigration, encourages enough H1B visas for economic development, and encourages immigrants to learn English, learn American history and become American.

We need a government competent enough to develop a visa system which protects us without enraging successful people worldwide and chasing away would be visitors, students and relatives.

Let me risk being radical. Levees shouldn’t break. Bridges shouldn’t fall. The Detroit school system should not cheat three out of every four entering freshmen.

I outlined the contrast between the world that works (UPS, FedEx, Toyota Production system, lean manufacturing, Six Sigma) and the world that fails (bureaucracies both public and private) in a YouTube clip called “FedEx vs. Federal Bureaucracy.” This video has now been seen by more than 1,100,000 viewers with no advertising. It is spreading because people sense how real the contrast between the two worlds is.

Despite the current failures of bureaucracy and politics, America has a great future with enormous opportunities.

There are three powerful reasons to be optimistic about America’s future:

1. The explosion of new knowledge in science is going to produce four to seven times as much new science in the next 25 years as it produced in the last 25. The opportunity for breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s, in cancer, in developing a hydrogen car, in creating new systems of learning, in radically improved air transportation with no delays, and in a host of other areas is just amazing. There is every reason to believe we will have a better economy, a better environment, better national security and better health in the next generation -- if we do the right things.

2. The evidence of what works and what fails is unmistakable. In 1960, South Korea and Ghana had the same per capita income. Today, South Korea is a technological and industrial power house and the 11th wealthiest country in the world. Before Prime Minister Thatcher, the French economy was 25% bigger than the British. Today, the British economy is 10% bigger than France’s and 50,000 young French men and women work in London. Forty years ago Ireland was much poorer than Germany per person. Today, Ireland is much wealthier than Germany per person. We know what works. It is just our current generation of politicians and bureaucrats who don’t get it.

3. The core values and habits of American civilization continue to make it the most creative, hardest working, and most integrative society in the world. More people come from more places speaking more languages and blend into the American melting pot of idealism, energy and creativity than in any other society in human history. Despite the best efforts of our elites to undermine and repudiate the core values and principles of American civilization, we remain strong and the research American Solutions will release over the next few weeks will show just how resilient and powerful the core American culture is.

Nothing I have described could be explained in thirty seconds at a typical political event.

None of this can be handled within the current political structure.

We need a new movement which transcends traditional politics and energizes and mobilizes the American people to action and to impose real change on their politicians and their governments at all levels.

Tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. EDT that movement begins its efforts with the first American Solutions workshop, which you can watch for free on your computer or your television or attend in person in Atlanta.

I hope you’ll join me for this historic event. Go to www.AmericanSolutions.com to sign up.