The View From 1776

My thanks to Frank Madarasz, who alerted me to this article on the Investor’s Business Daily website.

A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill?

This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters’ arguments.

The sham of global warming plays no real part in Democrat/Socialists’ rational designs. We are confronting an example of destructive religious fundamentalism, a fundamentalism of the same materialistic type that permitted liberals in the 1920s and 1930s to applaud Lenin and Stalin when they liquidated tens of millions of Russians in the name of progress toward social justice.

As in the Soviet Union, Democrat/Socialists’ motivation is to restructure the economy of the United States in conformity with the social-justice designs of liberal-progressive-socialist planners and social engineers.  Democrat/Socialists want to have the power to decide which industries survive and which will be driven into oblivion. 

In the simplest terms, Democrat/Socialists wish to impose tyranny far more severe than that of Parliament and George III in 1776. 

Their goal is the power to dictate to you the kind of automobile you must buy, the way your home must be built, how hot or cold you may be, and what kinds of jobs you will be permitted to hold....after, of course, much increased Federal taxes and rampant inflation will have taken away your retirement savings and any estate assets you may have intended to withhold from the political state for your heirs.

Read Firefighters Case: What Really Happened, published on the National Journal website.

THE MORE YOU EXAMINE THE NEW HAVEN AFFIRMATIVE-ACTION CASE, THE MORE INDEFENSIBLE IT LOOKS.
by Stuart Taylor
Saturday, June 13, 2009

I admire many things about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, especially her deep compassion for underprivileged people. I may well support her confirmation to the Supreme Court if her testimony next month dispels my concern that her decisions may be biased by the grievance-focused mind-set and the “wise Latina woman” superiority complex displayed in some of her speeches.

But close study of her most famous case only enhances my concern. That’s the 2008 decision in which a panel composed of Sotomayor and two Appeals Court colleagues upheld New Haven’s race-based denial of promotions to white (and two Hispanic) fire-fighters because too few African-Americans had done well on the qualifying exams.

The panel’s decision to adopt as its own U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton’s opinion in the case looks much less defensible up close than it does in most media accounts. One reason is that the detailed factual record strongly suggests that—contrary to Sotomayor’s position—the Connecticut city’s decision to kill the promotions was driven less by its purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics.

Whichever way the Supreme Court rules in the case later this month, I will be surprised if a single justice explicitly approves the specific, quota-friendly logic of the Sotomayor-endorsed Arterton opinion.

Judge Jose Cabranes, Sotomayor’s onetime mentor, accurately described the implication of this logic in his dissent from a 7-6 vote in which the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit refused to reconsider the panel’s ruling.

“Municipal employers could reject the results of an employment examination whenever those results failed to yield a desired racial outcome—i.e., failed to satisfy a racial quota,” Cabranes wrote.

The Sotomayor-endorsed position allowed such a “race-based employment decision,” Cabranes added, even though the New Haven exams were “carefully constructed to ensure race-neutrality” and even though the city had neither found nor tried to find a more job-related test.

The Cabranes dissent and the voluminous factual record that was before the Sotomayor panel flatly contradict the widely stated view that her position was justified by evidence that the exams were not job-related and that they discriminated against blacks in violation of the “disparate-impact” provisions of federal civil-rights law.

In fact, neither Sotomayor nor any other judge has ever found that the exams—one for would-be fire lieutenants, one for would-be captains—were invalid or unfair. Nor has any judge found that allowing the promotions would have violated disparate-impact law.
Rather, the Sotomayor-endorsed position was that under 2nd Circuit precedents, New Haven’s discrimination against high-scoring whites must be upheld based solely on the fact that disproportionate numbers of blacks had failed to qualify for promotion and might file a disparate-impact lawsuit—regardless of whether they could win it.

The decision to kill the promotions was driven less by purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics.

Indeed, the evidence shows that the promotions would have been lawful and that any disparate-impact suit by blacks was doomed to fail.

Disparate-impact law—as codified by Congress in 1991—specifies that an employer whose qualifying exam or other selection criterion produces a racially disparate impact can be held liable for unintentional discrimination only if (1) the test is not “job-related ... and consistent with business necessity,” or (2) the employer is presented with and refuses to adopt another, similarly job-related test with less disparate impact.

But the unmistakable logic of Sotomayor’s position would encourage employers to discriminate against high-scoring groups based on race—no matter how valid and lawful the qualifying test—in any case in which disproportionate numbers of protected minorities have low scores, as is the norm.

Such logic would convert disparate-impact law into an engine of overt discrimination against high-scoring groups across the country and allow racial politics and racial quotas to masquerade as voluntary compliance with the law.

Speaking of racial politics, even the Sotomayor-endorsed Arterton opinion found that there was evidence from which a jury could infer that, as the plaintiffs contended, “city officials worked behind the scenes to sabotage the promotional examinations because they knew that, were the exams certified, the mayor would incur the wrath of ... influential leaders of New Haven’s African-American community.”

The victims of the city’s discrimination included lead plaintiff Frank Ricci. Like other plaintiffs, he studied for months, for as many as 13 hours a day, in 2003 to prepare for the combined written and oral exam that he hoped would win him a promotion. He also spent more than $1,000 buying the books that the city had suggested as homework and paying to have them read onto audiotapes. (Ricci is dyslexic.) And he got one of the highest scores.

I sketch below some of the evidence belying the Sotomayor panel’s assertion in its own strangely sketchy opinion that the city “was simply trying to fulfill its obligations” under disparate-impact law when it blocked the promotions. This and other evidence show that the exams were fair—although not perfect (no exam ever was or ever will be)—and that the city’s decision was driven by racial politics, not by any desire to comply with the law.

• Connecticut and New Haven law require objective, job-related tests as a basis for promotions to counteract the race-tinged abuse of more-subjective promotion criteria in which—state courts have repeatedly found—the city has often engaged in order to facilitate political patronage, cronyism, and nepotism.

• Industrial/Organizational Solutions (IOS), the professional testing firm from which New Haven bought the two tests (which were 60 percent written and 40 percent oral) to measure the knowledge, skills, and abilities of would-be fire lieutenants and captains, based the exams on copious research to ensure that the questions were job-related and administered them in a scrupulously race-neutral way. The nine interviewing teams that actively administered the oral portion of the tests each had one white, one black, and one Hispanic member.

• Contrary to reports that no blacks passed, nine did. Their pass rate was about half that of the white test-takers, a common phenomenon in New Haven and elsewhere. Although no black candidate scored high enough to qualify for immediate promotion, three would have been eligible when, it turned out, new vacancies opened up over the next two or three years.

The mayor said he would block promotions even if the city’s civil service board approved the tests as valid and fair.

• Politically powerful African-Americans led by the Rev. Boise Kimber demanded loudly that no high-scoring whites or Hispanics be promoted. He has long been a key vote-getter for the city’s (white) mayor, John DeStefano.

• The mayor told aides that he would block promotions of the high scorers even if the city’s civil service board approved the tests as valid and fair.

• Kimber warned civil service board members of a “political ramification” if they approved the test results.

• The city presented three expert witnesses at the hearings. The only one who had read the exams closely, a firefighting and homeland-security expert named Vincent Lewis, who is African-American, found them to be valid and fair. The two others—Christopher Hornick, an IOS competitor, and Janet Helms, a professor with no public safety expertise—admitted they had not studied the tests, while vaguely suggesting that blacks might do better under some other selection process that wasn’t clearly described. But even Hornick recommended that the city proceed with promotions of the high scorers.

• The New Haven fire chief and the assistant chief, who is African-American, were involved in developing the tests and (the evidence suggests) believed them to be valid. But the city declined to call them as witnesses.

• IOS strenuously defended its tests and was ready to provide more-detailed written evidence of their validity. But the city—determined to block the promotions—refused to seek such information.

• Amid a political circus, the civil service board deadlocked 2-2, with two members expressing doubts about the exams. This killed the promotions.

• Neither the city nor anyone else identified any similarly job-related alternative test on which black firefighters might do better.

• When the high scorers sued, the city made no serious effort in the District or Appeals court to impugn the validity or fairness of the tests.

• Before the Supreme Court, the city’s new attorneys switched strategies and strained to make a silk purse out of their sow’s-ear case by coming up with a barrage of criticisms of the exams. But they shrivel on inspection. For example, the claim in the city’s brief that the tests were flawed by “irrelevant or contradictory” questions neglected to mention that black firefighters had faulted only two of the 200 written questions (100 on the lieutenant’s test, 100 on the captain’s test)—both of which IOS and the high scorers vigorously defended. The city’s attorneys also criticized at length aspects of the exams that clearly had no effect on which firefighters qualified for promotion.

If such belated, weak, and speculative criticisms—obviously tailored to impugn the outcome of the tests—are sufficient to disprove an exam’s validity or fairness, no test will ever withstand a disparate-impact lawsuit. That may or may not be Sotomayor’s objective. But it cannot be the law.

President Obama’s economic programs bear close resemblance to the 1920s Fascist State Corporatism of Benito Mussolini. 

The Federal government has nationalized banks and automobile companies, firing executives, deciding what products will be manufactured and where, and commanding banks to lend money to poor credit risks.  Cap-and-trade “green” legislation will force a massive increase in energy prices for the industrialized nation between the heavily liberal-progressive-socialist East and West Coasts, along with the loss of many thousands of manufacturing jobs.  Ever more detailed regulation of our daily lives is being imposed across many sectors of the economy.

After imposition of the President’s procrustean global warming policies, government will become the major generator of new jobs.  This is what Friedrich von Hayek called The Road to Serfdom.

The essence of President Obama’s political and economic program was summarized in a book published just before the start of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign.  That book, Mr. Stuart Chase’s A New Deal, also was the source of name that FDR’s campaign gurus adopted for his campaign and the new administration.  It is not accidental that President Obama’s advisors called his administration a new New Deal.

Mr. Chase offered a liberal-progressive-socialist analysis for the cause of the Depression and described the centralized planning and management liberals believed was required of the Federal government.  President Obama and his liberal-progressive-socialist brain trust have adopted those ideas.

Mr. Chase wrote:

…the cycle is a direct product of that specialization which appeared with the industrial revolution.  It is a product of laissez-faire, and the neglect to inquire what an economic system is for…There never has been control from the top, and that is the only point from which the cycle may be steadied…I suspect it is the end of the economic system as we have known it – and suffered with it – in the past…a new deal is in order.

What remedies did Mr. Chase propose? 

The drive of collectivism leads toward control from the top. … At bottom the conception of economic planning is science supervising a people’s housekeeping. … And so the final idea of a National Planning Board emerges; …a group which knows the past, can give capable advice as to the present, and sees into the future, especially the technological future. …The real work, the real thought, the real action must come from the technicians: that class most able, most clear-headed of all in American life, hitherto only half utilized in technical detail and in college class rooms. …This is a long-swing project we are starting, longer than the secular trend; longer than the industrial revolution itself.  Errors will be made; methods will be tried out and discarded; but the principle of control from the top must go on.

It is also instructive to note the New Deal thesis about the relationship of the individual to the state, as described by Mr. Chase:

The state is the embodiment of the whole community, and its rule of action, in theory at least, ‘the public interest.’ If your corporation is busily dynamiting the public interest, the state has the right to close you up. …To tell an American that he cannot invest his money in this project, or even to suggest that it is thrown away in that, is a bold and unheard-of step to the left; …But how else can the obsolescence rate be steadied, excess capacity and overproduction kept within bounds of market requirements, thoroughly vicious and wasteful enterprises be checked, the non-speculative investor be protected? …One of the most interesting tasks of the Planning Board will be an attempt to draw the line between those economic areas where competition is still useful and those where it has outlived its usefulness, and either is already supplanted or should be supplanted by some form of collectivism. …The balancing and regulating of man hours will, like minimum wages, operate to weed out parasitic enterprises, establishments so inefficient that they can make their margin only by driving workers through a ten or twelve hour day. …This is the program of the third road.  It is not an attempt to bolster up capitalism, it is frankly aimed at the destruction of capitalism, specifically in its most evil sense of ruthless expansion.  The redistribution of national income, the sequestration of excess profits, the control of new investments, are all designed to that end. …And woe to Supreme Courts, antiquated rights of property, checks and balances and democratic dogmas which stand in its path.

Compare this to Benito Mussolini’s statement in The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (1933),

The Fascist State has drawn into itself even the economic activities of the nation, and, through the corporative social and educational institutions created by it, its influence reaches every aspect of the national life and includes, framed in their respective organizations, all the political, economic and spiritual forces of the nation.

Sunday’s sermon by Pastor Dan Gardner at the Cohocton Assembly of God Church was on the message of Matthew 17:14-21:

14 When they came to the crowd, a man approached Jesus and knelt before him. 15 “Lord, have mercy on my son,” he said. “He has seizures and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. 16 I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him.”

17 “O unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me.” 18 Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the boy, and he was healed from that moment.

19 Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?”

20 He replied, “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

21 But this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.

Why are we, like the disciples who were unable to heal the young epileptic, unable to place full faith and trust in God?  Why is there so little evidence in our lives of the power of God?  How are we to be ambassadors to the world for the Gospel?

18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. (2 Corinthians 5: 18-20)

Jesus, in the passage from Matthew, shows us the way.

First, we must have faith, the tangible evidence that God is consistent with His Word.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1 KJV)

Faith is not about abstractions.  To bolster your faith, as young David did when Goliath confronted the Israelites, look around you and search your memory for the specific things that God has done to bless you in your own life.

32 David said to Saul, “Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine; your servant will go and fight him.”

33 Saul replied, “You are not able to go out against this Philistine and fight him; you are only a boy, and he has been a fighting man from his youth.”

34 But David said to Saul, “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, 35 I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. 36 Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God. 37 The LORD who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.”

Saul said to David, “Go, and the LORD be with you. (1 Samuel 17:32-37)

Second, our prayers must become an ongoing communion with God that establishes a relationship.  Prayer must be more than mechanical recitation.  We must pray continually for God’s guidance and the opening of our hearts to the impulses of the Holy Spirit, telling us what we ought to do to lead good lives and to help others in their times of need.

That sort of relationship with God is what shines through to others when we deal fairly with them.  It’s not a matter of education or worldly prominence, as Jesus’s disciples demonstrated:

1 The priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees came up to Peter and John while they were speaking to the people. 2 They were greatly disturbed because the apostles were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead. 3 They seized Peter and John, and because it was evening, they put them in jail until the next day. 4 But many who heard the message believed, and the number of men grew to about five thousand.

5 The next day the rulers, elders and teachers of the law met in Jerusalem. 6 Annas the high priest was there, and so were Caiaphas, John, Alexander and the other men of the high priest’s family. 7 They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: “By what power or what name did you do this?”

8 Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: “Rulers and elders of the people! 9 If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a cripple and are asked how he was healed, 10 then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. 11 He is “ ‘the stone you builders rejected,  which has become the capstone. 12 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

13 When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus. (Acts 4:1-13)

If we are to be Christ’s ambassadors, we need to be seen in the same way by others with whom we deal everyday.

Finally, fasting, the most neglected of the spiritual sacraments, is the starving of the flesh for the feeding of the spirit.  Fasting means literally doing without food for a prescribed period.  It may not be possible for everyone; for example, those whose poor health or medication needs require them to eat regular meals.

When you fast, however, don’t be like the hypocritical pharisees, who too often made a great public show of their piety.

Fasting is a form of self-discipline.  Knowing that we can resist the bodily pangs of hunger strengthens us to resist other sensual temptations.

11 And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. 12 The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. 14 Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature. (Romans 13:11-14)