The View From 1776

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Auguste Comte, a principal progenitor of socialism in the 1830s, advocated the Religion of Humanity, in which all the world’s peoples were expected to worship at the altar of atheistic materialism, uniting under the tutelage of French intellectuals. 

Following Comte’s lead, liberal educators since John Dewey’s day have taught students that the world is inevitably evolving toward a single world government encompassing all peoples and all cultures.  In the last presidential election campaign, liberal Senators John Kerry and Teddy Kennedy declared that American foreign policy is not legitimate unless it is validated by the UN. 

Only the use of the English language seems to be following that universalist script.

Some years ago, when the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer was still the McNeil-Lehrer News Hours, Robin McNeil produced a 13-segment program on “The Story of English.”  Among other things, Mr. McNeil noted that English is de facto now the world’s universal language, spoken and understood in more parts of the world than any other language.  Even Japanese commercial pilots landing in Tokyo communicate with airport control towers in English.

But American liberals, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, want to change all of that.

Read John Fund’s account of her latest maneuvers, published in the November 28 edition of the Wall Street Journal:

English-Only Showdown
By JOHN FUND

November 28, 2007;?Page?A23

Should the Salvation Army be able to require its employees to speak English? You wouldn’t think that’s controversial. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding up a $53 billion appropriations bill funding the FBI, NASA and Justice Department solely to block an attached amendment, passed by both the Senate and House, that protects the charity and other employers from federal lawsuits over their English-only policies.

The U.S. used to welcome immigrants while at the same time encouraging assimilation. Since 1906, for example, new citizens have had to show “the ability to read, write and speak ordinary English.” A century later, this preference for assimilation is still overwhelmingly popular. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 87% of voters think it “very important” that people speak English in the U.S., with four out of five Hispanics agreeing. And 77% support the right of employers to have English-only policies, while only 14% are opposed.

But hardball politics practiced by ethnic grievance lobbies is driving assimilation into the dustbin of history. The House Hispanic Caucus withheld its votes from a key bill granting relief on the Alternative Minimum Tax until Ms. Pelosi promised to kill the Salvation Army relief amendment.

Obstructionism also exists on the state level. In California, which in 1998 overwhelmingly passed a measure designed to end bilingual education, the practice still flourishes. Only 29% of Latino students score proficient or better in statewide tests of English skills, so seven school districts have sued the state to stop English-only testing. “We’re not testing what they know,” is how Chula Vista school chief Lowell Billings justifies his proposed switch to tests in Spanish.

Yet the public is ready for leadership that will forthrightly defend reasonable assimilation. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won plaudits when he said last June that one way to close the Latino learning divide was “to turn off the Spanish TV set. It’s that simple. You’ve got to learn English.” Ruben Navarette, a columnist with the San Diego Union-Tribune, agreed, warning that “industries such as native language education or Spanish-language television [create] linguistic cocoons that offer the comfort of a warm bath when what English-learners really need is a cold shower.”

But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that last year filed over 200 lawsuits against employers over English-only rules, has a different vision. Its lawsuit against the Salvation Army accuses the organization of discriminating against two employees at its Framingham, Mass., thrift store “on the basis of their national origin.” Its crime was to give the employees a year’s notice that they should speak English on the job (outside of breaks) and then firing them after they did not. The EEOC sued only four years after a federal judge in Boston, in a separate suit, upheld the Salvation Army’s English-only policy as an effort to “promote workplace harmony.” Like a house burglar, the EEOC is trying every door in the legal neighborhood until it finds one that’s open.

In theory, employers can escape the EEOC’s clutches if they can prove their policies are based on grounds of safety or “compelling business necessity.” But most companies choose to settle rather than be saddled with the legal bills. Synchro Start Products, a Chicago firm, paid $55,000 to settle an EEOC suit against its English-only policy, which it says it adopted after the use of multiple languages led to miscommunication. When one group of employees speak in a language other workers can’t understand, the company said, it’s easy for personal misunderstandings to undermine morale. Many companies complain they are in a Catch-22—potentially liable to lawsuits if employees insult each other but facing EEOC action if they pass English-only rules to better supervise those employee comments.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), who authored the now-stalled amendment to prohibit the funding of EEOC lawsuits against English-only rules, is astonished at the opposition he’s generated. Rep. Joe Baca (D., Calif.), chair of the Hispanic Caucus, boasted that “there ain’t going to be a bill” including the Alexander language because Speaker Pelosi had promised him the conference committee handling the Justice Department’s budget would never meet. So Sen. Alexander proposed a compromise, only requiring that Congress be given 30 days notice before the filing of any EEOC lawsuit. “I was turned down flat,” he told me. “We are now celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English.”

That’s what pro-assimilation forces are moving to do. TV Azteca, Mexico’s second-largest network, is launching a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that teaching English empowers Latinos. “If you live in this country, you have to speak as everybody else,” Jose Martin Samano, Azteca’s U.S. anchor, told Fox News. “Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people.”

Azteca isn’t alone. Next month, a new group called Our Pledge will be launched. Counting Jeb Bush and former Clinton Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros among its board members, the organization believes absorbing immigrants is “the Sputnik challenge of our era.” It will put forward two mutual pledges. It will ask immigrants to learn English, become self-sufficient and pledge allegiance to the U.S. It will ask Americans to provide immigrants help navigating the American system, the chance to eventually become a citizen and an atmosphere of respect.
This is a big challenge, but Our Pledge points out that the U.S. did it before with the Americanization movement of a century ago. It was government led, but the key players were businesses like the Ford Motor Company and nonprofits such as the YMCA, plus an array of churches and neighborhood groups.

The alternative to Americanization is polarization. Already a tenth of the population speaks English poorly or not at all. Almost a quarter of all K-12 students nationwide are children of immigrants living between two worlds. It’s time for people of good will to reject both the nativist and anti-assimilation extremists and act. If the federal government spends billions on the Voice of America for overseas audiences and on National Public Radio for upscale U.S. listeners, why not fund a “Radio New America” whose primary focus is to teach English and U.S. customs to new arrivals?

In 1999, President Bill Clinton said “new immigrants have a responsibility to enter the mainstream of American life.” Eight years later, Clinton strategists Stan Greenberg and James Carville are warning their fellow Democrats that the frustration with immigrants and their lack of assimilation is creating a climate akin to the anti-welfare attitudes of the 1990s. They point out that 40% of independent voters now cite border security issues as the primary reason for their discontent.
In 1996, Mr. Clinton and a GOP Congress joined together to defuse the welfare issue by ending the federal welfare entitlement. Bold bipartisan action is needed again. With frustration this deep, it’s in the interests of both parties not to let matters get out of hand.

Mr. Fund is a columnist for http://opinionjournal.com/OpinionJournal.com

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Most commentators blame corporate greed and poor judgment for the subprime mortgage meltdown and the resulting squeeze in the financial community.

In reality, excessive Federal spending on the socialist welfare-state inaugurated by the New Deal, and the Federal Reserve’s over-expansion of the money supply to fund it, are the proximate causes for today’s financial mess.  Without excessive money in the system, neither greed nor imprudence enters the picture.

Today’s mess could not have developed had President Roosevelt not deliberately devalued the dollar and repudiated gold payment clauses for the currency and Federal debt in the 1930s, while centralizing control of the Federal Reserve system in the Federal Reserve Board to facilitate Federal deficit spending.

As I have written frequently over the past couple of years, the Federal Reserve is an example of the inherent weakness of entrusting planning for the entire economy to a small group of intellectuals.  See Financial Hurricane Ahead for a partial list of those postings.

Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, the two most recent Federal Reserve Board chairmen, are intelligent and talented men.  But no individual, or small group of individuals, can assemble in real time all of the relevant data on economic conditions, process it, and comprehend it in a timely way to manage the entire economy.  Picture an ant trying to build the pyramids solo.

As Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor at large of the Washington Times, writes in his November 28 commentary:

“Many saw the disaster coming but kept quiet as the international Ponzi scheme kept belching huge profits. One leading global umpire, then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, didn’t throw any yellow or red flags on the plays, and admitted after retiring he knew about abuses in subprime lending but failed to foresee their paralyzing effects until early 2006.

“Mr. Greenspan, who led the Fed through 18 years and four presidents, still defends his lowering of interest rates from 2001 until 2004 that critics say caused the crisis in the first place.

“The housing bubble was the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon when Mr. Greenspan said in Oct. 2004, “there’s a little froth in this market,” but, “we don’t perceive that there’s a national bubble.” Frenetic bank lending led to the Denver Post story of a runaway prisoner who managed to borrow enough to buy three expensive houses while on the lam and then two more while in prison.”

A principal role for the Fed when it was created in 1913 was to react to differing regional banking needs by providing liquidity to local banks to meet seasonal lending needs or financial emergencies.  Not until Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal imposition of socialism in 1934 did anyone imagine that the Fed could, or should, be so foolhardy as to shred the differing regional needs into one massive pot and stir a national economic broth.

One of the cornerstones of liberal-progressive-socialism is a presumption first articulated by the early 19th century French progenitors of socialism.  In that presumption, individualism is abhorred, because individual business managers and entrepreneurs are led astray by greed, and “the people” are crushed by the barbarism of capitalist market competition.  Only intellectual planners have the knowledge and capacity to regulate the economy.  Only the intellectual planners have the breadth of vision to understand the big picture.  And only they understand social justice, implementation of which demands collectivist planning by the political state.

This is the paradigm that leads liberals to believe that only the Federal government can improve the living conditions of individuals, that individuals are helpless to deal with their own needs.  It’s time for liberal-progressives to get over it and re-enter the real world.

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Tightening the Noose on Iran
By Jeff Lukens

Al-Qaeda has suffered a humiliating defeat in Iraq, and the Sunnis who were once allied with them now oppose them. We may be finally witnessing an historic change in a democratic Iraq that will have profound effects throughout the region. Democracy in the region, however, is not welcomed by the leaders of Iran. In recent months, Iranian-supplied militias have been responsible for 70 percent of US casualties in Iraq. It is not surprising, therefore, that the focus of US military and diplomatic efforts in the region has now shifted to Iran.

The problem with Iran is multifaceted. We need an Iran that doesn’t have the potential to build nukes, that doesn’t support terrorism, and that doesn’t destabilize Iraq. Iran’s influence extends to significant Shiite communities on the western shore of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s leaders could see the military weakness of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar as an opportunity to take control of the entire Gulf. If that happened, roughly one-quarter of the world’s oil-output would be under Tehran’s control.

Moreover, if Iran develops its nuke, they could blackmail the region and strike out conventionally without fear of reprisal. If that were to happen, expect Turkey and Saudi Arabia to go nuclear as well. The prospect for a nuclear exchange in the tinderbox of the Middle East becomes a real possibility.

So far, Iranian leaders have shown no willingness to engage US diplomatic overtures seriously. And they won’t do so unless they feel pressure from tougher economic sanctions and a credible military threat. For the US, it seems we must deal with this situation now, or deal with a much worse situation later.

The ideal solution for us would be regime change in Teheran. But for now, State Department officials will settle for sincere discussions by the present one. Negotiations can only work when both sides enter into them in earnest. To this point, however, more diplomacy has only bought Iran more time to kill our soldiers, destabilize Iraq, and to obtain the bomb.

It increasingly looks like the only way to deal with Iran is to bomb them. But wait. While it is 90 percent certain that air strikes alone could neutralize Iranian nuclear capabilities, it is that other 10 percent that gives pause. What if Iran still has a bomb-making capability after an extensive air bombardment on their nuclear facilities? We may not definitively know the answer to that question until one is set off—and then it is too late.

Iranians may not like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad much, but they may react to an air attack by uniting to his side. The likely result of air strikes could increase Iranian troublemaking in Iraq and around the Persian Gulf.

Israel will not ignore Ahmadinejad with a bomb that can annihilate their tiny country. If diplomacy fails and Israel attacks preemptively, Iran will strike back, as will Hezbollah and Hamas. The US may be dragged into a wider ground war not of our making. While US naval forces in the gulf are formidable, we will be hard pressed to muster the forces necessary to handle the inevitable trouble on the ground.

To avoid being trapped between a choice of military action and a nuclear-armed Iran, we need to get moving diplomatically. Strong economic sanctions are the best way to convince Teheran that the costs of their goals exceed the benefits. If a military clash is to be averted, more nations will need to join US efforts in the economic isolation of Iran.

Building such a coalition is currently the priority of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The latest US sanctions target 25 Iranian individuals and companies owned or controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The list includes Iran’s three largest banks. A vital element of the measure is that it includes sanctions on foreign firms that do business with them.

Ultimately, we will need the European Union fully involved in this process as well. We may need to impose sanctions on all of Iran like those enforced on apartheid South Africa. State pension funds should divest from all companies doing business there. We will need to convince nations like China that it is in their interest to suspend trade with Iran as well. In a world of tight oil supplies, this will be no easy task. Increased oil output by Saudi Arabia should be made available to counter any spike in the market price. After all, they are among the ones we are trying to protect.

With the US preoccupied in the Middle East, we can probably expect Moscow to try to use the situation to regain its dominance in the former Soviet republics. An Israeli or US strike against Iran will give Moscow an opening to destabilize Georgia, the Baltic States and the Ukraine. With the US dedicating much of its military ground strength to Iraq, it is weakened to respond to a crisis elsewhere in the world. Should Russia manufacture such an event, the US could do little about it.

The Russians are happy to supply the Iranians with whatever air defense systems they need. Rising tensions would dramatically raise the price of oil on the world market and enhance Russia’s oil-based economy. It is a win-win situation for them.

A cutoff of Russian weapons would greatly diminish Iranian defenses. For that to happen, however, Moscow would want US deference toward them in the former Soviet republics. The Bush Administration may be forced to give Russian President Putin what he wants in return for Russia abandoning the Iranians to face the US alone.

Hopefully events will not go that far. In the past year, there have been reports from Iran of a deteriorating economy, gas rationing, riots and street protests. If all this is true under present conditions, we could possibly spark a widespread rebellion when the sanctions are tightened still further.

A credible case can be made for threatening Iran without actually striking it. For Ahmadinejad, being attacked first is desirable because it gathers him sympathy throughout the region. For the US to threaten but not to strike, however, would spoil those expectations and deny his need to be provoked into a response.

Air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities can always be done later. For now, sabotage and other covert operations may be a preferable course of action. Though Iran is a major oil producer, it imports 40 percent of its domestically consumed gasoline. Eventually, we may need to block those gasoline shipments, and even commercial air flights into Iran as well.

The Iranian leaders may find that they can continue their ways only at the cost of increasing their reliance on the Russians, and at the risk of military intervention by the US. If severe sanctions are applied, the Iranian people could very likely rise up to overthrow their leaders. At the very least, such measures may force Ahmadinejad to choose a conciliatory posture at the negotiation table. Time is limited, and the Bush Administration must pursue all diplomatic and economic avenues to force change in Iran if war is to be averted.

Jeff Lukens is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal and a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc., a non-profit (501c3) coalition of writers and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted at http://www.jefflukens.com

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The Shibboleth of Political Progress
By Steve Kellmeyer

I like Peggy Noonan. I really do. She’s a great writer with a habit of calm, penetrating analysis that almost always brings you to think about the world from a different perspective.

But not this time.

In her most recent essay, Mrs. Noonan makes the point that religion was not an issue in politics forty years ago. Mitt Romney’s father campaigned for the presidency: his Mormonism was never a question. Richard Nixon’s Quaker roots, Lyndon Johnson’s Disciples of Christ upbringing, Nelson Rockefeller’s Baptist background, none of this mattered.

She admits that Kennedy’s Catholicism was something of an issue, but argues that religion never became a real political issue until the rise of the evangelical movement made Jimmy Carter’s evangelicalism a major campaign theme. She decries the fact that today we constantly delve into candidates’ religious backgrounds, even as she admits that the question is relevant.

But her analysis is uncharacteristic - it is hackneyed, done to death, old as Moses. As I was reading her essay, I found myself thinking, “I’ve read this before… not as well-written, but I’ve read it before.” In fact, it is nothing more than the common complaint that religion is a private matter and has no substantive place in politics.

Is that true?

Private Religion
C.S. Lewis wrote, “When the modern world says to us aloud, ‘You may be religious when you are alone,’ it adds under its breath, ‘and I will see to it that you never are alone.’”

Mrs. Noonan correctly notes that Catholic candidates for the Presidency have always had a hard time of it and she correctly notes that religion was not much of an issue until Jimmy Carter came along. But she fails to think through the problem.

Why did evangelicalism make its rise in politics in the 1970’s as opposed to the 1990’s or the 1950’s? Why have Catholic presidential candidates always had a hard slog no matter what the age?

The answers to both questions are quite straightforward: it’s the problem of absolutism (or perceived absolutism) versus relativism.

Catholics were always opposed in political life precisely because Catholics were suspected of taking their marching orders from a foreign despot, an absolutist, in a word, the Pope. Al Smith didn’t just lose his candidacy because he was a city boy in an agricultural nation - city boys like Woodrow Wilson had won before.

No, Al’s problem was precisely that he was a Catholic whose Catholic values were necessarily seen as dramatically different than those held by a Protestant nation. Episcopalians may always have been called “the frozen chosen” but that was only because their worship was so close in outward form to Catholic worship. No one suspected them of actually being Catholics - the Anglican church had slaughtered too many priests for that suspicion to take root - but it was odd in comparison to the rest of America.

Still, the Episcopalians shared Protestant values, and that was what mattered. Catholics, on the other hand, lived in Catholic neighborhoods, Catholic ghettos, with their own distinct Catholic culture and Catholic life. They weren’t really, fully Americans.

It was Catholic Faith that had always been the odd duck in the United States, thus it was Catholic Faith that was the harbinger of the change Noonan comments on. What 1930’s Catholics were to the 1930’s Protestant Christian political elite, so have Christians in general become to the current political elite.

In the past, Catholics were attacked because they stood for something that the rest of the cultural elite did not. Today, Christians in general stand for something that the rest of the cultural elite does not.

No one asked about Nixon’s Quaker roots or Johnson’s Disciples of Christ upbringing because neither was a marker for anything. For all their ballyhooed theological differences, neither a 1950’s Quaker nor a 1950’s Episcopalian was going to vote to support legalizing gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, contraception or pornography. The cultural life of one was indistinguishable from the cultural life of another.

The Shibboleth
The Christian evangelical movement rose to political power in the late 1970’s precisely because Christians began to realize that their values were no longer being represented among the political elites. Even denominations that were fine with contraception and abortion were not fine with the increasingly pornographic culture that contraception and abortion inevitably creates. Christians began to notice skews, gaps, lacunae, holes, empty spaces between where they stood and where the nation was going.

Today, asking about a political candidates’ fervor in regards to religion is a short-hand way of asking where that candidate stands on a host of important cultural issues. Instead of delving into a dozen different topics, trying to ascertain the candidates’ position on each, the voter asks one question: “What is your relationship to Jesus Christ?” The answer to that question simultaneously answers all the others.

The practice is as old as Scripture itself:
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, “Let me go over”; that the men of Gilead said unto him, “Art thou an Ephraimite?” If he said, “Nay” Then said they unto him, “Say now Shibboleth” and he said “Sibboleth” for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. (Judges 12:5-6)

Test everything: hold to what is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

Yes, Mrs. Noonan, religion is again an important question in politics.
Yes, this is progress.
Yes, it is good.

Steve Kellmeyer can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) .?His website is http://www.bridegroompress.com

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In the Old Testament, God was exacting when affronted by disobedience to his commands and, especially, by efforts to hide that disobedience from Him.

Pastor Steve Treash used the Book of Joshua, chapters 6 and 7, as his text for the Sunday sermon at Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut).  These chapters recount the famous assault and conquest of Jericho, one of the first victories of the Israelites after their entry into the Promised Land.

All went according to God’s word to Joshua, except for one important detail:

[Jericho] and all that is in it are to be devoted to the LORD. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall be spared, because she hid the spies we sent.  But keep away from the devoted things, so that you will not bring about your own destruction by taking any of them. Otherwise you will make the camp of Israel liable to destruction and bring trouble on it.  All the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron are sacred to the LORD and must go into his treasury.  (Joshua 6:17-19)

But the Israelites acted unfaithfully in regard to the devoted things ; Achan son of Carmi, the son of Zimri, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took some of them. So the LORD’s anger burned against Israel.  (Joshua 7:1)

Having conquered Jericho, Joshua turned his attention to the town of Ai, expecting an easy victory.  Instead,

So about three thousand men went up; but they were routed by the men of Ai, who killed about thirty-six of them. They chased the Israelites from the city gate as far as the stone quarries and struck them down on the slopes.  (Joshua 7:4-5)

And Joshua said, “Ah, Sovereign LORD, why did you ever bring this people across the Jordan to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us? If only we had been content to stay on the other side of the Jordan! O Lord, what can I say, now that Israel has been routed by its enemies? The Canaanites and the other people of the country will hear about this and they will surround us and wipe out our name from the earth. What then will you do for your own great name”

The LORD said to Joshua, “Stand up! What are you doing down on your face?  Israel has sinned; they have violated my covenant, which I commanded them to keep. They have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen, they have lied, they have put them with their own possessions.  That is why the Israelites cannot stand against their enemies; they turn their backs and run because they have been made liable to destruction. I will not be with you anymore unless you destroy whatever among you is devoted to destruction.  (Joshua 7:7-12)

The lesson for us today is that God cares what unrighteousness we have in our hearts.  We may successfully conceal it from our fellows, but God sees and knows.  To get right with God, we need Total Truth; we need to stop making excuses, to stop trying to kid ourselves.

For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.  Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.  (Hebrews 4:12-13)

Just as the Word of God is sharp and penetrating, our efforts to lie to ourselves and to conceal our iniquities separate us from God and His blessings.  Without God’s presence in our lives, we lose life’s battles.

Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God.  (1 Corinthians 4:5)

Being pure before God means coming to Him, through Jesus Christ, in Total Truth.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched?this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.  (1 John 1:1-10)

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