Posted on 08/03/2008 11:35:30 PM PDT by neverdem
NEW YORK --If you like bilingualism, you will love septalingualism.
Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest brainstorm outstrips his notorious war on trans-fats, both for its audacity and sheer senselessness. America’s largest municipality soon will conduct official business in English and Spanish --which would be bad enough --plus five other foreign languages: Russian, Chinese, Korean, French Creole, and Italian.
“This Executive Order will make our city more accessible, while helping us become the most inclusive municipal government in the nation,” Bloomberg crowed as he signed this measure on July 22.
Bloomberg’s linguistic smorgasbord opens during a financial tempest. Thanks to Wall Street’s woes, tax revenues have tanked. As the New York Post noted, profit taxes from the state’s top 16 banks shriveled from $173 million in June 2007 to $5 million last June, a 97 percent contraction.
Meanwhile, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas calculates, Bloomberg’s inflation-adjusted, per-capita spending has averaged 4.5 percent annual growth. This has quadrupled the 1.125 percent analogous figure for former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. Red ink flows where Bloomberg’s rising government-spending curve intersects with Wall Street’s plunging tax-revenue curve.
Bloomberg has steered this stunningly extravagant initiative into this intensifying fiscal turbulence. At least 77 city agencies now must assign or hire Language Access Coordinators to determine which municipal services will be delivered in which of these idioms. Some city forms will be translated into these tongues; elsewhere, city personnel will perform their duties daily in these languages. Perhaps interpreters will rush in if, say, Haitian immigrants want to discuss the City Charter in French Creole. As the police and fire departments struggle to fight criminals and blazes, how exactly will Bloomberg finance all this? Are tax hikes just around the corner?
Bloomberg ordered this indulgence without forecasting how hard it may slam New York’s beleaguered taxpayers.
“We don’t have cost estimates,” says Evelyn Erskine, Bloomberg’s deputy press secretary. “We’re in the first stages of planning. Some agencies will have to translate documents online. Some with branch offices may have to hire people.” By January 1, Language Access Coordinators must recommend how their agencies will satisfy Bloomberg, and at what price.
Taxpayer dollars aside, Bloomberg’s septalingualism is a cultural migraine in the making and an insult to its supposed beneficiaries. Are today’s immigrants too feeble to learn English, as did the 12 million immigrants who traversed Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954? Since when were Italians, of all people, too wretched to fathom English? Is it too much to ask today’s Italian arrivals to speak America’s common tongue, as did the forbears of such distinguished New Yorkers as Giuliani, former governor Mario Cuomo, Home Depot co-founder Kenneth Langone, and Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese?
Before long, Bloomberg’s crazy scheme probably will ignite demands for ballots in these languages. And why not Chinese, Russian, and French Creole subway announcements? The city that epitomizes the melting pot will devolve into a modern Skyline of Babel in which New Yorkers increasingly co-exist with no shared means of communication. This merely will inconvenience English-speaking New Yorkers, but it concretely will hobble Koreans, Russians, French Creole speakers, and others who will have one less inducement to understand English, today’s lingua franca of global commerce. Bloomberg’s folly will marginalize these people, rather than merge them into the American mainstream with the linguistic tools to compete in an increasingly demanding world economy.
“I think this will hurt immigrants’ long-term assimilation into American society, both socially and economically,” predicts Russian émigré Yuri Mamchur, director of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute’s Real Russia Project. “Most workplaces require them to speak English. This policy does them no favors.”
Indeed, Bloomberg should scrap this program before it unleashes havoc. Its unspent outlays instead should teach immigrants to speak and write English. This will help them become productive citizens who interact with the vast majority of Americans — who speak English, not Korean or Spanish.
Before Mayor Bloomberg’s next stroke of genius, he should go fix Gotham’s proverbial windows, which are breaking anew. In short: Silvoulpè met asasen lan prison, arête moun kap sal mi yo ak grafiti, retire mandyan ki sou twotwa yo, netwaye lari a. That’s French Creole for “Please jail murderers, arrest graffiti vandals, and sweep derelicts off the sidewalks.”
Mr. Murdock, a New York-based commentator to HUMAN EVENTS, is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
Was ist das?!?
Take away his medium-sized abuses of power, and the dumb decision on basing the response center at the WTC, and that was the one job he really shined in.
Merin le telim.
Oh.
NYC is actually very easy to understand. Nothing happens there unless it is good for business.
Be real -- do you think that all of the abysmal social, economic, educational, and criminal justice policies in NYC over the past 40 years were all "good for business"??? Granted, beginning in the mid-90s some things changed for the better, but overall NYC has been run by a lot of nutty socialist race-baiting pols imposing some really stooopid policies on the city.
Up until the mid-to ate 1970s, NYC had a mixed economy. That is to say there were an abundance of manufacturing jobs. A lot of blue collar jobs, many held by immigrants. It seems strange now, but it’s true.
Beginning in the 1980s, that began to change. NYC became a financial, fashion and media center with high level skill set type jobs. These attracted an international following of foreign companies’ branch offices. That trend continues today.
And yes, all of the nutty social policies are good for business.
What no Arabic? The Moozies are not going to like this.
Mayor Bloom-ing-idiot, prepare to get a call from CAIR.
If that were the case, then why didn't they include Japanese, German, and other languages of nations where people have a lot of money? Or Arabic, since Middle Eastern countries are now the recipients of tons of U.S. cash in the form of oil revenue, U.S. government spending, etc.?
What the hell does the use of French Creole have to do with attracting business?
Wachoo lookinat? Maybe youwant with a schmeer? Oivey speak frickin' inglish, willya.Try dat in Creole, passmole!
The recorded speeches of Upchuck Schumer are already being used to torture Guantanamo prisoners (and everyone else.) Under Giuliani the Fascist, life in NYC started to become so livable that liberals found it boring and couldn't wait to throw him out and bring back the filth, chaos, and crime they loved to theorize about.
They done it! People don't believe this, but once upon a time, NYC was like sort of an American city. Now it's more like Lagos, Nigeria, but with better pizza.
Japanese, German and Middle Eastern businesses are already very well established in NYC.
Again, very little exists in the city without some connection to business. New York is probably the most business-oriented city on the planet.
I don’t get that at all. Sure, you have Wall Street and all that, but the taxation, it’s just stupid high.
Property taxes are relatively low. Businesses get huge tax breaks.
The taxes support a highly complex infrastructure geared toward businesses.
And yes, there’s Wall Street, but also the fashion industry, communications, advertising, architectural firms, engineering firms, etc. etc. — each of which is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Monolingualism is the only fiscally sound practice.
Build the fence and stop making us pay for the undermining of our country, our ethics, our morals and our way of life.
the financial industry runs this town and those types of companies are moving out in droves. gas is through the roof, MTA is raising prices...again, NYPD strength is getting lower every day, crime is up.
and this idiot is worried about a few Creoles being able to call 311. please.
“We don’t have cost estimates,”
Typical...
French Creole?
I’ve very glad this tool became an independent.
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