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Septalingualism: NYC Mayor Bloomberg's Latest Crazy Scheme
HUMAN EVENTS ^ | 08/01/2008 | Deroy Murdock

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.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Government; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: aliens; bloomberg; govwatch; nyc
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To: neverdem

New York City will now be officially renamed Press 2-3-4-5-6-7 city.


41 posted on 08/04/2008 5:32:15 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks (Drill Here! Drill Now! Pay Less! Sign the petition at http://www.americansolutions.com/)
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To: neverdem

Other countries have official languages. It is not in the least racist for our country, states and cities to declare English as the sole official language. If you live here, you should learn English.


42 posted on 08/04/2008 6:22:20 AM PDT by Unam Sanctam
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To: neverdem

Thanks for the ping!


43 posted on 08/04/2008 6:45:20 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: AmericanInTokyo
"別に外国語が流暢にしゃべらるって大きな問題じゃないでしょうか。 !!" Wha' dat be in Ebonics, baby?;)
44 posted on 08/04/2008 7:49:16 AM PDT by Frank_2001
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To: durasell
Japanese, German and Middle Eastern businesses are already very well established in NYC.

And the folks who run those businesses speak English, too. And they did it without having the city government pander to them in this manner, didn't they?

45 posted on 08/04/2008 9:25:12 AM PDT by Alberta's Child (I'm out on the outskirts of nowhere . . . with ghosts on my trail, chasing me there.)
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To: Alberta's Child

Competition is tougher these days. You do what you have to do.

NYC is competing with L.A., Dubai, London, etc. etc. for business.


46 posted on 08/04/2008 9:28:30 AM PDT by durasell (!)
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To: durasell
New York is probably the most business-oriented city on the planet.

Oh, please. NYC is very unfriendly to business unless your business happens to be a giant in financial services, a tourist attraction, or a professional sports franchise.

47 posted on 08/04/2008 9:31:48 AM PDT by Alberta's Child (I'm out on the outskirts of nowhere . . . with ghosts on my trail, chasing me there.)
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To: Alberta's Child

Uh yeah — I’d add media conglomerate, fashion leader, big pharma or major advertising concern.

What’s wrong with that? Big business creates jobs. Lotsa, lotsa jobs.

If you’re a guy who wants to open a corner store, then you best be clever, patient and ruthless.


48 posted on 08/04/2008 9:35:12 AM PDT by durasell (!)
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To: yankeedame

Lots of French Creole speakers in Flatbush and Canarsie in Brooklyn, to say nothing of SE Queens.


49 posted on 08/04/2008 10:28:57 AM PDT by Clemenza (McCain/Palin; Maverick and the MILF)
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To: durasell

All fine and dandy. I just feel that it is becoming “mallhattan” with all the suburban style chain stores. Then again, what is more New York that going into Duane Reade at 3AM?


50 posted on 08/04/2008 10:30:10 AM PDT by Clemenza (McCain/Palin; Maverick and the MILF)
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To: Kenny Bunk
Actually, the main trend of the Bloomberg administration has been the lifting of building codes to build more high rises in places like Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen, the influx of transplants from flyover country who make the city seem more generic, to say nothing of the chain stores that are turning a certain island into Mallhattan.

BTW: The homeless are back!

51 posted on 08/04/2008 10:33:07 AM PDT by Clemenza (McCain/Palin; Maverick and the MILF)
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To: neverdem


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.

No suprise.
The California dream of The New Tower of Babel spread across the land.

Heck, here in Missouri we even have our version of California’s
DMV providing a Bosnian-language version of the drivers manual.
To bend over for the approx. 40,000 Bosnians in the Greater St. Louis area.


52 posted on 08/04/2008 10:37:46 AM PDT by VOA
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To: Clemenza
The chains can afford the rents. But check out all the empty stores within the last 8 months. The landlords are playing a losing hand that the rents won't come down.

My prediction: You're going to see a lot of new, independent type businesses open over the next five years.

53 posted on 08/04/2008 10:37:51 AM PDT by durasell (!)
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To: Clemenza

influx of transplants from flyover country who...


These are the children from the richest families of small to medium-sized towns. Basically they left for college and never returned home to the family car dealership, funeral parlor or small manufacturing concern. A couple of things about them:

A) They are Corcoran realtor’s dream. No idea how much something costs, except that it’s “expensive” and that their parents want them in a “safe” building.

B)They’ve never seen NYC take a turn downward, i.e. 91/92.
They’re in for a surprise.

C)They ain’t wising up to the ways of the big city as quickly as they should if they want to survive.


54 posted on 08/04/2008 10:43:27 AM PDT by durasell (!)
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To: durasell
My prediction: You're going to see a lot of new, independent type businesses open over the next five years.

I agree, and I know from the retail end of the banking industry that the NY market is considered oversaturated with banks, and that consolidation of the banking industry should give pause to yet another bank opening in Park Slope.

55 posted on 08/04/2008 10:51:47 AM PDT by Clemenza (McCain/Palin; Maverick and the MILF)
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To: Clemenza

...but they won’t look like the small businesses of 30 years ago.

I predict very niche, upscale small businesses —$50.000 t-shirts and organic, holistic bakeries —aimed at very fragmented demographics. The day of new Greek diners is long gone.


56 posted on 08/04/2008 11:01:30 AM PDT by durasell (!)
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To: durasell
The day of new Greek diners is long gone.

The children of the diner owners, if they stay in the business, tend to open more upscale restaurants on the same site, including "upscale diners" (see the place on 14th and 9th in the Meatpacking district). Tastes change with the times and the generations, but even many young people don't want an impersonal world of SOLELY composed of Best Buys, Chipotle, and Whole Foods.

Speaking of young people, I still don't understand the whole "cupcake" phenomenon. Lining up for something mommy used to make, I guess.

I'm 32, and already feel old around such people.

57 posted on 08/04/2008 11:07:48 AM PDT by Clemenza (McCain/Palin; Maverick and the MILF)
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To: VOA
To bend over for the approx. 40,000 Bosnians in the Greater St. Louis area.

Didn't know that. ROP types?

58 posted on 08/04/2008 11:38:31 AM PDT by neverdem (I'm praying for a Divine Intervention.)
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To: Clemenza

If you don’t want the impersonal, then you go very upscale. Drop $50,000 at Prada and they will get very neighborly — they might even bring you a beverage.


59 posted on 08/04/2008 11:39:45 AM PDT by durasell (!)
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To: Jay Howard Smith

Liberals are sick.


60 posted on 08/04/2008 11:47:01 AM PDT by wtc911 ("How you gonna get back down that hill?")
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