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.
Ha! You must be joking.
Uh, no. Not at all.
$9 or $10 for a pack of cigarettes is good for business?
$9 or $10 for a pack of cigarettes is good for business?
Yep.
Ask any insurance company. Smokers aren’t great insurance risks.
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard this month.
$10 pack of smokes only helps the black market. And your premise is wrong. Smokers are HUGE insurance risks.
Remember... if you succeed in getting the government to accommodate Elvish, it will only be a matter of time before the the ACLU sues on behalf of Orcs who will obviously be discriminated against by Elvish translators.
And once you let Klingons get a foothold, well, all bets are off then. There’s simply no getting rid of them.
I said smokers are huge insurance risks...did you read my post?
“
Didn’t know that. ROP types?
“
Honestly, I’ve never been able to find detailed information on that.
Could be it’s some “Bosnians” that are also Serb Christians and/or
Muslims or even secularists Bosnians.
I guess I’ve presumed they’ve got to be mostly ROP types.
Seeing how there’s never any real mention of them in the news papers...
and Bosnian Muslims in St. Louis just sound like the perfect folks
to help St. Louis continue that fine Democratic tradition of keeping
the polls open past closing time on Election Day.
And lots of other Election Day frauds.
Why else would the State Department let them in...other than they’d
be total suckers for the party of Bill Clinton?
Missouri Department of Revenue: Driver Licensing
http://dor.mo.gov/mvdl/drivers/
Driver Licensing Forms and Manuals
http://dor.mo.gov/mvdl/drivers/forms/
El Manual del Conductor de Missouri (2005)
http://dor.mo.gov/mvdl/drivers/forms/spanguide.pdf
Missouri Driver Guide (Bosnian translation)
http://dor.mo.gov/mvdl/drivers/forms/bosguide.pdf
Uh, yes, I read your post and it said this:
Smokers aren’t great insurance risks.
So which is it? You've made a lot of posts on this thread so maybe you got mixed up.
Both statements mean the same thing — one is written in conversational style from the point of view of the insurance company.
The payout on smokers by insurance companies is greater than for non-smokers. Likewise, fat people tend to need more medical treatment and die younger than non-fat people.
God, I hate this Napoleonic toad.
SO I’M the one thats mixed up?
Not that unusual.
Happy FReeping!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.