Archive for January, 2009
By Thomas E. Brewton
As the proposed trade agreement with Colombia reveals, labor unions are organizations of self-centered greed, which disingenuously cloak themselves with pretense of God, country, and mom's apple pie.
President Bush, by calling for Congressional approval of the trade agreement with Colombia, is compelling liberal-progressives to choose between the high-flown, one-world internationalism to which they give lip service and kow-towing to organized labor.
Columnist Robert D. Novak described it this way in his April 4th article:
President Bush will send Congress a trade agreement next week forcing Democrats to make an unpleasant choice. Will they do the bidding of organized labor and reject a pact negotiated more than a year and a half ago with the country's strongest ally and best customer in South America?
…But to forget about a vote this year, as Pelosi wants, …would humiliate Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, a free-trader and a bulwark against the spreading influence in Latin America of Venezuela's leftist strongman, President Hugo Chávez.
Our liberal-progressive school system instructs callow youth that labor unions are agents of good and right. The facts are quite different.
The president of the United Auto Workers union has implicitly acknowledged the stark truth: industrial unions are killing American manufacturing jobs. Unions’ salvation, he says, must come from ukases promulgated by the commissars of a new socialistic, Democratic administration.
In a June 13, 2006, article by Jefrey McCracken, the Wall Street Journal reported:
United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger, acknowledging that his union confronts the toughest challenges in its 71-year history, told delegates to the UAW’s leadership convention that solutions to problems such as rising health-care costs or the rash of auto suppliers filing bankruptcy-law protection must come largely through the political process.
Union leaders expect a Democrat-socialist to win the presidency, and they expect a payoff via protectionist legislation that will reduce business profits, throwing non-union workers out of jobs and augmenting inflation, to the cost of the vast majority of citizens who are non-union members of the labor force.
By Kathy Shaidle
RightSideNews Copyright © 2009
Imagine a Super Bowl with all male cheerleaders and half-time prayers. In that America, they drink Jihad Cola instead of Coke and thank Allah when they win an Oscar.
Luckily, that America is fictional, one vividly described in Robert Ferrigno's 2006 futuristic novel, Prayers for the Assassin, set in 2040. But is it really so hard to imagine, in a world in which a man named "Barack Hussein Obama" can get elected President just a few years after Muslim hijackers destroyed the world's tallest buildings in the heart of New York City?
Today many Americans are either blissfully ignorant of, or simply indifferent to, the slow, incremental growth of radical Islam in their midst.
We sometimes hear about terrorist cells or suspicious Muslim "compounds" on the news. However, these stories represent merely the tip of an Islamic iceberg that could very well doom America. Not today or tomorrow. But in our lifetimes? That is a real possibility.
And don't shrug off Islam as "just another religion." Muslim sharia law deems women to be inferior to men, and allows husbands to "lightly" beat their wives. Polygamy and child bride marriage are condoned and encouraged, due to the example of Mohammed himself, whose many wives included a nine year old. Anti-Semitism and slavery are enshrined in the Koran, as is exploitation of and even violence against all "unbelievers."
Radical Muslims have learned they don't require bombs or hijacked airliners to destroy America. They can just use America's own ideological infrastructure against itself.
Using a kind of ingenious political jujitsu, radical Muslims rely upon everything from the rights to freedom of speech and worship enshrined in the U.S. Constitution to the current atmosphere of hypersensitive political correctness to push their agenda.
For example, the "Islamification" of the educational system is now underway. Textbooks whitewash Islam's bloody history. Public school children forbidden to pray or recite the Pledge of Allegiance are, however, obliged to play "Muslim for a Day." Meanwhile, universities eagerly introduce footbaths, Muslim prayer rooms and hallal cafeteria food.
By Thomas E. Brewton
Jan Burr raises the important point that governments should give attention, not only to current effects of global warming, but also to the near certainty of a severe cooling period within the coming decade.
In his comment regarding Global Warming: A Moderate Voice, Mr. Burr notes that global cooling will cause as much, or more, suffering than warming, because crops will fail in many parts of the world.
The need for prudence and for looking far down the road, rather than concentrating upon short-term public opinion expectations, is an old story.
When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream: He was standing by the Nile, when out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile and stood beside those on the riverbank. And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows. Then Pharaoh woke up. (Genesis 41:1-4)
By Thomas E. Brewton
A brief historical overview of changing banking practices abetted by the Fed's inflationary expansion of the currency.
The main effect of the Fed's current moves is to bail out the financial institutions. That's what opponents of creating the Fed feared in 1913.
The Fed's acting as lender of last resort to tide banks over periodic panics was, in 1913, vastly different from today. Banks then were more prudent, confining their lending to short-term self-liquidating advances, usually with maturities no longer than 90 days. Moreover, borrowers were expected to clean up their credit lines, that is, to pay loan balances down to zero at least once a year to demonstrate the strength of their balance sheets.
In the late teens and early 1920s, the only collateral eligible for rediscount at the Fed was bankers acceptances (export-import financing with maturities again of maximum 6 months) and commercial notes representing domestic shipments of goods to creditworthy companies. Not even Treasury Bills were eligible for rediscount in the Fed's early days. The effect was to confine commercial banks to financing agriculture and commerce. This tended to limit bank credit expansion to the underlying real growth of business.
Today, as the newspapers tell us in profusion, lenders are heavily involved in originating obligations with maturities up to 25 years.
When inflation began to take off around 1969, banks began to talk about "liability management." Old line relationship bankers had been schooled to know each corporate client intimately and to stick with that client through the ups and downs of the economy. After 1969 the game shifted to finding new sources of bank funds to carry new types of lending. Banks became something analogous to traffic directors for funds coursing around the world via 24/7 satellite networks.
Two major developments triggered this transition.
By Rob VandeWeghe
Scripture was not written by scientists for scientists; it was written by men living in ancient times. The Genesis account, penned by Moses around 1450 BC, was written when people were living in the late Bronze Age. Primitive stone and bronze tools were used to work the land, to make weapons, and to build homes. Writing as we known it was recently introduced, but not a widespread skill. The great emphasis of day-to-day life was to find food for survival. Natural science was limited to personal observation. Many in those days were polytheistic; they worshiped natural phenomena such as the sun, the moon, stars, fire, and water.
Moses, author of the creation account in Genesis, had been educated in Egypt. Ancient Egypt flourished from 3000 BC until the first centuries AD. Its successes were largely based on the irrigation of the Nile valley, early development of basic writing, trade with surrounding regions, and military strength. Egyptians believed in a complex network of multiple gods and an afterlife that emphasized the preservation of the body; hence, mummies. Moses’ Egyptian background is also evident in his choice of words throughout the Hebrew text.
This is the background against which the Genesis account should be read and understood. People 3,500 years ago had no concept of “knowledge” like we have in our time. That which could not be seen or experienced personally would be beyond their ability to understand.