As I’ve announced on Dust in the Light (I think), I’ll be writing a biweekly column, published Thursdays, for TheFactIs.org, an online opinion magazine jointly sponsored by the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute and the Culture of Life Foundation. My first offering is “Communicating with the ‘Faces of Hate’,” about conservative Christians’ designation, in some circles (e.g., among certain professors at the University of Rhode Island), as an unprotected target class.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial entitled “Pension Fund Politics” in which it made these comments about labor union practices:
[Open full post]One of the more dangerous political trends these days is the misuse of public pension assets for partisan ends. So it was encouraging this week to see the Labor Department give a refresher course on fiduciary duty to the AFL-CIO.
The instruction came in the form of a legal warning that spending pension fund assets on partisan crusades is a violation of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or Erisa. “A fiduciary may never increase a plan’s expenses, sacrifice the security of promised benefits, or reduce the return on plan assets, in order to promote its views on Social Security or any other broad policy issue,” wrote Alan Lebowitz, a deputy assistant secretary and career Labor official, in a letter to the union group.
This legal brushback pitch is a response to the AFL-CIO’s attempts to enlist pension managers as partisan allies. The union umbrella has threatened to pull its $400 billion pension business from any financial services company that supports personal Social Security accounts. This is political intimidation that no corporate pension fund would dare to attempt, lest it be sued. But it is part of a new union strategy that runs from California’s Calpers fund siding with striking unions against Safeway last year, to New York State’s Democratic Comptroller, Alan Hevesi, threatening Sinclair Broadcasting out of running a documentary critical of John Kerry.
The AFL-CIO claims to be unworried by the Labor warning, but this is probably both a legal and political mistake. Union leaders are already under scrutiny for wasting member dues on politics, with no apparent results or accountability. If workers discover that unions are also dipping into their pension assets, or are picking investment advisers based on politics more than return on assets, their desire to join unions will only decrease.
Labor’s resort to pension-fund politics reflects its overall shrinking fortunes in the workplace. Union membership has fallen precipitously for years, and last weekend came news that the AFL-CIO was forced to dismiss more than a third of its 424 employees. During John Sweeney’s 10-year presidency, the AFL-CIO’s reserve fund has dropped to $31 million from $61 million. Pension fund assets are the last stash of cash out there to exploit.
As the Labor Department has now made clear, that’s illegal. Resisting that advice will invite a lawsuit, as well as Congressional oversight to underscore that the fiduciary obligation of public pension managers is to workers, not to the political causes of union leaders.
John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of America, wrote:
We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
He also said:
You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe.
Another Adams quote contains these words:
The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.
Finally, John Adams said:
Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.
These quotes are consistent with other previously noted quotes by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson contained in this posting as well as these words from Calvin Coolidge.
These words from three leading Founding Fathers and four American Presidents can only lead to the unanswered question: Why are today’s secular left fundamentalists so committed to rewriting the history of our country’s Founding by claiming the Founding was a completely secular occurrence.
This posting continues a periodic series of postings (here, here, here, here) about some of the strange behavior in the academic community.
Roger Kimball weighs in with an editorial entitled “Retaking the Universities: A battle plan.” It is a lengthy piece, worthy of being read in full. Here are some choice excerpts:
[Open full post]…In my book “Tenured Radicals”–first published in 1990 and updated in 1998–I noted:
With a few notable exceptions, our most prestigious liberal arts colleges and universities have installed the entire radical menu at the center of their humanities curriculum at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Every special interest–women’s studies, black studies, gay studies, and the like –and every modish interpretative gambit–deconstruction, post-structuralism, new historicism, and other postmodernist varieties of what the literary critic Frederick Crews aptly dubbed “Left Eclecticism”–has found a welcome roost in the academy, while the traditional curriculum and modes of intellectual inquiry are excoriated as sexist, racist, or just plain reactionary.
“Tenured Radicals” is a frankly polemical book. In some ways, however, it underestimates if not the severity then at least the depth of the problem…
In email conversation with URI women’s studies professor Donna Hughes — who has published on NRO and FrontPage — about an online course that she’ll be teaching in the fall, “Human Rights and Foreign Policy,” I suggested that conservatives have quite a bit of work to do to reclaim inclusion with issues that are often considered “liberal” by definition. It shouldn’t be reasonable for students registering for a women’s studies course to assume that they know for whom their professor voted in the past five presidential elections or what her view on stem-cell research is. The following part of Prof. Hughes’s response struck me as worth publishing, here, and I’ve done so with her permission.
Even if you disagree with certain points of view, you have to read and understand them to know how to counter them. Otherwise, you’re arguing in ignorance. Where I find that bias hurts students is when they’ve been taught opinion as fact. No one tells them that what they are learning is just one side of a debate or a particular political perspective.
For example, I’m opposed to the legalization of prostitution from what I consider a feminist point of view — it’s not good for women! Yet that puts me in opposition to most liberals who support legalization or decriminalization of prostitution, and I find allies among social conservatives and faith-based groups who agree with me, but often for different reasons.
I just finished teaching a course on “Sex Trafficking.” I have my students read both points of view on the debates on trafficking and prostitution. They read some of the things I’ve written, so I don’t hide my point of view, but when they write essays they have to clearly indicate that they understand the debate and the arguments. In the class discussion, they frequently state their opinions. I don’t discourage that.
In the area of human rights and foreign policy, a very interesting coalition has come together in Washington to successfully pass a number of bills. As a feminist working to advance the well being and status of women around the world, I meet every week and frequently speak every day to members of our coalition made up of conservative Christians, Jews, Bahai’s, social conservatives, and liberals. I’ve learned that conservatives have different philosophies about foreign policy — and they can be more effective than the liberal approaches sometimes. As a result of working together, we have built a strong political alliance, learned to respect each other — and become friends. As a feminist and women’s studies professor, I was invited by the Midland Ministerial Alliance to come to Midland, Texas, and talk about trafficking of women. I spoke to a room full of Bush supporters. We got along great because we were united behind the Bush administration policies on trafficking and prostitution.
I will be drawing from my experience in this new class. That’s why I think conservative students might be interested in taking it. It will not be hostile to their views. The world is rapidly changing, and frankly, I think the liberals are out of ideas on what to do about it. From the perspective of a feminist who wants to promote the well being and status of women, we need more democracy and freedom in the world. It is only under those conditions that women can organize and lobby for more rights. Also, one of the greatest threats to women in the world today is Islamic fascism and it seems to be the neoconservatives that have figured out what a threat it is to the world.
President George W. Bush made two important appearances this week in Riga, Latvia and in Tbilisi, Georgia. At each stop, he spoke about freedom and democracy:
Latvia
Georgia
Here is how a Wall Street Journal editorial described the visits to Latvia and Georgia:
…two…moments from the trip better capture its real import.
The first was the sight of Mr. Bush standing alongside the presidents of the Baltic states at a press conference in Riga, Latvia. Asked by a reporter what he had to say to those who argue the U.S. is “inappropriately meddling in the neighborhood,” Mr. Bush replied: “The idea of countries helping others become free, I would hope that would be viewed as not revolutionary, but rational foreign policy, as decent foreign policy, as humane foreign policy.”
The second moment came Monday upon Mr. Bush’s arrival in Tbilisi, Georgia. The President was met at the airport by his Georgian counterpart, Mikhail Saakashvili, with a bouquet of roses, a reminder of the Rose Revolution that peacefully toppled Eduard Sheverdnadze’s post-Soviet regime. His motorcade was then cheered by thousands of onlookers as it made its way into the city; some 100,000 Georgians were expected to hear Mr. Bush speak today in the city’s Freedom Square…
But perhaps the most important aspect of Mr. Bush’s trip is that it underscores the coherence of his broader foreign-policy objectives. “Freedom is on the march,” the President likes to remind his audiences, and that message is as apt in Riga or Tbilisi as it is in Baghdad or Beirut. It also serves as a reminder that the achievement celebrated on May 9 was an incomplete one, and that the project Mr. Bush is embarked on now is nothing if not an extension of that achievement. As Mr. Bush said in his extemporaneous remarks in Riga:
“We now have the same opportunity — this generation has the same opportunity — to leave behind lasting peace for the next generation, by working on the spread of freedom and democracy. And the United States has got great partners in doing what I think is our duty to spread democracy and freedom with the three nations represented here.”
These speeches are important additions to the public debate about freedom and democracy, joining the arsenal of other key speeches put forth by the President since the War on Terror began. This posting links to those other key speeches since September 11, 2001.
[Open full post]Don has already called for an end to the political namecalling. John McCandlish Phillips, a former religion writer for the New York Times, has confronted the particular and recentyl popular application of the term “jihad” in relation to religious people by the predominantly left-wing op-ed writers in the Times and Washington Post (which published this column).
I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, fellow evangelicals along with traditional Catholics, in a ghastly arcade mirror lately — courtesy of this newspaper and the New York Times. Readers have been assured, among other dreadful things, that we are living in “a theocracy” and that this theocratic federal state has reached the dire level of — hold your breath — a “jihad.”
In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days.
Phillips recounted most of the major, left-wing columnists who have picked up on the “jihad” meme and then, after he reassured them that religious people aren’t going to hurt them, accused them of improperly revising history:
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