Liberal Lion or Liberal Lyin'?

With the death of longtime Massachusetts Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy this past week, the American people are provided another "teachable moment" in this summer of teachable moments. According to the mainstream media, with the exception of a few courageous pundits on Fox News, Kennedy was "the Lion of the Senate," a shaggy but noble figure whose very presence in the world's most exclusive club brought progress and bipartisanship to an otherwise unruly and divided collection of decidedly lesser beings. Whatever the measure before the Senate, he could forge an alliance with a colleague across the aisle and craft a compromise bill that made both sides giddy with feelings of accomplishment and victory.

Okay, time to wake up from our trip to Fantasyland.

Granted, Kennedy was by all accounts an affable, likable fellow in public and private and certainly toward those who shared his liberal vision. It is also true that he spent 47 years in the Senate making deals with moderate or liberal Republican Senators to push through legislation that incrementally accomplished his goals. Finally, it is difficult to find even political enemies of his who will speak disparagingly of him as a person, especially now that he is dead. Evidently, despite his money, power, position, and "Kennedy aura," he was a jovial, amiable man.

Yet, here is the teachable moment: Notwithstanding the charming veneer, Ted Kennedy was not a good man, and his politics were not beneficial for the United States. All of this begs the question: Why are Americans constantly duped by well-dressed, well-spoken snake-oil salesmen posing as concerned advocates for needed progress? From Franklin Delano Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and now to Barack Obama, Americans seem to love liberals who promise utopia yet produce only more government control and spend more of our money.

In spite of the mainstream media's self-imposed silence on the matter, Ted Kennedy's sins are well-known. His appetites for alcohol and women are legendary. The most notorious incident of his life occurred in July 1969 on Chappaquiddick Island. Young Mary Jo Kopechne died in a fathom of water under Dike Bridge, after the first-term Senator, who was married, panicked and left the overturned, submerged car in which they had been driving home from a party. Kennedy later returned with two friends to rescue her, but he never reported the accident to authorities. The car was pulled from the water the following morning and identified as his, whereupon he gave a statement to the police.

He later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury. The judge gave him a suspended two-month sentence, and his license was suspended for about sixteen months. At the inquest, requested to be held secretly by Kennedy-family lawyers, the presiding judge found that Kennedy had been negligent, but the district attorney decided not to pursue manslaughter charges against him. The next year, Kennedy was reelected to his seat, receiving 62% of the vote.

His actions at Chappaquiddick affected the lives of only a small number of people, but his numerous political actions throughout his Senate career involved millions of Americans. His first major piece of legislation was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the law that in essence opened the floodgates to millions of illegal aliens, producing the immigration fiasco this country now faces. About it, Kennedy declaimed on the floor of the Senate:

First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. . . . Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. . . . Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia. . . . In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. . . . The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

In fact, the critics were correct, as subsequent events have proved.

He is also known for his devastating, Senate-floor attack on Judge Robert Bork, only minutes after his nomination to the Supreme Court was announced by then-President Ronald Reagan. Judge Bork is a highly intelligent, civilized, even witty man, but one would think he was nothing short of Hitlerian after hearing Kennedy's scathing verbal assault:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

In this spirit, he and other Senators engaged in an unprecedented offensive to scuttle Bork's nomination, an action that has become a recognized verb, "to bork." Judge Bork has since written that Kennedy later said it was "nothing personal," but as vicious as the attack was, that is hardly likely.

Lastly, the present healthcare reform legislation is as much the product of his mind and ambitions as anyone's. With his death, Democrats are seriously considering placing his name on the bill, changing it from the wounded "Obamacare" to "Kennedycare," a more sympathetic moniker. No matter what it will ultimately be called, it will still be horribly damaging to American freedom, the healthcare system, and the free-market economy.

Which bring us back to the "teachable moment." How long have we known and repeated the old saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover?" It is clear that, as a nation, we have not learned the lesson. Have we in God's church learned it? Can we tell a good man from a bad one? Can we discern a servant of God from a servant of Satan? Can we tell the difference between true, godly love and human nature's counterfeit? Remember Paul's command in I Thessalonians 5:21: "Test all things; hold fast what is good."

Nonsense and Senselessness

When did the world stop making sense? Perhaps it has not made much sense for a long while, but lately it seems to have taken a definite turn toward the nonsensical, especially here in the United States. We Americans pride ourselves on being grounded and self-sufficient, full of practical know-how and a can-do attitude that can solve any problem or overcome any obstacle to our ambitions. Four centuries of history on this continent chronicles the efforts of a nation of pioneers and achievers in just about every area of endeavor. We filled a continent, fed the world, split the atom, and put men on the moon, not to mention our building the world’s most powerful military and becoming the world’s lone superpower. Much of this occurred because men and women used sound knowledge and reason to find ways that work.

Such soundness of mind appears to be rare these days. Unlike the overhyped swine flu, America’s loss of her senses seems to be a true pandemic. All over the country and in many different areas of life, people are making foolish choices, based not on facts and outcomes but on hopes and fears ginned up by Madison Avenue blitzes and eloquent hucksters. All it takes is a pretty or handsome face, a bit of enthusiasm, some flash and sizzle, and the average person is hooked.

The so-called solution to this crisis—healthcare reform, Obamacare—is itself mindboggling in its absurdity. On his August 20, 2009, radio show, Rush Limbaugh, never shy about saying what he thinks about liberal policies and initiatives, commented insightfully:

Obama's health care plan will be written by a committee whose head, John Conyers, says he doesn't understand it. It'll be passed by Congress that has not read it, signed by a president who . . .smokes, funded by a Treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese, and financed by a country that's nearly broke. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, his comment does not even consider the details of the massive reform bill passed by the House of Representatives, many of which will radically alter the way Americans will receive and pay for healthcare. In short, the proposed bill will take healthcare choices out of the hands of patients and doctors and give them to government bureaucrats and appointees. Clearly, its proponents eventually want to drag Americans into a single-payer system along the lines of Canada’s or Britain’s government-run healthcare monopolies.

What seems to be lost in all of the dickering over details is the fundamental matter of constitutionality. Does the Constitution of the United States even allow the federal government to run a healthcare system? Instead of being ignored, this should have been the first question America’s elected leaders—sworn to uphold the Constitution—asked themselves, but they are willing to let their negligence pass quietly unnoticed because healthcare reform will accrue far more power to government and its allies than just about any other scheme. In fact, the present hullaballoo created in these town hall meetings does not concern them, as it only deepens and widens the confusion and exasperation among the electorate and validates the idea that healthcare reform is legitimate, necessary, and urgent.

Could this senselessness and confusion be a fulfillment of Bible prophecy? In the blessings and curses chapter, God promises to send a kind of foolish madness upon Israel when the people fail to obey Him:

The LORD will send on you cursing, confusion, and rebuke in all that you set your hand to do, until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly, because of the wickedness of your doings in which you have forsaken Me. . . . The LORD will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of heart. And you shall grope at noonday, as a blind man gropes in darkness; you shall not prosper in your ways; you shall be only oppressed and plundered continually, and no one shall save you. (Deuteronomy 28:20, 28-29)

His spiritual people, however, His church, can be spared this plague of irrationality: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (II Timothy 1:7). “We have the mind of Christ” (I Corinthians 2:16), giving us the ability to see, ponder, and choose the right with wisdom and foresight. We can expose the nonsense of this world and provide the proven answers from God’s Word (Ephesians 5:11-13).

The apostle Paul advises, “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is” (Ephesians 5:15-17). As the confusion and nonsense mounts in the world, Christians must make no delay in seeking God and His Word for what makes eternal sense.

Panicked Yet?

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" cried Chicken Little.

"Wolf! Wolf!" yelled the shepherd boy in Aesop's fable.

Both tales are cautionary and highly applicable to America and the world right now. Believing that the nation's economy will cave if it does nothing, the U.S. government is about to commit $700 billion dollars, at last estimate, to a bailout scheme for quasi-governmental mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. At the moment of this writing, the details of the plan are sketchy—in fact, in flux, as nothing has been agreed upon—but among the speculated results are a massive governmental takeover of America's financial sector, or at least the housing market; limited oversight of the Treasury Secretary, who will ramrod the effort; and very little blame for the political and financial actors who caused this mess in the first place. When the sky is falling, who cares about free markets, oversight, and responsibility?

We should beware when our leaders urge us that some action must be taken "immediately" to fend off some looming crisis. Every blue moon, there is an actual crisis that must be handled expediently, but most of the time, the crisis is either not as dire as advertised or entirely contrived. Such is the case with our health care "crisis." Candidates for office wring their hands and tell us how terrible it is that some forty million Americans do not have health insurance and that government should step in and give it to them for free.

While the U.S. Census Bureau reports that there may be forty million among us without health insurance, at least twelve million of them are illegal aliens, another ten million or so are young and healthy people who have voluntarily chosen not to buy health insurance, another few million are in some way self-insured, and a significant number are between jobs and only temporarily uninsured. In actuality, it is estimated that only 29% of this forty million figure are involuntarily uninsured, thus about twelve million people, a number that is in no way critical.

As mentioned above, the politicians say this government health insurance would be free. Free to whom? There are no free lunches. Someone must pay for the care given by hospitals, doctors, nurses, and other caregivers. That "someone" is the American taxpayer. Politicians often point to Canadian, British, or Nordic national health systems as models, but they never tell the voter how much the citizens of those nations pay in taxes for their "free" medical care. According to a March 2005 CBS News article, the average Canadian family spends about 48% of its income in taxes, and in Ontario, for instance, about 40% of that is used to fund health care. If an American "free" health care system followed Canada's lead, the taxpayer could see what he pays in taxes jump by as much as 20%. Suddenly, "free" health care is quite expensive!

This is not to mention the horror stories about long waiting lists, even for what might be considered critical care. Certainly, many of these are isolated anecdotes, but it has been shown that both service and quality of care diminish after a government takes over a health care system. Care becomes rationed, and even more than by HMOs, procedures are frequently denied on the basis of age, weight, or some other supposedly disqualifying factor such as alcohol, nicotine, or drug use. In addition, care is often sacrificed to pay for the huge bureaucracy needed to handle the new system. Beyond that, public sector agencies are notorious for creating an environment of conformity and lethargy, discouraging quality service and innovation (just go to the nearest Department of Motor Vehicles to see this at "work").

Now, we need to think about the current economic crisis in these same terms. Is it truly a crisis? What is hiding behind the statistics that the media are throwing at us? What are the politicians not telling us? What are the hidden costs? Will lawmakers load the bill with political "extras," adding yet more debt and overregulation? Can the government really provide better oversight than the market? Will this bailout create another monster bureaucracy run by unelected and essentially untouchable executives? Do the American people really have any say in the matter?

Let us assume that this particular "crisis" is all about sub-prime mortgages and nothing else. What is the best way to solve this problem? Long-time mortgage expert Roger Schlesinger, in a recent column titled "What Am I Missing?" makes the case that this is actually a banner opportunity for moneyed investors to buy up foreclosed homes on the cheap. The fly in the ointment, however, is that both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have restricted investors to a small number of loans, required large down payments, and tacked on punitive points, all of which discourages those with money from coming to the rescue of the housing market. In the end, Fannie and Freddie are actually extending the housing crisis rather than helping to solve it. This is government at its finest.

Time will tell if this financial mess is a true crisis or a manufactured calamity designed to amass governmental power, benefit a particular Presidential candidate, sell out the nation to the international system, shield the responsible parties from prosecution, or all of them combined. What is evident is the stirring of fear among the populace that could build to a fever-pitch—from concern to worry to alarm and finally to hysteria and panic. The rhetoric of fear is increasing with each news cycle.

While Franklin Roosevelt's famous dictum resonates in these unsettling times just as it did during the Great Depression ("[L]et me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance"), perhaps we really need to fear, not the illness, but the cure. If the politicians and the media are so eager to sell Americans this bailout, we should be worried about what is in store for us on the other side. As the saying goes, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know."

The resurrected Christ tells the church of Smyrna, "Do not fear any of those things which you are about to suffer" (Revelation 2:10). If we are faithful and fear God rather than the distressing circumstances swirling about us, He will see us through them (Ecclesiastes 8:12).

Coming Home to Roost

How should one describe the news that the world’s largest automaker and the United States’ biggest corporation, General Motors (GM), will cut 30,000 jobs (17% of its 173,000-employee North American workforce) and close a dozen facilities by 2008? By all rights, Americans should consider it to be huge news. Yet, the announcement on Monday has already begun to fade as the news cycle picks up and runs with more interesting stories like the return to Crawford, Texas, of Iraq War protester Cindy Sheehan and the pandemonium of Black Friday.

Financial analysts have seen this coming. GM stock has fallen to as low as $20.60 per share in the past year, an 18-year low, while its credit rating has plummeted to junk status. The company’s market share has fallen seven percentage points over the last decade (to 26.2%), as it has struggled to sell cars in competition with, frankly, better designed, better priced, and higher quality foreign models. The automaker lost nearly $4 billion in the first nine months of 2005, and $1 billion in the last quarter alone—and this during its massive employee-pricing sales drive and continued offering of low-interest loans through GMAC, its in-house finance unit.

Beyond this, GM has massive wage and benefits problems. Its unionized employees have perhaps the most generous labor contracts in the industry, and the unions are so far unwilling to make significant concessions, blaming management for the firm’s poor performance. However, its biggest burdens are healthcare and pension costs. Each GM vehicle includes $1,500 in healthcare premiums in its price tag, and unlike most U.S. workers, GM employees do not pay any deductibles on their coverage and only 7% of the premium (compared to about 30% in other industries).

In addition, the company’s pension system is being strained to its limits. Each active worker is contributing to the pension coffers for 2.5 retirees, an increasingly untenable situation, threatening them with the specter of GM eventually walking away from its pension obligations just as Delta Airlines recently did through bankruptcy. Rival Ford has similar problems looming.

Such monumental problems do not just happen—they are caused. GM’s woes appear to be the consequences of sins coming home to roost. Both the Old and New Testaments contain similar principles: Numbers 32:23 says, “. . . be sure your sin will find you out,” and Galatians 6:7 reads, “. . . whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (see also Luke 12:2-3). At the root of American industry’s troubles are policies and practices that are bound to result in conflict, injustice, and perhaps the demise of many once-indomitable companies.

Some might argue that these companies are just poorly managed, and there is some justification for such a conclusion. But why are they badly run? Behind the lack of financial and business acumen is a fundamental spiritual problem, which usually can be summarized in one word: selfishness. Other spiritual failings that may be included under this catchall are pride, greed, hatred, envy, corruption, deception, and a host of others that often come to the fore under intense competition. When careers and big money are on the line, all the stops come out.

The best we can do these days, it seems, is to lament that, for the most part, gone are the days of business providing a quality good or service at a fair price. Perhaps small businesses can still work from this model, but big business is too ruthless to operate on such a “naïve” principle. Good guys do not last long among the wolves of the business world because, by refusing to join the pack in its sordid activities, they find themselves weak, isolated, and marked for attack. Today, if one is not a predator, he is prey.

God prophesied of this condition by the prophets. In Hosea 12:7-8, God speaks directly to businessmen: “A cunning Canaanite [or merchant]! Deceitful scales are in his hand; he loves to oppress. And Ephraim said, ‘Surely I have become rich, I have found wealth for myself; in all my labors they shall find in me no iniquity that is sin.’” Here, the Israelite merchant brushes away his sin by saying that his wealth proves he is blameless, yet God shows him for what he is: a boastful, deceitful, and oppressing sinner.

Amos 2:6-7 expands on some of his deeds:

Thus says the Lord: “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away its punishment, because they sell the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals. They pant after the dust of the earth which is on the head of the poor, and pervert the way of the humble.”

From His vantage point in heaven, He sees businessmen selling out their employees for a little extra profit. He watches them greedily taking advantage of every opportunity to squeeze every last bit of wealth out of customers, especially the poor and the weak. He takes note of every time they corrupt someone to fatten their bottom line. He later mentions their trampling of the poor, harsh terms, and profligate lifestyles (Amos 5:11); their taking of bribes and interfering in the judicial system (verse 12); and their undermining of religious practices, cheating, and selling inferior products (Amos 8:5-6).

Isaiah adds that this condition runs rampant through the entire nation, not just the mighty businessmen (see Isaiah 1:4-6). He suggests that, if the common man were in the high-and-mightys’ shoes, he would do the exact same, sinful things! He mentions them in verses 21-23:

How the faithful city has become a harlot! It was full of justice; righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers. Your silver has become dross, your wine mixed with water. Your princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes, and follows after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, nor does the cause of the widow come before them.

What we are observing in American business was inevitable. The anything-for-increased-profits model of business can only produce inequities, mediocre products and services, and strife, and these, along with the workings of a relentless market economy that punishes inefficiency, will destroy even the mightiest of corporations. And who usually ends up suffering? The little guy, the poor, the weak. We need to watch for these business breakdowns, as they are signs that a crisis looms.