The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1415012
C-6 Wednesday, September 29, 2021 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Most people have experienced being duped a few times. It is not a pleasant feeling, especially if you felt like a fool. Unfortunately, we are continuous- ly and unknowingly duped. Advertis- ers do it by placing obscure or hid- den objects in commercials, hop- ing your brain will notice it and buy their product. Music producers em- bed hidden messages in songs by placing them in the higher or lower frequencies or by musicians singing something backwards. We know many politicians are pros at duping their constituents. Have you given ANY thought that the world, including Christians, are being duped? Allow me to use the words of the apostle Paul to make my case. "2Co 11:14 And no wonder! For Satan him- self transforms himself into an angel of light.15 Therefore [it is] no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righ- teousness, whose end will be accord- ing to their works." Of course, if you do not believe in an actual devil, then you are already duped. Satan is not a dreadful medi- eval horned beast with a pitchfork. No, Satan appears as someone sooth- ing, like an ice cream peddler. His minsters wear three-piece suits and have lots of titles before their names. They are on T V, the radio, they write bestselling books, they smile a lot, and could be your next-door neigh- bor. Some of you might unknowingly be followers of these snake oil sales- people and Judas Goats. I know several Jewish-Christian writers who insist we live in a world that is Satanically possessed. This should not be surprising, consider- ing Jesus spoke of Satan and his syn- agogue, and Paul referred to him as the prince of the power of the air. Je- sus warned about Wolves in sheep's clothing who will not spare the flock. Let us look at how the church in America is faring. The Ol' Ship of Zion is taking on water. Fewer and fewer Christians are manning the pumps to keep the ship afloat and trim. It is apparent the ship is drooping. The church is in danger of floundering because it is comfortable with sin. The Church is following the culture and, while affirming everyone's brokenness, it neglects to hold everyone account- able to God. Many Christians read- ily embrace and celebrate what the church used to call sinful and ab- horrent behavior. Anyone who does not agree with and accept this new- found freedom and enlightenment is vilified, slandered, abused, labeled as un-Christian ad nauseam. The wolves are in the chicken house. We are witnessing a wholesale abandonment of the historical or- thodox teachings of the church. In its place is a counterfeit faith with all the right words, but no power led by an angel of light and his light bear- ing apostates. This is not the church of Jesus Christ but a social club de- Thomas and the Declaration of Independence Last week, Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas arrived at the University of Notre Dame to speak about the Declaration of Independence. Speaking invitations like this that Thomas accepts are few and far be- tween. Anyone who cares about our country and listens to this address will wish that he would agree to speak more. His presentation was a brilliant and profound articulation of what America is about at its core. It is what every American needs to hear in these troublesome and divisive times. Thomas tells his own story and how his life's journey led him to understand what America is about. He grew up poor near Savannah, Georgia, raised by his grandparents, under the tutelage of his grandfather, a devout Catholic and American patriot. Thomas' grandfather understood that the injustices of the country were not about flaws in the country but about flaws in human beings in living up to ide- als handed down to them. What need- ed to be fixed were the people — not the nation. This insight strikes at the heart of the divisions going on today that are so bit- terly dividing us. But Thomas left his grandfather's house and went to college in the midst of the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and Thomas became filled with bitterness and the sense that America is an irre- deemably flawed, racist nation, which is so much in the spirit of the times today. In his own words, "What had given my life meaning and sense of belonging, that this country was my home, was jet- tisoned as old-fashioned and antiquat- ed. ... It was easy and convenient to fill that void with victimhood. ... So much of my time focused intently on our ra- cial differences and grievances, much like today." "As I matured," Thomas continued, "I began to see that the theories of my young adulthood were destructive and self-defeating.....I had rejected my coun- try, my birthright as a citizen, and I had nothing to show for it." "The wholesomeness of my child- hood had been replaced with an empti- ness, cynicism, and despair. I was faced with the simple fact that there was no greater truth than what my Nuns and grandparents had taught me. We are all children of God and rightful heirs to our nation's legacy of equality. We had to live up to the obligations of the equal citizen- ship to which we were entitled by birth." As he continued work in the federal government, Thomas became "deeply interested in the Declaration of Inde- pendence." "The Declaration captured what I had been taught to venerate as a child but had cynically rejected as a young man. All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." "As I had rediscovered the God-giv- en principles of the Declaration and our founding, I eventually returned to the church, which had been teaching the same truths for millennia." Despite the strident voices dividing us today, Thomas observes "there are many more of us, I think, who feel Amer- ica is not so broken, as it is adrift at sea." "For whatever it is worth, the Decla- ration of Independence has weathered every storm for 245 years. It birthed a great nation. It abolished the sin of slav- ery. ... While we have failed the ideals of the Declaration time and again, I know of no time when the ideals have failed us." The Declaration of Independence "es- tablishes a moral ideal that we as citi- zens are duty-bound to uphold and sus- tain. We may fall short, but our imper- fection does not relieve us of our obli- gation." Thomas' message about the Decla- ration may be summarized: There are eternal truths; they are true for all of humanity; and it is the personal respon- sibility of each individual to live up to them. Thomas' detractors are those who reject these premises. This defines the culture war that so deeply and danger- ously divides America today. Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show "Cure America with Star Parker." Charity that changes lives Government-run schools fail kids. Teachers' unions and education bu- reaucrats say, "We need more money! " But America already spends a for- tune on public schools. My town, New York City, spends $28,000 per student — half-a-million dollars per classroom! Think about what you could do with that money: Hire five teachers? Pay for private tu- tors? Where does the $28,000 go? No one really knows. When governments run things, money vanishes into bureau- cracy. NYC spends $ 3 million per year on "executive superintendents" and $10 million on consultants. Some charter schools offer bet- ter educations for less. But NYC pol- iticians limit the number of charter schools. As a result, 48,000 kids wait on waitlists. Fortunately, some charities have stepped in to help. My video this week features Student Sponsor Partners, or SSP, a nonprofit that helps low-income students go to Catholic schools. Jeniffer Gutierrez, a parent in the Bronx, was ecstatic to get SSP's ac- ceptance letter. "I cried so hard when I received that letter because I knew it was an opportunity for my son. ... High schools in the Bronx are violent. There's no discipline. There's no ed- ucation." Her son Tyler didn't feel safe in pub- lic school. "One of my best friends was shot and killed right next to me," he recalls. Many Catholic schools, even though they spend much less per student than government-run schools, do better. SSP sent Tyler to Cardinal Hayes High School, where, says Gutierrez, teach- ers helped her son "excel in life." Tyler now attends St. John's Univer- sity on scholarship. He and thousands of other SSP students are on a path to success. That's why I support SSP. I'm not Catholic, but I've paid Catholic school tuition for dozens of kids and person- ally mentored five. That mentoring makes SSP differ- ent. SSP assigns an adult to every stu- dent. Often these relationships contin- ue after students graduate. Jorge Aguilar says his mentor "planted seeds in my brain that I could do big things in life." Aguilar then be- came the first person in his family to go to college. Now he's a doctor. "SSP helped me break the chain of poverty," he says. Eighty-five percent of SSP kids graduate high school, twice as many as their public school peers. Most are accepted by colleges. All this happened because decades ago, philanthropist Peter Flanigan wanted to give parents an alterna- tive to government schools. He hoped that would help at-risk teenagers es- cape poverty. He started SSP. One of the first kids he helped was Debra Vizzi. "I had been homeless," she tells me. "I left an abusive foster home and was sort of hopping around from shelter to shelter." She met Flanigan at a soup kitchen. He told her he'd pay for her to attend Cathedral High School. "I was suspicious, especially as a kid on the street, but he was legit," Vizzi laughs. "He paid $ 350 for me to go to one of the best high schools in New York City." Flanigan's mentorship gave Vizzi more than a better education. "He helped me trust men, believe in peo- ple, helped me have a future. Even helped me become a mother later ... something that I hadn't had." Vizzi is now executive director of SSP. "If you would have told me when I was 12 years old, I would run this or- ganization, I would have said you were crazy." This year, SSP has a thousand stu- dents attending different private high schools. Want to help? SSP seeks more peo- ple who will mentor a student and more donors who'll help pay for it. You can get more information at sspnyc.org. Maybe you'll join us and help more kids escape bad government-run schools. John Stossel is author of "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media." Pork is being served in Washing- ton again. Big juicy slices to the lob- byists with the deepest wallets and the campaign contributors who write the biggest campaign reelection checks. It is the way of the swamp. It is the currency of the Washington Beltway. It explains how people get so rich in politics. The two massive spending bills now circulating through Congress with a combined price tag north of $5 trillion are filled with earmarks and thank-you gifts to big donors and the Gucci Gulch lobbyists. That's why the bills have thousands of pages — to bring home the bacon. We still don't know even half of what is in this bill because, as Rep. Richard Neal, the head of the House Ways and Means Committee, ad- mits, he wants to "hold off on the (details of the bill) until we are at the altar." By this, he means pretty much what then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said before the vote on the A ffordable Care Act some 10 years ago: We will read the bill after we pass it. But here's what we do know so far about some of the gems inserted into the bill. A tax break for musicians will al- low them to deduct "the cost of quali- fied sound record- ing productions" by up to $150,000 each taxable year. Bruce Springsteen and Barbra Streisand, take note. Want an electric bike? Congress will give you a 15% refundable tax credit if you purchase one. Union members will be able to de- duct their union dues from their in- come. The Davis-Bacon Act, which forc- es federal contractors to pay higher union wages on their projects, will be extended to bonds used to pay for water, sewage and highway projects. There is a raft of provisions sub- sidizing electric vehicles. They in- clude a $7,500 credit for buying elec- tric cars, though the break would be even larger if the final assembly of those cars is done at domes- tic factories where workers are unionized. A new, sepa- rate break for buying used electric vehicles is also pro- posed at $2,500. So you get a tax break when you buy a Tes- la and then when you sell it! The wind and solar indus- tries will get billions more in handouts from taxpayers. We are told how efficient renew- able energy is, yet we have to give them higher and higher subsidies each year. And how about this one to help the Democratic congressional crit- ters trying to pass this bill: exempt- ing "local news journalists" from the employer side of the payroll tax. That's really Democrats delivering for their political base! So every oth- er worker has to pay the payroll tax except the media? Over the past couple of decades, taxpayer groups and heroic senators Unprecedented is an understate- ment to describe what's happening in Congress right now. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Lead- er Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., are driv- ing Congress to pass a $ 3.5 trillion spending package to go along with the more than $1 trillion infrastruc- ture bill that passed the Senate in August. Transparency and debate are all but nonexistent. As far as energy and environment issues are concerned, the long and short of it is, these bills are the Green New Deal by another name and Con- gress' bid to implement President Joe Biden's Paris climate commit- ments to halve greenhouse gas emis- sions by 2030. Looking at the committee propos- als in the House of Representatives, there are five main buckets of policy: A Clean Electricity Performance Plan, which would pay power com- panies $150 per megawatt-hour to increase renewable electricity gen- eration by at least 4% each year, and penalize companies that don't at $40 per megawatt-hour. Energy tax credits, extended and expanded for green energy technol- ogies, fuels, and vehicles. Federally funded grants, loans, re- search and develop- ment, and demon- stration of green energy. A new Climate Conservation Corps. New penalties on oil, gas, and coal companies, such as a ban on production off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and a punitive fee on methane emis- sions. Combined with the infrastructure bill, this includes a $ 6 billion bailout of existing nuclear power plants, a carbon dioxide reduction mandate on states implemented through the Department of Transportation, and tens of billions of dollars on green energy research and development, commercialization, and federal pro- curement. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said in August that "the Green New Deal is in the DNA of this green budget res- olution." Additionally, the Biden administra- tion has moved expeditiously to pro- pose new climate regulations in nearly every agency—but particularly from the Envi- ronmental Protection Agen- cy, the departments of Ener- gy and Interior, and the Se- curities and Exchange Com- mission—to prop up green energy and target nearly ev- ery aspect of the oil, gas, and coal industries. As others have noted, some of these pieces don't fit log- ically together into coherent poli- cy and don't take into account what states and the private sector are al- ready doing. Complexity is not the friend of transparency, and taxpayers are like- ly to bear the brunt of it. For example, it's possible that a power company with a lot of nuclear power generation could really bring in the bucks with the nuclear ener- gy bailout in Congress' infrastruc- ture bill, state subsidies for nucle- ar and renewables (for example, Il- linois' recently passed bailout), and the Clean Electricity Performance Race for the Cure By Star Parker Give Me a Break John Stossel Continued on page 7 Continued on page 7 Eye on the Economy By Stephen Moore Congress is back to serving pork Heritage Viewpoint By Katie Tubb Points to Ponder By Rev. Curtis Bond Climate policies in Democrats' bill lack transparency Falling for counterfeit faith Continued on page 7 Court