| Friday,
December 30, 2005
We begin with an intriguing question:
Is the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) a Marxist newspaper?
At first glance, the answer may appear to be
obviously not. However, a closer analysis shows that the WSJ is deeply
Marxist, at least in some crucial respects. Of course, the WSJ does not
claim to be Marxist. Indeed, the editors would almost certainly deny any
such thing. However, history shows that Marxists are not shy about creating
"front" organizations that advocate Marxist policies and ideas but deny any
direction connection.
Notably the WSJ passionately advocates the same
polices as other overtly Marxist groups. For example, "Political Affairs
Online - Marxist Thought Online" has a long article (http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/2425/1/137/)
on HR 4437, the immigration reform bill. Somewhat predictably, they oppose
the bill. Alas, it has been a long time since Marxists actually supported
higher wages for working people.
However, the real point is how precisely the WSJ
follows the party (Communist that is) line on immigration. Whether this is
because the WSJ is controlled by Marxists or because the WSJ simply shares
common interests with them is not clear. However, both use exactly the same
arguments for Open Borders.
1. "People will continue to come to the US so long as
gross economic inequality grows between rich and poor countries" - This is
standard fodder for the WSJ. Somehow we can't enforce our immigration laws
and we shouldn't even try. Of course, it is not evident that the U.S. has
tried to enforce its immigration laws for at least 35 years... The real
point is that the wage gap between the U.S. and Mexico existed for many
decades before 1970 and illegal immigration was nil. Why? Because before
1970 the U.S. did enforce its immigration laws both on an ongoing basis ("La
Migra") and via periodic roundups of illegals (1920, 1930s, and in the 1950s
via "Operation Wetback").
In more recent times, several nations, notably Japan,
Singapore, Malaysia, and Finland have demonstrated that immigration laws can
be enforced even with vast economic incentives for illegal immigration. How?
By real and ongoing enforcement. Singapore and Malaysia have severe
sanctions (caning for illegals and anyone who employs them). Finland has
never allowed chain migration to start. Japan is similarly intolerant of
illegal immigrants.
2. "The work of migrants is indispensable to many
industries, from agriculture to construction" - The WSJ repeats this bromide
with depressing regularity. Of course, the truth is otherwise. Before large
scale migration resumed around 1970, the work got done in the U.S. with our
own labor. In parts of the U.S. where illegals haven't taken over, the work
somehow gets done by American citizens even now.
In truth, America has far more unemployed workers than
employed illegals aliens. If you add discouraged and displaced workers the
number of available Americans utterly dwarfs the number of illegals (perhaps
5:1). Once the illegals are removed wages, working conditions and benefits
will rise to both improve the domestic supply of labor and too some extent
reduce demand (some folks may have to cut their own lawns). Clearly as good
Marxists, the WSJ regards the prospects of better wages and working
conditions as intolerable.
It should be noted that wages for production workers
have been falling for decades (since 1973). The minimum wage has been
declining for even longer. Any suggestion that we have a labor "shortage"
and need immigrants is easily refuted by the facts.
3. "Deporting or denying work to migrants does not
create a single job for anyone else" - This is a standard trope of the WSJ.
Clearly they are quite capable of articulating the party line. The truth is
otherwise. Significant sectors of the U.S. economy have been taken over by
illegals and are now closed to American workers. Meat packing provides a
good example. At one time, meatpacking jobs paid wages sufficient to support
a family. Corporate employers have been able to use illegal aliens to slash
wages and almost completely remove American workers from these jobs. Similar
shifts have occurred in construction, hospitality, car repair, etc. In every
case, Americans have lost out at the hands of foreigners. Worse, illegal
immigration has simultaneously raised housing costs (by increasing total
population density), reduced mobility (gridlock), increased taxes, etc.
4. "Beefed-up border enforcement doesn't deter people
from crossing" - This is really point one all over again and in this case it
is true. A revolving door border patrol where illegals can try to enter the
U.S. an infinite number of times really doesn't deter illegal immigration. A
system where the border patrol and ICE are forbidden to arrest and remove
illegals except at the border amounts to a "heads I win, tails the American
people lose" non-enforcement system. However, a real border fence would
work. Indeed, the shrieking in response to the proposed fence shows just how
well such a fence might stop illegals.
Israel provides the best current example of the value
of border fences. Apparently, not a single terrorist has been able to
penetrate Israel's security barrier (mostly a fence, concrete in a few
places to stop snipers). Given that suicide bomber wanna-be's are presumably
more highly motivated than aspiring dishwashers, we can only expect better
results in the U.S.
The points above are drawn directly from the Marxist
Thought Online article and the editorial pages of the WSJ. However, the WSJ
clearly takes a Marxist approach to immigration in other respects as well. A
few examples:
1. Income Redistribution - Income redistribution is a
standard Marxist theme. The idea that a free-market income distribution is
somehow "unfair" is recurring left-wing thesis. Clearly the WSJ has similar
views. Open Borders is a well documented tool for driving down wages and
increasing both corporate profits and the incomes of wealthy executives. Not
surprisingly the WSJ has no problem with "Robin Hood in reverse" immigration
policies. Some measure of how well Open Borders is working in this respect
can be found in the declining wage statistics citied above. However, the
amazing increase in income inequality since 1970 including the vast rise in
executive/worker wage ratios is perhaps a better measure of how Open Borders
redistributes income in a manner conducive to the WSJ.
2. Subsidies - Good Marxists are always in favor of
massive subsidies for their preferred goodies. For example, bread was
cheaper than wheat in the former Soviet Union. Indeed, it was a crime to
feed bread to farm animals. Of course, health care, housing, and public
transportation were all lavishly funded with the best of Marxist intentions.
The WSJ takes a similar line. It is a no-brainier to recognize that "cheap"
immigrant labor is dearly expensive for society as a whole. Numerous studies
have shown that immigrants are a serious burden on taxpayers at all levels
of government. After all, who exactly pays the health care, education, food
stamps, WIC, EITC, criminal justice, other social services, etc. that
immigrants consume. Corporate employers? Not exactly. More a "we can get the
profits and the taxpayers get the bill" kind of deal. Good capitalists
insist that external costs be recognized and paid by those who impose them.
Of course, as a Marxist organization the WSJ can't even contemplate such a
thing.
Some may wonder why the WSJ would adopt a Marxist line
on immigration. The answer should be clear. Free markets will never yield
the consistently inflated profits the WSJ clearly slavers for. Marxism
provides an alternative framework that can be used to justify any excess, no
matter how egregious. Given the potential social and political instability
Open Border may well bring, one might think the WSJ would be wary of mass
uncontrolled immigration. Perhaps as good Marxists, the WSJ favors the
complete immiseration the American people as a way of promoting radical
social change (a key reason Marxists favor Open Borders). However, perhaps
Lenin's comment about "selling the rope..." is the correct explanation.
Thank you
Peter S
=========
The Finno-Ugrics: The dying fish swims in water
http://www.economist.com/World/europe/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=5323735
Dec 20th 2005 | MARI-EL, RUSSIA, AND TALLINN
Russia finds outside support for its ethnic
minorities threatening
IF YOU want to embarrass a Finn, and infuriate
a Russian, raise your vodka glass to "Suuri Suomi--Uraliin asti!". That
means "Greater Finland--to the Urals and beyond". It sounds fanciful, even
potty. But it used to be real geopolitics. In the dying days of the Tsarist
empire, a swathe of Russia bubbled with nationalist agitation among
minorities, many with ethnic ties to Finland.
The Finns themselves got away for good. Their
ethnic kinsfolk--the Komi, Mari, Udmurts and the like--managed it only
briefly. In 1917-18 there was a big country in the middle of Russia called
Idel-Ural (literally, "Volga-Ural") which united the Finno-Ugric (the
"Ugric" because of distant cousinship with Hungary) and Turkic peoples in
those areas. When it was crushed by the Bolsheviks in late 1918, its refugee
foreign minister, Sadrí Maqsudí Arsal, got a warm welcome first in Finland
and then Estonia.
In Russian nightmares at least, that spectre
now looms again. According to Vladislav Surkov, an adviser to Vladimir Putin,
there is a "premeditated system of operations" by Finland, Estonia and the
European Union to fan discontent. The more nationalist papers have steamy
stories of westerners plotting Russia's destruction. After Mr Putin said
recently that foreign-financed groups should be subject to strict scrutiny
by the Russian security agencies, a website with close ties to officialdom,
news12.ru, said that pro-Mari pressure groups would now be investigated
further (the site also accused "Estonian nationalists" of stoking riots in
Paris).<snip>
============
Tourism in Iraq
Instant gratification society and abject lack of
historical perspective. Then look to today's story of the Florida teenager
who jaunts off to Iraq on his Christmas vacation from school and finds that;
Hey, things are tough elsewhere! He writes in his school assignment, “There
is a struggle in Iraq between good and evil, between those striving for
freedom and liberty and those striving for death and destruction,”
Happy New Year!
Couv
December 29, 2005
The Plague of Success
The paradox of ever-increasing expectations.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
After September 11 national-security-minded
Democratic politicians fell over each other, voting for all sorts of tough
measures. They passed the Patriot Act, approved the war in Afghanistan,
voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein, and nodded when they were
briefed about Guantanamo or wiretap intercepts of suspect phone calls to and
from the Middle East.
After the anthrax scare, the arrests of dozens
of terrorist cells, and a flurry of al Qaeda fatwas, most Americans thought
another attack was imminent — and wanted their politicians to think the
same. Today's sourpuss, Senator Harry Reid, once was smiling at a photo-op
at the signing of the Patriot Act to record to his constituents that he was
darn serious about terrorism. So we have forgotten that most of us after
9/11 would never have imagined that the United States would remain untouched
for over four years after that awful cloud of ash settled over the crater at
the World Trade Center.
Now the horror of 9/11 and the sight of the
doomed diving into the street fade. Gone mostly are the flags on the cars,
and the orange and red alerts. The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia,
and as beneficiaries of the very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention
al Qaeda very little and Islamic fascism hardly at all.
Apparently due to the success of George Bush at
keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more
often be the target of a relieved Left — deserving of assassination in an
Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S.
senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore.
Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the
leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the
Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby.<snip>
=============
The Conclusion was inevitable, of course
Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About
New Warming
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/earth/27warm.html
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Earth scientists with the longest frames of
reference, particularly those whose specialties begin with the prefix "paleo,"
often seem to be the least agitated about human-caused global warming.
This has been true even in 2005, a year that
saw the biggest summer retreat of Arctic sea ice ever measured, a new sign
that warming seas are rising at an accelerating pace and global temperatures
continuing a sharp climb that began around 1990 and appears unmatched in
2,000 years. But these backward-looking experts have seen it all before.
Recent studies have found that 49 million years
ago the balmy Arctic Ocean, instead of being covered in ice, was matted with
a cousin of the duckweed that cloaks suburban frog ponds. The forests on the
continent now called Antarctica and on shores fringing the Arctic were once
thick and lush.
And through hundreds of millions of years,
concentrations of carbon dioxide and the other trace gases that trap solar
energy and prevent the planet from being an ice ball have mostly been far
higher than those typical during humankind's short existence.
Compared with that norm, the rapid buildup of
carbon dioxide now from a binge of burning forests, coal and oil lasting for
centuries (and counting) is but a blip
In fact, the planet has nothing to worry about
from global warming. A hot, steamy earth would be fine for most forms of
life. Earth and its biological veneer are far more resilient than human
societies, particularly those still mired in poverty or pushed to the
margins of the livable.
Only we humans have to be concerned, and
species like polar bears that, like the poorest people, are pushed to an
edge - in the bear's case the tenuous ecosystem built around coastal sea
ice.
Henk Brinkhuis, a paleoecologist and botanist
at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said it might be hard to get used
to the idea, but the Arctic as we have known it for centuries "is history."
He said this may spell doom for polar bears, a
species that branched off from brown bears only about 250,000 years ago - an
evolutionary blink of the eye.
Still, this is a special case, not necessarily
a blow to the prospects of mammals in general.
The world's last huge warm spike, the Paleocene
Eocene Thermal Maximum some 55 million years ago, preceded "the biggest
radiation in mammals ever," Dr. Brinkhuis said.
"The first horses, cows, the first primates had
their origin right around then," Dr. Brinkhuis said. "It may be that the
extinction of the polar bear would be followed by all kinds of new species
in return."
None of this means that humans should simply
embrace their fossil-fueled potency without regard to the effects. In fact,
many scientists say, if we value the world as it is, there are still strong,
and purely self-serving, reasons to start curbing releases of carbon dioxide
and the other greenhouse gases.<snip>
Of course this assumes that fossil fuel
burning is the cause of global warming, just as it presumably was 50 million
years ago...
=============
No Child Gets Ahead?
Conspicuously missing from the debate over the No
Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act is a discussion of how it has hurt many of our
most capable children. By forcing schools to focus their time and funding
almost entirely on bringing low-achieving students up to proficiency, NCLB
sacrifices the education of the gifted students who will become our future
biomedical researchers, computer engineers and other scientific leaders.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/26/AR2005122600553_pf.html
Jason
All of which was predictable, and
certainly predicted by me if by no one else. Not so well noticed is the
effect of class structure: those who can afford good schools for their
bright kids send them outside the public school system. Bright kids born to
poor families remain in the public school system where they learn the
mechanics of gang management.
We sow the wind.
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