The Stock Market: Index of Evil

I invested in a stock for the first time in my life 10 years ago. In order to do this, I had to consort with all sorts of repellent humans such as stockbrokers, stock analysts, etc. I lost $350 over a few years, and the Commie in me says it serves me right.

I got the prospectus from the company I invested in, and it proudly announced that it was non-union now, and hopefully into the foreseeable future. Get it? This was a great reason to buy the stock! A unionized workplace is "no buy". A non-union workplace is a good reason to buy the stock.

Ever read the stock market pages? Check out what happens when a company goes union. Its stock gets pounded. What happens if workers get a raise? Stock gets hit. What happens to the whole market if unemployment goes down? Stock market gets slammed. Why? Stock market loves unemployment. What happens to the market is employee compensation goes up for the year? Bam, stock market gets pounded.

After a while, I concluded that the stock market was an index of evil. If it goes up, evil is increasing across the land. If it goes down, the forces of good must be winning some battles.

I wonder if we even need a stock market. I understand some social democracies have junked the whole game, and all stocks are owned by several huge national banks, which invest or de-invest accordingly.

A truly evil thing that the capitalist shits have done lately is to bury workers money deep into this hive of evil called the stock market. This means that average workers somehow make more money the more the workers get fucked, and lose money every time the workers start making out. How perverse can you get?

Your average American working stiff understands nothing of this stock market thing (really just a giant casino for rich people) and they think that if the stock market goes up, that's good for America, and if it goes down, that's bad for America.

I'm to the point now where I will about cheer every time I see that Index of Evil go down. Why should I cheer the rise of a metric for the devastation of my class?

I don't see how any progressive person can look at the stock market and tell me how wonderful capitalism is for workers. What a joke.

Take that, market fetishists! What of your vaunted "stock market"?

Union Busters, Inc.

Check it out. I shouldn't really have to explain this link to most of my readers, but for those who don't get it, this is a corporation that sells materials to other corporations to help them defeat unions.

Check out the Union Avoidance link - snarky management bastards giving the high-fives for defeating the workers' attempts to level the playing field with management by voting in a union.

Check out the Employee Satisfaction link. If you really want your employees to be satisfied, let em form a union, what the Hell. If you're going to give them everything (just about) that they would have gotten anyway if they formed a union, so let them form a union. Why not? Possibly power.

This is hard for most American morons to figure out. In a non-union workplace, management has 100% of the power. Management and ownership always has a voice, and always has power, in any workplace. Why shouldn't workers have the exact same power, and voice, as management always has, in any workplace? This is the most commonsensical argument yet for unions.

Your average American working class moron* type here in California hates labor unions. I've known quite a few who worked at unionized workplaces, and they despised it. They were too stupid to figure out that the only reason they were making bank at that particular job was because of the union.

They insisted that "the union never did anything for the workers". In large part, this is a failure of the union. If your average worker, "low-information" as he no doubt is, thinks the union doesn't do anything for the workers (and thus, his union dues that he resentfully forks over are wasted) the union has failed in its efforts to communicate to workers the importance of a unionized workplace.

Check out the unionized workplace link. Saddled with a union? Here's how to get rid of it!

Check out the motto at the bottom, "Helping the workplace work". Tell me what that means?

*I don't mean to imply that working class people are morons. However, any working-class person who hates unions needs to have their head examined. I wager few European working class people are that stupid, but here in the US, it's just about the norm. I don't know how anti-union working class people are in other regions, but it's pretty normal here in the West.

Socialism On Trial

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

This really is a delightful video. It highlights the fight of the Liverpool Labor Councilors fighting to defend Labor socialism in Liverpool in the mid-1980's during Thatcherism. What I found so heartwarming about it was seeing the majority of the White working class in this city rallying in the streets with red flags and signs saying socialism.

Here in the US, that sight is almost incomprehensible. No way will any group of White working class Americans anywhere march in the streets with red flags defending any kind of socialism. The interviews were also very uplifting. These working class Whites defended the Labour Party and its socialist project.

Why? Because they lived in a totalitarian Communist state and had to say that? No, because the socialist Labourites on the council had actually been making their lives better in real and tangible ways for decades.

This didn't happen by accident. The Labourites finally started winning big after WW2, possibly because the Right in the UK was discredited by the defeat of fascism.

Over 60 years, a very strong socialist movement, in the Labour Party, built its own Gramscian cultural hegemony in the UK. This succeeded to the point where your average Brit is a social democrat. There are large papers such as the Guardian, run by corporations, that are pro social democrat. Publicly financed broadcasting in the BBC is also probably pro-social democrat.

It is hard for non-Americans to understand how incomprehensible this is. The notion of huge broadcasting stations and newspapers supporting social democracy in the US is comical. The notion of your average American supporting socialist anything is a product of science fiction. The White working class in particular is irredeemable hostile to anything with the word socialist in it.

But this video shows that it is possible in the West for a socialist political party to win the hearts of White working class people. That notion right there shows that there is hope after all.

This interesting website highlights something else about US culture. Since Reagan in 1980, we have had almost 30 years of hardcore Gramscian cultural hegemony working like madmen to inculcate the market virus in our brains and make us hate anything government with Pavlovian unthinkingness.

In particular, an effort has somehow emerged, apparently cultivated by the Republican Party, that Democrats are fags, wussies, sissies or metrosexuals, and only Republicans and conservatives are real men. The Democrats are for the niggers, the Mexicans and the faggots*.

In White working class communities in rural and suburban California, it seems most of the young men vote Republican. If you're White, working class and say you vote Democrat, people will say, "Well you're not Black or Mexican, so what is your problem? Are you a queer?"

If you're a real man, you're a conservative. You love capitalism, you hate environmentalism, you hate towelheads, Islam, Europeans (especially France) and foreigners in general. You love global warming and plans to stop it are a Democrat socialist faggot plot against capitalism.

If you're a Democrat, your masculinity is suspect. If you're not a queer, at least you're not much of a man. Maybe you're a metrosexual. Reagan was real man. Jimmy Carter was a wuss. Bill Clinton, despite all the bimbos, was some sort of faggy not real man type. George Bush is a man. His father was supposedly a man too, but Bush Sr. actually has a pretty wimpy voice and mannerisms.

Basically, any Republican is automatically a big man and any Democrat is automatically a wussy metrosexual possible faggot.

You love globalization because it's capitalism on steroids, but say buy American (don't ask for coherence). You hate Palestinians for being dirty fighters and love Israel for fighting like real men. You love imperialism and colonialism for their manliness and cynical, real-world hardened views of the globe. And it's very manly and studly to be a neoconservative. You hate health food and love meat, especially red meat.

Socialism of any type, either in health care or social security, is for pussies and fags.

The love of capitalism is because all real men can supposedly become "successful" and "make good money" in the US, or, I guess, anywhere. Assuming 100% of US men decided to become he-men and make it to the upper middle class, how all 100% of them could somehow manage to squeeze into the top 20% is not explained.

If you're a liberal or a Democrat, you're not only a queer, but you're also a loser. If you're a liberal or a Democrat and you have some money, you're considered to be an insane person, working against your own interests.

Money is very much tied in with masculinity in our culture. American women, despite all the feminism, continue to judge a man's masculinity on his earnings. Somehow feminism managed to push equal pay for women while still winking at "take the man for everything he's got" game, giving "oppressed" women the best of both worlds.

An American woman's contemptuous, snarky, "You don't make enough money" is another way for her to call you a faggot or a pussy. So in addition to being called a loser, a low-income man is also told he's not a man. No wonder so many guys go postal.

Since money is equated with masculinity, the new conservative White guy does the same. He may not make much, but some day he will. Or he envies the guys who do. Or something. Or whatever.

It's interesting that in other parts of the world, particularly Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Arab World, the Muslim World, and Asia in general, an identity has been constructed in which a socialist man can be as real of a he-man that ever existed.

The ultra rightwing macho man is very much a US invention, but US politics cannot be understood these days without taking it into account.

*used sardonically

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The Necessity and Benefits of Unions in Capitalism

Responding to my Unions and Wage - Productivity Increases post, James Schipper notes:

You are quite right in arguing that no capitalist will increase wages as long as he can hire more workers at the going wage. That's why it's important to restrict the supply of labor within a country by immigration controls and by convincing workers to limit their offspring.

One 19th French economist was once asked what advice he had for the proletariat, and he answered: "Faites moins d'enfants" = make fewer babies. Not bad advice. As long as the proletarians keep increasing their numbers, their chances of prospering are so much smaller.

With open borders, the very large number of unskilled workers in the Third World are a huge reserve army of the unemployed.

And then some people still wonder why so many capitalists like immigration.

I quite agree with you that unions can be very beneficial for their members. However, it is very doubtful that unions can do much for the wage-earning class as a whole.

Suppose that the entire workforce of Peru became unionized, then workers in that country would still receive very low wages simply because average Peruvian productivity is very low. People can't consume more than they produce, unless they are subsidized from abroad.

A good case can even be made that the gains of unionized workers often comes at the expense of non-unionized workers. Suppose that in a country there are two sectors, A and B. Neither sector is unionized and in both sectors the hourly wage is 10 dollars. Now sector A becomes unionized and the union drives up the wages in that sector to 15 per hour.

As a result, sector A may employ fewer workers, and the laid-off workers then enter sector B, where they drive down wages to for instance 8 dollars.

What also may happen is that the products of sector A become more expensive, thereby reducing the purchasing power of workers in sector B, who also consume those products.

I'm certainly not a union basher, but there are limits to what unions can accomplish. If the economy is growing fast, then it becomes so much easier for unions to get wage increases. That's what happened in Western Europe after WWII.

In Canada, some of the strongest unions are now in the public sector, which makes them rather unpopular because the high wages of their members will translate into tax increases. Everybody understands that, if teachers get big wage increases, this will mean higher taxes for the general public.

I respond:

James, your comments about restricting the labor supply as a necessity for the working class are spot on. I personally never met a labor shortage I could not love. Labor surpluses cannot ever be good for any workers, but it's the capitalists' dream.

That's why they speak solemnly of such things as "the reserve army of surplus labor" - this entity, capitalist economics classes will ponderously intone, is necessary for the proper working of the capitalist system. Getting rid of this reserve army will be a disaster for the capitalist system.

I believe that we could easily have full employment in the US via public sector jobs at the minimum wage. I should be quite affordable, but the capitalist class would scream bloody murder at the tightening of the labor supply and the drying up of their "reserve army of surplus labor".

In general, those countries that are the most unionized have the highest wages and best working conditions for their workers, along with the best social democratic societies for everyone as a whole. I point out that the Swedish workforce is about 90% unionized.

Also, the US labor force was 43% unionized during the 1950's. During this period, all economic classes in the US were getting a fairly equivalent share of the economic pie. That means that if the top 20% gained an ~18% rise in income, the bottom 20% also gained about a ~18% rise in income.

It does not mean that the top 20% and the bottom 20% had anywhere near equivalent incomes. It only means that as the economic pie grew, each income sector was accorded a democratic slice of the pie.

Around 1973, this started to collapse, and things have been falling apart ever since. I pointed out in an earlier post that the bottom 80% of US workers have actually suffered a wage decline in the past 28 years, a time of good economic growth and great increases in productivity.

This can be attributed, more than anything else, to declines in the % of the US workforce that is unionized. We can practically match these two lines on a chart.

It is true that Latin America is not a paradise for workers. Nevertheless, many workers are in unions, and the unions are often very, very militant. They call strikes all the time, and the strikes are often violent street actions that bring out the police and even army.

It's clear that Latin American workers benefit from their unions, but I'm not sure how unionized they are. Clearly they would be much worse off if they were not unionized.

Your comments about unions lowering wages are somewhat theoretical and that is not necessarily the way things work in the real world.

In the real world, when Sector A of an industry goes union, non-union companies, while still fighting off the unions ferociously, will often up wages and benefits to near the levels of the unionized sector just to compete for workers. In this way, unionizing even a part of an industry can benefit the whole industry, even the non-union sectors.

Any sensible union will work with management to get a fair share for the workers while still enabling the business to remain profitable and stay in business. If the company goes out of business, no one will have a job and the union will be superfluous, with no members.

Sensible unions have demanded that management open their books and in some cases, have even taken pay and benefit cuts in order to keep their jobs. A pay-benefit cut with a job is still better than no job and no benefits at all.

Without unions, the management - union power ratio is 100-0. Management has all the power and workers have zero. With the union, ideally it is now 50-50. Each side has the power that they ought to have. If for no other reason, unions are good only in that they guarantee the proper and moral democratic rights of workers in an enterprise.

With a growing economy, a raise in teacher pay does not necessarily result in a tax increase as long as tax revenues are increasing in tandem with economic growth.

In comments to the same post, huy, a bright commenter from the UK, notes:

To increase productivity, workers need decent pay in order to work at their most productive, and sometimes unions are needed for this.

So capitalism actually needs unions to an extent, as sometimes a rich entrepreneur may forget that in order for his workers to work best, they need decent pay.

I respond:

Unions are *always* needed in capitalism. Otherwise the workers pretty much get zero, or less than zero. The capitalists automatically have all the power. Unions are just the way for workers to have power too. It equalizes the score.

Productivity increases are certainly possible during a period of declining wages and these increases are also caused by technology, not only workers themselves. So it is not really necessary for capitalists to pay workers more to get productivity increases. There are many other ways - speedup, technology, overwork.

Without a union, a capitalist is free to brutalize workers to get more per hour out of them. If they complain, he can fire them and there will be someone ready to take their place. In the past 28 years, wages for 80% of the US workforce declined while productivity had major increases. This shows you that capitalists need not pay workers more to get more productivity out of them.

The rich entrepreneur will not "sometimes" forget this, he will always forget this. Wages are a cost to the capitalist, and all costs are to be kept to a minimum using whatever means are possible. If you get an MBA these days at a business school, they will hammer this into your head until you have a headache.

Capitalism only works for workers, in general, to the extent that they are organized in unions. In the US, office workers have always resented unionization, due to class sensibilities. They tend to come from a bourgeois background, and they feel superior on cultural grounds to the working classes.

It's the old white collar versus blue collar thing. Office workers associate unions with the blue collar workers they feel superior to. Joining a union would be like putting on overalls and a cap and bringing a lunch pail to work. It's humiliating, and this is why they do not join unions.

Teachers and nurses are an exception to that trend. These are some of the last of the powerful unions in the US, and this is why there is so much rage directed against them in the corporate media and rightwing culture that is now equivalent to American culture.

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Unions and Wage - Productivity Increases

James Schipper's comments in the comments section suggest that productivity naturally leads to increased wages in capitalism due to the laws of capital and labor. I argue that productivity increases during conditions of labor surplus normal in most capitalist states probably come mostly due to the militant actions of Organized Labor.

James does aver that the replacement of American workers with illegal alien labor did have an effect on the destruction of wages in the construction industry. I argue that there were two stages to the process.

First they broke the unions, then they hired the illegals. Those were the two stages. The exact same thing occurred in many manufacturing plants, especially meat processing. Slaughterhouses, poultry-processing and seafood processing plants all used to be good union jobs with high wages as recently as the 1980's.

First they took out the unions, then they brought in illegals or other immigrants to the work. Many other fields besides construction have been taken out by illegals, including painting and landscaping. My White friends did all of these jobs and made good or decent money doing it. Having your own landscaping business is still a good way for young White men to earn some decent money. So much for Americans won't mow lawns. This is all gone now as most of this has gone straight on over to illegals.

James' argument operates only in the cases of a labor shortage. With a vast surplus of labor, an "army of labor" as the capitalists call the teeming hordes of unemployed, there is not much need to raise wages to compete with other businesses for top employees, as there are 5 guys waiting to take the place of the guy who quits.

The notion that unions are not necessary for workers to have good working conditions is unique to union busters. If unions are superfluous, do nothing but harm workers, and don't even raise wages or improve conditions, why would anyone join one? Better yet, why would capitalists oppose them so ferociously?

The record all over the West seems to be that the more unionized a labor force is or was, the higher wages were. Economic growth used to be spread out among all income classes in the US back in the 1950's and 1960's. In the 1970's, this started to decline to the point now where, from 1980-1992, only the top 20% gained money and the entire bottom 80% of the population lost money.

I would argue that this is exactly how the capitalists wanted it. This occurred during the pro-business Reagan and Bush Administrations. Furthermore, the decline in US wages and the lack of filtering down of productivity dovetails perfectly with the devastation of US unions. Not only that, but the war on US unions, along with the theft of workers' productivity growth, was all part of a project by US business.

To say that in the US, the businessman is the worker's friend stretches reality. Unless the worker organizes to get a good wage, a share of economic and especially productivity growth and better conditions, thing look quite bleak.

James argues that it is better to work for a big business than a small one in Canada. This is probably true, but I would argue that workers are often treated better by very small businesses, who, around here anyway, often treat workers as if they are part of a family.

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Project Middle Class Death

Updated August 23. Note: This post has been accused of racism. See here for my position on racism.

There have been quite a few articles lately about meatpacking plants in the US. Through the 1960's and 1970's, these were union jobs all filled by hard-working Americans. That's all gone now, and all of the work is now being done by illegal aliens or more recently refugees from foreign lands. Most of these articles have screamed about how no Americans are willing to do this kind of work.

It's quite interesting how plenty of Americans were willing to do this admittedly unpleasant work in 60's and 70's, albeit at union wages that you could buy a house and raise a family on. The unions were broken via a corporate conspiracy. This plot has been unveiled an Atlantic Monthly article, but I have not been able to find it.

First of all, the meatpacking companies moved their plants away from the large cities to smaller towns. It happened in LA - they moved to Las Vegas. There was no business reason at all to move to Vegas - it was done for the sole purpose of breaking the union. They hoped to break the unions by having the old employees stuck in Los Angeles and not being willing to move due to family ties.

The idea was to get the local rural people around Vegas to work for nothing, along with the few loyal workers who might move to Vegas to follow the company, who would work for less than previously, but not for as little as the new hires.

When they couldn’t find workers to be dupes for them (surprise!) they somehow managed to bus in Mexicans. From Mexico? Apparently. This was in the early 80’s, when Ronald Reagan, still champion of so many working class White Americans called Reagan Democrats, was President.

The US construction companies pretty much broke the unions, one by one, in the 1970's and especially in the 1980's. Somehow, an incredible cultural narrative has been constructed that tells us that only Hispanics, especially illegal aliens, are capable of or expected to do construction work.

When my friends worked construction in 1975-76, you could buy a house and raise a family on those wages, which would be the equivalent of $40-45/hour now for union jobs laying drywall. If you go around now looking at construction jobs, look hard, very hard, for the sight of a White man working construction. He barely exists.

It's all Hispanics doing the work. Mostly illegals, but the market is so flooded with low-skilled labor that you even have a lot of legal Hispanic immigrants and even Hispanic Americans doing this work. The business owners scream and fuss and carry on that they can't get White workers to do this work anymore. That's because it doesn't pay crap.

I do not really want to diss on any ethnic group. I'm sure back in the union days there were Hispanic-Americans who could cut the high standards of union work, where you cut it or you're gone. Nowadays, for whatever reason, the private housing built by cheap-labor Hispanics - legal, illegal, whatever, is well-known to be garbage.

Everyone knows this, the White workers like my own brother who are constantly browbeaten by their bosses ("You better shut up and knock it off or I'm going to replace all of you with Mexicans!"), the hip Whites tuned in to the construction scene, probably even the businessmen-criminals themselves.

The problems often start cropping up within a year or so after the builder’s warranty ended. Sagging roofs, foundations so poorly laid they start cracking and splitting. Pipes so poorly fitted and installed they cause leaks; with the predictable high cost of ripping out wallboard to replace them.

That’s the price of that cheap Hispanic labor for you. One would think that after labor costs declined from $42/hour in 1976 to $4-10/hour in 2008 (2008 dollars), the businesses could "pass on a lot of those savings to the home buyer.

That's what the right-wing and business crowd always tells us is so glorious about crap wages - the consumer saves bigtime. In the case of homes, not one nickel got knocked off the price, ever. All those savings just translated into extra profits for the builder.

There is a rightwing, classist line that the crushing of the US worker occurred because US union workers had gotten fat and lazy and were demanding too much money! The poor suffering businessmen just could not make a profit anymore! They were in danger of losing their yachts, and their mansions were about to be foreclosed!

In the 1970's, a lot of US businesses started screaming hardship. That's because our standard of living in this country was as high as it has ever been (1973). Wages were rising right along with productivity, and no capitalist will stand for that for very long.

At this time, most unions said that if the companies opened their books to independent auditors of the unions' choosing, the unions would take the cuts the company was claiming were needed. The whole thing was just a massive lie because none of the companies ever opened their books. Chrysler did, but only because they were forced to.

The whole thing was a shell game - a plot to make it look like if they did not offshore, they were going to go out of business. As it turned out, they went ahead and offshored anyway.

All of the offshoring happened because at this time, business schools started teaching the profoundly unpatriotic notion that the purpose of a business is to generate vast paper profits for their skyrocketing bonus and stock option plans. Prior to the 80’s, most CEO's weren’t compensated so lavishly for short term stock actions, and they managed it like a family business.

It really was a cultural shift, and it once again coincided with Mr. Reagan, whom 53% of Americans say is a hero.

On American Renaissance, a worker tells the saga of one of these shlock MBA's:

The place I worked for just had a president of one of its divisions leave. The man was a complete failure. No product came in at schedule or expected cost. He instituted stupid money wasting policies that could be found in any of the CEO worshipping books around. He walked away with over $40 million for his 5 year stint as a lowly division president - $30 million from stock options.

All the stock growth was just from being in the right place at the right time. Now that we can’t grow the top line, because our primary products have completely penetrated the market, we are talking about moving production overseas. There is nothing wrong with our workforce, nor are they greedy and lazy. We just can’t get the stock price up and too may bonuses are dependent on it.

There you have it. All the mergers, all the demands for wage and pension cuts, all the hiring of illegals and refugees and cheap labor this or that, all the breaking of unions, all of this is just to get the stock price up so executives can fatten their wallets on the bonuses. It's doesn't have anything to do with international competition or any of that.

You think any MSM media source will tell that? Dubious. Lou Dobbs, the sole populist voice in our nation's mass media? Perhaps. Good luck finding another one.

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Why US Business Loves Mass Immigration

...And why every American who is not a businessmen should not.

This post will show how immigration is great for US business, but it's bad for everyone else in the country. That includes everyone who doesn't run a business, all of you, "What's good for my boss is good for" worker-fools.

James Schipper has been laying out some excellent reasons in the comments threads about why immigration does not appear to make much sense for economics or society as a whole. In fact, mass immigration seems to be detrimental to your average person. His arguments seemed logical, but I had hardly heard them before.

But then I wondered, if it's so obvious that mass immigration is bad for society and even for average income, why would business and the elites support it?

Turns out that business has no interest at all in the average income of workers. In the Third World, they are perfectly content to have millions starving or living in the streets every year, as in India. Or to have 90% of the population in poverty as Guatemala was for years and Haiti is now.

As long as the rich stay rich and business stays profitable, they don't really give a flying fuck about anyone else and whether they are in poverty or not.

In Haiti, the elite has a monopoly on food sales, which they mostly import and mark up at very high rates. Since the poor have to eat or starve, they have no choice but to pay the high prices. So even a 90% poor country can still generate high profits for business. Fewer poor people would mean rising wages or more of returns going to wages than to owners. Of course, business always opposes rising wages and increased shares to workers.

Let's let James show us just how supporting mass immigration is logical for businessmen:

The reason why the business community tends to support immigration is that more immigrants means more workers, more customers and more real estate users.

The essential question is not whether immigrants work for less than natives but whether the presence of immigrants makes labor cheaper than it otherwise would be.

I think that mass immigration has a depressing effect on wages, or else its prevents wages from rising as fast as they would rise without immigration. Lower wages do not necessarily translate into fatter profits because, by lowering production costs, immigration may lead to lower prices.

Slavery also lowered production costs, so the ultimate beneficiaries of slavery may have been the consumers of goods produced with slave labor.

More immigrants likely means that there will be economic growth, and that can mean increased sales. What matters to business is not per capita sales but total sales. Let's illustrate this. We have a town with 500 people and a restaurant. Let's assume that on average each town resident consumes 6 restaurant meals per month, so the restaurant sells 3000 meals per month.

Now 200 immigrants enter the town. They lower average income, so that each town resident now consumes 5 meals instead of 6. The restaurant still benefits from the population increase because it now can sell 3500 meals per month instead of 3000. if you are in the business of selling widgets, you are better-off selling 1200 widgets to 150 people than 1000 widgets to 100 people.

Suppose that no immigrants had entered the US in the last 50 years, would average real estate prices be as high today as they are? I doubt it. The more people you put in a given space, the more property is likely to be worth in that space. Immigrants have to live somewhere. Since business owns a lot of real estate, they benefit from population growth.

For business, the important thing is usually total economic growth, not per capita economic growth, let alone per capita consumption. For ordinary people, the important thing is per capita income growth and its distribution.

Let me illustrate demographic investment once more. We have a country with 400,000 high school students and there are 400 high schools. Schools last 100 years, so each year the country has to build 4 schools. Let's assume that a school costs 50 million dollars. That means 200 million in building costs per year.

In addition, the country spends 5,000 per year on each student. Adding the building costs to that amount, the cost of each high school student is 5,500 per year if the student population remains the same.

Now we make the assumption that the student population increases by 4000 each year. Since there are 1000 students per school, the country has to build 4 more schools to accommodate the new arrivals. Instead of building 4 schools, the country now has to build 8.

In the first year after the growth in the student population, the costs per student are (404,000 x 5,000) + 8 x 50 million = 2,420,000,000/404,000 = 5,990. In other words, the cost per student has increased from 5,500 to 5,990.

The increment of 490 can't be used for consumption. That is the effect of demographic investments. It reduces consumption. Education is an investment.

The establishment can also believe in a lot nonsense. Many members of the elite may believe in immigration because it makes them look cosmopolitan, tolerant and sophisticated, so unlike the unwashed who don't like immigrants because they are unenlightened and bigoted. It is a coalition of plutocrats and political correcties that keep the flow of immigrants going in Canada and the US.

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Illegals, Unions, TINA and National Sovereignty

Excellent commenter Uncle Milton notes presciently about illegal immigration. Comments at the end:

Uncle Milton: Unions didn't gain any real power in this country until the immigration doors were slammed shut in the 1920s. In the modern era (the last three decades) you don't have to look very far to see how cheap Latino labor has suppressed the wages of meat packers, janitors, construction workers, etc.

When critiquing illegal immigration, I find it much more productive (and appealing or at least tolerated) by a wider audience when you bring up what it has done to wages and how employers have profited.

Now with the globalization of computer technology many things can be done overseas: accounting, programming, tech support, architecture. In theory, this is done for lower costs, but I know multiple cases were companies brought labor back to the US.

We hear all the time about how the US isn't producing enough engineers. What you don't hear as much is that the average engineer only stays in the field for about a decade instead of a 30 to 40 year career. Quite a bit of ageism in the field.

Our country's currency is being debased, our technology distributed (and frequently "borrowed" with no recompense in the process) to other nations, and unrestrained immigration (and attendant high birthrates of "migrants" subsidized by US taxpayers) are straining resources.

It's generally profitable to those in top 1/10 of 1% of wealth but not so great for everyone else. The concept of national sovereignty being the source of ones wealth seems to have been tossed out the window. At least Japanese and Chinese people seem to have a better grasp on the concept that a stable cohesive nation is your most important source of wealth.

Uncle makes a fantastic point here! The US labor movement only really got going after we seriously restricted immigration in the mid-1920's. We then massively loosened up immigration in 1965, at least racially speaking. At some point after that, we began to experience mass immigration.

Frosty Wooldridge notes that the 1965 Immigration Act resulted in immigration going from 170,000 - 1.1 million per year. That's a damn good reason to oppose it right there, even if you care nothing about the racial angle.

Mass illegal immigration from Mesoamerica started under Reagan in 1980, picked up tremendous speed after 1990 and has exploded since 2000.

The US union movement began to go into a serious decline around 1973 (Any relation to the 1965 immigration act?), about the same time that US wages started to seriously stagnate and wealth began being distributed upwards. Yes, even the Jimmy Carter "Atari Democrats" were in on this bullshit. We've now had 35 years of this insanity.

Plunging wages have combined with wildly increasing inequality, a flood of illegal immigration, an evisceration of our social democracy and what little Social Contract we ever had to produce 28 years of varying degrees of reactionary politics, with a brief intercession for a Eisenhower Republican Democrat named Clinton (actually, Ike was much more progressive than Bill Clinton).

Does any of this make sense? Of course not.

Why does a population where the bottom 60-80% are getting eviscerated march off and vote for the eviscerators every year? Well. They do it in the 3rd World. They used to do it in Latin America. Can you see where we are headed?

The ageism in IT is disgusting. You get about 10 years and then no one will hire you anymore because you are too expensive. 90% of new IT hires are going to H-1B job thieves anyway, and one of the Senate's paragons of Democratic liberalism, Barbara Mikulski, recently introduced a bill to greatly increase the number of H-1B job thieves to the US in order to destroy even more US jobs and lay off even more US workers.

Does that make sense? Of course not.

It only makes sense in a Democratic Party whose liberal wing has utterly abandoned US workers.

I disagree that the illegal immigration flood is only beneficial to the top .1%. Sure, they love it, but I think the entire top 20% benefits, and further, the entire US business class, from small business all the way to corporations, just loves it to death. Hispanic-Americans generally don't benefit a bit, and I insist that most of them are actually harmed by illegal immigration, but they line up on racial grounds anyway.

One of the worst things about Reagan-Thatcherism's TINA (There Is No Alternative) neoliberalism is that everywhere on Earth it has been tried, it has generally benefited only the top 20% of the population. The bottom 80% gets screwed no matter what. From 1980-1992 in the US, the top 80% gained a lot of money and the entire bottom 80% of the US population lost money!

It's been this way everywhere and as regular as clockwork. That's why Latin America is turning their back on this shit. They've had a couple decades of this poison and they are not buying anymore. These "dumb Latinos" are not as stupid as Gringos think they are! Hell, they are smarter than most White Americans.

Anyway, this nasty 20% bastard class has been created everywhere, and everywhere it has done quite a bit of damage. This class is deeply invested in neoliberalism and makes up the overwhelming majority of the professionals and movers and shakers in society. They seek to keep neoliberalism in place forever by whatever means they can.

Even in the UK, a nasty 20% elite has been created since Thatcher. They have nice new foreign cars and second homes in the country. The result has been the rightwing Labor governments of Blair and Brown. In Latin America, the masses actually voted these professional and business elites out, but it hasn't happened everywhere.

The notion of national sovereignty being the source of a nation's wealth is an interesting one, but I do not know where to start on that subject. Maybe someone else can chime in.

It's clear that in Corporate World, there is no national sovereignty anymore. The corporation is the ultimate traitor - it has no national allegiance whatsoever. How do drive around that nasty speed bump is a pretty difficult question.

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Open Borders is Bad For Workers

Commenter James Schipper of Canada points out what any economics student or especially Marxist ought to be able to figure out: that open borders is terrible for workers in high-wage countries. That the Left in high-wage countries supports such an obviously detrimental to workers agenda means that it completely misunderstands the economics of modern capitalism.

Nowadays, the Western Left can only be said to be worker-hostile towards native workers. They support immigrant workers, and it is a known fact that immigrant workers in many cases in the West have been shown to actually lower wages for native workers. The Left responds that this is a lie.

Even worse, the Left calls any Western Leftist who opposes certain modes of immigration racist. At best, this is a grotesque abuse of the term similar to the way many objectively reactionary groups are overusing this word these days. At worst, it is slander and name-calling.

The Left's objective hostility to native workers in the West has resulted in historic losses in recent days in Belgium, Italy and the UK. It seems that only right-wing nativist parties are appealing to workers in these countries. Much of the vote for the rightwing is due to anger at uncontrolled immigration in these countries.

The extent to which these rightwing and often fascist or proto-fascist parties will actually work for the interests of workers is not known, but historically, they have not benefited workers much and have tended to side with capital over workers every time. As the Left grows more and more irrelevant, it continues piping away at the same old losing tune.

Things are much different here in the US, where both parties are 100% pro-mass immigration, and indeed both are apparently 100% pro-illegal immigration. In the US, there is no candidate for a voter wishing to express an anti-immigrant agenda. This is ominous in that it means that a demagogue of the Right could potentially win many votes on this issue alone.

The election of either Obama or McCain would probably result in a renewed attempt at mass amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens, with resulting chain migration of up to 30 million of their often-hazy and not too cool relatives over the next 20 years or so.

Such a monumental mass migration of poorly screened immigrants with a known tendency to form a vast underclass should at least be discussed by American voters. Instead, the entire elite supports this project as do all of their media. Most especially, 100% of the large business class and much of the small business class of the US support illegal immigration, fake guest H-1B workers, and mass legal immigration.

Studies show that up to 75-80% of the US public opposes broad aspects of this mass immigration project. It is ridiculous to characterize 75-80% of the US as "racist" for opposing this project and harkens to the abuse of this term by reactionaries above.

Anyway, take a look at James' comments:

Let's take two swimming pools, one with 6 feet of water and the other with 2 feet. If they are at the same level and connected with an underground pipe, what is going to happen? Obviously, water will flow from the first pool to the second, thereby lower the water level of the first and raising that of the second.

Similarly, if there is complete freedom of movement of goods, labor and capital between a high-wage and low-wage country, the wage level in the rich country will fall and that of the poor country will rise. The magnitude of the change will depend on the relative size of the high-wage and low-wage country.

If there are completely open borders between India and Australia, then wages in Australia will fall a lot, but they will barely rise in India. Conversely, if there are no barriers to the flow of goods, labor and capital between the US and Nicaragua, wages in the US will hardly go down, but they will rise a lot in Nicaragua. Numbers always matter.

Another problem with free international migration is that it creates an open demographic system. Open systems have the advantage that they make the import of solutions possible but they also have the disadvantage that they allow problems to be exported.

Suppose that Ruritania stabilizes its population, but that Slobodia's population keeps growing. If there are open borders between the two countries, Slobodia will export people to Ruritania and Ruritania's population will grow despite its demographic stabilization.

Likewise, if Ruritania succeeds in raising the standard of living of its workers while Slobodia does not, then, if there are open borders, many Slobodians will emigrate to Ruritania, thereby lower the standard of living of Ruritanian workers.

What is true of demographic open borders is also true of commercial open borders. If there is completely free trade between Ruritania and Slobodia, then any efforts to conserve non-renewable resources by Ruritania may be nullified by Slobodia. Under free trade, a country whose population remains below its carrying capacity may still experience starvation because a lot of its food will be exported to countries with populations above their carrying capacity.

If there is complete freedom of movement of goods, labor and capital between countries, the fast breeders will export their problems to the slow breeders, the slow economic growers will export their problems to the fast growers and the depleters will export their problems to the conservers.

Finally, a quote by Wouter Bos, the leader of the Dutch Labor Party: "We have to choose between a generous welfare state and restrictive immigration on the one hand and a stingy welfare state and liberal immigration on the other hand." Sensible words! if only more leftists saw things that clearly.

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More Illegal Immigration Madness

First off, let me start out by saying that I am a Leftist. In fact, I am a Communist. However, unlike 99% of Leftists, I actually oppose illegal immigration. Why? Because it is one of the worst things that has ever happened to American workers of all colors.

In my town, Madera, California, I figure that 85% of local Hispanics support the illegals that run amok all over here. The reason for that is clear. Hispanics, like every other group except Whites, are allowed to be and even encouraged to be ethnocentric.

What's completely insane about is that in their ethnocentrism, Hispanics are really hurting themselves. You never see a Help Wanted sign in this town. Why would you, when the unemployment rate is 11%? Yet I don't know one single illegal alien who is out of work. It seems 100% of them are working.

My White friend has roofing skills. He goes down to the local hiring hall and tries to get hired, but he does demand $9/hr. That's $1 over minimum wage. Yet every time, the employers say that some illegal over there will do it for $4-5/hr (that's far below minimum wage).

Also, my friend says that every job he applies for demands bilingual skills in Spanish. As he is not bilingual, he is SOL.

I find this ridiculous. It might be slightly sensible if these Spanish speakers were natives who had lived here since 1850 and hence had some right to their native tongue.

Instead, almost all of the ones you will need to use Spanish with are illegal aliens who hopped the border in the past 20 years. The notion that one cannot get a job in the US unless one speaks a foreign language is preposterous. I think it ought to be illegal.

Bottom line is I know all sorts of young Americans around here who are out of work. Now, they aren't always the most wonderful citizens, but if there were Help Wanted signs all over town, I think they could work somewhere.

Instead, they are unemployed and spend their days involved with gangs, crime, tagging, rolling drunks, fighting with gang rivals, leeching off their stupid girlfriends, engaging in petty thievery, and especially smoking dope. They just in general act highly uncivilized.

I would like to point out here that in a manner that is little discussed, illegal immigration has been partly responsible for gangsta culture, drug abuse, laziness, and just general cultural degeneration among young Americans of all races.

Studies have shown that as illegal immigration has increased over the past 20 years or so, the number of young Americans who count themselves as "discouraged workers" who have dropped out of the labor force has grown significantly.

The two things must be related.

Illegals are taking all the low-skilled labor and these were the sort of jobs young Americans cut their working teeth on in their youth. With no work to do, young Americans become discouraged, drop out and culturally degenerate in various ways.

In the comments section, commenter Lafayette brings up a highly pro-immigrant Weltanshauung in the UK involving Polish workers. The content is familiar. Britons are told endlessly the society will collapse if not for the immigrants. There are so many jobs that young Britons just will not do. If the immigrants go, the economy will tank. On and on.

I don't know the dynamic of Polish immigrants in the UK, but I assume that they are working for lower wages than Britons work for. Otherwise the entire UK media would not be cheering them on. I also noticed an article recently that said that Polish workers were better workers than British workers.

This is part of the pro-immigrant culture that we went through in the West under Reagan. Starting under Reagan, a new culture developed in America whereby rightwingers repeatedly endlessly what crappy workers Americans were, especially blue collar workers. There was no evidence for this whatsoever, but the talk went on.

Americans, mostly young Whites, were also told that blue collar jobs were for losers. The only way to be a winner in America was to run a business or work in an office. Good, honest, US working class culture was degraded with an incessant drumbeat. At the same time, the illegals started to pour in.

I think that these two things were connected.

There was a concerted rightwing project to tell young Americans that working class jobs were for losers and that US working class workers were crappy workers, combined with the beginnings of a total flood of unskilled labor from south of the border. The unstated assumption: the US working class all needed to be replaced by immigrants, especially illegals from Mesoamerica.

At the same time, an all-out war was waged on unions, the organizations of the US working class. The notion was also promoted that Americans are some kind of sissy fussbudgets who will not do any kind low-status labor. Therefore, we needed to import millions of illegals to do this work or else the economy would collapse. We were also regularly harangued with stories about phantom labor shortages.

After about 15 years or so of mass unskilled illegal immigration, the US Left did an about-face and decided to represent the interests of immigrant scabs over native workers. The nasty and wicked notion that normal, sane and reasonable opposition to illegal immigration was racism (!) was promoted, and soon wormed its way through the whole culture to where it is now widely accepted.

After that, the labor unions themselves, the last holdout of the workers, went over to the immigrant scabs, and US workers were finally left completely high and dry.

I would like to point out that the entire MSM was complicit in this, and they are to this day. Realize that if the MSM is consistent about any one thing, it is their sheer and utter contempt for labor. There is not one single major US newsmagazine, TV news station or large daily newspaper that is the slightest bit friendly to labor, much less organized labor.

As the UK's lunatic pro-immigrant culture continued, these same nasty memes wormed their way into the culture. One is the notion that there are certain jobs that Britons simply will not do. It's not stated, but what's implied is that Britons will not do this work for any amount of money. I don't know about Britons, but here in the US, that's manifestly untrue for anything other than field work.

A much more pernicious line soon followed, and this is that the foreigners are actually better workers than the natives. The Right will start this line, but soon the ultra-traitors of the Idiot Left will pick up on it.

I had an anarchist say straight to my face that US workers are lazy and incompetent, and that's why we need illegals to replace them (!).

Lafayette also points out that in the UK, the entire Left has given up on the working class. Instead, it is supporting immigrant scabs who are being brought in for the sole purpose of driving down the cost of labor for UK native workers.

What followed after that is that the labor unions themselves got on board and supported the immigrant scabs over the interests of native workers. Since government and media never support native workers, and as Lafayette notes, the Left completely gave up on them, what this means is that native workers lost their last friend - their very own unions .

The Left here in the US and UK will respond with the pleasant-sounding nostrum that what is needed is to organize all of the immigrants, especially the illegals. The problem is that this feel-good fall-back position is utterly doomed to failure.

The notion that organizing these illegals is going to help anything is even more idiotic here in the US than it is in the UK. Unionization in the US has been plummeting since the 1950's and in particular since 1973. Unions are now so weak that it's ridiculous. That they are suddenly going to organize all of these immigrant scabs and regain all their power and glory is comical.

Even if they did organize the immigrants, as Lafayette notes, what good is it with ten or more workers lining up for every unskilled job? All the unions in the world are pretty useless in the face of a tidal wave and resulting massive glut in unskilled labor.

Under capitalism, labor is like pricing - it is based on supply and demand. Massive oversupply of low-skilled labor will result in the bottoming out of the price of labor just as massive oversupply in a type of goods will result in the collapse in the price of that particular widget.

So with fields like construction totally glutted with low to unskilled workers, the high-paying construction jobs of yesterday are never coming back, whether you organize the immigrant scabs or not.

US unions can't even organize US workers and get them to join unions. How will they organize a bunch of illegals who can't even speak English?

P.S. I am not a xenophobe. I do support limited (200,000 a year?), tightly controlled legal immigration. The immigrants should be rigorously analyzed, and the vast majority of potential immigrants should be rejected. Immigrants should be required to jump through many hoops in order to prove to us exactly how they will be an asset to our nation instead of adding to our nightmarish underclass.

Educational, legal and other histories should be reviewed. Those immigrants from whatever land who successfully run this tough gauntlet are likely to be net benefits as opposed to net detractors to our nation.

One of the principal problems with illegal immigrants is that it is unscreened, so instead of getting high-quality immigrants, we get the peasantry and urban poor of the Third World. They are unlikely to be net benefits to our land in either the short or long run. Chain migration (family reunification) should be drastically scaled back or ended altogether.

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