Let's see what's on the end of that long newspaper spoon...William Burroughs, "Naked Lunch" (1959).
This book really ought to be mandatory reading for all second graders, by the way. On the end of that long newspaper spoon? A mean gruel and lies, cons and mind-heists.
Let us look at a few recent topics: How I Helped Moved a Factory To Mexico, from Business Week, actually a pretty good business publication. This article goes to show you the sheer insanity of the US government. Sure, global forces often more or less mandate taking plants out of the country.
The factory in the US closes, and $18/hour workers lose their jobs. The jobs go to Mexico, where the same work pays $3/hour, including benefits. Since $3/hour is not nearly as good as $18/hour, the flood from Mexico to the US continues.
Almost no one in Mexico is starving. As an illegal alien farm worker from Oaxaca told me over drinks at the bar about Oaxaca, "Comida, si. Dinero, no." In Oaxaca, there is plenty of food, but no money. So everyone heads up here. Why, cuz they are starving? No, so they can buy 27 inch color TV sets.
US workers lose when US jobs are shipped overseas, then lose once again with the mad, lunatic illegal alien invasion that is ruining US working class jobs all over our nation. We have been shipping jobs to Mexico wildly since NAFTA in 1994.
One would think that this flood of jobs to Mexico would have resulted in a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration, but in fact, 1994 approximately coincides with a total explosion in the illegal immigrant tsunami to the US.
After NAFTA, workers and consumers in the US, Mexico and Canada all lost ground. Got that? Workers in Mexico, the US and Canada all got screwed by NAFTA. Some say they never made it up since either. Only business cleaned up, and only some businesses at that.
All free trade agreements between disparate nations, that I can tell, are going to have the exact same effects as NAFTA. Probably all free trade agreements that the US has negotiated since NAFTA have had similar effects, probably on a smaller scale.
Workers, consumers and public all get screwed. The environment takes a massive hit. Crappy Mexican trucks flood our highways and destroy them. All free trade agreements are always sold with the same load of crap that NAFTA was, as benefiting workers, consumers, the public, and hell, even the environment, why not?
Nearly the entire US media, from top to bottom, is in on this lie, and if you only read the MSM, you will never figure out the con. Workers, consumers, the public, the environment, and lots of small businesses get screwed by NAFTA-bullshit, and on top of that, we get an avalanche of illegal aliens.
Wow, what a deal! Hail NAFTA! Hail free trade!
File under lies, lies, and more lies: As reasonable folks may have guessed, Business Week (once again, heads up to a good capitalist magazine) columnist Ed Wallace informs us that there is no gas shortage. No gas shortage, no oil shortage, no nothing like that.
Has the media ever told us that? No. Have the politicians ever told us that? No. What do the media and pols tell us? That there is a gas and oil shortage! Why is there a gas and oil shortage? Oh, so many things! Especially, rising demand in China and India! Oh, but what a load of crap that is!
We are also told that we are somewhere near Peak Oil (but no one knows when that hits or what it even means) and this is the cause of the problem. Forget it. Peak oil implies a supply-demand equation, and no such mathematics is working like that here.
The cheerleaders for capitalism tell us that one of the great things about capitalism is supply and demand. It is true that this is an excellent way of fixing prices, and it is possible that socialist economies ignore this at the risk of their extinction. But oil prices have nothing to do with supply and demand! Nothing!
The fundamentals of the oil and gas market are exactly the same as when oil was $60/barrel back in 2006. Whether the market can go back to the $20/barrel in 2002 is not known; possibly it cannot. Check out this great, prophetic Tom Friedman column from that year wondering if the Iraq War will shoot oil to the horror of $60/barrel.
But as far as supply and demand go, oil ought to be no more than $60/barrel and I assume that gas should be no more than $2/gallon or so. So why is it $120/barrel instead of $60?
Because capitalism doesn't necessarily work on supply and demand. The rest is just sheer speculation. Traders are pulling their money out of the sinking dollar and plunking it right into oil and other commodities, and it's sure been a nice ride all right. Just a bunch of speculators bidding the price up like crazed buyers at an auction; that's all it is. That's the cause of your $4/gallon gas.
Oil reserves are at their highest levels since 1999. Gasoline reserves are at their highest levels since 1993 (!) But surely demand is rising, China and India and all that? Nope, demand has been falling all year now and will probably fall even into the summer.
On the other hand, oil refineries are not necessarily doing that well at all, at least according to them. They are getting killed by high oil prices on the one hand and low gasoline demand on the other. In order to make a decent profit, refineries have deliberately cut back oil production. The purpose of running the refineries at low speed is to push up the price of gas even further.
Distillates such as airline fuel and diesel have seen their prices so through the roof, and there are shortages of these, but they are deliberately created by the industry. If there were, why are we exporting more distillates than we are importing. Not only that, but imports of distillates have crashed by some 40% in a year.
It would seem that in all of this insanity something like a National Industrial Policy would be called for. For decades, countries South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and now China, not to mention most of Western Europe, have done just that.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that capitalism with no government (free market neoliberalism) is an orchestra of great musicians with no composer. At some point, it's the economic equivalent to an insane asylum or an elementary school playground.
We can also see that that all of the feverish nostrums peddled by the politico-media Lying Classes are loads of garbage? We need to fly to Saudi Arabia and beg the Saudis to turn up the oil spigots! We need to drill in the Arctic!
We need to drill everywhere, off the beach next to your house! We need to get rid of environmental regulations and taxes that make gas so expensive! And last but not least, the favorite of right-wing liars everywhere, we need more refineries!
We do not really need any of these things, at least at the moment. The oil refineries lie is one of the most evil of them all. It is probably peddled by the stinking garbage in human forms that run the oil industry itself.
The line goes like this:
-Oil is high! -Why is it high? -Hardly any new refineries since (insert year)! -Why not? -Evil environmentalists! Evil regulations! They've made it impossible to build new refineries! -(sputtering) Bastard environmentalists and regulators! Get rid of them so we can build more refineries! -Yes, yes, yes!
The thing is, this whole line is just an incredibly devious lie peddled by Oil Company Scum and their gargoyle allies in government and media and rightwing politics. No regulations have gotten in the way of building any new refineries in the US.
The industry itself has flat out refused to build new oil refineries in the US because industry does not want to create more refinery supply. Low numbers of refineries are good for keeping gas supply low and prices high. The conversational ruse above is designed to get rid of existing environmental and other regulations at existing plants.
This ethanol mandate crap is about to do the same thing to food prices. My advice if you are worried about your money to put it into food stockpiles, preferably non-perishable. Food is going to go up in value quite a bit soon - it is already - and it is not going to be pretty.
It's looking ugly and it's going to get uglier. We socialists have in general done a superb job of feeding people and a way better job of feeding people than capitalism has (despite the Mt. Everest of capitalist lies about how socialism starves people) and hopefully a hungrier world will find more socialist-oriented policies are better for filling the belly.
My bullshit detector was screaming the other day when Yahoo Headlines shouted in my ear that Congress was going to be briefed on how evil North Korea was helping wicked Syria build a diabolical nuclear reactor.
I remember well when Israel bombed the plant in question.
I looked into the story extensively at the time and my conclusion was that Syria was building a chemical weapons plant, not a nuclear reactor plant, at the site. The North Koreans are experts at chemical weapons stuff and the Scud missiles to shoot them with, and that was apparently why they were there.
Now there is reportedly a new video showing that evil Syria was just about this far (index and thumb nearly touching) from building a devilish nuclear power plant, to build nuclear bombs with, to load on missiles, to shoot at Israel, to kill all the Jews!
To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews! To kill all the Jews!
This is obviously a Jewish media cabal influenced article, and all such articles include the Holocaust Porn fetish typical of most Jews nowadays.
The Holocaust traumatized them, but they'd already predicted it for millenia, and it had already been attempted over and over according to them, because Jews really do love to believe that their enemies have been trying to exterminate them all from day one!
The whole history of the Jews, according to them, is Jews fending off mad Final Solution attempts by Persia-Nazis or Roman-Nazis, or Russian-Nazis, or Arab-Nazis, or This-Nazis or That-Nazis.
You can't understand the Jew until you get to the Holocaust Porn thing. It's not just his own death; that's bad enough. The baddies are never going to be satisfied with one Jew. They are going to do every single last one of them.
Understanding this helps shed light on phenomena like Zionism: Go Nazi ourselves, steal some land, arm to the teeth with nukes, and dare the anti-Semites to wipe us out.
How bout Iran? Does Ahmadinejad want to kill one Jew? Course not. He wants to kill them all.
Does the PLO and Hamas just want to kill a Jew here and there for sport? Nope, they want to "destroy Israel" = code for kill all the Jews.
Why do Jews need to go to Israel? Because evil whatever-Nazis in the Diaspora are getting ready to kill all the Diaspora Jews.
For Chrissake man, it's porn! It's Holocaust Porn! It's a fetish already. How else to explain the absolutely sickening and clearly unhealthy Jewish obsession with the horrors of the Holocaust. Holocaust museums, coming soon to a city near you. Holocaust Museum, my Jewish girlfriend took me to visit her very own, this was an essential part of our romance.
What's a Jew reading these days? Oh, a Holocaust novel. Or maybe some non-fiction, surely with a Holocaust twist somewhere in there. Hollywood has a Holocaust hard-on . Seems every year there's more and more Shoah tales.
I do not have enough information yet to look into the North Korean - Syria reactor thing yet, but I have studied Syria's nuclear program in the past. My take was that Syria has been working on a nuclear program for about 25 years now but has made little headway due to shortages of money, technology, brains, etc.
This is actually quite common; many smaller countries have similar nuclear projects in the ruts. People just do not get it. Rome was not built in a day, and neither was any nuclear program. They require a highly developed economy and always take years and often take decades to even get going.
Even when they do, there is one problem after another. The super brains like A. Q. Khan of Pakistan are few and far between, and he's under house arrest.
So let us say I am somewhat skeptical that Syria was about "this close" to building a nuclear weapon.
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The idea is that cops want illegals to cooperate as crime victims and witnesses to crimes. But my observation is that illegals don't cooperate even if they are crime victims. I watched one car full of illegals hit a van with a couple of illegals in it in town recently. I asked the people who got hit if they wanted to go to the cops, but they turned around, got back in their vehicle and drove away.
It's well known that the local gangbangers around here prey on drunken illegals, who are often wandering around at 3 AM with pockets full of cash. It's called "rolling drunks." The victim never goes to the cops.
It seems like 50% of this stupid city of 50,000 people are illegal aliens and their awful children. If in general they acted like Danes or Japanese, I honestly don't think people would care that much. They don't, and that's part of the whole problem.
We could easily modify Sanctuary City policies to say that cops may not ask witnesses and crime victims of their immigration status.
Heather MacDonald offers some commonsense solutions to the admittedly difficult quandary of whether or not cops should get involved with immigration law - local cops should be able to arrest known criminals who have been deported and are back in the US - that's a felony anyway.
I was stunned that many cities don't even try to figure out if the criminals they arrest are illegals. At the very minimum, police ought to check immigration status of everyone they arrest. They sure do here in this town. A check of the county jail site reveals a vast number of criminals who are remanded to the INS.
I think the ethnic lobbies need to be called out as traitors. The Hispanic Lobby is a treasonous lobby with far worse dual loyalty issues than the Jews. At least Jews don't form street gangs that lay waste to hundreds of square miles of cities, and they're generally pleasant, intelligent and civilized in person.
The truth is that an overwhelming number of recent immigrants from Mexico in the past 20 years (Almost all recent immigrants from Mexico are illegal aliens - 85% of those who immigrated from Mexico in the past 18 years are illegals) are loyal first to Mexico and then, if at all, to the US. That's not acceptable.
Probably very large numbers of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans think that the Southwest belongs to Mexico, and they have a right to walk across the border the same way they can walk across the border from Oaxaca to Michoacan. Fact is, they don't think that border has a right to exist.
That's a completely unacceptable and downright treasonous attitude, and it ought to be condemned by patriots every time it rears its head.
The entire Hispanic Lobby in the US is basically a Treason Lobby which is loyal to a foreign state and disloyal to America.
Furthermore, the Hispanic Lobby and their moron allies on the Left really do advocate something resembling Open Borders. Once you sit down and talk to them, it quickly becomes apparent that they think anyone ought to have a right to walk across the Mexican border into the US no questions asked. And right away, they should have the right to ask to be legalized, and that right should be granted.
That's completely insane. Not only is there a terrorist question involved, but Mexico is screaming with a mad Drug War that is starting to look like Iraq. Sooner or later, this insanity is coming to the US. Open Borders would only hasten the day.
People seem so puzzled about why I am so militant on this issue. Let me tell you, only three years ago I supported full amnesty for all 12-20 million illegals in the US. Why? I didn't live with them. I heard stories from my friends about how illegals had laid waste to whole vast urban areas in my state, but I shrugged my shoulders. Like Black crime, it didn't effect me.
Moving to a Valley city that feels it's it's about 50% illegals tipped me over into near-psychosis on this issue real fast. It's kind of the liberal-until-mugging story.
One more thing whenever anyone tells you how wonderful illegal aliens are. Just remember:
Illegal aliens did 9-11!*
*It's a little-known fact, but several of the 9-11 terrorists were illegal aliens - VISA overstayers. We really need to publicize this issue more - Illegal Aliens Did 9-11 is one kickass slogan.
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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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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In the comments section, James Schipper makes some interesting comments about laissez faire economics and libertarianism in general. His comments are in italics, mine are follow in normal font.
JS:Laissez-faire usually means short-term gain for a small minority and short-term pain for a large majority, medium-term gain for a larger minority and medium-term pain for a smaller majority and only long-term gain for the majority.
RL: I don't agree with this at all. The case of neoliberalism seems to show us that the gains never do filter down to anyone below the top 20%. This is what the neoliberal advocates keep saying - "Give it time, give it time." But no matter how much time you give it, it never seems to work. We are now 28 years into a neoliberal revolution in the US, and have things gotten any better for any larger majority?
Of course not. Things just seem to get worse and worse. Neoliberalism only accomplishes massive wealth transfers from the bottom 80% to the top 20%. It's designed to do that in perpetuity, since class war never ends in capitalism, even in fascism.
JS:The Chicago boys are actually right in that speculative bubbles are only possible if the government engages in massive monetary expansion or allows the banks to do so. This means that the most essential part of government regulation in a modern economy is the regulation of credit and the currency. Too much money and credit = inflation and speculation.
RL: The problem here is that these Chicago Boys characters have been cheering on every single speculative bubble that ever existed, and they created quite a few of them themselves. Their libertarian project in Chile ended in massive failure such that even Pinochet had to step in with major government intervention to save the economy. Huge intervention by the state was the only thing that saved the economy.
In Russia, the Boys succeeded in looting the nation, transferring the money out of the country, engineering a Depression 3.5 times worse than the US Depression and killing 15 million Russians. The Chicago Boys and their acolytes were behind the Asian Flu crashes in the late 1990's too.
The only way to prevent speculative bubbles is through government regulation of an economy, and the Chicago Boys apparently oppose all such. The business sector, whom the Chicago Boys represent, always supports a loose money policy during the good times in order to facilitate the cheap money necessary for economic expansion and of course speculation.
Furthermore, the US capitalist class, nor any other capitalist class, would never support the Chicago Boys' apparent prescription here - getting rid of the Fed's regulation of the money supply. Business loves and needs the Fed, despite all of its rants against socialism. Anyway, the role of a central bank is overestimated. Even in a state without a strong central bank regulating money, you can still get massive speculative inflows. This was the case with the nations harmed by the Asian Flu.
The Fed itself is run by economists who are themselves working hand in hand with Big Business and are generally followers of Chicago School Economics. The only thing the rich care about is inflation, and business everywhere on Earth has cheered on every speculative bubble that ever existed. They can't get enough of them.
To blame these bubbles on a reactionary government institution called the Fed, implying the Fed is some kind of socialist institution (though its recent actions have indeed been socialist) is beyond perverse.
What's deadly to business and the rich is inflation. The rich hate inflation because it cuts into their incomes. Most rich people don't even work at all. They just kick back and live off rents and equities. Nothing cuts into their lazy money more than inflation. Further, inflation engenders demands for wage increases, which is why business hates it so much. It also increases costs for supplies, which they may or may not be able to pass on.
In order to stop inflation from hurting the rich and business, the Fed fights inflation by throwing millions of Americans out of work, since inflation and unemployment are two ends of a scale. As unemployment gets "too low", workers start getting "uppity" and demanding wage increases. This is deadly to capitalism, so the Fed responds by deliberately increasing unemployment and throwing millions out of work.
If you take a university course in capitalist economics, they will tell you that capitalism operates on the premise of "the benefits of mass unemployment". The benefits lie in the disciplining of the worker. The notion that mass unemployment has any benefits at all is enough to turn my stomach against capitalism.
Further, I'm not enamored of any Austrian economist.
JS:Too much money and credit = inflation and speculation.
RL: Problem here probably being that the Fed cares little about speculation (although it does worry about it a bit - witness Alan Greenspan's famous "irrational exuberance" comments a while back) but cares a lot about inflation.
Speculation does not necessarily lead to increases in core inflation, but it surely runs up some prices. Housing market, oil and dot com stock speculation surely created bubbles in those sectors, but in the case of housing and dot com's, did not effect core inflation.
JS:As to the New Deal, it was a colossal failure.
RL: I can't comment on this. The general analysis here in the US is that the New Deal saved US capitalism from Revolution, hence it was painful but worth it. This analysis comes from the more enlightened among capitalist sectors themselves.
Of course Western Europe and the Asian Tigers were not built on laissez faire. Even today that Japan, Singapore and Korea have extreme government intervention in the economy in terms of state planning of the economy. That's often termed corporatism.
It's not like Gosplan where the social economy is planned down to the # of eggs you will eat in a year. Instead this sort of economic guidance actually works. Government works with firms to help them compete against foreign sectors, goosing some sectors while letting others wilt.
No country with a mostly private education system and a poor public education system has ever produced any kind of an educated population.
Up here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, we have many roads that are private. The country never got around to making them county roads. Without exception, they are horrible. In many cases, there are expensive homes and properties lining these roads. The homes sell for about ~$300,000+ now. Most people living there have some money and they are not poor at all.
Thing is, everyone would have to get together to pitch in to fix the road and maintain it. People, even well to do folks, can never seem to get together to do that, so you have a horrific road. It's really strange to try to drive down a nightmarish road while looking at very nice, fancy houses with new cars on either side.
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Lack of regulation in capitalism leads to the ability to roll up huge gains in wealth for those at the top of the food chain, and also leads to huge economic disasters on a national scale such as we are experiencing now in the US.
The italicized portion of the previous sentence is precisely why business, the rich, the media and the plutocratic political parties in the US (originally the Republican Party, but now both parties), support the deregulation of the capitalist system in the US and all over the world.
The verdict is in on the deregulation of capitalism that has been the rage all over the world for the past 30 years. Almost everywhere it has been tried, it has caused massive discrepancies in wealth distribution. The top 20% of the income earners everywhere on Earth have benefited, and the bottom 80% have lost out.
That's why Latin America has been voting in leaders who have campaigned on platforms that can be roughly translated as, "The Hell with neoliberalism". Far from being Leftists or Communists, most of the new Latin American Left is simply objecting to the observable failure of 20-30 years of neoliberalism in Latin America and trying to fashion some sort of social democratic alternative.
Even honest proponents of neoliberalism in the US media like Fareed Zakaria have admitted that neoliberalism in Latin America has failed. The usual lie has been, "It hasn't had enough time to work yet."
This is a lie.
Neoliberalism in Latin America is working exactly as planned.
It was designed to enrich the top 20% and impoverish just about everyone else. Everyone on Earth, neoliberalism has devastated the public sector, wages, working conditions, schools, health care, etc. It has probably killed millions of people. In fact, there is good evidence that it is killing millions of people all over the world every single year.
Read about the history of the US economy in the late 1800's as it lurched from one panic to another, with wild run-ups in wealth for the rich in between.
Unregulated capitalism is like a cocaine addict with a trust fund. He can have a real wild blast as long as the money lasts, get high as a damned kite and soar to the skies. There's almost no limit to how high he can get. When the crash comes, he's going to be pounded physically and psychologically, and his trust will be drained. Freemarketeers argue that it's worth it for the fun of the run.
Regulated capitalism is like a middle-aged man who drinks a couple of glasses of wine a night. He's not able to get rip-roaring drunk like he did in his youth, nor is he able to drink his troubles away, but the hangovers are nonexistent, and he's not committing slow suicide anymore either.
Regulation is like a fog layer on the coast in a Mediterranean climate. It takes the extreme heat and cold out of a climate and leaves it at a moderate, some would say boring, middle.
During the Roaring 20's, people forget 80% of the US population actually lost money. It was only "roaring" for the top 20%. Nevertheless, most Americans think of this as a time unlimited prosperity. As we can see, not only is America governed and reported on exclusively by the Rich, but even our very history is the History of the Rich.
The Great Depression was directly caused by unregulated capitalism in the US, despite the desperate efforts of rightwing economist Chicago School professional liars to lie their way out of the facts. In the 1930's, a huge regulatory structure was put into place in part to prevent a second Great Depression from occurring.
It's worked well, but now a lot of the regulations that were put in post-Depression have been whittled away, such as the Glass-Seagall Act, that attempted to build a wall between commercial and investment banking. That way, if high-risk investment banking goes under (as it is prone to) it doesn't take down the commercial banking sector (where Mrs. Jones has her nest egg) with it.
Deregulated capitalism quickly leads to a state of affairs where you have wild economic growth and bubbles followed by bubble deflations and panics.
It's no way to run an economy, but this is the way every capitalist on Earth wants it.
Every capitalist on Earth is like a gambler in a casino with a credit card with no limits. Sensible nations do not listen to what the capitalists want - they never want anything good for the nation in the long run. The capitalist perennial children need to be continuously regulated on a short leash by regulatory adults in government in order to have any semblance of a decent society under capitalism.
Since 1980 and the beginnings of massive deregulation, the wages of 80% of the US population (nonsupervisory workers) have declined by 1% in constant dollars. They should have been going up in tandem with productivity increases, and productivity has gone up a lot in 28 years. 100% of the productivity increases in the last 28 years went to the top 20%, and 0% to the bottom 80%.
Before anyone screams race, this is the way unregulated capitalism works in any society - even an all-White one. The bottom 80% of the US population that got screwed massively in the Roaring 20's and resulting capitalist hangover called the Great Depression was overwhelmingly White.
A regulated capitalism would look a lot like what we had in the US in the 1950's and especially 1960's and 1970's. It works pretty well for a capitalist system. It's true that it tends to stifle massive wealth run-ups and bubbles (almost always caused by massive fraud anyway) but it also makes for a smoother ride and much fewer crashes, panics, recessions and depressions.
The Taoists discuss the Middle Way. So it is in capitalist economics as in the rest of life. "Live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse," sounds romantic at 18, but a 50-yr-old who makes such a statement is a moron. Our economy has been run by 18-yr-olds for decades now. As long as we have a capitalist economy, it's time for some adult supervision.
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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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...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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Commenter huy (his blog is here) responds to the World O' Crap, Meet World O' Lies post with this very astute comment, that sums up completely a town where I spent 16 years of my life - Oakhurst, California. He's captured the Zeitgeist of this town, and really all of White small town rural California perfectly. My comments follow:
huy: It's annoying to see Republicans call liberals elitist.
Its playing to the stereotypical backward small town white Americans. "Us Republicans are like you guys only richer and with more class. We hate blacks and Homos. We love guns and bashing immigrants. We hate feminists. We are real men just like you, and the liberals are all mocaccino-drinking art fag homos unable to accept reality and the competition and ruthlessness of capitalism."
The Republicans try to give the image that they share more personality traits with the white small town American (despite the fact that their policies shoot them in the foot) while the liberals are made to seem as out-of-touch elitist faggots who look down on the small town working class White Americans (despite the fact that the liberals' policies do more to help the working class small town White Americans than any other party).
The Republicans want presidential campaigns based on personality traits and 'values', while the liberals want a campaign more centered around policies and how they affect the citizens and individual demographic groups within the US population and the economy.
A Republican can wear a cowboy hat and a lumberjack shirt, drink a beer, hold a rifle and say "homos can fuck off" and he'll be sure to get a significant percentage of the less-educated more socially deprived small town American White vote.
Social Deprivation breeds ignorance and rightwing attitudes and the rich Republicans are abusing this social deprivation in small town America to maintain their presidential power and electorate. Religion also helps make people vote Republican, and religion is strongest amongst the poor and socially deprived.
Its a disgusting, feudal, immoral, sick game the Republicans are playing. By keeping the poor poor, they can preach the backward views fostered by poverty in order to stay in power and continue to exploit the very poor people who vote for them whilst the Republicans and tycoons own multi-million dollar estates and control the media to further control the minds of the poor and socially deprived and earn in billions.
The Republicans need poor small town White Americans to stay in power and stay rich, thus they do everything they can to prevent the social progression and economic development of small town America, because that would mean they would lose power, and also they want to spend as little money as possible on helping citizens anyway so they can spend more money on themselves and their businesses.
The Republicans are keeping the poor just wealthy enough not to complain, but preventing them from escaping enough social deprivation gaining enough and education and possibly economic development too so they don't turn liberal.
Huy hits it spot-on, but there's no point talking sense these Whites. Most of them are not rich at all, and those that are doing ok are usually making a lot less money than Whites in liberal bastions like Los Angeles and the Bay Area, so there's no way to explain this stuff on a money basis. I guess you could try to explain it on a "we hate minorities" basis, but in these types of places, there are no minorities.
This is what I don't get. If any Whites should vote "we hate niggers* and Mexicans", it should be those in the cities that have the most contact with them. Surely at least some of those contacts are going to be quite unpleasant.
But if you ever find a 90%+ White area in California, rich or poor, it's solidly Republican. Since there are no minorities around to hate, and those that are are well-behaved, how could they be voting "we hate niggers"? Apparently a lot of them are. Question is, how does voting Republican protect your pretty White towns and cities from the nigger and beaner hordes? It doesn't. Not one bit.
Whites have been voting in an openly racist way for Republicans for years (as commenters at American Renaissance say, the Republican Party is the party of the Whites) and what have they got to show for it? Not a hill of beans.
The Republicans have been in a contest with the liberal Dems to see how many million illegal Mesoamericans they can flood into our country to wreck every White city and job in their path. Are Republicans passing laws legalizing housing discrimination against Blacks and Browns? Are they bringing back segregation? Are they bringing back Jim Crow? Are they sending all the niggers back to Africa? Course not.
So how does voting Republican benefit these Whites in their White towns in any racial way whatsoever? It doesn't, and it can't possibly.
Huy only briefly touched on the all-important Christian fundamentalist aspect. It's everywhere in White rural America, and the fanaticism and insanity of these folks is something to see.
I'll take the Hispanic Catholic Church any day over these loons. Catholicism, despite all its faults, is at least sane, and your average Catholic is a sane human being. I wish I could say that about a White fundamentalist. A White fundamentalist, no matter how intelligent, is seriously out of their fucking mind. I mean it.
In White small town America, just about every White is some kind of fundamentalist nutjob. Even those that aren't are usually anti-abortion. Why? Who knows? Don't they know that abortion kills way more Black and Brown babies than White babies? Guess not.
Living in Oakhurst, I generally avoided politics or religion. Just about every White you met was a Republican or a fundamentalist, or usually both, so you just kept away from those subjects and made friends anyway.
These are funny places. You have the Republicans who spent years in state prison and ride motorcycles and hate niggers and beaners. You have lots of speed freak Whites on meth, missing teeth and parts of their minds, and they all vote Republican, if they vote. The Republican Party has the White rural tweaker vote down pat. Why do the tweakers vote Republican, the party of the drug war? Family values? Don't ask.
One really needs to ask what all these idiot fundamentalist Whites have gotten for voting Republican for all these years.
Someone tell me what the Republican Party has ever done for fundamentalists. Is abortion illegal yet? Are the fags in jail? Is porn illegal? What's the point? The Republicans talk the fundamentalist talk, but they never deliver a thing. Yet every year, the White fundamentalists march off and vote Republican again and don't get a damn thing in return.
If one could make a case that Republicans were good for low and average-income small town Whites, while Democrats were harmful to them, one could say that small town Whites are at least voting their economic interests. That's not the case. The Republicans have never helped these small town Whites in any whatsoever, and in fact, their politics have been hostile to them.
Let's look at statistics - since 1980, non-supervisory wages (80% of US workers) have risen by a mere 1%, despite very high cumulative economic growth and rising productivity all through that period. Other studies show that the bottom 90% of US income bracket has lost 7% of its income over 30 years, while the top 1% doubled their income.
Clearly, the Republicans don't do jack for small town Whites making less than $80,000/yr or so. In fact, objectively, they fuck them over, year in and year out.
So why vote for em? As huy suggests, it's all psychological. Living in these White towns, I can tell you, voting Democrat is virtually a sin. If you are young White male and vote Democrat, your peers will say, "But you're White!" The Democratic Party is "the party of the niggers and Mexicans" as one young White Republican (one of most wild drug abusers I've ever met) told me.
And it's more than that. If you are young, White, male and redneck-macho the way you are supposed to be in White rural America, voting Republican is frankly an assertion of masculinity. The Democratic Party is the party of the fags, and it seems that many young White males in the rural West vote Republican as an assertion of masculinity and a way to show that they are not even 1% queer, dammit.
Seriously, if you tell other White males in these towns you vote Democrat, they look at you like you're not much of a man, or maybe even you are a little bit queer, or maybe more than a little bit?
In these towns, Whites buy groceries with food stamps and the doctors' offices are filled with Whites in Medicaid. And probably 90% of them vote Republican. Guaranteed.
I don't hate Oakhurst at all; I've made my peace with it. It's a very peaceful, albeit somewhat boring, town, and there is almost no crime. You're away from the diversity, the excitement, the petty crime, the gangs and dark-skinned Underclass and it's ok in a sleepy and pretty kind of way.
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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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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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Superb commenter James Schipper takes on internationalism and suggests that nationalism is better for workers in this most interesting comment from the comments section of a recent post. My comments follow. I will say that I have a problem with nationalism in general and especially with the sound of the term "national socialism" for obvious reasons. Nationalism leads inevitably to racism, it seems.
But following pure internationalist logic, we are obligated to completely open borders. If you go over to leftwing and liberal pro-immigrant sites and prod them a bit, you often find that they actually do believe in Open Borders for the US.
That would mean that at some point, 1/3 of the world would be here, and 1/2 of Mexico (since 1/3 of the world and 1/2 of Mexico wants to come to the US). I argue that this would be a disaster for this country for many reasons. For one thing, we would become some kind of Calcutta West. For the environment, it would be a complete catastrophe.
At least at the start, unselected immigrants who are not interested in assimilation are only capable of recreating their own society in the new country. So Indians would recreate Calcutta in the US and Mexicans would recreate Mexico City in the US.
An excellent reason to make the immigration process highly rigorous, time-consuming, and difficult with much rejection of potential immigrants who do not make the cut is to insure that those immigrants remaining after the gauntlet-run are dedicated to assimilation.
Unscreened mass immigration, in particular illegal immigration, tends to create masses of immigrants with little interest in assimilating, plus you tend to get countless bad people mixed in with the good.
Many illegal immigrants are actually low-quality immigrants and would be rejected by any sane and rigorous US immigration program. The burden should be on the immigrant to show us precisely how and why they are going to be net positive to our country and not a negative.
Rigorously screened immigrants forced to go through a difficult and trying immigration process would be less likely to recreate Calcutta and Mexico City in the US.
Massive immigration of unskilled laborers is not only bad for ordinary workers, whose wages are driven downward, but also for taxpayers in general. There is no way that an unskilled immigrant can ever pay as much in taxes as he consumes in government services. There are two distributions going on here: upward redistribution of income among natives and transfer of income from natives to immigrants.
Your analysis above is essentially correct because it is based on the obvious premise that the real enemies of workers in high-wage countries are workers in low-wage countries. However, this is in flagrant contradiction with the Marxist idea that there is harmony of interests between all the workers of the world. That Marxist idea is totally false.
In a closed economy, workers and capitalists are like buyers and sellers. The interests of buyers and sellers are not necessarily harmonious but they are complementary and therefore in principle compatible.
Capital without labor is like a truck without a driver and labor without capital is like a transportation worker without a truck. Such a worker can't transport much. Capital without labor is useless and labor without capital is unproductive.
Under national capitalism, there can be solidarity between workers and capitalists. Under global capitalism there can't be because capital will use foreign labor as scabs, as you pointed out.
You may not realize it, but you are actually a national socialist in the literal sense of the term. The slogan of national socialism is not "Proletarians of the world, unite", but "Workers and capitalists of the nation, unite in the interest of the nation". National socialism does not preach international proletarian brotherhood but national brotherhood.
The Marxist notion of class struggle is pernicious because it makes national solidarity impossible, the only solidarity that can exist. Class struggle should not be fomented but overcome. Divisions can only be overcome by appealing to a higher common interest, and that can only be the nation.
It is only when the capitalists abandon all solidarity with their proletarian compatriots that class struggle becomes necessary, but such struggle should not be waged at a global level because the foreign workers are the allies of the capitalists. Instead of preaching class struggle, the left should appeal to the national sentiments of capitalists.
You and Patrick Buchanan are actually quite close. Your position is also quite similar to the BNP and the German NPD.
Another Marxist idea that is completely false is that workers have no country. It is often capitalists that have no country. Workers are tied to a place and that makes them patriotic. Nobody can have jobs in 20 different countries, but capitalists can easily own businesses in 20 countries.
If there are people without a country, it is global capitalists. A former CEO of the "Dutch" multinational Phillips once said that he wished that the head office of Phillips could be located in the middle of the Atlantic, which goes to show what a loyal Dutchman he was.
Over 80% of the employees of Phillips are now non-Dutch, so to call Phillips a Dutch company simply because most of its owners and top managers are Dutch is to show a capitalist bias. A company does not only consist of owners and managers but also of employees. Calling a company like Phillips Dutch is like saying that SA under apartheid was a white country because whites had most of the wealth and power.
The superiority of national socialism over Marxist socialism was proven in WWII. When Stalin had to motivate the Russians to fight, he didn't appeal to international proletarian solidarity, which would have been a complete flop, but he appealed to Russian nationalism because genuine nationalism unites while Marxist class struggle only divides.
Socialism can only work at a national level. The Swedish socialist, among the most successful in the world, created a welfare state for Swedes only. It was solidarity that ended at the national border. Now that the Swedish socialists have been infected with political correctness, they are undermining the Swedish welfare state by importing huge numbers of immigrants.
As one Dutch socialist put it, the welfare state is a strictly national arrangement.
The Left has hurt its cause immensely by its hostility to religion and to nationalism. Socialism without nationalism is impotent and nationalism without socialism is fraudulent. A person who claims to be a nationalist but who is a libertarian willing to let poorer members of the nation languish in misery and ignorance is like a man who claims to be a good family man but who never helps less fortunate family members.
Bottom line: there is absolutely nothing progressive about massive immigration of low-skilled to unskilled labor whatsoever. Citizens suffer from cutbacks in government social programs meant to help them.
There is a redistribution of income upwards in the citizenry itself, such that the lower 80% or so of society loses and the upper 20% of so of society gains. IOW, owners and possibly upper management and investors make out big and the workers (generally 80% or so of society) lose money.
In addition to losing money, they also lose services. It is quite possible that they may also see tax hikes to pay for diminishing services. Workers see their wages decline, suffer income losses, lose social services and get tax hikes.
The top 20% of society gets a tremendous amount of increased income, sees dramatic decreases in the wages it must be its workers, and in all probability sees the Gramscian culture of society change in favor of the top 20%, who now increasingly run things and dominate society in general. Why? With the dramatic income shift upwards towards the top 20%, this group will be able to buy the government more and more.
Since government is mostly made up such folks (in Congress and the Executive Branch), they will be delighted by their increased wealth and will continue to direct government policies to continue this redistribution.
The lopsided money shift will also mean that more and more of a nation's discretionary spending will be done by the top 20%. I believe already they spend at least and possibly way over 50% of all consumer spending. So advertisers direct most of their advertising to this top group, and just ignore the bottom 80%.
This is why when you turn on the TV, you see one advertisement after another directed towards the top 20% of society. This is why when you open up Time Magazine, 90% of the people they interview are in the top 20%, and most of their stories seem to be directed at this group also. It is almost as if the rest of us did not even exist.
I would also like to point out the inevitable: sitting there watching TV and seeing one ad after another directed at the top 20% and realizing that one is a million miles away from that income bracket, many folks will only get resentful and angry and determined to get into that bracket.
Since even if everyone tried to get into the top 20%, 80% would fail, most people are just never going to get there. This increases the dog eat dog mindset, societal atomization and probably even the crime rate.
Liberals and the Left support this!
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Independent Left journalist in California. Trustafarian in a shackteau, slumming it up in the barrio. Revolutionary, Leftist nationalist, Christian, liberation theology, replacement theology. BA Journalism, MA Linguistics, Green Party, Communist Party USA, Democratic Party.
Generally, topics focused through a progressive yet heterodox lens. Discusses race a lot. Also lots of shock and horror videos - if it bugs you, don't read or watch. Pan-humanist universalist, non-racist race realist, despises the PC, Cultural Marxist, Identity Politics, Western New Left. Iconoclast, smashes all party lines, angers everyone. Notorious provocateur; if I'm not making you mad, I'm not doing my job. Channeling Andy Kaufman, Tony Clifton, Lenny Bruce, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Kinky Friedman, Hunter S. Thompson and Wally Gator. Shoot first.
