the attached gives some coverage to those in our society who "lose" when immigrants -- illegal and otherwise -- are looked upon as an inexhaustible [and perhaps compliant] pool of low-cost labor.  and surprise -- it's the have-nots.

One statement in the article rings really true -- "Some Hispanic and black thinkers agree that many American employers are taking advantage of both groups."  No, say it isn't so.

Well, that's what a 5 cents cheaper head of lettuce is buying our society in the aggregate.

has had some blowback on their own constituents?

One statement in the article rings really true --

"Some Hispanic and black thinkers agree that many American employers are taking advantage of both groups."  No, say it isn't so.

Victacrat to the end......

But won't closing the border cause an immediate increase in global warming...oh shit, what do we do now Algore?

It's a GOP plot!!! As everyone knows, (intellectually superior) liberals are concentrated on the coasts...We must increase the natural migration of "legally challenged" future voters, if we are to seize power....er, I mean promote "social justice!" Yeah, SOCIAL JUSTICE!!!!

It's not just unskilled workers that are losing out to lower cost immigrant labor.  The H1B visa program    is having the same effect on highly ediucated IT workers, allowing corporations to hire lower wage immigrants at the expense of American workers.

it's a done deed, a dead certainty, a fait accompli.

Workers of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your money and your race hatred!

Go for it!

If it's not Salma Hayek and the legions of cousins coming to bus tables illegally, it's Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, and those legions of dreary Canadian musicians, coming to depress us with "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".

I have it on the authority of Pat Robertson that busboys are far more of a threat than terrorists, or even Federal judges, because they lull people into the false belief that somebody else will clean up after them.   For that, they must all go to the ovens.

Walls on BOTH borders!   And machine guns at the waterline!   They'll never take us alive!!

Any coincidence the Southern states began to turn Republican right when civil rights challenged the status quo in those states?  

Just think, if the Republicans had any appeal to these groups, then it would be a lift to them.

So, why can't Republicans appeal to them?  

Republicans have no problems pandering to their constituencies, and I don't think it's because of higher morals that they can't do it so well with Hispanics and Blacks.  

I think those groups know in their bones that if they wait for anything to "trickle down" to them from Republicans, those leaks will be fixed first.

There were severe riots when industries began to undercut union workers by hiring black workers as "scabs."  That was in 1918.  

You scoff when I write about "economic racism."  Explain this some other way then: those companies hired blacks then with the idea that they could pay them far less.  Just like they are doing with immigrants now.  The results were lasting scars in the city that I live in.  And-- an aggravation of racism among what became the lower to middle class.  The Irish and Italians in my town have never integrated with the blacks because of that.  

I think you should judge this by motive.  Ask any immigrant if they would rather be paid $7 and hour or $14 an hour.  It's that simple to determine that they don't have the motive lower wages.  Search for it elsewhere then.

So, who does, Xi?  The companies.  There's no reason to think of corporate actions as a force of nature.  

Meanwhile, if you're going to have sympathy with the "low cost" sectors, why not have it for the immigrants, too?  

If real wages have been declining, it's simply because in the name of efficiency, the rich are making themselves richer.  Look at corporate profits now and look at wages.  The rich make themselves richer by racism or any other way.

I know I sound like a Marxist.  Even though communism failed, capitalism has all the failings Marx identified, but the "remedy" imposed was worse than the sickness.  

Humans make an ecological niche cooperating to overcome nature.  

But are they going to cooperate to overcome their own nature?   and would that be a good plan?

What is an equitable distribution of wealth?  Should there be any allocation according to adaptability or talent?   Should those most adapted decide who they will give their money to?  Or should we allow ourselves to be harassed by people who have no other talent?  Should we support the mentally handicapped to the point of making them our rulers?   You can already see the result of that.

It could be that the failing of communism was too much of a gap between rich and poor, while the US maintains a range, and makes it much easier than most countries to move up or down that range.

-- Modified on 5/26/2006 9:12:54 AM

"""I think those groups know in their bones that if they wait for anything to "trickle down" to them from Republicans, those leaks will be fixed first."""

Got it.

Zin, the mMrxist part's ok with me.  It's just another analytical POV from which to analyze things.

Imbalance of power, again.  The workers and the scabs in 1918 had less than the employers, and the workers in 1918 had more than the scabs.  Just like twoday, legally employed workers have more [but not much] power and organization compared to the undocumented types, and both, again sadly, have much less than the employers. Be sure, if the African-American scabs had not been available in 1918, the employers would have found some other white guys, or Asians, or children to act as strikebreakers, even if they had to import them.

Be sure that the Irish/Italians in your hometowm [Detroit?  Chicago? Milwaukee?] would have found some other pretext to hate the African-Americans, and vice-versa, if the artifical cause of economic competition had not been introduced by the masters of capital.  Personally, I think "hatred" is one of the most common of human emotions.

I do sympathize with the undocumenteds, but I sympathize more with the indigenous low-wage workers in this country.  And they have first claim on my sympathies and our wilingness to redistribute collective societal goodies ahead of some newcomers from downtown Tijuana and Tegulcigulpa [spelling?] and other points South.

Happy Memorial Day.

What do you see about what you quoted that would cause you to doubt it?  

There is no doubt that the wealthy back their economic interests, individually and through corporations.  They get earmarks, the get the bulk tax cuts every way you cut it, they collect on the lions' share of pork.  These funds do not "trickle down."  Meanwhile, due to chain ownership of the media, they have pulled off a propaganda coup in convincing people of the middle class down that it's somehow immoral to do this.  

If middle- and lower-class people aren't working politically in their *economic* interests but the rich are, who always wins then?  Who gets punished for their higher morals then?  With separations of class becoming a chasm now, do you disagree that this is what is happening?  On what grounds?

Moreover, do you object when people of those classes vote for the Representative who "brings home the bacon?"  Perhaps I should point out that those government funds work first to make somebody rich richer, with the "trickle down" being an incidental side-effect.  

You might dismiss this as class warfare.  No.  We have politics instead of warfare.

As long as the lower and middle classes are kept divided against each other, their prospects will sink.  

Manufacturing jobs are being outsourced to the lower-wage countries.  The few jobs unskilled jobs that can't be outsourced are primarily restaurant, janitors or landscapers.  Fine jobs, but at available wages, the ethnic groups complaining about immigrants taking them should ask themselves if they are worth the antagonism.

It does not happen that often, but you certainly hear about it when it does (like man biting dog).  It will be even rarer now that the inheritance tax is repealed.  

The failure of communism:  it wasn't based on human biology or evolutionary history.  It could only be imposed by the barbaric discipline of psychopathic people, which overtime undermined it as a respectible system.  Marx's failing was that he started from Hegelianism, and couldn't foresee the personalities that his work would appeal to.  

Capitalism gave itself a makeover to defeat Marxism.  Capitalism became consumerism.  This put a wedge between people as consumers and people as workers.  Now that communism is gone, consumers can count on being screwed as badly as workers.  

-- Modified on 5/27/2006 9:06:35 AM

It's too difficult for me to believe that at that time (1918) no white guys were as desperate as the African Americans hired.  However, it also exploited the racism of the unions, who were determined to keep the African-Americans from joining the shop.

In some situations, racism is good business.

Quite right re racism being good business. Sadly. From what I know of this period, the white scabs would have been extremely recent immigrants just off the boat or displaed agricultural workers from the border states of the South.

PS. Incidentally I once read an essay, and the point was parenthetical, but in the 2 decades prior to the Civil War, manual labor jobs were advertised in NYC with higher wage rates for free African-Americans than for recent immigrants Irish. It's from this period that the phrase "no Irish need apply" arose.

2nd PS. If you haven't done so, if you get a chance read Upton sinclair "The Jungle."  A wonderful if overwrought American novel, it's got a great part about African-American scabs in the stockyards.  Also, Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" has a section where the male protagonist [Mr. Parkhurst?] is driven by desperation to become a scab uring a trolley-operators' strike.

now or at any time in history, that you believe allowed more

The failure of communism is simple:  people have no authority over what they were responsible for.  They were responsible to artificial constructs created by people who were far away and did not know what was going on.   IOW, it's a theory, nothing more or less.   So, eg, factory managers had incentive to produce products that met quota, not ones that sold because they were useful.   Terrible economic system.    And one failure is Marx's lack of comprehension that equity ownership means nothing; it's mgmt & control that means everything (and EVERY lawyer knows that).   So "the people" or "the state" ownership is BS; it's all about who's on the politburo.

Capitalism is not, and never has been, an ideology.  It's a rationalization for what evolved in the West.   It's infinitely flexible, and that's why it survived.

"No person left behind" is political BS.   There will ALWAYS be people left behind, and we cannot improve that by pretending that re-defining behavior changes it.

The attack by corporations on American labor is impressive, and Tusayan is correct that it is hitting both skilled and unskilled workers. At the unskilled end, of course, you have the illegals/'guest worker' programs, which are reminiscent of the indentured servitude programs of colonial America. For skilled workers, they are being hit with the H1B visa program and 'outsourcing' of jobs to India, China and elsewhere.

In San Diego, biotechnology was one of the new industries that has been touted as replacing manufacturing jobs lost oversees. For a read on how this is working out for this 'biotech beach', check out the below link.

As this global labor arbitrage strangles American labor with concommitant cutbacks in research & development, I'm wondering exactly what it is that the U.S. will be producing in the future that will keep us a major economic player.

The "land of opportunity" has become a myth.  Listen to the program at the link below.

As for your next point-- I contend that what you cite were the symptoms of the Soviet Union's failure, not the cause.  The Soviet Union and the rest of the communist system began to unravel after Stalin died, as his patronage appointments began to died and fall from power, a process that took decades.  Stalin was a monster, but he was a genius too.  Even Hitler said so, long before his ass was kicked.      

As I said, communism depended on a psychopath to impose it, and psychopaths gravitated to it.  Under Stalin, the Soviets produced the most advanced planes and tanks in the world.  When the US made available lend-lease supplies, the only things the Soviets wanted from Americans were Jeeps and Spam.  They found our weapons substandard.  As for the planes, Stalin said he didn't have the pilots to waste in them.  They found that American products were built "by factory managers [who] had incentive to produce products that met quota, not ones that sold because they were useful."  It wasn't just military that the Soviet Union excelled (outside of the executions and gulags, mind you.)  After the war, the Soviet economy grew at double digits for more than a decade.  Not bad considering they had lost 23 million people in the war.  When Kruschev declared they would bury us, there was cause to think it was true.  

When we later tried to make a rifle better than the AK-47, our troops ended up with that wretched frankenstein, the M-16, made by Matel, under quota, by people far away who didn't know what was going on.

I have considered whether the US today suffers from the same malaise as the Soviet Union.  Instead of Brezhnev with his secret health failure, we have Dick Cheney accompanied by his medical team standing ready to jump start him.  We have dishonesty, propaganda, and secrecy in government.  If you work for any corporation now at the lower level, you realize that people are "responsible to artificial constructs created by people who [are] far way and [do] not know what [is] going on."  It seems to be true of our government and military as well.  

I have walked into Costco and Sam's Club, or Shop n' Save, and I have wondered if they resemble Soviet commisary in its better days.  I wondered what would happen to them in worse times.      

The failure of communism is not simple as you declare.  The symptoms of it were not unique to communism.  I stand by what I wrote of its failure.  Marx never considered the type of animal he was starting with. However, its failure needs to be studied more seriously. I remind you that, unfortunately, it hasn't failed completely.  The ghost of Marx is still lingering above us.  It's in Cuba, it's in China, South Korea, and it's spreading in Latin America again.  

Contrary to your thinking, capitalism *is* an ideology.  Talk to any economic conservative or read Adam Smith.  It replaced the ideology at the time of mercantilism-- just as Adam Smith advocated.  You are almost right that it wasn't conceived as one, because the word "ideology" did not exist, nor did the concept-- **until Karl Marx coined it**.  Yes, just by thinking about ideology, you're being a Marxist theorist.  

You may be right about leaving no person behind.  It's impossible not to.  Biology will teach you that.  Civilization, however, is a rebellion against our biology, which otherwise would make us cannibals.  Those left behind will always wreck the structures upon which those in the forefront depend.  The have's cannot afford that.  In a world of shrinking resources, we better consider social engineering options.  Human behavior can change, and I can cite examples.  There are serious consequences to not changing human behavior, quite possibly including extinction.

No one has been a bigger welfare "queen", dependent upon handouts from the federal government, than Halliburton [and, indirectly, Cheney (ex-CEO) via stock, stock options and retirement benefits].

Dick Cheney led Halliburton as CEO from 1995 to 2000. On the surface, it looks like he was succesful, as the Halliburton share price rose from 18 to 40, when he left to assume the VPOTUS in 2000. On another level, however, Cheney's main 'achievement' was the purchase of Dresser industries, a competitor saddled with tremendous abestos liabilities. Wall Street finally acknowledged these issues when HAL's share price dropped to less than 10 in 2002.

But Cheney stepped up to the plate, in his unofficial capacity as emeritus-CEO, and helped to both engineer the Iraqi war (Part Deux), and the outlandish no-bid contracts to Halliburton. Coincidentally, Halliburton's share price soared from less than 10 to more than 70. Of interest is that all of this occurred, immediately after the Iraqi invasion - you know, the one that was suppose to be about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

So, you can say that the federal government, courtesy of VPOTUS Cheney, has indeed 'been very, very good' to Halliburton. I think I saw a recent report that the Cheneys' are worth north of 100 million, a direct consequence of war profiteering taken to a level that would make any self-respecting robber baron blush.