Category Archives: Labor

'Putting Americans Back To Work'

In October, I blogged Pat Buchanan’s timely call for a moratorium on immigration. Peter Brimelow of VDARE.COM has timed his demand for such a logical move with the clueless Obama’s Job Summit. In an article for WorlNetDaily.com titled “Putting Americans Back To Work,” Peter exhorts:

“Incredibly, despite the recession, about 125,000 legal immigrants and “temporary” workers a month – as many as 1.5 million a year – are still entering the U.S.

And, with some 15 million Americans unemployed, there are still an estimated 8 million illegal aliens holding jobs here.

Indeed, the Obama Administration has repeatedly promised that it will try to amnesty these illegals next year. This would end any hope that they might eventually leave the American job market. In fact, because there’s usually a fair degree of back-and-forth across the border in the illegal-alien population, the administration’s repeated promises of amnesty are probably discouraging departures.

Democrats and Republicans have been bickering about whether the Obama administration’s stimulus package really created the claimed 650,000 jobs.

But during the same period, twice that number of legal immigrants and “temporary” workers entered the U.S. – easily swamping even the most optimistic estimate of jobs created. …

It’s literally a holy cause with them, and they react very nastily if you question it. You even sometimes find economists making easily refuted claims that immigration does not impact U.S. employment and incomes – in other words, that the laws of supply and demand have been repealed, uniquely, in the area of immigration.

In contrast, contrary to stereotype, critics of immigration policy are generally rational. What’s not rational about supply and demand?

But why don’t MSM journalists at least ask policymakers about the option of an immigration moratorium as a way of reducing unemployment?

There’s the usual liberal media bias, needless to say.

But my own theory (which will probably sound weird to anyone who hasn’t spent the years I have in establishment financial journalism!) is that it goes beyond bias. Journalists don’t ask about an immigration moratorium because nobody else has asked about it. The idea would just never occur to them on their own.

Call it intellectual inertia – if you want to be kind.”

[SNIP]

Peter is indeed too kind. I’ve tied this mindless ennui to the “Age of the Idiot.”

Stimulating … The Printing Press

Economy, Fascism, Government, Labor, Media, Political Economy, Propaganda

As someone once observed, “They All Lie For Someone.” The Associated Press finally stopped bowing and scraping to The Celestial One, got off its collective duff and did some digging. Note how the NPR begins the report from the White House’s defensive retort, rather than with the meat of the news item. (Bad reporting or a meta-message about what matters?)

“The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.

Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.”

More.

If we are to believe the most pessimistic report, this being it, $787 billion was paid in order to create 30,000 minus 5000 jobs. Of course, we know it’s far grimmer than that, as,

“Government consuming what it appropriates, prints or pirates from the nation’s dwindling savings cannot generate plenty; it can only destroy or crowd wealth out.”

America: Long Lost To The Left

Government, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, The State

What motivates Middle America “to distrust its government, for it surely does”? Pat Buchanan packs a lot of pathos into the answer. I hope he is right, because not everyone agrees about what moves Middle—or is it “Meathead”?— America:

“…the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.”

“Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: ‘They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.'”

“Yet, we had seen these folks before. They were Perotistas in 1992, opposed NAFTA in 1993 and blocked the Bush-Kennedy McCain amnesty in 2007.”

“In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.”

“They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.”

“They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.” [My emphasis]

“They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.”

“America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

Moratorium On Immigration

Affirmative Action, Economy, IMMIGRATION, Labor

Asks Pat Buchanan: “with nearly 25 million Americans unemployed, or no longer looking for work, or in low-wage part-time jobs, 8.5 million U.S. jobs are believed to be held by illegal aliens who broke into the country or overstayed their visas. Why is this not a matter of national outrage?

For every job opening in the country, there are six unemployed Americans… there are six Americans out of work for every job opening, it is time to call a moratorium on immigration. Why are we bringing into the United States over a million legal immigrants a year to compete for jobs against 15 million to 25 million Americans who can’t find work or full-time jobs to take care of their families?”