Monthly Archives: December 2010

by | December 31, 2010 · 2:07 PM

“Cheating, Snooping, and Felonious Conduct,” by Alpha Unit

A horrible crime has occurred in the state of Michigan. You may have heard by now. But the people of Michigan need not fear: a prosecutorial posse is pursuing this criminal with vigor.

A 33-year-old man who suspected his wife of cheating got into her e-mail account, using a password that he says she kept in a book next to the computer. A computer that the couple shared. Leon Walker says he had no choice but to snoop in his wife’s account. He cites concern for the couple’s child, whom he didn’t want around the man he suspected of being her lover.

His suspicions were confirmed, apparently. The couple’s subsequent divorce became final this month. But the state of Michigan isn’t done with Walker.

He’s been charged with unauthorized access to a computer in order to “acquire, alter, damage, delete, or destroy property.” The law is typically used to prosecute people for identity theft or for stealing trade secrets. Walker could possibly serve five years in prison.

At question is whether a spouse can expect privacy on a jointly owned computer. Walker’s attorney says no. Furthermore, he says:

If there’s going to be a concerted effort in the future to prosecute everybody who looks at somebody else’s e-mail under their roof, they had better build a bunch more courthouses because we don’t have enough courthouses.

I’ve heard some people raise the question: if a wife had gotten into her husband’s e-mail account and confirmed that he was cheating, would the state be going after her? Probably, if someone thought an example should be made of her, I’m guessing. That’s what seems to be happening here. Mrs. Walker filed a complaint about her husband’s actions, according to the prosecutor.

If a man were similarly caught, would he complain about his wife getting a hold of his e-mails? Or would he do as expected and “take it like a man”?

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Filed under Alpha Unit, Crime, Gender Studies, Guest Posts, Law

by | December 30, 2010 · 6:29 AM

Our Class Enemies are Waging War on Us

Our class enemies may be defined in various ways:

A. The rich, in this case the top 5% making over 105,000/year.
B. The corporations.
C. Wall Street, a subset of (2).

I include the rich because it is obvious that there is a huge transfer of wealth going on. On the individual level, only those in the top 5% have seen their share of the pie rise.

It is hard to delineate the transfer of wealth from individuals to corporations, since corporations are tied in with individuals.

For instance, 60 years ago, corporations paid about 40% of all income taxes in the US and workers paid about 6%. Now the figures are reversed: workers pay about 40% of all taxes, and corporations pay about 6%. Yet corporations continue to scream that they are overtaxed, demand lower taxes, and threaten to move offshore for lower taxation. I realize that those figures only add up to 50% or so of taxation, and I don’t know where the rest comes from. But it’s clear that there has been a huge shift from corporations to workers over 60 years or so.

It’s hard to say who is losing money in the mass income shift. The upper middle class, those making $56,000-105,000, has seen their share of the pie stay the same. They are neither winning nor losing in the race. They are holding their own and growing with the economy.

I would guess that the bottom 80% of the population, those making less than $56,000/yr, are the ones that are seeing their slice of the pie decline. So there is a mass transfer of wealth probably from those making below $56,000 to those making above $105,000. Those at the bottom end of the 80% are probably losing the most of all.

Here is how they are doing it:

  1. First they destroyed our unions. This really started kicking in in about 1973, but unions have been declining since 1955 or so. This also seems to be ongoing.
  2. Next they sent the manufacturing jobs overseas. This is apparently still ongoing.
  3. Then they raided all the pension funds and stole the money that had been sacked away for workers for their retirement. This is also ongoing and apparently accelerating since the task is not yet complete.
  4. Presently, they are in the process of eliminating employer paid health insurance. This project is just getting underway and will probably accelerate over time.
  5. They have all but exempted the wealthy from taxes in line with the classic Third World model. This project is definitely ongoing, and Republican President Barack Obama just gave it a big jump start by saying the tax cut bill. This one is definitely ongoing and not yet completed, but seems to be accelerating. Part of the game is a shift of taxation off of rent, wealth and investment income and onto wages. The rentier class is to be more or less exempted from taxation.
  6. They are trying to destroy public education and affordable college education, once again along the lines of a Third World model where public schools are underfunded, ruined and lousy and the only way to get a good education is to send your kid to private school. There will be moves in the coming year to make huge cuts in Pell Grants for college students. This project is very much ongoing and has been for a good 30 years or so. It is very much accelerating lately in the wake of budget troubles.
  7. They destroyed the value of our homes. This is ongoing here in California, as home prices continue to decline.
  8. The next on the agenda is Social Security Trust Fund. Republican President Obama will announce the opening shots in the war to destroy Social Security in his State of the Union address.

What I don’t get is why has the media, across the board, been 100% behind 1-8 in toto? It is almost impossible to find a daily newspaper, newsmagazine, or TV or radio news station that is not backing this project to the hilt. I’m not sure I understand this. Is it because the US media is completely owned and controlled by people making $105,000/yr.?

Also nearly the entire American intelligentsia is behind it. Are they representing their class interests here, since they most all make good money? Both political parties are behind it. The Republican Party represents only the rich and the upper middle class and is the party of class war, so this is not surprising.

But why the Democrats? Are the top Democrats also wealthy people working for their class interests? Is the Democratic Party in the last 20 years with the onset of the DNC working for the interests of their large corporate and wealthy donors, A-C above?

It’s interesting that there are few people in either party and almost no one in the mass media representing the interests of the bottom 80% in this class war. Most in both parties and almost everyone in the media is on the side of the rich waging class war on all the rest of us.

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Filed under Democrats, Economics, Education, Government, Higher Education, Journalism, Labor, Obama, Politics, Republicans, US Politics

by | December 29, 2010 · 9:58 PM

Philippine Communist Party Celebrates 42nd Anniversary

Here it is.

I don’t get it. There was a huge rally, attended by 1000’s of CPP supporters in Mindanao, Philippines. There were also many CPP members there, many NPA fighters in uniform, and an NPA commander. Many reporters showed up. There were police and army checkpoints leading to the rally which backed up traffic for 2 miles.

I don’t get it. Why did the authorities allow this rally to take place in the first place? Doesn’t make sense to me. Someone explain.

Update: I get it. They were in the midst of a cease-fire at the time.

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Filed under Asia, Left, Marxism, Philippines, Regional, Revolution, SE Asia

by | December 29, 2010 · 7:23 PM

Why Would Anyone Do This?

What the Hell is wrong with this chick, Veronica Moser, the famous Austrian scat star? She’s been eating shit on camera for a good 18 years now. Why? And why doesn’t she get sick? She’s eaten the shit of a lot of people over her career. And she really eats it too, no fakery. She also puts it in her pussy, and that has to be a terrible idea. How does she get away with doing that?

I don’t think this is something I want to try, to be honest.

Why do people eat shit? I don’t get it.

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Filed under Coprophilia, Gross, Pornography, Sex, Sick, Sick and Evil

by | December 29, 2010 · 3:34 PM

Murdering Mao

Nice from a Maoist list I am on. The author is Harry Powell. He lays out pretty well the rightwing offensive to completely discredit the modern socialist experience as a total failure which was led by the worst homicidal maniacs that ever lived. How do we counteract that? For starters, Communists should quit killing people, no matter how much they deserve it. Communists kill one person, and the rightwingers will scream about it for the next century.

Note that this is not just a rightwing offensive, but it’s also being carried out by centrists, liberals and even Leftists like Trotskyites, who do themselves few favors by indulging in counterrevolutionary ideology.

Finally, the idea of a Labor figure accusing the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition of being “Maoist” is ridiculous!

MURDERING MAO

Here are the opening paragraphs of a recent article in a British
national Sunday newspaper:

Chairman Cameron’s regime is not a million miles from Mao

Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, Sunday 19 December 2010

I put it down to Tony Blair. Also to Margaret Thatcher. And to Mao Tse-tung. To understand this government, you need to appreciate the debts that it owes to these three influences: Labour’s triple election-winner, the Conservatives’ most radical postwar prime minister, and the Chinese dictator responsible for the deaths of more of his own people than any other leader in history.

To be fair to the coalition, it is not their ambition to replicate the body count heaped up by the Communist party of China during Mao’s lethal reign. Nor does this government share many of the late tyrant’s political ends. Yet in its methods, I am increasingly struck by the strange similarities between the regime of Chairman Mao and that of Chairman Cameron.

Some of the coalition’s senior figures are conscious of this; some of them are even proud to draw the parallels between themselves and the author of The Little Red Book. In recent weeks, I have heard one important figure in the government talk of unleashing a “cultural revolution” in the public services and another hailing devolution of power away from the centre using Mao’s old slogan: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”

Further on:

I have actually heard more than one member of the cabinet explicitly refer to the government as “Maoist”.

And:

They are urged on from within Number 10 by the prime minister’s principal strategist, Steve Hilton, who is probably the most Maoist person in the government.

It is but the latest episode in a never-ending barrage of propaganda to discredit the first wave of socialism in the world and those who led this revolutionary movement.

Andrew Rawnsley, a prominent apologist for the New Labour Government that was, now tries to undermine the current Conservative/ Liberal Democrat Government in Britain by likening it to the socialist regime in China during the period when Mao Tse-tung was its leader. Rawnsley is trading on an assumption, probably accurate, that most of his readers believe that Mao and his comrades were mass murderers.

Mao, he tells us, was “responsible for the deaths of more of his own people than any other leader in history”. This is the accolade normally reserved for Stalin but now, it seems, he has been overtaken by Mao.

Factual accuracy – like specifying just how many millions Mao was supposed to have killed – is not highly prized in this sort of writing. It was, of course, a hundred and not a “thousand” flowers which Mao called upon to bloom. But the facts don’t matter here. The main point is that Rawnsley thinks that the worst thing he can say about the Cameron/Clegg Government is that it is “Maoist”.

Rawnley’s article is based on what over the last twenty years or so has become a major trait in the dominant bourgeois ideology of Western capitalist societies: the idea that socialism has failed, that attempts to bring about socialist transformation were led by homicidal mass murders and have been complete disasters. Most people in countries such as Britain and America think that they “know” this to be “true”. Rawnsley feels confident that his readers will share this “knowledge” with him.

Recently I was talking with a Trotskyite, a history teacher, who told me that “Mao murdered millions”. I asked him to tell me something about which people were murdered, how, where, when and why. All he could say was that “there is this book which tells you about it” although he could not name the title and author and he had not read it.

Further discussion revealed that he knows nothing about the history of modern China and he conceded that this is the case. I quoted Mao to him: “No investigation, no right to speak.”

Here we have a person interested in history and socialism but his knowledge of People’s China has no doubt been picked up from exposure to the popular mass media. Like most of us, he assumes that the ideas he absorbs from the general culture in which he lives are true until he comes across contradictory evidence. Given this climate of opinion, communists have an ideological mountain to climb, something I have discussed in my pamphlet Media Representations of the Socialist Period.

There is a linguistic dimension to this reactionary ideological
obfuscation. In recent years in Britain I have encountered young people from mainland China, especially students, who think of themselves as “communists” but whose outlook is completely bourgeois. They find it confusing to encounter an English person calling himself a communist but who is highly critical of the present regime in China on the grounds that it is on the capitalist road.

One postgraduate journalism student tried to clarify my ideological confusion for me by quoting Teng Hsiao-ping: “For all to become rich, a few must become rich first.” Of course, most people in the West still think of China as “communist” and given the media images of billionaires, corruption and consumerism in China today this simply compounds this linguistic mess.

Is it possible for communists to undermine this sort of reactionary ideology which proclaims that socialism has been a disastrous failure? However hard we may strive to do so, we are only likely to meet with some success if the objective conditions are favourable for us to do so. Now in Western capitalist societies we may be entering a period when it is possible to begin to undermine some of this reactionary
nonsense.

The imperialist wars on Iraq and Afghanistan followed by the world-wide financial crisis of two years ago have considerably weakened bourgeois ideological hegemony, the dominance of reactionary ideas. The student protests in Britain over raising university fees together with the general movement across Europe against public spending cuts on
services and benefits could provide the right climate of opinion for an ideological fightback. But are there any communists left to do it?

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Filed under Asia, Asian, Britain, Capitalism, China, Chinese, Conservatism, Economics, Europe, Government, History, Imperialism, Left, Liberalism, Maoism, Marxism, Political Science, Politics, Regional, Socialism, Trotskidiots

by | December 29, 2010 · 6:22 AM

More Illegal Immigration Madness

Repost from the old site.

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, 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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Filed under Britain, Capitalism, Conservatism, Economics, English, Europe, Europeans, Government, Hispanics, Illegal, Immigration, Journalism, Labor, Left, Legal, Poles, Political Science, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, Racism, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Republicans, US Politics, Useless Western Left, Whites

by | December 29, 2010 · 4:29 AM

Open Borders is Bad For Workers

Repost from the old site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, take a look at James’ comments:

Let’s take two swimming pools, one with 6 feet of water and the other with 2 feet. If they are at the same level and connected with an underground pipe, what is going to happen? Obviously, water will flow from the first pool to the second, thereby lower the water level of the first and raising that of the second.Similarly, if there is complete freedom of movement of goods, labor and capital between a high-wage and low-wage country, the wage level in the rich country will fall and that of the poor country will rise. The magnitude of the change will depend on the relative size of the high-wage and low-wage country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Filed under Belgium, Britain, Capitalism, Conservatism, Democrats, Economics, Europe, Fake Guest Workers, Fascism, Illegal, Immigration, Italy, Labor, Left, Legal, Marxism, Political Science, Politics, Racism, Regional, Republicans, US Politics, Useless Western Left

by | December 29, 2010 · 4:26 AM

Why US Business Loves Mass Immigration

Repost from the old site.

…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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by | December 29, 2010 · 4:22 AM

Project Middle Class Death

Repost from the old site.

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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Filed under American, Capitalism, Capitalists, Conservatism, Culture, Economics, Education, Europeans, Higher Education, Hispanics, Illegal, Immigration, Journalism, Labor, Mexicans, Political Science, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, Reposts From The Old Site, Republicans, Scum, US Politics, Whites

by | December 29, 2010 · 4:20 AM

Unions and Wage – Productivity Increases

Repost from the old site.

James Schipper’s comments 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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