Author: Greg Saunders

I really, really hate the President’s plans for “immigration reform” and it looks like I’m not the only one :

“Society is made up of groups, and as long as the smaller groups do not have the same rights and the same protection as others – I don’t care whether you call it capitalism or communism -it is not going to work. Somehow, the guys in power have to be reached by counterpower, or through a change in their hearts and minds, or change will not come.”
– Cesar Chavez

Since I’m too lazy to rewrite my thoughts on the President’s horrible, elitist, and divisive plans, here’s a rerun of a post I wrote back in November.

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For all of you conservatives who love to praise the “free market”, let me call bullshit on this enduring lie that the President frequently cites to sell his immigration plan. From yesterday’s speech :

As we enforce our immigration laws, comprehensive immigration reform also requires us to improve those laws by creating a new temporary worker program. This program would create a legal way to match willing foreign workers with willing American employers to fill jobs that Americans will not do. Workers would be able to register for legal status for a fixed period of time, and then be required to go home. This program would help meet the demands of a growing economy, and it would allow honest workers to provide for their families while respecting the law.

The “jobs Americans won’t do” lie was also recently advanced in the Washington Post by a spokesman for the Labor Department and a “panicking” farmer (via Kevin Drum) :

“There are just some jobs people don’t want to do,” Nassif said. “It’s the most developed nation in the world using a foreign workforce, and people need to recognize that. We need to make them legal.”

Jack Vessey said he listed openings for 300 laborers at the state office of employment last week to prepare the lettuce fields for harvest. “We got one person,” he said. “He showed up and said, ‘I’m not going to do that.'”

The key to unraveling this bullshit is that the anonymous laborer quoted above likely ended his gripe with “unless you pay me more”. The President wants you to think this is because American workers are shiftless elitists, but it’s the employers and their shills who are the assholes here.

What people like the George W. Bush don’t understand is that capitalism is not a one-way street. When the demand for workers is high and the supply of laborers is low, the rational solution would be for employers to raise wages, increase benefits, or both to ensure that supply catches up to demand. But that would mean actually spending more money, and we can’t have that.

Instead, employers have found a way to get around their obligations by employing “undocumented” workers (and thus creating a demand for illegal labor). Why are these men and women willing to do the same job that Americans are unwilling to do for less money? Well, they’re here illegally, for one. They probably don’t speak English well and have little familiarity with existing labor laws. They’re doing a job that’s unskilled while under the constant threat of deportation. Sounds like the new face of indentured servitude to me, but the President and his allies are trying to figure out ways to make it acceptable.

But here’s the key to all of these proposals : These illegal workers aren’t being offered citizenship, but membership in a “guest worker program”. Bush and co. don’t give a damn about the working class in this country, they just want to make sure that the crooks aren’t penalized for breaking our labor laws. The solutions bandied about would create a pseudo-citizenship which will protect employers but do little to lift immigrant workers from the bottom rung on the economic ladder. When residence is closely tied to employment, the threat of deportation doesn’t go away, it just gets hidden a little better.

Which makes this whole debate even more galling. Immigrants are being exploited, American workers are getting screwed, and the whole debate is happenening as if these two groups of victims are on opposite sides. If you want to stop illegal immigration, you don’t need to build a fence. The supply of illegal labor will go away once the demand for it ceases. We don’t need new plans, we need to rigorously enforce the laws already on the books. If that means that employers are going to have to pay more to the people doing the jobs that “Americans won’t do” and pass those costs on to the consumer, then it’s hardly our place to question the wisdom of the invisible hand, right?

Also, it should be stressed again that George Bush and his allies should be ashamed of themselves for slandering us with their anti-worker rhetoric. Aren’t you paying attention, America? The President of the United States just called you an indolent snob. He thinks you’re too lazy to do an honest day’s work and too effete to do work that will get your hands dirty. Doesn’t that piss you off? It should.

Reading Tom’s earlier post about Bush’s weird face reminded me of these photos from Oct. 2004 :

Although the links to the source are long dead, I can assure you that those aren’t photos of a wax dummy. Aside from the unflattering sweat, the President looked bloated and unhealthy. At the time these photos accompanied news about skipped physical exams and the mysterious hump on Bush’s back. Looking back, I don’t remember ever getting answers to the rather obvious question : Did/does the President have some sort of illness he isn’t telling us about?

Awww…poor Ben/Augustine. He’s decided to step down to spend more time with his family. For those who want to know why Ben’s plagiarism is everyone’s fault but his, make sure to check out RedState. The pity-party is full effect, with Ben whining :

But in the course of accusing me of racism, homophobia, bigotry, and even (on one extensive Atrios thread) of having a sexual relationship with my mother, the leftists shifted their accusations to ones of plagiarism. You can find the major examples here: I link to this source only because I believe it’s the only place that hasn’t yet written about how they’d like to rape my sister.

I know that charges of plagiarism are serious. While I am not a journalist, I have, myself, written more than one thing that has been plagiarized in the past.

Don’t you understand? Ben’s the victim here. If he can’t convince you, take a look at some of the other diaries on the site’s homepage for various calls to arms, posted under titles dripping with self-righteousness like “This is About Decency”, “We Must Defend”, “We Must Continue”, and my favorite “We Must Attack” which begins with this hilarious bit of faux-intellectualism :

It was Hannah Arendt who introduced us to the banality of evil. There was more to this thing called “evil” than grainy newsreel footage of delirious chanting of “Sieg Heil” or the “Internationale.” Rage and hatred were not the first steps toward convincing seemingly normal people to go along with totalitarianism. First, repression had to seem normal. Domestic enemies were not hated – they were dehumanized. In the eyes of their countrymen, their souls were emptied of any qualities extraneous to Political Man. They were the imperialist/capitalist running dog/Jew/Trotskyite – and that was all.

In 2006 in America, we see perfect replicas of Stalin’s drones at work in response to about the only decent thing said about the Domenech affair on Daily Kos. It is an exquisite performance right out of the two minutes hate.

The left is all bent out of shape about Ben’s plagiarism. You know who else hated plagiarism?? Hitler!

Of course, it would be unfair to blame Ben for something written by others (no, Ben only takes credit for the good stuff other people write), so let me highlight the last line in his oh-so-classy resignation letter :

To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America.

Such a humble statement from a guy who started this little disaster with the line “This is a blog for the majority of Americans.” The most pathetic part of this whole experiment gone wrong is that his “To my enemies” postscript is the closest this self-described spokesman for “the majority of Americans” gets to taking responsibility for his own actions.

Get over yourself, Ben. You screwed up. A lot. Real men don’t throw temper tantrums when they’re caught cheating.

Here’s a good example of the immoral healthcare system that conservatives are trying to protect :

Authorities released a videotape this afternoon of what they say is the dumping of a 63-year-old woman on the streets of skid row.

The videotape, recorded by security cameras outside the Union Rescue Mission entrance on San Pedro Street on Monday afternoon, shows a taxicab pulling a U-turn and then driving out of view. A few seconds later, a woman wearing a hospital gown and no shoes walks from the same direction, wandering in the street and on the sidewalk for about three minutes before a Union Rescue Mission staff person escorts her inside the mission.

LAPD Capt. Andrew Smith said he believes the taxi took the woman, a 63-year-old Gardena resident, downtown against her will after she was discharged from Kaiser Permanente Bellflower on Monday.

You’d think examples like this would prompt the American public to say to themselves “Hmmmm….I wonder why this doesn’t happen in other countries?”, but the very concept of providing healthcare to everyone is pilloried as a step towards despotism (unlike, say, the disposal of the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments). Here’s how Tom Neely and I sent-up the GOP talking point a couple of years ago :

If the Democrats knew what was good for them (ha!), they’d collect stories like this as evidence that the United States is long overdue for a universal single-payer healthcare system. Sometimes showing a willingness to go down in flames on principle prevents that very thing from happening.

I haven’t written anything about The Washington Post‘s hiring of Ben Domenech because I support their first amendment right to piss away their credibility by hiring an asshole, but the dirt people have been digging up on the self-described spokesman for “the majority of Americans” has really shocked me. No, not Ben’s double-life as “Augustine” or his overt racism. The thing that I find amazing is that Ben Domenech is so ethically challenged that he plagiarized movie reviews. Movie reviews! These weren’t assignments that required research, interviews, or even a basic degree of accurracy. All he had to do was sit through a movie and write a couple hundred words about what he thought, but he couldn’t even do that without stealing.