But he’s also right.. Like a stopped clock? Maybe. Read on.
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In his recent article Emulating Failure, Booman wrote:
Maine Governor Paul LePage is a bigot and an idiot.
He did so because said governor made a speech opposing unlimited illegal immigration to the U.S. Yes, he used an uninformed example in his speech but if he had been toeing the DemRat line instead of the RatPub one there would have been no negative comment from Mr. Booman.
Bet on it.
I received a missive from one of my favorite bloggers soon after reading it.
Here it is:
Oh!
I completely agree, Booman!!! Let those poor people come in. In fact, I’ll go you one further. Let’s completely open our borders to let anyone in who wants to come, and while we’re at it let’s also make being a citizen of the U.S. really easy by putting up a nice, simple digital sign-up available in every language on earth!!!
But…
Wait a minute!!!
I guess we’ve pretty well done that already, at least we’ve done so on the southern border that connects us with incredibly cheap, incredibly hard-working labor.
Never mind.
Yore freind…
Emily Litella
Read on for more.
Lissen up, Booman.
Anybody who thinks that there is anything even remotely “humanitarian” about the flood of illegals coming over the border belongs in that giant kindergarten class that we laughing call the centrist-media informed public.
This immigration thing is a place where the interests of the corporate controllers and the Democratic Party come into full agreement. The controllers get their semi-slave labor and the Democrats get a massive voting bloc.
Now…I am not in any way against immigration of poor people. I would not be here if a segment of the Central Americans of their day…the Irish…had not immigrated in great waves during the 19th century, and the Afro-Cuban/Puerto Rican music that is a very important part of my life would also not be here. In fact, without immigration the U.S itself. wouldn’t be here. Not in the same form, for sure. But when masses of people immigrated here during most of the 19th and 20th centuries, they came to a place that needed workers. There were too many jobs and not enough people to do them and they could see a relatively unobstructed road to prosperity rising up right in front of them. One generation, maybe two of hard dues and they had a good chance of leading a much better life than the one from which they had fled.
Now?
Now we also have need for workers, but it is a different need. Now it’s not that there aren’t enough bodies to fill the jobs, it’s that there aren’t enough bodies willing to fill the jobs at the wages being offered for the work.
That is a big difference.
Why is that?
How did it happen?
i refer you once again to Ross Perot’s prescient warning during the 1992 presidential debates:
If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided i was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.
People whose ancestors have lived in the U.S. for multiple generations simply will not work for the wages that poor Central Americans from strife-torn countries see as acceptable. I will never forget a conversation I heard between two black, project-style/gang banger-style kids on the subway maybe six years ago. They were talking about a job one of them had been offered, and he said:
I don’t work for that kind of money. That’s Mexican money!!!
Then they both started laughing the laugh that does not mean “Ha Ha.”
Meanwhile the Central Americans are taking those jobs…and making it through on that kind of wage…while these kids and millions like them languish in the dreams of Hip-Hop riches fed to them by the controllers’ media machine. Not just poverty-level kids either, and not just black kids. A great deal of the U.S. “unemployment” problem lies in our working class/middle class population of all races. I’ve seen it happen up close and personal. People just give up and go on welfare and food stamps because the job opportunities and wage levels are so low that they can live better not working. Not working in any official sense, in a day-to-day job. There’s a huge jobs grey market out there, y’know. People with master’s degrees in useful areas (and a college loan debt to match) just give the fuck up.
This all fits the corporate plans…until of course, it doesn’t. Corporations live on a quarterly horizon. One quarter of loss is all it takes to make already fidgety stockholders and creditors really nervous. Two quarters? Three? “Yer outta here!!!” they say. If Obama was on that kind of calendar he’s be gone three times already.
Meanwhile in Never-Never Land America the restaurant dishes still get washed, the lawns get mowed, the car washes are staffed and the building contractors pull up to the local square every day and load up a new bunch of undocumented workers for the day’s work.
The problem is…when does this influx of workers drive the wages down so far that no one will be able to afford to work and live? When does the inflationary cycle that has made my beloved Manhattan uninhabitable for all but the 1% and their workerbees reach Everytown, U.S.A.? We keep welcoming more and more workers, we’re gonna find out real soon.
This Maine governor? I dunno if he’s a “bigot and an idiot” or not. If he is, he’s certainly not lonely. And I don’t know whether he’s saying what he is saying because he’s a dumb motherfucker or whether he has thought this thing through. Either way…he’s got a point. Packing a country with yet more uneducated, low-skill workers…a country that has already pretty much lost things like Detroit , its proudest industrial city…is only a temporary answer no matter how hard these workers have been culturally preconditioned to work. When is the last immigrant that will break the country’s back going to show up?
Any day now.
Aaaaany day now…
That’s what I think.
Just sayin’…
Is a Democratic win in 2016 worth the risk of losing the country that (s)he is supposed to govern?
I don’t think so.
Do you?
AG
