It is ironic that the sinister policy of replacing American citizen workers with foreign indentured servants is being promoted by the leadership of the Republican Party, which was founded in the 1850s by reformers like Abraham Lincoln, who championed free citizen labor. The United States fought a Civil War to replace two rival labor systems on American soil with a single system of free wage labor by citizens with equal rights.

In the generations that followed, Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt continued the fight by seeking to outlaw coolie labor from Asia, the use of prison gangs by industry, and other forms of unfree labor that undercut the wages and the rights of American workers.

It is no coincidence, however, that Gramm and DeLay -- the strongest champions of the guest-worker program -- come from the Deep South, the region of the country where wealthy, ruthless elites have been most hostile to the interests of ordinary working people in both the 19th and 20th centuries. The disturbing plan of today's Southern Republicans to create new plantations, manned by Mexican guest workers rather than black slaves, is more Southern than Republican.

Today as in the past it is unfair to force struggling American workers to compete on American soil with foreign workers lacking benefits and civil rights and tied to a single employer -- just as it was wrong to force free American workers in the past to compete with African slave labor and Asian coolie labor.

Say No to Guest-workers by Michael Lind - senior fellow at the New America Foundation, an independent, non-partisan, non-profit public policy institute, and author of Up From Conservatism, and The Radical Middle http://www.sci.sdsu.edu/salton/SayNoToGuest-workers.html

The Guest Worker supported by the Democrat Liberals like Kennedy, Southern Dixiecrats like Phil Gramm and Tom DeLay, and Corporate pimps like McCain is virtually an indentured servant program. It's un-American. If America needs workers, then they should come in as applicants for American citizenship. Or we should import cheap foreign products. But importing a virtual underclass of unassimilated slave labor is unacceptable.

Smith is saying, the costs of maintaining colonies in order to maintain a preferential trade arrangement exceeded the benefits – thus his statement that the project is unfit for a nation of shopkeepers. But the cost to the shopkeepers is a small fraction of the cost to Britain – they pay only their pro rata share – whereas the shopkeepers get the lion's share of the benefits. If the shopkeepers had to bear the whole cost of the arrangement, the benefits would not be worth it. Thus his analogy to the sucker deal that someone hypothetically offers a shopkeeper: buy me a house and I'll promise to buy all my goods from you from now on. The shopkeeper would quickly reject such a deal. But if the shopkeeper can find others to pay for the house and he pays only a fraction, the deal might be in the shopkeeper's interest. Using the asymmetric distribution of costs and benefits to explain why governments take actions that are not in the general interest – whether the special interest benefited be farmers, seniors, or Northrop Grumman – has become part of the tool kit of the modern economist, due to the "public choice" revolution started by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. But notice that Smith had the idea two centuries earlier. 

Adam Smith's Economic Case Against Imperialism. By David Henderson, The Wartime Economist/Antiwar.com November 28, 2005 http://antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=8159 Good stuff from David Henderson, over at Antiwar.com.  Drop in OIL and the Petro-Dollar, and the you've got it right, and you begin to get the picture that the US would be a lot better off spending the treasure we are wasting occupying the Mideast, developing alternative energy sources and energy independence.   The Neo-Con theory that the US must product our Client States from the threat of Islamic Fundamentalism, our dominance over the supply of Oil, and the continued status of the US Dollar as the World's Reserve Currency is a House of Cards, destined to bankrupcy and ruin for the American working folk.

 

Can America Afford it's Belligerent Foreign Policy? - Paul Criag Roberts - VDARE Archives

How will Americans pay for the decades of war that the neocons are fomenting? The Afghan and Iraqi wars are being financed by the Chinese and Japanese whose loans cover the Bush regime’s budgetary red ink. Can US nuclear primacy succeed in forcing the indefinite extension of this financing as a form of tribute? Can the neoconservatives subdue the Islamic Middle East with nuclear weapons without endangering the flow of oil?.....The classic method of war finance is inflation. The Romans destroyed the intrinsic value of their coinage with lead. When the US can no longer sell its bonds, it can print money.

The US might have nuclear primacy, but it no longer has economic primacy. The US economy has been living on debt. In 2005 American consumers overspent their incomes for the first time since the Great Depression. The rising trade deficit is cutting into economic growth. Middle class jobs for Americans are being lost to offshore outsourcing and to foreigners brought in on work visas. Salaries in the jobs that remain are being forced down. Adjusted for inflation, starting salaries for university graduates are declining. Business Week’s Michael Mandel (September 15, 2005) compared starting salaries in 2005 with those in 2001. He found a 12.7 % decline in computer science pay, a 12% decline in computer engineering pay, and a 10.2% decline in electrical engineering pay. Psychology majors experienced a 9.3% fall in starting salaries, marketing a 6.5% decline, business administration a 5.7% fall, and accounting majors were offered 2.3% less.

Economist Alan Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve, estimates that 42-56 million American service sector jobs are susceptible to offshore outsourcing. Whether or not all of these jobs leave, US salaries will be forced down by the willingness of foreigners to do the work for less....By substituting cheaper foreign labor for US labor, globalization boosts corporate profits and managerial bonuses at the expense of workers pay....Education and re-training are no protection against offshoring and foreign workers entering America on work visas.

Paleo Conservatives seem to be the only ones who have not forgotten that Adam Smith was the original critic of Imperialism not Karl Marx.  Smith's message: the cost of maintaining the military forces needed to protect foreign markets and/or resources never generates enough tax revenue to break even. The result of an policy of Imperialism is a long, slow slide downward, decades of economic hardship on the citizens, and eventually social collapse and hyper-inflation. 

Fastest Rise in Federal Spending since FDR/Growth dismays some within the GOP. Richard Wolf/USA Today Monday, April 3, 2006.

Federal Spending is outstripping economic growth at a rate unseen in more then half a century….The Federal Government is currently spending 20.8 cents for every $1 the economy generates, up from 18.5 cents in 2001, White House Budget Documents show. That's the most rapid growth during one administration since Franklin Roosevelt, who served during 1933-45, during the Depression and World War II.

The costs of maintaining US military dominance of Mideast Oil is outstripping the economic growth and the tax revenue that it is supposed to generate. US military spending combined with interest on the existing debt consists of so large a proportion of the US budget, that even massive cuts in domestic spending are not going to resolve the deficits, even if the political support for domestic spending cuts existed. So the Federal Government is financing the costs of the US oil empire by slowly selling off our assets to our enemies.

If Alan Greenspan every believed in the free market fundamentalism he used to peddle back when he was a member of the inner circle of the Cult of Ayn Rand, you'd never know from the monetary house of cards that he's saddled the US economy with.  The so-called "prosperity" is dependent on the ability of the Fed to continue exporting our inflation to the rest of the world. Under Greenspan, the US economy has become a Keynesian perpetual motion machine, piling up massive deficits whose interest payments now constitute the largest expenditure in the Federal budget.  The US prints US dollars to pay the interest, and the flood of US dollars are absorped by the the growth of the World Economy. 

The basis of the House of Cards is the petro-dollar. If Europe and Asia wants to buy Mideast oil, it has to do it with US dollars, instead of Euros or Yen. As long as the Mideast oil producers remain client states of the US military machine, the world will continue to accept US dollars. And Alan Greenspan's perpetual motion machine continues to chug along. 

Sometimes people ask me how I can reconcile my opposition to unrestrained immigration with my own ethnic background descended from immigrant peasants from Eastern Europe.

That's easy. The massive illegal immigrant invasion that we are experiencing has nothing in common with previous immigrant migrations.

In the old Cold War era movie, "Red Dawn" about a Soviet/Chinese Communist invasion of the United States, the United States was systematically dismantled into several territories based on old regional and cultural divisions. For instance, the southern states were split out based on the lines of the Old Confederacy. The Southwest consisting of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas was returned to Mexico. New England states formed another unit. The Upper Midwest States from Minnesota to Michigan were returned to French Canada. And so on. Sound bizarre? Well that's what the United States did to Yugoslavia.

Book Review: The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, by Louis Uchitelle

Most of the economic analysis by free market fundamentalists on the problem of displaced workers and outsourcing of factory jobs are more statements of ideological faith then economic analysis. What economic analysis that is presented is based on misstatements of fact about labor growth in the US. So Uchitelle’s book is welcome addition to the massive misinformation campaign by the big Ivory Tower think tanks like the CATO Institute that dominate the Internet and the mass media.

This book documents the problem of layoffs. And clearly it's a problem---as Uchitelle thoroughly documents---since layoffs are widespread, and the great majority of laid off workers either drop out of the labor market, or take jobs with less skills and lower pay. Another fact of the layoffs that is often dismissed by free marketeers is that most of the layoffs in last 10 years were a result of management incompetence and short-term vision, not worker productivity.

As a result, American is left with an economy that is weaker and less productive. Worse, our economic growth has become completely dependent on monetary policy slight-of-hand tricks that Alan Greenspan pursued for over 10 years. Greenspan’s economic plan is hardly a "free market" solution, as it consists of creating unsustainable economic bubbles with financial deregulation and artificially low interest rates. Worse, the low interest rates that the free market fundamentalists are so fond of are an illusion, made possible by massive deficit spending financed by foreign governments, first the Japanese and the Arabs, and recently to the Communist Chinese government.