Incalculable Fraud, Incalculable Wealth Transfer

Isn’t Bush's proposed radical new economic plan simply a massive wealth transfer from you and yours truly to the super-wealthy?

Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing Naomi Wolfe warned us about in The Shock Doctrine—minus the fighter jets and tanks (at least so far)?

Shouldn’t every American be in the streets demanding that the CEOs, boards, and senior officers of these failed companies forfeit ANY profit?

Shouldn’t we demand that the taxpayer be repaid with vigorous interest and levy a penalty fee?

Shouldn’t there be immediate prohibitions against these guys just dumping the bad loans on Fannie and Freddy (us) and skimming the goods ones at bargain-basement rates?

This is an incalculable fraud on all who invested in these outfits, and an incalculable wealth transfer, and it’s all being pulled off with perfect insouciance. I’m speechless.

Erecting Our Own Tombstone: AZ's Employer Sanctions Law

From the National Immigration Law Center, "Erecting Its Own Tombstone: Arizona's Mandatory Basic Pilot/E-Verify Law" (April 2008). Read this PDF. Be sure to scroll all the way through it to catch the nitty gritty. The findings won't shock anyone with two braincells to rub together, but may surprise state Republicons and other Haters.

In other words, our Employer Sanctions law is causing new business to avoid moving to AZ, existing business to avoid expansion and to lose revenue, homes to foreclose, consumer goods, produce, and other marketable objects to languish on shelves, rental units to go unoccupied, the state budget to collapse in on itself, and construction, agriculture, entertainment and service, landscaping to cut back and/or fold. It's causing job losses, profit losses, budget cuts, layoffs, and, mostl likely, increases in all citizens' dependence on our public safety nets.

The good news is that there's never been a faster demonstration of the principles of Karma. What goes around comes around.

Here in AZ, as elsewhere, these measures are taking all the guesswork out of wondering what effects harsh anti-immigrant hate laws will have on state and municipal economies (meaning schools, new highway construction, infrastructure maintenance, emergency/security services, etc.). Now we know. Anti-immigrant laws kill towns, cities, and states.
AZ's Employer Sanctions law's consequences for the state's operating budget and for GOP election prospects are predictably causing a major divide between business and the GOP, which can't be all bad, and making even more of us loathe Russell Pearce and Republicons.

Don't you love it when a plan comes together? I'm talking to you, Gould, Pearce, Harper, Grimes, etc.

Republicans Driving Immigrants out of AZ's Economy

As we predicted, the employer sanction law is pushing both documented and undocumented immigrants out of Arizona. Together with the Republican-engineered tanking economy, the Republican-engineered "employer sanction" law, which punishes employers for hiring undocumented workers, is driving down school enrollment, apartment occupancy, home buying, and retail sales in what undoubtedly will be a continuing spiral of decline for as long as the Republican-engineered home mortgage fraud crisis and the resulting Republican-created credit crisis persist.

How marvelous for us all.

If there's anyone in this state who has the unmitigated gall to vote for any Republican anywhere at any time in the future, it will prove beyond any remaining doubt that a sack of cement is smarter than a Republican.

Ask me if I'm angry.

Republican Russell Pearce and his merrie band of Republican racists has declared war. Unfortunately, like his White House mentors, Cheney and George, he's shot the wrong target. As Republican Sherrif Joe Arpaio and his thugs round up brown people, they are creating a climate of fear--called "panic" in this NYTimes article--that is enveloping not just undocumented workers but documented residents of 24 years and more. This is because they can't find jobs when the economy is depressed, and they have relatives here who are not documented, and they feel the flood of hostility being intentionally whipped up at Mexican immigrants. They don't feel welcome anymore, because they aren't.

The hysterical reaction of Republicans to the influx of (invited and lured) citrus harvesters, cotton pickers, farmworkers, construction workers, restaurant workers, hotel and motel service personnel, food service and grocery workers, landscapers, miners, and domestics--terrifying bunch, huh?-is rapidly worsening an economy that is already bringing record foreclosures and other disasters.

As these families leave, they withdraw their children from our public schools and school revenue, based on headcounts, tanks, too. They leave, and when they do, they leave groceries, gasoline, household goods, school supplies, sundries, prescription medications, clothing, shoes, and all other consumer goods on the shelves. Then businesses close and homes go into foreclosure, and when businesses close and homes are abandoned, city, county, and state revenues plummet and neighborhoods deteriorate. When these things happen, everybody--brown, black, yellow, red, and white, turns blue.

This is predictable in a state that historically has always depended on Mexican laborers for its prosperity. It doesn't take a genius to connect these dots. Apparently, however, it takes a bunch of Republicans.

It's not Immigration. It's the Economy.

To control the immigration debate, the Right has constructed a box made of the same-old, same-old tried-and-failed reactionary memes, and all of us are trapped within it.

Have you noticed? We never, ever seem to talk outside that box. Even when we seek to rebut, we repeat the memes and reinforce them in the public mind.

Individually and collectively, these sound bites are nothing but voter registration and privatization enhancement devices. That’s it. They have no basis in reality because that’s not the point. The point is to obscure reality, not reveal it. The point is to create a new reality and marshal the masses to defend it.

Observe the trap. Every one of the handful of popular immigration disinformation nuggets is designed to hook, recruit, and redirect the attention of one or more vulnerable sectors of the public. The disgruntled, the fearful, the racist, the desperate, and/or the bankrupt and the medically besieged have to be distracted from reality, captured for the Republican Party, and given a pressure valve, a scapegoat to shoot at. Ergo, “illegals.”

It’s no accident that Lou Dobbs--voice of the populist Right--commiserates with the middle class while he pumps far Right propaganda to the masses: Elections aren’t won without the middle class. So far, thanks largely to his megaphone, we either lamely rebut the memes (a lost cause; you can’t prove a negative), or we sit on the sidelines, frightened ourselves or frozen between false polarities like opposing labor or opposing immigrants.

But today's election results in Virginia and elesewhere, and the economic trends highlighted in today’s Financial Times may point the way for a whole new conversation. It turns out that voters are not driven as one to the GOP by immigration after all. It turns out that after a long post-traumatic stress disorder coma, Americans are waking to the real dimensions of the disaster the Right has wrought. Let's hope the Democrats wake up and smell the anger.

Meanwhile, indeed there are real considerations to be faced in the complex immigration issue, but we're trapped in a GOP sound chamber and missing the facts pretty much entirely.

Here’s my take on some of the memes, who they target, and how they function.

“Illegals” steal jobs and force down wages. There are millions of underpaid and un-benefitted “union orphans” and unemployed workers stranded on our shores waving adieu at jobs gone overseas and wages depressed by the GOP wealth transfer machine. How better to channel their rage than by telling them that a horde of brown people is stampeding across the land to steal their jobs? The sheer beauty of it! This meme positions the Right as the outraged friend of the workin’ man, and polarizes African Americans and Latinos. It also puts rotten rock liberals, who acquired their political values from a bumper sticker, between a rock and a hard place: Oh Lordy! Whom to support when the union people are fighting with the Black people! God forbid we question the premise.

“Illegals” steal elections. So many corruptions beset us, but undocumented workers lining up to vote is not among them. Still, this meme is perfect cover for Rightwingers who want to diddle state voter registration rules and tweak those little black boxes. It hooks the racism in us all, and drives a lot of Americans to the polls to support “voter fraud” propositions that actually are intended to defraud minorities, not to un-fix fixed votes. Heightened ID requirements and other measures are designed to keep poor people and minorities from voting, but under cover of “voter fraud,” GOP secretaries of state and tainted highway patrolmen get away with tricks that ordinarily would land them in jail.

“Illegals" bring crime to the neighborhood. "Illegals" drive down property values.” How many people who’ve played by the rules actually haven’t gotten where they expected to be? Hard work hasn’t automatically brought the American Dream—not since the 1970s, not since corporations took health insurance and pensions off the table and gave 99% of the productivity yield to the CEO.

More recently, millions were prodded to seize lowered mortgage interest rates, but weren’t told that their lenders were giving kickbacks for higher home appraisals. Now that house values are tanking and crime driven by poverty and drugs is rising across the country, a lot of furious people want something more tangible to smack down than Countrywide’s voice mail hell, and a lot of corporate lobbyists, drug dealers, and mortgage raiders desperately need the GOP to divert them.

They’re nothin’ but a bunch of "illegals!” This meme of perverted genius is the cinder-like heart of Rightwing xenophobia and racism. It reduces a whole person—a human being with a name, a family, a story, and a dream—to one word, a word that acts to numb us to the huge difference between what is merely legal and what is just. As cleverly, that word points us away from our own complicity: It was we who allowed our politicians to create NAFTA and CAFTA, and it is we who benefit from prices that are subsidized on the backs of the very people we demonize. Nice. But as long as we focus on those “illegals,” we aren’t likely to focus on NAFTA and CAFTA or global warming. It’s old-fashioned rabble-rousing; if nothing else can get the rabble pissed off and to the polls, the vision of thieving brown hordes and cowboy militias surely will. This is class war, only, as “employer sanctions” measures are about to demonstrate graphically, we’re shooting each other.\

“Illegals" don't pay taxes. Not exactly. The fact is that working Americans are funding the war, the country, and wealthy Republicans, who simply are not carrying their weight. But taxes are always a sore point. Paint the Democrats as tax raisers and friends of dirt-poor free-loading "tax cheaters," and paint the GOP as the party of law and order. Like the “illegals” meme, the tax meme appeals to the dutiful, unassuming law abiding voters among us—the so called “moral majority.” They may be God-fearing, but all the same, somehow they aren’t part of the new GOP aristocracy. Like the rest of us, they may wonder where the money went. Better to vote righteous indignation than to consider the possibility that they’ve been had, bad, by King George II.

“Illegals" have driven our hospitals into the ground and shred our safety nets and public schools. Somebody has, that’s for sure, but not brown-skin immigrants. For-profit hospital corporations like that owned by the Frist family shut down small rural hospitals to drive down costs. Right-wing fundamentalists attack school funding in favor of privatization—charter schools, private schools, and school voucher programs--and in favor of curriculum control through coordinated home and private Christian schooling. Neo-Con Republicans un-fund New Deal federal safety nets in the name of privatization or small government (except in Iraq), and shift social service costs to already overburdened states. We may notice that the lynchpins of the New Deal lie in tatters, but it’s hard to see clauses buried deep in government funding bills. Besides, it’s easier to gratify the dispossessed if we put fences militias on the border. It’s also more profitable to build private mercenary armies, private prisons, and miles of walls than tend to the nation’s social and physical infrastructure.

The debate as it is currently constructed really isn't about immigration. That's just the screen. It's the subtext that is controlling us. Time for us to get out of the box, look at the facts about immigration, and notice that loud crashing sound around us.

It's our disintegrating country, thanks to the GOP. This is what the Virginia voters are waking up to. And Rahm Emmanuel, James Carville, and Hillary Clinton are dead wrong to steer the party away from telling it like it is.

Callin' It Like He Sees It

Surfing around, found this:

As someone who loves traveling and climbing in Europe, I'm dismayed by the ever-weakening dollar. Five years ago, my dollar would have bought a euro and change; today it buys less than 75 cents. In other words, everything is at least 33 percent more expensive. Dave Goldstein and I were lamenting this fact as we hiked out to a climb the other day, and he said something along these lines: 'You can blame Bush, and I will every chance I get, but Cheney is the one calling all the shots. We ought to rename the dollar the Dick.'

Yep.

But hey, it's a great economy, right?

Thanks to The Mountain World for the grin.

No Top of Ol' Smokey

Disclaimer: I’m writing as a daughter of East Tennessee, descendant of some of the first Anglo settlers in an area of The Great Smoky Mountains known as Cades Cove. Those hazy blue ridges are in my blood, and for 200 years, my family has called them home.


Maybe our flagrantly “Christian” president can explain to me why he needs to drive heritage landowners off their land, blow the tops off majestic mountains, destroy irreplaceable habitat of countless mammal, plant, fish, amphibian, reptile, and insect species, dump megatons of toxic wastes and acid mine drainage into the headwater streams and rivers that supply much of the southeastern US, eliminate about 1,000 sq. miles of the country’s most diverse biosystem, depress numerous local economies in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, pollute their air, permanently bury their creeks, streams, and other waterways, and bring on floods, mudslides, and acid rain to wipe out what's left of natural life, when instead, he could provide education, job creation, economic security, and environmental protection enhancements for millions of Americans and secure our global competitive footing by pursuing clean alternative fuels. I’m too stoopit to get it. I mean, what would a smart person do?


That said, Dirk Kempthorne, Bush Interior Secretary, issued a proposed rule that, according to the New York Times:

would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.

Environmental activists say the rule change will lead to accelerated pillage of vast tracts and the obliteration of hundreds of miles of streams in central Appalachia.'This is a parting gift to the coal industry from this administration,' said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va. 'What is at stake is the future of Appalachia. This is an attempt to make legal what has long been illegal.’

Is it me or does “Appalachia” seems to function sometimes as a throwaway prompt, almost as if inherent in the word itself is “it’s only”?

What the Times and other outlets I've seen haven't noted is -- guess who's responsible for evaluating coal mining companies applications an requests for exceptions to applicable rules? The Army Corps of Engineers! There, don't you feel better?

What is mountaintop removal?
What does it look like?
What does it do to the economy?
To families and communities?
To the environment?


Six things you can do to help

1. Get up to speed on the issues. Read the books. Missing Mountains and Lost Mountain and Big Coal, see the documentary, and watch the video.

2. Demand it stop. Contact your senators and representatives until it does.

3. Contribute generously to those who are fighting on the front lines.

4. Get green! And

5. Register to vote as Democrat or Independent, and

6. Never, never, never, ever vote Republican again.