The black Ferguson rioters have legitimate reasons to be angry, but they have been tricked into protesting the wrong thing

Suppose that the blacks rioting in the poor neighborhoods of Ferguson, Missouri, were protesting that the fact that their jobs and livelihoods have been stolen by illegal immigrants, and that Obama’s illegal immigrant amnesty/legal immigration surge is going to crush them into third-world poverty.  Suppose that they were protesting trade deals that ship their jobs overseas.  Suppose that they were protesting the government giving trillions of dollars in bailouts to wealthy financiers while starving the real economy of investment.  Suppose that they were protesting the Obamacare scam that forces people to pay small fortunes in medical insurance while depriving them of real medical care and setting traps to scam people into paying for out-of-network coverage.

Why in that case, the rioters might get some sympathy.  In that case the rest of America’s working class might go, hey, maybe they have a point.  Maybe I should be angry too.  Maybe we should make common cause and work together to fight the corrupt Neoliberal oligarchy.  And maybe the working class in the United States could make some progress.

That, of course, would never do.  So blacks have been trolled and goaded into an incoherent rage over something that makes them look like mindless animals to the rest of the country.  That suits the rich and powerful just fine.  It’s all been scripted.

In a country of over 300 million, statistically there simply must be well-documented cases where a white policeman shot an unarmed black man without reason.  And there simply must be cases where a white man has raped a black woman and the evidence is clear.  And yet, every single time that Al Sharpton and Barack Obama etc. make a big deal out of an alleged injustice against a black person, it turns out to be either an outright fraud or at best seriously ambiguous.  That must be by design.

Why no big-time covered-on-CNN protests over the policeman who without looking threw a flash-bang grenade into a baby's crib and crippled it?  Because most Americans would find that appalling.  It's not a good fit for the script.

I mean, if blacks were protesting a clear case where a white police officer shot an unarmed black man for no reason, the rest of the country would not have a problem with it.  Instead blacks are goaded into being outraged about things that are false, and the rest of the country sees only that blacks want to railroad innocent people and they have double standards and they are stupid ignorant beasts who are part of a culture that worships thuggism and violence.

Not so long ago American blacks were protesting to get the vote, to be able to join labor unions, and to attend good schools.  Perhaps grudgingly, the rest of the country saw the point, and blacks made gains.  Now American blacks are protesting that a person who pretty clearly acted in self defense be lynched, and the rest of the country is unimpressed.

Why do you think that the reverend Al Sharpton gets so much time on CNN etc?  It’s not because some reporter thinks that he has something interesting to say, and it’s not because God has deemed Sharpton to be the Official Spokesperson For All Black People In The United States.  No, it’s because the rich who own the corporate media have decided to write Sharpton into the script.  Because he is useful to them.  And that’s why you don’t hear much from Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky or anyone like that: they and many others have plenty more interesting things to say than Sharpton, but the rich don’t want their message to have access to a mass audience.

We also have to be careful: it may well be that many American blacks think this is all stupid, but you won’t hear anything from them on CNN, because that’s not the script.  No, the script is mindless rage that wants revenge even against the innocent, and that’s all you are going to see on TV.  Just remember: what you see on TV is not an unbiased sampling of reality, it’s what the programmers have decided to select.  

Maybe most American blacks aren't this stupid, and all this media frenzy is a setup.  I may have fallen into the same trap that I am warning about...  But how can we know, when the mainstream press is so rigidly controlled and censored?  (IMHO one of the biggest injuries that BIll Clinton did to the United States was allow the consolidation of the media).  Perhaps - just perhaps - American blacks should consider using alternative media outlets.  And maybe the rest of us should tune out of CNN etc., and not believe everything we read in the corporate press.  

And maybe black Americans should run their so-called 'leaders' out of town on a rail.  If shills like Al Sharpton and Barack Obama are routinely booed by blacks every time they show up in public, not even the corporate press could smooth that over.

Managing the rage of the oppressed is a major job of an oligarchy.  In addition, while I do not in any way advocate violence, when a people are being crushed and they have no other options, their only recourse is to threaten to burn the whole place down.

When the communists first took over China, Mao pushed to maximize population growth.  This policy soon drove the average Chinese into such abject poverty that even the totalitarian communists nearly lost control.  So the communists redirected the rage of all those angry and hungry young men onto ‘cultural enemies’, to avoid that anger being directed at the state.  The government also backed off on their policy of maximizing population growth.  Now, while China is far from perfect, significant progress has been made for the average person.

In contrast, in India the elites have been quietly pushing for/allowing to occur a massive population explosion, and there have been no real threats of revolutions or rebellions.  Thus the Indian elites have been free to continue their cheap-labor policies, and the average Indian has a standard of living inferior to late Medieval Europe.

In the United States a hundred years or so ago there were labor riots, some of which involved thousands of armed people and could only be put down by the regular army.  Of course the populace always loses in any confrontation with a regular army (which has discipline and a chain of command), but the army can’t be everywhere at once and you can’t profitably run a mine when it’s been occupied by federal troops.  I suspect that it was the fear of militant labor organizers, communists and anarchists that caused the oligarchy to allow FDR to implement the new deal, not anything so feeble as mere democracy.

When being reasonable fails, the only recourse is to be unreasonable.  That's reasonable, isn't it?

To repeat I am not advocating violence, but history does show that it sometimes yields good results for the working class, at least in the long run.  The Neoliberal oligarchs and their running dogs in the mass media are surely vile, but one must nonetheless admire the skill with which they have manipulated poor blacks in this country, and how masterfully they have controlled the public narrative.  Joseph Goebbels would be jealous.

A little while ago a bunch of white lacrosse players at Duke University were falsely accused of raping a black woman.  The whole black ‘leadership’ piled on, demanding that these whites were guilty even before the evidence was in.   When the lacrosse players were as usual exonerated, they might have been expected to have some anger towards these so-called black leaders who had so unfairly slandered them.  Instead, some of them extended the hand of friendship: they said that they now understood firsthand the problem of prosecutorial abuse, and they could imagine how poor blacks without the legal or other resources of upper-middle class whites, could be crushed by such a system.  They offered to make common cause with blacks on this issue, to build a bridge – and of course, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama etc. spit on them, because it’s not their job to build bridges between Americans and work for a better world.  It’s their job to channel black anger into self-destructive outlets, to make blacks look like dangerous savages, and to help the rich play divide-and-conquer with the American people.

The approved mass-media image is of American blacks as mindless animals.  But if American blacks will allow themselves to be so easily duped into fighting the wrong battles, perhaps there is some small measure of truth to this image after all…  Perhaps American blacks should start thinking for themselves, and question their so-called ‘leaders’, especially when their ‘leaders’ are so obviously on the payroll of the other side…  And if most American blacks are smarter than they are being portrayed on TV, maybe they need to get a new set of leaders that can fix this.  One can dream.

“Amnesty” for illegal immigrants who are already here is cover for the real assault

The papers are full of how Obama is going to provide executive amnesty for (allegedly) five million foreign nationals who are present in the United States illegally, but who have been here for some time and are already employed.  This is a deliberate misdirection: the primary assault on the American people is going to be massive increases in legal immigration, plus amnesties for illegal immigrants who have are not yet in the country, plus refugee status for basically the entire overpopulated third world.

Consider the effect of giving legal status to 5 million illegal immigrants who are already working here.  While there are issues of basic fairness for those who played by the rules, and rewarding a crime sets a very bad example for future behavior, by itself this is not a big deal.   Because they are already working here, and because 5 million by itself is not that large a number for a country the size of the United States, legalizing them would have a negligible effect on the labor market.  That’s why it’s not the real deal.  The rich WANT massive downwards pressure on the labor market, and they could give a fig about amnesty for those already here.  But because a limited amnesty for those already here is arguably somewhat reasonable, it makes a good fig leaf to hide the real assault on the American worker.

What do the rich want?  They want more people, as many as possible, as quickly as possible, from all sources as possible.  They want massive increases in the immigration of scientists and engineers, so that even the most skilled of the middle class can be driven into poverty.  They want refugee status for everyone in Haiti, and Central America, and Mexico, and places with endemic ebola – in other words, from everywhere at all.  They want the parents of all illegal immigrant children to be allowed to come here – and that very much includes all the accompanied illegal immigrant children that Obama has been letting cross the southern border the last year.  And the rules for amnesty will not be checked so most recipients of amnesty will be people who have yet to enter.  And all the promises of increased border enforcement will be broken, just a all such promises have been broken before. And so on and so forth.

In short, the rich don’t give a darn about ‘amnesty’ as it is portrayed in the corporate press.  The rich want to ignite a population explosion that cannot be rolled back, that will overwhelm the technical and physical resources of the nation so that most people live in 9^th century squalor, and the rich live like Indian IT billionaires with entire skyscrapers and private residences.

Surely Obama is acting outside of the law, and surely he is arrogant, but remember, Obama is just a hired hand.  You don't think an obscure community organizer became president all on his own, did you?  He was given his position by the oligarchs that rule the United States, and he is only following their instructions for pay.  Instead of saying that Obama is acting like an emperor, we should instead say that the rich and powerful are demonstrating that they can buy any policy they want.  It is the oligarchy that is becoming above the law, not Obama.  That is especially important to remember because while Obama will step down in two years, the oligarchy and their power will still be there.  Focus entirely on Obama and you miss the primary enemy.

Keep your eye on the prize, humans.  Don’t fight by the other guys’ rules.  This is not about amnesty.  This is about jamming a billion people into the United States within the span of those now living. Remember that.

Racism You Can Believe In

A wit recently said that ‘racist’ has replaced ‘communist’ as the new swear word of the establishment.  A case in point is that any talk of the effect of rapid population growth on pushing down wages or harming the environment is inevitably met with screams of ‘racist’.  But it’s all rubbish.

It is an established fact of economics that, for societies without an open frontier, rapid population growth causes poverty for the many and riches for the few.  This is agreed upon by both classical and Keynesian economics, and up until about 1970 was the consensus view of all mainstream economists.

However, the rich want profits for themselves, and if that means that there must by poverty for the many, well, nothing personal, strictly business.  But saying that the rich want to increase the population to drive down wages sounds bad, so the rich have waged a massive propaganda campaign to convince people that rapid population growth cannot ever be anything than an unalloyed good.  To this end they have used lies and misdirection and tortured logic such that the sanest person’s head would spin.  But on top of that, they reflexively slander all opposed to overpopulation as ‘racist’.

An example of this process is the environmental organization the Sierra Club.  Now the Sierra Club used to stand against rapid population growth, for the simple reason that rapid population growth is a major cause of environmental damage.  Then a wealthy rentier with an arguable stake in cheap labor spent $100 million dollars to bribe (IMHO) the leadership of the Sierra Club into changing their position, and instead insisting that rapid population growth has no effect on the environment – and anyone who says differently is a racist (check out http://www.susps.org/).

A key point is the Sierra Club did not change its position because of new data, or a reasoned debate.  The Sierra Club changed its position because the leadership had been paid to do so.  I don’t mean to pick on the Sierra Club, it’s just that usually this process is veiled in secrecy, and operates quietly as wealthy donors only bestow their largess on those who – wittingly or not – will support their selfish interests.

The Neoliberals and their running dogs in the media (I love the phrase ‘running dog’ and have always wanted to use it in a sentence!) have so confused and confounded public discourse that today even the most intelligent and skeptical person cannot hope to see through all of their deceptions.  No sane person can be skeptical of everything all at once, and most of what we believe is inherited via herd instinct from what we have been told in school and what we read in the mass media and what our friends and colleagues say.  Thus the toxic meme that any talk of rapid population growth being bad is de facto evidence of racism has permeated the so-called liberal community until by now they no more think about it than a fish does water.

But on the other hand there are some real racists out there, but, perversely, they are applauded as saints!  I refer to the corporate-sponsored Hispanic racists who demand that they should only care about people of their ‘raza’ (‘For the race, everything, outside of the race, nothing’.  I am not making this stuff up).  They insist that they care nothing about their fellow citizens who are white, black, yellow or red – only their precious raza.  Indeed, they don’t even care about individual Americans of Latin American origin (whose prospects will be harmed by massive third-world immigration just as surely as Americans of other races will be), but only the aggregate power of their raza.  Their single goal is to massively increase the numbers of Hispanics so that their raza will have more power relative to other races.  It’s like Hispanics are a species of xenophobic insects from a bad science fiction novel aimed at conquering the galaxy.  Now that’s racism you can believe in!

Of course, most Americans with Latin American ancestors are as skeptical about jamming a billion people into the United States as any other American, but that’s not the script.  Thus the corporate press constantly hammers home the false idea that Hispanics care only about importing more of their kind, and that if Republicans are to win the racist Hispanic vote they must support them in opening the borders to an unlimited number of foreign nationals and driving wages down to sub-poverty levels so that Mark Zuckerberg can get even richer.  Surely only a racist of the vilest sort could object?

Remember that 'Hispanic' is a completely artificial term that was created out of whole cloth by the rich to divide and conquer the American people, and to try and create a sector of the American populace that will be an ally in their efforts to drive down wages by opening the border.  For some time this was a myth, hammered home on the pages of the New York TImes but not believed by most so-called 'Hispanics' (who in earlier times were referred to as 'white').  But this long pretense may finally create its own reality.  Goodbye melting pot, hello civil strife.

If you are one of those species of liberals that insist that opposition to open borders is racist, and you have made it this far, I congratulate you.  I humbly suggest that for the American people to only want to moderate the rate at which foreign nationals be allowed to settle in the United States be moderated, to a level that does not depress wages or increase crowding, is totally reasonable.  I also suggest that whenever the press talks about ‘immigrants’, you replace the word with ‘foreign national’.  Americans have nothing against immigrants – many US citizens are of course immigrants – the issue is entirely about foreign nationals (who have their own countries thank you very much) and how many should be let in each year.  Opposition to a too-high level of immigration is arguably nationalistic (perhaps, dare one say it, patriotic), but it is clearly not racist or even xenophobic. 

Instead, I suggest that whenever you hear the word ‘Hispanic’ mentioned in public discourse, that you replace it with ‘Hispanic racist’.  It is, after all, only the truth.  And the truth is in such short supply that we should produce it whenever we have the chance.

Corporate-sponsored Hispanic racists.  Racism you can believe in!

The fraction of the population that is foreign born is economically irellevant

When discussing the impact of a government’s cheap-labor immigration policy, pundits often talk about the fraction of the population that is foreign born, and when calculating the impact on wages they only count the immigrants themselves.  This is rubbish.

What counts is not the fraction of the population that is foreign born.  What counts is the total increase in the population that is caused by a specific immigration policy.

Suppose a young couple immigrate from some overpopulated third-world country.  Because it is poverty that drives people to immigrate, and because rapid population growth is the single greatest cause of poverty, the age distribution in immigrants tends to be low.  So this couple will likely be in or about to enter their childbearing years.

Suppose they have two children.  Now the total increase in the population due to their immigrating is four.  Now suppose that each of their children has two grandchildren.  That’s four, but it is shared with two other people, so the increase is only another two – the total increase due to the original two immigrants is now six.  Now the grandchildren have children – eight in total, but shared with other people, we should only count two, but the original immigrants have passed on, minus two, and the total increase in the population due to the original two immigrants is stable at six.  Even though the fraction of foreign born is zero, the net increase remains, and in this example it is three times the number of the original immigrants.

When you import third-world refugees, the number of immigrants is just a down payment on a much larger increase in population down the road.  This happens even if they average two children per family, because of demographic momentum.  Of course, if their fertility rates are higher than two this multiplier factor can be much larger.  Assume that the first generation has four kids, the second has three kids, and all succeeding generations have two.  In this case the multiplier factor would be nine.

Granted these are simple examples.  In the case where we had two people each with two children, if they entered the country with their children already born and the children are counted in the totals, then the multiplier factor is only 1.5.  On the other hand, if there are so many immigrants so quickly that they fail to assimilate and their fertility rate does not drop down to replacement, then the sky is the limit.

Nevertheless, even if we cannot predict the total numbers with certainty, if Obama imports tens of millions of people in the next two years (which is quite plausible when you count illegals and all the different expanded legal sources) this could end up being hundreds of millions, easily.  Hello Bangladesh.

Now consider California.  The fraction of the population that is foreign born is only about 25%, but post-1970 cheap-labor immigration policy is responsible for 50% of the current population.  In other words, without post-1970 immigration there would be about 20 million people in California, but instead there are about 40 million people.  When you consider the impact on wages, traffic, water, etc., it is the total increase that counts.

Suppose you are an ecologist, and you want to study the impact of a new species of plant being introduced to an ecosystem.  Originally there was one plant, but it has spread and multiplied and now there are 1000 plants of that species.  Do you only calculate the environmental impact of that one original plant?  Or of all of it’s progeny?  Obviously, the latter.

Now those economists who have ‘proven’ that massive increases in population cannot cause living conditions to fall are of course whores, and they are lying on so many levels that it is hard to know where to start.  They would doubtless be happy to prove that the sun rises in the west if you paid them enough.  Anyhow, consider only California and water.  Now California is a desert with erratic rainfall.  Originally the occasional dry year kept the population low.  Building dams and pumps for aquifers allowed Californians to average things out, and is what allowed the population of California to grow.  However, now the population is so large that this is not working.  There is no long term dry trend in California’s weather, it is exactly as it has always been (“Causes of the extreme dry conditions over California during early 2013”, by Hailan Wang and Siegfried Schubert, special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 95, No. 9, September 2014).  It’s just that demand for water has increased enough that people can no longer store enough water in the wet years to tide them over the dry ones.  There would be no ‘drought’ in California if there were still just 20 million people living there.

Now consider the economic impact on the average worker.  Let’s temporarily ignore the impact on wages, traffic, rents, etc., and just look at water.  Post 1970 immigration has doubled California’s population.  This will be true even if immigration is stopped and the population stabilizes and the percentage of the population that is foreign born drops to zero.  The average person will have to pay much more for water, and use less of it, and spend a lot on more expensive water-conserving appliances.  And they will also have to pay more for food, as the effect of more expensive water ripples through the rest of the economy.  And this price will have to be paid basically forever, year after year, generation after generation, long after the last foreign-born immigrant has passed away.  Just considering water, the total cost to the average Californian will be colossal.  Surely this should be considered in any economic analysis of the effects of immigration?

But of course those wealthy oligarchs who are responsible for jamming so many people into California won’t have to do without – with all that cheap labor, and being able to charge high rents, they will make piles of money, and take hour long showers and swim in their own private heated Olympic swimming pools.  So that’s all right then.  If the little people are running out of water it’s because they are lazy.  If only they would work harder and all become billionaires they could all have plenty of water.  Yeah, sure.