Well-Observed: Two big industries that don't have a clue

Image by blogefl via Flickr

Higher Ed and Recorded Music. Well worth a read.

A good Kunstler and an even better reply

James Howard Kunstler has a pretty good piece up this week -- I wasn't going to link to it because of the one weak part, a bit of immigrant bashing (two paragraphs starting with an absurd notion to cut legal immigration, segueing to an attack on, basically, brown people). However, some commenter posted a good reposte; so, with that correction, it's worth reading the whole piece, which is otherwise pretty good.

It's kind of depressing to see that even JHK has bought into the phony "immigrant crisis" that needs to be "solved" by fair means or foul.

The "infux" of Mexicans in recent years has actually become an "outflux."

The proof that the phony crisis has been implanted even in otherwise sane minds is that Lou Dobbs was allowed to stop his nightly rant.

The reason the Mexicans (let's face it -- that's what we're talking about when we say Immigrants) is that the corporatists needed someone to take the fall when the economy and the jobs market went to shit. When Rufus, who formerly made $35 an hour in a no-longer-existent factory finally goes looking for a job swamping toilets or picking vegetables in the hot sun, the corporatists don't want him pointing a finger at Wall Street. They want him clubbing anyone he sees who is or even looks Mexican for "stealing his job."

The Mexicans in the US have been set up as a scapegoat class much the same as the Jews were set up in 1920s Germany to explain the financial failure of the country.

In a healthy economy, you need the immigrants -- with or without papers -- to take the shit jobs no citizen wants because of their upward mobility. The immigrants fill the vacant space at the bottom.

However, once the corporatists have robbed the treasury, sold off the infrastructure, killed the unions, sent jobs to slave labor in China, destroyed our manufacturing base, etc. then we are in a period of extreme downward mobility.

It's not that Mexicans are "stealing" our jobs. It's just that a lot of Americans are, or will be, forced to start seeking out jobs that previously only undocumented immigrants would do.

The "immigrant crisis" is the most successful propaganda disinformation effort in the history of the US.