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Jul 10, 2014 at 8:35 am
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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
The kinds of things those Murrieta people were shrieking at their protest are described here.
Those in power positions recognize--unconsciously perhaps and unvocalized certainly--that sex is the only force more potent than all the measures at their disposal that maintain them in positions of privilege.
So they demonize the sexy--be it an individual or a multitude. Because sex is the only thing that sells better than what they're peddling.
Latin, African, Asian and mixed race people are being noticed for what they are . . . just fucking beautiful . . . and that is a threat.
Sex has always won--it will always win . . . until the unsexy destroy the world in spite.
Indeed, a crisis might (will?) beget another crisis. From low birth rates in developed countries to higher ones in developing countries and mass immigration from developing countries to developed ones. It's a conundrum ethical, economic or otherwise.
I have absolutely have no problem with people of color especially young ones coming to this country. I welcome them. To be sure, immigration among other factors is what makes this country great, diverse and certainly, a destination. Age balance and a healthy (2.2%?) birthrate is good for a country. But, it is difficult to achieve. Not all humans can come to the US.
I had thought efforts were made to improve the economies south of the border in the W. hemisphere NAFTA (?) among others. Clearly, that's not working as hoped for. So, we are faced with this crisis.
My biggest problem is simple. Why are so many parents (I don't care where they come from, their heritage etc.) allowing their under 18 y/o children to cross international frontiers unaccompanied (except for traffikers) and undocumented? That seems to me horrible. Would you allow that of your children? That to me is the moral conundrum. Making one's children vulnerable even for econonmic largess and/or more freedom.
If I had kids and I had the choice between keeping them home and watching them die or sending them away with at least a chance of surviving and thriving, I'd send them away and hope. Why keep your children in Hell with you?
The only reason to want more children in the population is to keep on this eternal year over year growth of the economy nonsense. Stabilizing the world population would be better than having it grow to unsustainable levels. And before anyone makes a dumb "modest proposal" crack, this isn't about enforcing the birth rate, but just allowing the natural trend of developed nations with smaller families.
This reminds me of the movie "Children of Men". Central premise was that no one had been born anywhere on the planet for 19 years. I liked the film, but they also set up a situation where the UK was keeping out young immigrants, which was completely illogical.
This is fucking classic Mudede.
"one of the biggest problems rich countries are facing is the aging of their populations. In Italy, for example..."
Umm.. Chuck, Italy isn't "rich."
According to the World Bank, Italy's per capita GDP is $34,619, (vs. the US at $53,143). Italy's population to workforce ratio is only 5% lower than ours, most of that due to their earlier retirement. According to the EU, Italy's average retirement age has RISEN to 60.4 years.
Italy's debt to GDP is 127%, ours is 106% (and climbing). Italy's unemployment rate is STILL up there, at 13.7%.
Fact is: Italy is fucked not because of low birth rate and productivity. Italy is fucked because of the same socioeconomic swindle you keep advocating for.
Socialism causes unhappiness and grief.
You think the Europeans are happy and the US citizens unhappy?
Gallup Polling in 2014 of Happiest Countries
Canada - 79 points
Sweden - 78 points
USA – 78 points
France - 76 points
Finland – 76 points
Italy – 75 points
Germany - 74 points
United Kingdom - 73 points
Legal immigration is great. Bring us your hard-working, your ambitious -- yearning to be free. In accordance with our laws.
Indeed, I do. I highly recommend a film, "El Norte" from the 80s that recounts such a tale. I've also visited Nicaragua & Honduras. I've seen the conditions and they aren't necessarily pleasant. I get it. Many people want to leave.
I still contend it is morally repugnant, Superman story or not. Some of these children are under 14 y/o and some die:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/nyregi…
It simply points to the increasing sense of despair and hopelessness these people face on a daily basis. Seriously, I cannot even imagine how bad one's life must need to get to finally reach a point where you feel the only possible chance for your child to survive into adulthood is to send them on a thousand mile overland journey with little more than the shirt on their back, with no guarantee they will even safely reach their destination, all in the desperate hope that MAYBE things will be better there.
It's a Sophie's Choice of the highest order to be sure, but the only thing "morally repugnant" about it is the fact they feel they have no other option other than to make it.
Why do you think the Catholic Church for example is so vehemently opposed to ANY form of birth control? It has far less to do with morality than it does economics: you can't keep assimilating new followers - or their tithes - if your current flock aren't pumping them out at a steady rate.
Also, paying workers good wages allows them the luxury of having children they can pay for, as children are expensive. But the myopic impulse of pure capitalism is to focus entirely on profits right now regardless of what that means to society in the long run. Pure capitalism is a fairly recent, modern concept; it hasn't "always existed", as the owners and their lackeys - you - would like us to think. Left alone, it will consume society and itself, like a fire flaming out. So there's your unhappiness and grief.
Charles, thanks for your headline and your post. We desperately need to hear this more! One point no one has brought up is what I believe is the key reason Republicans are so vehemently opposed to Latino immigration: Latinos tend to vote Democrat! Republicans are terrified that if all these Hispanics moving in and living here in the underground already are brought into society as full fledged citizens, then Republicans will never win again. It's not really about race. If Latinos tended to vote Republican, then Republican leaders and conservatives would be tripping over each other to roll out the welcome mat as the most American, Christian, humanitarian thing to do. This fear is even more keenly felt when you consider that they lost the last presidential election mostly because Latinos didn't vote for them - and is there any wonder why! Since then, as we all know, there has been deep, troubled reflection within Republicans about whether they should give up being the party of just conservative white people. Racism is a complicating factor (for them) in that internal debate. However the opposition to Hispanic immigrants extends from more prosaic and immediate political concerns. They're just afraid they'll lose. Both Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter (if I remember)have expressed this fear quite explicitly.
I think the French, who have come up with
Two things go hand in hand with the collapse of the birthrate: access to contraception and rising standards of living.
There is some suggestion that people will only avail themselves of contraception when infant mortality declines and a further suggestion they'll only have more babies when they can afford them and expect the babies will ultimately have at least an equal standard of living. I think the jury is out.
There is no question that given access to contraception (family planning), women in developing countries will use it and their birthrates will plummet; without the enormous burden of that birthrate and the ability to plan, standards of living rise across those countries for everyone, not just women.
The reason I mention all that is the French have tried a series of reforms to reverse the low childbirth rates, most of which center on making children cheaper to have.
However, Charles' entire argument rests on a faulty (and not original to Charles) implicit assumption: that our historic worker::retiree ratios are somehow inviable fundamentals. They are not. There is nothing that says we need to maintain a fundamentally regressive social safety net revenue structure; the social safety net can be provided easily using a more progressive tax structure (smaller, narrower tax base).
If we deem - as the Free-marketeers, FUIGMs and other assorted Austrians seem to have done (and hoodwinked everyone else into believing) - that it's natural and acceptable for all of the rewards of productivity gains - all of the output of our economic system - be concentrated in a small narrow slice of the population, then it seems to me to follow perfectly logically that the revenues needed to maintain that society (and the consumer base upon which it's built) should be levied upon that same small slice. It's Willie Sutton really.
In short: if we are super-productive relative to the 1930s, then why not raise enough revenue from 3 workers as we used to need 10 workers for?
Good analysis.
Thanks to all for being civil on this hotly contested issue that Charles broached.
In the context of that story, no, it wasn't. That society was a dystopian nightmare for just about any country that wasn't the UK. They were keeping the immigrants out because they were getting flooded with them.
@15,
While I'm sure most parents in third world countries fiercely love their children, if you had any actual experience in those countries you would know that *many* of them don't. That's why obligatory child birth is so fucking ugly; many parents wind up hating their children and see them as chattel. Among many examples, there's a worldwide epidemic of parents selling their very young daughters into sex slavery.
So how about we not presume to know what the parents of these children think?
The global birthrate is declining no matter what, so we would do well to figure out other solutions for taking care of the elderly rather than talk up unsustainable population growth. I find it funny that Charles the Marxist is buying into the libertarian/capitalist mantra of unlimited population growth, which is really only *necessary* for unlimited economic growth.
Come on, Charles, capitalism doesn't need growth to "survive", and Japan is in no danger of collapse because its economy isn't growing.
1) Switzerland
2) Norway
3) Canada
4) Denmark
5) Austria
6) Iceland
7) Australia
8) Finland
9) Mexico
10) Netherlands
11) Sweden
Which of course leads to another aspect of the issue: organized religion is founded on the principle that, no matter how awful your life is in the here-and-now, if you just follow our instructions to the letter, do everything we tell you to do exactly how we tell you to do it, and never question us as to why we're telling you to do it, you will receive a reward for your faith and suffering in the next world - and all it will cost is your unquestioning obedience, plus a 10% service charge.
But, what if things aren't quite that bad? It's a lot harder to convince the flock to delay gratification until after death when life-before-death ISN'T a short, brutal, ultimately hopeless struggle merely to survive.
@22:
If you would go back and re-read my comment, I think you'd see I was most certainly NOT presuming to KNOW how "many" (strange you would feel the need to make such an abject qualification when that appears to be the entire point of your objection) parents in third-world countries feel about their children, but that I find it difficult to IMAGINE how awful the circumstances of their lives must be to prompt them to make such a choice. It's the difference between attempting to view the situation from a position of empathy as opposed to from a position of authority, as you appear to be doing, since you obviously KNOW so much more about these things - based on what exact superior personal experience you possess, I've no idea - but the inference of such is rather unambiguous.
But of course Capitalism requires constant growth and expansion - that's how Capital does what it does. Your mistake, it seems to me, is to believe that Capitalism is inherently rooted in, or can be limited by, Nationalism. But, as we've seen with alarming clarity in the 20th Century, Capitalism cannot be constrained by political or even geographic boundaries - it simply rolls over them with impunity when necessary to achieve its own ends.
Japan's economy, as stagnant as it has been over the past 20 years or so, is simply a reflection of Capital's innate fluidity: when market conditions in one place cannot sustain growth and expansion, it will seek out other markets where conditions are more favorable. The result for Japan was that investment ebbed away, forcing the government to resort to things like huge injections of new currency to prop up a sagging economy, which, if not carefully balanced or sufficiently large in scale, can actually work to the detriment of a nation's internal economy. And all of it - boom AND bust - are driven almost entirely by whether entities with sufficiently large amounts of fluid Capital decide it's in their best interests to invest there, based solely on the prospect of how much profit (Capitalistic growth in its purest form) can - or cannot - be made.
Japan might not be in any "danger of collapse" in a general sense, but there has been unquestioningly a great deal of both economic and political instability during the period of stagnation, which only very recently has started to settle down as Abe's administration seems to have been at least marginally successful in slowing the country's rampant deflation, huge debt-to-GDP ratio, and trade imbalance.
They're not going down for the count, but they've been on-the-ropes for the better part of two decades, without a doubt - and frankly, one of the main reasons they've rebounding to the extent they have in the past couple of years is due to the increased influx of Capital, which is coming in precisely because of the clear opportunities for growth presented by that economic turnaround.
According to one poll. And yet....
http://www.gallup.com/poll/169322/people…
Give us a massive enough global economic catastrophe - at least on-par with the Great Depression, through which Capitalism only barely survived because of a subsequent World War - and then we'll see.
it's clear that the ezst way to make a bunch of people healthier and wealthier is to move them from a very unhealthy, unwealthy place to a very healthy, wealthy place. this is the most useful form of redistribution. unfrtntly we have a dispersal problem associated with labor demand and costs of living in the northern states
@31 no system will survive a catastrophe that's "massive enough". shoutout to the dinosaurs
@23 "unlimited growth" is some silly mantra? given the strong correlation between social welfare and GDP level, I'd say growth is a useful target. Marxists have always been pro-growth, and usually even claim that planning will result in a rational concert of factors of production that will produce faster growth
@32 we share a big, active border with Mexico. think about the relative career prospects of Mexican immigrants and, say, Taiwanese immigrants. think about the recent history of transnational ethnic groupings and their political tendencies (Kurds, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, etc). hell, how did the SW became part of the US in the first place? white people moved in as immigrant settlers, then decided they'd rather have the territory to themselves and stole it from the incumbent authority. I don't mean to say latinos have devious political ambitions like Sam Houston's, but there is a tendency for groups that haven't been treated very well under existing political arrangements to push for changes, and those changes won't always coincide with the interests of the broader population
I'm pro-immigration and I don't mind the illegals cooking my food, cleaning my house, etc. they're bettr off making sub-standard wages here than they r making standard wages there, and I'm better off with chiles rellenos, clean house, childcare, Russophone tutor etc. their families and towns r better off with their remittances. we're all wealthier, like magic, but pretending that the concerns of those people who want the US labor force and housing market to be closed shops r just backward neuroses will not help convince them and it will not help craft an immigration policy suitable to the optimization of human flourishing