Bizarre Tribute. Coretta Scott King died today. In the coverage of her death, CNN Headline News showed the national and state flags in Atlanta flying at half staff. The flag was plainly different from the one I grew up with. Instead of being based on the Confederate Battle Flag, it is now based on the governmental flag of the Confederacy! Big change. So we have the oddity that Georgia, supposedly concerned about negative views of its treasonous past being boasted in a racist symbol, exchanged one symbol of racist treason for another. And to honor a black civil-rights leader, the State of Georgia (temporarily) lowered the Confederate flag!
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This is the "Stars and Bars", the official "national" flag of the "Confederate States of America", the failed attempt at creating a federal union devoted to slavery.

This is the current flag of Georgia.

It is described thus by the website of the Secretary of State of Georgia:

Georgia's new state flag is based on the first national flag of the Confederacy (the "Stars and Bars") and consists of a field of three horizontal bars of equal width, two red separated by a white bar in the center. In the upper left corner is a square blue canton the width of two bars. In the center of the canton is a circle of 13 white stars, symbolizing Georgia and the other 12 original states that formed the United States of America. Within the circle of stars is Georgia's coat of arms (the central design on the state seal) immediately above the words "In God We Trust" -- both in gold.

So not only does the Georgia state flag celebrate high treason; it also entrenches religion and tells everyone who is not religious that they are not genuine Georgians. Moreover, the attribution of the 13 stars to the original 13 states is less than candid. As you can see from the picture of the pure Stars and Bars above and Confederate Battle Flag below, both of those had 13 stars too! which stood for the 11 states that attempted secession plus Kentucky and Missouri, border states that were slave states but did not attempt to secede. God (you should pardon the expression, I hate the South!
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The current banner is one of several that have flown over Georgia. All of them since the Great Rebellion have been based on either the Stars and Bars of the Confederate Battle Flag, except for a brief period, 2001-2003, when controversy over a Confederate Battle Flag flying over the state capitol produced a flag that reduced the size of those Confederate symbols but left them as official symbols of the 'great' State of Georgia. This is that flag:

The flag I grew up with flew from 1956 to 2001:

It replaced a flag that had been based on but did not exactly match the Stars and Bars. You can see it in miniature at the bottom of the 2001-2003 flag. Georgian segregationists thought the old flag too subtle, so adopted a more flagrant Confederate symbol.

"An overwhelming amount of evidence indicates that those who introduced the [1956] flag change and those legislators who voted for it were not motivated by a desire to offer a memorial to Confederate soldiers, but were influenced by the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings and by the fear that the Court would find Georgia's county-unit system unconstitutional. Indeed, the flag change was a symbolic representation of "massive resistance" in Georgia-a change that reflected Georgia legislators' unwillingness to change." [John Walker Davis: "An Air of Defiance: Georgia's State Flag Change of 1956," The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2, 1998, p. 307-308, as found at http://fotw.vexillum.com/flags/us-ga3.html#1956]

The county-unit system, a variation at the state level of the Electoral College system, was indeed ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1963 for violating the "one man, one vote" rule required of states by the Federal Constitution.
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In the late 1990s, indignant blacks and other loyal Americans resident in Georgia forced the legislature to reduce the Battle Flag to one of several miniatures across the bottom of a new flag. But that wasn't defiant enuf, not treasonous enuf, so the legislature submitted a new design, with a full-sized Stars and Bars, to a referendum. The moronic, disloyal voters of Georgia approved the current design, showing again that white trash, despite their frequent bellicose jingoism for 'Amurika', are at heart really traitors.
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The Confederacy was established for one reason, and one reason only: to preserve the enslavement of black people. In its war of insurrection, the Confederacy caused a minimum of 558,000 and perhaps as many as 700,000 deaths, at a time when the total population of the United States (including the Confederate states) was only 31 million. The bulk of those deaths were of the poor and middle class. Abolitionists and other Union soldiers at least fought for their enlightened self-interest and for morality. The Southern poor who died, however, were cynically used by the rich against their self-interest. Consider the proportions of slaveholders to nonslaveholders in the Confederacy:

5,140,000 Non-slave-holding population of the slave states
3,500,000 Number of slaves in the slave states
310,000 Slave holding population in the slave states

[And earlier on that page] The ... slave-holders may not have been the majority of the population, but they amounted to one in four southern families. Of the slave-holding population, half owned fewer than four slaves. One-thousand-eight-hundred owned more than 100 slaves and counted as planters.

Though this was a proportionally small fraction of the South's population, its members presided over a great deal of political and economic power.

Slavery depressed wages for Southern whites, yet the rich were able somehow to persuade the poor shmoes they were abusing to fite for slavery! Amazing. And appalling.
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That the poor white trash of Georgia, of all places, should choose a Confederate symbol for their state is especially astonishing. After all, the Civil War that their ancestors' treason produced resulted in the burning of Atlanta and Sherman's March to the Sea! People who had no slaves and whose wages were severely undercut by competition from slaves actually fought for slavery and saw a large part of their state reduced to ruins for that privilege!
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It's the same now: the rich Southern elite are using the votes of white trash firmly held in debt slavery to keep poor people, poor and in debt — including the very people who vote for them! Southern white trash step proudly up to bat for their abusers. "We ain't gonna let them damned fairies marry [as tho gay marriage has anything to do with the real problems of Southern whites], and if to keep faggots down we have to elect people who hate us as much as we hate fairies, well, then, we'll just keep electing the bastards. Because they're our bastards. They own us and we like being owned." Are Southern whites brain-dead?
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The South has been an albatross around our neck for our entire national history (since independence). The only time the South was more boon than bane was the end of the Revolutionary War, when the South bore the brunt of British fury. But that's a long time ago, and the harm the South has done us, endlessly, far outweighs its contributions of every type, in every era since. It's a pity that we did not utterly destroy the South at the end of the Civil War, kill every traitor, and replace them with immigrants. Had that been done, the United States today would be unrecognizable from its current benited self. There would be no Trent Lotts, Tom Delays, or the rest of the neo-Confederate, Southern Mafia that controls the Nation thru control of — of all things — the Republican Party: the Party of Lincoln, the President who freed the slaves only by defeating the Confederacy! History does have a sense of humor.
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But there's nothing funny about the bizarre gesture of respect for Coretta Scott King. It would be far more fitting if the Georgia legislature were to adopt a new state flag that removes all visual references to Georgia's self-destructive defense of slavery. Attachment to an evil past keeps the South backward, and backward-looking. Where is the "New South"? Let a genuine New South arise, and let it arise in Georgia.
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(All flags courtesy of Flags of the World website.)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,243.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:23 PM

 
A Magnet for Lies. AOL yesterday hilited a story by one Malcolm Ritter of the Associated Press about a new technology for detecting lies. Titled "Telling a Lie? Brain Scans May Rat You Out", the story examines the possible utility of "functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. It's a standard tool for studying the brain". The system being tested studies three areas of the brain to evaluate whether a person is telling the truth or lying.

[A]dvocates for fMRI say it has the potential to be more accurate [than the polygraph], because it zeros in on the source of lying, the brain, rather than using indirect measures. So it may someday provide lawyers with something polygraphs can't: legal evidence of truth-telling that's widely admissible in court. (Courts generally regard polygraph results as unreliable, and either prohibit such evidence or allow it only if both sides in a case agree to let it in.)

The technique requires use of extremely expensive equipment and cooperation by the person under suspicion.

Subjects have to cooperate so fully — holding the head still, and reading and responding to the questions, for example — that they have to agree to the scan.

"It really doesn't read your mind if you don't want your mind to be read," [a neurologist studying the usefulness of the technique] said. "If I were wrongly accused and this were available, I'd want my defense lawyer to help me get this."

So maybe the technology is better termed a "truth confirmer" than lie detector.

There are serious questions about its accuracy, however, because in the first study, 3 of 31 test subjects fooled the program! That's a failure rate in this small study of nearly 10%. The test subjects did not include any pathological liars, career criminals, sociopaths, retarded people, or garden-variety lunatics, so we don't know how well it would do with their brains.
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Moreover, the long (2,300-word) article nowhere contains the four-letter string "safe". That worries me.
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We need to be very wary of subjecting people to powerful forces being applied to their brains. I have seen too much go wrong in technology — from flipper-armed babies produced by thalidomide to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger 20 years ago yesterday — to be comfortable about using so invasive a procedure on large numbers of people who do not have brain tumors, autism, epilepsy, or any other serious brain-related malady such that the potential benefits plainly outweigh the risks.
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Sometimes grave problems with a new technology don't show up until years after large numbers of people have been exposed to danger. Think about asbestos, which we used for generations to make ourselves safe from fire, only to find out, too late, that exposure to tiny fibers of that life-saving mineral could produce fatal cancers.
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We need to find something that is, as the Food and Drug Administration's standard requires of medications, both "safe and effective". One is not good enuf. It must be both effective at rooting out lies, even in people who do not wish to cooperate, and safe so that innocent people can volunteer to cooperate, with full confidence that they are not thereby consenting to have their brains scrambled by a machine we didn't realize could do that.
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Head back to the drawing board, guys.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,241.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:22 AM

 
Ann Who? Radical Rightwing commentator Ann Coulter made a little joke yesterday:

speaking at a traditionally black college, [she] joked that Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned [because] Stevens is one of the court's most liberal members.

"We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee," Coulter said. "That's just a joke, for you in the media."

Isn't she amusing? No, actually, she's not.

Coulter has made a career of writing and lecturing on her strongly conservative views.

At one point during her address, which was part of a lecture series, some audience members booed when she cut off two questioners. "I'm not going to be lectured to," Coulter told one man in a raised voice.

Oh? It's alrite for her to lecture others, but not for others to lecture her. I see. I didn't know that was the way it worked.
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Who, after all, is Ann Coulter? She's just some nut off the street who somehow got a Radical Rightwing book published and then became the darling of the loonytunes Right.
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How is it that some people get to be famous pundits and commentators, sought out for paid speaking appearances, while other people, far their superior in every significant regard, who actually have constructive things to say, cannot get 2 seconds of exposure in major media? Is a puzzlement.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,241.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:15 PM

 
Viva Hamastan! This is a great day. The people of Palestine have elected a government that stands up proudly against Israel and does not accept the right of Jews or the Zionist-dominated Government of the United States to tell them how to vote, how to live, how to deal with the violent occupation of their land by mass murderers backed to the hilt by outsiders who have done them wrong for 50 years. Palestinians are mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore.
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Nor should they.

Hamas won 76 seats in the 132-member parliament, while Fatah, which controlled Palestinian politics for four decades, won 43 seats, said Hanna Nasser, head of the Central Election commission. The 13 remaining seats went to several smaller parties and independents. * * *

[Shithead George W.] Bush said the United States will not deal with Palestinian leaders who dispute Israel's right to exist.

"If your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you're not a partner in peace, and we're interested in peace," Bush said. [Of course you are, even if peace should require the dissolution of Israel and the creation of a multiethnic, religiously neutral United Palestine in its place, right?]

Israel's acting foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, asked the EU not to deal with a "terror government." * * * [Wow. That's certainly the pot calling the kettle black.]

"You cannot have one foot in politics and another in terror," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.

Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud Party, condemned the vote. "Today Hamastan was formed," he said. Labor Party politician Ami Ayalon said Israel might have to change the route of its West Bank security barrier to take Hamas' victory into account. * * *

Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi [the short-haired English-speaking woman we have seen on TV dozens of times over the years] said Fatah's corruption, Israel's tough measures and international indifference to the plight of the Palestinians were to blame for Hamas' strong showing.

Zionists feign indignation that anyone might deal with the sovereign government of Palestine if leaders who believe in the power of violence take control, all the while Israel rules by violence and the United States has armies occupying two entire countries! What hypocrisy!
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No one on Earth believes that the governments of Israel and the United States forswear the use of violence. They use violence every day. What's sauce for the goose really is sauce for the gander, you hypocritical bullshit artists!
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Hanan Ashrawi says plainly that "international indifference to the plight of the Palestinians" has produced desperation and militancy in the people of Palestine, so George Bush's response is to threaten further to isolate Palestine and worsen the conditions Palestinians suffer under. He won't be satisfied until every single Moslem in the world takes up arms against us.
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Bush and other Israelis (yes, Bush is for all practical purposes an Israeli) are fiting a valiant war for segregation, and seem to believe in a brilliant future for segregation. Israel is building a "security barrier", a literal wall of separation between Jews and Moslems, and trusts that such segregation will bring "security". It's as tho Mississippi built walls down the middle of every town in the state to keep "coloreds" away from "decent white folk". And the U.S. taxpayer is paying for it.
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Segregation is no more the "wave of the future" than was Communism. Modernity is diversity, and the future is about inclusion rather than exclusion, equality rather than supremacism, be it white supremacism, Jewish supemacism, Moslem supremacism, or any other. When will people get that thru their heads?
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Bush and other Israelis pretend that destroying Israel means exterminating Jews. That is bullshit. The United States destroyed thirteen colonies. It did not exterminate the people of those colonies. It just changed their form of government and the terms of their relationships with Britain.
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Palestinians can destroy Israel without exterminating the Jews who live there. All that needs to be done is to erase the border and disestablish Israel as a "Jewish state", instead to merge it back into a United Palestine. Jews who accept that Moslems and Christians are their exact equal and are willing to live as Jewish Palestinians with no more rights or privileges than any of their fellow citizens can stay in Palestine. Those who are not willing to live as equals will have to leave. But I don't want them here. We didn't take in the heroes of apartheid when South Africa eliminated its racist state. We mustn't take in the heroes of Zionism when Palestine eliminates its racist state.
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Why are we so blasé about a "Jewish state", but terrified by the thought of a "Moslem state"? Onetime presidential candidate John B. Anderson said he'd like to see the United States proclaim itself a "Christian country", but he was denounced for that. So "Christian country" and "Islamic republic" are utterly unacceptable to decent, modern people, but "Jewish state" is fine? Not with me it's not.
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There are proportionately 10 times as many non-Jews in "the Jewish state" (20%) than there are Jews and Moslems in the United States (2%), yet we can't call ourselves a "Christian country" but Israel can call itself a "Jewish state". Not acceptable.
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We rejected the idea of calling ourselves a "Christian country" because we understood that to do so would tell the tiny minority who do not identify at least culturally and ethically as Christians that they are not real Americans and have no right to be here. We rejected that idea. But it's okay with us if Israel calls itself a "Jewish state", even tho that plainly says to the 20% of its residents who are not Jewish that they are not real Israelis and have no right to be there.
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We even send billions of taxpayer dollars a year, year after year after decade — to the tune of $100 billion so far, and climbing at over $3 billion each and every year — to bolster that kind of bigotry. We have sent 160,000 troops into Iraq and spent over $300 billion (and counting) on destroying Israel's worst enemy at the time, Iraq, and are thinking about invading Syria and maybe even Iran for the exact same purpose, to make Israel safe in its vicious bigotry. Has the leadership elite of the United States lost its mind? Apparently so.
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Maybe we can do something about that in November, if some people who aren't Zionist loons will run for Congress.
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The wonderful result in Palestine explodes the myth that democracies cannot go to war against each other, and we need to bring home to the fools in Washington and Europe that it is justice, not democracy, that produces peace.
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Any truly representative democracy will reflect the actual concerns of the voters, and the voters of Palestine, as those of Iraq, have horrendous problems caused by foreigners. The Hamas victory in Palestine is the first shoe to drop. A militant, anti-Zionist government in Iraq is the second shoe, which has not yet dropped only because the government of Iraq has not yet been able to come together. But the naive, infantile belief of the Zionists who control U.S. foreign policy, that if only we bring democracy to the Middle East we will have peace, because democracies would have to accept the right of Israel to exist (as a racist, religiously discriminatory and segregationist state) has been shown to be moronic.
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The result in Palestine should also serve as warning to the empire-builders in Europe who want to create a European superstate to challenge the United States for world preeminence. If they think that the mere fact that both the EU and U.S. are democratic precludes war between them, they are dead wrong.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,239.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:59 PM

 
"Studies" vs. Common Sense. The American College of Chest Physicians ("ACCP") recently announced that studies show that cough syrup doesn't work and may even harm patients by delaying them in seeking medical attention for serious conditions.

Americans buy about $2.9 billion worth of over-the-counter cold medicine and another $400 million of prescription cold medication, a university study found in 2003. About $270 million goes for cough syrup, which generally sells for a few dollars a bottle.

We are to believe that Americans are so astonishingly stupid that they spend $270 million a year on something that doesn't work, with many of them coming back year after year to buy something that doesn't work? I don't think so.
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Nor does Dr. Marc K. Siegel, an associate professor of medicine at the NYU School of Medicine, think so. In an op-ed piece in the New York Post today, he says:

OK, I've always understood that cough syrup contains low doses of chemicals that have never been proven to work. And I certainly understand that I must look for the underlying cause of a problem, not simply slap on a treatment. But what's the ACCP's [answer] to a question like this: "Doc, I have a bad cough. It's always gotten better with Robitussin. What am I supposed to do now?"

Well, ACCP, what do you have to say? Suffer through it? You would have me tell my patients to suffer through it? You can't be serious.

My answer: "If it helps you, then continue to take it."

Am I treating a cough, or just providing a placebo? If the latter, what's wrong with that?

Medicine is in large measure about how people feel. If someone feels better for taking cough syrup, it works.
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Indeed, clinical medicine consists in seeing by actual practice in the field what works and what does not work. It doesn't rely upon academic studies. The pretense of academics is that a lot of what we think we know is false. The assumption of democracy is that when you put together the actual experience and wisdom of the many, you are likely to come up with better public policy than if you heeded only the few. Plainly that doesn't always work, as for instance in regard to legislation as to religiously influenced views of morality. But as to what works and what doesn't work, I'd rather listen to the many than the few.
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I know that cough drops have worked for me. When I was attending real-estate school, I'd often get a tickle in the throat because of the air conditions in the closed classroom. A Hall's cherry-flavored cough drop handled the problem nicely. And tasted good too. Am I imagining that? Well, let's see. Without the cough drop, I coughed. With the cough drop, I didn't. Hmm. That's a toughy.
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Maybe something else would have worked equally well.

Research published in the journal Pediatrics in 2004 suggested dextromethorphan, often listed on labels as DM, or diphenhydramine, an antihistamine, did not offer any more relief to children suffering from cough than sugar water.

But sugar water doesn't come in handy little lozenges you can carry in pocket or purse, does it?
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There are times when people need to greet each day's "scientific" news — this week: coffee is bad for you; next week: coffee is good for you — with a healthy dose of skepticism. Listen to your body and you may hear greater wisdom, truer to you, than anything you'll hear on TV or read in the papers.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,236.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:17 PM

 
Bolivia Arrives. Just a brief entry today, to compensate for a long (but important) entry yesterday.
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Bolivia's first Indian president, Evo Morales, was sworn into office today. He vowed to:

convoke a constitutional assembly later this year to answer Indian demands for a greater share in power at all levels of society.

Bolivia is 55% pure-blooded Indian ("indio" in Spanish), 30% mestizo (part-Indian), and only 15% pure-blood white. Yet there has never, in almost 400 years, been an Indian at the head of government.

[Morales] said his government would rule "with all and for all" and would not seek revenge for the past. He also reiterated promises to respect and protect private property.

It is the phrase "with all and for all" that prompted me to comment on anything at all today. I like it, and hope he means it.
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Every now and then, someone from a theretofore oppressed group rises to power and does not wreak vengeance. In South Africa, it was Nelson Mandela, who embarked upon national reconciliation that has taken the worst out of the will to make up for an unfair past — tho there have been many murders of white farmers since the black majority took power peacefully, but that might just be because there has been a huge jump in murder generally in that sad country (which I'd like to see join the United States). Bolivia's new president indeed compared the treatment of his people, the Indians, to apartheid in South Africa of old, and:

promis[ed that] his government would move to squelch discrimination dating to the Spanish conquest in 1520.

Note that, please: 1520. Latin Americans are very keen on blaming the United States for everything that is wrong in their countries, but there has never been anything like justice in that part of the world. Ever. Neither the United States nor any of its predecessor colonies existed in 1520. During the Spanish and Portuguese era the people of Latin America blamed Europe for their problems. Then came independence — and things didn't change. Unfair dictation by Europeans was replaced by unfair dictation by locals. No improvement. Rather than look into their own culture and root out the ugliness, they cast about for some outsider to blame, and landed on the United States, even tho the U.S. had nothing to do with any of it and had either to work with what was in place, hold itself aloof, or intervene.
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If we worked with the people in power and cultural institutions long in place, we were accused of co-conspiring in oppression. If we held ourselves aloof, we were accused of turning a blind eye to injustice. If we intervened, we were accused of imperialism.
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Never, the world is to believe, were Latin Americans ever responsible for their own mess. It was always somebody else's fault. Let's hope that changes. Bolivia is as good a place as any to start.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,225.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:55 PM

 
Mad Jap Disease. Japan has once again blocked beef imports from the United States with the excuses (a) that portions of backbone had been included in some shipments and (b) Japan is scared to death of "mad cow disease". The Japanese must be out of their minds if they think Americans buy that load of bull.
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In reality, Japan is doing now what it has been doing for decades: discriminating against U.S. imports while racking up huge surpluses in its U.S. trade, at our substantial expense. Tho the U.S. trade deficit with China is the one now attracting the greatest attention — to the extent the trade deficit, with its potential for economic disaster for this country, gets any attention at all — there is still a great big deficit with Japan.
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American labor unions are concerned, rightly, about the export of American jobs of many types. Strictly speaking, export of jobs refers to the movement of manufacturing operations by U.S. companies from the U.S. to offshore locales. But there is a negative impact upon our economy from simple inability to compete in trade with low-wage or unfair-trade nations.

The growth in the trade deficit over the past two decades has destroyed millions of high-wage, high skilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S., and pushed workers into other sectors where wages are lower, such as restaurants and health service industries. When I appeared before this committee last spring, I summarized EPI forecasts that the Asia Crisis would lead to the elimination of one million jobs in the U.S., with most of the losses concentrated in the manufacturing sectors of the economy (Scott and Rothstein 1998). These job losses have begun to materialize, despite the continuing boom in the rest of the economy. The U.S. has lost nearly 500,000 manufacturing jobs since March of 1998, due to the impact of the rising trade deficit.

That paragraph comes from an Economic Policy Institute ("EPI") statement before Congress in July 1999, so the 500,000 manufacturing jobs lost referred to a loss in 16 months, at a time when our trade deficit was relatively modest.
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Now, the trade deficit is immense. The EPI reported February 10, 2005 that:

The U.S. Department of Commerce today reported that the merchandise trade deficit reached a record level of $666.2 billion in [ ] 2004, a 21.7% increase since 2003. The aggregate U.S. trade deficit, which includes both goods and services, was $617.7 billion, a 24% increase over 2003. The real goods and services deficit as a share of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) increased to an unprecedented 5.8% in the fourth quarter of 2004. Growth in the deficit reflects surging imports and a continued, rapid decline in the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing industries. The U.S. had a $37 billion trade deficit in advanced technology products (ATPs) in 2004, an increase of 38% since 2003. * * *

The deficit in trade with China in 2004 was $162 billion, up 30.6% in one year; with Japan, $75 billion, up 13.9%. The U.S. economy stays afloat in part by a vast inflow of capital from abroad, but part of that is in the form of purchase of U.S. treasury securities, on which we have to pay interest to foreigners.

[Our] current-account deficit continues — to the tune of $1.1 million a minute. The cumulative deficit since 1990 in the US current account adds up to $3.1 trillion, Mr. McMillion calculates.

To finance the deficits, the US must borrow an equivalent amount, one way or another. These new debts are added to the nation's already massive foreign debts. It means more of the federal taxes Americans pay are being sent to central bankers in China, Japan, Taiwan, and to other foreign entities and individuals — now owning about 40 percent of Uncle Sam's debt.

That was from an article in the Christian Science Monitor of July 29, 2004 speculating that the world may be losing patience with the "unsustainable" U.S. trade deficit. All the numbers are, presumably, worse now, but what exactly those numbers are for the year 2005 is hard to find this early in 2006. For the 11 months thru November 2005, the deficit with Japan was $75.9 billion, which suggests that for the full year it will be up 8-10% from the year before.
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For all the harm the trade deficit is doing us, what good is it doing the people of Japan? Little or none. In fact,

the protectionist measures that created the positive balance of trade also caused the price of goods in Japan to be much higher than they would have been had imports been freely allowed.

How much more do things cost in Japan than they would if Japan did not discriminate against U.S. imports? Let's take rice, a staple of the Japanese diet.

In 2000, the selling price of rice in the Japanese domestic market was approximately four times higher than FOB prices in California. Private firms are allowed to sell rice, but the state trading enterprises are responsible for most of the sales. According to WTO rules, Japan has to import at least 8 percent of its annual consumption. Normally the imported rice is not distributed to the Japanese domestic market (see the paragraph below), which contributes to keeping domestic prices much higher than those elsewhere. * * *

The rice that enters Japan, in accordance with WTO imposed policy to open up borders, is not immediately traded. It is warehoused for about one year before being distributed, in the majority of cases, as food aid. Some of the imported rice, however, is destined for industrial use (e.g., sake, beer). Thus the Japanese domestic market remains isolated from the world market.

So the Japanese housewife has to pay four times as much for rice as her American counterpart. How about beef, the takeoff of this piece? The average price of a pound of beef in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2005 was $4.00. To get the Japanese price, we have to do some conversions:

According to the Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries' weekly retail price survey (for August 15-19; announced August 22[, 2005]), the price of Japanese beef rose 6 yen from last week to 706 yen per 100g of roasting-quality meat, in line with its level of early June this year. This is the highest price since imports of US beef were stopped due to BSE incidence in the US.

The Yahoo currency convert says that 706 yen = $6.12. The Metric Conversions website says that one pound = 453.5924 grams. So a pound contains a bit more than 4.53 units of 100g each, which yields a U.S. equivalent price for a pound of beef of $27.76! I'm astounded. Divide that by 4 to find the ratio to U.S. beef prices: a Japanese has to pay 6.94 times the cost of beef to the U.S. consumer. No wonder Japanese cuisine uses small quantities of meat and large proportions of rice and vegetables!
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Why on Earth do the Japanese tolerate such an outrage? If people want to eat less meat, they can certainly opt to do so. But to be precluded from eating meat by outrageous prices derived solely from protectionism is incomprehensible.
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It gets worse. Some Japanese simply can't afford beef often, even as thinly as it might be sliced. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that:

[Japanese beef] Consumption is forecast to decline by about 20 percent due to shortages of imported high quality beef. Japan continues to demand that all beef exported to Japan from BSE [mad cow] countries come from animals that have been tested for BSE and that have had specified risk materials (SRMs) removed regardless of age.

So if they can't, or won't, pay the higher prices, they just do without. What a bunch of sheep. Maybe that's why they don't eat much meat. Sheep are herbivores.
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Interestingly, while the U.S. wants to export beef to Japan, the WTO says the U.S. is importing a lot of beef from other countries!

The United States is projected to increase its beef imports by 10 per cent this year to 1.03 million tons, and overtake Japan as the world's biggest importer of beef.

That, presumably helps keep U.S. beef prices low.
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Exactly why are Japanese denying themselves the benefits of inexpensive American beef? Because, you see, there is no end to Japanese credulity. ONE cow in the United States was found to have had mad cow disease. One. For that, Japan banned all U.S. beef for two years! Never mind that hundreds of millions of Americans eat beef several times a week with no ill effects. And never mind that it hasn't even really been established that consuming the meat (muscle tissue, not brain tissue) of cattle infected with mad cow disease causes any health problems in human beings. The total number of cases, worldwide, of human disease linked to mad cow disease was, at the beginning of 2004, "about 140 ..., almost all in the UK." 140. Out of 6.5 billion people on Earth. 140. Almost all in Britain.
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Moreover, the thesis that eating beef caused the 130+ cases in Britain is dubious at best.

[T]he infected beef theory [of causation of a disease in humans] has mutated into an orthodoxy in the medical and public health community that few have been brave enough to challenge.

One public health expert in Britain, George A. Venters, did manage to publish an article in the British Medical Journal in October 2001 titled "New variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: The epidemic that never was." Venters maintains that the infected beef theory is simply wrong. He challenges the biological plausibility of BSE causing variant CJD because there is no direct evidence that the supposed vehicle of BSE infection — a special protein called a prion — is infectious. Nor is there direct evidence that BSE prions survive cooking, digestion and the human immune system.

After discussing the numerous deficiencies in the BSE-Creutzfeldt-Jakob hypothesis, Venters observed: "The evidence that has been amassed is directed toward confirming the [BSE-CJD] hypothesis rather than testing it. Salient contrary information has either been played down or ignored."

Panic about mad cow disease is a cynical manipulation of fear by the Japanese Government to rationalize away simple protectionism. Period. But it has worked to scare the credulous Japanese:

So far, the reaction [in Japan] to the first shipments of American beef has been mixed. While some restaurants and grocery stores have rushed to put it on sale, others have flatly refused to serve it. At the same time, most Japanese say they remain concerned about safety. In a poll last month by the Kyodo news agency, 75.2 percent of respondents said they were unwilling to eat American beef.

What a bunch of morons. Now the Japanese Government has again banned U.S. beef, so prices to Japanese consumers, which were starting to come down, will go up again.

Surveys rate Tokyo as the world's costliest city, a reputation perpetuated by perfectly shaped hundred-dollar cantaloupes and tender wagyu beef steaks that cost as much as shoppers elsewhere might pay for a whole cow.

But analysts and travellers say Tokyo is not really as expensive as its image, especially after seven years of falling prices and an influx of cheap imports from China. * * *

A key symbol of Japan's seven-year deflation, fast-food chain Yoshinoya's ... 300-yen beef bowl [presumably that means noodles with beef], is due to make a comeback next year after the recent resumption of U.S. beef imports, banned for two years on fears of mad cow disease.

But now the imports that were to bring down the costs have been banned again.
+
Still, there is some hope for Japanese consumers.

While rice and other food prices are still relatively high due to heavy subsidies and high labour costs, imports from China are lowering the average cost of groceries overall.

Trade pacts with countries like the Mexico and the Philippines are also expected to make tropical fruits and vegetables more affordable in the years ahead. Avocados can already be found as cheap as 100 yen apiece — less than in most supermarkets in New York or London.

So imports are bringing down prices for Japanese consumers. Why, then, does the Japanese Government play these stupid games with U.S. beef?
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Put these things together.

• The U.S. trade deficit is immense and dangerous.
  
• The U.S. is under increasing foreign and domestic pressure to reduce its
  trade deficit.
  
• We have a large deficit with Japan.
  
• Japan is willfully and maliciously discriminating against U.S. imports, and
  Americans have reason to be mad about that.
  
• Liberalized trade benefits the Japanese consumer.
  
• A trade war whereby the United States shuts Japan out of our market would
  be catastrophic for Japan.
  

You might come to the conclusion I long ago did: that Japan should join the United States as several States of the Union.
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On August 6, 1987, the English-language Asahi Evening News of Tokyo printed a letter from me that advocated this. That letter says in part:

There is no replacement for the U.S. market. ... So if Japan is to continue to prosper, it must continue to have access to the U.S. market. That access is revokable as long as Japan remains a "foreign country," vulnerable to charges of unfair competition and appeals to xenophobia. * * *

Only statehood can guarantee perpetual access to the market that alone keeps Japan prosperous. Only prosperity guarantees Japan's democracy. And just think of how huge, dynamic, and fabulous a country Japan and the United States together would be! At last the people of Japan would have room to grow, room to breathe, free of the confines of crowded islands and a semi-feudal tradition.

For its part, the U.S. would secure a rich, well-educated population strategically well placed to restrain Communist China from its ambitions to displace the United States as the world's sole superpower, by war if need be.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,223.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:54 PM

 
Second Shoe Drops. The Bush Administration's aspirations to "protect" us by watching us all extremely carefully, à la George Orwell's Big Brother, have become unmistakable. Not content to "protect" us from "terrorists" by listening in to our fone calls, they are now intent on "protecting" children from "pornography" by tracking what everyone (not just children) looks at on the Internet. What excuses will the Radical Right make for this? Or will even they wake up to the plain fact that powerful forces are trying to control us in every particular of our lives, like the busybodies of our Puritan precursors in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even here in New Jersey? (My city, Newark, was founded in 1666 by Puritans from Connecticut.)
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A line has been drawn in the sand by Google, which refuses to turn over to Government snoops, records of what Americans — and others?, in the interconnected world of the Internet — look for thru Google's search engine. All Americans (and outsiders who might also be tracked) need to tell the Government to stop this slow, steady movement toward mind control.
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Government is supposed to be our servant, not our master.
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It is supposed to keep the information superhighway in good repair and free of litter (spam) and hazards (viruses, worms, Trojans) so the Information Society can roll right along. The Government of a free society is not to erect barriers nor shut down stretches of the Information Superhighway that go places that dried-up old prudes don't want us to see.
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The first thing we need to see is that this Administration doesn't trust us, any of us, and doesn't accept that we have the right to live as we want, not as they want us to live. If they won't take the hint from public-opinion polls or lawsuits, then maybe it's necessary for us to make the point with a few carefully targeted assassinations. Violence is so very effective. If the citizenry had killed the judges in the witch trials, Salem would not have disgraced American pre-history with its witch-hunt. But the citizens of Salem did not kill the insane judges. Instead, they killed 20 innocents in a single small town.
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In checking for what year the witch trials occurred, I discovered a chronology of events which shows, serendipitously, that the whole problem started on this date, January 20th, in 1692. Altho there was no United States then, and the various colonies other than Massachusetts that later became States do not really share any guilt in the misdeeds of Britain's Massachusetts colony, the Nation at large has adopted that pre-history as American history. The Salem witch trials shame us 314 years on, and that's good. The point of history is to learn from the past in order not to make the same mistakes.

After 20 people had been executed in the Salem witch hunt, Thomas Brattle wrote a letter criticizing the witchcraft trials. This letter had great impact on Governor Phips, who ordered that reliance on spectral and intangible evidence no longer be allowed in trials.

Who was this courageous gentleman who dared to speak out against the witch-hunt?

Thomas Brattle we know well. "He was," wrote President Leverett of Harvard at his death, "a gentleman by his birth and education of the first order in this country." Born at Boston, in 1658, of wealthy parentage, a graduate and a master of arts of Harvard, then a traveller and a student abroad, he won such distinction as a mathematician, and notably as an astronomer, as to be made a member of the Royal Society, and was in close touch with the world of scholars; but his career was that of an opulent and cultivated Boston merchant, and for twenty years, from 1693 to his death in 1713, he was treasurer of Harvard College. "In the Church," said of him the Boston News-Letter, "he was known and valued for his Catholick Charity to all of the reformed Religion, but more especially his great Veneration for the Church of England, although his general and more constant communion was with the Nonconformists." In other words, he was of the liberal party in religion and politics, an eminent opponent of the Puritan theocracy, and he did not escape the epithets "apostate" and "infidel."

The letter here printed did not see print in his own day; but that the present copy exists suggests that it may have been meant to circulate in manuscript, and it is not impossible that it was even written for that purpose. Yet if so, we may be sure it was used with discretion.

Google may prove our Brattle, rallying us to stop the creeping totalitarianism the Bush Administration is trying to pull off. But it might pay a price for its courage. Today Google stock saw its largest one-day drop ever. The Bushite would-be tyrants must be delited to be driving down the stock of its enemy — and make no mistake: the Bushies do regard Google and everyone else who resists them as enemies — but the price to Google of complying with Government's demands is likely to be far higher, because Americans worried about their privacy can find and use a foreign-based search engine to avoid Government snooping. So Google stands to lose whether it resists or complies with this outrageous Government powergrab over the lives of Americans. Its real choice is to distinguish itself in bravery or cowardice. Not a hard choice.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,222.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:40 PM

 
American War, Foreign Narrator. I chanced to see part of a new PBS documentary miniseries about the French and Indian War called "The War That Made America". It is "presented" — that is, narrated, with some onscreen appearances — by Graham Greene, a Canadian actor. Why?
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During the first hour (of two one-hour episodes of the TWTMA series) I was mainly watching the second hour of a biography of Ozzie and Harriet and their offspring, switching to TWTMA during commercials, so I missed the beginning of TWTMA, and didn't know who was narrating. I became suspicious when I heard the Canadian pronunciation Ee.'ra.kwah for "Iroquois", which is properly said Ee.'ra.kwoi in English. Canadians give it a Frenchified pronunciation. As I listened, I heard other suspicious mispronunciations, like Oswaego for "Oswego" (Os.wee.'go). So I checked the Internet, and sure enuf, Graham Greene (the actor, not writer) is Canadian.
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Not only is he Canadian, but he is also Iroquois, member of a confederacy of Indians most of which took Britain's side in the American Revolution!
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Why was a Canadian Iroquois chosen to "present" a documentary called "The War That Made America"? I thought that perhaps the producers were Canadian (tho it seemed an odd title, and interest, for a Canadian production), and this was just bought by PBS. No, apparently it was made by WQED Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, probably because Fort Duquesne (predecessor to Pittsburgh) features prominently in that war. So an American production company chose a Canadian Iroquois to narrate a documentary series about the making of America.
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Perhaps they define "America" differently than most people do, to mean British North America, including Canada, and that will be spelled out in the remainder of the series, which airs on our local PBS station next week. But that doesn't make sense, because the series focuses on George Washington, who it says played a major role in starting the French and Indian War, then later broke with Britain to divide British North America and remove the bulk of its territories and population from the Empire.
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I'm offended at the choice of a foreign "presenter" for an American documentary series financially supported by a whole bunch of American foundations and by tax moneys taken by the U.S. Federal Government — and not just a foreigner, but a member of a group that fought viciously against the United States in the Revolution. What is wrong with media people?
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The series also seemed to go out of its way to be "politically correct", showing blacks as prominent members of the British colonial army sent against the French. Is that a carefully documented reality or, as seems more likely, an inauthentic intrusion of modern sensibilities into 18th Century history? The French and Indian War was fought in the northern British colonies, and blacks, be they slaves or freedmen, were in fairly short supply around here. Washington came from Virginia, so perhaps we are to believe that lots of Virginians were involved, and Virginia had lots of blacks, so, all things being equal, there should have been lots of blacks in a Virginia regiment. But here's the catch: all things were not equal. In much of the South, blacks weren't even taught to read; would they really have been taught to kill?
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Greene tries to impart a measured and balanced view of Indian behaviors that everyone today would regard as "savage", explaining what scalps and captives meant to natives, as tho somehow we should excuse the monstrous savagery of the Mohawk (Iroquois) allies of the French in the episodes shown Wednesday nite. I imagine the Indian allies of the British were equally unrestrained against the French and France's Indian allies. Certainly the behavior of the Indians whom Britain used against us in the Revolution was monstrous, and Britain continued to incite murderous violence against Americans in our western territories even after the Treaty of Paris, so I can't believe Britain's Indian warriors were any more civilized in the French and Indian War.
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Graham Greene unflinchingly talks of the atrocities, but the narration implies disdain for the Europeans' view of their Indian allies as savages. It's almost as tho murdering and scalping 75 men and women who had surrendered at Lake George and taking 500 more captive wasn't such a terrible thing. One must wonder if he would have indicated comparable aloofness if Europeans had slaughtered and mutilated Indians after their defeat.
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The PBS webpage about the series says that Greene is "an Oneida Indian whose ancestors fought in this war." My father's ancestors lived in the Hudson Valley at that time, but I don't know if any of them were involved in that war. I do know that one served as a private in the Revolutionary War. And the first Schoonmaker on these shores was severely wounded in an Indian attack termed the "Wilwyck Massacre" in 1663 (when the region was still under Dutch control), so it would not surprise me if my family had been involved in some way in the French and Indian War. (Apparently a collateral line, the ones that changed their name to Shoemaker, saw action against the Indians in 1755, but I don't know if that was part of the larger war.)
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(The Oneida tribe is said to have sided with the Americans in the Revolutionary War, breaking with other tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. So why was Graham Greene born in Canada? Perhaps his ancestors did not flee after the Revolution with the bulk of the Iroquois but migrated in the 1830s, when some Oneidas went to Wisconsin but others went to Ontario.)
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The behavior of the Indians was often savage indeed, and far from bitching and moaning about mistreatment by white people, American Indians of some tribes should be very thankful they weren't wiped out to the last man, woman, and child. Even sympathetic portrayals, as in a movie Graham Greene appeared in, Dances with Wolves, show savage behavior as normal and normative. In that film, Robert Pastorelli (of Murphy Brown fame) plays a (white) plainsman who is peacefully eating dinner at a campfire when he is murdered by Indians shooting several arrows into his body.
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Most Americans arrived on this continent long after the Indians had been pacified. Those of us whose families got here before then don't have such romantic views of our 'innocent red brothers'. And Americans who know their history have reason to be indignant that WQED chose a Canadian Iroquois Indian to present its series on "The War That Made America".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,222.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:03 AM

 
Rate Hike Mishandled. I was in the post office yesterday. I had to mail a letter and had not yet secured any 2-cent stamps to update the booklet of stamps I carry in my wallet. As I waited on a very long line, the clerk announced that they had no more 2-cent stamps! The woman in front of me was dismayed: "This is the second post office I've been to today [that didn't have two-cent stamps]." Last nite, Jimmy Kimmel Live did a comedic bit about the postal rate hike that showed that a post office in the Los Angeles area — the other side of the continent — also ran out of 2-cent stamps. What is going on?
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The United States Postal Service is a largely independent agency rather than an integral part of government now, but surely the Federal Government should be able to make it do its job. The Bush Administration is increasingly looking like The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, and this hugely mishandled postal rate hike joins a growing list of aggravations that might move voters to oust enuf Republicans in November to cause Dubya real problems in the last two years of his term.
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Fortunately, Dubya can't run again (thanks to a Constitutional term limit), but even if he did, the way things are looking now, the Democrats would have to do something really stupid, like nominating a woman, to lose in 2008. I wouldn't put it past them.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,222. Yup, that's all 2's: 2,222, as in "This war is too, too, too, too stupid.")
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:01 PM

 
Worrying about Nothing. Media have gone to town with a story that is supposed to scare us: our cellphone calling records might be bought by somebody! Oh my God! NOOOOOOO!
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The records show only what numbers you call or are called by. They do not show what you said. They do not show where you were at the time. Who cares?
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Coming on the heels of revelations of government wiretapping, this is supposed to worry us, but shouldn't. Media love to worry us about nothing, to make us think we need to pay attention to media rather than ignore them (and their advertising). But there are a lot of things the media want to worry us about that shouldn't worry us at all. This is one of them.
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It may well be that every single phone number you call or are called from is listed in the directory, so what's the big secret? Where's the danger? Oh, perhaps if you are trying to carry on an extra"marital" affair (whether you are legally married or merely involved in what is supposed to be a monogamous relationship), you might not want someone to know you're talking to someone you're cheating with. But for the rest of us, the records at issue are of no conceivable importance. If somebody wants to spend $100 to find out what phone numbers I call or call me, who the hell cares?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,220.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:32 PM

 
Patriotic Noises, Treasonous Realities. The United States is marching toward the edge of a cliff, and the Marine Band is keeping the pace brisk with an energetic rendition of "The Stars and Stripes Forever". Perhaps that should be renamed "The Stars and Stripes For Now", because this country is headed toward disaster.
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(This is a theme I plan to revisit frequently over the next few months, dealing in detail with one small piece at a time, of a very large problem. But I cannot spend too much time on any given day, because I'm not getting paid for this, and I need to devote more time to personal finances. Let me, today, simply draw the broad outlines of the problem. This problem affects me personally, as it does many others. I have been interested in media most of my life, but to find work in broadcast journalism, I would have to compete with a host of foreigners, even for local radio spots. WINS, a New York-based all-news station, employs some guy with an Australian or lower-class British accent as a traffic reporter! Traffic! Why do we need a foreigner to tell us about local traffic? If I or unemployed American actors or actresses wanted to find work doing voiceovers for television commercials, we'd have to compete with Brits, Australians, Canadians, and other foreigners — there are dozens of commercials nowadays with British accents — who are somehow allowed in to take jobs away from Americans in an industry, acting, that has an unemployment rate in excess of 60%! The National Endowment for the Arts says, "In 1980 only 26 percent of musicians received all of their income from performing arts work, as against 32 percent of [people the NEA classes as] actors". That means that 68% of actors can't find full-time work in their field. Yet, we're still letting actors into this country from all over the world. Why?)
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The United States prides itself, and is roundly criticized abroad, for its strong nationalism, which seems at times to pass over the line into jingoism. The reality, however, is that large segments of the leadership of the United States are so globalist that they are effectively treasonous.

• Our foreign policy is controlled by Israel.
  
• Our largest retailer is in league with Communist China.
  
• Companies with names like "America Online" have shipped off their technical support operations to India.
  
• Our movies are made in Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, with top roles taken by foreigners.
  
• Our domestic media are shot-thru with foreigners in some of the most prestigious, influential, and best-paid jobs to be had.
  
• Our advertising is filled with British accents, and indeed it seems as tho
  Hollywood has moved to England. From Narnia to Harry Potter to Nanny McPhee to The New World and Alexander and Troy and Gladiator, and on and on and on, American films are filled with British accents. American actors have to put on British accents if they are to find work in their own film industry, in order to portray ancient Romans, medieval Germans, Spanish conquistadors, or any other nationality whatsoever. All the world in all eras spoke with British accents, we are to believe, because, you see, American accents aren't good enuf for American films.
  
• Marine One, the helicopter of the President of the United States, is soon to be European!
  
• Some places, like New York City, allow resident aliens to vote in school-board elections, and some ultraliberals are arguing that our historic principle of "no taxation without representation" requires us to allow all resident aliens to vote in all elections.
  
• We even, now, hear loud noises coming from supposed conservatives to change the Constitution to permit current citizens born abroad to become President.
  

The premise behind all these phenomena, and more, seems to be that we can give to foreigners every single job that now exists in this country and we will just make more and keep on truckin'. We can ship all manufacturing operations abroad and still be secure that the equipment we need to defend ourselves or keep our economy moving will always be there. And we can slash wages, cut benefits, and end pensions to compete with the poorest workers in the world, but Americans will still enjoy a high standard of living that is the envy of the world.
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To date, according to the AFL-CIO, the United States has already shipped some 3.7 million jobs abroad, and another 14 million are at risk. We don't need them, say the globalists. They were old jobs in old industries in the old economy. Oh? Tech support call centers are old jobs in old industries? Computer programming is part of the old economy?
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I have said here before and say now again: it is not possible for the United States to compete in worldwide free trade without catastrophe. That is, we cannot possibly compete in total free trade without total collapse of our economy and standard of living. We can compete if we chop the wages and benefits of our employees to a fraction of their current level and consign ourselves to work until we die, but why would we do that? So the rich can reap obscene profits and feel good about their wonderful lives because everyone else is miserable, that's why. That's not a good reason.
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In addition to exporting jobs, we are also importing labor to take jobs away from us here at home. Lou Dobbs of CNN harps on massive movement across our southern border by people who take many of the worst jobs in the Nation. Who, however, complains about the best jobs in this country being taken by foreigners? (Among such jobs are a whole bunch at Dobbs's own network. CNN is filled with on-air employees who are unembarrassed to speak with thick British-style accents.)
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Let's look at three jobs: movie star, broadcast reporter, and corporate CEO. I can see Nicole Kidman being hired to play an Australian or even Briton. But why was a foreigner hired to play an American housewife in Bewitched? Was there really no American actress who could play an American housewife brilliantly? Is it inconceivable that American actors could fill any role now given to foreigners at least as well as the foreigners now hired?
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After network news anchor, perhaps the most prestigious job in all of American broadcasting is White House correspondent. CBS News's chief White House correspondent is John Roberts, a Canadian. Why?
+
When Ted Koppel (born in Britain) retired from his spot as anchor of ABC News Nightline, ABC revamped its format to three co-anchors, one of them Martin Bashir, a British journalist of Pakistani ancestry.
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Even the Chief Executive Officer is a foreigner in many major "American" corporations.

In the same way that U.S. companies look abroad for new customers, they seek new executive talent.

That has resulted in a virtual melting pot of CEOs across the U.S. corporate workplace: Pharmacia president and CEO Fred Hassan hails from Pakistan. Alcoa boasts a Moroccan CEO, as does Eli Lilly. In fact, 11 of that drug maker's top 22 executives are foreign-born. NCR, Coca-Cola, Goodyear, Kellogg, and Philip Morris are only a few of the many other leading American corporations with foreign-born bosses.

CEOs from nearly 100 foreign countries run American companies today. According to Tom Neff, chairman of the recruiting firm Spencer Stuart, the number of foreign-born CEOs in U.S. companies has risen nearly four times in the past six years.

"It shows that markets are more global, boards are more open, and there is more talent outside the United States," says Neff. "What's more, American workers have become more receptive to foreign-born bosses, and shareholders like the lower pay packages demanded by European and Asian talent. * * *

[An Indian observer] argues that with a few exceptions, this approach to leadership is unique to the U.S., which boasts, in his view, the best crop of corporate leaders. In contrast, his home country of India has a rigid caste system that makes it tough for some very qualified people to attain leadership positions. "The meritocracy in the U.S. corporate workforce has led many of the best people to leave their countries and come [to the U.S.]," he says.

The article excerpted above, by one David Lipschultz, appeared in The Chief Executive of January 2002. If the phenomenon cited had quadrupled in the six years before 2002, what has it done in the four years since?
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So pronounced is the shift in loyalties of major transnational corporations based in the United States, indeed, that the same organization, the Chief Executive Group, that published the article excerpted above, published a "Commentary: The Quiet Debate Among CEOs: Are We American Companies or Not?" just a month ago.
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In short, some very highly placed and powerful men in corporate leadership have absolutely no loyalty to the United States. But that does not explain why our government should be actively or passively subverting our future. State governments are sending jobs overseas!
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And what they're not shipping abroad, companies and governments are giving away to immigrants, even in fields in which we have high unemployment of well-qualified, native-born citizens.
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Even if we might have difficulty finding native citizens to pick lettuce or work in sweatshops, surely there are lots of Americans willing to take corporate management positions. Why are so many foreigners allowed into this country to take away our best jobs?
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Is it really conceivable that of 300 million Americans, none could do as good a job as these foreign CEO's? Or is it that Americans wouldn't work as cheap?
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Not content with shipping millions of American jobs abroad, the champions of the Republicrat New World Order are now allowing non-Americans by the million to flood into this country and take ever more millions of jobs away from Americans in their own country. If the lowest-paid jobs and the highest-paid jobs are taken by foreigners abroad or at home, what is left to the rest of us? What will hard work and sacrifice net us if an inexhaustible supply of foreigners exists to undercut us?
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In the one area where major corporations should be hiring foreigners for the top job, they're not. The American auto industry (well, that part that has not yet been bought by foreigners), is headed by Americans, who somehow cannot create the corporate culture that produces high-quality, competitively priced, extremely reliable cars that Japanese and European automakers long ago created. (The one major "U.S." automaker that is doing well is Chrysler, which was bought by Daimler-Benz, a German company, in 1998.) If the U.S. auto industry must become much more rigorous about quality, why has it not hired the top Japanese auto executives to change the mindset of American carmakers? I'd be okay with that (tho not with some Japanese silliness, such as quasi-militarist, forced, group calisthenics in the morning). Ford did, for a while, have a foreign CEO, Lebanese-born and Australian-raised Jacques Nasser. But Lebanon and Australia are not the world's leaders in automobile manufacture, and Nasser didn't do a good enuf job, so was ousted. Meanwhile, Japan continues to dominate the quality lists of cars sold in the United States. Why doesn't GM or Ford buy its Japanese rivals or steal away their top management? That might make some sense. But the bulk of the shifting of jobs from Americans to foreigners makes no sense for this country at all.
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I am utterly and absolutely opposed to free trade and open immigration from countries that remain independent of the United States. I am an Expansionist: if foreign countries want access to our market and our jobs, let them join the Union, end their independence, and assume the responsibilities as well as benefits of citizenship. That is the way to promote world integration, because that would subject all areas that gain access to our market and our jobs to our standards of pay, benefits, working conditions, worker rights, environmental protection, political freedom, and social mobility. The people employed in those other geographic areas by our corporations would pay taxes to our shared government, enlist in our military, and contribute to our society rather than subvert it.
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It doesn't help that future for people like Lou Dobbs to say, very publicly, "We love Canada [as an independent country]. We love Canada." Let's love Canada, sure, but as a region of the United States, which it should long ago have become. As an independent country, Canada is a thorn in our side, a constant source of immigrants taking jobs away from Americans, as tho of right — immigrants who mostly refuse to become U.S. citizens. And why should they take U.S. citizenship if they can abandon their country but pretend to be remaining faithful to it?
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Canadian independence with free access to our market is destructive of U.S. industry and dangerous to our security, since Canada's foreign-policy attitudes and lax immigration and refugee policies allow entry to very questionable people who can then live close to an almost unwatched border. Lou Dobbs opposes a North American security perimeter with free movement of people within it but separate national units for Canada, the United States, and Mexico. He apparently can't wrap his mind around a different, and far better future, however: a united North America in which there is only one country and one citizenship for one great market, all within a single security perimeter. And an even wider union? Beyond considering.
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We should be joining many compatible countries together within the structure of the United States, which has succeeded in merging 15 separate countries already (the original Thirteen States, which could have gone their own separate ways, plus the former Kingdom of Hawaii and Republic of Texas). That is globalization that makes sense and benefits everyone. So to India, China, Mexico, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and every other place now raiding our economy I say: Join the Union — or stay the hell away from us and leave our jobs alone.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,217.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:00 PM

 
Misrepresenting Liberalism. Planned Parenthood, which went from advocating contraception (preventing conception) in the 1960s to promoting abortion on demand today, mischaracterizes its childslaughter agenda as "liberal". According to an AP article today about efforts abroad of U.S. conservative groups:

Carmen Barroso, director of International Planned Parenthood's Western Hemisphere Region, said conservatives have been particularly active in Latin America."Whenever there's a major initiative to liberalize laws, they marshal their forces against it."

That should be not "liberalize", which implies that making abortion more readily available is a liberal cause, but "loosen laws" or "weaken protections for children".
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What is "liberal" about killing the defenseless? Liberalism is about protecting the little guy, not slaughtering him. Powerful laws against abortion are liberal, because they interpose the state to protect babies from the viciousness and immorality of their parents.
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New York City was reminded again this week of the need for intervention by the state to prevent the murder of children, when Nixzmary Brown,

A bright and talented 7-year-old girl was beaten to death [January 11th] in her Brooklyn apartment — where she was often tied to a wooden chair — even though child-welfare agents were already probing allegations of abuse [the New York Post reported January 12th].

There is no more a private right of murder in killing a 7-week-old than there is in killing a 7-year-old. Nixzmary Brown was killed inside her home, by her parents. What business is that of society? Doesn't a parent have the right to kill his or her child? "I brought you into this world. I can take you out." No. No you can't, not without the state stepping in and trying to stop you, or punishing you after the fact.
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A child's life does not belong to his parents, at any point. Not at 7 years old, not at 7 weeks old, not at 7 hours old, not at 7 seconds old.
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Protecting the defenseless is the very first responsibility of society and the very fundament of liberalism.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,215.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:04 PM